Do You Realize?

I think I'm a fake liberal.

Anyone who's spent a goodly amount of time around here knows that my politics lean pretty far to the left. I'm even pretty socially liberal. Or am I? My social liberalism has recently been tested by a situation in our neighborhood. I'm a fake. A sham. A freakin' NIMBY, for pity's sake!

We live in a nice, established neighborhood. The houses were all built 20 or more years ago; there are a few families with kids, but not a lot. Often, we leave our front door and our cars unlocked. It's usually pretty quiet, despite our across-the-street neighbor, who is a lawyer with an obnoxious, drunken twentysomething-year-old son.

Long story slightly shorter is this: We have relatively new neighbors with a young son (hereafter called "K.") who has begun taking liberties with other people's boundaries. In the span of a week, he's taken toys that don't belong to him; walked into our fenced-in backyard & jumped into our pool after being told he could not, as adults were not home; walked into our unlocked front door when no one answered the doorbell; walked into another neighbor's unlocked front door under the same circumstances; gotten into yet another neighbor's vehicle uninvited; and hauled out our garden hose to play with on several occasions. He does not leave when asked or directed, even by an adult.

Here's where my fake liberalism shows up. Through the grapevine, I've heard that a local church is buying and/or renting houses in town, then setting up underprivileged families in them, sometimes even putting a couple of families together in a larger house. This is how K. and his extended family (I've seen at least five different cars in the driveway) allegedly came to live in this house. A truly liberal person would think that this is a fine charitable thing that the church is doing to help the lower class families in town to get up on their feet to make a better life for themselves. Is that what I'm thinking? Well, yes. But, I'm also thinking that maybe it's not so wise to scoop someone up out of the 'hood and dump them, ever-so-benevolently, in a 4000-square-foot house in a quiet neighborhood with obviously very different expectations than the ones they seem to be accustomed.

I soothe my wounded progressive pride by telling myself it's a good thing we're not hard-core Second-Amendment-or-bust types, or K. might be pulling some buckshot out of his ass right about now.

Photo Hunt Saturday--Funny Signs

I've had this week's photo picked out for a couple of months now, anxiously awaiting the time I could share it. This week's theme is: Funny Signs. We found this sign in downtown San Francisco. We thought it not simply funny, but quite hilarious. The accompanying, um, stains add to the effectiveness, no?

Update

Busy, busy, busy as a bee. That's me.

A few things that I have had going on:

• We're getting ready to start graduation invitations for Eldest. It took a week of online digging to find a company that offers grad invites made from recycled content paper. Although they could have stepped up with recycled content in the envelopes, I'm rather pleased that I even found these. I'd love to see a printing company step up with all-recycled-content invites and envies, printed with vegetable dyes.
• A thunderstorm night before last annihilated the gazebo we had just installed in the back yard (I am white girl extraordinaire, and sunscreen alone will NOT cut it); we hadn't yet put the bolts into the ground, and our famed North Texas wind turned the damned thing into a parachute; it flipped over our fence into our neighbor's driveway. AAAAAARRRRRRGH!
• We've finally hired someone to come take care of the rest of the digging, stump removal, and pea gravel installation around the pool. (We'd officially run out of places (legal or otherwise) to dump wheelbarrows full of dirt.) And cleaning out an irrigation pipe we've found while digging and the broken sprinkler pipes. And the sprinkler wires I may or may not have accidentally sliced with the Mantis last spring.
• I've been scrubbing grout in my tile floors. Completely gross job, with four cats and three dogs and humans traipsing on it (and if one of the dogs decides to "mark" something, those grout lines become perfect little river beds. UGH.
• I've planted our elephant ears and caladiums. Now the wait begins for weather hot enough to coax them out of the ground.

Those are the main things that have been occupying my time the last few days. What have you been up to, gardening or otherwise?

Edited to Add: The birdie who made this nest is a robin, and she has three eggs!

Happy Earth Day!

Some of my favorite personal images of Mother Nature:

Great Smoky Mountains, 2007

Texas Highway 289, 2006

Arches National Park, 2006

Do something kind for the Earth today. Even if we can't all agree on the causes of climate change, surely we can all agree that treading lightly on the Earth can only result in good: plant some flowers, pick up some trash, recycle some plastic bags, try some local and/or organic food from farmers near you, make some homemade jelly.

Manic Monday--Bipolar Teenage Decision Making 101

Scientists have discovered that two pathways exist in the human brain to the final destination of a decision. One is the limbic system, which controls emotional decision-making, along with other "gut reaction" activities, like the fight-or-flight response; the other, the parietal and frontal cortices, which are in charge of planning and rational decision making, among other things.

In the above mentioned study, normally-functioning people were found to have both pathways, and that even they were torn (as shown by brain activity via MRI) between a choice involving some sort of immediate gratification and one involving a more logical one which would provide an even greater reward after a short waiting period (in the study, somewhere between a month and six weeks). Using my admittedly limited scientific knowledge and my slightly more efficient common sense, I've come up with a reason for Youngest's inability to make even the easiest of "right" or "good" decisions, if not a way to combat my extreme anger and frustration regarding those decisions.

I posit that, because a bipolar person's limbic system activity is often elevated and his/her fronal lobe regional activity is suppressed/delayed/otherwise fucked up, this makes their ability to make rational decisions very, very difficult, to say the least. Further, as Youngest is only just now reaching some semblance of adolescence, the cerebral fibers in his frontal lobe are still not finished developing. So, in layman's terms, his brain's road to a crappy decision is wider and well-paved, while the road to a good decision is a one-lane dirt country lane.

Last night, one such decision-making session played itself out in a fashion equally fascinating and frustrating. For a couple of weeks now, Youngest's best friend (BF) at school and Youngest have been planning for Youngest to go home with BF after their early release day this upcoming Friday. It's a bigger deal than most trips to a friend's house, because BF lives an hour away, so these trips are pretty infrequent. As personal hygiene is currently low decision on the totem pole, we've been using this trip to BF's to encourage showers. His decision to take a shower or not on school nights will directly be tied to his ability to go to BF's; more, if he chooses to miss a shower, he will have to explain his decision to BF all on his own. Until last night, he'd been doing fine. (I suspect his not having to shower on the weekend further lowered his motivation to actually get back up on that horse.)

Despite my trying to get him to shower earlier than usual, to combat the particular situation that occurred, and despite the fact that he was happily awake up until the very point of decision-making, he decided he was "too sleepy" to take his shower. He was not too sleepy to argue with me in huge, convoluted circles, mind you, but four fucking minutes in the shower was too much to ask. We tried every bit of logic and every bit of emotional impetus imaginable, but nothing was budging him. His limbic system just wanted to lay in that bed and not do a damn thing if it wasn't fun. His frontal lobe was on the picket line... "Hell no! I won't go!" Eventually, I sat on his bed and told him that since he couldn't seem to make this decision, and that BF was that important to me if not to him, I would sit and talk enough that he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. After letting us know exactly how much he hated us for trying to sabotage his friendship with BF (WTF?!!? Delusional, table for one!), he took his shower. He spewed vitriol for about 10-15 more minutes before passing out mid-sentence. Ahhh, the fun-filled roller-coaster ride of bipolar disorder.

Green Thumb Sunday

EARLY MARCH:

MID-APRIL:

Photo Hunt Saturday--Thirteen

This week's theme is: Thirteen. If I had been thinking and not working so hard this week, I could have done something creative with it, since I was born on Friday the Thirteenth, and thirteen is now one of my favorite numbers. But this works, too. This photo is of Youngest; he is thirteen years old. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't take this photo, but I own copyrights to it. I thought it was appropriate not only for today's theme, but to put a face with The Disorder. Sometimes I have to remind myself that Youngest is so much more than his disorder. He is intelligent and funny, very creative, and he is the most genuinely generous and giving child I have.

You Learn Something New Every Day

While considering plants for our large outdoor pots, we were thinking sago palms in one set and replacement Rum Runner hibiscus in the others. Then we remembered Marshmallow's tendency to snack on everything she can get her teeth on (yesterday she ate cotton burr compost like it was cereal) and decided maybe(!) it would be a good idea to check toxicity of these plants for dogs.

A quick Internet search ruled out sago palm; even a small amount of this plant will cause swift renal failure in dogs. But hibiscus is a different story. There are conflicting reports. Some lists of poisonous plants have hibiscus included on them, some don't.  And so it was that I sat on the phone for fifteen minutes with the ASPCA Poison Control Center. Nevermind that we had already purchased the hibiscus online. According to the ASPCA vet I spoke with, the hibiscus will cause some pretty severe gastrointestinal upset, but it is not life-threatening to dogs. We decided to proceed with the planting and place some chicken wire around the plants until they no longer seem like a novelty to Destruct-o-Dog.

So, that's what I learned yesterday. That, and hard manual labor outside with only dogs for company is not nearly as much fun as with a friend, with, say, speech capabilities and opposable thumbs and an innate revulsion to caprophagia.

A Tuesday Ten--How Does Your Garden Grow? Edition

Spring has most definitely sprung here in USDA Zone Seven. We've been working diligently outdoors sporadically for a week or so and for the last two days straight outdoors, planting beds, trimming branches, shoveling dirt and rocks, getting the pool ready to open for the year. Here are ten things we've been busy doing:

1. I finished splitting and planting my hostas in the mostly-shade bed, along with new companion plants for texture and color variation. We now have 7-10 different varieties of hostas, and I'm pleased to announce that all of them have begun to grow vigorously. For companion plants we chose 2 different ferns, one tall and traditional, the other lacy and low and clump-forming. We also added some beautiful coleus. (The jasmine in the photo below is the one that was pronounced dead a couple of years ago.)

2. We've trimmed and thinned the bushes and trees out by the pool. The crepe myrtles were out of control.

3. We've arranged an electrician to come out this morning to fix two of our outdoor outlets, the poolside lights, and figure out what damage Marshmallow did here (I'm surprised the fool did not electrocute herself):

4. Hubby's trying to grow tomatoes again this year, a Brandywine plant. The first year he tried was a miserable failure. When we didn't really know for sure which was the "up" end of the tomato cage, we should have called it quits.

5. I've finished planting my new bed full of perennials. This is the first time we've planted so many; we've planted one here and one there, mixing them with annuals, but it inevitably leads to neglected perennials, so I wanted to try a bed of all perennials. There's columbine, salvia, flax, candytuft, bee balm, and a patch of transplanted speedwell groundcover, to see how it will react to being moved (before I pull it all up willy-nilly and killy-killy it all). I've added a bird feeder and birdbath, (and look at the size of the birds we've attracted! Heh.) and I will hang a matching hummingbird feeder soon.

Along the wall (in the photo), you can barely make out the foxglove and Turk's cap. (If anyone knows what the low-growing bushes are, please let me know... we've forgotten, though we love them.) I love the foxglove, but I have to admit to an odd combination of a queasy, uneasy feeling knowing they are so poisonous to humans and a slight thrill knowing I'm totally prepared if I'm sent on any spy mission that calls for poison. I know I'll be suspicious of any herbal teas hubby presents me, unbidden, for awhile. Heh. Here's a closer view of the lovely, deadly foxglove.

6. Hubby has been diligently scrubbing and vacuuming, unclogging the pool filter, scrubbing and vacuuming, unclogging the pool filter, scrubbing and vacuuming the pool. I'm glad he's got the patience. I would have drained the pool and dropped some C4 in the hole long ago.

7. We've picked out new patio furniture and patio dining sets, all in metal, so as to deter Marshmallow from making a snack of them, as she has our wicker (and our electrical cords... see #3).

8. Middle and I prepared these:

There are two of them along the same wall as the chewed electrical cord. Any ideas for filling them? This took an insanely long amount of time to prepare, and we were insanely proud of them when we were finished. We dug a foot down into the clay soil, Middle pushing the wheelbarrow out to a vacant lot for dumping*, and then we filled the cavity with pea gravel. Let me see you grow there NOW, weed bastards! MUAAAAAHAHAHA! (That's the honest-to-Pete correct spelling, according to the Genius that is RedMolly.)

9. I just purchased some pretty lemon-zesty petunias and some fuchsia bougainvilleas for hanging. I will put them in my coconut-fiber-lined hanging baskets, once I trim the damn things down to size (I trimmed one... ONE... last night, and I considered it a great fucking victory half an hour later. Just three more to go.)

10. We've arranged a sprinkler man to come out to fix our broken sprinkler heads (and the wires that I might have accidentally sliced last year with the Mantis).

So, tell me how spring has sprung in your corner of the world. Are you planting, weeding, readying a cursed (in this case, pronounced KER-sed, two syllables) swimming pool? How are you spending your spring days out-of-doors?

*No, this is probably not even close to legal, so can anyone tell me what else to do with 20 wheelbarrow-loads full of dirt? We spread about 10 loads in the 3-foot "alley" between our privacy fence and the next-door-neighbors'. It's better than the cigarette butts they throw back there.

Photo Hunt Saturday--Twist(ed)

I wish this week's theme, Twist(ed), had come a couple of weeks later, so that my subject would be in full glory. My star jasmine's twisting tendrils are trained on metal obelisks on either side of our front door. In late spring/early summer, it erupts in tiny white star-shaped flowers whose visual beauty are surpassed only by their olfactory marvels. For a month, we are treated to the luscious smell of jasmine every time we pass through our front door.

One of these plants was, for all intents and purposes, dead about three years ago, the effects of a particularly nasty winter. I dug it up and hauled it to the nursery, where they pronounced it dead. Undaunted, I went home and replanted it and nursed it back on its long road to recovery. Today, it is only slightly smaller than its counterpart across the path.

In the first photo, you can see the vines twisting on their support. In the second, if you look carefully, you'll see the little bird's nest which has been built by some enterprising little feathered friend.