Mother Nature and Monsoons

I love monsoon weather with the rain beating so hard on your house you can barely hear yourself think. I feel safe inside knowing I've worked to keep this house rain-proof and construction-sound to weather nearly anything Mother Nature throws this way. About six years ago we had a storm with 123 mile per hour winds. My 93 year old fortress stood strong.

I like it less when it all creates more construction work and expense for me:

My poor, poor newly stained fence bit the dust...what you can't see is the rest of the fence flapping in the wind. It's very disturbing. I feel like the perimeter is breached and my security compromised. Sigh. I do remember laughing to myself when I was staining it and noticing all the rot that at least when it collapses it'll look good. It does look good - even horizontal!! My newly painted porch is soaked, still lovely, and no longer slippery. Painting it was a good plan.

The Winter War is here. It's a never-ending battle. I can't wait until summer.

Murder She Wrote

I'm feeling really badly about this.

I tried all summer to kill the yellow-jackets that have moved into my walls or roof through the little hole underneath the outside molding. Those homemade traps didn't work. They caught a lot of flies but the yellow-jackets didn't care. I filled one with some really nice homemade wine, and they still didn't care. I resolved to live and let live as long as they weren't hurting me. Yellow-jackets are good for gardens as they eat the bad bugs, or so I've heard. I also read when the winter freeze sets in they will all die anyway. Then someone told me because our winters have been so warm they might just hibernate and never die.

And then they started getting noisy. In the middle of the night. A purring, humming, almost like a soft woodpecker staccato only one hundred times faster. Off and on all night. Sometimes during the day I could hear them when I'm on the computer. That made me nervous. Are they trying to bore through the wood walls into the warmth of my house? What happens if they break through? Will I have to have my whole house fumigated? That can't happen. What I would do with a house full of mean bugs.

So I called the local exterminator. Nice guys. Of course they told me their pesticides were non-toxic. Yeah, right. I took precautions anyways, stuffing towels under my doors and around the wall where the stingers lived just on the other side. Because the hive couldn't be seen or reached, the exterminators said they would use a dust that covers the entrance so when they fly in and out it would kill them. No huge fumes. Still, I knew better.

The boss man was training a new hire, explaining in great detail what is to be done and why. It was fascinating. And then he retrieved this little blower to blow the dust. It had dust in it already, but he was unsure if it was the right dust for the yellow-jackets. To test it he opened the blower and SNIFFED IT! I was horrified! I tried to explain to him that was not a good practice. He laughed. Again, I tried to tell him he won't be laughing when in the next couple years he's diagnosed with lung or brain cancer. Pesticides were developed to kill. It's really not smart to purposely sniff poison! He laughed anyway. These young boys think they are immortal.

So they poofed the dust in the holes. The yellow-jackets went insane, buzzing loudly, and flying crazy. Then they all dropped or disappeared. I watched trying to keep a safe distance, but I think I might have got a whiff of it as my lungs started feeling heavy. It's been two hours and my lungs still feel heavy. It amazes me these companies think their killing chemicals are safe, but if you want to kill something, it works.

I feel sad for them. They are just trying to exist in this world like every other creature and here I am poisoning them with chemicals that would poison me.

I'm glad I'm not a yellow-jacket, but most of the time I feel like one. Irritable, mean, just trying to survive, and sensitive to toxic chemicals.

October Movie Reviews

5 stars: Awesome enough for multiple viewings
4 stars: Great
3 stars: OK
2 stars: Tolerable, but not suggested
1 star: Blah, don't even bother

Age of Adaline  is about a woman who was in a car accident in the 1920s and never ages. Every ten years she must move and change identities so as not to be discovered. This involves never getting involved with anyone, or the classic theme love makes life worth living. Can you imagine being thirty years old for the rest of your life? I assume she doesn't get sick either, but they didn't get that detailed. I didn't like Blake Lively's whispery voice. It sounded too fake although maybe she was going for a certain early 20th-century-style in diction? I don't know. She made up for it with great evening gowns and that swishy, butt-wiggle walk. Great story, great acting, and great characters. Harrison Ford had a good, but minor role. We rarely see him anymore. ****

From Here to Eternity is a 1953 classic with Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, as well as an all-star cast of supporting actors. I saw it in the library and realized I'd never seen it before, although I've seen plenty of spoofs on the beach scene. In its day it was a huge hit garnering 12 Academy Awards including Best Picture, but to modern viewers such as myself, it's excessively melodramatic. Frank Sinatra was SO SKINNY, and oddly enough he sang one song and not very well, I might add. How did that little runt get to be so famous? ***

Goats is about a teenage boy who basically raised himself while living with a new age wacko mother. And Goat Man (played by David Duchovny), the pseudo pot-smoking father figure who has lived in the pool house for as long as he can remember who takes him on goat treks in the Tucson desert and grows pot in the greenhouse. His wealthy father lives on the east coast but has been absent for most of his life. The kid goes off to prep school. It's dysfunctional at it's most dysfunctional, but the kid is a survivor. David Duchovny is unrecognizable as Goat Man with a long hair and beard. He's always so odd it's entertaining. ***

The Men Who Stare at Goats was a very strange movie about psychic warfare with Ewain McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges. Too weird yet boring for me. *

The Village Barbershop is a movie about a barber in Reno who's wife dies, and then his business partner dies. He's a bit of an idiot when it comes to business and finance and he's not very personable. He likes routine and gets out of wack when someone messes with his precise schedule. He begrudgingly hires a woman with a whole set of problems of her own. That description makes it sound like a comedy. It wasn't. It was more a human drama about daily existence and how our lives and perceptions change with the people we encounter. It was a bit slow, plodding along at a snail's pace, but good characters. Normal people doing normal things. ***

Not many movies this month - I ran out of ideas. Then I had this wild idea of binge watching seasons of ER. I can't believe I've never seen this television show ever in my life. For years I never knew who George Clooney was. I definitely understand all the hype now, but that Noah Wyle is so adorable...I'm on season three now. It's good, fast-paced, human-drama with interesting characters. For a prime time television show on a major network, I can certainly see how it got all those Emmys.

 

Can you believe it's already November???