Pleasantries of the Day

 I did my grocery pick up this afternoon because rain was forecast for this morning. We got a few drops on the windshield, but the pavement didn't even look wet. We could really use rain. Our grass has turned brown. The sprinkler system was never repaired/replaced all summer. 

The condo that burned in February is being worked on some. The predicted date of completion keeps being moved out. Now it is end of November or mid-December. Apparently, no effort was made to fix the irrigation system controls that were burned though we were told they would fix it. 

My neighbor across the street is a Master Gardener, i.e., he has taken the courses/training to earn that title. He is now being employed on a contractor basis at Grace Village. He stopped by this afternoon to ask if he could remove my rose bush and plant a fall mum in its place. He will also plant some bulbs for spring (tulips, maybe hyacinths). Then he will plant something with color for summer. I told him I don't know anything about caring for a mum in the ground. (I always bought one in a pot and discarded at the end of fall). He said he would take care of it. He is going to do similar planting at the unit at the other end of my 4-unit condo building. He wants to keep an eye on how these plants do to inform him if doing something like this at other condos is feasible. That was a pleasant surprise. As I have said before, I do not have a green thumb. 

This afternoon before heading to pick up my groceries, I stopped at the lobby of the Grace Village independent living building. Winona IT, the company that is currently managing the IT at Grace Village, wanted to treat the apartment and condo residents to ice cream. There was a little freezer chest with Igloo ice cream. The Igloo is an ice cream fast food shop in Silver Lake that I have mentioned in a previous post. I chose a cup of Brownie Cascade, chocolate ice cream with bits of brownie. Yum.

My husband is having a medical procedure tomorrow morning that will require me to accompany him. I have loaded a series of books by Nancy Mehl to read on my Galaxy tablet. I started reading number 1 on Monday and because it is a suspenseful book, I kept reading. Now I started on number 2 of the series last night. I think I will download on Hoopla number 3 in case I finish number 2 before he is ready to come home. Mrs. Mehl is a Christian writer. 

I love autumn and am looking forward to my new mum. I may still buy 1-2 small mums in pots to replace my potted geraniums on the front porch.

Mums

Yesterday I bought some mums for my front porch. I was intrigued by the celosia (a "wheat" variety) so bought it, too. There was no care tag. When I got home, I looked up Celosia on the internet. It needs lots of light; the front porch is not going to give it what it needs. I bought a plastic pot and put the plant in my sunroom. The internet said it could be grown inside. Since I have never grown celosia I don't know how long it will bloom. For now, it is pretty in the house.

This afternoon I brought the celosia inside so just the mums are left on the porch. I expect the mums to last until the end of September.

Maybe I should take the celosia out of its original pot and replant into the textured container. I think I am going to just leave it as is; I feel lazy.

We have days in the 80's but by the end of next week we will be in the high 60's. Then I will put out some autumn decorations, including a green tablecloth with a runner of autumn leaves in the sun room. I bought some sweet corn from the produce stand this morning. They seemed to have plenty; lots of people buying big quantities for their families and Labor Day parties I suppose. These may be the last ears we eat.

There were at least a dozen people without masks in the grocery store today. They made no effort to distance either. Next week I am going to order online for car pickup. One of the county high schools switched to virtual learning for 2 weeks as they have 100 students with COVID (symptomatic), and because the staff have to isolate for 2 weeks, not enough manpower to keep the school running efficiently. We will see what they and the rest of the communities look like after Labor Day get-togethers. Lots of people are pretty cavalier about the pandemic. 

Found out it was 100 people isolating; only 5 students tested positive and had symptoms. By closing the high school, they were able to transfer janitors, cafeteria workers to the elementary schools where they were short of staff because there too people had been exposed outside of school and needed to be tested and get results.

Roller Coaster

I took the thermal blanket off of my bed this morning. Too warm now that we have days in the 80's. I had it folded to the side the last several nights anyway. I put on a flannel sheet that serves as a light blanket if I need more than my regular sheet. We were in the low 60's several days, now a run of 80's until Thursday when we will be 30 degrees cooler. Then it will be time for the electric blanket at last. Maybe bake some zucchini bread, too. The ups and downs should be about over.

My colossal Costco mum is in full bloom now. 

With the cooler weather this weekend, it will be time to plant my winter aconite bulbs/corms. They look like large dried-up chocolate chips. I had to order these on the internet. They are the little yellow flowers I saw last March under an apartment window. I have given up on crocus.

This week is swap shop at Grace Village. I saw a purse, a necklace, and a shirt last Friday when I brought my contributions in, but they were all gone by 9:30 a.m. when I arrived this morning for the taking part.
I did take a couple of tops that aren't perfect fits, but they will serve my purpose of garden/house work. 

Almost every time I put my weekly pill minder in my purse when we eat out at restaurants, the lid has come open and I have to dig around in the bottom of my purse to find the pills. No more. I have a new pill minder with tight lids from swap shop. Easy to see color, too.

The other item I took to play around with is a container of curlers. I have been toying with the idea of curling my hair occasionally, especially as it grows out mid-way thru my haircut cycle.

These look unused and come in several sizes. I still have some ratty old ones from decades ago; these will replace them and be better.

Crisp and Colorful

It's about 50 degrees and sunny now at 9:30 a.m. I had to put a blanket over my flannel sheet early this morning, but I am not ready to put the electric blanket on. Maybe in another week.

I did buy a mum for the front porch. My husband asked for yellow.

Wednesday while the floor installers were here, I kept out of the way and busied myself by taking the metal wreath I bought at Goodwill store and adding some wired ribbon to fill in the gap where apparently a leaf had fallen off. I've never had an autumn hanging on my door and this was a cheap way to do so.

I really like the ribbon with gilded pumpkins that I bought at Joann's. Not sure how it will hold up on the outside door; I will take the wreath down in about 8 weeks.

I don't often buy novels at the library book sales nor the discount section of Half Price Books unless I have heard of the author. I took a chance on Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I thought it was pretty good for a first novel. However, when I looked at the reviews, it was panned for lack of character development and being overly sentimental. I would agree that the characters other than Henry and Keiko were flat, but I did care enough about the two leading characters to keep reading. Their thoughts and actions were not age-appropriate at times however for 12 and 13 year-olds, too mature.

This is not the first novel I have read that includes the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, though it played a major part of the storyline in this book. 

Henry Lee, a recently widowed Chinese American, reads about the reopening of the Panama Hotel in Seattle and a surprise in the basement. The building has been boarded up and vacant for over 40 years, but now in 1986 it is being refurbished. He joins the crowd to see the items that have sat undisturbed for decades after being stored by relocated Japanese families. As a parasol twirls, Henry thinks of his childhood friend Keiko. He gets permission to rummage in the filled basement and hopes to find a treasured item he and Keiko both loved.

The writing shifts back and forth mostly from 1986 to 1942. The themes include father-son relationships, parental expectations of Asian immigrants for their American-born children, cultural differences and animosities, and the injustice of rounding up Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans and their children with short notice to take them to internment camps in the interior United States. I did not know that Seattle in the 1940's had a thriving jazz community; Henry's older black friend Sheldon introduces Henry to the music.

 

Henry's father closely follows the Japanese invasion and battles in China and works at raising money for the people of China to resist the Japanese. He hates the Japanese. He insists Henry speak only English at home even though he has a poor grasp of the language himself and Henry's mother knows only a few words; yet he wants Henry to finish his schooling in China once it is safe. Contradictory desires which put Henry in a hard place and impairs communicating his pre-teen difficulties with his parents.

Henry works in the school kitchen/cafeteria at an exclusive prep school in order to attend. He is the only non-white student until Keiko joins him under the same arrangement. Keiko who was born in Seattle to American-born parents and only knows a few phrases of Japanese from her grandfather becomes Henry's best friend. This is a friendship that he must keep from his father who insists that Henry restricts himself to Anglo and Chinese Seattle and does not go to the Japanese district. Henry is torn between his Chinese duty of filial obedience and the blossoming relationship with Keiko.

When Keiko's family is taken to an internment camp, the two young people realize they are in love and promise to keep in touch and "wait for each other". As the war drags on for 3 years, their letters grow fewer and though Henry at the end of the war makes an attempt to meet Keiko in Seattle, he loses track of her.

It is Henry's son Marty who plays a role in finding the treasure in the hotel basement and learns of his father's past, forging a bond that had been strained by Marty's departure from the old Chinese traditions and by the death of his mother. 

The ending is fairly implausible but leaves room for speculating a happy outcome.