Buy a Keen, Sell a Keen

My favorite Keen shoes were discontinued years ago. I only just discovered it because it took years for my pair to wear out. I even asked Keen what happened to my shoe. Well, they "evolved" it into another shoe, that I just don't like. The material is stiffer and the shoe is less comfortable. I know, I bought a pair.

Luckily for me there's eBay, where you can buy almost anything. And as luck would have it, I found my old shoe, barely worn, in my size. I ordered them at the buy it now price of $14.90. That same day, eBay sent me a notice that would let me sell one item for free. And guess what I decided to sell... you guessed it, my barely worn pair of Keens. I sold them for the same price that I bought my pair for. It seemed fair. They sold in three days.

The pair I bought:

The pair I sold:

And the original shoe that I loved so much, I featured it on my photography website for a couple weeks.

I'm definitely one of those Keen converts. I tell everybody to buy Keens. This particular shoe is the most comfortable shoe that I own. I don't know what I'm going to do when I wear out this "new" pair in ten years.

Spirit Guides

I've always been curious who my spirit guides are. Go ahead, start being judgmental now—there's more coming. So today at the psychic fair (see, I told you), I asked a psychic and she said she could see two. One is an alligator in a baseball cap with a wicked sense of humor and the other is a Tibetan monk telling me to just breath.

Well, if that doesn't just sum me up, I don't know what does.

Who even thought you could have an alligator as a spirit guide? And I get a redneck one who's sarcastic. Wow. Now I have to wonder how they are assigned. I guess that's something to ask at the next psychic fair.

Time for a New Washer

So my washer broke. After 13 years, my front loader sounded like it was going to explode when I washed a load of laundry. I had quite the adventure finding a new one. The door opening to my kitchen is 26.5" wide. All large washers are 27" wide and 30" or more deep. And my contractor made sure to get the largest unit he could that would fit in my kitchen. He found the only unit that is 26.5" wide. After buying a new set and returning it the same day (when I remembered that I had narrow doors), I finally found my 13-year old Gibson reborn as a Frigidaire. They make almost exactly my same machine. The size specs are exactly the same (the knobs have changed a bit). So that's fantastic. Except nobody sells it in the is area and nobody would special order it for me. I had to buy it from a place in NYC and have them ship it here. But they don't install or haul away.

I have somebody taking my old one away. I listed it on Craig's List as a free working dryer if they take away my broken washer. Turns out a repair man is coming to pick them up and fix the washer for a shelter. That's a nice use for my old washer. I've read that it's not hard to fix (bearings and possible spider arm replacement); that most of the money is in the labor. If I were to pay to fix it, it would cost almost as much as buying a new one. Not worth it for me, but worth it for the repair man.

You know what's strange, I'm going to miss my old machine. The kitchen remodel was my first remodel in my first home. It worked like a champ. 13-years without a single hitch. (Although it is featured in another one of my blog posts on leaking water, but that came out of the return, not the washer.) I don't know how I grew attached to a washing machine, but I did. Since my new one is almost exactly the same, maybe I won't miss it so much. The new one actually has blue accents so it will match my kitchen better, so maybe I'll like it even more.

UPDATE: Here's the new one in place. 2.5 hours to install, due to some heavy rain (they only delivered to the door) and the fact that I can't help lift a 250 lb washer. It was just too heavy, so we used a series of slides and tilts that made it go down my front steps. I guess it's nice that the plastic is as white as the painted metal. And look at the lovely blue highlights that match the blue countertop and floor. Now I'm just waiting for the guy to come take away my old ones.

Frangipani: Abigail

Last year when I got back from Key West, I order a frangipani plant. Actually, I ordered it in the hotel in Georgia on my way home. I should have stopped at a nursery, but it didn't occur to me until I was driving for 10 hours through Florida.

This year it's growing like a champ! I imagine I have at least one more year until it blooms, if not more. This one is should be small and bush-like rather than tall and tree-like. You can see where it's grafted, I imagine the bottom part is what keeps it short.

PS My mom gave me the ceramic cats in the background. They are a Baltimore tradition. I've never seen them here in Virginia. My neighbors little dogs bark at them like they are real.

Madagascar Palm

I bought this plant over 15 years ago for 99 cents at a Franks. Anybody remember Franks? A plant store that is long gone.

The plant was no more than 2 inches tall and had cute little palm leaves at the top. This sucker grew to over 7 feet tall and it must weigh over 75 pounds. I have to lug it outside every summer and lug it back in in the fall. One year it fell on my head (see previous entry).  I use to replant it every couple of years, but I stopped doing that when it became too heavy and painful to hold. I just throw some leaf mulch in the pot each year to replenish the soil. Actually, after reading about this cactus, I'm surprised it grows at all. I don't have it in sand or cactus soil and I never have. It's just regular old plant soil for this thing.

This year I decided to cut off the top. I read that was the way to  prune them. They even said you could plant the top and it will root. We'll see. I won't be sad if it doesn't work because heaven knows I don't need two of these monstrous things to lug in and out of the house.

What I learned in my internet search is that this plant is related to the plumeria (or frangipani as they say in Florida). If you read my Key West blog, I fell in love with the smell of frangipani. This plant blooms in warmer climates and smells like frangipani. It won't bloom here because it goes dormant in the winter when I bring it inside. It prefers the tropics, like me.

UPDATE 7/13: It's working! The trunk is spouting branches all around the cut. There's about 20 sprouts.

And the top is doing just as well. I don't know if there are roots yet, but it's not dying as the leaves keep getting bigger. Two smaller plants will be so much better than that one large monster plant!!

UPDATE 2013: It worked, 2 years later, and both top and bottom are growing like champs. I hope that now that they are growing in shoots they won't get to be 7 feet tall again.

Lightning Bug!

I saw my first one tonight. It's officially summer! Sadly, I saw only one. His buddies weren't ready to come out yet, although it is hot enough tonight.

Opportunities

I bought this towel at HomeGoods. When I looked at the receipt, for department it said "Opportunities." The department for the blue towels behind it was appropriately named "Table Linens."

I'm wondering why the special department for the rooster. What kind of opportunity did I just buy?

My Garden in Spring

Spring is my favorite season, no doubt about it. I combined my new fascination with PocketBooth with my love of my garden in a little photo collage celebrating spring in my garden.

Given that my garden is 90% in the shade, it's a challenge to get anything to grow. The snowball bush came with the condo and will actually grown into a tree if you let it. The drawf mondo grass took about 12 years to get it to cover my whole path (and I'm still working on spreading it past my yard). I've already discussed my glorious rose, which is giving it's last hurrah this week.

I'm lucky to have a garden in my condo. It's called "Limited Common Area." I'm allowed to landscape and plant (with approval) 20 feet from my house. I can only go ten because of the privacy bushes that somebody planted back there before I got here and besides right past the bushes is a big hill. 10 x 40 feet is just enough garden. I put in a patio and a path and have spent the last 15 years trying to get sun plants to grow in the shade. I know, a futile endeavor, but it gave me something to do.

I stop going out there in June when the mosquitos invade, but the cats stay out there year long. I swear the garden furniture is just for them.

Photo Booth

We use to get family photo booth pictures when we went to Ocean City for vacation. It was a time-honored tradition. I think you can see my niece and nephew growing up in those pictures from baby to teenager. We use to try and fit the whole family in the booth especially when the price went up to $2 a strip!

For Mother's Day, I downloaded the Pocketbooth app on my Droid. It made all of us laugh. I love these pictures, they are better than anything I could have taken with my DSLR. This is my family, goofy and funny and really in love with each other. I'm lucky to have them.

Fuk Luk Sau

I read a Feng Shui book once and tried to implement a few feng shui practices. Years ago, I bought a Fuk, Luk, Sau set. They sit on a higher shelf in the dining room. The shelf is stable until the cats jump on it and knock everything off of it. They don't do that often because I scream bloody heck when they do. But years ago they did it and Fuk and Luk got chipped. Fuk is for happiness, Luk is for wealth and Sau is for longevity. It seems that the breaking of the statues indicates that I'm going to live a long time but with no happiness or wealth. That's quite a bummer.

So instead of living with that fate, I went to Chinatown today to replace my three statues. Here's to changing fate!

Alexandria in May

Last year at this time I was just starting my month in Key West. I loved that month. I loved it so much, I'm probably going to retire in Key West. I would retire there now if I could, but it seems the universe has many, many, many more years of work ahead of me.

I missed a few things while I was away last year. One of them was my rose bush. It only blooms once a year and that's during the first week of May. That trailing rose amazes me each year because it grows in the shade. Almost complete shade. Zephirin Drouhin is it's name. It has some wonderful features, the most important being that it grows in the shade, another being that it's thornless, and yet another is that it is amazingly fragrant. The downsides are that it blooms only once and gets horrible black spot (that could be because of all the shade that I have it in).

I miss Key West, but I love watching my rose bloom. Here's a little edited picture of one of the early blooms. By next week it should be covered in blooms.

Lucky Pennies

I found lucky pennies number 9 and 10 in Georgetown under a bridge in the dirt. I think they have been sitting there a while, collecting a lot of luck I hope!

Dsylexia

I've never been tested for dsylexia - honestly, I couldn't tell you why spell check kept telling me that spelling was wrong, but it's dyslexia. I had to look it up. Typing it several times finally allowed me to see that the S was in the wrong order. Let me tell you, when I was younger, looking things up in the dictionary was damn hard! The internet makes my life so much easier because I can put in my completely wrong spelling and it will give me the right one. The dictionary is still hard for me to use.

I've been crappy at spelling ever since I can remember. In second grade they put me in a slow reading group. Nobody ever hinted that I may have had a problem. I was just slow, at least that's what I thought. And I couldn't spell simple words. Again, I thought the world was telling me that I was stupid. My mother's boyfriend use to constantly tease me about reading only short books. I hated reading and I guess I couldn't ever tell people why because I didn't know I was seeing things differently.

My frustrations were compounded by the fact that I couldn't tell time to save my life. My mom even bought me a special Jack and Jill watch, it had blue from 12 to 6 to let you know that was "after" and red from 6 to 12 to let you know that was "before." It didn't help. It still took way to long for me to figure out time. I was really happy when I got a digital watch and I could just tell people it was 9:15 instead of trying to figure out quarter after nine. I remember getting so frustrated that I would just show people my watch when they asked me for the time.

Also, I cannot tell my left from my right without visual cues. People say turn left and I have to look at my left hand. You should see me giving directions, I'm yelling "TURN RIGHT! TURN RIGHT!" and I'm pointing left which is pissing off the driver because I mean left. I've learned to tell people to go where I'm pointing and not where I am saying.

Most people find the left/right thing funny. But those same people think my inability to spell and tell time indicate that I'm stupid. I've hidden my spelling problems for as long as I can remember. People would not believe that I graduated with honors and I can't spell. I tend to use small words and stick to things I can spell, that also adds to the stupid stigmatism. It probably didn't help that all my friends were really smart in the language arts which added to my inferiority complex.

Thank heavens my math skills were really good. The best thing I ever learned was how to find transposed numbers really quickly (if the difference is  divisible by 9, then a number is probably transposed). But math was always my friend except geometry where I would take the longest way possible to solve problems. It was so bad my teacher would look at my answers on the board and tell the class not to copy my answers. They were right, but long. I took 15 steps to solve a three step problem. My brain just didn't work like other people's. It got things, but not in the same way.

It's gotten easier as I've gotten older. The more I read, the more I can see word patterns. Even if I don't see the letters in the right order, I know what the word is because I've seen it a million times. I learn to see things in context (which makes me a crappy editor/proofer because I make the words right in my head even when they are wrong). I guarantee you there is a completely wrong word in this piece somewhere that I will find at a much later date because my head is seeing it as right.

I've only just starting letting people know that I have a problem. It took me quite some time to prove that I wasn't stupid and now I think I can let them know that I can't spell, tell time, or tell my right from my left. I know (edit: found the word! it should be no) longer care if people think that I'm stupid because I know that I'm not.

P.S.
Right now I'm reading more about dyslexia. It's crazy. Kids with dyslexia often grip the pencil too hard which I did. I still have a bump on my middle finger from the pressure I put on pens and pencils. My 1st grade teacher would wipe her hand across my paper smudging all my words as a way to tell me to write softer. She failed me in handwriting.

OMG! Kids with dyslexia are confused about yesterday and tomorrow. I had the hardest time understanding that. I remember saying "the night after the day before today" for last night because I just couldn't make sense of time in that way.

Some facts about dyslexia:

• People with dyslexia are often gifted in math.
• People with dyslexia have extreme difficulty telling time on a clock with hands.
• People with dyslexia have difficulty learning multiplication tables (I was so upset when my fourth grade teacher held me back in math because of those stupid multiplication tables when I could solve problems faster than anybody in the class).
• People with dyslexia have difficulty tying shoelaces. 
• People with dyslexia have an extremely difficult time organizing their belongings. (Many people think I'm messy. HA! There a reason for that.)
• People with dyslexia misspell many words—even though they often use only very simple one-syllable words that they are "sure" they know how to spell. (I just wrote about that above!)

Read more here: Bright Solutions for Dyslexia, Inc.

Perm Smell in House

Tonight when I got home, my home reeked of perm. I was pretty sure the cats didn't give each other home perms while I was out because I can't get them to do anything when I'm away (darn those lazy cats). I thought maybe my neighbor gave herself a perm, but the smell seemed awfully strong for a neighbor event. Ok, maybe my pipes were a little smelly. Perhaps, that happens in these old condos with the old pipes.

When I searched the internet, which is full of wisdom and insanity, for perm smell in house, I found this answer:

"Oh my dear people. Did you ever stop to consider the smell is being manufactured by your brain? as a result of negative energy? I experienced the internal gas smell recently, and also suffered from it around htis time last year. I was not in the same place either time. However, there were extreme lifestyle changes coming into play. For now, the smell has subsided, but only due to walking int he ocean and working on releasing the negative energy. I know this sounds really whack! .. but just open you mind to the possibility! It would have been much easier if it was a fume from my house or car .. but I'll make it through the smells this time too!"

So I can honestly the say that the whole time I was searching my house for the awful smell, I never once thought my brain was trying to tell me that I had too much negative energy. I was confused as to why my brain was telling me somebody got a perm in my house while I was away at work, but I was positive my brain was telling me something was stinking up my house!

As I sat in my hallway tying ribbon to an umbrella, that's another blog post, I heard a hissing in my portable battery pack. Turns out the sealed battery was leaking and causing that awful sulfur smell. 

So now I have a battery to replace. And while I'm at it, I'm going to get rid of all my negative energy. I figure it can't hurt and it might turn my life into a sweet-smelling journey. Although I'm certain my cats will remain forever lazy no matter what I do.