Anansi

In late July, I stopped in my local library to return the book I had taken on vacation with me, and while I was there I saw a tray with about six tiny cups holding baby spider plants.  I also noticed that the library--which is very tiny as libraries go--had been somewhat rearranged in the about three weeks it had been since I was last there.  There was now a big spider plant in a pot in the front window behind the checkout desk, and, I suspected, that big spider plant was the source of the little 'potted' babies.

The tray had a sign that said "Free", and each little spider plant had a popsicle stick in it with a small envelope hanging from the stick that said "Adopt a baby spider plant".  Inside the envelope was a small booklet on baby spider plant care.

Each little (paper, looks like a ketchup cup from Burger King) pot had a small, infant sized wrist band taped around it, and each of those bands sported a name.  Every name was a character in a book, and while I didn't recognize all of them, I suspect they had something spider-related in common.

When I read this one, Anansi, I knew that I would be taking a baby spider plant home with me.  Because Anansi is not only a character in a book, but it is also a song by Raffi.  When my kids were little, we listened to a lot of Raffi. We had many Raffi cds. The lyrics to Anansi immediately popped into my head:

Anansi, he is a spider,

Anansi, he is a man.

Anasi, he is a lazy one,

Do as little as he can. . .

The song goes on of course, look it up if you don't know it (beware, it will stick in your head!).

Yep, that little plant, that Anansi, was definitely waiting for me to show up and claim it.  So I did.  He went home with me, cherished like an unexpected prize.

Once home, I opened the envelope and found the care booklet. Also inside the little envelope, was a teeny tiny certificate of adoption with the plant's name on it and other parts to be filled in by the adopter.  The envelope, booklet and adoption certificate are all very cute and remind me of the little things inside the pages of the Jolly Postman books.  Whomever at the library came up with this idea for rehoming their (unwanted--not enough room) baby spider plants did a brilliant job.

This little Anansi has gotten a new, bigger, more durable pot.  And a place with indirect light.  I had been wanting a spider plant for a while, it's been many years since my last one died (cats?  young children?), and now I have a new baby one to enjoy.

Games Horse People Play

 There are many 'games' that people who spend copious amounts of time around horses are familiar with.  Probably the most well known is "Catch Me If You Can" (which sometimes is also called "Tag, You're It"), where the horse person goes out into the pasture to catch the horse and bring them in (usually to ride, sometimes for the farrier or the vet), and the horse, spying the person from across the pasture comes part of the way to the person, then spins and runs off in the opposite direction.  If the person gives chase, following the horse, this can go on for a long time. That one is one of my most hated games, and I refuse to play it unless absolutely necessary (there are ways to train this out of a horse, but you must be diligent in the process).

There's also "Find the Shoe", in which the horse loses one of their shoes, either by getting it sucked off in mucky spring mud, or steps on the heel of it with the toe of a rear foot while running and wrenching it loose (in which instance it may go briefly airborne).  Either way, there's a metal shoe out in the pasture somewhere, and the person is tasked with finding it.  Over the years, and working and multiple farms with shod horses, I've gotten to what is probably expert level in that game.  It's time consuming, but I can succeed.

Another is "Where's My Halter?",  where the horse, turned out with a halter on either rubs it off on something (their leg, a tree, the water trough, a fence post, the edge of a run-in shed or other building) or entices their pasturemate(s) to play Bitey-Face and pull the halter off for them.  Then the horse person must search the pasture to find the halter so they can put it back on and lead the horse from the pasture back to the barn or whereever else the person had it in mind to take the horse.  I also avoid this one by not leaving halters on during turnout (a few exceptions being if the horse is new and unfamiliar with the barn routine or hard to catch [see "Catch Me If You Can"]).

The latest one I have had the dubious honor of playing (thanks, Tubbs) is "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?"  Tubbs always wears a fly mask over his face when he goes outside, even in the cold weather when there are no flies.  This is because he once had a cancerous tumor on the lower lid of his right eye, which, during treatment of said tumor, left him with light sensitivity and decreased vision in that eye as well as missing a small chunk of eyelid.  So he wears his mask as both protection from bugs and other things that might get into that eye and as sunglasses against the UV rays.

Tubbs, however, would prefer not to wear a mask.  He likes to try to rub his off.  He also has a tendencey to shred them.  A couple of weeks ago, his owner brought him out a brand new mask to replace the one he wore into dilapidation.  The 'old' mask was a light grey color.  The new mask is a stylish black (he's a black horse, so this one, at a glance, blends right into his head).  Unfortunately the mask not only matches the color of his hair, it matches the color of every manure pile in his pasture.

So, one recent evening, when I went to bring the horses into their stalls for dinner, I found Tubbs mask-less.  Which meant, ready or not, I got to play "Fly Mask, Or Pile of Horse Poop?" and try to find his mask in the expanse of pasture.

In the three pictures above, can you tell which black splotch is a pile of poop and which is the fly mask?

If you said the fly mask is in the third picture, you'd be correct.  But without getting up close, it's hard to tell which is which.  Definitely not a fun game when you are searching an acre of pasture.  Then again, none of these games horses like to volunteer their people to play are very fun.  Just another reason horse people are crazy.

A Drive Down Memory Lane

 Or, actually, down Queens Lane, which is the name of the road my paternal grandparents lived on for about 10 years after my grandmother retired from her factory job (Grandpa was 11 years older than her an had been retired for a while) and they moved from Michigan to Southeastern Ohio to be nearer to her family (she was born in eastern Kentucky and had several siblings still living in Kentucky at the time).  For several summers, my brother and I would go spend a week with Grandpa and Grandma at their 'farm', which was two acres on a hill side next to a small dairy farm, and they grew a huge garden.  Our visits always happened to coincide with the peak of green bean harvesting and canning.

But it's been over 35 years since I was last there.  When they moved, and sold it, in early 1992 to be nearer my Uncle in the Akron area because Grandpa had quite bad Alzheimer's by then, and Grandma had never learned to drive a car, I was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with DH as he was working on finishing his engineering degree.  

On our way home from the Myrtle Beach vacation in July, our route took us not terribly far from the little town they had lived outside of.  DH asked if I wanted to detour and drive past their old place, and I said sure!  He had never been there, only heard stories from me about it. That was the piece of land that inspired so much of my desire for my own plot of land in the country with a big garden, and I had so many fun memories of the place that how could I pass up this chance to revisit it?

I knew that their old single-wide house trailer was long gone from the property. The people they had sold the land to had built their own home on it.  But I thought I would recognize the land, the big red pole barn.  And surely the neighboring dairy farm would be a dead giveaway.  Or the small house and metal sided shed that belonged to the neighbor on the other side of Grandpa and Grandma's place.

Nope.  Nope.  And nope again.  Instead of having been built up in the last 34 years (35 since my last visit), the whole area seems to have become grown over and more wild.  Even the narrow road, always about one and a half car widths, had become less civilized.  More of a two-track in some sections than an actual county-maintained road.  The old houses I remembered?  Most of them gone. The chicken man's shack of a house, I couldn't even tell you where it had been. The dairy farm?  Not a building left!!  The big red pole barn at Grandpa and Grandma's?  Also gone. The other neighbor's house and shed?  You guessed it, gone.

The only way I even recognized the place was as we came around a curve in the road, and it began to rise to a hill up ahead.  My whole body strained forward, towards that hill.  My body knew that hill even though absolutely nothing else was how I'd remembered it.  As we crested the hill, my head turned left and I saw an unfamiliar house with unfamiliar small outbuildings, and I knew, I just knew sure as the sun rises in the east that once upon a time, I had swung on a stick tied to a piece of rope tied to the sturdy branch of a tree that grew atop the embankment edging the road.  Right there.  In the early 1980s, a 9 or 10 or 11 year old me had swung out over that exact spot in the road.  And somewhere hidden behind the house that now stood on the hill, my Grandma had been inside the house trailer pressure canning beans, and Grandpa had sat in the shade of an apple tree that no longer existed.  And behind that house trailer, behind that apple tree, on the other side of a field fence that was long gone, in a pasture that now was full of brush and trees,  brown Guernseys once grazed, waiting for the farmer's son to drive around on his three-wheeler to round them up for milking.  Way down at the bottom on the hill, now all in brush, used to be the other neighbor's shed, that if I threw with all my might, I could lob an apple from that apple tree by the house trailer on top of the hill and just barely peg the shed with a satisfying pinging sound.

Everything was both familiar and totally unrecognizable at the same time.

For a good hour or more after that, as we drove, on the interstate again, DH and I talked about what that piece of land had been, who the people had been, how life had been.  It was a great way to pass the time on our long journey home to this little place here.  A place that in many ways, is now what that little two acres in rural Ohio had been then.

(Except I don't swing out over the road on a stick on a rope no more.  I also don't lob apples at other people's sheds.  I do pick and can green beans, and walk in fields, and hear the mooing of cows at my neighbor's dairy farm.  Unfortunately those cows don't graze in grassy pastures, they stand in free stall barns all day and have ground food brought to them by tractor loads.)

New Socks, Underway!

 After finishing my Dad's socks for Father's Day, I took a short break from knitting.  Not because I wanted to, but because there were so many things vying for my time (like prepping the farm for a farm sitter while DH and I were on our big family vacation in July).

However, I knew I wanted to take a knitting project with me on the long drive to and from Myrtle Beach, so two days before we hit the road, I went into my stash of fingering yarn and grabbed out a blue tonal skein.  Why blue?  Because for over a year one of the things on my Want To Make list has been a pair of blue socks for myself.  

At the time I wrote that list, I didn't have a specific pattern in mind, but now I did.  Because in late June I had been working ten minutes here and twenty minutes there on darning some of my handknit socks that had worn holes in the balls of the feet or the heels (or both!) and in that pile of socks to be mended I found my Cadence socks.  

I had knit these socks ten years ago, and they had been darned at least once since then.  Unfortunately, when I gave them a good look this time, I had to admit that they were just too worn out to darn again.  It would be more like trying to knit new heels and soles for them.  And I definitely didn't have the time, talent, or enough of the original yarn left to attempt that.  So I sadly said goodbye to them.

All of which meant that my next socks, my blue socks, would most definitely need to be knit using the Cadence pattern that I so loved.

With my pattern chosen, and yarn in hand, I cast on the first sock.  Knit two rows of the cuff, then packed yarn, needles, pattern, and row counter away in my travel bag so it would be handy on my trip. 

On the way to Myrtle Beach I didn't get a whole lot of knitting time, as we had K3 and Faline riding with us.  I managed to get through the cuff and the first chart for the leg.  I also knit a little (an inch?) off and on while at Myrtle Beach some of the times I was hanging out on the balcony having a breather from all my vacation-mates.

On the way home, it was just DH and I in the truck (Faline rode with her parents and brothers, who were marathon driving straight back to Michigan.  K3, along with Toad and Rascal, stayed in South Carolina visiting their other grandparents--K2's parents) and I got a ton of knitting done.

When we arrived back home, I had the leg about three-quarters knit.

Then it sat for a week, untouched, while I scrambled around trying to catch up on housekeeping and farm work post-vacation.  Recently I have worked on it a couple of brief spells and currently I have finished the length of the leg and am about half-way through the heel flap.  

I have no illusions of any great spans of time to knit on this in the near future.  If I can have both socks done by my own birthday (December), that would be great.  But more than likely I will be setting this project aside later this month and working on a different knitting project instead.

Because Faline, seeing me knitting while we were on the road to our vacation destination, dropped hints in the way that only a five year old can do.  "Amma, I don't have any socks knit by you.  I like pink.  That would be a good color for knit socks."

Her birthday is mid-November.  I have at least one skein of fingering yarn in pink.  If I focus my knitting time on it, I could probably whip up a pair of youth size 1 pink socks by then.

Books Read in 2026: July

 Laughed Til He Died by Carolyn Hart.  Liked it.  I picked this up at the Spring book swap not realizing it was number 20 in a 26 book series!  That said, it read well as a stand alone, although I do think I may have read one of the earlier novels years and years ago.  The main characters felt familiar.  Anyway, this mystery has a quick pace, lots of characters, not gory and also not too cutesy like I find the modern (last 8ish years or so) cozy mysteries to be.

Summer State of Mind by Kristy Woodson Harvey.  Sucked me in right from the start.  While I didn't like how some of the characters behaved (way too rapid met-to-bedroom for me), I did like the story even if it did seem to resolve a little too quickly and easily in the last few chapters.  Compared to most of the book, which had many messy complex things about the characters, the last portion just wrapped up everything too neatly and 'everybody's fine with it' for me to find believable.

The Shippers by Katherine Center.  This is her newest rom-com and it was absolutely the most perfect beach read to take with me on summer vacation.  I loved it.  I devoured it.  I could have easily read it in one continuous reading marathon if there hadn't been family with me to interrupt my reading time.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.  This is another book I picked up at the Spring book swap.  I threw it in my suitcase while packing for vacation in case I finished my other book I was bringing along (which I did).  And, while I do like the author's descriptive style, I have to confess that overall the book just felt like it had no real point and I started to struggle with my desire to keep reading it right around page 70 or so.  I kept going to page 120-something and decided to DNF it.

Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden.  Another book swap find.  I have to admit I just opened it near the end of the month, so haven't read enough to have an opinion of it yet.

A Puzzle A Month

I pick up jigsaw puzzles in spurts.  Sometimes none for months (or maybe even a year???), and then two to four or even five at once if I happen upon a bunch I like for a good (cheap) price.  My 'free' time varies throughout the year, and historically I do only a few puzzles over the course of twelve months, mostly in the cold dark months of winter.  Which means I have found myself with a backlog of puzzles waiting to be put together.  Some from as far back as 2015 according to this Goodwill sticker on one.

I like to do puzzles 'in season' by what their picture is: winter scenes in winter, summer scenes in summer, etc.  Some are harder to peg down the exact season, and those I tend to do if my eye happens to catch that one more than a seasonally recognizable one at the time I am grabbing a puzzle to work on.  Which is how I have 11+ year old puzzles in my stash that still haven't been done (rarely do I do a puzzle more than once, so I tend to give them away after completing them).

 This past winter I put together a big one.  In spring, none.  In late spring I decided that I should, if possible, devote some of my scarce summer free time to working through that puzzle stash.  If I could get one puzzle put together each month that would be a good thing.  Not just for reducing the amount of puzzle boxes I have stashed, but because working puzzles is a relaxing thing for me who has a hard time sitting still if her brain (and hands) aren't working away at something.

In June, I did this one:

And for most of July, I picked away at this one for about three weeks:

This is the one I have chosen for August: 

I find it both entertaining and a bit frustrating to note the difference in price on puzzles from the exact same Goodwill location in 2015 (99 cents) to the 2025 sticker on my August puzzle.  It's not like it costs them any more to acquire them in 2025 than it did in 2015 (ahem, free donations).  Then again, overhead costs (utilities, building maintainence, minimum wage) have gone up a lot in 10 years, so I guess that 'explains' the price jump.  (I'm looking at it in percentage increase--a tad over 131%, rather than simply $1.30 more).

Anyhoo. . . 

Maybe I'll try to keep up this puzzle a month thing for the remainder of 2026.  That would open up some currently used (for puzzles) storage space as well as bring me some tidbits of enjoyment weekly and would move along five more puzzles to new homes by 2027. Win-win, right?

A Pocket Full of Shells

 (My apologies if you will now have "Bulls on Parade" running through your head the remainder of the day).

This month, DH and I took our first family vacation in probably twenty years.  I know we didn't take one in 2007, the year DS1 graduated from high school, and the next year he was in the Marine Corps when we took the other three kids out to Oregon and back roadtripping to (and from) the family reunion hosted by DH's second youngest aunt. So it's been twenty years, or maybe even 21, since DH, I and all four of our children (and population exploded family) went away together on vacation.

We (DH & I) have talked about doing this for a long time, especially in the last several years.  Then, in 2025, on the flight back from taking K3 and Toad to Sedona over Spring Break, DH asked the two of them for ideas of places we could all go on vacation together in the future.  K3 said "The beach!"  Specifically she was thinking of Myrtle Beach, where we had taken her and Toad back in 2022, and her alone way back in 2015 (which she couldn't remember that trip because she was only 3 at the time.)

Which was how this family vacation went from concept to reality in 2026.  DH. Me.  Our four kids.  Their spouses (and DD2s current boyfriend [whom I really do need to assign a blog name to because he's looking more and more like a lifer]).  Nine grandkids (Two-EEs daughter Cowgirl didn't come; at 17 and having been living with her father and step-mother for the last few years she has in the past 8 months or so decided she doesn't 'need' her mother or that side of the family.)  Myrtle Beach.  Four days, three nights, lodging for everyone covered by DH and I. (They were on their own for food, transportation and activity expenses.)

It was chaotic.  I mean, is it even possible for anything involving 19 people, 9 of them children, to not be chaotic?  It was often loud. (NINE children!)  Was it enjoyable?  Do any of us ever want to attempt such a thing again?

YES!  And another YES!  In fact, on the long car ride home, there were texts flying back and forth vehicle to vehicle and state to state (it's about a 14 hour drive for most of us) proposing we do a huge group trip every 2-3 years.  Possible future vacation destinations were tossed around; from mountains to beaches to National Parks.

But back to this current vacation.  I tried to walk the beach every day.  Sometimes at low tide, sometimes at high tide.  Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening.

And it seemed that I couldn't take a beach walk without coming back with shells in my pocket.  Which brought to mind the lyric "rally round the family with a pocket full of shells".  Different context, different shells from the song mentioned above, but it sorta fit.  Lotta family.  Lotta shells.

some of my favorite shells are teeny, but intact

In addition to finding shells, there was 

--swimming, both in the ocean and several of the resort's pools (most of which I did not have my phone for, so very few swimming pictures)

9 grandkids together on the beach!, 

Buck, K3 holding Lucky, Toad holding Octavia, Rascal, Tractor (front), Faline (mostly hidden by Tractor), Sixlet

--kite flying; tiny kites that hardly show up in the pictures although we watched from our balcony other people (adults) flying huge shark and squid kites

--group dinners made in one or both of the suites we stayed in (one 3-bedroom suite and one 2-bedroom suite).  Smoked brisket and pulled pork (the first night, brought from home, smoked by DH), spaghetti and meatballs, make-your-own taco bar (Tuesday!), and white chicken chili with toasted baguettes (which oddly enough wasn't the wrong temp/flavor for a hot humid southern evening and was heartily enjoyed by all ages).

waiting to be called to dinner

waiting again

--kids babysat by aunts and uncles while sets of parents each had a turn at a childess afternoon or evening out.

DD1 in charge of (niece) Octavia

 --general shenanigans

Monkeys on the luggage cart

"Hiding"

Can a 2 year old fit in the cabinet?

Yes, yes he can.

--and even a succesful family picture (which I decided was too many tiny faces to try to make them unrecognizable/anonymous so I could share it online and abide by my own no recognizable faces blog photos rule).  I have plans for that family picture to be enlarged and printed on a canvas to hang on my living room wall before the year is through. (We also have not had a 'real' family picture since before DS1 graduated high school in 2007.  Its been a crazy past 20 years.)

In addition to our mass activities, some family members formed various smaller groups for various outings (I didn't go, so didn't get pictures) such as:

• miniature golf 
• go-carts 
• an aquarium visit 
• a driving range
• a nature preserve 

And while they were gone to those things, I enjoyed some peace and quiet, reading or knitting or beach walking or sitting on the edge of the water just feeling the waves and thinking; and recharging my (introvert) batteries for more group fun!