In which we will be back up and running shortly!

We've been mostly offline the last few days - the hard drive abruptly died on Maddy's computer. (RIP HP Pavilion, 2010-2014....)

That was the bad news.

The good news is - she had backups. Plus with all the photos uploaded to FB and to - well, here - and Ipernity, she has most of the photos that may or may not have been backed up. Plus, she tried Chrome a few months ago but did't keep it as her default. Well, Chrome was kind enough to take all her settings and bookmarks and save them on her Google account - so one download of Chrome later and she has almost everything back the way it was. And what's not back can be recreated or found again. So the moral of the story is - backups! And download Chrome even if it's just to save your online settings. It was really awesome that one download and a quick install later, everything was back to normal - well, as normal as normal gets around here, anyway.

Pics to come - we also drove down to Cold Spring today and got some awesome fall-type pics.

In which we're keeping an eye to the sky because it looks better than the ground....

Someone (I assume it was my "Woodstock fella," John Ashton) posted a charmingly cryptic post on the Satellite Paradiso FB page: "Keep an eye to the sky."

 Sounds like a plan to me......

Because it's better than looking at the yard right now

What started out as a simple "fix the leak that soaked the drywall downstairs" culminated in most of the side and back yard being torn up to fix the curtain drain last week and early this week.

Maddy *thinks* her poppies were spared - she told them to keep the backhoe well away from that flowerbed and they did - mostly - but there's not a heck of a lot else left. The worst part is that we don't even know for sure if all this really did anything or not. The back and side yard don't seem quite as squishy - the ground's usually kind of wet, but it seems drier. But then again, we're nine inches short on rain right now and it's been dry for almost two weeks.

And where it wasn't dug up, there are tire tracks. Everywhere.

Where's a deva to even start?

"If we find out they didn't have to do this...."

"Smackdown time?" I think Scaramouche was going to say something else, but decided to keep it G-rated.

"You better believe it."

Aura thinks the poppies are fine, though. They're normally dormant by this time of year, anyway.

"You're going to need to seed it with winter grass and cover it with straw," she said of the rest of this mini-disaster. "If you don't, the spring melt's going to just wash it all away. Maybe you can ask the fella who does your leaves for you if he can do it."

"Or maybe you come with me to Lowe's and help me pick out grass seed," Maddy said.

"We can try. Get some bulbs while you're at it and I'll help you put hyacinths in," Aura suggested. "Hyacinths and hellbores. You need some early spring color around here that isn't daffodils. and see if you can order more of those poppies, maybe."


Leave it to a deva to see an opportunity when most people just see a ginormous mess. But I think this is going to take more than a couple of bags off grass seed and some bulbs......

In which we interrupt this blog for a PSA : Have you seen this Hitty?

Janet Cordell's Hitty, Sequoia, is still missing. She vanished from a woodworking show in Ohio last November.

More info can be found on Janet's website (Link Here.)

With the holidays coming up, there's still a chance she might turn up on eBay or Etsy.

You never know.

Keep an eye out. It may not be too late to bring Sequoia home!

In which - introductions and random pictures....

I think I'd like autumn better if it went right back into spring, but it is a pretty season.....

Leaves won't be changing for another few weeks, but we have some color.

Although Maddy insists that green is a color, too.....

Aura said it was good fishing weather. If - no, let's say when - I'm ever lucky enough to meet John Ashton, I'll have to ask him about that. If he and Aura don't end up talking hooks and lines, the whole time, that is.

Someone, however, forgot to tell the fish - or maybe warned them, I'm not sure....

"Aw, come on, fishies, Why don't you want to eat this nice, fat, juicy worm?"

Besides the obvious, she means? And you really have to hear that last line with Aura's Scottish accent.

The sisters....

Even storm devas like to just watch the clouds go by sometimes.

 And now some introductions....

Meet Kira. She's the sea star (aka starfish) deva who Scaramouche met down in Australia when she was trying to help find that missing Malaysian plane. Kira's hoping to learn how to communicate with - well, just about everyone and everything, the way Scaramouche does.

Kira's very outgoing, outdoorsy and down to earth, as they say. I think winters here might be a bit of a surprise, but I think she'll be able to handle it just fine. And I just love the color of her eyes.

And this is Tempest's friend Zephyr - yup, like the fish :). Zephyr is, appropriately enough, a wind deva. She's very, very shy and hasn't told us much about herself. I think John-John, our intrepid stylist, may be planning his first devic makeover on her. His first words to me were "The poor dear is so cute, but her hair just isn't doing anything for her face!" Don't get him wrong - he's not being nasty. Anything but.

"The only really ugly people - or dolls - I've ever met were ugly because of their personalities, not their appearance," he told me once. "I have, however, met a lot of people - and dolls, for that matter - who have no idea how beautiful they really are. Sometimes you don't even really need to change anything about them. You just have to make them see themselves the way they really are."

And people actually wonder what Shel sees in him.....

In which second opinions are a very good thing - mostly........

"So this is what they wrote up?" Fawn said.

"Apparently," I said. "They were trying to pressure Maddy into leaving her keys and taking a rental car. They kept saying it wasn't safe to drive. I think she finally convinced them that she had to go talk to the bank about getting the money for the work. With parts, labor and tax, it would have probably been over two thousand dollars."

"And may I add that she totally did NOT state any of this - stuff. She didn't mention anything other than it needing the oil change the appointment was for."

Maddy had a pretty ugly little thing happen at the dealership when she took the Rogue for an oil change. (I need to add that this isn't a Nissan dealership - it's a Jeep/Dodge/Kia/Hyundai place.) The mechanics sent the poor girl at the counter to tell her that they had done a 100-something-point inspection and found all this stuff wrong with the Rogue and she needed to leave it and make arrangements for a rental because it "just isn't safe to drive." Maddy, however, kept politely saying she'd need to go to her bank and speak with them about getting the money BEFORE she agreed to anything and (finally) got the keys back and got out of there. Before we'd gotten a mile, the "check engine" light was on. So Maddy pulled into the Walgreens lot and - hello, loose gas cap. (It wasn't loose before they started messing with her car. Just sayin'.) A few clicks and - no more light.

"It was making a funny little whirring noise every now and then. Like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle. Except I hadn't mentioned it or asked them to check it," Maddy said, coming in.

"Is that why you took it to Hyatt's?" Fawn said.

Maddy nodded. "Guess what it was."

"A baseball card?"

"Nope. Mud flap. It had gotten bent and was hitting the wheel. Problem was, it wasn't where I could see it without crawling under the car. They just bent it back into place. And the vibration when I hit the brakes really hard - which I also had NOT mentioned - that they claimed was the "worn bushings" or whatever - that was because the brake rotors hadn't been replaced when I had the brakes done and they were in really bad shape. The pads had worn down just enough for it to be noticeable."

"Didn't the dealer do the brakes?" I seem to remember going with her for that early in my blogging career.

She nodded. "So Hyatts redid the brakes and did the inspection. I actually had been expecting them to tell me that something really horrible and expensive was wrong with the Rogue, but it wasn't. Not that brakes are cheap, but it was a lot less than the two thousand the dealer was trying to charge me. So no more dealer. It's Hyatt's from now on."

"Did you tell them what the dealer said?" Fawn asked.

"No. I didn't want to come off like I was trying to play them off of anyone else. If something was wrong, they'd find it. But you know, when things started going really wrong with my little black Saturn, it wasn't like someone coming out and telling me "oh, by the way, your transmission's shot." I knew something was weird before that. Every time something's gone wrong with one of my cars, there were symptoms. And the symptoms the Rouge had just didn't match what they were telling me."

"Like how?"

"Well, they were saying the torn boot was on the passenger side, but the noise supposedly coming from it was coming from the driver's side. Kind of a clue that something wasn't right...."

"So what are you going to do?" I said. "You should tell someone. Report them. Dutchess Cars, I mean."

"To who?" Maddy looked at the writeup. "And I don't think I have a case with the way they phrased it. I think the best I can do is warn everyone to get a second opinion if something like that happens to them."

"Something like what?" Hawthorne said, coming over to look. "The heck?"

"The dealership's explanation for a bent mudflap." Maddy explained.

"Losers. They saw a female walk in and their eyes lit up with dollar signs - ka-ching! - like in an old cartoon or something." Hawthorne looked disgusted.

"And oddly enough, the Rouge was just out of warranty by about fifty miles," I added.

"Hmmmm..." Hawthorne looked thoughtful. "I'd say it's time we opened up a nice big can of whoop--"











"Hawthorne, stop. Every time you take matters into your own hands that way, something bad happens."

"Yeah, to the idiots who deserve it. Tempest, these morons can't go around thinking that just because a customer is a woman, they can rip her off. It's not right!"

"You also don't know that was what happened. Maybe they just made a mistake."

"That's a pretty big mistake for someone who's supposed to know what they're doing." Hawthorne retorted.

(For the record, I'm with Hawthorne on this, although I don't think I'd trust her taking matters into her own hands either....)

"I say we go all gladiator on them. Fa-tang! Fa-Tang! I tell you, I would make an awesome gladiator, wouldn't I?"

"Nefoedd helpu ni..." I'm not sure what Tempest said, but I think it's Welsh for "Oh crap..."











Maddy's note: It's "Heaven help us," according to Google Translator. I think the devic facepalm says it all, though....

In which - watch out, sweet thing, a change in the weather is all that you bring.....

"At which point this bloke, who fancied himself to be quite the "new frontiersman," as he put it, tells me that he doesn't need to know more about plants than he already does..." Not everyone is as receptive to devic wisdom as the Findhorn folks. "I decided against telling him he was standing in the middle of a lot of poison ivy. I supposed he was going to figure that one out himself before too long,"

Yeah, giving a deva a hard time isn't any more advisable than giving Mother Nature one.

No such problems here today. Aura talked to Azalea a couple of days ago and it looks like Tori is going to be out of our hair for awhile. We hope, anyway. Scaramouche is expecting a protege - according to her, the word is NOT "mentee" - a young tidepool deva (according to her) who she met while she was down trying to help find that plane that vanished in March....

 "This is the lion's den/I hope you knew that before you came in/this is where the angels and the devils fight/and they're choosing up sides tonight!"

(You have to imagine Hawthorne trying to sing that when she can't carry a tune in a bag....)

She sometimes hangs out with this band from her hometown of Kansas City called the Rainmakers. (Maddy was pleasantly surprised to find out they were still together. Another band she liked back in college that's still around.) Judging from some of the old magazines Maddy dug out to show me, Hawthorne adopted the stovepipe hat from their lead singer  who did NOT accessorize his with a pink bunny dress.

"Hawthorne, what are you doing?" I said. "And who's that?"

"Hey guys, this is Tempest. She's a storm deva. I met her back in Missouri a few years ago when we were stopping a tornado."

"Trying to. We didn't really." Tempest had an accent that Aura told me later was Welsh. "We ended up having to send it into a bunch of unoccupied buildings because we couldn't steer it far enough around the town."

"Oh yeah, right. We kind of took out the church, didn't we?" Hawthorne looked sheepish.

"It destroyed several buildings," Tempest explained. "None of them had any living occupants. It was the best we could do with what little time we had to work with."

"You don't, like, drop tornadoes on purpose?" Not the best way to phrase it, I know, but you try asking that question.

"Oh no, never. I'm just one deva of many who bring rain and snow where it's needed. At least I try to. But I can't call up a cloud if there's not enough water vapor in the air to work with. And sometimes the rains I call up get out of control and the next thing I know, I'm trying to control what your human friends call a supercell thunderstorm."

"Sometimes those things take on a life of their own," Hawthorne added.

"They are alive, in their own way. Some of the most powerful storms are almost sentient," Tempest said quietly. "All devas work with powers we can direct, but not control."

One thing she hasn't worked with before is humans. Unlike the others, her work really doesn't lend itself to human collaboration. So this is a first time for her.....


















Note: Tempest is a Pukifee Dony who arrived about six weeks before I was expecting her. I'm not complaining, though.

Bonus shot - Tempest in action a couple of nights ago.

In which the tree comes down and Scaramouche needs to start telling me stuff....

Not the usual view from the window this morning....

Along with the dead tree, the other trees in the front yard needed some attention. Dead branches removed, a couple of limbs overhanging the house trimmed back, that sort of thing.

Not fun for a deva who works with plants to watch, though, even though it was all needed for the health of the trees.

"It's like watching surgery," Aura said. "But you can tell they're feeling better." She looked around. "I warned them what to expect, so it's not as bad. But still not pleasant."

Here's what it looks like without that tree. There's still a nasty tangle of brush to contend with - this looks like a wilderness, but it's actually where the hedge overgrew into the old lily garden.

"Aura, you're going to have to show me what to do with this. I don't want to just go in and start cutting stuff," Maddy said.

"Why is there so much barberry?" Aura said, looking around.

"It spreads. I think they've classified it as invasive."

"No, I mean, why so much barberry in the first place?" (For those not familiar with barberry, it's attractive, but it gets out of control. And it has thorns. Lots and lots of thorns....)

"My father planted it. Remember, ninety-nine percent of what grows in the yard was his doing. And he didn't always have good judgement in matters of the garden."

"It's a nice plant, but it doesn't really belong here. And it's not very welcoming with all the thorns."

"That was why he planted it. He used to say it was to keep people out. What people, I don't know."

~*~

Aura was happy to see the twin oaks doing well after their trimming.

"Solid and healthy," she said. "You don't usually see that in trees like these."

"Trees? So it is two?" Maddy said.

Aura nodded. "They're two separate trees that, instead of one choking out the other, grew together. If you really look closely at the base, you can see they have two separate trunks instead of a fork. An oak that forked this far down would never have survived."

This is the bottom of the trunk, by the way.

And this is looking up.

















~*~

These are more my style, for obvious reasons.

"If it weren't for al the noise from the trucks, you'd think this was Bearsville," Scaramouche said.

"You were up there?" I said.

"Yeah. I went up there with the New York Dolls when they recorded up there. First time I'd been out of the city. I can see why your guy fell so hard for it."

"My guy?"

"Yeah, John Ashton." She looked around. "I was hanging around there when they were recording Forever Now. They were so cute. I don't think any of them had ever been out of London for any length of time and here they were out in the country."

"You met them?" She really needs to, like TELL me stuff like this.

"Yeah. They're all really nice, although I don't think poor John realized he wasn't seeing me because he was drunk. He was kind of a mess in those days. Sweet, but kind of a mess. He got it together, though. They all did. I have to show you a picture one of their friends took of John and Charlotte, my salamander."

Okay, I need to get some stories out of this girl. Like, a lot of stories.....