Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 According to what everyone else around us has been doing we are a bit late in getting anything out into the garden.  Many, if not most, local gardeners have had lettuce, onions and other cool weather things planted for a few weeks.  Gary's Aunt Kathy has had lettuce growing in a little planter in her front yard for a month or more.  We usually wait 'til the end of March to get going.  So all day yesterday was dedicated to gardening. I got the weed eater out and sheered off the garden beds here by the house.  Then I got out Little Brother, my rototiller, and tilled them up.  Later in the evening I planted every onion slip and bulb I'd bought in the second garden bed.  I am going to head to Greasy Creek this morning and get more. Gary was feeling much better yesterday; he's on the recovery end of this bout with COVID, so he did quite a bit of stuff, too.  He got the mower going, and mowed the lawn where it's been getting shaggy.  He spr...

 Here is an old photo of my Grandmother Davis standing out in her garden.  I have no idea of the date of this, except that it was probably early to mid 60s, before 1966 anyway.  I believe it was in 1967 when she had her right arm removed due to bone cancer (?).  I was born in July of 68, so her surgery could have been in early 68, I am not sure of the dates.  At any rate, I was just about a year old when she passed.  But my mom always said that she believed Grandmother Davis was partly the reason I turned out left-handed; when she held me in her lap she always used her left hand to move my left hand around, due to her having lost her right arm.   She was a character, from what I gather from my mother's stories of her.  A devout Christian lady, but still with her quirks and foibles, as we all have.   She loved her garden; both vegetables and flowers.  I believe her main love was flowers.  She had various blooming bushes gro...

 Lawrence (on the left) and Riley Davis.   I don't know if I have shared this photo on my blog before or not.  My father, Lawrence, was a lumberjack in his younger years in Northern California, there in the coastal redwoods of Humboldt County...he probably worked up in the mountains of the neighboring counties as well, but I am not for sure of that.   Perhaps I have shared stories of his before on here.  I am sure I have shared some on Facebook.  I wish I could hear him tell them again.  I don't remember him telling much about Riley working with him felling trees.  Riley was a sea man.  He and his second wife owned a ship and spent many years sailing up and down the East and South coasts of the USA. He had plenty of tales too.  I remember Shirley, his second wife, telling how she was swimming in a bay in Louisiana, or maybe it was Florida, and a gator was in there with her and Riley started yelling at her to swim faster.  ...

 A year ago today, in 2022, I got this in the mail.  It actually came to what was my mother's address up the road from us where I cared for her until her passing in December 2021.  This was a jury duty questionnaire thingy, to fill out so the courts can have it on file to call you for jury duty in the coming year.  It actually made me laugh; she had been deceased for almost a year and, had she been living, she would have been 93 years old and in the last stages of dementia.  Had she been alive and in her right mind she would have had a great laugh over the idea of her serving on a jury at that age and in that condition.  I posted this picture on my Facebook timeline asking for people's opinions about why in the world the court system would send out a jury duty letter to a 93 year old who'd been dead almost a year.  Of course I got varying responses.  I believe in most states and counties there are cut off ages and you can fill out paperwork at the...

In going through my photo files to find something to post I ran across this picture. This is the building where I used to work. It went by a couple of names; the Justice Center, or as we called it: MCDC. Multnomah County Detention Center. The very top 5 rows of windows belong to Portland Police, their entrance was at the back of the building. The rest of the building was the jail, with the entrance you can see here in this pic. This was the main jail in Portland; one of 5 jail facilities at the time I was there. Yes, the jail population in Ptlnd OR averaged about 1,200 per day, give or take a few, it depended on funding for jail beds. That is more than the population of half this county I live in. When hubby told me this county had not long ago built a nice new jail that would house more than 30 inmates I rolled around on the floor laughing almost. What's really freaky is that they have a whole floor for just the sex offenders. What does this have to do with the dairy? Ummm..not mu...