Lazing and Lolling

March 11, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Despite the end of winter coming in just over a week, there are very few signs of spring, though generally by this time the snow drops are coming up and the tulips are poking through the soil. There are no snow drops yet, but a couple of tulip tips were visible before this latest round of snow and single digit temperatures. (Last night, it got down to 7 degrees Fahrenheit.) From what I can see, those brave tulips are still green beneath the snow, but the sort of up and down weather we’ve been having is hard on spring blooms.

I suppose this kamikaze weather — warm spells interrupted every week by winter storms blowing through — doesn’t give the bulbs much impetus to wake up and be perky. Come to think of it, this weather doesn’t give me much impetus to wake up and be perky, either, but ever since I moved here, I can’t sleep past first light so, perky or not, I do get up. I’m hoping the bulbs will eventually do the same, though there’s not much I can do about it if the drought exacerbated by this peculiar weather pattern has killed their interest in waking up.

Surprisingly, the ground isn’t frozen. I went out in the mid-morning chill to loosen the ground around my newly planted trees, and I was able to get down pretty far. The person who planted them for me dug post holes rather than a big bowl, and I needed to loosen the dirt to give the roots an easier time of spreading when growing season starts. I might not have gotten down far enough to make any difference to the roots, but at least the loose dirt will help soak up moisture, which will then loosen the deeper soil. At least, that’s my surmise. It might not make any difference at all, but I worried about the trees, so I needed to make the effort to my quiet my mind.

That bit of digging made me look forward to gardening weather. The last frost here generally comes around the fifth of May, so I can’t do any planting until then, but there will certainly be plenty to do once the weather is consistently warmer. If nothing else, I can water my grass and my bulbs. The lilies (which may or may not come up depending on whether I planted them deep enough), like a lot of water in spring, and not so much later in the summer. I also still have a few patches of weeds to dig up. I wanted to wait until after the trees were planted, thinking the weeds would be dug up when the holes were dug, but that didn’t happen. Still, it’s a small area, and I got started on that today.

I’ve been rather lazy this winter, lolling about, reading and doing as little as possible (though come to think of it, I’ve been working a lot more hours at my job the past few months, so that cut into my lolling time). It makes me wonder how I will cope with having a lot to do when gardening season rolls around. I suppose I’ll do what I always do — do what I can when I can. Of course, I won’t know what all I’ll have to do until May when I see what comes up and what I need to replace or replant. Until then, I’ll continue my winter ways, lazing and lolling.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

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An Exercise in Hope

March 6, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I had a nice surprise today: snow! We haven’t had so much snow this winter that I’m sick of it, and anyway, it wasn’t much of a snow — just enough to cover the ground and my front ramp while leaving the sidewalks clear. But it was enough to make a day spent inside feel cozy, especially when accompanied by a book and a cup of lemony spiced tea.

More snow is expected for Thursday, along with frigid temperatures, but hopefully the intervening days will be warm enough for digging.

I’d planted three 6-foot- tall greengage plum trees at the beginning of last winter, which was supposed to be the optimum time for planting, so that’s when the nursery sent the trees. One of the trees did well, but two didn’t survive the winter, though sprouts did shoot out just above the graft mark. (I was hoping to get trees with greengage roots so the inevitable volunteers would turn the tree into a greengage forest, but I took what I could get.) I lopped off the trees just above the shoot, and one of truncated trees seems to be doing well, but still, the nursery said they’d replace both trees. (I had to pay shipping, which made those replacement trees rather expensive, but hopefully it will be worth it, especially since they won’t replace the replacement trees if there is a problem.)

They decided not to take a chance on the replacement trees not making it through the winter, so they promised to send them in March, which sounded good a year ago. Well, now it’s March. Those trees are slated to arrive tomorrow, which is why I’m hoping for decent digging weather. I can’t plant those trees by myself; even if I could dig the hole deep enough (which I can’t), I couldn’t hold the tree upright and fill in the hole at the same time. My contractor said he’d send someone to help, and I’m sure he will. Eventually.

Luckily, it will be cold enough that the trees shouldn’t come out of dormancy if they have to wait a bit. I suppose if worst comes to worst, I can do the planting myself over several days, but I doubt that will happen. I have been so patient with this contractor that generally when something is time-sensitive, he figures he owes me and he gets it done. (Oddly, these extra things he does so quickly for me are more in the line of favors since they are handyman jobs rather than typical contractor projects.)

As always, though, any gardening project is an exercise in hope. I hope the trees get here safely. I hope they get planted in time. I hope they grow. I hope they blossom. I hope someday to eat plums picked off my own trees.

A lot of hope!

But first, the snow.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Water Update

March 4, 2022 — Pat Bertram

It’s been so warm here the past few days, I thought it would be a good idea to water my grass. I’m sure it needed the moisture — this has been a very dry year for us, with only a few piddly snow days — and it also gave me an excuse to spend time outside in the sun as well as reacquaint myself with my yard. A few sprouts are showing — mostly the larkspur that I’ve been trying to naturalize, which is good. What I mean is that it’s good there are a few sprouts and it’s also good that there aren’t more of them. The last frost typically comes the first week in May, so there would be plenty of time for the weather to kill off any baby plants that were so foolhardy as to show their faces. (Larkspur aren’t foolhardy, just hardy. They don’t seem to mind the cold as much as other new sprouts do.)

In other water-related news, I received my water bill yesterday, and this one is as mystifying as the pervious bill that showed a 19,000-gallon usage over my normal winter usage. When the people in the office saw that high usage, they sent the meter reader out to read the meter again. (It’s a fairly new meter, an electronic meter that was installed at the end of summer.) When he took a new reading, he said the meter was working perfectly and that there were no leaks, but the meter had already shown a usage of 3,000 gallons since the previous reading a few days before.

I called the office, of course, and they said the meters were guaranteed to work perfectly without error, and she told me I had to have an intermittent leak, like from a toilet that didn’t shut off. She wouldn’t listen when I explained that there was no problem with my plumbing, but a week later, she did send the meter reader out again. He shoveled the snow off the meter (this was right after the only real snowstorm we had all winter), took another look, and said the meter wasn’t running, which indicted there were no leaks. He had me go inside and run the water for a minute, and the meter showed a gallon usage, so he decided that meant the meter was working fine.

He suggested that someone might have stolen the water, but there was no outside tampering, no digging to get to my water pipe, and if by chance anyone had used one of my outside faucets (which I’d sealed off with insulation to keep the pipes from freezing), I would certainly have heard 20,000 gallons of water moving through my pipes. For that much water to be missing, they would have had to run the water continuously for days, and that simply had not happened.

Meantime, my contractor sent someone out to check my plumbing, and they found no leaks, no water, no anything to indicate what had happened to the more than 20,000 gallons of water that were now missing.

So nothing was done. The people in the office insisted the meter was working fine and that I must have leak. The meter reader said the meter was working fine, but there was no leak. The contractor said there was no leak, the problem was with the meter. I paid the inflated bill anyway, because the only thing worse than excess water would be no water.

So, fast forward to the latest bill.

This time, the overuse was about 3500, all of which had occurred between the time of the original reading to the time of second rereading. The last ten days of the billing period — from the second rereading to the final reading — showed my normal winter water usage of about 30 gallons a day.

Now I’m stuck without any recourse, because obviously, whatever set the meter off somehow self-corrected. My surmise is that the first subzero cold spell we had made the electronic meter go haywire, but who knows what the truth is. All I can do is hope that the meter continues to work properly and to monitor the situation in case it doesn’t.

I have taken away a lesson from all of this — if the people at the water company are not concerned about a hypothetically missing 20,000 gallons of water in a drought year, then I’m not concerned about wasting water by watering my lawn in the winter.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Changes

March 1, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I’m getting over a rather severe allergy attack that kept me idle all weekend — a lot of rest punctuated by ginger-lemon tea and reading. Normally such an attack comes when I’ve let the furnace filter go too long without changing it, but that wasn’t the case this time, so I didn’t think it was the culprit. I changed it anyway. As it turned out, the filter was dark with dust, darker than normal, but I’d changed to a filter with a higher MSR (Micorparticle Performance Rating), so perhaps this filter does a better job of collecting dust than the previous one I used. Maybe, now that the filter is changed, my allergies will settle back down and give me a respite from the aggravation.

One thing I was remiss in changing is my water filter. I always let it go a couple of extra months because there is just me drinking the filtered water, and I haven’t been doing a good job of imbibing the stuff straight. I just use tap water for making tea, which I think is okay. The water here has a pretty good rating now, though once upon a time it was terrible — terrible tasting and terribly high in naturally occurring radioactive particles as well as contaminants from agricultural runoff. I hedge my bets by drinking tea with tap water, filtering the water for drinking, and occasionally buying bottled water (mostly because the bottles are easy to stow in a pocket or a purse). A water pipeline bringing water directly from the mountains has been in the works for decades, which is great, but by the time it gets all the way out here, I’ll be gone.

Since I’m talking about all the things I’ve changed today, this first day of the month, I might as well mention that I’ve changed tarot decks, too. This deck, I Tarocchi delle Stelle, is much more pleasing to me than the one I used last month. The cards have a good feel — both physically and psychically — at least compared to last month’s cards, and even though they are much larger than playing cards, I can still shuffle them without too much trouble.  The instruction booklet is written in an archaic dialect of Italian, which seems a bit ludicrous since the deck was published in 1991, but I can use the meanings I’ve collected from various sources to interpret the cards.

To my amusement, when I googled these cards trying again to see if I could find a translation of the booklet, I found a previous blog post of mine: I Tarocchi delle Stelle | Bertram’s Blog

In case you’re interested, today’s cards are the seven of wands and the king of pentacles. The seven of wands is about obstacles and overcoming opposition. The king of pentacles indicates that the way to overcoming is by being practical and methodical. (Actually, even if you’re not interested, those are still today’s cards.)

These are all the changes I’ve made today. So far, anyway. Most of the day is still to come.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Posted in house, life, tarot. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Upcoming House Anniversary

February 28, 2022 — Pat Bertram

One week from today will be the third anniversary of “wedding” my house. It seems a weird way of describing the purchase, but the house offers me much that has been missing from my life since Jeff’s death — stability, a home, comfort. It also offers safety and security, at least as much as is possible in turbulent times. Of course, it can’t offer companionship or conversation or love, though it does give me something to love and care for, which is important when one is alone and hasn’t any inclination for pets.

Because of this upcoming anniversary, I feel as if I should get the house a gift, though the house is spoiled enough as it is, with all the money I’ve lavished on it — not just a new foundation for the porch, but a basement floor, landscaping, sod, a garage, and a whole slew of minor gifts.

Still, if I think of something, I might consider getting something to honor the occasion.

The traditional third anniversary gift is leather, though there isn’t anything of leather my house and I need. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember the last leather thing I bought. I doubt there is even a single strip of leather on my shoes.

The modern third anniversary gift is glass, but even though I do have and do use things of glass, I don’t need anything beyond what I have. I wouldn’t mind another goblet to add to my collection of miscellaneous goblets, but there isn’t room in the cabinet, and besides, I seldom use stemware. My water receptacle of choice is an old glass peanut butter jar because I can put a lid on it to keep from spilling and to keep bugs out in the summer. (Too many times at night I’d reach over for the glass of water on my bedside table and miss. By the time I got out of bed and cleaned the mess, that would be the end of any chance of sleep. Even worse are the times I accidentally drank a bug a night. Eek.)

In the end, I doubt I’ll get anything to mark the occasion. After all, I celebrate this wonderful house and home every day.

I did get a present from my sister, though, which is very nice. She thought these bowls would make me smile, and they do. The house has yet to let me know what it thinks of our gift.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in grief, home, house, life, relationships. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

A Small Life

February 21, 2022 — Pat Bertram

It’s amazing how many hours there are in a day when one gets up early, like way too early, before the sun is even a hint in the sky. Already I’ve read, played on the computer, cleaned house, went for a walk, fixed a meal, and now here I am, trying to put together today’s blog.

For a change, I have plenty of time to write; it’s just a shame I don’t have anything exciting to write about. There’s just me, and that for sure is not exciting. I am not one of those folks who live large. I’m certainly not lavish or extravagant (though I did recently splurge on a winter coat that was marked down for clearance). Nor am I living in what is considered luxury by other people’s standards.

The truth is, I live small. I spend most of my time alone. Even before the whole Bob mess, I stopped going to restaurants or any place groups of people hang out. (Groups were never really my thing, anyway.)

And yet, my life seems luxurious to me. I have a lovely small house and a comfortable home. (Although in today’s world, “house” and “home” are synonymous, I don’t consider them so because you can have a house that’s not a home and a home that’s not a house.) I have a small job so I can afford luxuries like eating. I drive a small car that was paid for decades ago. I have all the books I want to read a small walk away. So, yes, luxurious!

Still, luxury in my eyes is not exciting to others by any means. And even though I mention such things as my house out of gratitude at this still-surprising upturn in my life, I fear sounding braggadocious if I expound too much. But basically, this is my life. A small life.

And yet, I do wish I had something more exciting to write about than me.

Maybe someday . . .

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Posted in being me, blogging, house, life. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

House Responsibilities

February 19, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Today I went to take one last look at the house I’ve been looking after because the owner is returning and I wanted to make sure everything looked okay. And it did. Nothing out of place, nothing broken, the roof fixed where the shingles had blown off during a windstorm.

At least, everything looked good on the outside. On the inside? Not so much. Although I’d merely agreed to check on the place occasionally, I’d tried to keep the plants alive, thinking it would be hard for him to come back to an empty house, and even harder to come back to dead plants. The plants did fine for ten months, then suddenly, whatever I was doing was the wrong thing, and several of the most expensive plants died. Too much water for some plants, perhaps, and not enough for others, though I’d stuck to the twice a month schedule that I’d been doing all along. I suppose the house temperature, set for 55 degrees in winter, could be a mitigating factor once the cold hit, but whatever the reason, those poor plants look awful. The way I figure it, though, if he was really concerned about the plants, he’d have given me specific instructions other than simply for me to check on the house once or twice a month.

I’ll be glad not to have to worry about his house for a while. Taking care of my own house is enough of a responsibility, without worrying about anyone else’s. (My water meter situation still isn’t resolved, for example.)

I have a hunch I’ll be back taking care of his house again in another month or two, because once he gets his papers in order, he’ll be rejoining his wife in Thailand. She’s doing well, but apparently not well enough to travel, though to be honest, I can’t imagine anyone being well enough to handle such a trip — talk about planes, trains and automobiles! Buses, too. Yikes.

I feel sort of mean, but I won’t stop by to see him for a week or ten days until he’s out of quarantine. So, not only will the poor fellow be coming home alone to a house full of dead plants, he’ll continue to be alone for a while until he’s safe from catching and spreading The Bob. (Other people, though, might be friendlier and less picky than I am.) Even worse, he’ll be coming back during one of the coldest spells we’ve had all winter. Tomorrow and the next day we’ll be getting up almost to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, but then Monday night, temperatures will drop more than sixty degrees into the low single digits. The daytime highs for the following few days won’t get out of the twenties. Brrr!

Luckily, I’ll only have to worry about my own house, so although that won’t help him at all, it will help me get through the winter blast that’s coming.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Just a Kid

February 4, 2022 — Pat Bertram

One’s concept of old and young seem to change as the years pass. I remember when I was very young asking my aunt how old she was. I think she was in her forties, but she answered, “Twenty-nine.” Then she and my mother laughed. I had no idea what the joke was. To me, back then, twenty-nine was unfathomably old. And now? Unfathomably young.

For many years, I looked young for my age, so the one time I asked for a senior discount that was advertised, I thought there might be a problem proving I was old enough, but the clerk (just a kid) told me she’d already given it me. What a come down that was! I never bothered asking for a discount again; I didn’t think my ego could handle it.

Now I do look my age, even to my age-adjusted eyes. Even if I didn’t look old, I’d know I was because people seem so dang young. I watch the news sometimes with the lady I help care for, and it seems to me that people reading the news are a bunch of children playing at being newscasters. They’re not that young, from mid-thirties to early forties but still, they look like kids to me. But then, to the woman I care for, I look young. “You’re just a kid,” she tells me.

Not that it matters, really. I once was young, and now I’m not. It’s all part of the cycle of life.

Oddly, unlike my aunt, I never told anyone I was twenty-nine. Even when I was twenty-nine, I doubt I told anyone my age. The topic just doesn’t come up. Or perhaps other people aren’t as rude as I was when I was young. Come to think of it, I don’t know what prompted me to ask my aunt her age. I really wasn’t at all rude when I was young. I’m not rude now that I’m not young, either.

This last part has nothing to do with age, but is a follow-up to my water meter dilemma. The meter reader was just here. He checked the meter, and says it’s working fine, that I have no leaks though somehow the meter shows another 4,000 gallons used in the past three weeks, which is impossible. Normally, one person uses about 3,000 gallons a month, and that includes, all indoor and some outdoor water usage, which is what I use in the summer. But it’s winter, and in the winter, I use half of that amount.

I suppose this is more proof that I’m not just a kid anymore; if I were, I wouldn’t have to deal with this mess.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Posted in culture, dealing with old age, house, life. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Unresolved Issues

February 3, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I tend to worry about things, especially those I can’t do anything about, which makes sense because if I can do something about an issue, I would do it and not have to worry. A case in point: this current situation with the water meter showing that I am using water at the rate of 1000 gallons a day. I’ve already set things in motion to find out what is going on, but I can’t follow through. It snowed for almost twenty-four hours straight, and we’ve been dealing with below zero temperatures, so there’s not a whole lot of probing for outside water leaks that can be done. Nor can anything be done about the meter until it’s been shown there is a problem with the meter itself (which the water company vehemently denies.)

So I worry, but not the anxious or frantic or agitated or feeling mental distress sort of worry. The worrying I do is the more insidious kind — pushing thoughts around in my head, continually going back to them to see if there is a different way of looking at them, and touching the thoughts the way one probes a sore tooth. When I do manage to put the thought out of my head, I feel it in my body, a sense of forgotten things left done.

But nothing changes. Nothing can change until the snow melts at least partway ant the ground warms up a bit.

Because of this tendency to worry, I’ve always been one to charge at problems. I don’t like unfinished things, the sense of having forgotten things, or feeling as if things are hanging over my head, so I try to do whatever I can to resolve these things. I don’t know if any of this — the worrying at things or the charging in to fix problems is good or bad, and I doubt it matters. Life goes on either way. (Well, life goes on until it doesn’t, but that’s a completely different discussion.)

I’ve been doing well keeping things out of my head and learning to deal with unfinished things since there are so many unfinished things to be done around the house and the yard, but this water meter thing has me flummoxed.

In the end, I’m sure, it will all work out. Meantime, it’s just one more unresolved issue in my life.

In a way I should be glad of such issues — it gives me something to blog about. Otherwise, all I’d be discussing is shoveling the snow and it’s bad enough having to do the work without having to talk about it.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Posted in blogging, house, life. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Water Saga

February 2, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I was a bit disappointed when I moved here and saw my creepy basement because I’d imagined a finished room. Instead, I got a dark dungeon-like space with a rotted floor from too much flooding, crumbling half walls, and spooky nooks, though no crannies. (A nook is a corner or other small space; a cranny is a gap or a crack in a wall.)

Above and beyond the walls shown in the photo are deep crawlspaces with all the pipes and ducts and other arteries of a house exposed.

As it turned out, the new garage with plenty of storage space precluded any need for basement storage. Still, I had the basement cleaned out, the floor concreted, the walls painted white, all of which made the place look a trifle less like a dungeon and a bit more like what it is — a utilitarian space for the water heater and furnace, as well as those “arteries.” It’s still not pretty any way you look at it, but it does the job.

The best thing about the basement turns out to be the thing I really didn’t appreciate — the visibility of all those pipes and ducts (visible in real life, that is; they’re not visible in the attached photo). When I got my water bill with the hugely inflated water usage, it was easy enough for me to go down to the basement and look for any drips or flooding. I didn’t see anything. A worker who came to help me find the leak didn’t see anything, either.

This is a basic house, fairly simple with not much hidden besides the buried pipes leading to (and from) the house — the gas line, the sewer line, and the water pipe. So, if there is no leak in the house, no water running anywhere in the house, there are only two places for a leak — where the buried water pipe connects to the meter and where it connects to the house. The pipe itself should not be a problem — the old lead pipe was replaced before I got here as a condition of the sale. (I even have the receipt somewhere.)

Unfortunately, with all the snow that was dumped on us, as well as the frigid temperatures we’re going to be treated with the next few days, no one will be able to get out here to probe for water leaks. But that’s beyond my control. What I can do — I did: go down to the basement and look for leaks and listen for water movement through the fully exposed pipes.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in home, house, life. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »
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