House Cleaner day adventures

The house cleaners were back today, so it was once more time for me to figure out an adventure to have so as to leave the house to them, without being underfoot while they go through the place like a family of whirlwinds.

Bitterly cold, also windy, not conducive to nice strolls, and it was grey out when I was making plans, not conducive to feeling like going out at all.  But still she persisted.  And I realized I still had not done the Annual Witchhazel Hunt.

Ah, here's a good thing to do, I thought. Usually I walk there, since it's on the edge of a local park, where the bus shelter is, which structure may account for its survival after a lot of severe weather.

But nowadays in extreme cold, that's a bit too far to walk. But why not drive there on my way to other destinations, self, I asked myself.  Parking lot right there.  And I did, and found that I was not quite too late to catch some of it in bloom.  I was a bit late to the party, since usually the first or second week of January is the best time.  But, as you see, I did score a couple of twigs, and scurried back to the car to get warm again.

I noticed that I'd got two species. Witchhazel grows a bit like forsythia, masses of branches coming up from the ground in parallel, so this may be two species that are just growing as close neighbors.  I picked the twigs off what appeared to be one bush.

And you'll see one set of yellowish flowers, one of the classic red wild starburst design.  You'll see how tiny these are, imperceptible if you don't know they're there. And you can see further down the stem, the bell-like shapes that appear after the flowers have blossomed and gone.  The flowers will smell interesting once they get warmed through in the house. It's always such a treat to find flowering shrubs in the depths of the winter, and this winter definitely has its depths, what with one thing and another.

Then came a couple of dull errands, dvd back to the library, Target for a couple of vital things I forgot to ask Handsome Son to pick up, including paper tape, that invention that people are now using to tape the top of the face mask so as to avoid fogging up your glasses.  This is very important right now, since as soon as I leave the house, the glasses, warm from the house, fog over instantly, and it's not just fog.  It's almost instantly ice, which is a different thing to get rid of.  Not good for driving.

Anyway, after that, off to find new views, and I decided to go up to Cranbury, since I was halfway there already, left Target by the back way, headed up a country road, to the old village of Cranbury where half the houses are Revolutionary period, complete with plaques to prove it, and the graveyard holds locals for three centuries. Including the person who was the first traffic fatality in the region.  Fell out of his carriage after a very good day's trading and celebrating in Philadelphia, a real own goal if ever there was one, he probably thought as the wheels passed over his helpless form.  Poor guy.

Anyway, that's for another time when the weather's nice enough to stroll about and take pictures for your viewing pleasure.  Today I thought it would be good to watch moving water with sun sparkling on it.

So I went here, the park on the banks of Brainerd Lake, moving water, complete with all kinds of ducks and fishing birds.  Many diving ducks today, too far for good pictures, but the very good part about this place is that you can sit in your car with a perfect view. There are benches near the water, where I like to go to and read in good weather.  

Handsome Partner, after he had lost a lot of mobility, loved to come here, and I could help him do just the few yards from car to bench where he could enjoy being out of the house, and with plenty to see on and around the water.

And this is where I came to sit after I'd made the arrangements after his death, at the funeral home just a few yards from the park.  It was a calming and helpful place that day, as well as many others.

I hadn't planned on birds today, so I didn't have my binoculars with me, so I'll have to look up the waterbirds by memory.  I think there were coots and some other species, all swimming together.

I came home to a clean house, feeling much better about everything.  Amazing what a bit of sunshine and fresh air, however frigid, will do for a person.

Festival Weekend followed by Recovery Sunday

 
Sunday was a quiet, sunny day perfect for all kinds of things from bread baking, finally the weather allowed it, to a stroll by the river, an icecream in the sunshine and a walk down a historical street.  And since I was pictured and crowded and musicked and noised out, I decided just to do it, not to take pictures.  The pic here of Brainerd Lake in Cranbury was my only concession, so as to give you a nice general image of the day.

So I had a peaceful time just watching the sparkles on the river and the reflections of the water under the leaves of the pin oak leaning over the water, then a stroll past historical houses and their gardens, in the last flush of flower and fruit of the summer before Fall starts officially.  A stop for peach icecream, then a duck into the used bookstore, where I scored a Pym I don't own, though I've read it a lot, a Few Green Leaves, and home to rest from all this exertion, reading Pym on the patio.  Just focusing on being there, not on framing up pix of it and transmitting it all.

To see why this was vital, and why after an exciting day on Saturday, I needed down time from people, however wonderful, for a little while, go here

 And, since I heard of Jackie Collins, a writer I'd never read, not my taste I thought, having died, I thought I'd do a bit of tribute reading, and I put Hollywood Wives on my library list!  I could have got it on CD but I thought having that prose read over my goldwork stitching wasn't very congruous, so I'll read it in an actual book, with a cup of tea.

Speaking of reading, and of CDs, since I'm always busy doing stuff and can't be reading paper books at the same time, I've done quite a bit of CD reading, and highly recommend Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins, just brilliant.  And Philippa Gregory The King's Curse.
Currently I've finally got my hands on Shirley Jackson's collection of essays and short stories, some not published before, the collection put together by her children and recently issued, I Want to Tell You.  So far, so excellent. Well, it's Jackson, what did I expect but brill?

And I've been eating and cooking, too, but will get into that in the next day or two, with some dogmatic statements...why are you not surprised?
 

Expedition to Brainerd Lake

Though this sounds like a real enterprise, in fact it's about a five minute drive away, and said lake, fed by running water like most lakes around here, is at the foot of a municipal park.  It was a favorite destination to drive HP when he was still more or less on his feet.  I have pix of him happily sitting by the water enjoying the views and birds.

here's a view taken from the bench he liked to sit on.

Oddly enough the bridge you see in the pix is not a rustic footbridge -- this is NJ, and it's a major highway with an endless river of traffic and noise. But the sound of the moving water is a great antidote to the traffic sound, and it's a peaceful place to sit.

I found a new feature since I was there a while ago -- a Rain Garden.  New to me, this is a great device for rendering runoff water from parking lots and streets, clean and filtered, returning it to the freshwater streams clean.  

 Here's the explanation and diagrams.

This one is near a parking lot, and consists of a sunken bed, with a lot of rocks and gravel and a pipe system for runoff to the lake (or the street if you're a homeowner and put it in your front yard) and the rocks avoiding standing water.  Good growing soil then mulch follow, and it's planted with natural shrubs and flowers.  This is a great idea, particularly since we have an ecological treasure under our feet.

About an hour south of here, in the Pine Barrens, or under them to be exact, is the largest freshwater aquifer in the western hemisphere.  Yes, surprising if your knowledge of NJ is derived from the Sopranos and corny NY comedians!  but nemmind that. We are reminded all the time that the storm drains feed directly back into our freshwater streams -- the water table around here is only about 30 inches below the surface, which becomes very obvious in times of great rainstorms, when it's well above the surface.  

A while back our local Girl Scouts did a nice stenciling project, with a turtle and a reminder not to throw anything into storm drains.  Every storm drain had its little motif.  Now they've been made permanent, with metal plates saying the same thing.

So here's how it the Rain Garden, another part of the freshwater conservation effort, looks, very subtle, fits right in.  

And the lake no doubt is most appreciative. This is a good fishing spot, which you can tell from the numbers of heron and cormorants and the occasional egret to be seen often diving and catching. The Rain Garden was financed by our state water company, yay, along with the work of garden clubs and the local municipality.

I did a little drawing of one view here while I was there, which you can see here