Sheep

Walter's delivered his load in Calexico.

He tells me there are huge retirement complexes going up everywhere in Yuma, Az. They seem to use a lot of water, because around them is all green. And that doesn't happen there without irrigation.

In Calexico he saw a bunch of sheep. Grazing. On urban land.

Irrigated urban land.

Green.

--Are they Navaho? I ask.

--No, no. Not a reservation anywhere in sight.

--Are they weed control animals, like goats?

--No. Someone's growing grass here, and grazing sheep, on purpose.

We're both mystified.


Hmmm.

Tax sheep?

Hot Load in the Desert

Walter's off to Calexico with a hot load. But after he delivers it, he'll sit down with me (via cell phone) and we'll break through to Hello and bloggerbot those pix within an inch of their lives.

Out of Tucson now, where he tells me the traffic was truly terrible. That he'd be out of the city faster if it were New York

He's in a part of the country that has many early memories for me. Camping and traveling though the desert as a child with my family, or at fancy summer ranch camp in my teens. Riding those beautiful trails, such stunning scenery you don't notice you've been horseback for 10 hours until you figure out you're hungry and the sun is setting.

I want to plant things for Walter. In mittel Europe they don't have much yucca. He's mentally cataloguing his favorites as he goes, something I've been trying to get him to do for years and years. I'm pretty sure one of his best-loved is the Joshua Tree.

Even driving trucks with Walter through that country, I couldn't really get him to settle down and observe his plant favorites. Now he is. And once he makes up his mind to really think about something, Lord that man goes to town on it.

I think he just noticed tamarisk. Saltcedar. He told me of a lacy tree, not so tall...

I need to be there again. Oh, I'm filled with longing. I miss the desert so much sometimes it makes me feel utterly lost and alone.

Ouch!

I say this a lot as I work. For a few years now, I've been teaching myself how to react naturally to sudden pain. Lately I'm swinging back to the old ways and ignoring it again. It's probably not the wisest way, but it's more dignified.

Hurricane debris has its dangers. I dropped a big chunk of wood on my foot a couple days ago.

It was pretty bloody, but I tend to drip blood every time I hit the yard. So I shrugged it off.

When I took my special MRSA-killer bath that night (using Hibiclens, the soap of scrub for surgeons) I realized it was deeper than I thought.

Sigh.

Off to the ER I go. Holy Cross is my current fave.

I had to park some 60 feet away from the entrance! a busy night. Hurricane casualties. The waiting room only had a couple people, tho, so the rush was over. Good. Even though I brought some Jane Austen, just in case.

"We'll have you in and out!" they said. They were tired and about to change shift, they wanted to go home after the busy period. Or...

As I was getting myself processed, Walter called. Shoot. He heard the background noise so I had to confess where I was and what I did. Very quietly, he asked, Which foot? WHICH FOOT? --The right one. The good one. (w takes a deep breath.)

I was not quite paying attention to the conversations of the staff until I realized the shooting scene they were discussing wasn't a TV plot, or something in Miami, but right around the corner from the hospital. Some psycho. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-cshooter09nov09,0,3174865.story?coll=sfla-news-broward

Everyone was trying to figure out how to drive home. We do that a lot these days anyway, what with hurricane complications.

Eeeekk! Perhaps they wanted to get us out quick just in case Mr. Psycho slipped the blockade and got in the hospital. Or, before they had another rush - a bunch of shot-up people.

Off I go to the little room with the little bed. Here comes Mr. Dr. He has a good look at it and starts cleaning it. I continue chatting with him like nothing is happening.

"Excuse me. Doesn't this hurt?" he asks.

"Hell yes!" I reply. I'm back from Allowing Myself to Say Ouch, to my original practice of Don't React.

He asked if I would mind if he used something other than stitches. Sure. but ???

And what does he pull out of his bag of doctor stuff? Superglue!!!

Oh, I'm delighted! I tell him it's my First Time. Never seen it used before, only heard rumors. It gives me the giggles.

He pulled out a little sealed package. I said, suspiciously now, That's not the kind I buy at Home Depot.

He grins. No, it's medical grade stuff. But still the real pure Superglue. Only the best.

I get a tetanus shot, and go over some MRSA things with him, and get sent on my way with stern warnings against Silvadening the Superglued boo-boo. (I'd shown them my little kit: How many people do you know who carry a bottle of Silvadene in their bag every time they leave home?) The nurse put a really cute bandaid on it with like four flaps to it? --Is that a special Big Toe Bandaid? --No, we use it for other places too - and I asked for one for my collection. She gave me a nice handful.

The shooter was still out there.

I went out the back way, and home.

I've Been Having Such a Blast!

Sunday was one of those dreamy Chamber of Commerce days. The weather's been beautiful, and on the weekend the traffic was light. People going to work get frustrated because so many traffic lights are still out, and you have to drive around debris piles and electric company trucks, and all this gives you a long and tiring commute.

And on Monday, the kids went back to school. More traffic. But the relief of normalcy, and of getting kids out from underfoot, was quite nice to local parents. You need to do icky hurricane recovery things and you want to shield your kids from too much of this, but if you don't do it the kids' lives are impacted by the continuing disruption. With them around to keep entertained you have little time for cleanup and those FEMA things anyway. School reopening is good. Even though they had to kick out a lot of hurricane refugees to do it - schools are popular shelters.

I've collected loads of plumeria to root, around a couple thousand pieces, and around the same amount of "air plants." These are bromeliads, usually tillandsias, that were blown down by the storm and destined for the plant debris chippers.

Plants that grow on other plants are epiphytes. I LOVE epiphytes. Most orchids are epis, and staghorn ferns, night-blooming cereus, Spanish moss.

Meaning, if I have a couple thousand bromeliads alone - not to mention, several hundred pounds of two species of cereus - I need wood. Wood to mount the plants on.

So I go about in the Saturn and pick it up from the debris piles.

I take pictures and talk to people. Sometimes I find shelving units just right for my plant operation, and take those home too. I have a perfect piece of shadecloth now, which I'll need for tender rootings. There are lots of people like me doing this, and it's really not an embarrassing thing to do down here, not like other places. We often set the "good stuff" aside, hoping someone will come get it. 99% of the homeowners I talk to are so grateful to see there's a future for plants they had to throw away, it's very sweet. It makes all of us feel better, not just me.

The wood I'm collecting is mostly live oak (any species, like laurel or water oak), cypress (bald or pond), and pine (slash, longleaf, loblolly). These are the host trees these plants choose, so I know they'll do well.

There's a lot of art that goes into good mountings, and the more beautiful I can make them, the more good homes I'll find for them.

So I've also been throwing in a few loads of beautiful wood that may not be the best host, but if I can give the plant good medium under it, like sphagnum moss, it may work well. I picked up two carloads of sisal (Bridal Veil) because of the great beauty of the wood.

Yesterday evening, helping myself to a particularly fine stack of oak, I started talking to the people next door: the homeowner and two chainsaw guys, those landscaping types we have down here by the jillions.

The homeowner is in the Ft. Lauderdale Garden Club so we had Stuff to Discuss. One was, she has a tree with neat fissured bark that hosted several chunks of staghorn fern. I didn't know what the tree was, and she forgot the name, but the landscapers told me, Naseberry. Yes! just as I suspected from the homeowner's description, a chicle tree, sapodilla. The original chewing gum source. And since she told me the staghorn ferns grew there volunteer, and wild orchids and bromeliads and all such, I can see this is a fabulous host plant.

And she told the chainsawers to trim some limbs.

This morning, I go back there. Such fun!

Soon the debris piles will be gone. No more collecting available. Then I'll take a deep breath and figure out how to quickly mount several thousand epiphytes.

Work Work Work...Rescue Rescue Rescue...

It's now two weeks since Wilma hit.

Walter came down a few days after the storm, and left yesterday morning.

We have our water, power, cell phones, and one of two land lines restored.

I have perishables. Fresh milk is available again. Finally, finally. The gas lines are gone too. Did you see them? Some were more than 3 miles long. One guy I talked to was in line for 10 1/2 hours. He needed fuel for his generator. When he finally got to the top of the line, with only 7 cars ahead of him, the gas station ran out of fuel.

Smaller plants like my triangle palm and a mini-dragon are back up and nicely staked via Walter. He's great at that. The huge volume of pruning and vegetation clearing is largely complete, but at that, there's still a lot to do.

The 20-foot queen palm is off the roof and standing upright again. This was an exciting operation, whereby we used Walter's semi - the tractor, or "truck" part - to pull her up. (don't worry, pics to come!) She's naked. Defronded. But she's up.

The orchid tree will survive, too, but unfortunately had to get decapitated. This is a popular lazy-ass pruning style that fills me with scorn, that should only be used when strictly necessary. It was. All my careful pruning and shaping over the years, the beautiful structure, is gone. The queen palm split the trunk and all major branches when it fell. It used to shade my house. Now it's around 5 feet tall, just naked trunk, no leaves.

The roof is amazingly intact. No leaks at the last big rain. There's some damage, but considering what almost happened, our roof dodged a bullet. When the queen palm came down, it did it so slowly and gently, it just delicately laid its fronds on the roof. The orchid tree under it caused all the dents and scrapes.

The window that blew out in my home office still has its plexiglass, and Walter duly admired the skill of my work, especially under hurricane conditions. Good man! Two other windows were blown out. One was by the cat pans. It's now boarded. The last was on the west side. A huge armoire in that room blocks it. Since boarding that window would take almost a day's work, and it's not a window the Bad Guys can enter, we're leaving it unboarded for now. (This is a long story involving drilling holes in concrete block.)

A board fence surrounds about 75% of my property. The fence almost all came down. The posts were snapped off at ground level, so simply propping them up is the best we can do for the present. Our friend and old neighbor Danny will be helping us with that, now that Walter's off again.

The inside of the house was crammed with things like porch furniture, hurricane supplies, and stuff for "fun" work to keep me happy should I have been housebound for several days by the storm. It's slowly being cleared out. A fair amount of furniture got water damage, and it's going out to the side of the street, to join all the other huge piles of debris. Lucky for us, it was all stuff we weren't so fond of.

Between all the work Walter missed, and those hurricane expenses, we're broke as can be. The only good part is that people understand when hurricanes hit, they hit your wallet too. Financially, yes, I'm scared. I take deep breaths and deal with it as best I can.

Next week is my time for doing claims: house insurance, car insurance, FEMA, what have you. When Walter was here the time was so precious I put it off until after he was gone. It's also true that the adjusters are going up their learning curve, there's more power so more offices are open, and the whole process will go much more smoothly for me now.

Work work work. The amount of work to be done after a major disaster is staggering.

Since I'm built for emergencies, and have the dubious advantage of living a hurricane-prep life because of my health problems, this sort of thing doesn't depress me the way it does other people. Still and all, sometimes I need to get away from it.

So I'm also doing plant rescues.

Every street is covered with head-high debris piles. Vegetation goes in a separate pile to get hauled off to the chippers. Here's where k comes in. I find things like plumeria that's easy to root, or whole plants people are throwing away in general disgust, and load them into my Saturn and bring them home. I know I can't TLC all of them back to life. But even if I can only save 50%, the fact remains that 100% of the unrescued plants will die. We lost our canopy, so many trees, so very much of our Green. We need plants just now, all of us.

And it's a wonderful boost, an emotional diversion, from the work around the house.

I'm very tired. I'm covered with bruises and cuts and insignificant fractures and weird little infections, tiny fang marks from spiders and centipedes, fingernails split to the quick. Skin burns from the poisonous sap of Euphorbia lactea. MRSA invades so many of these that every night I go to bed with around 30 bandaids holding down the Silvadene I slather on them, and I'm greasy all over from the wounds I just cream but don't bandaid. My bandaid needs break my budget like nobody's business.

It's worth it. Ever so.

And Here I Thought Hurricanes Aged Us

Yesterday morning my house was on TV.

Well, my carport, actually.

I live in Wilton Manors. It's a small town on the north side of Ft. Lauderdale.

And it's Last on the List for FPL.

We still have 70% of homes without power. Broward County has almost 90% restored now, same as Dade. In the two counties combined there are only 250,000 still without, and while that's a big number, it's a huge improvement.

There are long extension cords snaking across the roads from one house to another, as neighbors with generators - and those lucky ones, like us, who've been restored - help out the UnElectrified.

So here's the local ABC affiliate, Channel 10, doing a news segment on how Wilton Manors has no juice. I went to tell Walter. Who shortly informed me that the little news segment was being sent live from across our little street.

See, we have power on this side, but across the street does not. This is the usual state of affairs. Katrina was different: it knocked a huge ficus into a sort of electrical trunk, and clearing a downed tree like that takes a large crew days and days of chainsawing. That time, Across the Street didn't even lose power; we were out for five days.

On my way out on an errand, I explained this to the nice lady as she waited for her next live segment to go on. I told her we probably were electrically blessed because we're on the same grid as the fire station and elementary school.

And lo and behold, she mentioned that on her next live segment. That was nice, in a silly sort of way.

But here's the kicker: She identified me as "a young lady from across the street!"

YOUNG LADY?!?!!!

I am 47. She's around 25 or 30.

WHHHEEEEE!!!!!

Oh, for life's little thrills.

The Mayor of Broward County

finally got her power turned back on last night.

That was Wilma Day 10.

When the Going Gets Tough...

I like asking people what their animals did during the storm.

Most say, They hid. Under the bed, in the closet, or in the Cat's Secret Mystery Place in the kitchen.

One guy told me his dog is a Co-Dependent, so it followed him everywhere he went.

What did Mr. BabyCat do?

He took a nap.

Right in the middle of a howling hurricane.

Must be one of the benefits of great old age.

We Got Nuked

Just in case you hadn't heard.

Broward County, Florida was Ground Zero for Hurricane Wilma's visit to the US.

Now that we're finally beginning to recover, I can add to kmom's email. Just please understand, what we feel here, myself and Walter and my neighbors, is pure and simple gratitude. We were lucky. Extraordinarily lucky.

See, it's been far, far worse than I let on to kmom at the time.

Our power was restored last night - 8 days after Wilma hit. We weren't scheduled to get it until November 22, but we're on the same grid as a fire station, so we have electricity while most of our neighbors still don't.

Almost all our phone service is finally working again, too. Even the cell phones were blown out. We're still under a Boil Water advisory, but at least we had water again after only a couple of days without.

This area is devastated.

In our neighborhood, at least there's been no loss of life so far. But every single house was, one way or another, trashed.

Our queen palm came down and smashed into the orchid tree, which kept it from slamming through the roof and/or window - and/or me.

Unfortunately, just after the tree slowed, a window on the east side of my home office blew out.

And the hurricane blew in.

It picked up an ironing board that was leaning against the wall and tossed it around. It knocked my precious framed antique fan off kilter, and took my prize-winning 1st grade drawing of "Smiling Elephants" down, but didn't break the glass.

It threw around some electronics, too. The laptop appears to have bit the dust.

Me, I got a bunch of little glass cuts, some of which are now MRSA infections, and us with no doctors or hospitals open. But it could have been so very much worse. Broken glass blowing at hurricane-force winds is dangerous indeed.

After the blowing glass, the problem was this: Once your house is breached and the hurricane gets inside, the whole place can go like a house of cards.

All our plywood was stored outside. I was NOT going out for it in the middle of the hurricane. That's one of the principal reasons for fatalities.

I ran through the house to our stash of rehab stuff and found a piece of plexiglass. It was a little too big and Lord, that stuff is strong, you absolutely have to predrill holes. The cell phone was still working some, and I talked to Walter and hacksawed and drilled and after working about an hour - listening to that Howl, trying to push the plexi into place with a hurricane pushing it back into me, and broken glass slicing me up - suddenly the eye of the hurricane passed over. Just the southern edge of it, just a little space. Just enough to let me hammer the sucker into place before the Howl started up again.

I was tired and bruised and bleeding, probably a few hairline fractures - my fingers, and oh God, the bad foot got smashed, the hurricane kept blowing the plexi into me over and over as I tried to fit it - but it was quiet again. I mean, the hurricane sounds were outside the house, not inside.

I felt safe.

I knew then that for a small stretch of time, I'd felt real fear.

I have nothing against fear. Reasonable fear is the kind I respect. It's there for a reason. It tells you something important, something you need to know.

Power's Out

I've set up the inverter, so the fridge, computer, TV, and $6 fan are running.

Unfortunately, my queen palm is coming down. If it does it may come through this window, my home office window. Time to run.