So Much for Gadgets

I wish I could just let the sleeping cat lie.

But as you can see, he has a boo boo on his head, and it won’t heal by itself. So I went to PetSmart to get a pill pusher.

I also found some things there called Pill Pockets. They’re tasty little things that you push the pill inside of, and the cat just gulps it right down. Uh huh. They make a doggie version too, and dogs DO gulp. Cats don’t.

I picked George up and put him on a towel and offered him a pocketed pill. No way. He sniffed the pill a foot away and started looking for a quick escape. So I wrapped him in the towel and put my elbow on him to hold him down while I loaded the pill pusher.

I just let his head peek out of the towel, opened his mouth carefully, and inserted the pill pusher. It wouldn’t push the pill out. The cat started fighting. I covered him back up with the towel and put BOTH my elbows on him while I tried to see what the problem was.

Oops. I forgot to take the piece of cardboard out of the way. So I did that and tried again. The pill went in, the cat spit it out. The now-soggy pill went in again, the cat spit it out. I wrapped the pill in the pill pocket and put the whole mess in the pusher. It got stuck. I got it unstuck and tried again. The cat spit the whole mess out.

I finally gave up and used my fingers. It’s like trying to feed a toothpick through a table saw. But I didn’t get bit toooo badly. I took advantage of the bloody finger to test my blood sugar for the afternoon, why poke another hole later?

I guess I should try to look on the sunny side: at least I don’t have to take George’s temperature twice a day with a butt thermometer.

Time to Garden Again!

It’s been so sunny and warm outside for this past week (my condolences to people outside California). And my work hours have been reasonable, so I’ve been able to actually SEE my yard in the daylight.

So yesterday I took a day off, now that the project at work is under control, and spent it playing in the dirt. If you’ve never been to Cosumne, you may not realize that we have the most marvelous dirt in the world. Officially it’s called Hanford Loam, with streaks of Hanford Sandy. Unofficially, it’s riverbottom. Which can be unhandy if the river decides to take its bottom back, but so far this year that hasn’t been a problem. (Thank you, God.)

Bob likes to play in the dirt, too. He actually got up from his comfy place on the couch...

...and helped me. He went to Green Acres and got compost and cedar mulch, then hauled a few wheelbarrow loads of chicken poop and rice hulls to the garden spot. He also picked up these new things for me.

They’re nice and bright, they go very well with my new yellow wagon AND they’ll be easy to find when I inevitably misplace them.

I’ve been reviewing what was best and worst about the garden last year. The worst first: the soil was so rich, the worms grew huge. No, not as huge as boa contrictors. It’s not like they were a danger to humans. They were an attraction to possums. Some mornings I’d head out the door to work and it looked like someone had taken a miniature backhoe to the garden. The possums didn’t go after the plants, but they did dig a few up in their search for worms.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I guess just keep putting the plants back in the ground. Or hope the possums don’t come back. Or fence the front yard and get a dog, but a dog might do even more damage to the flowers.

Some things that were a great success were also a pain. The morning glories were glorious, but they went on to take over everything that grew near them. I might look for a less exuberant vine to grow on the chain this year. A dark purple clematis?

The lilies were lovely. I was looking forward to seeing them in their second year and was careful not to plant anything over the top of them when they died back for the season. Just before Thanksgiving, a gopher family evidently harvested the bulbs for their holiday dinner. So I need to replant lilies AND discourage gophers.

My main problem for a while, though, is going to be making myself get the whole garden ready before I start planting things. I get 4 square feet done and I want to run to Green Acres and buy stuff to fill it. And yes, I know it’s still too early but buying flowers is probably my favorite thing to do.

So be prepared for another season of flower pictures. In the meantime, there are things blooming in the yard. Camellias mostly. A lot of mine were raised from seed. When I worked downtown Sacramento at Central Press many, many years ago, I used to walk at lunch time. I’d go to Capital Park and gather camellia seeds from the old bushes that grow there. The flowers are fairly plain, but the bushes are really tough.

Oh, one more worst thing: finding where I planted bulbs last fall when I cut one in half with my trowel. That doesn't come close to my all-time worst garden experience: digging up half a toad. I haven't done that in a long time, but it's something that's guaranteed to send me to Puke City.

I’m heading back out to the dirt again today, but first I’m going to PetSmart to get one of those tube things you use to give pills to cats. George has a sore on his head and I have 20 pills to give him over the next 10 days. He weighs 11 pounds of solid muscle now, it’s all Bob and I can do to hang on to him, let alone try to open his mouth and keep a pill in there. What a bruiser!

Just One More

Snicker. Life is so much more fun with Obama. I hope it stays that way.

More Fun on the Net

I couldn’t get this to work, so I called Bob in to advise me on the use of Photoshop. He took a class on it. Twice. And this is what we came up with:


It’s great to have a kid who not only knows Photoshop, but is a good sport. But I don’t think he knows the words to “My Country Tis of Thee.” They didn’t sing that kind of stuff at the Waldorf school.

No problem, if he’ll wear the hat, I’ll sing.

Doodling on the Net

Sometimes the internet is just too much fun. I couldn’t find the place where you can have Aretha’s hat put on your head, but this one was cool. Except it looks like I have blood dripping out of my mouth and eyes. Yum.

At home in the daylight

After a 13-hour shift yesterday, today was pretty decent. I got home about 5 p.m. and actually got to see the horses and the peacocks through the drizzle. Rudy was a little damp, but he’s still colorful. He came around the back door looking for some puppy chow. I was happy to oblige.

I had a phone call tonight. From a polling company. The fellow on the phone asked a bunch of standard questions, a lot of them about what I do with my spare time. I told him I had none, I’d been working very long hours. At one point, I could hear him yawning.

I said, “Did you just yawn? Hearing about my life bores you?” He apologized, but then we started laughing. He said he was calling from Nebraska and everything there is dull this time of year. And cold. I told him my life really IS dull right now, but I’ll take that over Nebraska.

I like phone polls. My favorite is when the questions are over and they turn off the tape recorder and then I can ask the questions: “Where are you? What’s the weather like today? How do you like your job?” I’ve talked to some fun people that way.

Onto another random thought. You may have observed, as I have, that when you tell your doktor that you read something on the internet, he’ll sort of sneer and maybe make a disparaging komment. Well, I don’t mention the internet anymore. If I want to bring up something I’ve diskovered, I’ll say, “Aunt Bea says...” As in “Aunt Bea says Vaporub will kure toenail fungus.”

This works great. Maybe bekause they don’t want to make a negative remark about a relative or something. Try it next time you have the opportunity and let me know how it works for you.

By the way, I kan still spell just fine. For some reason a key just stopped working on my keyboard. Guess whih one. Foo, this was an expensive keyboard, too.

Work is Hectic Again

The big project came back from the approval process with changes that have to be made by Wednesday. So we’re all involved in another big push to get the work done. Just in time to work another weekend and miss another holiday.

Oh well, it’s not like I had big plans. It would have been a great time to sit out in the yard and work on the garden spot, it seemed so sunny and warm. It must have been nice, George the cat spent all day outside.

Dogwoods Are Gone

Bob got up at 11 this morning and dug up the dogwoods in his pajamas. The clothes you sleep in are your pajamas, right? Well, by the time he was fully awake he had the two trees dug up and was on his way back to sleep.


Marvi took the trees. Marvi was my last boss at work. I love her, she’s everything I’d love to be - bright, busy, a good gardener, active, agile. Retired.

We packaged the trees and stuffed them into her RAV4 (they are such great cars!). I have to admit the trees were a bit taller than 4 feet. What was I thinking?

So now I have a big hole to fill in. Oh sigh! Whatever will I do? Head for Green Acres nursery as soon as the weather is safe for planting things, of course. Looking forward to those days, I bought myself two belated Christmas gifts yesterday. One is a little gardening seat that reverses so you can kneel on it, and the other – ta-da! – is my own little yellow wagon.



They use similar wagons at the corn stand so people can haul pumpkins to their cars. I’m going to use this one for gardening and to haul my own wood to the wood box. This morning I hauled a bit of hay to the horses. Still not strong enough to throw the stuff over the fence without getting half of it down the front of my shirt and in my hair, but I’m working on that.

It has been so nice to have a couple of days off this week, before the next crunch at work. And the days were even nicer because they’ve been sunny and warm. Sunday I got to spend some time with Julie and Marta, catching up on "who's doing what these days." It was so good to see them. Later that day I had a call from Merlene from Texas. We went to high school together, read Richard Halliburton adventure books and dreamt of traveling on our own adventures. Merlene spent her summer vacation in Chile, doing just that. I loved hearing her stories. Now if I can just get her to start writing them down.

Today I got to spend a few hours with Marvi. We went to lunch at Bert's Diner, and then to Sheldon Feed. This afternoon I sat in the sun and visited with Rudy and Trudy Patoodeh. Rudy’s new tail is awesome. There’s probably 40 pounds of cat chow in that tail. I’ve been giving the penguins a bit every day for extra protein during feather-growing season. If Rudy fans his tail during a high wind, he might end up in Lodi.

Cats and Christmas

We put a few ornaments on the potted Norfolk Island pine this year, and strung a row of fake poinsettias across the mantel and called it Christmas. Very simple.


Not much stuff, but there were a couple of packages. Velcro loves the packages. She not only gets her favorite thing - empty boxes! - but she gets to be adorned in ribbon and paper. She stays on the floor in the middle of the detritus for a long time. She doesn’t play with it, she dresses up in it.

I love my tubby old (10 years now) cat.

Need a Dogwood Tree?

I have two small (4 foot) Dogwood trees in my flower bed that are ready to be dug up and transplanted. They are the white variety, like the wild ones, and came up from seed.

Sometime in the next 2 weeks should be prime replanting time. If you’d like one or both, give me a call. First caller gets to dig. They're good lawn trees. The parent tree is maybe 10 years old, and it's small and tidy, with beautiful leaves in the fall, and covered in blossoms in the spring. It also has small red berries in the fall that the birds gobble up. They obviously missed a couple a few years ago.

The Prince and the Pea

I’m trying to catch up on the mountain of laundry that has accumulated while I’ve been working. Charley is happy to help fold towels, and then sleep on them.

Do you think he’d feel a piece of Purina Cat Chow if I slipped it between a couple of towels?

Even with neuropathy, my feet can feel a piece when I step on it. One of the cats spits out the pieces he/she doesn’t like, so there are always chunks on the floor around the feed bowl. Of course, I’m not accusing Charley of that.

I'm B-a-a-a-ack!

We finished the monster project yesterday, on time. There were 55 600-page training manuals, complete with graphics and PowerPoint slides. The writers started in October. The job finally got to the production department full-force in mid-November, and we worked 7 days a week (with Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day off) until yesterday. There are 5 of us in production.

I usually love big jobs, and I don’t mind long hours, it’s always been an occasional part of my job. But this project was so complicated and detailed, and we had to work with equipment problems and a tech department that just doesn’t give a damn. They loaded MS Office 2008 on our computers, which we did not NEED for our jobs, just as we began working long hours. It made our 6 printers fairly useless, they needed more memory.

Now, you or I could get on the internet and order memory and it would be delivered to our front porch the next day. The memory for our printers, which was ordered before Thanksgiving, just got installed yesterday. AFTER our books shipped. When you’re working very hard to produce a product that will bring income to the company and help everyone keep their jobs, it’s hard to deal with this kind of attitude. I think the boys caught a virus from working with Microsoft products and PCs.

Most of what I’ve done in the past 2 months isn’t very interesting. It’s like time that just disappeared, and I won’t try to recall it to write about it. I'm just happy it's gone.

The holidays were otherwise not too cheery because I lost two of my last three uncles. Both Uncle Ray and Uncle Bud passed away. In my mind, the four Miller boys are all together again, probably out fishing on some heavenly lake, or sitting around a campfire and telling each other fish stories. What great times they shared with us — their nieces and nephews and grandkids. They were the kind of guys who were not just important to their families, they were well known and loved in their communities and by their co-workers as well. We were all so lucky to have them.

I don’t know what turn your lives are taking in this year of change. I haven’t talked to many of you recently. But now that I’m sitting here with a real life again, I think I’ll do some thinking about where mine is heading, now that it looks like I’ll actually live for a while.

With the long hours and grueling work, I never even had a cold. I still can’t dance. And I still have trouble combing my hair. But I feel strong and healthy.

I hope you do, too.



This was my last bouquet from the flower garden, the day before frost ended the show. Please ignore my filthy screen, this IS the country, you know. Today I feel like Captain Picard, just escaped from the Borg and wondering where the next adventure will take me.

XOX