And the rains came

Last night, leaving work, the temperature had turned deliciously cool. Like 20 degrees cooler than at lunch. It was so delightful that Ms. Packratty rushed home, walked Charlie and then turned her attentions to the laundry room, where she successfully got the easy 50% of the painting job done.

This lovely luminous blue in a semigloss was a Packratty find at the infamous Home Depot OOPS shelves in the paint department. $1 quarts and $5 gallons when you can find someone else's mistake that is your perfect (or reasonable facsimile thereof) color ... and for $5 a gallon, Ms. Packratty finds she can be VERY reasonable.
Of course, tonight the taping and cutting in and the second coat on the areas that weren't ready for a second coat last night will happen and then the painting the walls that will be remaining white begins. That will be considerably less speedy and nowhere near as dramatic. However, the contrast tells Ms. Packratty that the white appliances against the blue wall with white shelving will be dramatic and very clean looking.


Then better things happened. The new washer required only a minor adjustment and when the repairman was leaving, Ms. Packratty noticed with delight that the first rain in weeks was starting. By the time she departed for work, the rain had been gently falling for at least an hour and the immense amounts of pollen were starting to wash away.






And, just because they were so tiny and beautiful, as if Faberge had made a beautiful enamelled pear:

Yellow season

Just as New England has a peculiar season known as Mud Season, Atlanta and much of the Southeast has it's own vile precursor to full Spring — Yellow Season.

This is when the billions of pine trees (and oaks and hickories and dogwoods and Bradford pears and so forth) burst into bloom and coat everything with a fuzzy layer of the reproductive cells of plants. All takes on a yellow hue. Normally, this season falls during the spring rainy season, so that the coating of yellow is washed off or diluted every day or two, sending swirls of yellow through the gutters in scummy little cakes. This year, we've barely been able to summon up a heavy dew and the yellowness is getting intense. In the mornings, the first car or two through the parking lot leaves visible tracks through the yellow, just as if it was a light coating of snow.

Besides coating windshields, Yellow Season has other perils. During the morning commute, one occasionally sees cars swerve out of control, or speed up suddenly. It is Ms. Packratty's firm belief that these actions are not related to cell phones, coffee drinking ot makeup application by commuters, but are instead caused by fits of uncontrollable and profound sneezing.

She has also considered taping off a square yard of a neighbor's car roof (a car that has not been moved in a week and so it's coating is undisturbed) and carefully scraping off the pollen load and weighing it. If one knew the weight if the pollen coating one square foot, the pollen load per square mile could be calculated. And from thence, the pollen load for the square mileage of the greater metro area could be extrapolated. Ms. Packratty suspects the gross weight of the tree gonads coating everything would indeed be ... gross.

For those who might think this exaggeration:



This is the roof and back window of Charlie's Chariot, which was washed on Sunday. Picture taken mid-morning Thursday. The streaks were caused by excess fluid from window spritzing.


Now excuse me . . . aaaaitttchhhhooooooo!

Here is the queen herself, looking sulky.

What? No, you don't need to pick up these papers or CDs.

And here she is, marching down the bed, the instant she realized that Ms. Packratty was sorting out the desktop.

"Mine. It's ALL Mine."

Too Long Silent

OK, it's been a while.

Life has been more than a little insane - ranging from the death of the washing machine and a scramble to find cash to pay for a replacement, to a reprise of last summer's back problems, to an endless slog of too much craziness at work.

The span of silence also encompassed the visit of my dear friend from Colorado who came through to see her first grandchild and roosted with me for about 18 hours between her arrival at the airport and being taken up to Lake Lanier where her son and daughter-in-law and the baby are living. It's always wonderful to see Tobye and I was able to give her the book and the skein of alpaca silk lace weight that I'd been unable to resist buying for her.

I am still knitting on the chocolate brown afghan and I am within about 1 1/2 skeins of being completed, thankfully.

There has been some chiding for my failure to post pictures of Delilah Fuzzybutt, the real owner of Chez Packrat - Ms. Packratty being permitted to live here with Charlie only because she requires certain attentions, such as a steady supply of high priced kibble and a clean sandbox ...

Therefore, here we have Ms. Delilah as she makes sure Ms. Packratty's efforts to tidy her desk and sort things went to naught. OK, Blogger doesn't seem to want to accept pictures. We'll try again later.