This and That: A Blog

About time for some garden news.    I didn't realize I'd missed Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day until yesterday!  I've been doing the bare minimum outside due to summer heat, just watering, and a bit deadheading in the front yard, and watering again. While the temperatures have gone down into the 90s from the 100s, the lemon cucumber leaves show damage from the hotter days.   While the lemon cucumbers have yet to produce any cucumbers, the Salad Bush cucumber is doing well.  The plant looks dreadful.  Either this kind always does, or it thinks it's dying and putting out cucumber after cucumber. This one escaped my sights, I discounted the ugly plant!  I expected it would be too bitter and pithy to eat, but it wasn't (see below).   One of my FFA $1 mystery tomatoes is a nice large red one.    Ready to enjoy, a warm tomato and a cooled cucumber! The Herb Garden is happy, but even herbs need some water on hot days.  The little flo...

 I had a birthday last week, and all my presents were pre-owned, either thrifted or from eBay, which often doesn't offer the bargains you'll find thrifting, but still secondhand. You may remember this from a post on my lost blog.  One of my sons bought this for me in July from Goodwill.  It's matted and framed, I usually omit including those in post photos. Untitled rainy cityscape on newsprint by California artist Mary Pedri (1912-1908)  According to the label on the back of the frame it won an award at a festival in 1963. A friend gave me these early 1950s salt and pepper shakers.  They are Bonzo the Dog , a very popular cartoon character in the 1920s, one of the world's first cartoons, and inspiration for mass marketed merchandise.  His artist retired him in the 1930s, but had a second wave of popularity, especially in Japan, in the 1950s.  Without the Internet and image searches they would remain just strange little dogs!  I was surprised when...

The Goodwill Bins finally had glass (which isn't just glass, it's pottery, glass framed pictures, anything really that breaks)!  At 10¢ a pound it's one of my favorite things to rummage carefully through.  c1930s Chinese soapstone seal of the Buddhist goddess of compassion,  Guanyin . It has the seal on the bottom.    Two 1970s hand-painted Italian Bassano Ceramiche ABC molds. Molds, but designed to hang on a wall. I thought there might have been a missing middle sized one (these are 5" and 3.5"), but it turns out two are a set.  I wouldn't mind finding more, this pattern (or similar, as they are hand-painted, no two will be the same pattern) also comes in green and blue.  Two adorable gnomes that can spend some time in the garden.  Sure, they are originally just Dollar Tree gnomes, but they're cute, and all the glass I bought that day came to much less than one new gnome.   I'm glad the glass is back.  At a yard sale I got the...

 It's National Thrift Shop Day!   You just know I'll be celebrating!  Of course I tend to celebrate thrift shopping every day. My local Goodwill stores are giving double the loyalty points today, plus I'll get extra loyalty points for my birthday.  That means a trip to the Goodwill Bins is in order later.   One of my favorite things to find in thrift stores is artwork.  You may be surprised just how much nice stuff is out there for a few dollars.  These are a few pieces that stand out to me.  All shown unframed. Oldest  Black Chat, hand-colored lithograph, 1884 75¢ St. Vincent de Paul  The Bookworm,  color plate No. 410, c 1850 (created the same year as the original painting by Carl Spitzweg )  Goodwill $6.11 in frame  The Chelsea Pensione r, hand-colored copper-plate engraving, c1826  St. Vincent de Paul $4.50 An Opossum of Van Diemen's Land ( Tasmanian Opossum), copperplate engraving, 1785 From the Frenc...

  Sunday Stamps is brought to us by the letter  C. C oimbra University  on what I think is a particularly pretty stamp. Portugal 1972 C amp Fire Girls 50th Anniversary USA 1960 The celebratory 50th anniversary program was " She Cares... Do You ?"  I was a C amp Fire Girl, started as a Blue Bird, went to a C amp Fire summer camp (not the one for my city area, I went to one that had horses, Camp Augusta ), and continued through 7th grade.  C hristmas C arriage USA 1970 C redit Union USA 1984 Another 50th anniversary stamp, it celebrates the signing of the Federal Credit Union Act by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We've had A , B , and C .  Next week continues the pattern with D.

 

Skywatch Friday  A few years ago I went to Salem, OR to accompany someone taking a professional state license exam (Salem being the state capital).  While there we visited the OHS Museum of Mental Health.  Opened first as an "asylum" in 1883, it was still a hospital when used as a filming location for  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  It certainly seems highly inappropriate now that employees, including the superintendent, were cast in the film, and even more so that patients were involved, behind the scenes, as well as on-screen.  There is no public record of their consent, if they were even able to give it.  Of course, there is a new hospital now, on the same grounds.   While it's not a happy place to visit, I do recommend it if you are ever in Salem.  It was eye-opening to see exhibits and read about the patients and "treatments."  So many women were keep against their wills due to their husbands claiming they were acting "crazy...