I did my time with psycho child men. 
Maybe a Hawaiian adventure had its compensations? Sometimes, when the up sides and the down sides of a decision are all large, it's hard to know how to feel about it. Seeing that night sky on a regular basis must have been amazing.
I like the contender a lot, and the others all have good points.
Are these close to where you're living now? It always helps to know the neighborhood when you're talking about things like noise.
Having spent a lot of time in hot climates, I vote for insulation, if you have the option!
@Piano-Dad
You can find me at maryannaevans at the y-place.
I definitely cut back on one thing on that list--haircuts.
I was going to a high-end salon solely because I could walk there, but the price to just touch up my roots without even blowing it dry was insane. I was rationing cuts to a quarterly schedule, trying to stop the money hemorrhage.
A friend told me about a cosmetology school fifteen minutes away. I've been twice and the student did just a good a job with the color and the cost for that, a cut, styling, and the tip was a third what it was at the fancy place.
I'm sure I'll spend my savings on chocolate.
@Jodi said in hi chat I need your help writing an essay:
@Mary-Anna said in hi chat I need your help writing an essay:
would allow students to type their work and relieve the poor instructor from the need to read their handwriting.
An old fashioned typewriter or work processor at every desk? Seriously - wouldn’t be hard to have something like that set up for student desks in the classroom that was not connected to the internet. We had computer labs in college that we did assignments on.
I think it may come to that, Jodi.
@Piano-Dad That would be fun!
Do you have my yahoo email? (I'm not sure when my ou.edu account will turn into a pumpkin.)
@rustyfingers said in What are you reading?:
@Mary-Anna @Piano-Dad #booksky #BannedBookSkyClub over on Blue Sky is reading The Left Hand of Darkness in June. I might use that as
an excusemotivation.
Ooh! Good to know!
And it sounds like tai chi is not for you! I had that experience with karate, but so far tai chi is good.
@AdagioM said in What are you reading?:
@Mary-Anna Are you enjoying the tai chi?
I am!
My experience with Tai Chi was near zero. I've been doing some videos that are more fitness-oriented than true to the practice, I think, which I think of as more like fitness club yoga than like the yoga you'd do at an ashram. By contrast, this class is being taught by someone who's been practicing under a master for something like twenty years. Some of his more advanced students attend the beginners class with us, and even they have studied for quite a few years. Anyway, it seems pretty authentic.
I also find it challenging to follow, not least because of my regrettable tendency to confuse left and right, and I agree that it helps tamp down the chatter in my head that never goes away. It doesn't feel all that challenging yet physically, other than to my balance, but I suspect that I'm working harder than I realize. I'm also meeting people in my new town, which is a big bonus for me.
@Piano-Dad said in What are you reading?:
I have never read any of Ursula K. Le Guin, so I'm starting the Left Hand of Darkness.
I've had that one on my bedside table for a while. I read and admired The Dispossessed many years ago, and I've taught from her book on writing, Steering the Craft, but The Left Hand of Darkness is her most famous book, so I really want to read it and The Wizard of Earthsea.
Also, I've started taking Tai Chi and my teacher recommended her interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, so I just grabbed the ebook.
I just got an up-close look at a new-to-me invasive plant. We spent the day at Tony's mom's house and there was a ton of rosa multiflora in her yard.
I'm 99% sure there's another new-to-me pest in that yard in the form of trees of heaven surrounding her pool.
As for the other weeds? Heck if I know.
On the plus size, there are magnificent two-story-high rhododendrons in full bloom all over the property. We agreed with the realtor who thinks we should take pics right now and call it The Rhododendron House in the sales material.
We lived in the country, sort of. It was the best of both worlds, in that our house sat on four acres, but we were ten or fifteen minutes from town. My parents kept more over an acre of that land as the yard, which Daddy mowed with an old Cub Cadet tractor that came with the house, so Mama gardened with a big canvas. She planted roses and small flowers that you had to get close to see in the back yard. In the front yard, if it couldn't be seen from a car hurrying down a country road, it wouldn't do. Under some truly massive pine trees, she planted tons of azaleas, which grow to the size of a minivan (maybe a school bus) in that climate. They were honestly spectacular. She also moved azaleas and some redbud and dogwood trees out of the woods behind the house into the front yard, and she had a behemoth of a wisteria climbing up one of those pines and a yellow jessamine climbing up another. I remember daylilies, too, and nandinas and a pyracantha and masses of orange cosmos in the fall.
This happened over years, so I don't remember her as being one of those people who was always out in the garden. I think she tended it a little at a time while we were at school, and also she planted things that didn't need much tending.
The subsequent owner clearcut the lot and bulldozed the azaleas early in this century. Nevertheless, this is what people from my hometown still think of when they see me. They say, "I drove by your house and thought of your Mama and her azaleas."
Spring flowers are in full swing here.
Iris, rhododendrons, azaleas, peonies, columbine, kousa dogwoods, roses, clematis are blooming. Daffodils and tulips are finishing up. Hydrangeas and daylilies are budding.
It's really gorgeous out there.
I didn't buy any bishop's weed. Yay! Who knows what might have come with my friends' plants, but I didn't see any bishop's weed in her yard.
I knew which plants tended to be invasive in Florida. Well, mostly. Now I'm really curious about rose of sharon, because I've never seen it on a list of invasive plants, but I don't think it's heat-sensitive, so maybe it throws off all those seedlings there. Crape myrtle would do that, but I had a big yard when I had crape myrtle, so I just moved the seedlings someplace where I wanted color six or eight months of the year. My next-door neighbor at that time was really into gardening and she loved invasive plants the best. I counted five flowering plants in my yard that had come over from hers, and her four o'clocks looked like an invading army heading out into the common area behind our houses.
My mother is also the reason I got the lilies of the valley, wtg. She loved it, but it wouldn't grow in Mississippi. She did have something that looked similar. It may have been summer snowdrop.
I didn't know that rose of sharon was invasive. I put them in an area that would be mowed around. (Around which will be mown?) Will that contain them? They do grow in the South, but I've never had one. I don't remember them being invasive there, but I do know that they have a reputation for being unkillable, which is what I need in a plant.
I see Solomon seals in neighborhoods around here, so they seem like a good bet for a native that will do well and be pretty. I also see bleeding heart, which I've always loved and never lived in the right place to grow. My neighbors have the exotic variety, but I see on the New York native websites that there are native bleeding hearts, so I'll look for those. And maybe some of the exotics, too, since they don't seem to be invasive.
I love it!
Virtually everything in this market is multistory with basements that raise the entry six or eight steps above grade, which makes me wonder what the Victorians did when they got old or broke a leg.
On the plus side, all these stairs may keep us fit longer, but we're pragmatic enough to think about the problem they present. A ramp or wheelchair lift will get us in the house, if need be. Once in, there's a full bath and bedroom on the first floor, so if one of us were disabled on the short term, we could manage pretty easily. If it were both of us, we'd have to farm out the laundry.
If it were long-term, we'd want to be able to access the second floor. There's a spot where one of those new small-footprint elevators will fit if we decide to go maximal. The less maximal approach would be a chair lift on the stairs, which we know will work because we're told that a previous owner had one. That would get us to the laundry and our bedroom. If the time comes when none of these things work, it will be our cue to find some kind of independent or assisted living situation.
The positive aspect of this house in terms of aging is its location. If we can still get around but aren't able to drive, we can walk to the necessities of life and to public transportation. That has the potential to keep us independent longer, and perhaps as importantly, keep us from being too isolated in our old age.
The ones I've seen in people's yards around here look like red Columbine, so I may have gotten a native plant. I have my eye on some other plants native to New York, since they fit into my current gardening scheme which is, "Hey! I'm in a new-to-me growing zone. Let's plant some things I've never been able to grow before!"
This house has a very small yard, but it seems that it has been inhabited for 140 years by people who weren't very interested in flowers. Most yards in this part of town have a lightly tended Victorian-cottage-garden-packed-with-flowers look that I just love. Ours had some untended foundation plantings, three huge trees, a couple of patches of hostas and a hydrangea bush. The church plant sale was held by people thinning out those gardens full of things that are easy to propagate and hard to kill, and I kinda love the continuity of that.
So I got some lilies-of-the-valley, even though I know they're thugs in the garden, so I planted them in a bed bounded with a wide sidewalk. (Most of this stuff is going there, actually.) I also got some hellebores, because I have a lot of shade, some foxgloves, and some iris. A friend gave me some daylilies, rose of sharon, and Montauk daisies, too. Quirt is correct when he says I need to take a break from planting before I put in more than I can take care of, but as I read that list I think I should go get some native plants to balance out the exotics. Gardening is an illness. 
Pretty! I've never grown columbine, but I got some at a garden sale that was basically stuff people dug up out of their yard and donated to their church.
What variety and color of columbine did I buy? I don't know, because it was just a pot that said, "Columbine." ! I hope it's as pretty as yours.
@ShiroKuro Congratulations on the paperback!!! That's exciting!
@rustyfingers, I don't think Amanda has met either of your kids, but I'll ask when they visit this weekend. Maybe at BeeLady's party, but I'm not sure they were there. I've met them, but I think it was another time.
I've thought of you as academic funding has been thrown into chaos. I've got a proposal for a monograph out at an academic publisher at the moment, and I'm working on a proposal for an edited collection with a colleague who has a publisher in mind. Both of them are British publishers. (And one of them owns the other one, but the contraction in the number of both academic and commercial publishing houses is a whole nother conversation.) Both projects probably belong with British publishers anyway, since there's a lot more interest in our research focus, Agatha Christie's work, in the UK than there is here, but American academia is a scary place right now.
Yes, let's find a time to get together!
SK, I've lived in several neighborhoods that were good for "going for a walk," including our Oklahoma neighborhood, but getting exercise and sunshine while going about my errands is new for me and I like it a lot. I find myself making a game of not cranking my car.
There are some things I've bought like a spool of thread and some nails that would have been cheaper at Target, but it was totally worth a few cents for the pleasure and convenience of walking to the quilt store and the hardware store. The bank, the dry cleaner, the yarn store...literally right around the corner. We're getting rid of one of our cars, and the one we're keeping is a hybrid, so our gas bill is incredibly low and our insurance costs will go way down. We'll be applying those savings to the startling increase in our property taxes, but the quality of life is a lot better here. As they say, you get what you pay for.
