Stir crazy

So I'm sitting here on my butt recovering from surgery.  I'm feeling fine by the way, but I have strict orders not to lift anything over ten pounds for six weeks.  This is frustrating for me because I've got things I want to do around the house, and nobody is home to help me, because M and B are at work.  I did get B to remove all the pollen laden furniture off the front porch this morning so I could hose everything down.  Now I have a clean porch, but all my furniture is sitting in the side yard because B didn't have time to put it back before he had to leave for work.  I'm finding myself sitting here looking at things and wondering, "is that less than ten pounds, can I lift it, move it, clean it, paint it?" This is going to be a long six weeks.

In a poetry kind of mood

And were that life - now gone from hand -
And I reborn - again
Would search the world -
for one brief glance -
That life - that love - that ken.

KS - 12/10/12

Happy May Day!

The May Day Fairies were up at dawn again this year and left a collection of lollies for good children in the neighborhood. For some reason I am very sleepy.

Spring!

One of my favorite scents of Spring is lilacs.  They remind me of the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY when I was little, and our neighbor, Mrs. Fuller's backyard that had a wall of lilacs and you could smell them all over.  These lilacs are on my daily walk with the dog.  Every morning I stop to smell them.  You need to smell them as much as possible while they're in fresh bloom, because when they start to fade, the stink is unbelievable!  :-)

The old and the new

Today I went on a field trip with students in our Environmental Studies department. We took them to see an old grist mill and a new wind turbine. We also got to see an old windmill that was used to pump water. It was part of a greater Earth Day / week festivities in our area. It was interesting to see various types of windmills that ground wheat for flour, pumped water for livestock, and generated electricity for a community college. The old grist mill had cloth sails, but they could not be put on because the winds were around 15-20 miles per hour and that was too strong. The winds had to be between 5-10 m.p.h. Who knew? The water pumping windmill would operate regardless of the wind speed. The modern wind turbine had to have winds over 3 m.p.h. but not more than 80.

Steampunk rat at Etsy

For CK: