Artemesia stelleriana 'Boughton Silver', top -  R. 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' & R. 'Susan Williams- Ellis' & R. 'Bathsheba' 11 October 2021

Today 11 October 2021 I am in an existential bind. Tomorrow I must take this computer and its accompanying CRT monitor to my man Bensen at Powersonic Computers in Richmond. He is going to migrate the contents of this computer into a new one that will be upgraded to Windows 10 and will have super video card (for my scanning) and lots of memory.

This means that for two days I will not have this old guy and by new one will be ready perhaps by the end of the week. With no computer I cannot scan. As the fall garden shifts into the coming winter there are still roses that are blooming. As the garden declines I particularly notice Rosemary’s plants like her fall aconitum which will bloom in the next few days. I am waiting for Hosta ‘Tardiflora’ to finally have the buds on the scape (hosta-speak for stalk). I am hoping the plant waits for my computer to be operative so that I can scan them.

This is important as in June 8 of next year I will be going to the American Hosta Society Convention in Mineapolis. I will be doing a presentation called The Beauty of Hosta Flowers  & Companions. I do have scans of the flowers of Tardiflora but it would be nice to have the latest ones which are about now!

My forthcoming trip to Buenos Aires (December or January), the hosta convention and my planned drive, alone in March to my Rosemary’s birthplace of Brockvile and where she was raised in New Dublin, Ontario keep me alert and away from perhaps becoming an alcoholic (not a chance!) to drown my grief for the loss of my Rosemary which is not getting any better (can grief become better?).

I am lucky (I hate using that all-so-popular “blessed) to have my two cats Niño and Niña and two daughters that keep tabs on my life. Yes those cats do also keep tabs on my life. My youngest daughter visits me twice a week and I cook her a full dinner. We chat and then I drive her back to Burnaby. On my way back, anticipating the attention and company of my cats, I listen to the damndest best program on CBC Radio called Ideas. The one today I had heard before and it is hilarious. It’s about the relationship of chickens with mankind.

Hilary visits on Mondays and Thursdays. Today’s menu was my Rosemary’s recipe (from The Joy of Cooking) for Yorkshire Pudding. For gravy I used my special recipe that involves lots of red wine and this time I cut up slices of my son-in-law’s baron of beef from Saturday’s Thanksgiving dinner. The salad was my mother’s favourite. It consists of chopped tomatoes and onion with sliced hard-boiled eggs. For drink I squeezed oranges and lemons. Dessert was strawberries with whipped cream.

The scanning of the flowers for this blog came at the realization that if I did not do the scan today there would probably not be any decent roses by Thursday or Friday.