Sprung, computer on its way, etc.

OmegaMom here with the latest.

GrannyJ is now safely ensconced in her new assisted living apartment as of yesterday afternoon. Her phone (and associated DSL line) is due to be moved today, and her Mac Guru is supposed to pick up the computer, back it up, and set it up at her new place today or tomorrow. At which point, she will need to go through her innumerable mail messages--some important, some not--read the new comments which I haven't had time to print out and take over to her, and post her Very Big Thanks and Very Big Love for all her commenters who have followed this saga.

"Walking" Prescott is still a bit much for her, but WalkingPrescott isn't. She says she has enough sorted and grouped photos for two years of good blog posts, and I know that her new home has lots of photo opportunities, too. At the beginning of her illness, she was exhausted and down and feeling like she couldn't do the blog any more, but as she has gotten better and better, the urge to sit at the computer has been growing.

My brother is arriving today, and I am leaving on Sunday, heading back to less sunny climes. I hope that in the next few days, mom will start writing her own blog posts again!

Woohoo! My Camera's Well!

Hi! GrannyJ here (channeled by OmegaMom). Briefly. Breathlessly. With a few pix of the workout chamber.


Big emphasis: Getting folks walking again. Ms. Lower Body in charge.


Ms. Upper Body offers a collection of grown-up toys that really work you out.


Other miscellaneous equippage:



A place to practice living-at-home skills. All presided over by this beautiful quilt.

(Tag-on by OmegaMom: The nursing home is talking about springing GrannyJ next Wednesday--she's just doing too well, too quickly! So the sudden push is on to find an assisted living place for GrannyJ. Having her ask for her camera, and say she had an idea for a blog post, was music to my ears, believe me.)

Better! And birthday!

GrannyJ is safely ensconced at the Good Samaritan nursing home. They are making her do physical therapy for two hours every morning, and the end result is that she is doing better. She had a Burst O' Energy this evening while I was visiting, and actually walked around her room on her own without me flailing the imaginary whip and chivvying her along. The best part? When she was done, she checked her blood oxygen level, and it was still over 90%.

The lesson here, we think, is that old cliche: Use it or lose it. They're making her use it, and thus she is finding it again.

Of course, this is an up-again, down-again process, and will probably take weeks. But it made me happy (oh, yes!), made her happy (oh, yes!), and I thought all her readers would like to know.

Additionally, GrannyJ's birthday is on Monday! So if you would like to leave her birthday greetings in the comments, I will be sure to print them all out and take them with me to read to her when I visit on Monday.

Quick update

This is OmegaMom; I've posted an update on GrannyJ on my blog for those who are concerned.

Update

Hi, all--this is OmegaMom, GrannyJ's daughter. She wanted me to write a post to let you all know what's going on.

She's not doing very well, and I am here at her house to help her out. Looks like she'll need to go into the hospital/nursing home for a while to get her back up to par, see if evaluations show that there's anything that can be done. But right now she's in a fairly bad way.

She wants you all to know that the blog is the most fun she's had in years, and that she loved doing it. She doubts that she'll be able to keep it up--she certainly can't go out and take new pictures, and she has too little energy to put together posts from her stash of existing pictures. But the blog has been a source of joy for her for the past few years, something that she has truly enjoyed putting together and sharing with her readers, and she has loved the interaction with every one of you.

Take care.

Goodbyes

As of mid-afternoon, everybody is gone. Even the last two tadpoles, who joined their buddy who moved to the neighbors' fish pond a couple of days ago.

As of this morning, we had a two-legger (above) and a four-legger (below).

The two legger was carried by OmegaMom in a small gelato dish to the pond; the granddotter carried the nearing froghood critter in her hands. figuring that he was almost ready for the open air.

Goodbye, tadpoles! Enjoy your new lives as frogs. Meet your cousin or brother or sis (below), photographed by our neighbor, who reported that the little spider had attached a guideline to the froglet's nose. Neighbor wondered how long the spider lasted after that foolish maneuver.

A few hours later, the dotter and granddotter were packed and in the rental car on their way to Sky Harbor and thence Alaska. It's lonely here, with just me and the Max cat, but I had a wonderful three weeks with all my family.

Links: Steve Lummer posted an interesting, behind-the-scenes angle on the July 4th fireworks, while Touch Wind travelled to Patagonia where even the pizza parlor featured cool metal figures (scroll down -- there are six separate posts in the series). Then there's The Modulator with the July 10 Friday Ark, featuring a long list of recent critter posts.

Cotton candy

Lucky granddotter! In contrast, my depression-era childhood was deprived: my ever-practical mother refused to spend a single, hard-earned penny on cotton candy. Ever. All air, no substance, she would say. She was right, of course, but that's beside the point. Which is that cotton candy is the essence of a holiday fair: sweet, fluffy and insubstantial.

And oh so tempting.

You don't even mind the sticky, gooey aftermath. All that's required is a practical dose of water. Not even soap.

Biology day camp

As I've mentioned previous summers, the Sson is an ecologist who almost always travels with camera, specimen containers and a fine microscope. What it adds up to for the three grandchildren who've been visiting is a veritable biology day camp.

One granddaughter met a beautiful snake, who assumed the boa position.

Grandson came across more than one Prescott area lizard...

And the littlest granddotter caught herself a polliwog or two. Note that this fellow is well on his way to frogdom.

And everybody pitched in to add various arthropods to Sson's collection, shown here after they emerged from the deep freeze.

Furthermore, the little one had a chance to see wasp larvae through the microscope -- and she was changed from one who goes a girly eeoooh at the sight of a bug into a kid who is quite happy to collect and handle the six-legged critters.

Merry Christmas to One and to All!

My dotter brought this lovely Christmas card from the granddotter and I decided that it would be my card to everyone out in the strange and wacky on-line world that we share. Wishing you...

A MOST MERRY AND WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS

And may the spirit of Christmas last you all the coming year until Christmas is once again with us! Thank you for your comments, your readership and your support.

A pair of rag rugs

As I've often mentioned in the past, my mom loved to make things. A Christmas angel. Her own wedding dress. A toy dog. A ceramic frog. My clothes. Slip covers for an old sofa. Drapes. You name it, she made it. Rag rugs are no exception. One year was the year of the giant crocheted rug of many colors. No, the rug pictured here was not made by Mom, but by my ex-sister-in-law (we're divorced) who saw Mom's work and made her own which I photographed on my visit to Memphis this past summer.

Back in the early aught-40s, there was no Internet, chockablock full of instructions and Mom was on her own. At that time, most homemade rag rugs were braided; Mom figured, why not crochet instead. That way she wouldn't have to take the extra step of sewing the plaited strips together. It worked quite well, though washing that heavy, 6-foot-diameter monster was a big of a problem.

One day at her favorite fabric store (Phelps by name, back in Jax Florida), she came across a new rug-making gizmo that enabled her to use small pieces of cloth for a type of knotted rug. We both worked on this project, though it wasn't nearly as rewarding as the crochet. Took a lot more time to cover the same amount of floor and the result was really quite shaggy. I had never seen another such rug until this summer over on McCormick Street in an antique shop (above, below). Mom's rug was much more colorful, BTW; as I recall, it didn't hold up as well as the crochet.

My own rug-making was limited to a series of pictorial hooked rugs, but that was in another time and another world. I do have pictures however and might just post a two or three one of these days. In the meantime, if you are interested in rag rugs in their many manifestations, a visit to the Rugmaker's Homestead is a must.

The Pinzgauer arrives

Saturday I arrived home from the Prescott Photo Walk to find this lovely parked at my house. The Sson's new back country toy had arrived from Iowa. A Pinzgauer, a military vehicle of choice in Mittel Europe and many other countries, originally made in Austria.

As yet, Sson had not driven said vehicle and it was time to give it a whirl. See all those controls? It's apparently a good enough off-roadster for the Swiss army to take almost anywhere in the Alps, for example.

And so, after he was comfortable enough, he invited me for a spin up the Thumb Butte Road. I have to say that we got plenty of respect on the road (below), though this is a much smaller, lighter vehicle than either the German Unimog or the American Hummer.

Before parking off the road, to give me a proper photo op, the Sson did suddenly pull off, circling over stumps and some pretty rough territory. Vehicle did fine, especially considering that its clearance is much higher than our civilian 4-wheelers, not to mention other serious features.

And, oh, what glorious shooting I could do through that high, wide and handsome flat front windshield. Assuming, of course, that it had been cleaned and no new splats had occurred.

Cool lacings!
According to Sson, there are fewer than a thousand of these neat trucks in the US, all made in the 70s and 80s. Though the machine is still made, now in the UK, the newer trucks don't meet our current American safety & other standards, though they're good enough for the picky folk in the European Community. Besides, they cost upwards of $100Gs+. The older vehicles basically qualify as collectibles; the Governator, for example, owns several.

I suspect the Sson has been lusting for a Pinz ever since he was stationed in Germany during the 70s. Though we have a nationally known Pinzgauer/Unimog dealer out Iron Springs Road, he was fortunate enough to find this particular vehicle on an eBay auction at a much better price.

Photo Walk Blogs: Several local bloggers have posted their pictures and reports of Saturday's big picture-taking extravaganza, including Rich, Sadira, Tombo and Dagny. Worth a visit to each!

The Box

The Sson arrived. And. He's wonderfully like his dad, my LH. Much of the afternoon we spent talking about what ... oh, something like shoes & ships & sealing wax. You get the drift. One subject that came up was the book that my SIL plopped in front of me while I was in Alaska. He had purchased it, based Amazon's recommendation specifically to him. It was called, simply, The Box. Less simple, the subtitle: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. The author: Marc Levinson.

These containers that I photographed on my way to the Anchorage airport (above) aren't really the Real Thing; after all, they're small enough for air transport. What Levinson talked about in his book was the super-sized, standardized sea-going container that brought about a mighty logistics revolution, behind my back and the backs of most American consumers. A stealth revolution that birthed WalMart, Costco and big box stores in general. Came close to destroying several unions as well as centuries-old ports around the world. Helped invent the Chinese economic miracle. Not to mention holding inflation at bay. Fascinating reading.

But the Sson, who had been well aware of these changing times, brought to my attention the further fate of the very same box -- as an architectural unit, for example. But then, he watches Home & Garden TV; I don't. And so I consulted The Google and found sites here, here and here among many others. He also talked about Pods, the new way to stash your stuff by bringing in a container which you fill & which the company then takes away to store Elsewhere until you're ready (if ever) to need your junque once again. Also, incidentally, an easier way to move your household by container train & truck from Town A in Maine to Suburb B in SoCal. (Reminding me, BTW, of the GrannyJ family move from Chicago to Arizona way back when. We had at least a small bookstore's worth of books, plus a personal machine shop as well as miscellaneous Science Stuff. The husband settled on hiring a semi trailer to be sent via piggy back. There was, after all, a railroad siding over in Kirkland.) Fascinating afternoon, wouldn't you say?

Critter time with the Sson & family

When Sson and family arrive, we usually have at least one small critter scene. One year it was a spade foot toad. This year, an alligator lizard. All credit goes to the Yoda cat. Twice he hunted down and caught the youngling . It was in the house. He was relieved of his catch almost immediately, of course, and the animal was popped into the handiest container in the kitchen.

Out came the cameras. GD (above) and GS (below). Me, too, of course.

Sson shoots a close-up with a long lens.

Next, he picks up the little fellow for another close in shot.

And kindly gives me a chance at a closeup, too.

Other critters that were collected this visit: a big, muscular pine borer beetle (no, not the kind that kills the trees, but the kind who bores into trees already dead) and (below) a silvery looking grasshopper. I think an Oak Creek tadpole resided in the hallway for a day or so also before heading for a new life in Louisiana on Wednesday.

Linkage: First off, the July Festival of the Trees, where Walking Prescott rates a mention. Then, another Crown King fire picture, this one by Dagny showing a ghostly Thumb Butte nearly hidden by the smoke. Followed by a fascinating bit of agricultural practice -- Maria Langer, a writer of computer books and a chopper pilot from Wickenburg, signed on to fly over Washington state cherry orchards to help dry the ripening fruit following rains. Apparently if the fruit stays wet, it may crack open, thus ruining the crop. Also: please go back a few posts to read the final comment which came in last night from a native son who talks a bit about the old days in Prescott. He also wants to know just when the local Cornet store closed. I know it was after we arrived in the area in aught-81.