Spring flowers

[alfsauve]

I'm very cold adverse.   If it's cold enough that butter stays firm it's way too cold for me.   Thanks to USAF, ChanuteAFB and the Artic Circle for that conditioning.

Sadly we had to take down 25' wall of Confederate Jasmine yesterday that succumbed to the early-spring-sub-freezing cycle we had.   It was so pretty and smelled so good when it bloomed.  Plus gave us privacy from the street view.  I've also been told by a woke neighbor not to call it CONFEDERATE JASMINE.  Evidently those who control these things have another name for it now.  <LONG SIGH>

I'm going to redo the puppy fencing, then probably plant Clematis.

Here is the wall in all it's neeked, glory.

[Big Frank]

So sad. All those "woke" people need to "unwoke" and F*** OFF!

[Big Frank]

I got some good pics of the daffodil on the north side of the steps Saturday. It took longer to bloom than the one in the open, well to the south, and a bit further west. This one is tucked into a shadow until afternoon. You can see big fat tulip leaves next to it too. We may have dropped a tulip bulb in the same hole as the daffodils when we planted them, but I don't remember doing that. I took another pic of the grape hyacinth, and one of the tulips halfway in bloom on the south side of the steps. The grape hyacinth, Muscari, should be darker purple later in spring if I don't mow it down. Here's a good picture and an illustration from Wikipedia. The clusters of flowers look like upside down bunches of grapes when they're fully in bloom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscari

[Big Frank]

Sunday I took a couple more pics of the grape hyacinth. Not that it's worth looking at again, but I figured it didn't have much time left for this world. I think it's just a bulb that I can dig up and transplant. If so, it should be dormant in the fall. We had at least a few days in a row last week where it was in the 80s, or near 80. Then when I took out my trash, at 2:15 this morning there was snow on my car! What the shit?

[Big Frank]

Well, guess who finally got some color today? They're a lot more colorful than 2 days ago. Now they look more like the grapes in their common name. I can mow them down and have pictures to look at, and now they won't be crappy pictures. Actually, I hardly ever look at my flowers except to take pictures. I ignore my them most of the time, but I do take time to stop and smell the roses. They're so darned good! And I'll have plenty of lilies, as usual when their time rolls around.

P.S. These flowers grow halfway between the front porch and sidewalk, and driveway and sidewalk up to the porch. All by themselves, right in the middle of that half of the yard. The half of the yard on the other side of the sidewalk to the porch is just grass, and no flowers. Well, not just grass. Grass and weeds.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

I'm very cold adverse.   If it's cold enough that butter stays firm it's way too cold for me.   Thanks to USAF, ChanuteAFB and the Artic Circle for that conditioning.

Sadly we had to take down 25' wall of Confederate Jasmine yesterday that succumbed to the early-spring-sub-freezing cycle we had.   It was so pretty and smelled so good when it bloomed.  Plus gave us privacy from the street view.  I've also been told by a woke neighbor not to call it CONFEDERATE JASMINE.  Evidently those who control these things have another name for it now.  <LONG SIGH>

I'm going to redo the puppy fencing, then probably plant Clematis.

Here is the wall in all it's neeked, glory.

It took me a long time to realize that room temp in the kitchen was less than in the living room where the thermostat is. I only have the vents open to heat 2 out of 8 rooms in the whole house. One room doesn't even have a heat duct, just a square hole in the floor upstairs for the heat from downstairs to go through the ceiling. The farmhouse my dad grew up in had a hole like that in the upstairs hallway, and a wood stove downstairs to heat the whole two-story house. Even with (maybe) 14 quilts on the bed it was too cold in the winter. My bathrooms get enough heat through the closed slats of the vents. It may have been 65 degrees in the kitchen, and possibly even lower, but since I don't live in the kitchen I didn't notice if it felt cold. But when it got too hot, the whole house was hot and I ran both of my window air conditioners. One is in the bedroom, and the other is in the living room next to the open doorway with a box fan in front of it aimed right at me in the dining room.

Now I'm reading that closing vents in rooms you don't use is a bad idea. It costs more in heating costs, plus it can screw up your HVAC system.

Anyway, Alf, my kitchen was too cold for you, until the whole house was too darned hot.

[alfsauve]

Pretty flowers.  Azaleas and Pinases (sp) are really blooming now.

My parents and I lived for a while in an open, studio like, house.  The bathroom was the only separate room.  Eveyrthing centered around a kerosene stove in the middle of the space.  A short center wall separated the kitchen from the living room and a small bedroom space had 3 wall but was open towards the center of the house.  I remember my dad filling the stove's tank from a Jerry can and that we had an portable electric heater in the bathroom.

Advice on whether to open or close vents assumes the HVAC was designed and installed properly.  Mine has too few sq feet of return vent(s).  Blocking off an unused room actually helps, or so one technician told me.   Just recently had all the insulation in the attic replaced.  Made a huge difference. 

[Big Frank]

The flowers turned out okay in the last set of pics, but he daffodils really looked good to me. I should send the pics to my friend and his wife and say, look what I got. The tulips are trying to bloom, and the lilies will be the last of the bulbs to bloom. After the flowers are done for the year I usually mow them down but the lily leaves keep growing. I should let them be until the leaves die. My "June roses" will probably bloom the last week of May again instead of June, since the weather has trended warmer for several years.

I put a thick attic blanket in a long time ago, the pink stuff that looks like cotton candy but is no good to eat, and was advised by a home energy analyst years later to put another roll over top of it. But I didn't. I don't feel lucky about guessing where to step when I can't see the edge of the 2xs under the insulation. And they don't all run the same direction, so when you get halfway across chaos ensues. I could have laid boards on top of one layer of insulation to put in the next layer, but that sounds too much like work. My house leaks heat and air all over the place, and the attic seems to the only place that's insulated. I think the walls had something like Vermiculite or cellulose in them that settled down to practically nothing. When I replaced a light switch, I didn't see anything behind the receptacle except the outer wall of the house. Ever since I moved in, the more things I look at, the more I see that needs to be fixed. Things that are seriously wrong. NOTHING in this house is plumb, straight, square, level, or parallel to anything else. They sure don't built them like they used to. A lot of stuff should be torn out and redone, but if the house was gutted, all the problems in the frame would show, and I can already tell there's work that needs to be done there too. If it was an area anyone wanted to build a new house this ~95 year old POS would need to be demolished. And the site of this unholy mess blessed before anything else is built.

[Big Frank]

I took a couple pics pf the tulips Wednesday. They're looking good and healthy. I didn't even notice the dandelion there or I would have decapitated it. I finally mowed the front yard, twice with the mower at different heights to mulch the long grass, and it looks good. Good for this area anyway. And I mowed around the grape hyacinths. They look more purple with my Oakleys on, so I think they're distorting the color. I wore Ray-Ban Aviators with G-15 lenses (neutral Gray color, 15% visible light transmission) for so many years, I got used to my sunglasses not distorting colors, just making them darker. I should put those on then compare the color difference with the Oakleys.

I'm supposedly mostly color blind according to one type of test, but if this is what color blind looks like, I wouldn't want to see in full color. It would be like everything in the world was covered in fluorescent paint, and I was walking around with a blacklight.

[Big Frank]

ROSES! My June roses, whatever kind of roses they are, usually bloom around the first week of June. This is the first week of June, and they bloomed this week, Monday or Tuesday. It was still May, but the last week of May is the first week of June too, so they were right on schedule. They used to bloom around the second week of June 20-30 years ago, the first week of June 10-20 years ago, and sometimes the last week of May in recent years. I think it's getting just a bit warmer, a little bit earlier, but I like it. I went a couple of weeks without having to run the furnace or air conditioner day or night. I didn't even need to turn a fan on for a long time, but I need it now. I love living up here in the temperate zone. You guys down south can keep the sub-tropics and swamp ass summers all to yourself.

1. From straight in front.
2. From the driveway next door.
3. Quarter view from driveway.
4. View from porch, camera held high.
5. Quarter view next to porch.

They're off to a good start, huh?