The Ugly Face of Swine Flu

We've been fighting what is being reported as H1N1 flu at our house for the last few days. This is a video of an unvaccinated 3-year-old suffering from the disease. Don't let this happen to you and the ones you love.



We've been home all week. Loopy loopy loopy. The boys just take turns getting a fever. Ricky on Sunday, Robbie on Monday, Ricky on Tuesday, here we are Thursday night and I'm afraid to check to see which one's afire. (Actually the temps aren't even that bad.) The meanest part is that I think we're all feeling better and then someone pops up with a recurrence.

I'm not really complaining. I just wanted an excuse to post the video :)

Redirect to Gardening Blog

See my latest blog entry at carolinesgardening.blogspot.com titled "Nature Prevails".

New Gardening Blog

Hey, I've started a new blog just about my gardening efforts.
carolinesgardening.blogspot.com

Maintenance Schedule

Just keeping a list of things I want to do and when I need to do them....

Summer 2009 - Build IBM beds in rest of back yard; build strawberry pyramid
September 2009 - Plant strawberries; build grape trellis; divide and distribute daylilies
November 2009 - Start winter sowing
February 2010 - Severely prune abelia and pull out more honeysuckle
March 2010 - Figure out swarm control measures
April 2010 - Plant muscadine vine

Gone, baby, gone

Here's my first lesson for 2009. Swarm control.
My bees swarmed on Easter. I was in the backyard and heard a really loud buzz, just like what I hear when I open the hive. Looking around, it was easy to find my girls up in the top of a tall, tall, pine tree in our woods. I knew they were mine. It was sad. I called the family out and we watched until they flew off.
I left the hive alone until yesterday. It was confirmed: there were way, way fewer bees and no brood. There was one large queen cell so hopefully she'll come on out and take care of business until I can requeen. Dwight Porter of Porter Farm Bees won't have available queens for another three weeks. Then I have to decide if I want to drive all the way there for one queen. I like the Russians, though. Might be worth it.
I also saw varroa mites (eeek!). I'll have to get back in there and try the powdered sugar technique to see if I can help them help themselves.
I talked to Richard of the Meck Bees group and he offered to have a swarm catcher call me the next time they go out. Then I could bring the swarm back to my hive and augment my population until my girls get going again. I would absolutely love to catch a swarm, just to say I did it :)

Trip to Florida

These are pictures from our trip to Gainesville and Tampa. I'll start first with a picture from Charlotte :)

We went to a Bobcats game with the Charlotte Gator Club. The Bobcats played the Knicks for whom David Lee, a former Gator, plays. We got into the arena early, watched the teams warm up, and got to meet David Lee.

This past weekend we went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. Alex had a surprise for his boys!

We went to the Orange and Blue Game. Florida won! We sat in the student section and had a great time. Beautiful, slightly overcast day.

Ricky and Grandmamma hanging in the back seat!

This is Ricky's new baby. It was originally Alex's doll when he was born (that baby is older than most of us in the family...) but has been handed down to the next generation. Ricky buckles him up in the car and everything. We tried to see if his name was Muno but I don't think so.

This is called doughnut overload. Sad when you can't even finish your doughnut.

And if you're wondering why there aren't more candids of Robbie, it's because this is what you get when you try to take his picture.

Celebrating the Laptop

I'm sitting here on the porch drinking coffee and enjoying my fabuloso new laptop that Alex gave me for my birthday!! Since I can, I'll post a video of Ricky :)

Our Backyard Garden

We have been working hard this early spring to get our backyard going. Here's the latest picture....

OK, OK. You may have guessed that this is someone else's backyard. In fact, this is the Little Homestead in the City and my new inspiration for what we can do with our little patch of ground.

Alex and I built a 4' x 10' raised bed as our start. I have been adding compost material and topped it off with composted cow manure, sphagnum peat moss, and mushroom compost from our local Wallace Farms.

The mulch is a free delivery of wood chips from a local tree service that was cleaning out the woods in our neighborhood. I have mulched a lot of areas and still have a moderate mound of material left on the driveway. And it was just a half-load! Can't imagine what a full load would do to me!

I also made several ollas for improved, consistent irrigation. An olla is a clay pot that you bury to its neck and fill with water. You plant your plants right next to it and the roots reach out to the pot which releases water just as the soil dries. Ashamedly, I will admit that I finally went to Wal-Mart where the 6" pots were $1 each. The lowest price elsewhere I could find was at GardenRidge for $3. Darn those low prices.

My planting approach is based on square foot gardening. The idea is that you divide your planting space into 1' x 1' segments and then you plant a certain number of plants in each segment depending on the type of plant.

Dad came over and pulled out four of our u-g-l-y crepe myrtles and I planted needlepoint hollies in their place. It'll take a few years for them to get a decent size, but they look ok now and they will be great as an evergreen backdrop to our projects in time. Our neighbor has an amazing lawn and I never liked the idea that he had to drive up his driveway and see our life in progress. We may miss the myrtles at first but will be glad when we have some more permanent screening too.

I also removed the climbing rose bush that has engulfed everything nearby. It's a beast. In its place went trellised peas.

My front yard effort has been to remove the honeysuckle that has overgrown everything in our mailbox-side bed. It's so bad, I'm contemplating whacking the shrubs down to nibs so I can fully eradicate the honeysuckle. The abelias are all overgrown anyway; I just might really screw up their natural form if I go for it too hard. Now that it's fully spring, I'll have to wait until February. Not like the honeysuckle could get any worse, right?

Future plans for the back yard include a grape arbor and a second raised bed to be put into action this fall.

My friend Kate gave me the brilliant idea to put blueberry bushes in the front yard. I added five additional plants earlier this spring and the results on my older bush has been tremendous. They are all popping with future berries!

Home Alone

I am convinced that if we left Ricky home alone for a couple of weeks that he would be just fine. He can work the TV, climb to the top of the pantry and open the peanut butter, draw the water and take a bath, etc., etc. Here's a picture of what you get, though, when you leave him alone for just long enough to check your email....



















Bottomless with one - just one - shoe on and doing something bad under my bed. It looks like a dead body in this picture but it was actually a lively scene, whatever was happening under my bed.

Kitchen Update

Wanted to put the before and after pix of our kitchen. As always, it's not 100% but there's a lot that is finished. I have come to love the orange in the kitchen. It's definitely my color.

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen After:

I'm in the market for a chandelier for the eating area and I need to figure out how to fix what's hanging on my walls there too. I relocated some key pieces and it's just not the same.

Nature, Taking Care of Business

I love my bees. They are so awesome and they do not need me. Not to feed them, not to clean up their poop, not to be their friend.

It was in the 60's today and they were flying so I figured it was my chance to whip up a sugar solution and see if I could help them not starve before spring. I got out there, put the sugar syrup in the feeder, and then stepped back to observe. Those little girls were bringing in pollen! On Feb 1!! I had heard a rumor that redbuds were blooming and that this might be a good year for honey but I didn't think my girls had it in them to go find it.

In this video, look for the bees flying around with giant yellow balls on their back legs. You can see it a couple of times. One girl flies in with some and then another one crawls out of the hive and back in.

Cakes

I just finished a birthday cake for our friends Anne Frances and Whitney and thought I'd post it and the others I've done. My mom used to make great cakes for us when we were kids and I guess it has spilled over.

A Swamp stadium cake, for yet another national championship game probably.





















Ricky's second birthday - a Nemo cake.

Gator heads for Ricky's first birthday. The yellow one's eyes wouldn't stay up...

Robbie's 4th birthday - kachow!


























Robbie's first birthday - hey, he's a Leo.
























A nearly finished cake for Anne Frances and Whitney from last year.




















Robbie's second birthday. The cupcakes were the best :) Not many ate the Oscar cupcakes but they were the most authentic.



















A kitty cat cupcake from our "Welcome Home Stripe" party when he returned from a month-long "va-cat-tion"
























Robbie's third birthday.











And my most recent, a field of horses for Anne Frances and Whitney.

Extracurricular Activities

So can I tell you how much I love coaching my Lego team?!?! We are experiencing a true creative process and I'm applying a lot of the development skills I learned at Andersen Consulting, just on a much smaller scale. The boys are really responding to the different challenges and I can see the kinds of professions they will wind up in some day.

One is already an engineer at heart (I know enough of them to tell...), one is never going to engineer anything but will be the sales guy who promises the customer all kinds of cool design features that can never possibly be worked in given the timeline and budget, one is just a really great, curious, talented kid, and one of my first graders is restless, fidgety, chases the other kids around the room, and is constantly goofing around but has the most raw genius and consistently busts out with the best finished product of any of them. And then there's Robbie and Charlie :)

So fun. In the picture above, they had just finished building the first phase of our barge-style solution to this year's challenge. (Long story short, it has to be something in the category of Think Green and their idea was a ship that will clean rivers of litter.) They filled the sink with water to make sure it would float. If there's anything boys like, it's seeing if something floats...

My other new extracurricular is my Scrabble Club. Laurie and I called a couple of other smart moms from PLP and we are beginning to play Scrabble once a month. It came out of a conversation in which Laurie and I were lamenting the brainlessness of bunko and how we needed to get out of the neighborhood a bit. Our first meeting was last weekend and it was so super fun. I memorized all the 2-letter words but Laurie still won by 4 points, playing qis for 50 points... Maybe next time....

December Pix

Seems I have a lot of pix from December to post so here we go.

Good old Stripey had a good Christmas...

We were supposed to meet up with some old friends and reunite but the morning we were to leave, Ricky busted out in an all-over hard core rash. Maybe not the best picture to start things out, but those cheeks sure are cute in his corn starch bath.

Grandfather + Grandchild(ren) + Sofa = Secret Snuggle

With Welo and Nana in town, Alex and I had a great New Year's date!

Rockin' out with the cousins... (Somebody thinks she's big in that chair...)

OK, OK, it's not Ohio snow. We got a half inch and it was melting by noon (during Obama's inauguration speech!) so we had to get out there and make Frosty the Snow Head. Yes, those are Miniwheats for eyes. It was melting! We had to hurry!

Apparently, Ricky's favorite temperature is *not* cold...

Book List

The Federalist Papers - Hamilton, Madison, and one other guy
{Currently in progress, slow going, get on with it already. Can't wait to get out of the first half of why the states should create a federal government in the first place instead of dividing into a loose confederation of 3 to 13 nations. Can't wait to get to the second half that talks about why the Constitution was sufficient and good. Dude. Breezed through the first several (of 80+) until they just kept being titled something like "more on the previous topic". I'm getting done with the previous topic. But it's still good. I'm not complaining...}

Race Matters - Cornel West

Democracy Matters - Cornel West
{I might need a break before, after, and between those previous two...}

The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small - Marian Wright Edelman

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Sophie's Choice - William Styron

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
{This one's a recommendation from the owner of The Milky Way so if you have feedback I'll take it.}


I'm going to start a list for Robbie too:

The Hobbit - This is the next one for sure.
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Aesop's Fables
Ooo here's a list on wikipedia

Buddy Update

Some people have been asking about Buddy lately so here's the scoop.

I have been seeing him weekly since school started in September. Instead of reading, we've been doing mostly math. His teacher, in my opinion, is much improved over last year. She laments that she is unable to provide him the attention he clearly needs but seems to be hanging in there with him. She acknowledges that he's not a bad kid, just annoying :) Just wants constant attention. I saw his old teacher in the hall the other day and she had the nerve to say to me, "I miss that little guy. I just love him, God help me, just love him." I rolled my eyes and replied, "Oh, come on!" and she insisted. It was all I could do to turn and leave the school. I mean, this is the woman who had him suspended from school for hiding under his chair, right?

Anyway, he's doing pretty much the same. His family is in their own place(s). Strangely, they continue to move every several weeks with the excuse of bedbugs in the apartments, but it may be more likely nonpayment. Regardless, they are on their own.

Here's something else weird. He doesn't have a little brother. I asked the school person where his little brother spends the day since he's too young for school and she looked at me like I had two heads. "He doesn't have a little brother." I know more about this brother than any of his other siblings. He mentions him every visit. How they sleep with their mom or in bunk beds together. The school person said maybe it's his cousin because he often refers to his cousins as brothers and sisters. I think it strikes me as strange because I would expect family relationships to be more defined than that and I wonder if it means anything or not.

Buddy's adult front teeth are growing in and his face is thinning out. He looks way older than he did last year and he's lost a lot of his babyish habits.

He had his 8th birthday and we did cookies and cupcakes at lunch. That was fun. I stayed after lunch to watch his class in action and it was interesting. They sat in a group and discussed the books they had recently read on the subject of kindness. It was easy to tell who was engaged at home and who wasn't. One girl busted out with some serious wisdom and the teacher and I caught each other's eye. She said afterwards that that is what keeps her teaching.

As I mentioned before, I have been reading a lot and thinking a lot about a solution for him. I think my friend Adrienne summed it up for me. She related the story of a man who replied, when asked what the answer to all of this mess is, "One person at a time." I think that's it. All of the social services in the world aren't going to affect this little guy's life and the kicker is, as I told Adrienne, people care about poverty, care about children not receiving an education, care about kids who are neglected, but nobody cares about *Buddy*. And that's his problem.

So here's my strategy. I'm not sure how or if it will work out, but I'm putting it out to the Universe.

Step 1: I've recruited another person, a good looking, successful, Masters-degreed black man, to volunteer with him also. His job will be to demonstrate to Buddy how life can be. He will give him the life experiences that he does not currently have the opportunity to do. I'm putting a lot on this man's shoulders but someone's got to do it and I hope it's him. I bought him a signed copy of one of Cornel West's books and it's going in the mail tomorrow.

Step 2: I am going to find someone to take him to church to see all of the people in his world who are good people, who are consciencious, hardworking, loving, committed. I need to write an entry about seeing Cornel West last month. That's another story. But at that event, I learned of a church that meets pretty darn close to where Buddy lives. In his book "Race Matters", Dr. West talks about looking past liberal constructionists and conservative behaviorists and instead dealing with the black nihilism in the community through something he calls conversion politics. The preacher of the church also addressed those kinds of issues at the West event, the issues that can only be solved through a loving community. Buddy needs that. The challenges are (a) to let it be OK with the mom and (b) to find someone to bring him to church every Sunday.

Step 3: Down the street from where the church meets is an African-American bookstore. Its owner is highly involved in community organizing. I'm thinking that's a superior after-school environment for him and maybe his sister during the week. The big idea is to find an adult willing to meet at the bookstore and hang out for a while, bring a good snack, read, hang out, talk. Again, it's about one-on-one attention, behavior modeling, community, finding people who will care about him specifically.

Big plans. We'll see :)

I had a chance to meet the mom at the Christmas lunch at Buddy's school. But she didn't show. I did meet his sister and that fifth grader has the eyes of a 30-year-old. Once we get Buddy going, she's next.