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Artist, writer, unapologetic progressive, LGBTQ+ ally
A super easy way to keep up with your old pal Katy is to subscribe to my newsletter!
Artist, writer, unapologetic progressive, LGBTQ+ ally
My friend Stacey lives in Minneapolis and luckily was not on the bridge over the river at the time of its collapse. Which reminded me of the footage I’ve seen of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (also known, ominously, considering its fate, as “Galloping Gertie”) tearing itself to pieces in a high wind in 1940.
Any ideas what this is? It came from a tree, and it’s about 3/4″ in diameter.
I love all the rain we’ve been having lately. I think it’s precipitated to some degree almost every single day for the past month, which is unheard of in Texas, especially considering that for the past several years we’ve been living under drought conditions. The rain has also kept the temperatures down; normally it’s in the upper 90s by now, but we’ve been holding in the mid to upper 80s. Steamy, but a little cooler than usual. However, you know who else also loves all this rain? Mosquitos. I have never experienced mosquito infestations like we have right now. I can’t even go out to get the mail without being eaten alive. I mentioned some time last month that I went jogging one morning and was attacked and followed by a cloud of mosquitos. This happened to me again yesterday evening as Doc and I went for a walk. Eventually I just strolled boldly down the middle of streets instead of on the sidewalks, to be as far away from grass as possible. Doc said that every time we passed near an area where they were hanging out, he could see them approach the backs of my legs, flying in formation to the strains of the Imperial March from Star Wars. He acted as my rear guard and smashed any that landed on me. I still managed to end up with a couple dozen bites on my legs, face, and arms. His cotton full body armor kept him relatively bite-free. I wonder if I have West Nile virus?
On Sunday morning I woke up early, as I seem to be prone to doing lately, and went for a jog at 8 a.m. As I left the house, the weather was cloudy, humid, and still. I like to run in a hilly neighborhood a few blocks north of my house, and to get there I walked along the edge of a large park. By the time I felt the first bite, a few dozen mosquitoes had attached themselves to the backs of my legs, happily sucking my blood and leaving their little disease-ridden venom gifts in return. I freaked out and frantically tried to swat them off (managing to satisfactorily squish a lot of them), but more kept coming at me. I took off running and realized that a big cloud of mosquitoes was following me! It took me several blocks, a couple of right angle turns, and a lot of swatting and smushing to get rid of them. Passing drivers must have thought I was having some sort of insanity fit, flailing and running and slapping myself. I guess that I walked through a low-hovering cloud of them somewhere along the edge of the park. It’s no surprise with all the rain we’ve been having. Every time I walk out of my house, even if it’s just to get the mail, I end up with 2 or 3 bites. I’m itchy as all hell today. If you notice me exhibiting flu-like symptoms in the next few weeks, alert the paramedics that I might have West Nile virus. On a semi-related note, one of my favorite made-for-SciFi-Channel movie titles is “Mansquito!” It sounds like a terrible movie, but what an awesome title!
Brittney spotted this crazy glossy fungus growing at the base of a tree this evening. Parts of it look like apricot jam, parts of it look like mushrooms. Mmm…. mushroom and jelly sandwich… 🙂
Doc and I like to take photo walks when the weather is nice. Usually we just start from our house and head off in a random direction and see what we can find that is interesting. Today we ended up at the YMCA pool in a park a mile or so from our house. As I circled the pool looking for interesting things to photograph, I kept getting whiffs of strong pot smoke from a couple of guys sitting on a picnic bench near the treeline, smoking. Doc wondered aloud what kind of people come to a public park to smoke out. I said, “People who don’t want their parents to smell the smoke coming from their rooms.”
When my parents moved six years ago, they gave us their potted Satsuma orange tree. The first year, it produced a glorious crop of 40-50 little oranges. Then, because I’m such a horrible gardener, it was attacked by whiteflies and black sooty mold, and it took several years of regular treatments with garlic-pepper-seaweed tea, compost tea, horticultural oil, and insecticidal soap (and me spending hours with wet paper towels, gently scrubbing the soot off each individual leaf). The poor little tree was too sick to produce any oranges. Eventually, the whiteflies stopped coming back. Last spring it produced dozens of tiny little orange blossom buds like this, which turned into teeny tiny oranges, about 1 mm across… and all promptly fell off after about 2 weeks of growth. This spring we’ve got teeny tiny orange flower buds again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fruit!
While I don’t hate birds, they do kind of creep me out. Especially corvids (crows, blackbirds, and the like) — they are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. They stare at you with those beady little yellow eyes, and it feels like they’re trying to determine the best way to kill you. As long as I’m at a safe distance from them, I like watching them in my backyard, though. We have a hanging feeder that the squirrels keep figuring out how to get at. We keep trying to outsmart them. I’m not sure who will eventually win. At the feeder we get a mated pair of cardinals (always, one of them eats while the other sits on the fence to keep watch, then they switch), dark-eyed junco sparrows, robins (just in the past week), bluejays, mockingbirds, black-capped chickadees, and doves.
After my night of misery and sleeplessness, I relented and went to the doctor. She confirmed that indeed I do have a bad case of poison ivy. I got a steroid shot in the hip, and also a steroid cream to rub on the rash. And something called Zyrtec, which I think is an allergy pill, to help me sleep at night. She told me to avoid hot showers because they would irritate the itching, which does seem to be the case, so I’ve been taking barely-warm ones. Kathryn told me, though, that hot water, as hot as you can stand it, actually can help once you get beyond the first few minutes of “this hot water is making the itching worse!!” Lots of people have pointed me in the direction of home remedies, which I’m not opposed to, but most of them seem to be geared towards stopping the spread of the rash when you’ve just contracted it. I got it ten days ago, so I think that the point at which most of that stuff would work is long past. Today I look awful, but at least I don’t feel quite as awful today. With skin cream freshly applied about 2 hours ago, the itching has subsided to a low-grade background noise. If I thought about it I would probably need to start scratching, but it’s not an overwhelming urge right now. The cream goes on twice a day, so I didn’t even bring it to work, but I do have Calamine to treat “spot itches,” although I’m doubting its actual effectivenes. Other things that I have learned: The reason that it can pop up later in unexpected places is because the poison travels internally through the bloodstream. Most cases of poison ivy last anywhere from 12 to […]
Things always seem magnified in the middle of the night — jokes are funnier, ideas more brilliant, fears worse — and I think I’ve figured out why. It’s because I’m supposed to be SLEEPING and my body is PISSED at me for not being so, and all events get interpreted through a lens of subconscious freaking out. Hi. It’s 3:30 a.m. and I’ve had maybe 30 minutes of sleep with more looking unlikely. My body’s pissed and now so is the rest of me. The barely-broken-in upstairs air conditioner chose to cease operations about six hours ago, and since it is Texas in September (not as bad as August but still in the 90s during the day and 80s overnight) we are sleeping downstairs on the futon, which is rather comfortable as a sofa and not bad as temporary sleeping quarters, but it ain’t my Tempurpedic. And it is small, so we are sleeping (or not sleeping) nearly touching, and the body heat generated by my wonderful nuclear furnace husband is intense, so even in the relative cool of the one working a/c unit I am hot and sweaty. I’ve spent most of the time that I’ve lain awake trying very very very hard to ignore the fact that my arms are itching intensely due to poison ivy. This is easier to do when my mind is occupied by, say, writing, or work, or television, or running errands. Not so much when I’m lying still and trying to will myself to sleep. I did finally drift off sometime after 2:30 a.m., but woke myself up at 3 scratching. I just don’t know how I can possibly control what I do in my sleep. At least it was only one arm this time, but it was intense and I could not […]