Plants and Prokofiev

[star_swan]

I mentioned somewhere that I would put up photos of my container garden so here it is with other random things, cut so that you can choose to look at it.



This is what it looks like as you walk out the sliding door:



Trees above that scene, looking out:



Cat interlude; Sir William :P



Crappy selfie:



More patio:



My favorite tree!



Hummingbird!





This is the best that my garden has ever looked! I am really hitting my stride this year.

So I live in an apartment complex that has had a barely functioning laundry. Each week a new sticky note would appear on one of the washers or dryers. It was like a bad joke. This has been dragging on for months. Finally yesterday I was beginning to wonder if I would need to go to this place in town, Laundry Lounge, as we were down to four washers and five dryers for the entire place, when a man materialized and fixed all of them in under an hour!

This made my week. I have never been so excited to do laundry.

Also, it is Sergei Prokofiev's birthday!! (Well, they changed from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar so...it is mostly his birthday.)

I am listening to all of his piano sonatas. I am on No. 8 of 9. :O
For anyone interested, I will stick links below to various recordings!

I really like his 5th Sonata . Here is Gergiev conducting his Fifth Symphony with a toothpick because he is a little cray cray. He is brilliant though. The second movement of this one sounds mechanistic. I love it!

And here is one of my favorites: Sarcasms! It's solo piano stuff where he has a bit of fun, a little too much fun? I just love that he wrote something "sarcastic".

Finally (cause I would be on here all day), I really like Tales of An Old Grandmother. The first piece is so wistful. It makes me think of the fading light on tall buildings. I want to play this one!!

More "what I've been up to" stuff on a separate post though it isn't drastically exciting. Mainly practice, work, errands, procrastination, mad plans, and tv shows. :)

Random question of the day: do you all drink tea and if so, what kind(s) of tea do you like? I really like Earl Grey and Russian Caravan. And how do you take your tea? I am a little tea mad.

Comments

[oraien]

Tea tea tea- I am a tea drinking fiend.

Mostly it's just straight black, hot or iced based on the weather, bit sweet with a lemon wedge and I like it super strong.

But I also love mint tea in general and Tazo's Wild Sweet Orange too. Earl Grey is good but sometimes it strikes me as tasting like lemon pinesol and that is.... not good :P I like it with coconut milk though!

Sir William is adorable and I also like the watercolor (I think) squares behind him!

[star_swan]

Hooray for STRONG tea! :D
I got this stuff once that was quite scary: Builder's Tea. Supposedly strong enough for British construction workers. You could steep it for 30 seconds and have trouble seeing the bottom of the cup. Even so, after awhile, I was steeping it for three minutes. Still tasted great. It had such an earthy robust taste that was great with a little milk.
My dad and his family are British so I've been putting milk in my tea forever. Not all teas though.

Early Grey is something that a few companies get just right and others terribly, terribly wrong! I like Twinings loose leaf EG in the tin and this Peerless stuff I can get in bulk. There is some fancy dancy Earl Grey in bulk that is like a zillion dollars a pound also. It looks less fine and more twiggy.
Ooh. I should try it with coconut milk. I have used milk milk. Tea is pretty much the only time I even drink milk. Dairy does not always agree.

He's a trickster! He is very sweet though. He is SUPER chatty, like the chattiest cat I have ever lived with. He makes these vocalizations at times that sound almost like Chewbacca.

It's acryllic but it looks like watercolor under that light. I took a class awhile back and we made a guide for mixing colors. The paints along the top row are standard hues out of the tube, the first column on the left is those hues mixed with white, and all of the other rows in the middle are the various hues mixed with one another. Mixing paints is an art in itself! It is seriously tricky trying to make colors that you see around you that match. Do you paint? :D

Ugh. I have to get up early tomorrow to drive somebody to a retreat.

[oraien]

Ooh tea story you just reminded me of!

I used to work as a security guard for a construction site and in the early mornings I would bring my massive gas station travel mug full of random breakfast tea with me and one morning this older construction worker stopped by my station to talk before work started (we were there around 5:30 every morning and didn't leave till after 6PM, so you know, long days and dark-

And when he found out I drank tea and liked it STRONG, he brought me whole packages of Bewley's tea that was all he'd drink because it's what he got at home in IRELAND (no idea what he was doing in backwater West Virginia doing construction work but no big deal) and it was AMAZING on cold early mornings and strong enough to pretty much stand the spoon up on end in the cup XD

And I STILL would throw the teabags in and leave them all day with a bit of heavy cream!

I don't drink anything with milk milk since our household went vegan last year, but between cashew mylk and almond mylk and COCONUT MILK, we're pretty set on the milk substitutes that are not soy milk!

Your sir sounds like my sir~ I'll have to post some pictures of him. He's a flamepoint siamese and SUPER TALKATIVE Talker Mc-Talkson, for serious. He's my baby too, so he's spoiled rotten XD

Oh, acrylics! It does not look like acrylics at all under that light but that's so neat anyhow! I could say that I paint, and if you take that to mean that I own paintbrushes, Liquitex acrylics and all that jazz and am too intimidated to do anything with them, you'd be spot on XD

I am not really an "artist" but more a "wannabe".

[star_swan]

I looked that stuff up. Ooh! It's got a pretty castle on the tin. :D Bonus.
They have Breakfast, Afternoon, and Dublin Morning, oh my.

We've been getting this stuff around the corner, Typhoo. It's not as robust but it's pretty good. Still. I can't resist the allure of a new, delicious looking tea!

I love coconut milk, but I never did really get a taste for almond milk. Trader Joe's organic soy in the refrigerated section is tasty. Like it's the tastiest soy I have ever had.

Percy, Bill's brother who passed away, he was a flame point! Their mother was a flame point. I figure that is why Bill is so chatty. Percy wasn't as much. Like he was chattier than average, though he had this sweet lilting voice that would turn throaty when he was upset. I look forward to pictures!! He growled at intruders, Percy.

I think you can be an artist if you want to be. Heck, so many people call themselves artists. I used to think I wasn't worthy and then there is the euphemism "creative type". :)

[oraien]

I've had typhoo as well and really quite enjoy it, not quite as strong as the other though :D yay for tea and pretty tins, it's a really good coffee alternative. When I drank milk, I used to just mix a bit of heavy cream in. No need for sugar or anything else when I did that XD

I love coconut milk, and almond is really thin in comparison to cashew milk, which I also love. Never had TJ's soy though, actually- I will have to try it next time I am around the city!

It's funny that Bill's brother was a flame-point because 3 of Yoshi's siblings were all orange tabbys! I think Yoshi would just run and hide from intruders, but Kirby would probably puff up like an angry dandelion and try to scratch their eyes out, so there's at least some balance in it.

I am an eclectic "creative type". I mostly write but sometimes doodle, sometime photograph, sometimes sculpt, maybe dabble in paint a little but I'm not effortlessly talented or even really practiced-a-long-time talented. I just sort of dabble :)

[star_swan]

but Kirby would probably puff up like an angry dandelion

this is one of the best cat descriptions I have ever read!
I have pics around here somewhere of Percy. He liked to steal dirty dish towels and run off with them and the vet said that Siamese really like wool. Wish I could have know that before he chewed through some sweaters. :S
I remember passing the litter box, and smelling damp wool and saying to him. "Did you digest and get rid of my sweater?!I could have continued to wear that!"

He ate holes in parts of it. Weirdly, the wool was curled at those spots. I know that we have sugar breaking enzymes in our mouths...what the hell do cats have??

Dabbling is nice though. :)
It's difficult to find time for more sometimes.

[oraien]

Lava. Cats have lava and sandstorms in their mouths, I'm sure of it. *sagenod*

You'd have to meet Kirby to understand why I describe him that way XD He has no guard hairs like some cats do and his fur is UTTERLY soft and plush, much like a bunny or almost like a chinchilla? And when he gets worked up he PUFFS and gets twice his normal size and does, for all the world, really look like an angry dandelion!

Thankfully, we have no wool in our house, but I'm not sure Yoshi would eat it even so. He's a.... sensitive soul? You don't even have to yell at him to startle him and make him run out of the room, which I find funny and worrisome in turns because no one's ever actually hurt him or anything, he just really does not like being 'yelled' at?

I have exactly NO time for anything but sleep and work these days with the barn and my desk job x_X Sometimes I wonder what I've gotten myself into and then I'll be looking at Bridge and realize OH YES, THIS.

[star_swan]

I had to look up what "guard hairs" were. XD It sounded familiar. Percy, who passed away like almost exactly a year ago had a lot of those. He had this coarse upper layer. Bill is really soft as well. He rarely puffs up. His tail will get fat on rare occasions. Mostly he acts aloof like nothing frightens him. Or else he dives under the downstairs sofa.
Yesterday, he emerged and ran across my legs. Owch. I slathered it in aloe vera and it is mostly healed. :S

Our cats are like that! I wonder if they were abused. but we got them when they were three months old.

You MUST post cats pics. :P

[oraien]

I really do need to do an updated "here are the babies" post- since now we have a bunch of scalie things too XD

Yoshi never really puffs up much but sometimes he will look sort of "bigger" somehow. But the cat weighs almost 20 pounds so I really can't tell most of the time XD

Kirby's been sleeping on my pillow again since I've changed my barn schedule. He really hates it when I'm away from home and the husbeast is there alone. Even though he's PJ's cat, he loves me best XD

[star_swan]

He sounds so adorable!
Yeah, Bill is like my daemon (from His Dark Materials). He follows me everywhere. Literally. He will go off on his own but generally if I get up to leave a room, he wanders after me.

Yoshi is BIG. He's a siamese so some of that must be muscle. Good gods! :D

I look forward to future kitty pic spams! XD

[oraien]

I promise one of these days I will have enough time and energy to make a post and get pictures of our menagerie up! We've got SO MANY THINGS now, plus I really want to put up some pics of Bridge soon.

Yoshi is giant and if he is partially muscle he doesn't want us to know it. He'd rather be a limp noodle because he gets more belly rubs that way XD

[star_swan]

My other cat who passed, Percy, loved belly rubs! And tale pulls, oddly. If you try to get to Bill's belly, he bites. Unless you soften him up first. Lying in the sun makes him fairly amenable to belly rubs and extended periods of affection.

Me too! I need to make a cat pic post, a life about town post, a book gush. I uploaded pics to my photo album but I have been so scattered/busy lately.

I will look forward to your kitty and assorted animal photos whenever they arrive. :)

[vintagewitch]

I love tea! I pretty much only take my tea plain, with no add-ins. I also really don't like iced tea, so I'll drink hot tea in the middle of summer.

My favorite black is definitely Earl Grey or a good Assam (but I'm allergic to cinnamon, so sometimes tea is hard.) As for herbal, I love Tazo's Wild Sweet Orange (which doesn't have aforementioned Evil Spice).

I feel like mostly I've been drinking medicinal teas lately. I should fix that, because tea is lovely.

[star_swan]

Me too! I have never been able to quite understand iced tea. Once, I was at an Indian restaurant in town and it was 90 degrees out and we were sitting on the patio and I asked for hot tea. The guy who ran the place was so ecstatic that I ordered it hot (we were on the same wavelength obviously) that he brought me an entire pot. Every time I went after, he would come to the table with a pot and say, "You don't pay for tea." :)
It feels good to drink it hot on a hot day! I was born someplace super humid so I sort of miss sweating.

Oh wow! I live for cinnamon. :) I put it on coffee, on rice. I am weird like that.

I have smelled that Wild Sweet Orange! I should try it sometime.

Tea IS lovely. I do drink chamomile sometimes in the evening in order to calm down before bedtime. I suppose that it is a medicinal use.