I Think

I have been having a nice chat with msolga today. We mostly covered my writing and the several pen names I have. I miss her presence on this forum.

bumpers

This season I am fighting to tame my back yard. Yaupons are a bit of a problem, but the real culprits are poison ivy and thorny vines. A while back, I started digging the roots of the vines, in earnest. There are two kinds. One has a long root system that springs up new vines and the other has clumps of roots that resemble potatoes. I have these mostly out. In the winter, when the p. ivy was down, I started digging these up, one plant at a time. There were lots, in the cold weather, but when spring came, they popped out everywhere, all over the yard. Every day I have been going over the ground and digging. Some of them have roots quite a few yards long and some seem self contained. I have it all under control, this year. But what I wanted to write about is, I have learned how to beat poison ivy rashes. It is so simple, I don't know why I didn't hear of it sooner. My next door neighbor got shots for it last time. I am highly susceptible. Now, each time I start feeling a slight poison ivy itch, I wash all suspect areas with Dawn dish soap. After I have rinsed away the soap, I get a clean wet wash cloth and scrub all suspect areas. Without the rag and the scrubbing, it does not work. I change clothes if I think they have been affected and I don't let the clothes or wash cloth touch anything, except the bottom of the clothes washer. Since I learned this, I have not had a single outbreak.

Well, I guess I better get started on my income taxes. My name ain't GE, so I got to pay me some.

Taxes done.

My wife's niece did our taxes this year. As a retired Accountant, I've become lazy in my senior years.

Talk about lazy, I waited until just and hour before the fifteenth ended.

Hey, edgar. Taxes are due this year on April 18. You got them done early.

I sent mine in by mail, because, if I made a mistake on it, the one opening it will likely see it early on, since they see the actual W2 forms and such. Sent electronically, they take your word everything is accurate, until some neat guy looks it over more than a year later and tells you you have to pay back your refund, with interest.

Here ya go, ed - tested in Indochina by Ranch Hands:


Bretter Living Through Chemistry. This stuff could wipe out rubber plantations.

But, seriously, I am next door to the company that extracts my drinking water from the ground. I am very careful about what I put out there.

We had a storm with hail. After the hail, we were warned by phone that we should seek shelter from a possible tornado. I says to mrs edgarblythe, "Where in hell are you going to seek shelter, when you are in the middle of a mobile home neighborhood and the alert is for the next 15 minutes?" I says, "If we are gonna die, we are gonna die. Nothing to be done about it." But we did get dressed.

Our address is Tomball, but the other side of the main street has a Spring address. The picture is from Spring.

Are you ok now? (13 hrs later)
How are your neighbors?

My neighborhood appears to be okay. We live on an incline that must run for a number of miles, making it virtually impossible to flood. Water ran across my yard, like a six or eight inch deep river. Biggest problem, I have a small roof leak, now.

They just finished the Grand Parkway and where it crosses the nearby streets and Hwy 2920, it did flood there, because Houston freeways always trap water.

I've been worried about you but figuring you two and doggie were south of the main damage. So wrong I was.

I don't know how much rain I got. Some places got 17 inches. It quit raining just a bit ago and I was able to repair my roof leak.

A drowned toad became the symbol of my rainy adventure. I hoped I was wrong and put it in a position that the water would drain out, but I was too late to help.

You wouldn't know we live higher than our neighbors, but it really shows when we have rain. The rain drains down our street, and the first cross street is where the water drains. We didn't know this when we bought our home, so it was pure luck.

The longer I live here, the worse Houston flooding gets. All the construction seems to trap the water, with only small drainage available for fast filling water.

My perception of the southwest is they (we, as I'm here now) have no clue about drainage. I'm too old to teach the city engineers, if they have any on staff.

I figure it is worse where you are.