Dream, I didn't know that you came over here! It's been fun re-living a condensed version of your adventures. And it's been really wonderful seeing the warm welcome you've received and the accolades from your fans. I bet that you didn't know how big your fan club is!

Zuzu, my cats interacted with the raccoons & possums. I may be one of the people who Dream referred to, with anecdotes about peaceful co-existence between cats & wild critters. One of the cats was at our house, when we bought it - he lived outside, so had co-existed with the critters for years. He became a wonderful (& eventually) indoor companion & lap cat - he lived to be about 15. The cat we brought with us to the house (fortunately was no territorial, at the time) & he touched noses with the raccoons & playfully ran with them. Dream's observations about raccoon culture led me to believe that the raccoons respected the area near the house as cat territory. They always let our cats eat first, just as you observed.

Dream,
I love your doll and who can look elegant when you're outside? I have worn some pretty clownish looking tops because they were cheap and I could get them dirty. I caught sight of myself one day, came in and changed and cut it up for a rag, lol!

I just checked and the Heidi Chronicles are still on DG. I read through a few of them again and that was enjoyable. I can't believe they go way back to 2006. That's even earlier than I remembered.

The floating planter may well have had a worm or something, but the floatation system was torn apart too, like the raccoon was enraged to have this new item present.

I don't think any of us garden in our finest. I always feel so bad for our super mailman when he comes by and want to tell him not to look.

Good news that the Heidi Chronicles are still present.

Hi, Liz!!!

I am SO happy to see you here!
(Liz, btw, is one of the reasons I'm here. Sure hope that isn't a secret.)
YOU and 1 other very good DG friend both sent me messages recommending a move to ATP in that very same week.
I decided right away to make the move, thinking surely the 2 of you could not be wrong, but it took me a month or more to actually leap off that diving board and into the water. The chaos & insanity of the Mar 3 incident in which everything was scrambled & no one could find new posts or current threads was, for me, the final straw.

Right after I arrived at ATP, I made a post in my thread over 'there' saying "I'm in my Sandbox now, where are you?" I was hoping the word 'Sandbox' would key both you and my other DG friend that I had finally moved here. Did you not see that post at all, or did you miss my cryptic attempt at communication? I even kept my doll avatar and thread name in hopes of catching your eye over here. As you can see, I've been a little busy getting re-acquainted with old friends, but rest assured that I was already planning an expedition to come looking for you if you didn't show up soon!

I totally missed your "sandbox" reference, Cheryl, but am glad you're here - your thread was one of the only things keeping me at DG... And the added bonus is that you've picked up lots of old friends to join the discussion.

Thank you, Billy!

I really haven't been doing much gardening the past couple years due to my back injury, just a few veggies, mostly in pots. All of my flower & animal pics are archived to a backup disk (somewhere?). The doll pics, on the other hand, are on my laptop, because I've been photographing them for ebay sales. I used the doll pic over 'there' just because it was handy. Over here, I felt more than a little self conscious using the doll avatar when everyone else is sporting either a portrait or something in keeping with the gardening theme, but I stuck with the doll to help my friends from 'that place' find me here. Your compliment of the doll avatar is most appreciated.

I guess I have a bad habit, a carry over from youth, of wearing my old 'throw-away' clothes around the house, even when I'm not gardening. As a kid growing up, I was never allowed to wear my 'good' clothes around the house but always had to change into my old duds as soon as I came home from school, church, or wherever. School clothes and 'around the house' clothes were never interchangeable in those days, and it seems the habit has endured all these many years. To this very day and even though my Mom has been gone for years, I cannot get comfortable at home until I remove those 'good' clothes. But it has saved many a new garment from stains, bleach, tears, you name it.

SongOfJoy,

It's good to hear that they haven't archived (or tossed) those old files yet. Every now and then 'over there' I would get a message from a new member who had suddenly stumbled upon those old files. People often report staying up all night to read them all, that sort of thing, which amazes me but is also very good to hear. The prequel, the things I wrote about the occurrences which predate the Heidi files, actually date back to 2002-2003.

I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed reading some of those old files. To me those files are like journal entries, part of a day-to-day record of the events as they occurred. In the early days, there was so much to tell that I just hurried inside to type it all as fast as possible, eager to capture all of the images and impressions before they faded.

Dream,
Same thing here. Change from school clothes as soon as we got home. It's still practical.
Your doll is unique and I love to see it. My avatar isn't gardening either unless you call it hair farming for Wigs For Kids.

ecnalg,

I didn't post a response to your post yesterday. I started one but didn't get it finished - it's a bit involved. Today I've been trying to get some things done around the house, but I will post that response soon. I just didn't want you to think I was ignoring you.

While I was doing some cleaning, that snippet I told you earlier about saving moths drifted into my mind for some reason. I didn't know them as moths then, btw. I called them flukets (pronounced like 'flu' and the 'ket' from 'kettle')

The fluket project began when, as a preschooler, I found a dead one in my bedroom window. Curious, I checked the other windows all through the house and found 2 more. I asked my Mom what they were, but she didn't know their name. To her they were all bugs. Then I asked my Mom why they were dead and why all 3 of them were in windows that way. She said they came in sometimes when we held the door open too long, and once in the house they couldn't find their way back outside. She said they went to the windows, because they thought that was a way out. Then they would get trapped there in the window, flailing at the glass, and overheated by the sun and eventually die.

I was one of those highly [over] sensitive children who loved all creatures and not only hated to see anything die but really felt their pain as though it were my own. It made me very sad to think of those little flukets trapped in the window that way, so I asked my Mom if they would sting me or hurt me. She said they were harmless. So from that day on and until I was much older, I started checking the windows in the house for flukets each day, carefully catching any I found between my hands, and then dutifully carrying them back outside to freedom.

Mom would kill them with the fly swatter if she saw them, so my fluket project was something of a stealth mission to locate and free trapped flukets before Mom killed them and before they expired in those murderous windows. It would be many years before I would learn that my flukets were actually moths and many more years still before I would reveal to Mom the details of my fluket mission.

Edited to add pronunciation guide (1st paragraph) for my made up word.

Dream,
What a wonderful memory. I too hate to think of anything trapped and dying in windows or a spider web. I really feel good about getting them out. The spider has plenty of bugs to eat and I don't rip the whole web.

They never said a word but I bet my neighbors got an eyeful of CRAZY LADY

Me trying to free a butterfly from a web 14 feet up. I taped two brooms together with SCOTCH TAPE -- That rescue stick creation was bending and flopping before I even got out the door, but time was wasting, I knew that butterfly would damage itself.

Ghostly white old lady legs....wild hair...favorite nightgown flapping (you know what those favorites look like - well loved and worn ) ....standing on 6 inches of leaves - middle of the woods..in pink furry SHEEP slippers ..no underdrawers.....TERRIFIED of snakes slithering ...flailing at "empty" air ( I could see a web and butterfly but those neighbors couldn't ) with a collapsing double broom .

I am so glad I never saw myself in video on Facebook

The butterfly never even said thanks .

Rosie,
SO CRACKING UP!!! And they never do say thanks - flailing with laughter now!

MISSINGROSIE said:They never said a word but I bet my neighbors got an eyeful of CRAZY LADY

Me trying to free a butterfly from a web 14 feet up. I taped two brooms together with SCOTCH TAPE -- That rescue stick creation was bending and flopping before I even got out the door, but time was wasting, I knew that butterfly would damage itself.

Ghostly white old lady legs....wild hair...favorite nightgown flapping (you know what those favorites look like - well loved and worn ) ....standing on 6 inches of leaves - middle of the woods..in pink furry SHEEP slippers ..no underdrawers.....TERRIFIED of snakes slithering ...flailing at "empty" air ( I could see a web and butterfly but those neighbors couldn't ) with a collapsing double broom .

I am so glad I never saw myself in video on Facebook

The butterfly never even said thanks .

😆😖😏

MissingRosie,

I must agree with the others here. You do present one heck of an image, Lady!!!

About the "Ghostly white old lady legs....wild hair", was the wild hair ON the "ghostly white old lady legs"?

I cannot believe Scotch Tape held together that well or that long but am awfully glad you saved that butterfly.

Have you check YouTube?

No. You Tube not on my list and so IF I am there..I will never know it!!!

The hair and the legs...polar opposites 😊
But, now that you mention it.....I probably was porcupine lady and crazy lady..because I was cold!!

Oh, the lengths to which we will go to save even the tiniest creature. It's one of the things that makes me most proud of our species!

I know all too well that situation in which you wonder how you must look to neighbors who can probably see you but likely can't see the creature(s) with which you are interacting. The 2nd summer when I was dealing with the raccoons, I used to sit at the back of my yard facing the forest at dusk sometimes quietly talking to the hidden raccoons on the other side of the fence, trying to coax them to come down into the yard to eat. I had only been in my new home for a few years then, and I often figured if the next door neighbors saw me out there facing the forest and [seemingly] talking to myself, they would surely think me a total nut case. By now they probably realize they were right.

Rosie, I can't see the tiny images in several of your posts. On my laptop, they just show up as rectangles, all with the same tiny, undecipherable letters in them. Very strange. I don't think I've encountered that before. Are they emoticons or emoji of some sort?

About the missing Emoji, I think I've figured it out. My MacBook laptop is 3-4yrs old now. The version of OsX it is running is outdated. Until now I've never run across a problem, but this looks like the 1st sign of things like the Emoji which are beyond my outdated OS.

Although Apple has repeatedly offered me free upgrades, to date I've not accepted any of them. My reason? Mostly Steve Jobs or rather the lack thereof. My OS officially became obsolete, prompting Apple to offer me updates to newer versions, about the same time that Steve Jobs left the company. I liked the innovative atmosphere he brought to Apple. His death left me concerned about whether subsequent products would continue to have the same qualities. I've held off on upgrades for fear of loosing the features I love about my Mac and, instead, ending up with something more like Windows.

When El Capitan came out, I gave some thought to upgrading, but decided against it after reading that while some people love it many others are having major problems with it, and the dividing line between the happy people and the sad people seems to be memory. It needs a LOT of memory, and although it claims to work on the amount of memory I have, based on user reviews it only seems to work well on computers with more memory. Plus, and I'm really glad I read this before upgrading, once you upgrade to El Capitan, you can't easily remove the upgrade and go back to your old version. Some of your files, photos, etc get updated to fit the new OS, and can't be accessed again if you drop back to a lower version. Argh!

So this is why I'm still using the older OS and apparently why I'm not able to view those Emoji characters.

Rosie, what kind of device are you using? Just curious.