Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday and bought some fabric. My son had given me a gift card at Christmas that I’d never got around to using. Armed with a 40% off coupon, I went shopping.

Most of HL I never walk through. All that home decor stuff, ugh. But I do have to go by the stamping stuff and the clearance corner. Didn’t see anything I wanted there, but since all the cake and candy stuff was on sale, I got some mini paper baking cups. I’m going to need those next winter, for fruitcake cookies.

I did browse a bit… saw a double layered plastic cup with lid and straw. Ron could use something like that for his pepsi, a double layered cup wouldn’t sweat. He won’t drink with a straw, but we could toss that bit… however, after more investigation I decided it wouldn’t work. Has to be hand washed, can’t go in dishwasher. Forget that! Even if it wouldn’t get washed that often, I am not buying something that isn’t top rack safe.

Made it over to the fabric area, and what I’m looking for is some fabric to sew a cover for the generator that sits on the porch. I am thinking canvas, some kind of sturdy fabric. I finally find the denim, canvas and twill. If I go with twill, I can actually buy a color. Hmm. But wait… don’t I have dyes at home? Why be boring? I went with a white twill. I asked for 5 yards and the gal starts measuring it and folding it up. It’s a darned cut piece rolled on the bolt. But it’s 4 7/8 yardage, so I take it. I know I don’t really need 5 yards, just want to be on the safe side. Since I didn’t measure the generator before I left home, I’m guesstimating.

On my way home I stop at Chicken Holler. They are a garden center mainly, but they also have a big wood stove showroom. I remember when they used to be out in the middle of nowhere. Now they are right smack dab in Farmington with McDonald’s, Dollar General, Sonic, Shell gas station and a grocery store all across the street. Oh, and the Farmington High School right next door. I had stopped by on Friday to see if they had any hydrangeas. I’ve actually never cared for hydrangeas, but last year I saw some SUPER blue ones. I decided that if I could get a SUPER blue hydrangea, I’d get one for my birthday this year. They had a few, some that are advertised as blooming all summer. I got one of the long bloomers and a bag of Aluminum Sulfate to make sure it will bloom blue. Have a place picked out to plant it, will probably get it in tomorrow.

Anyhow, on to photos…. the cover for the generator was a grill cover. Perforated plastic, and the cats destroyed it pretty quick. It didn’t fit well anyhow….

And then the one I sewed and dyed. Hopefully it will last a lot longer that that crappy plastic one. I’m waffling on spraying it with Scotchguard. I did put a LOT of fabric softener in the final rinse, that acts as a water repellent to some extent.

I could have fitted the top part of that a bit better, but aside from the rounded corners at the end pieces I didn’t want to do a lot of fussing, so I went with only the bottom measurements. I have a bit of fabric left over… including a piece that I measured wrong and so I was lucky I overestimated! The hem is 6 inches deep, I did that for weight, so that the weight of the fabric will hold it down better. It’s protected from most weather and most of the sun, so I hope it lasts a few years. Not that it was a lot of work… but it was a PITA to sew all that yardage into an open cube shape! At least the cats won’t rip it apart instantly like they did with that plastic grill cover.

While that was washing and drying I walked the dogs. Got down to Copperhead corner and realized that yet again, I forgot the camera. So, after we all came back I got the camera and went down to the far end of the property again. That one wild flower I like to photo. Some day I might dig it up and move it up here… and probably kill it in the process…

I also took some photos around the yard. My clematis is blooming. It’s being beat to death by the wind, but it’s blooming ever so nicely!

Then there are the flower beds in front of the porch. A few years ago I put in a bunch of bags of dirt, sprinkled mixed seeds in there, and then put baby chicken wire on top to keep the cats from digging. We had some pretty good flowers until the next year and the cats figured out how to dig into the dirt through the wire. So I pulled all that off… and built frames that went from the wood border up to the porch. That worked until the wire got bent and cats would just climb inside to use it for a litter box. AUGH!

Last year I had nothing to keep cats out, I took all the chicken wire off and I had four o’clocks and lunaria. They all did well. But after digging up the naked ladies just outside of one wood framed bed, I realized that the poor plants wouldn’t grow because the footing sticks out from the rocks. No wonder I have trouble with things growing and needing watering too often… it’s just some dirt on top of concrete for half the bed. Duh! No wonder all the plants want to escape… it’s not just being used as a litter box, it’s that there is no ground to put roots down into.

So, a couple photos of how the plants are escaping the lack of soil…

I plan to make the flower beds about twice as deep this year. I’ll move the landscape timbers out and put longer ones in at the sides… except for maybe that I’ll extend them down a bit, too. So that they go past the corners. My hydrangea is going to go in on the far left of that second photo, a couple feet out from the walls. It seems to be the best place for it. Needs some shade, only gonna get that somewhere close to the house.

Plus… evidence that my grapes will get fruit this year. One of my muscadines hasn’t leafed out, and both are still bleeding sap although the other one has started leafing. I don’t see any signs of blooms yet on the one survivor, maybe I’ll never get fruit from those. Sigh. I’ve already bought a replacement for the one that isn’t doing anything but leak sap… a concord grape. I love the flavor of muscadines, but perhaps the cultivated ones from Georgia won’t ever do well here. (oh, and a few years ago I had a mystery vine… duh, it was a wild muscadine! It had fruit and against Ron’s advice I even tasted the fruit. Alas, the neighbor weedwhacked those all down.) But anyway, the REGULAR grapes are gonna fruit this year, every single plant has buds. Sweet!

All of the regular grape vines have lots of these buds. I must be doing =something= right! Even if those cultivated muscadines aren’t doing so well… Big sigh!

One last photo. I’m overrun with Armadillos. There is a burrow under my blackberry hedge, and the blackberries aren’t growing very well in that area. I want to get rid of them, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t much you can do. They do have sensitive noses… armadillos can smell the bugs and worms and such that they eat, that’s how they know where to dig. So, some ammonia on a rag and poked down into the burrow. I thought they’d all come running out, but no. So I put another rag down and poured the last cup of ammonia out of the bottle into it, and left the bottle in the hole. None of that has seemed to bother the armadillos… they just dug the hole bigger so they can get in and out around that bottle. Sheesh. I need a BIG rock. I bet they’d just dig around a big rock, too. A fire might work, but there is a wooden fence post just above that hole so I’d likely catch that on fire. (I was thinking of pouring some charcoal down that hole and then lighting it)

Anyhow, the armadillo hole.

Looks HUGE, and it actually is pretty large now that they’ve dug it out more. I want them GONE… armadillos make for bad garden neighbors.

Well, I’ve got pizza to make for our dinner and more things to do before dark… and then it’ll be bedtime and work in the morning. I’m glad I could get a few photos up today, a blog without photos is boring!

hugs,
Vyx

LOL, sounds kind of crazy doesn’t it? I don’t wear make up. I barely remember to put moisturizer on my face. I’ve always been lazy about my hair… I keep it short so that it’s easy to care for and I use cheap shampoo. I just have never been too interested in looking like everyone else.

But I saw something advertised recently that sort of interested me. I have an eyebrow problem, always have had. If I don’t do something I basically have a big brown caterpillar across my face. For most of my life I did nothing most of the time. Shave off the middle, maybe, if I even bothered to do that.

Then a friend told me that getting my eyebrows waxed would probably work really well AND it wouldn’t hurt nearly as bad as I thought. I knew tweezing was never gonna be my thing. So, I went and had it done. I was amazed… it really =didn’t= hurt that bad, and I finally had shapely eyebrows! This was 10 years ago or so. Since then I’ve gone to salons to have it done, tried various products at home to do it myself, but I was never really happy with the results. The best eyebrows were that first time. Then it all went down hill. Got one of the best haircuts once, but the stylist who cut my hair so well almost gave me two black eyes doing my brows. It’s sort of a hit or miss thing… even with the same stylist. I’ve come home far too often with mismatched brows. Doing it myself is almost as bad… sometimes wax strips would work, sometimes they wouldn’t, and I tried quite a few products. Cold liquid wax, strips, goo, glorified tape.

So, when I saw this new heated wax system being advertised I thought… hmm, maybe. It’s the Sally Hansen Simple Spa Wax Warmer kit. Not too expensive to try, at about $20. I got one. No cloth strips, which I was skeptical about. Can they really make a wax that doesn’t need a way to get it off?

Yes, they can. It works beautifully. It works better than any hot salon wax I’ve ever had done. Much better than the cold wax stuff at home in any variation. No cloth strips to either wash or throw away depending on the type of goo used.

The applicators are just craft sticks… popsicle sticks and tongue depressors, and that is a mistake. Need a thinner stick for eyebrows, really. Not a problem, I can find the size stick I need for next time. The wax heats up in about 20 min. or so, and you test the heat on your inner wrist before using. Don’t want it too hot. Apply it… and this is the tricky part if you are doing your own eyebrows, lol! I managed to drip some right into my eyelashes… that small craft stick is too big even for my bushy eyebrows. But it comes off with a bit of baby oil, so I didn’t have to yank out my puny eyelashes. Let it cool a bit, then rip it off. It takes all the hair and not the skin. Most of the home products always take some of my skin, too. This one didn’t. Not only that, but the redness went away faster.

So, and I know this is a weird place and time for me to be posting a beauty product review… but I love this new kit. It works better than anything else out there for home use, and I rate it better than salon wax, too. Hey, if I mess up I have only myself to blame… I’m sort of tired of paying someone ELSE to give me mismatched eyebrows. Five stars for the Sally Hansen Simple Spa Wax kit!

Hugs,
Vyx

I know it is, because our lilac is blooming. Not as great as it did last year, but it’s going good. Can’t blame the lilac… we had a dry summer last year and I watered and made a few things bloom at the wrong time. Lilac and Jane magnolia both bloomed in late summer, eek.

I’ve got radishes… those seeds I planted back in February. They need water right now, but we are supposed to get rain Sunday so I may hold off watering. I need to rototill the rest of the garden anyhow… the regular garden, and the new bit we started last year. I picked a nice handful of eating size radishes today, yum YUM!

Artichokes. I’ve got artichoke seedlings to plant out. That new bit we dug up last year is going to be home to those. I’ll have to baby them and keep them alive through our hot dry summer and then mulch like crazy in the fall to keep the roots from freezing in winter… but I’ve done it before. I have high hopes I can do it again. This time with =real= artichokes, LOL! I planted some a few years ago, did the baby thing with them… but I had the cut dried flower kind instead of the eating kind. Sigh… but still, same family, same care. I want to do it again, I miss fresh artichokes and I’m not willing to pay $3 each for last years old tough ones that we get in the stores here.

I won’t be planting 15+ tomato plants this year. Maybe just 6 or so. No peppers, I never use them all, they just go to waste. Perhaps a bit of squash and a cuke plant or two. No pickles for us this year, but that’s okay. My neighbors seem to have moved and are not planting a garden next door, so I won’t get free cukes like I have for the past couple years. I don’t really have the space for cukes… but I’m also not insane enough to plant 2 or 3 fifty foot rows of cukes. Well, my garden rows are only 25 feet anyhow, but still… :) The guy next door would go a bit nuts planting and couldn’t give it all away fast enough before everything would max out and quit. Couple cuke plants, couple squash, I’ll still have more than I can eat.

My grapes are budding out with leaves. Even the muscadine grapes seem to have survived my pruning. I thought I pretty much killed those, because since I pruned them they’ve been bleeding sap out like crazy. But I see swelling leaf buds finally… the regular grapes are leafing out. I oughta get grapes this year of some kind. I’m probably insane, but I want to plant a few fruit trees this year. Right, Vyx… you’ve got 5 grape vines, and 50 feet of blackberries… how the heck are you gonna take care of more fruit? I dunno, but I want to. :)

Well… I need to get outside with the camera this weekend and hope it works… lots of cute little wild flowers this year. With ME doing the mowing everything has more of a chance to grow.

hugs….

Vyx

It’s not all about babies, although I have those…

New grandbaby is awesome! I wish I could see him more. Time for that… he’ll get even cuter as he gets older.. up until maybe the teenage years, lol! I posted a couple new photos on FB, so I won’t post them here.

We also have kittens. MeepMeep decided to have kittens, and I decided to freak her out because she wasn’t in with her new (but cleaned) kitten by bringing her and the kit in the house. So I make a bed, make a cave, put a litter box in the house in a bedroom… etc… etc… and bring MeepMeep in with her baby. I wasn’t thinking about Meep not knowing in the house is good… she’s not a regular visitor inside, like some of the other cats.

So, bringing her in, That was no help, it freaked her out, shut down her labor. There is a DOG in the house, for one thing. I shut the bedroom door, and visited with her, but it was not okay. In the morning I took them both back out to the heated kitty house on the porch.

When I got home from work she’d had more… and another cat momma, Patches, decided to have her kittens too.
Well, the natural thing for our cats to do is have kittens together. They share Momma duties. As they get older they sometimes don’t LIKE to do that, but at least for a first litter, help is okay. (last year Libby and Patches had kittens at the same time, and Patches ousted Libby, took over her kittens) I thought for sure that Patches would be ousting Meep, but if she tried it, Meep wasn’t going for it. I’m glad Patches is helping her out, showing her the ropes and all.

Patch and Libby still don’t get along. Patches has been forcing Libby away from food, starting fights with her. I guess I’ve got a queen war going on, but since Libby is so laid back she just backs off. I make sure Libby gets her share of the food, and try to keep Patch from picking on her. About all I can do.

One thing I think is worth reporting… the Momma cats kicked everyone else out of the heated house. That was fine when it was warm, but then it got a bit chilly again. I had to take the kitten bed I’d made for in the house outside and fix it up for other cats to sleep in at night. Dusty and Snowball got right in there to sleep. I think their feelings were hurt that they got ousted… they are still kittens themselves.

News other than kittens and babies… plants are growing. Or not, as the case may be. I planted a number of grape vines last year, and I pruned them one nice weekend in February. Since then they’ve been bleeding to death from where I pruned them. I hope they grow… it’s mostly the muscadine vines doing that, not the regular table grapes. I’m not doing anything to them, might make things worse…. just waiting and seeing.

Of my three peonies planted last year, only two have come up. The third one may yet still pop up, wait and see on that, too. Considering that they were “guaranteed to bloom” I’ll be happy if they just grow… I didn’t expect them to bloom last year even with that guarantee. Come to think of that, what a bogus guarantee that is… who expects a bareroot chunk of something to do well the first year? Get established yeah, bloom, hah!

My Jane magnolia is blooming nicely. I even took a photo! Two, actually… that came out okay.

I just love Jane magnolias. Didn’t know they were magnolia trees for a long time, I always called them tulip trees. We planted one in honor of my sister Cherie in her yard and it’s done well. Much better than the dogwood there has done.

The mini iris also bloomed fairly well. They are so cute and tiny. I really should move them everywhere… they usually bloom before we get to mowing and they are so short that even when we do mow it probably wouldn’t hurt them at all. It would be nice surprises in the yard if I dug some up and scattered them here and there.

Also growing well is my clematis. I’ll wait to photo that until it blooms. Weeds have taken over everywhere… the weeds that get the purple flowers that look so lovely in big chunks. They rake out pretty easily and actually die off pretty quick when the weather gets warmer, so I’m not too concerned.

Last year I became enamored of blue blue blue hydrangeas. The bluer the better, and I’ve seen some super blue ones. I was thinking that that’s what I want for my birthday this year, a bluer than blue hydrangea. Has to be super blue, like the ones I’ve seen locally. On the other hand, I also adore the crab apples blooming this time of year, especially the deep red ones. Plus there is my favorite hedge shrubs… flowering quince and forsythia mixed together in a hedge. I love the orangey pink of flowering quince and I love forsythia too. Just can’t beat that totally yellow. Quince are slow growing, but forsythia is a quick grower. They look pretty together, but eventually the forsythia will take over, have to whack it back and all. I know where I can get plenty of forsythia cuttings when they are done blooming… and my Mom will probably thank me for regaining some of her yard, lol! The quince… well, I want an old fashioned orange/pink one. Might be harder to find, I know my Mom doesn’t have any.

I moved one of my bluebird houses. I had it pretty close to the house and sparrows kept wanting to nest in it. So I took it down and moved it way out in the field, attached it to a tree. They won’t be bothered by me messing with my flower bed, or with cats too close. Forgot to check on it today, but I did check the box by the blackberries and that looks like it has a bluebird nest in it. If I start seeing junk in the nest, I’ll pull it out… that’d be sparrows using trash for their nest. I built those boxes for bluebirds, not the dang sparrows.

I’m almost done feeding the birds. I don’t usually, because of all the cats here… I don’t want to be luring birds to be cat food. But we had a lot of snow in February, so I made feeders out of 2 liter bottles and got a big bag of sunflower seed. I also stocked up on suet cakes and a new suet feeder. Ran out of the suet cakes pretty quick, and I’m down to maybe one more filling of the feeders before I’m out of seed. Then all the feeders will come down and the birds will have to find a new place to eat. It’s one thing to be feeding them when the ground is 2 feet in snow and the cats are huddled in their house…. I don’t want to come home to any piles of feathers on the porch. It’s not fair to the birds to lure them here and bait the cats with them. It has been interesting to see all the birds, though. Three kinds of woodpeckers, cardinals, and a bunch that I don’t know what they are. Finches and goldfinches in winter color. But too many I just don’t know. I need a bird book to refresh my memory. :)

Ron has been slowly getting better… he’s progressed to taking a shower without the cervical collar. Bath time is a lot quicker than it was. His next doctor appointment is Tuesday and he’s hoping he can have the collar off all the time. He still won’t be fully recovered to go back to work, but at least he’ll be able to move a bit more. I’m not really expecting a lot more help around the house with stuff for a while… I doubt he’ll be mowing the lawns this year, but if we can at least move the furniture back to normal it would be good. He’ll be super disappointed if that collar has to stay on, so I hope he’s healed enough for it to come off. I think he has… he’s hardly ever in pain any more, and I think when he is it’s caused by the collar now. But we’ll see.

Well, this was just going to be a short note about spring flowers and I turned it into a long rambling post as usual… LOL! Guess this is it for now…

hugs,
Vyx

Aiden Reilly Campbell. Born March 10, 2011 at 7:30 pm. 8 lbs 5 oz and 20.5 inches long.

My first grandbaby! I got to hold him today, and I cried. He’s really precious.

I’ve been having trouble with my camera… so these aren’t the best pictures. Oh well!

Here is one with his momma, my stepdaughter Candice.

Awesome!

hugs,
Vyx