Being Lucky

Do think you have been lucky in life? If so, how much of it was due to personal effort and how much due to chance? Andy and I did a lot of the right things — like study and work and save — but we also know we were lucky to have lived in a time and place where that was rewarded. We thank our lucky stars every day.

Hurray for humility and gratitude, and Happy St Patrick’s Day! May the luck of the Irish be with you and your loved ones.

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1025 Days

Translation:

I eat a lot of fast food. I suppose that explains why they say “Haste makes waist.”

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Where Are You on This Map?

Click on the image for higher resolution.

Notice the prediction is for five days starting Thursday.

This weekend is different. Andy will stay down here today because of the wind — gusts of up to 50 mph are predicted. And we’re also having our first red flag warning for fire.

The meteorological calendar is correct — winter is already over!

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A Big Change

First an Update on the Plants and Balloon:

The bean plants haven’t changed much, except for one spindly branch growing on the right.

I’ll probably toss the plants out in the near future. I planted a couple of garbanzo beans and will see if they start to grow.

The balloon is still slowly losing helium.

12 weeks old

The sweet potato is growing, but I don’t like the looks of it. No green leaves.

I’ll watch it for a while longer, but then I’ll toss it out.

I haven’t talked about my pothos — I had some growing in three 4-inch pots, but they started getting overgrown. Instead of moving them to bigger pots, I started propagating new plants from cuttings. (All my pothos started from one cutting a friend gave me about 35 years ago.)

That wasn’t the big change. They’ve been working on our building, changing some posts, adding metal clading to the cross pieces, and painting the posts and stucco lighter colors. So there has been a lot of activity on our porch:

The building looks a lot different.

September 24, 2025

March 13, 2026

They’re almost done with our building, except for painting the doors a lighter color next Monday. Doing this to 10 buildings is a lot of work!

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I Like Winter Better

This past winter was glorious — a lot of sunshine. We’re going to pay for it with the fire danger, of course. There’s already a fire watch for this weekend because of the wind — Andy says he may stay down here if it’s too strong.

Next weekend the National Weather Service is predicting,

An unseasonably strong high pressure system will begin to build over the southwest US toward the middle of next week with weaker winds and record and near record high temperatures reaching 15-25 degrees above 1991-2020 averages as early as Wednesday. This ridge of high pressure looks to become powerfully strong next weekend with an increasing likelihood of a historic and hazardous early season heatwave that could far surpass daily record high temperature records across much of northern and central New Mexico.

AccuWeather agrees about the warm spell– click on image for higher resolution:

Nope, way too warm for spring. I like winter better. (Yes, I know it will be a lot worse elsewhere, but it’s supposed to be an extra-hot summer, my least favorite season.)

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Poor Chihuahua!

Click on the picture for the video.

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We Can Relate to That!

March tends to be windy here. We’ve had some winds so far, but they haven’t been as bad as the time Andy stayed down here rather than risk them.

He did stay down here last Saturday, but for a different reason. He started to get up around 8 or so but he was cold, so he climbed back under the covers and slept for a couple more hours.

When I mentioned that to Kaitlin she wrote,

Brrr! I wouldn’t get up either. But he does get all the blankets in winter (his time is almost up for the year!).

Huh? Oh, yeah. When she was young she and Andy had a running joke. They shared the blankets — equitably. He got them in winter, and she got them in summer. What could be more fair than that?

I still laugh when I think of it. Hurray for family jokes and happy memories.

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Sun Puddles

Click on the image for higher resolution.

I know pups and kitties like that. They remind me to make time for naps. 🙂

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They Have a New Puppy!

In answer to yesterday’s question: Sigh, Pixie was right, the bananas sold at the store are sterile so they can’t propagate. If you’re curious about how to grow a banana tree, click here.

For a non-AI video, here’s one about the new puppy at North Yuki Husky.

Good Lord! What a bundle of energy. 🙂

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Growing a Banana Tree

In her comment to yesterday’s post, Sandra Czosek mentioned this Facebook video showing how to grow a banana tree from a banana. (Click on the picture to see the video.)

Do you think it would work?

Posted in Life As a Shared Adventure | 26 Comments