Simply Belle

My daughter had been enticing us to visit her in Stanford U while she is still a student so she could show us around one more time. My husband, who is always conscious of spending (and I don’t blame him,) thought that the trip was unnecessary as we will be making another trip in June for her graduation. I, however, didn’t even have any second thoughts about the whole idea. This opportunity only comes once, and I was not about to pass it up. It took a while before my husband finally caved in.

So, off we went. We drove and slept over at a friend’s house in LA. They served us great Filipino food and dessert, and entertained us with great karaoke music. They even had take home goodies for us.  We were so spoiled. Steve got in some chess practice with a friend, Vic. We had a great time. Those friends of mine are a treasure.  Priceless treasures!

The following day, we headed to Irvine to scout for apartment for Steffi who will be working in that area right after graduation. She had her  job secured a the beginning of her senior year when companies were laying off workers here and there, left and right.  A couple of hours later, we spotted a decent place in Costa Mesa which we thought was good enough for our daughter. It is a 5-minute drive to the beach, and a 10-minute drive to work. Not too shabby, eh? Though there is one problem, as always – her future roommate prefers 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms apartment. In that case, they are going to find it themselves.

Anyway, the trip to Stanford U was worthwhile. Stanford U is huge, which comes in second behind University of Moscow, in terms of continuous land area. It took us forever to trek the whole campus. My husband developed blisters, and decided to head back to the dorm. I was getting tired, too, but still had the stamina left to continue with the tour, if needed. But, my husband prevailed, and so we gingerly walked back to the dorm, resting in between, as the blisters were about to pop.

The next day, we had the opportunity to sit in Steffi’s classes. Funny, while the lecture was going on, I inadvertently hit the half-empty bottle of water against the laptop and created noise, getting everybody’s attention including the professor. The professor knew exactly where the noise came from. So, he said, “you there, in the back, (he meant Steffi), try to impress your parents.” Everybody laughed, of course, and Steffi was put on the spot because of me. Sorry!

The next class was rather interesting but I kept dozing off a minute at a time at the beginning of the class because it was hot even with air condition, and also, I was sleep-deprived the night before. You know how it is sleeping in strange place? It takes several days before you get used to the environment and its noise. I remained awake though the rest of the lecture.  Whew, wouldn’t it have been an embarrassing situation again for Steffi had I been caught sleeping by the professor?

One thing I noticed about our daughter, she was proud of her parents despite how homely/odd we look…he he. She made an effort to make an appointment with her friends and mentor just to meet us even for a short while as they were busy with classes and jobs themselves. She didn’t see us as a nuisance around her boyfriend, going to places, like church and cafe. It was probably her boyfriend who felt that way about us. Yes? No? (you know who you are)

Though the highlight of this trip was when her A Capella group serenaded me with 3 beautiful songs, with Steffi as a soloist in one of the songs. I am so used to hearing them only through video that a member record whenever they give concert, and didn’t realize how much beautiful they sound live. I felt so overwhelmed and honored to be crooned by a bunch of good-looking and talented kids. Sorry, I didn’t take pictures because my daughter thought it was inappropriate and I would be more like a stalker (according to my daughter.)

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Tagged by Noemi.

I love being their role model

Once in the church, I heard the pastor say, “your children are what your parents are.” It hit me hard! That was the time when daughter #1 was going through a hard phase. I took the pastor’s words literally and blamed no one but me for what my daughter had become. “What could I have possibly done wrong,” I asked myself. I never drink or smoke. I went straight home from work and vice versa so I could be at my children’s beck and call despite of how tired I was. I repeteadly turned down invitations from my friends for a night-out session. I said, “not until my daughters are out of my house, only then, I might consider it.”  To date, I haven’t succumbed yet to any of those invitations.  We never keep a booze in the house except for a bottle of cooking dry sherry. I just mainly concentrated my life in raising them to the best of my knowledge. When they needed me at school, I always made time even if I had to forfeit my lunch.

Thank goodness, that was just a phase. She is as good as gold now, and so as daughter #2. Both are non-drinkers and non-smokers, and both are good and responsible girls. It turned out that the daughter of the pastor got pregnant before she even finished high school.

I love playing guitar for them.

I started playing guitar for them and sang songs like ABC’s and from the Sounds of Music ever since they were babies. At age 2 or 3, Steffi could sing ABC’s well with the guitar. She went like this, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, Mino Mino P. Lexi’s favorite song, however, was Ency Wincy Spider. Sitting on a cart in a grocery store, she would sing the song non-stop. It was like a broken record…ha ha. Now, they are both into singing and playing guitar. We all self-taught ourselves to play guitar sometime in high school.

I love cooking their favorite food.

Both my girls love Filipino eggrolls or lumpia. Even though fixing eggrolls is time consuming, I always make time to wrap a dozen or two amidst my busy schedule just to satiate their appetite of their favorite food. When they were here this recent spring break, I knew I didn’t have much time for it but, somehow, I managed to fix eggrolls with help from my girls and Steffi’s bf. They were awesome helpers, especially Steffi’s bf who was able to master the art of wrapping eggrolls in no time.

I love hanging out with my girls

When they are home during  school break, I always spend some time hanging out in their rooms, catching up on the latest events and developments in their lives, and filling in for the missing part in life. I love to hear new songs from Steffi, which are saved in her computer. I also love watching movies with them through a projector in their rooms. In fact, I got to watch Slumdog Millionaire with them (my girls and S’s bf) from the computer through a projector, for free. It was like watching in the big screen at the movie theater. That was a lot of fun. Now that the kids are gone, my living room is dark, empty and quiet again. I should have adopted a little rug rat.

I love exchanging clothes with them.

Since we are approximately the same size, we love wearing each other’s clothes. One time, I wore Lexi’s expensive denim pants, and a friend of mine saw it at work, and loved how it fit on me, so she asked where I bought it. Ha ha, she caught me right there and then borrowing my daughter’s pants. There were times when I couldn’t find a particular outfit, and it was because one of my daughters took it without my knowledge. Oh well. One thing I like about my girls,  they love to share their clothes with me. Though now I am limited to what I can wear from their wardrobe because Lexi is about 7 pounds smaller while Steffi is a lot taller.

Note:  I blurred his face for anonymity

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Guest blogger: Steven Hilliard (my husband)

When I retired to sunny and dry Arizona from the cloudy and wet Pacific Northwest, I figured I had it made. Maybe now my tomatoes and peppers would ripen with all the heat and sunshine. That was the problem, there was just too much heat and sunshine at five-thousand feet elevation. The thin atmosphere permitted the sun’s rays to literally burn up my seedlings and even some mature plants like pole beans. Not only that, the extremely dry mountain air, only 10 to 15 percent RH, sucked up the moisture as fast as I could drench the soil with the garden hose. By midday my squash, cucks, and zucks were literally panting for a drink. I just couldn’t keep the soil damp no matter how often I watered. That was the first year.

The second year, I bought mature potted plants from the local nursery and things went pretty well for awhile. In fact, that year I was able to harvest a satisfactory crop of vine-ripened tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers, most of them heirloom. But the predators caught up with me the third year. When I say predators, I’m talking about elk, a whole herd of them that can glide over an six-foot fence as easily as a pole vaulter. What was left of the garden after they were finished, the javelina cleaned up. Javelina are peccaries that over the centuries immigrated to the southwest from the Amazon jungles. These smelly, pig-like rodents run in family groups and can squirm under a fence as easily as do snakes. They can turn a garden into a dust bowl in three passes. So I built a chain link fence with a strand of electric wire on top. That kept the big critters out.
But I forgot to mention the little varmints–the rabbits, ground squirrels, and pocket gophers–that wandered in from the nearby national forest. Let me tell you about the worst of them, the pocket gophers, which eventually brought about my downfall. I noticed one fine day that a normally healthy tomato plant looked droopy, like it needed watering. So I gave it a good soaking. The next day, of all things, it had vanished! The second plant next to it now looked wilted. What’s more, the following day, son-of-a-gun, if that love apple didn’t disappear as well. It went on like that sequentially, until the entire row of tomato plants wilted and disappeared from the face of the earth.

It started again with the pepper plants, one by one, day after day until that row was almost depleted. I frantically watered what remained of them and even replanted new starts, but it was hopeless. The disappearing act played on every day like a tired television movie that I’d seen dozens of times before.
Later, as I dug near a row of eggplants, I happened to notice a pepper plant in the act of being pulled under the soil right in front of my eyes! Something was summarily dragging the plant, roots first, under the soil. Although I was furious, the humorous scene reminded me of a cartoon where Bugs Bunny was filching carrots from Elmer Fudd’s vegetable patch. “What’s up doc?” I muttered along with a heap of other expletives that aren’t fit for print. A few minutes later at my feet I spied a near-sighted, hamster-looking rodent clearing out its tunnel and kicking the dirt onto my garden clogs! He was so intent in his work, and so nearsighted, that he didn’t even notice me as I stared at him, my mouth agog.
I tried smacking him with the flat side of the shovel but he was gone in a flash. I dug up his tunnel and came to an underground cavern where all my heirloom vegetables were stored, like hay in a loft. Well, I tried every poison and smoke bomb I found at the plant store but I was just throwing away my money. The traps they sold were great at driving their spikes into the palm of my hand, but useless otherwise. Nothing worked. It was too much for me. After some forty years of gardening, I decided to give it up and eat TV dinners instead of fresh heirloom vegetables. In spite of this lovely climate, I couldn’t get anything to grow. The clever pocket gopher had me licked.

Then, last year, although it was late in the season, an inspiration hit me–raised beds. I don’t know where I got the idea–probably from a magazine article. Money was no object here. What counted was outwitting the critters, especially the pocket gophers. I started by digging down a foot deep and establishing a five-foot wide by sixteen-foot long bed. To keep out the pocket gophers, I laid down a roll of half-inch mesh galvanized hardware cloth that I bought on sale at the local home improvement center. For the sides and ends I mortared up three rows of 8 x 8 x 16-inch cinder blocks. Pocket gophers are burrowers, not climbers. The blocks were mortared only on their tops, not on their ends. I capped the whole affair off with a row of two-inch thick headers.

Then I shoveled in screened topsoil and plenty of composts. Compost holds the moisture well, keeping the soil from drying out, which is a major headache in this dry climate. To temper the sun’s harsh rays, I covered the whole affair with shade cloth. I found through trial and error that 40% shade cloth works best at my elevation, anything stronger and the plants turn out leggy. Down in the desert near Phoenix they use 70% shade cloth. Wow!
As a frame for the shade cloth I installed hoops made from half-inch PVC water pipes every four feet along the sides. To do this I drilled a series of holes with a masonry bit into the caps and stuffed the ends of the pipes into the hollow spaces of the blocks. Shade cloth was draped over the whole affair and secured by plastic clips that I ordered over the internet. Now I finally had a garden!

Shade cloth, let me tell you, is a boon to this type of gardening. As I pointed out, it not only protects the tender cultivars from literally being roasted by the sun’s rays, but shields the area from wind-born weed seeds, many insects, and cats wanting to use the place for a litter box. My greatest pleasure was to find a grasshopper the size of a marlin lure tangled in the strands of the netting. I plucked it out and dashed it against the ground and then tried to stomp on it. That amazing pest got up and hopped away. They’re that tough. No wonder locust plagues have brought down whole civilizations in ancient times.

Not every plant likes shade cloth though. For instance, once established, peppers and eggplants prefer to brave it out without the veil over their heads. Tomatoes, on the other hand, prefer the morning sun but are thankful for the afternoon shade. All of this proves that a person should yield to the needs of his little darlings. I learned this the hard way when under the shade cloth the peppers and eggplants put on an impressive display of leaves but very little fruit. Or were these nightshade berries, judging by their size? As you can see from the photos, the chard, beets, turnips, carrots, onions, lettuce, etc. sure liked it. This project turned out so successful that I built another bed–twice as long as the first one.

As the cool season stepped in to replace the summer heat, I replaced the shade cloth with greenhouse plastic. Also I replaced the summer vegetables with cool weather crops like spinach, turnips, kale, etc. I even planted mache and miner’s lettuce, as well as an assortment of lettuces, chards, onions, beets, and Asian greens. Most of the old standbys did very well during the winter when the outside temperatures got down into the twenties and even sometimes into single digits or lower. They were quite cozy under the poly wrapping as you can see from the photos.

As of this writing, I’m itching for the summer planting season to arrive. I’d like to try some exotic varieties next like sunchokes, saluyot, and winged bean plants. Arizona, with all its faults, is perfect for growing vine crops such as squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, and Armenian cucumber. I can’t wait for May to come.

As far as all the money I spent, and it was indeed substantial, I read somewhere that for every dollar invested in a garden a person can expect four dollars in return. Every day, even in the bleakest of winter weather, I was able to present a huge plastic bowl filled with fresh greens to my wife, which goes to verify that statement. Also it’s nice to gaze out of my kitchen window in the morning and see that my organic vegetables are still there in the garden, not in the bellies of javelina or elk. But my triumph over the wily pocket gopher is the greatest reward.

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Bear with me my dear blogger-friends because this is yet another shameless plug about my daughter from yours truly. This time though, I am an extra in my daughter’s music, singing harmony.

It wasn’t actually planned. While we were sitting in the comfort of our living room one fine morning, my daughter was in the mood to sing while his boyfriend was playing the guitar. I kind of liked the tune of the music she was singing so I joined in and did the harmony. The name of the song is Hallelujah. I suggested that we record the song in the computer just for fun, which she agreed without a fuss.

You can listen to the music by clicking on this.

For one take, I thought it came out okay.

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