Waking up from a long sleep.

It's been over a year since I last posted. The year has been hectic. I haven't had time to remind myself to slow down. There is always something to do. I hired a man to help me. With the heat of summer, we did not do what I would have liked to do which is work outside.

I like to piddle work inside the house.  Unfortunately, I worked entirely too hard before he came.

I learned a lot about hiring someone. For one thing, I am not good at making the rules.

He wanted to be paid under the table. I wanted to pay him and take out taxes and have worker's comp insurance. I needed help, I paid him under the table.

He came at 10:30 and had left at 3. He did not like my dogs. He was allergic to fire ant bites, He had a bad back. The work he did was mediocre and he did not naturally move from one project to another one I needed done. He did not put trash in the trashcan. He left it where he had been working. I had to leave one day while he was working, he worked quickly and went down to my mother's room to sit to get her to let him leave early. I paid him $75 for each day. My compromise with paying under the table was I could only afford two days a week.

The good news is he stopped coming. I did not have to ask him to quit. It saved me from taking that bull by the horns. All it took was telling him to wear clothes that he didn't mind getting paint on. We were going to paint the hallway that next Monday.

I do know you can pay someone up to $600 and not report it to the IRS. So I would pay the next person the first $300 under the table. If they are a keeper, I would pay the taxes.
I'm going to be lucky if I ever get anyone good.

This man was good person. The problem was what he thought the job would be versus what it was. Add to that, he is in my situation. My home life is too hectic to fit a job in. He has young adult children and a wife who still works but is sick. She goes to sleep as soon as she returned from work at 3 PM and slept until the next morning. This is why he needed to leave by 3 PM.

I'll continue to be nice to whoever I employ. Part of the relief of getting help is not getting the stress from negativity. The other part is I don't enjoy pulling that person out of my psyche that has to give someone hell to get the job done. As Blanche DuBois said in Tennessee William's play "A Streetcar Named Desire", "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."

The mother cat I have recently adopted and her brood is not helping with the housework.

Currently, I am feeding a dog that is immensely afraid of me and my car. It likes my food. I rolled down the window and called to it that it has a home when it is ready.

I've been hesitant to post a new blog post in that I do not have the time to visit everyone. Add to that is content. I've decided to post pictures of my part of the world. I'm not a professional photographer and the picture content is quite ordinary. But someone from a different part of the world may enjoy the novelty. I certainly enjoy the pictures of others.

This will be a brilliant Gold in about a week. 

Cassiopeia, the cat, standing in tall grass with a branch of poke salad in the foreground. The birds love the berries. The red in Poke salad makes it very poisonous. You have to know how to pick it and prepare it to prevent poisoning. At this point in the stalk's life cycle, it would be extremely poisonous.  I have eaten poke salad. It tastes about what you think grass clippings would taste boiled.

Muscadime grapes are finished for the year. They were delicious. Muscadimes are grapes native to North America. The thin skinned European varieties do not grow well here due to Pierce disease.

Beauty berries

I created a nice area for the kitty and her babies in which the dogs would not be a problem. BoDuke insists he could never be a problem.