What wine drinkers do on long weekends

Let me start by saying that Jim and I are not lushes. Fact is, 90 percent of the wine bottles you'll see in the photos below came from our youngest and oldest daughters — and their friends, too, to be fair.

My daughters aren't lushes, either, they're just always happy to lend Mom a hand whenever asked. Let's just say they were extraordinarily zealous in their assistance this time.

Here's the thing. About a year ago, I saw the following on Pinterest:

I thought it was a creative way to upcycle wine bottles and add a bit of whimsy to our unusual back yard. So I asked my daughters to start saving their wine bottles for me.

Boy, oh, boy, did they save wine bottles, unloading them at my place each time they'd visit.

This past weekend, Jim and I put all those wine bottles to use, creating a border similar to the one I'd pinned on Pinterest.

We did bury our bottles deeper than those in the pinned photo. Plus, we chose to stagger rather than line them up perfectly — perfection is something that just plain doesn't fit our wild and wacky back yard.

I planted wildflowers several weeks ago in the area the bottles border. Now we just have to wait for those flowers to grow. And for the bottle labels to weather away. (Note to self: Soak off the labels next time I do such a thing. And consider convincing Jim to dig up these bottles then rebury them after I remove the labels. My money's on labels weathering away sooner than exhumation.)

I'll share photos a few months down the road, once the flowers have grown. Stay tuned. And feel free to enjoy a glass of wine while you wait.

Just keep the bottle to yourself, when you're through. I've had more than my share, as you can see. Of bottles, that is.

Today's question:

What did you do over the long weekend? And was drinking wine involved?

Long live Grandma's hoya

I've never been very good at growing houseplants. Because of that, I felt quite nervous and unduly obligated when the care of an elderly houseplant was informally included in the deal when we bought our current house nearly five years ago.

The sellers told us upon our agreement to buy the house that they were leaving the plant they had inherited when they bought the house, a plant started by the original homeowners when the house was built in 1975. Story was, according to the sellers — who had no information on what the plant was, only a stern warning to not let it die — that the plant bloomed only once a year and "thrived on neglect." I'm pretty good at neglecting plants, yet I still worried about my ability to make it thrive.

Soon after we moved into this house, Jim and I hosted an open house for our previous neighbors so they could see why we left them and the street where we thought we'd live forever. While explaining the plant story to one of the former neighbors, an older German woman who always had interesting stories to tell, informed us the plant was a hoya. She seemed rather excited about it, but not being much of a houseplant person — and definitely not knowing a darn thing about hoyas — I smiled, just happy that we finally knew what the plant was.

Our first couple years living here, the hoya never bloomed. It did stay alive, though, growing like mad. (I apparently neglected it correctly.) The darn thing stretched across our dining room window with tendrils offering nothing more than creepy fingers that reached farther and farther toward the far wall. I eventually had to cut back those wild fingers that had overtaken window and wall. I was fairly certain I had done the poor plant in.

Soon after my over-zealous trimming, the elderly wife of the now-deceased builder and original owner of our home arranged a visit with us. She, sensing her mortality, hoped to see one last time the one-of-a-kind home she (a concentration camp survivor) and her former husband had built after immigrating to the U.S. from Poland. When she visited us, she was escorted by a couple of her adult children and her 20-something granddaughter, all of whom had lived in our house for many years, all of whom had cherished memories of the home their family patriarch had built.

Two of the daughters, both older than I am, exclaimed upon seeing the flower-less but still very much loved (by them, not me) hoya in the dining room. They asked to please take clippings of it, and I, of course, encouraged them to. The granddaughter excitedly clipped a bit of her grandmother's hoya for herself, too.

Then, not long after they visited, the hoya bloomed for us for the very first time. It was just one lone bloom that I noticed one day while sitting in the dining room talking to Jim. We couldn't believe it. The flower was lovely, the scent intoxicating. Within a week, the bloom died.

A year later, the plant bloomed again, this time with a few flowers. Again, they soon died.

This year? Well, that photo above is our hoya right now. This year it has bloomed better than ever, bursting forth with not only incredible flowers, but literally dripping with a luscious scent that fills nearly all three levels of our house, especially come evening. (Look closely at the photo in the lower left of the collage and you'll see the sticky liquid scent oozing from the blooms.)

This plant is amazing. I'm now in love with it. I love its story, its blooms, its scent. I love that the previous owners took clippings of it for their homes, for their granddaughter's home, that it's tendrils have stretched far beyond this house.

On Sunday, when Brianna and Andrea will be here for Mother's Day, I plan to give them cuttings of the happy hoya for their home. Eventually Megan will get a piece of it, too.

The abundant blooms this year lead me to believe the hoya will continue to thrive, that one day I'll be able to share cuttings from it with my grandsons, just as the granddaughter of the original plant owner carefully clipped from Grandma's hoya to cherish in her own home.

I hope that granddaughter's hoya clipping has thrived, that it has bloomed and made her smile as she remembered her grandma, who had passed away less than a year after the visit to our house. Perhaps the cuttings I share with my grandsons from Grandma's hoya will one day do the same.

Long live Grandma's hoya!

Today's question:

What memories do you have of your grandmother(s) and plants?

Gizmos and gadgets: Impress grandkids with how things used to work

Take a look around the library or a bookstore and you'll see there's no shortage of books based on the theme of “How Things Work.” Such books, most often written for elementary age kids, explain — and sometimes show with brilliant illustrations — how science, the body, our government, and everyday gizmos and gadgets of a dazzling array work.

Those types of books are always fun to peruse with grandchildren. While they learn how things work, we grandparents get to see how our grandchildren's minds and imaginations work.

Even more fun, though, is showing grandkids how things really work. More accurately, showing them how things really used to work, things that you — and possibly your children, parents of the grandchildren — once upon a time used on a regular basis.

In fact, grandparents may have what may seem to some an outdated home, yet to a grandchild, Grandma and Grandpa's house could serve as the ultimate museum on just how things used to work.

Take telephones. Some of us still have rotary phones. I do. I don’t use it, as I’ve gone high-tech with an iPhone and no longer even have land-line service. I do, though, still have that old rotary phone around, a style of phone my oldest grandson has likely never seen and surely has never used.

Next time my grandsons visit my house, I'm going to pull out that old rotary phone and show them both how telephoning friends and loved ones used to work.

Consider music, too. My oldest grandson is used to accessing Mom's and Dad’s smartphones, iPads, iPods, computers and even the television music channels for listening to music. Some days my daughter does go old school with my grandsons and plays — gasp! — CDs. But records? I'm pretty sure my grandsons have never seen a record, never heard a record.

Well, I have records. Albums and 45s. And I have a record player. I even have records that I used to play on that very same record player for my daughters to dance to, sing to at the top of their lungs. Next time my grandsons visit my house, I plan to play a few records for us all to sing and dance around to together, the way enjoying music used to work.

Maybe we'll even bust out the cassette player and cassettes for a real party atmosphere! Yes, we still have them.

Cameras are another biggie, another gadget most of us have on hand — and not just on our smartphones. One of my hobbies is taking photos, and I’ve taken literally thousands of photos of my grandsons in the four-plus years I’ve been a grandma. All have been taken with a digital camera. I do, though, still have a camera that requires film, results in photos and negatives.

I can just imagine how intrigued my grandsons will be when I buy a roll of film — they do still sell it, don’t they? — and load it into my old camera, then click-and-advance to show them how photos were taken in the old days. (Of course, the oohing and aahing will have to wait until I get those photos developed. They do still have one-hour photo centers, don't they?)

Now if only I still had that 110 Instamatic from my early years of photo taking, just after shelving the Polaroid camera. Even my daughters might be impressed with my old 110 camera and its film cartridges, my weapon of choice when my girls were wee babes.

The ideas for sharing with a grandchild how things used to work are endless once you consider the changes in just the past few decades to all things electronic.

Think televisions. Turning a dial to change channels? How bizarre that might seem to a child used to using a remote.

Or typewriters versus computer keyboards … and iPads.

What about transistor radios versus Pandora on iPhones or iPads?

And the one we all lovingly remember, possibly still have: crank-style ice-cream makers. The ones you (or your own mom or dad) had to pack with salt then all the kids took turns cranking and cranking until the creamy goodness was ready.

Pretty amazing gadgets we grandparents once used, if you think about it. More impressive are the Jetson-like advances in just our short — yes, short — lifetimes. Imagine the jaw-dropping advances our grandkids will see in their hopefully long lifetimes.

So take a look around your home. One need not be a hoarder to have all the equipment on hand for entertaining — and educating — a grandchild for hours.

And when you run out of ideas, simply consult your encyclopedia. Not the one you access online, but the one on your bookshelf. You do still have one, right? I thought so, for we grandparents know printed encyclopedias are the way accumulating knowledge used to work.

Every once in a while those old encyclopedia volumes still work, at least when it comes to entertaining a grandchild with our antique accumulations. Plus, they work in grand ways for pressing leaves and flowers inside the pages, too — something newfangled online reference sites will never be able to do.

photos: stock.xchng

Today's question:

What are some of the outdated gizmos and gadgets you still own? (And, no, your spouse doesn't count!)

Water woes

On Saturday, I got an infinitely small taste of what some of those affected by Hurricane Sandy have gone through and, in some cases, are still going through.

The day started as most any other Saturday, meaning I had a huge to-do list, especially considering the many gifts I'm making for Christmas. I did a little here, a little there, and by about 10:30 that morning, I went out to the garage to do some painting projects I had lined up for the day. I figured I'd get the painting done then clean the cats' litter boxes before taking my shower for the day.

So I painted away. Around noon, just as I headed into the house  to wash off the black and brown paint covering my hands (and the lubricant I'd sprayed all over them to help with removing the paint from my hands), Jim met me halfway to say water was flowing like a river in the street in front of our house—and there was absolutely no water on tap inside the house.

Apparently a water main had burst. Jim and I—both of us unshowered—joined the neighbors in the street to hem and haw about the wasted water that could have gone to good use on our drought-stricken trees. Water that would have done a world of good for my paint-and-lubricant-covered hands, too.

As the wait for utility crews to arrive and repair the broken main was long and uneventful, I headed back inside to do what I could to clean my hands and eliminate what I could from my to-do list. Soon Jim followed and we set to work putting up the majority of our Christmas decorations.

Time ticked on and by dinner time, still no water. With no way to make dinner without water, Jim ventured out to pick up Taco Bell. We used wet wipes to wash our hands before touching our tacos, but at least the repair crews had arrived and were hard at work. Even as daylight was gone, they toiled away.

Time continued ticking on...and on...and on.

And the utility crews continued working...and working...and working.

By 9 p.m., the big guns had arrived. Big trucks with big equipment, including big lights. They dug big holes and carried big pipes.

All the while, I sat on my big butt in front of my big window with my big camera in hand, documenting their work late into Saturday night.

 

Soon after midnight, the clean-up crews were scooping up the last of the dirt. The water was on. Hallelujah!

By 1 a.m. Sunday, everyone was gone.

Until Sunday afternoon, that is, when a few of the neighbors dropped by to check out the street repairs.

I think they were impressed. I know I certainly was. Not only with the repair crew, but even more so with the folks affected by Hurricane Sandy now that I'd had an infinitesimal smidgen of a sampling of what they endured for many, many more hours than I did.

Today's question:

When did you last endure a utility service outage (water, gas, or electric)?

One-word Wednesday: Frustration

Today's question:

What's your greatest frustration of late?