Late Night Quickie

Finally! the internet is on again after hours down and it is 11:20pm.  Time for bed.  But I want to show you a photo of the beautiful Bromeliad in bloom in my yard.  Only one is blooming right now and it is such a crazy flower.  

I did manage to find the can of roofing tar in my shed.  Boiled some water and poured it into a bucket and set the can of tar (not much left) into it so the tar will be warm & easy to spread.  I have a wooden ladder that gets me easily up to the porch roof and then I can get onto the main roof as well.  It has only a slight pitch so not very dangerous, but I am very careful anyway.  I had a good idea where the leaks were (you really can't tell from looking at the old patches up there) from counting the rafters and so forth.  I didn't do the whole roof yet, just where the leaks were, I think.  Glad I did it cuz it poured like mad later on for hours.  When the weather cools off a bit I will do the rest of the roof.

I need to weed-whack the whole yard.  All this rain has created quite a jungle.  Cleaned off my ceiling fans since it cooled off enough to shut them off for a while.  I'm glad I am on high ground  because a lot of this town floods with heavy rain.  

You can see how the water can remain in these leaves, can't you?  But such a nutty flower! Pink, red, yellow & purple!

Thinned out some files today while looking for paperwork.  Boring but necessary at times.

OK  gotta snooze   More later.

Difficulty at the Beginning

That reminds me of one of the hexagrams in the I Ching (Chinese/Taoist Book of Changes).  It has been really difficult to find the time to get back on here again to write altho many ideas went through my head today.  I stayed home all day, which I love to do, without driving anywhere.  I had enough food so I just got busy.  Did a batch of laundry and hung it on the clothesline (I am an environmentalist, after all) only to run outdoor a couple hours later to yank it back in again.  It was partly dry and now it is hanging here and there around the house.

  Kept adding to my To Do list as I went along.  It is pretty long already.  I don't recommend a single woman buying her own house unless she has ample funds to hire people to fix things.  I have some serious plumbing issues which are very expensive to fix and I will describe all that later.  Meanwhile, I climbed into my crawl-space attic today when the rain started pouring down.  I meant to see if there are any leaks in roof at present.   I first put on long pants & shirt, sox & scarf over hair.  It is funky up there.    Well, I was unhappy to find leaks in 2 spaces.  At least it is not bad enough to have shown up on my ceiling yet...but it is just a matter of time.  I need to climb up on my roof with a can of roofing tar and putty knife and go to work spreading a glob of warm tar over the screws in the spots that leak.  I've done it twice before in the last couple years.  I guess the tar wears off.   Summer sun in Florida is quite unforgiving.   I really need a new roof but that is not in my current budget.  So as time allows, I will again cover each of the jillion screws up there on my metal roof with tar.

It has been raining almost daily here lately.  I make sure I have no standing vessels collecting water without being emptied But...there are plants that hold water and allow the breeding of mosquitoes.  Bromeliads are succulents and fall into that category of water-holding.  They have lovely flowers at times and I have no intention of removing them so I have read that I need to drop a bit of oil into the plants to stop that breeding.  Wish me luck on that.  There are quite a few.

I heard a great thing on NPR yesterday.  A young guy in Boston, Jamaica Plain area, started his own business after looking for a job for a really long time.  It is called "Bootstrap Composting" and he collects food waste from city dwellers for a reasonable price and brings it to a farm.  The food waste is composted and his customers can later on reap some of that rich composted soil, if they want.  Otherwise it is donated to the farm.  But get this, he has No Car!  He does it all with a bike and a pull-cart and on rainy days he carries the buckets by hand-truck on the subway!  What a Guy!  Now that is recycling.

Well, that's it for now.  I can go on & on buy then I will be switching subjects so I will save it for another day.     Hugs & kisses to all.