“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.”

The weather today is the same as it has been in days: sun, blue skies and a temperature in the 50′s. Wednesday we’ll get some much-needed rain, and I’m hoping it will pour.

Every morning when I go get the papers, I check out the front garden. It is filling up with the shoots of flowers, and I noticed some of the flowers I planted last year have spread, and in the garden close to the house, some have already bloomed. It is still too early to plant as the evenings get cold, but that will give the flowers time to fill in so I’ll know if I have any space for new plants. I love shopping for plants. I do need to shop for herbs to plant in the side garden and for vegetables to plant in the garden below the deck. Last year I had tomatoes, cucumbers and beans. I never thought I’d become such a gardener.

Today is a lazy day. I could go get my new dump sticker, but that can wait as the dump isn’t open on Mondays and Tuesdays. I am going to do a peapod order later so maybe that will count as grocery shopping. The end of my book is close, under a 100 pages, so this afternoon I will get comfy on the couch and finish it. I could do some house cleaning stuff, but I won’t.

The Amazing Race ended last night, and I was happy with the results. Three teams were left for the final hour. There was only one team, a newly married couple, I hoped wouldn’t win, and they didn’t. They came in second, and I suspect the results stuck in the guy’s craw for a long time. Usually we don’t know when the race took place, but this one was in December as we saw Christmas trees and lights in some of the cities. They went to amazing places on this race, as promised by the title, including Botswana, a country on my list.

I am not a fan of reality television except for the Race. I could care less who dances or sings the best or who gets a rose or even why a rose is given. I won’t watch people make fools of themselves, and I don’t care who survives. All of these programs got me thinking about the movie Running Man. I wonder how close we’ll get to that reality or even how close we already are.

“…at morning, I’m unruffled – I’ll sit with my tea and Muse Cat beside me and listen to the soft chime of the grandfather clock…”

The sun streaming through the front door is hot. Fern has taken possession of the rug in front of the door and is, as usual, sprawled in the sun. Maddie and Gracie are here on the couch with me. Gracie is having her morning nap. After all, she has been awake for a couple of hours and must be exhausted. Maddie just wants a few pats.

All of us have morning rituals. Fern and Gracie sleep on my bed so when I wake up, they jump up and wish me a good morning. Gracie wags her tiny Boxer tail so much I expect it to become a rotor and for her tail end to take flight the way a helicopter does. If my morning ever becomes a cartoon, that’s exactly what would happen. Fern rolls all over the bed and sometimes has to grab the sheet or she’d roll right off. I pat her and she bumps me with her head to let me know she expects more. After the morning greetings are done, I feed the cats and Gracie and I go downstairs. Maddie is usually on the table in the sun. She gets her morning pats after which I let Gracie out and put on the coffee then I go outside to get the papers, and most mornings I stop to admire the new flowers. This morning there were two yellow and white daffodils which had just bloomed. After admiring my garden for a while, I go back inside, fill Gracie’s dry food dish so she can munch during the day, leave two biscuits in her crate then grab my coffee and go into the den to read the papers. That is my morning just about every single day except Sunday when I go out to breakfast, the only break in my routine.

Soon enough it will be warm, and I’ll be on the deck with my coffee and papers. Gracie will take her morning nap spread out on the lounge, and I’ll stop and watch the birds at the feeders. Sometimes I bring my laptop outside where I’ll write Coffee.

I love my mornings.

“Life is more fun if you play games.”

Last night was cold, and today is chilly though the sun is warm. I envy Fern who is sprawled on the mat by the front door in the sun. Her fur is hot to the touch. Cats know how to live.

My tulips have bloomed. Their bright red is eye-catching. The hyacinths are pink and white and purple and are in the front garden where everyone can see them. My neighbor called and thanked me. She said she looks out her front window often to see how beautiful the colors in the garden are.

I only remember pansies from when I was a kid. They were the only flowers my father planted in the small garden near the front door. I loved their faces. To me they had eyes and mouths and different expressions and they all looked like they were wearing bonnets. I expected them to break out in song. Their voices I figured would be high like the voices in the old cartoons. They’d sing and bob their heads in unison.

When we were really little, my dad would lie on the floor and raise his legs just a bit. We’d get on his feet, stomach first. He’d then raise his legs all the way and up we’d go as high as his legs would take us. He’d hold our hands and spin us using his feet.  We’d laugh the whole time. The worse part was we had to take turns. Even this ride had a line.

I loved it when the whole family would jump into the car for a Sunday ride. My dad would pick back roads, and we’d see farms and cows and sometimes horses. My brother and I each had a window. On warm days I’d open the window, and stick out my hand so the wind could blow it.

When I was growing up, my parents did all sorts of stuff with us. I doubt they knew how important all of it would become, how it would become part of who we are now. They gave us a love for museums, the fun of taking a ride with no destination, and the best of all, playing games together at the kitchen table. Tonight my friends and I will play Phase 10 and Sorry, a game I’ve been playing since I was six.

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe…”

Today will be warm, 85˚ warm. Right now, though, the house is still morning cool, especially this room. The dog is sleeping in her crate. I can hear her snoring. She and I both slept in this morning. Last night I was up until after 2am watching the Red Sox playing Seattle first then some really bad movies. My taste definitely changes when the choices are so few. I’ll tolerate almost anything to pass the time until the Sandman comes.

My acorn squash has flowers, and I have already eaten some of my tomatoes. I figure my first year with a vegetable garden is a success. Not only that, it’s been fun watching everything grow. Today I’ll have my cherry tomatoes in a small salad. The first tomato got popped right into my mouth. It was wonderful!

Today is quiet. Usually on a Saturday I can hear people’s voices and lawnmowers and the occasional car going down the road. I don’t know where everybody is, but I’ll take the quiet. I have  new book called The Leftovers which is calling for me. I figure a cold ice tea, the book and some cheese and crackers will be terrific on the deck later.

Fall is my favorite season here on the cape, but summer is a close second. It is when spend my days outside, even to taking an outdoor shower. I grill my dinner. We have movies on the deck. Some afternoons I fight Gracie for the lounge and I take a nap. The nights are filled with the wonder of fireflies flitting around the trees and the mornings are bird songs. Even the sounds of lawnmowers are welcome.

Sometimes I look at the cape as if I were on vacation. I drive on all the scenic roads and along the shore. I visit shops instead of stores. Sometimes I stop for lunch and have clams or shrimp and French fries as take-out. Every now and then I eat at A&W Root Beer and always have hot dogs. A sunny day is the best time for meandering. Everyone else is at the beach. The roads are mine. The last time I roamed I went all the way to Wellfleet. I took Route 28 down and Route 6A back. Before I went home, I stopped for an ice cream cone. It was a perfect day.

If you think dogs can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.

My PC has gone to PC hell so I’ve disconnected its lifelines and will haul it to my computer guru today. I’m thinking it needs a new hard drive. Luckily, all my music, pictures and a variety of files were backed-up. I learned that lesson before this.

Today is a delight with a cool breeze and little humidity, but that’s supposed to change. Last night the weatherman said showers. I’m hoping he’s right.

The outside will get my attention today. I have a new holder for bird feeders which goes into the ground and has a squirrel baffle on the rod. The spawn of Satan will try to climb and the baffle will slide him right back down again. I figure it will be fun to watch! Nothing better than a frustrated spawn. The rod had six hooks so I’ll pick up a hanging plant or two. Another chore is the front garden where I noticed some flowers are picnic food for the bugs so they need to be sprayed. I’m thinking any excuse to stay outside today!

Last night I had dinner at my friends’ house. Tony barbecued burgers for us and two small burgers: one for Darci, my friends’ dog, and one for Gracie. When I got home, I gave Gracie half and left the rest in the bag on the counter. It disappeared, but this morning I saw the empty bag in the backyard. It seems Gracie is a counter surfer!

My dog Duke, the Boxer I had when I was growing up, was a great counter surfer. Nothing was safe. Once he grabbed the Sunday roast, and my brother and I had to pry his mouth open to save the meat. That was when I learned that tooth marks can be pressed out of uncooked roasts. My Shauna, also a Boxer, was a wonderful counter surfer. She could reach all the way to the wall. One time she stole a cake cooling on the counter and ate half of it so I had to hurry out and buy dessert as half a cake wouldn’t do. Shauna was also a trash bag mauler. If I left the bag on the kitchen floor, Shauna could break any world’s record in opening the bag and taking any food. I’d find trash on my bed because she used to haul it upstairs for reasons I never fathomed. Gracie, who has access to the outside through her door, takes the trash out if she’s been bag surfing. Every now and then I go out and collect her trash. I always feel a bit like her maid.

“Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.”

I should be outside wabbling “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” as today is perfect. The humidity is gone, the sun is shining and it is only 72°. Last night the sky darkened and winds blew from the north so I expected a tremendous storm. We got one for about five minutes. The huge drops pounded the deck, and I was hoping for thunder and lightning. I’m still hoping. The storm was a bust.

I declare today a deck day. I’ll haul out my iPad and the magazines I got yesterday and sit and enjoy the day. I do have to fill the bird feeders and water the veggies, but those are my only tasks of the day.

My first cherry tomato is ripe. Fireworks are in order!

The roads were filled this morning when I went to breakfast. I found a booth right away in my diner, but within a short time, crowds were waiting outside for seats. The crowd is a sign summer has definitely started here, but, for those of you who are skeptics,  I even have further proof of this change in seasons. As I was going to the diner, the driver in front of me for what seemed like forever put his blinker on four times before he turned. I cursed. The air turned blue. Yup, that’s my summer color!

It’s a short post today as I can see the deck out my window from here in the den. The breeze is ruffling the leaves, the birds are singing and I swear I can hear my name being repeated over and over again.

“I say, if you believe what you read in the comic strips, then you believe that mice run around with little gold buttons on their red pants and drive cars.”

The morning is overcast, damp and foggy. I was woken up by a small plane landing on my neighbor’s runway. Okay, I admit there is no runway, and there was no plane, but it sounded like one, maybe the Songbird; instead, it was the loudest, noisiest lawn mower in existence. To top it off, the house across the street was being mowed at the same time by a stand-on mower. I had no choice but to get out of bed.

Creature News: a new segment today on Coffee. First news is the frequent sightings and finally a picture of the black bear on Cape Cod. The paper says black bears have not been here for centuries, but one is back now. The consensus is it swam across the canal and is probably a young, around two-year old, male very capable of making the swim. The paper warned people to protect their beehives and watch their bird feeders. The article also said to expect more bears. The second piece of animal news has to do with my electrical problem. The lights went out in the same spot again almost right after I’d turned them on so down cellar I went and threw the switch, but I heard a sizzling noise and turned the switch off. I called my friend Shane, the electrician, and he came over yesterday and went right downstairs to check. He came out to the deck where I was and said he’d found the problem, and he wanted to show me. Downstairs we went and he shined his flashlight above to a hole. Halfway through the hole was a mouse, a dead mouse with eyes wide opened, who had bitten into the wire. Shane will come back to fix it as I have to move furniture in my den so he can attach a box from the inside-outside to by-pass the eaten wire. That mouse really did look surprised.

Today I am going to be in Hyannis at spot number 7 on the Kennedy trail. It will be Peace Corps and a few of us will be there to answer questions. I’ll have my Ghanaian flag and wear Ghanaian dress, traffic stoppers for sure.

The Dylan song, My Back Pages, was removed from the server so I deleted the posting. It surprised me as I have posted several Dylan songs in the past. I figured he must be getting really grouchy in his old age. The good part of that deletion is that MediaFire gets the complaint, not WordPress, so I am in no danger of being deleted as I was on Blogger. Putting the link in the comments was a great idea instead of making it part of the posting.

I get to buy my annuals for the deck today. Nothing better than a stop at the garden shop. I will be circumspect. I promise!

“The key to a nice-looking lawn is a good mower. I recommend one who is muscular and shirtless!”

 

The sun is shining and the day is getting warmer. It was cloudy when I woke up and only 65°. It is supposed to get as high as 75° and be sunny all day, the same with tomorrow.

Well, I spend mega bucks at the garden shop yesterday and wrecked my back pulling the heavy cart. Luckily one of my former students works there and he dragged the cart to my car and filled the trunk and the back seat. For the vegetable garden, I bought cucumbers which should be enough to fill the rest of it. I bought cherry tomato pots for the deck, four or five different herbs, a hanging plant for the deck and four different flowers for the front garden. The only flowers I didn’t buy were the annuals for the clay pots which are all around the deck rail. I’ll get those later today or tomorrow after breakfast. That’ll finish the garden for this season, said she with tongue in cheek.

My neighbors are disappearing. I can no longer see down the row of houses to my friends’ house at the end of the street, and the neighbors on each side of me are almost completely hidden. My deck is again becoming my private refuge.

I finished my book. It was an odd book revolving around two sets of conjoined twins born 80 or so years apart, but I really liked it. Sometimes I don’t enjoy interspersed backward and forward trips in time, but this novelist did it well. As always, I’m sorry I finished the book. The joyful anticipation of sitting and reading it is gone.

This world is such a noisy place. I woke up this morning to the sound of the lawn mower at my neighbor’s house and a leaf blower on the next street. The leaf blowers are the worst. They are the noisiest of all garden machines and the worst spewers of pollution.

I miss the summer Saturday sounds of my childhood: the click clack of hand mowers, the scratching sounds of rakes and the swishing of brooms across sidewalks and driveways. Back then, there was something communal about mowing lawns. I remember my dad stopping to talk with our neighbor who was also mowing his lawn. My dad would lean on the long handle of his mower. They’d talk a while then they’d get back to the task at hand, mowing their lawns. I also remember my dad with his hand trimmer working on the bushes in our front yard. His trimmer looked like giant scissors. My dad always chopped the bushes too short, and my mother always complained.

When I used to mow my own lawn, I had a hand mower because back then my lawn was so small, just the front of the house. I also had hand trimmers. Now, I have a landscaper who has all the tools, the noisy tools. I do have to admit, though, my lawn and my yard have never looked better.

 

“I take care of my flowers and my cats. And enjoy food. And that’s living.”

We’re back to a chilly, damp day. Gracie is already sleeping on the couch, on the lower berth, the cushions, while  Fern has the upper berth, the top of the couch, for her nap. Yesterday I managed to buy a new tire for the car and new speakers for the computer. After I got the tire, I decided to meander and go down cape on Route 28 and sight-see a bit on my way to buy the speakers. During my wanderings, I happened to find a store I’d never seen before so I stopped to do a bit of shopping. Not a thing I bought is useful, but I figured I deserved everything. The last few days haven’t been memorable.

My peas are beginning to show a bit of greenery above the ground. I noticed them when I watered the new raised bed in the backyard yesterday. My herb garden has been around a long time, and I’ve always had tomatoes in pots on the deck, but the peas are my very first from seed vegetables. I felt like a real farmer of sorts when I saw the shoots yesterday.

I had an early morning meeting today, but that completes my entire schedule for the day though I really do need some groceries. I figure I’ll read, take a little nap then drag myself to Stop and Shop. Tomorrow is dump day. We couldn’t go Saturday or Sunday as I forgot to get the new sticker, and the dump is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Ah well, such is life.

I’m not complaining mind you, but every now and then I need to grouse. It keeps me on an even keel.

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

I’m thinking it must really be spring. The nights are cold but the days are sunny and mostly in the 50′s. Yesterday the plants I had ordered on-line were placed in the garden. I got excited at the idea that soon enough I can fill my wagon at the garden store, and my front garden will be a blaze of color. Spring makes me smile.

The Red Sox open today in Detroit. My expectations are lower than they have been in years because of last September and their spectacular fall from grace, but this is a familiar place. Until the Sox won the World Series in 20o4, we Sox fans always had hope but never too much hope. The let down was less painful that way.

I read in the paper this morning that the New York City Department of Education has sent a list of fifty banned words to textbook publishers. No, they aren’t composed of four letters, and no, they are never beeped on TV. Here’s some of the list: dinosaur, birthday, pepperoni, dancing, home computers, Halloween, space aliens, divorce, slavery, terrorism and disease. The school department wants these words eliminated because banning them “allows our students to complete practice exams without distraction.” With tongue in cheek, I wonder about pizza without pepperoni, and I’ll have to start singing Happy (hum here) to you, Happy (hum here) to you and T-Rex was just a big animal. I’m not sure how I’ll get around dancing. Gyrations could be the substitute but that seems suggestive. ET is just a visitor from another place. History is going to take a big hit if we eliminate discussions of slavery. As for the others, how can the school department eliminate the word terrorism? What caused that big hole in the ground?

This is taking political correctness to a terrifying height. The reasons for banning these words all hinge on so called cultural sensitivity. Talk of dinosaurs may offend people who don’t believe in evolution though that has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays so no one else should either. Pepperoni is junk food, and not everyone can afford a home computer. Rock and Roll music is on the list. Maybe we need a new Alan Freed to rise in defense. I am speechless which is probably good as I wouldn’t want to offend!

List of banned words: Political Correctness.