First Trip to the Beauty Parlor

Gertie and Della, the two poodle pups who came into our lives last Thursday, made their debut at Waggers grooming salon this morning.  I picked them up at three o'clock, and Kathy knew we had to grab photos of them before they lose that "just brushed" look.  So here they are, looking somewhat intrigued by the array of strange sounds Kathy made to arrest their jitterbug motion and make they look her way.

Gertie's on the right with the gray lead, G for Gertie, you know; and the smaller Della's on the left with the bright blue lead chosen because it's not pink and not black.

The intelligence of poodles is some kind of wonder.  They already know the phrase, "Kennel up!"  That means it's time for another blissful rest time in your cage.  Last night Gertie walked right in on her own.  Della didn't but she did hang around nearby so that I could nudge her in.  Then, as I reported earlier, I read them more Swamplandia! and heard not a peep nor a whimper, and they slept through the night again until the reasonable hour of 6:30.

Their potty training is short of complete, but we're doing better, and one or both of them appear to realize that if an accident is to be had, it is preferable to have it on the hardwood floor rather than on the oriental rug.  Accidents, however, are on a sharp decline as trips outside are more frequent.

They are thrilled to have been provided with an indoor racetrack for their war games.  They love the long shot from the refrigerator all the way down to the end of the hall at the far end of the house, and the big loop through the living room is almost as much fun as the obstacle evasion course we set up for their enjoyment in the dining room.  We know this course as a table with four chairs and a glass top, but to them it's more of a playground, sometimes with an unexpected cat.

I can't say that I'm getting very much done, other than studying my new kids.

Bedtime Story

Last night was our third night with the poodle pups, Gertie and Della.  We put them into cages at the foot of our sleigh bed, and then I climb into bed and read a bit before turning out my light.  Kathy is a night owl and comes to bed an hour or two later, after the mournful howling has ceased and the dogs are quiet.

It's Della who is the howler.  Gertie seems confident enough about going to bed in a cage.  She may be aware that I'm in the room, or she may not care at that time of night.  But Della, oh, Della!  She feels abandoned when I am out of sight.  I've let her cry herself to sleep the first two nights, but last night some new idea came to mind.

Translation: "Cease from trembling; prepare yourself to live!"  That's a quotation from the fifth movement of Mahler's second symphony.  Several years ago the St. Louis Symphony Chorus sang this.  Our Music Director, David Robertson, stepped in as a last minute replacement for an indisposed guest conductor.  It was Robertson's first-ever performance of the Mahler 2nd, and he led it as if he'd written the piece himself.  During rehearsal, he told us the first line of this quotation is a common Austrian parental comfort phrase to a distressed baby.

So I said, "Hoer' auf zu beben, go to sleep now" the first few times Della was about to launch her epic wailing, and each time she quieted down.  It is not surprising that she has picked up some German even before I began her lessons.  Poodles are smarter than people sometimes.

Then I remembered telling Kathy that puppies are like human babies in the crawling stage.  They must be allowed to explore their environment, but they must be watched with vigilance.  And so it happened that I drew on my experience with babies and decided to read the puppies a bedtime story, and the story at hand was Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

This is one of the best books I've read.  I could use a sappy word and call it "magical," but that would actually devalue the book, as "magical" is so overused as to induce nausea.  It is also "enchanting" and "spellbinding" and touching.  It is funny and (here comes another terribly overused word in advertising blurbs) "wise."  Whenever I hear a book being described as "wise" I resolve not to read it.

Lately, Swamplandia! has been the book at my bedside, so wherever I was in the story, that's the part I began to read aloud.  Della never even began to wail once I began to fill her environment with the sound of my reading the story.  She began to imagine Ava and the Birdman putting in at Stiltsville, and Ava's brother, Kiwi, trying to get the hang of a placement exam from hell for a night school G.E.D. class at the Community College.  She wondered if Ava's sixteen-year-old sister Ossie was dead or alive with the ghost she had eloped with.  And she was fascinated about the red foot-long baby Seth, a mutant alligator Ava carried as a pet in a wooden box, Ava being a Seth-wrestler, even at her tender age, at Swamplandia!

Here is a photo of the author who comforted my Della and Gertie last night, Karen Russell:

Thank you, Karen, for such imaginative, funny, brilliant writing.  Thank you from me, from Della, and from Gertie the two poodles in a new home.  I hope things come out well for Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi.  Gertie and Della hope so, too!

Gertie and Della

Keb and I are parents.

 Thursday we drove to Little Rock to meet two standard poodle pups, female, aged sixteen weeks.  They were bred at a kennel named Renowned Poodles, located within a bird sanctuary 15 miles west of town in the mountain wilds.  Getting non-blurred pictures of puppies is a challenge!  Here they are in a typical "jump up and kiss me!" attitude with Kathy.  She was about to decide that the smaller one on the right is Della Street and the stockier one on the left is Gertrude Lade.  Their mother is the white dog on the left.  The dad isn't black, either.  The girls show their parti-color heritage with little white patches and a white toenail here and there.

Friday morning we returned to the kennel to pick up the girls and bring them back here.  They traveled well, with Gertie taking constant interest in the potential to jump up front and see better while Della hunkered down and bided her time.

We chose these names because of our enjoyment of the Perry Mason TV series.  We've been collecting DVDs of that series and have eight of its nine years on hand.  Della Street is Perry's legal secretary.  Gertie is the receptionist in the outer office.

Kathy had ordered crates for the puppies so that they could sleep in our bedroom without getting into the million varieties of puppy trouble while we slept.  Puppies of all varieties take lots of attention and vigilance, but poodles distinguish themselves by a trickster trait.  They are so smart they need to invent games that involve blitz-theft.

 There's Della yesterday afternoon during a 30-minute free play time in which I served as the Watcher and Alpha Male, barking "OFF!" whenever I saw tooth-testing of rugs, leather furniture, and the many house plants in the area.  Della is testing the tensile strength of a Christmas cactus with a view to carrying off a piece to nibble on.  Behind her on the hearth is a little arrangement of stones and driftwood found on the Oregon shore years ago.  That is now up on the mantle, as the pieces of wood seemed great chew toys for a few seconds.  OFF!

We bought two litter mates so they would have a familiar companion before meeting our two cats and possibly freaking out.  Here they go into Kathy's office to explore all the old dog smells on the rug she brought here from West Plains when we combined households and lives four years ago.

The kitchen is proving to be a very interesting place.  The door they use to go in and out is there.  Their food and water is there.  Even more interesting, there are dish towels, hand towels, and many counters at a good height for thievery.  Gertie-with-the-big-white-patch is measuring the distance to my banana peel this morning.  Too far, alas!  OFF!

This is Della, smaller of build, with a smaller white patch, looking for another fun opportunity.

This is Gertie, trying out her "who, me?" expression after a minor transgression, such as testing the dining room seat cushions for chewability.  We've given them chew toys, which are the hit of the party, briefly, until other things come to mind.

Neither likes the nose leads we use instead of "choker chains" or leather collars.  After two days of trying to rub them off while we go "walkies," they are figuring out that heeling in the perfect position results in no bothersome tension on the loop around the snout.  They are adapting to what feels best, and I am heaping praise on them in my baritenor range, "GOOD GIRL!"

I am sure they will easily learn the Latin names of all our plants in the coming months.

Yuletide Work in the Daylily Database

Fierce winds and horizontal snow defined yesterday and gave what I hope is the promise of some real winter cold in the offing.  There's not even enough snow on the ground to hide the grass, but the wind chill is something else.  I want to see truly dead foliage on all the daylilies, no exceptions and no excuses.

I've begun the work of continuous running through of my photo-enriched database to try to come to grips with a game plan for the pollen-dabbing in the summer.  The down side of having too many keepers is that each one expects me to imagine a couple of smart crosses to improve the turkey, or latent babe, as the case may be.

Here's what my database screen looks like.  I built it with FilemakerPro a few years ago.  It has three places for pictures and two windows where I can write the pollens I want to bring to a daylily and the daylilies I want to take this one's pollen to.  This seedling 07-153 on some days is white with a blue eye, and the plant is Dormant, but not pod-fertile, so I'm about to erase the names of pollens I want to bring to this one.  I want to use this a lot, so I'm going to consider carefully the crosses that might yield tall, large flowers with clear backgrounds and blue patterned eyes.

This coming year has to be one of heavy purging after serious early evening evaluation.  I can become too easily encouraged by pictures I take before 8 am, before a day of sun has revealed flaws in substance and color.

I got a good handle on plant habit, rapidity of increase, and hardiness last March when I ventured to confirm the foliage classification of my whole collection as well as my keepers.  I need to do another check of plant vigor before the foliage is up in 2013 because everything has been in place undisturbed since May of 2011.  Anything that seemed a slacker last spring had better show better growth three months from now, or show cause why it should not receive a disposal flag.  Here's one I know I must discard:

It's one of several beautiful keepers from SHERRY LANE CARR X SASSY SALLY.  All the flowers in the cross are "melon blends" with quasi-oatmeal tones.  All have nice yellow ruffles, green throats, and plant vigor.  All are too short to care about, and none have the good scape I hoped would come from SHERRY LANE CARR.  I could make more crosses to try to improve these in the next generation, but I could do as well or better by starting over again with different parents.  In fact, I have much better yellows and blends from other crosses already made.  

This cross was an attempt to do better than either parent, but only the flowers of the kids are interesting.  Their presentation is a disappointment.  I've got to dig these keepers out and work on something else.

Now I'll show a few keepers I will keep working with.  This lovely flower is a result of using WYOMING WILDFIRE to correct the opening flaw of MAPLE HUES.  I did correct that flaw, and I got a dandy flower, but the scape is shorter than either parent and the flower is extremely reluctant to set a pod.

I'm going to take this pollen to my collection of orange flowers with red centers and edges.

Here's another I like, and will take here and there to see what will come of it.

This is the result of trying to improve a favorite seedling (BEST KEPT SECRET X ROSE IMPACT) by crossing it with GREAT WHITE.  My favorite seedling very often imparts its form, as it did here.  GREAT WHITE gave this seedling a well-branched scape.  But I want to see more height, and want to overcome this flower's habit of beginning to decay in mid-afternoon, and I want to see fewer flowers open at once.  I've got a nice keeper from attempting those reforms through a cross with SHANTIH.  Now I want to cross this one with some others and see if I can retain the clear rose pink coloration.

There are several things I do not want to work on, much less achieve.  Among them is an increase in the already Rococo look of attention-grabbing yellow edges on convoluted petal surfaces.  I know, I know, some people like that look...it's well beyond the metaphor of "full-figured" and even "Overfull-figured."  Metaphors engaging the mind in memories of skin mag models and soft porn are avoidable, but not very, as we're conditioned to spicing our talk of flowers with words like "mighty," "husky," "feminine," and "voluptuous."  And, may I add, without a libido, where would we be?

So, these somewhat excessive flowers exist, and I am a garden judge, and my job is not to criticize the taste of such creations but to take them for what they are and find the ways to discern merit and demerit.

One other thing I am not working on is "fringe."  But this seedling came along a couple of years ago, and I saved it to see if I could make anything good happen with it.  I call it my "Shaggy Dog."

The cross is HEARTBEAT OF HEAVEN X ((BUTTER CREAM X VICTORIAN LACE) X J. T. DAVIS).  The pollen parent was a craggy-edged cream seedling with a big flower and lousy substance.  I knew I would have to compost it, but thought I'd see if anything good might come of it anyway.  The smoothly-ruffled edge of HEARTBEAT OF HEAVEN came though with rough, shaggy stuff in this mongrel.  The color is poor, the substance is poor, the scape is poor, and it won't set pods.  I believe the odds are against generating success from such a monster, but God gave it to me and I have to see what it will do.

I'm still a disciple of Oscie Whatley.  I like size, vibrant color, and a great healthy plant.  Unlike Oscie, I like patterns and want to fool with them.  But I can't fool with all of them in my keeper bed, so I'm going to have to cull and "add value by subtracting."  Wish me luck.

Salad Days at Hidden Lake

It's early December and I'm thinking of an early December in 1995, the year I came to St. Louis.  The afternoon had been mild and I'd driven over to Edwardsville to visit my cousin, Marge St. Pierre.  A cold front blew in while I was there and I used the heater and defroster in my car on the half-hour drive back to St. Louis.  The temperature fell through the floor after I parked the toasty-warm car, and the next morning I found my windshield had a big crack across it.

We are having no such December here, not yet, though I hope we do.  Indian Summer is supposed to happen in October.  We've had it in the past week.  We've had enough nights in the low twenties to kill most of the daylily foliage, but we've had enough warm days around seventy to make some of those plants put up new leaves.

Yesterday I thought I'd document our salad garden, Kathy's prime accomplishment of the fall, but I got sidetracked by the geese who had been sampling the grass by the lake shore.  As soon as I walked out with my camera, they took to the lake.

The big white ducks out there were Easter presents from our neighbor to his wife.  For a while they acted like they thought they could keep the lake to themselves, but now the visiting team outnumbers the home team by a lot and they've all made friends.

The raised veggie beds have been more fun for Kathy and more good eating for both of us than we imagined.

She planted three of the beds with cool weather crops just to try out her planting methods and ideas. The green beans were the first to die from frost and we never ate them.  The peas were arrested in their development, and we didn't eat any of them, either.

However...there are gallon bags of greens in the refrigerator, and we've been eating off them for the past three weeks.

Kathy tried several varieties of lettuce, spinach, arugula, radishes, etc.  They're planted in dense areas of the bed, which is narrow for easy weeding and harvesting without stepping on the dirt.

I held the camera at a wonky angle to get this picture.  I hope it doesn't make you dizzy!  The colors and forms of these edibles are a wonder to me.

I had not thought we would have a hard time keeping up with the yield of such small beds, but you can see here that Nature likes to provide a bounty when the weather favors growth.  Color!  Form!  Texture!  Taste!

Kathy makes a salad of these greens with some chopped radishes, chopped celery, and store-bought hearts-of-palm, and we dress the greens with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing into which I place four masked cloves of garlic and about a tablespoon of country style Dijon mustard.

Bon apetit!

Christmas Music From Hell

Is there really a "hell?"  If so, is it under where we stand or right here?  Is it reserved for after we die, those of us who deserve eternal torture, or is it served up to us, unawares, during the span of our unsuspecting, innocent lives?

I am an innocent man, goes the song.  Well, really, I am!

But yesterday I was subjected to a unique form of hell as I walked into an establishment that was providing continuous background music of the Christmas variety.  For me, if not for you, Reader, HELL is having to overhear a recording of Wayne Newton's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

You may adore Wayne Newton for all I know.  I don't really care.  It's not your hell but mine that I describe here.

Hell has rooms!  It's not a single place of flame, stadium nachos, stale cookies, or roadkillburgers.  If the first room features inescapable Wayne Newton, the second is a gallery of Johnny Mathis singing Sleigh Ride for all eternity, with a larynx so high and tight that the listener suffers sympathetic strangulation, though not enough to lose consciousness.

Bob Dylan's Christmas from the Heart CD is too awful for Hell.  It doesn't serve the purpose of eternal torture.  If I had to listen to any track all the way through I would be dead before the end, even if I were dead already.  I am a Bob Dylan fan, but with exceptions.

Jingle Bell Rock is well-suited to hell, and I expect to hear it many times in the coming weeks.  I don't think I'll hear Gene Autry sing "Here comes Santy Claus" very much, and it's so bad it's acceptable.  Elvis's Blue Christmas is not hellish at all but is a piece of family history around here.  I discovered the meaning of "going ballistic" long before that was a trite expression when I proposed that my father give me the Elvis Christmas Album for Christmas.

There are innumerable recordings that never should have been made for Christmas, but they are sometimes just so bad they engender laughter, which has no place in Hell.  I think of the spectacular bungle that is an arrangement of "Lo how a rose ere blooming" for Sting.  His constricted, constipational delivery makes me wince with laugh-loathing.

And yet he sounds sincere, and I have to remember that someone loves Sting, somewhere, if not for his singing.  I just had to interrupt that CD.  Painful, but not torture.

I am unaware of a Guns 'n' Roses Christmas Album or a Blessed Holidays With the Doors album or any recording by the Al Qaida Children's Peace Choir.  If these exist, they may be contenders for my personal Hell.  Until I learn of more bad music there will be Andy Williams hugging the life out of me with It's the most wonderful time of the year.

A New Front Door

Our fall project began modestly, as all epics do, with the simple phrase, "we have to replace this %^&#$ door."  The front door, you see, was not easily locked, once you got it open for the FexEx man or the insurance salesman, the young helper, or the scout.  You had to lift mightily on the door handle to make the deadbolt seat properly.  Opening the companion door required a hammer and screwdriver to force a vertical deadbolt up, and the same tools to force it down again when you wanted to close the door.

As long as we were going to replace the door, it was reasoned here, we should also correct the front stoop and the slanted step leading to it.  Here's what the stoop looked like on one of our inspection tours before we took possession of the house in 2010.

You can see the cement work left a lot to be desired,  and you can make out the oval door glass that seemed to belong to a house of some other style.

Kathy designed a set of two broad landings to replace the one slanted step.  The landings would be flanked by low block walls to provide visual balance to the new sense of mass leading to the front entrance.  The work began in the last week of September.  I've covered the early stages in previous blogs.  I'm going to pick up the story on November 15 and show the final week of the project.

The picture below shows the new facing board supporting the door frame.

The old facing board had been eaten away by termites long before we bought the house.  The previous owners had subscribed to a pest control program and had replaced a two-by-four beneath the floor joists behind this facing board.  Our house inspector had noted the two-by-four and the evidence of termite damage during a look at the basement.  At that time it wasn't possible to see the damage to the facing board.  Once the Branco team exposed it, we could see light through that board from the basement.

The ends of the floor joists had been chewed as well, so the builders had to create a load-bearing wall to support the end of the joists.  The old door had been a devil to close because the structure beneath it had sagged.  Here's Tim Yankow finishing the attachments of the new load-bearing structure.

Naturally, we didn't imagine what we'd get into as soon as we dismantled the old door, but this has been our "house story" from before we moved in.

Steve Brandt worked on making a perfectly square new frame to receive the new door.  What you see in the picture below is the new opening as well as work to restore the columns on either side of the door and to add electrical boxes to serve the new outside lights.

With a little time to spare that day, Steve and Tim started work on sloping the ground away from the new wall.

November 16

Steve continued finish work on the support structure for the new door frame.  He pieced in cement board, covered it with a piece of brown composite deck board to match the color of the new door frame, and installed flashing to assure that the new support structure would shed water.

November 17-18

Steve took advantage of great weekend weather to install the new LED lights along the walkway and following the curve of the far garden.

You can see how the far garden's curve meets the long walkway.  In poetry, the two-syllable combination named a trochee is indicated by a long horizontal stroke followed by a curved stroke.  The word "baby" is a trochee.  When you look at this long walkway followed by a curve you're not just witnessing "poetry in landscaping," you're witnessing a work of homage to our previous home in University City.  The bay window of the kitchen provided the "unstressed syllable" to the right of the straight line of the dining room wall.  I used that image to design the gardens in back yard at that house.  Here's Steve looking suitably unstressed as he connects wiring in the unstressed part of the landscape trochee.

The lights are following the curve of that bed, a curve which won't be visible until we cover some of the dirt in the foreground with new sod.

November 19

After laying base material and covering it with sand, Steve began to lay pavers on the landing.

He used the same pavers and the same pattern he followed a year ago when he built our patio below the new deck.  Tim operated a stone-cutting saw to cut pavers to fit at the edges.  The cut below is one of my favorite pieces in the landing.

Steve knew this pattern well enough to get the job done fast. In just a few hours, his part was finished.

Steve's father Carl then fitted the new pieces of cedar to complete the columns on either side of the front door.

November 20

Steve arrived with six yards of topsoil in his trailer and spent part of the morning establishing the new slanted grade for the lawn in front of the landings and walkway.  The front yard is full of low areas that drain poorly after rain showers.  We wanted to keep the storm water out in the middle of the yard.

Once the topsoil was laid down, Tim worked on smoothing it out while Steve and Carl removed the old door frame and the famous oval windows.

Then came a fateful moment: bringing the new door frame from the laundry room, where it had been painted and varnished, to its point of attachment.

They brought it outside and then eased it into place...

And when it didn't fit perfectly, Steve shaved microns of wood from the bottom of the supporting wood to achieve a remarkable, snug fit!

You can tell he's a happy man as the sun goes down.

At this point he didn't know that he had another hour's work ahead of him.  When he put the door on the hinges he discovered that the factory carpenters had positioned the opening for the tongue of the doorknob a fraction of an inch too high, so the door wouldn't click into place.  I bit of tweaking with a utility knife and chisel resulted in another perfect fit, leaving one more day's work to finish off the framing inside the house and clean up the construction site.

November 21

I had called Daniel's Farm and Nursery yesterday as soon as Steve finished putting down the topsoil. I gave them an estimate of the area to be sodded and Daniel called the turf farm in time to assure a delivery of three pallets of sod first thing.  Last night a fog moved in while I was at chorus rehearsal. Getting from the city out to the Missouri River was no problem at all, but as I approached the river valley I saw the heaviest fog I've seen in sixteen years.  The fog was still hanging around at nine in the morning when Daniel's crew arrived with the sod.

They started at the "unstressed syllable" and defined the curve of the garden and then worked down the walkway.

With five helpers, he made quick work of the job.

Then it's break out the hose and tamp down the edges.

Around eleven, the fog burned off.

The garage had served as a staging area for lumber, saws, and assorted equipment.

Carl spent the morning finishing the trim pieces in front.

Steve worked on trim for the inside.

He started his cleanup around 4 on the day before Thanksgiving while Carl and Tim policed the outdoor area and packed their trucks with equipment and tools.  Steve put the pictures back up on the walls and I rolled out the carpets and took this last picture of the finished door.

And it opens and closes with an ease you wouldn't believe!