Lizzi

And thanks from me, too, Bluemoon. I have already sent that to all my cat-loving friends!

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Robindcr8l!!!!!!!

Baldur

I love the existential cat video, thank you bluemoon!

Baldur

After a week of blistering heat the weather is finally tolerable . In my case it is greatly preferable if the ambiant air is substantially cooler than body temperature. This is not generally the way of Summer in New England.
The inferno ended with a bang (several bangs actually). Wednesday saw quite a ferocious thunderstorm which climaxed as golfball-sized hail pummeled the area.
Luckily I had the automobile and was out visiting a friend who is convalescing some 20 miles South of here. Had I been home our vehicle would have been among the thousands requiring autobody work.

My garden was badly hit. The squash and pumpkin leaves, being rather like fragile parasols, are in tatters. We lost many small tomatoes, the beans are not amused, but oddly the eggplants laughed it all off.
The echinacea and milkweed are all tumbled over, there are fragments of oak leaves all over the lawn and the garden gnomes are upset.
Baldur has been rather busy with damage control.

An amusing matter has surfaced again.
I am once more being mistaken for a witch. How do these things happen? (and it has happened often enough)
Gladly these are somewhat tolerant times for sorcerors.
Some weeks ago I spent a Satyrday afternoon alone with a Miss Nicci T.
I had decided to host a Steampunk Tea at my home and invited the locals that are familiar with me from the Steampunk chat room. Seeing how similar events turned out locally preparing for 12 people seemed correct.
Baldur cooked, took out the Spode, polished the brasses and dusted the house. Only Miss Nicci showed up.

She apparently practices the Craft to some degree, and is part of a circle. When they are not stirring up eye of newt they hold educational sessions featuring lectures, tea and light refreshments. Miss Nicci has since inquired if Mr Bear might lecture on a topic of his choosing at their midOctober gathering.
Certainly if it were a matter of my demonstrating the procedure for making the proper cucumber sandwich I could hardly decline, but to lecture on the metaphysical? Truly this would be disastrous,
or perhaps highly entertaining.

Oddly enough several other members of her circle are very dear friends of mine. This dawned on me only after she mentioned the name of the group. The odds of my knowing any of them would be quite small seeing the collective meets some 50 miles from here, but somehow fate has intervened.
I had, years ago, attended a ceremony that involved incense, nudity, chanting and dancing in a ring at the invitation of one of her co-witches. He had been a dear friend for some time and thought the experience would interest me. This event was all male and certainly reserved a suite in a lower hell in my next afterlife. However I am truly glad I attended.
There was much similarity between a Christian Mass and what transpired if one overlooks the naked men holding hands and racing in a ring about the altar.

I have thanked Miss Nicci for her consideration but declined the role proffered, though perhaps I will attend as a guest.

Dragon

That video was a hoot bluemoon, I had to share it with my friends too. What a rough life it is to be a cat.

It has been rather busy here at Chez Dragon (aka Margaritaville). My hubby recently finished digging a trench from the side of the house down to the garage so we can have power and gas run to it. At the moment our garage door is powered by an extension cord run through the window and in the winter we plugged our cars into it as well but we'd love to have proper power out there. I advise anyone building a house to spend the extra dollars and have them put power out there at the time of building. Foolishly we thought we had asked for it but it turns out we hadn't (or at least it never made it to the paperwork). I helped my hubby dig for the first 6 feet or so but I am not a very good digger and the first day we worked at it I had a terrible cold which made me even less effective (though it did often make me light headed). Fortunatly for me my fella had done a few hours worth of work on a co-worker's vehicle and was owed some time so he suggested that his friend help him finish the trench and it was done much faster than if I were helping.
Today we spent the day helping friends put up their new fence. It was a beautiful day for it with lots of sun, hot but not unbearably so. Just hot enough to be a good excuse to take frequent breaks some of which included slurpees. I kind of wish we had that kind of weather yesterday as I was at the farmer's market trying to sell my wares and instead got heartily rained out. I did get some lovely beets, cabbage and onions from the Hutterites though and made a hearty borscht to take the chill off our bones when we got home.

We've been very fortunate this year not to have had the same thunderstorms suffered at Boughbreak. I was sorry to hear of Baldur's veggies (and his resident gnomes displeasure) and hope all makes a good recovery. We often get hail here, sometimes of the golfball sized variety. Not so this year (so far, fingers crossed, knock on wood). In fact our one hailstorm this year was gusty but the hail was rather small and didn't do much more than knock the petals off a lily that was past its glory anyway.

Glad to hear that Baldur's car was out of the path of destruction, I know repairing hail damage can be expensive. I have heard that the method they use to repair minor hail damage is to heat up the metal and let the dents just pop themselves out, so sometimes just leaving your car out in the hot sun on a very hot day can cause the dents to undent themselves (if that's even a word). I don't think this method works well with heavy denting though.

A shame only one showed up for your Steampunk Tea. I would be fascinated to attend such an event though I'm afraid I wouldn't know what to wear not having much in the way of Steampunk attire, though I would venture to say my black corset might work out nicely. We saw a number of Steampunkers (?) at Comicon. I thought their outfits looked the most imaginative, and that's saying something when talking about Comicon!

Anyway, it's starting to cool off here and I should probably go water my plants.

Dragon

Oh and happy birthday Robindcrdl! Hope you come visit today and collect your birthday greetings.

Robindcr8l

Ahh, the Universe intervening and sending me here for my birthday wishes! I was actually on my facebook page and got a Thinkdraw update with a very compelling picture. So compelling, in fact, that I clicked on the link to see who had drawn it, and was not surprised to see that it was inked_gemini, one of the many great talents here who leave me open-mouthed wondering where on earth they got the patience to practice their talents! Anyway, haven't been here in so long that I had a few months worth of Top5's to browse through, then decided to look in on Channel Baldur, only to find the lovely birthday wishes! So thank you Dragon and Baldur! And thanks for that cat video bluemoon. It is now on my facebook page, also, entertaining the masses! Enjoyed reading about evryone's gardens and ants and watching International Space Station videos, too. Now back to my cave I go.

Baldur

A friend of Robert's brought us 10 pounds of very ripe peaches from his tree. What a nice gift even though they all had gotten bruised a bit and wouldn't last long at all.
Baldur just cleaned peeled, sliced and froze the lot of them.
My own peaches won't be ready for a couple weeks.

Baldur

Thomas Cromwell is excuted (1540)
King Henry VIII marries Catherine Howard (1540)
Cyrano de Bergerac dies (1655)
Antonio Vivaldi dies (1741)
Johann Sebastian Bach dies (1750)
Robespierre is guillotined (1794)
Beatrix Potter is born (1866)
Earl Tupper is born (1907)
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is born (1929)
A B-25 bomber crashes into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building (1945)
The Kennewick Man is discovered (1996)
Reverend Ike dies (2009)

Happy Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval
Happy World Hepatitus Day
Happy Dancing Day

Baldur

I was actually enjoying watching the Olympic opening ceremonies last night They were exactly what they should be. Spectacle.
The bucolic English countryside was overrun by the Industrial Revolution. It was even amusing to see an army of Mary Poppins descend into the stadium to banish nightmares. Then came a turn for the worse.
The next segment called 'Frankie And June Thank Tim' however was in my opinion a mess.
This was basically a boy meets girl minidrama set to 4 decades of British pop music, culminating in how the Internet saves the day.
The 2 stars of this piece are lost in a sea of garishly dressed dancers. On the telly (this is British after all) we are given an advantage over the crowds attending live in that the camera follows them. In person this had to be just a jumble of dancing with no obvious storyline.
... Frankie sees this hot girl on the subway and would love to meet her.
Unfortunately she disembarks with a bunch of her friends and is lost in the crowd.
Frankie realizes that she dropped her cellphone, which he quickly retrieves.
In the midst of a few dance numbers he calls her.
Am I the only one seeing the problem here? He does after all have her phone in his possession.
Anyway they meet, they fall in love, June throws a huge house party where they dance together in the attic.
The End.

Dragon

I did not watch any of the opening ceremonies. In fact the only opening ceremonies I think I have ever seen was the Vancouver games in 2010. I didn't even see the one in Calgary in '88 and I lived there for it. Last night I was out trying out my brand new roller skates for the first time. Would have loved to skated with my hubby (he's the roller derby player after all, and the one who got me skating in the first place) but he wrecked his knee at practice and is on strict restrictions from his doctor. He may be able to do some gentle skating next week if he's careful.

I do wish I'd been able to catch a little of the ceremonies as I'm sure they were quite spectacular.

matthew

A plethora of Poppins... I hear a tune coming...

Baldur

Today's musical moment (as predicted)

'Just a Spoonful of Sugar'
by Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman

In ev'ry job that must be done .
There is an element of fun .
You find the fun and snap
The job's a game

And ev'ry task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake.
A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

A robin feathering his nest
Has very little time to rest
While gathering his bits of twine and twig
Though quite intent in his pursuit
He has a merry tune to toot
He knows a song will move the job along - for

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way



The honey bee that fetch the nectar
From the flowers to the comb
Never tire of ever buzzing to and fro
Because they take a little nip
From ev'ry flower that they sip
And hence (And hence),
They find (They find)
Their task is not a grind.

Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h ah!

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

Hazer

Wondering if Dragon survived yesterday's storm? I saw some pretty mean looking clouds to the north and heard about the tornado watch including Red Deer. Hopefully all is well at Chez Dragon.

Dragon

Yes I survived though one of my bird feeders didn't. I had taken it apart to clean it out and hadn't gotten around to putting it back together yet. The wind picked the glass cylinder right up off the table on the deck and dropped it down on the stone path a floor below. Needless to say it did not remain intact. Pity really, because that feeder it quite pretty but requires the glass in order to fill it with seed. I may still hang it up somewhere anyway and just fill the bottom with seed daily.
It was quite a storm though. At one point the wind was blowing so hard that the rain falling from the peak of our garage roof was actually going up! Crazy.
Hope you fared well too Hazer, did you get much of the storm in your neck of the woods?

Hazer

We were to the south of the storm. I had my two special needs clients ready to head for the basement though, just in case. Tonight we're having some nice showers with no hail or strong winds as predicted. My lawn needs the rain.

You may be able to salvage your bird feeder by using a modified pop bottle to replace the glass cylinder.

Dragon

I thought of the pop bottle, might try that out. It has never been a great feeder for actually feeding birds because the holes are too small and the seed tend to block it up. We don't have many birds in our area yet (unless you count crows) but I'm hoping once they start finding feeders they'll start coming around. I have 2 more feeders that I'm planning on hanging down lower from the deck supports. Fingers crossed that I'll get the visitors I'm looking for.
I have been thrilled to see a great many dragonflys (dragonflies?) swarming about our neighbourhood. More of them means fewer mosquitos and I'm all for that!.

Baldur

Happy Birthday polenta!

polenta

Thanks Baldur. As you may know, it's kind of difficult to get to be 63. LOL!!!

Baldur

Well I don't know that yet lol