Janette’s Neighborhood

Here are updated photos of the house showing the freshly painted exterior.

Believe it or not, that wild grass in the foreground is as tall as I am. It does a nice job of screening some of the less attractive portions of our unlandscaped yard. I tried to encourage the grass to spread by spending several days digging up hundreds of thistles in late May and early June. No wonder my back got sore. The lawn was green for a little while as it became colonized by weeds, native grasses, teeny weeny flowers and other assorted local riff, raff. I did get all the thistles and broom seedlings out. Then the weather turned dry and hot. Now it's dirt with dried dead stuff on top and a few very hardy green weeds. Andy's on the lookout for deer even though they don't come this close to the front of the house (no shrubbery or baby trees or garden to eat). A guy working next door with an excavator asked our permission to spill some fill down the side of a slope a few feet onto the back of our lot. We said okay and I asked him to set up this rock beside our driveway in return. Someday I'll get around to cleaning it up and sticking some numbers on. The back of the house looks much better now that it has been painted. I have a few planters on the deck railing. We probably won't be able to do the landscaping until next year and I'm dreading the mud that we'll have all winter in the rain. This is a close-up of some of the Petunias I have in the deck planters. They did nothing for about five weeks. Then it warmed up and boom! Flowers all over the place.

 

I decided my next book should have a higher proportion of multi-syllabic words. I picked one of Robert Ludlum's thrillers, The Apocalypse Watch.

I couldn't find an extract so I fed Wordle a plot summary plus three reviews, one negative and two positive. This word cloud actually does give a little insight into the story.

I'm noticing that nouns show up more prominently than verbs in these word clouds. I have to think about what that means...

I do a series of shoulder and lower back stretches every morning and lately they have been getting tedious. Instead of thinking about body position and what body part I'm stretching, my thoughts wander off to painting doors, whether I should try to find a new hair stylist soon, and the plot of the latest mystery I'm reading. Also, what is the name of that tree that I can see through the window? Could it be a Douglas-fir?

On Monday my new chiropractor gave me four lower back and hip exercises to do every day. Tuesday morning I tried to incorporate them into my routine and had the usual new exercise confusion about getting my body parts into the right position, forgetting how to count, and disliking getting down onto the floor for exercises. It reminds me that I haven't vacuumed up the dog hair for ages.

Later on Tuesday, a DVD that I bought on eBay arrived. Yoga for the Rest of Us - Back Care Basics. I watched just part of it, not able to sit through the whole thing - watching other people do Yoga is pretty boring.

But this morning I tried to include the Yoga-type breathing and mindfulness in my exercises. It's another small challenge that I hope will keep me interested for a few more days...

Here is another Wordle word cloud created from an extract taken from the latest book I am reading. The names of two of the main characters featured in the book are obvious, but the rest doesn't seem to reveal much.

A person could go blind staring at these neon colours.

Every night just after supper we go for a short walk. Sometimes we stay on the paved road in our subdivision but usually we follow one of the trails back into the bush behind the houses. A few days ago I took my camera along and here are some of the things we saw.

 

On Wednesday I hit a big rock and blow up one of my car's tires. On Thursday, while we wait at the service station for my replacement tire and rim, Andy shatters the rear sliding window on The Big Guy's truck as he tries to crawl through from the back into the cab. This morning one of the back tires on my car is completely flat with a screw embedded in the tread.

Tomorrow I plan to stay in bed.

Show us the very last picture you took. No cheating!

This is the very last photograph on my camera. I'm glad it's one of the more interesting ones and not one of the boring over-exposed pictures of rocks I took on the same day.

I took this photo on Tuesday. It's sort of a weird shot Distance and the angle I was shooting from make the three main elements (the house, the trees, the field of broom) look quite different in relation to each other than they are in reality.

Inspired by Janette's word cloud, I went to Wordle and made one for myself with an extract taken from the book I just started reading. It's an interesting way to look at a book. The words are there and you can spot what seem to be the important ones but the context is all scrambled.

Today I was driving home on the highway from a shopping and errands excursion in Victoria. It's about a 45 minute trip up The Malahat. I was in traffic, doing about 100 km/h, rounding a big bend near the Summit where there's only one lane going each way and nothing but a solid yellow line between the northbound and southbound traffic. The SUV in front of me suddenly swerved, over the centre line and back, around a large rock in the centre of our lane.

Things happen pretty fast at 100 km/h.

The same maneuver was impossible for me - oncoming traffic on the left and a steep slope (cliff, actually) on the right. I did the best I could, crowding the yellow line but I hit the rock anyway.

There was some very bad banging and thumping under the car and then heavy vibration. I thought I was dragging the rock underneath and that it was disemboweling my car.

After I pulled over onto the very narrow shoulder there was so little room between my driver's side door and the traffic roaring by that I had to wait for a clear spot in the traffic before I could open my door and get out.

It wasn't quite as bad as I thought. Basically, the front tire on the passenger side blew up. A few more inches and I might have missed the rock altogether.

Anyway, to make a long story short, several hundred cars and trucks and one police car flew on by before someone pulled over. By this time I had the spare and the jack out, had searched fruitlessly for the lug wrench and was standing in the ditch on the edge of the cliff trying to decide whether or not to call for a tow truck on my cell phone.

They were a family, tourists from Florida who had already been on the road most of the day with bored kids in the back seat. The man was incredibly gracious and helpful. He found the lug wrench, changed the tire for me and laughed at my ranting about all the Canadians who had zoomed by without even slowing down. He had even spotted the rock and said that I had broken it into pieces.

I have been in Florida several times and have always liked the people there. Now I like them even more.

The weather has not been very good for painting outdoors this week but the painters did manage to get one coat on most of the outside of the house.

This is my office. My view to the south is our front yard, the roadway, trees on the other side of the road, and between the trees further uphill on the other side of a field of Broom, a couple of our neighbour's houses.

Unfortunately, on sunny days the light and heat make it impossible to work at my computer. I've ordered shades for the window.

The Scotch Broom is in full bloom all over the place here. The stuff grows anywhere where the ground has been disturned or fill put down. It doesn't seem to like shade so it's never right underneath trees. Broom was imported from Europe in the 1800's and here on Vancouver Island it's considered a noxious weed. It spreads really easily from seed and crowds out native grasses and plants. Once the plants get established they are really difficult to uproot.