Edisto Gardens

    As soon as I realized I had the power to make panoramic photos (easily I mean; I've been doing it by hand for decades), I wanted to go to Edisto Memorial Gardens in Orangeburg, SC, where a world of roses awaits. It just seemed like the perfect place for a panorama: roses everywhere, surrounded by tall trees hung with Spanish moss. Also, next door is Horne Wetlands Park, a boardwalk along the Edisto River with panoramic opportunities of its own.
    Unfortunately, today promised to be overcast at best with a high chance of rain. However, this isn't the deal-killer that it might be, because the Panorama app on my phone requires you to be able to see the screen, and a sunny day makes this pretty tricky. Also, pewter skies go well with roses.
    So I gave it a try. The rose-centered panoramas went very, very well. I also brought along my Nikon and shot some ordinary closeups of especially striking roses. Generally, I liked these well, too. The Edisto though didn't work out. It was just flat astonishing. On the boardwalk twenty or maybe fifty feet from the water, you would think there were no mosquitoes at all. At the water, however, there was nothing but. Panorama app requires you to hold the camera steady for a few seconds each several times; it was all I could do to manage a single second. So I bailed on smart phone panoramas. I did go back and shoot four shots with the Nikon, panning the river fast enough to beat the mosquitoes. When I got home, I finally put the Nikon's software on this computer, including a Panorama application. So I got my Edisto River panorama after all. It's huge, but it's great. I used a cut down version for my new Facebook cover picture. I like it a lot.
    T-Mobile was pretty good to me on the trip, but by the time I turned around to head home, I was knocked down to 2G. There was supposedly a good Thai restaurant in Orangeburg, but at 2G I couldn't get directions, nor could I get a decent map. So I came home and instead got Thai from a formerly reliable restaurant here, but they seemingly have taken to putting pad thai in their MSG instead of the other way around. Still pretty good, though, and a good enough ending to a crazy fun morning.

Tennis anyone?

    Since Dad got the walker, I've needed to go out and get him a couple of tennis balls to put on the feet so his progress will be less jerky and jittery. No, this isn't the new nuclear-powered walker but the old original one that he got a year and a half ago. What can I say? I'm an idiot. I thought there were special pre-cut tennis balls and was getting around to finding out where you buy them from. Finally I asked my sister, who is both really smart and works for the VA, and she said that you just get regular tennis balls and an X-acto knife and use the latter to cut an X into the former.
    Not having either thing, I asked my friend Gypsye (who sometimes works for a circus, which ran away to join HER) if she did. She did not, but did have a swiss army knife with a saw attachment. When she loaned it to me, I remembered that I have an LL Bean swiss army (lower case indicates non-brand-namehood in both instances) flashlight (I swear I am not making this up) that sister Anne had given me. In the end, I used a corkscrew, scissors (or anyway one scissor) and both saws and made fairly short work of my Xs. As Dad is at dialysis, I don't know yet if the balls will go on the walker, but if not I'm pretty sure I can make the Xs bigger. For the record, the corkscrew wasn't necessary (but was fun). Gypsye also had a useful suggestion for which local courts to search for free tennis balls, so wins all the way around.
    Malcolm's Father's Day visit was very fun. Hopefully his drive home is uneventful; car was making worrying noises that the mechanic at Sears couldn't pinpoint. But he thought it might be the transmission. Talk about worrying! I think he has AAA at least.

Edit: Ha! Completely unnecessary! Sister Anne is sending a replacement walker which is arriving tomorrow and she's already sent hi-tech tennis balls that are pre-cut and fitted with a connection for the feet of the walker. So yaaaaay! This turned out great because putting tennis balls with an X cut into them onto a walker turns out to be really hard, in fact beyond me. So double yaaaay!

Windows Phone is growing on me

    Now that I know how to use voice recognition (including using it to send (albeit very carefully worded) text messages) and the camera's Panorama function, I'm very, very, very taken with the cheap new phone. Granted I'm less thrilled with T-Mobile, which isn't good at providing service ten miles out of town. Or indoors. (or anyway in more than one set of doors.) But the Nokia Lumia 521 is definitely growing on me, and since I libelled it earlier it's probably best to mention that I'm a lot happier with the weird thing now. Unless the package is lying to me, I think it's smarter than this computer. Which is a pretty smart smartphone right there. (I looked it up and it isn't quite, but still.)
    Father's Day went well as the weather turned out friendly and Dad eventually got over the idea that he wanted to go to Outback, which is generally a nightmare on Sunday evenings even when it isn't Father's Day. We went to Grecian Gardens instead and had a very lovely night. Then my friend Gypsye came around to my place to try my very weird pumpkin cobbler. We had a nice visit and though we could never decide whether it's good pumpkin cobbler, we agreed that it's good something. Open pie, I think she called it. Anyway, whatever it is it's really neat. Will I make it again? I dunno. I like stuff that's more portable so I can share, but I might do it anyway. Really neat is pretty good.

Outdoorsiness in abeyance

    The flies and mosquitoes have come out in their numbers on my favorite trails, so nature trekking may be put aside for the season. I don't know why they bug me so; mosquitoes hardly ever bite me and flies don't at all. I just don't care for them perpetually getting under my hat, into my glasses and down my back. The fast-moving ones that rocket off the top of my head make me particularly unhappy, but since I took up hat-wearing that isn't so much of a problem. Anyway, there are numerous parks around here with paved trails which are much less buggy, so it's not like I'll give up walking. There just may be less rambling going on.
    Father's Day may turn out to be a little tricky, as it's gone overcast. Weather Channel app says no rain, though, so hopefully we can take Dad out assuming that he wants to go. Although he may feel that his best Father's Day is to stay in and have take-out brought to him, which would be fun, too. I have a feeling it will work out, regardless.

We dig two-week-long Father's Day

    This weekend, brother Malcolm is down for Father's Day, for even extra additional fun. As odd luck would have it, I turned up at Whole Foods (looking for organic popping corn, which is a LOT harder to find than you would think) on a day when they had wild-caught East Coast shrimp for $5/lb, even if you just bought one pound, but just for that one day. So of course I bought a pound. As it was labeled "previously frozen," I had no choice but to use it immediately, so for one last time, I made my crazy-mad-stupid-brilliant Lowcountry Thai shrimp boil bisque. (This is shrimp boil with some coconut milk thrown in and as such isn't worthy of such a grandiloquent name, but hey, this is how I have fun.)
    I also tried to make maple-pumpkin cobbler. Of the two, the shrimp boil was a success; the cobbler was pretty iffy. I sort of put it back in the cooling oven to let it finish and... forgot it for an hour. Even so, it's a few notches above fiasco. But it's a few below excellent.
    Be all that as it may (Alice used to claim that one day I would have a show on NPR called "Be That As It May." I still aver that this isn't really a phrase I use that often; it just sounds like a phrase I would use often.) Malcolm got into town in time to sample both. He found the shrimp boil to be improved with the addition of Crystal hot sauce and the cobbler to be improved if he aimed at the cobbler part where the honey is. But I think he found everything fairly satisfactory. We also played with my new phone a lot, which proves to have a lot of features I didn't know about. Most of them work surprisingly well. Hopefully the rest of the weekend is as fun.

Rollator

    Sister Anne got Dad a new walker, and it's really great but problematic. It's a Rollator, a four-wheel walker with brakes. The model may be Hugo, or maybe they just named the dang thing. The problems are many. It's quite heavy. It won't fit in my trunk. It's hard to fold up. It's harder still to unfold. It has a seat but to sit on it you have to chock the brakes; the only way I see to do this is to hold the hand brake grips, but if you do that you can't stand up again. I hope that I'm just an idiot and am missing a bunch of obvious stuff. Maybe it will work out brilliantly. But I have my severe doubts.
    Let me stress that none of this is a criticism of Anne, who is one of the world's greats. What I question is who did they design this for? Because you don't need a walker unless you have severe balance problems or weakness problems. A walker that you have to lean down to fold or unfold is not going to be helpful. A walker that's too heavy to lift isn't going to be helpful. A walker with a seat is no use if you can't get up again. Again, I hope I'm wrong about everything. I'll admit that I didn't read the instructions all that closely once I had the thing assembled. But I suspect that we're going to be sending Hugo back, a pity really.
    Yesterday my trip to Congaree National Park the previous day became retroactively a lot less fun when I found a tick attached to the back of my neck. Knowing that I should have put him in a jar and gone to the doctor with him, nevertheless I didn't, freeing him on the front porch. No common sense, me. But I'm reasonably sure that there is very low incidence of Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever in central SC. Knock on wood. But I admit to feeling more than a little nervous about it.

Strife goes to a party

    Oh all right, so I baited and switched you. I've got absolutely nothing on "Strife goes to a party" except that it would have been a great murder mystery title about 70 years ago. There was a popular Life magazine feature called "Life Goes to a Party," and a terrific Benny Goodman number of the same title. Looking it up, I was surprised that I remembered how it goes, not having heard it very many times. But at this late date, I'm not sure anyone would get the pun. Born too late again, I guess.
    Yesterday I took my friend Jim and my new phone off to Congaree National Park to go hiking. I immediately found that I had no signal at all, so it was a washout in that sense. And the trails were very muddy and slick and eventually impassable, so it was a washout in that sense, too. However, we had a real good time. And eventually, somehow, the phone coughed to life and my dad was able to get through to ask me to take him to a dental appointment that afternoon. I did and that went well, too. He had a couple of fillings that had fallen out and the dentist replaced them. And he got around quite well. So in spite of the really astonishing heat out (98 yesterday, 97 today), it was a really good day. And very low on strife.