I am such a miserable slacker!!! There is just no excuse for not blogging, except that I haven’t been knitting, and it’s been too hot to turn the computer on.
Here are my H and I offerings for ABC-Along (oh so late, I’ll bet they are on M by now).
I used to live in Hawaii, so H had to be something related to Hawaii. I don’t have many things left from the islands since that was more than 30 years ago, but I do have a couple of t-shirts, but I could only find one.
Hubby went there several years back to help a store in Hilo get its inventory together. He was an inventory manager supreme for Borders Books, and that particular store in Hilo apparently lacked staff members who understood even the basics of book inventory management let alone the fine points or in the lingo of the book business, “sorting.” I remember my first day at Borders when I watched a sort happen right before my eyes in the backstock area. The store manager said it was triage more than anything else, learning how to move thousands of books and get them sorted, shelved, pulled, sent back to publishers or the warehouse.
As was often the case, hubby was enlisted to fly out there to Hawaii and get things under control, which he did lickety split, hence the lingo “I (eye)survived.” And all he brought home was this t-shirt. No, I’m kidding, he also brought home macadamia nuts and chocolate covered macadamia nuts, but they were gone within two days of him getting off the plane.
The t-shirt is kind of cute because it has an image of a Border’s inventory sticker with bar-code and basic book inventory info.
Here it is next to my well-worn 1977 Honolulu Marathon t-shirt that I am so proud of that I never wore, and sent it home with all my stuff when I first considered moving back to the mainland, but changed my mind and stayed in Hawaii for a few more years after all. When I came home I found my younger sister wore this to death; it was frayed, stained, and generally in very ill-repair, and boy, I'll tell ya, I wanted to kick her ass, especially since I never put it on except for when it was handed to me at the finish line:
Back in those days pretty much everyone I knew was either a runner or a pilot. I think about those days with a very bittersweet nostalgia. There is nothing at all quite like the sight of the sunset with Diamond Head in your rearview mirror as you drive down Kalaneoneole Highway from Niu Valley to Hawaii Kai. Perhaps the only other more incredible sight is the Pacific Ocean off to your right when you are on the same highway going towards Kaneohe and Kailu, taking the long way to the other side of the island, driving fast along the winding, and often dangerous mountainside road, the steep and rugged dropoff to your right descending all the way down to the Pacific, crashing into the cliffs below. "Breathtaking" can't do it justice.
Yes, I was pretty active most of my life, and I surely do miss running. Hopefully I will start getting it together again so that I can get back to running and racing.
Moving on to I, we have what hasn’t left hubby’s hand since he got it for Christmas, the ubiquitous, or should I say, the Incredible iPod Touch. Haha, notice the
Incredibles playing on the pod. Pretty sharp picture, eh? Ah, blurry as usual, but this was taken after twilight, and of course the flash bounces on these shiny surfaces.
I’ll leave you with a garden turtle (look hard), since most of what I have been doing since May has been related to yard work, or rather, expanding my front garden/flower space. What backbreaking work that is, digging out the sod, placing the bricks, pea pebbles, and all those 40# bags of potting soil, not to mention trying to dig out overgrown hostas and tiger lilies, WHEW!! I'm thinking of using this photo for T (turtle). Look in the upper right hand corner to see a tiny bit of the sunset that matches the same purple-blue of the balloon flowers and the May-Night Salvia.
I used excellent soil, ACE Hardware brand organic potting soil mixed with Michigan peat, so I have a superb growing environment, even if my hostas are getting too much sun and way too much heat, causing their leaves to look a bit burned.
Everything grew so rapidly without any Miracle-Gro or other fertilizer that I had to try to double the space, which couldn’t really be done given the small size of the area, but I almost doubled it. Everything still looks crowded on the original plot, yet I completely removed all my lilies (tiger and a lovely brick red) and split three hostas in half, so I am going to have to expand to the side of the house this fall or next spring. But since we’ve had 90+ degree Fahrenheit with 70% humidity for several days in a row, I’m done doing major yard projects till the weather cools off.
Digging up the soil is the very toughest part, and cleaning out all the dead matter at the end of the season or the beginning of the spring is almost just as bad. I swore when we moved here that I would not get involved in any gardening, but almost immediately we put in a nice sized herb garden because we have no trees on our block, therefore, lots of direct (harsh) sunlight, great for growing monumental-sized herbs, which hubby uses in his excellent gourmet meals.
We came from a house that had 15 trees on the property ~ very shady ~ but so many extraordinary flowers because the elderly woman who owned the home before we lived there was a gardener extraordinaire. It was constant work to keep the vegetation under control, and sometimes I couldn’t keep up with the fecundity of it all and had to enlist help.
Now everyone is so busy with their own lives that it is hard to press nieces and nephews into service. Ack, getting old and out of shape sure sucks!!!
