Hopefully I’ll be able to post something over the weekend. But I HAVE to get my taxes done, because I’m heading back up to Illinois on Monday for filing.
My dear aunt’s illness and death has set me back a bit – but the funeral was lovely and it was great to see family and her church friends.
(She’s buried at the Arsenal, and until my uncle passed [WWII vet] I had NO idea that military cemeteries bury the 2nd deceased spouse on top of the first. I found that a bit disconcerting.)
I will be heading up to Illinois tomorrow (Thursday) for my Aunt’s funeral.
I’ll come back over the weekend to finish up preparing my taxes, and then shortly head back up to Illinois to go over them w/ my CPA.
My Aunt has passed.
I will be taking a “sabbatical” of sorts, and probably be scarce for the next week or two.
I apologize, but I’m going to take a pass this week on posting. My 92 y/o aunt was admitted to the hospital a couple of days ago.
When I talked to her last weekend she said she had “severe sciatica” – to the point she could barely walk because of the pain.
She’s never been very fond of doctors and it took some work to convince her to even go see her PCP. When she did, her PCP admitted her and a CT scan revealed extensive bone metastasis, most likely from breast cancer for which she had a mastectomy a few years back.
She’s been moved to the Long-Term Care (LTC) Unit, and is looking into Hospice Care.
I’m designated as her Medical Power of Attorney, so it’s been a bit busy.
She has a very strong faith and is at peace with the time she has left.
I have my taxes done by my Mom’s CPA back in Illinois close to where my aunt is, and it’s scheduled for May 4th. I don’t know if I’ll have to change that or not.
So I hope you understand why I’m taking a pass this week.
But I want to share the most poignant moment I’ve seen in a long time from this past week’s Memorial Service for Capitol Police Officer William “Billy” Evans when his 7 y/o daughter, Abigail, comforted her Mother and wiped her tears away during the service:
What do a lawyer, accountant, military intelligence manager, insurance executive and an information tech have in common?
They’re five friends from Mount Vernon (WA) High School Class of 1994 who decided to plunk down $1.5 million to buy a tulip farm (reasonably named Tulip Town) right before the pandemic hit!
[You can visit their website, Tulip Town which opens with a delightful overview video]
The friends decided to name their partnership the Spinach Bus Venture, after the rickety nicknamed “Spinach Bus” they rode during their summer jobs out to the agricultural fields in Skagit County Washington to pick spinach seeds and dig daffodil and tulip bulbs.
But they admit the timing of their purchase could NOT have been worse. Some background will make this clearer.
In Skagit County, about 1,000 acres of farmland are cultivated to grow tulip and daffodil cut flowers, along with annually harvesting over 20 million bulbs for gardeners.
About 500 of those acres are dedicated to tulips, which account for 75% of U.S. commercial production. Additionally, 75 million cut flowers from those fields and greenhouses provide for more than half of all U.S. floral sales. And the bulb industry produces $20 million in annual gross income.
But as impressive as those numbers are, the biggest generator of income for the two tulip farms remaining in Skagit County (Tulip Town with 30 acres and the much larger RoozenGaarde and Washington Bulb Co., with 500 acres of daffodils, 350 acres of tulips and 15 acres of greenhouses) comes from the annual Skagit County Tulip Festival.
It runs for the entire month of April and the paid admission, flowers, bulbs and souvenirs sales account for over 90% of their annual revenues for both Tulip Town and RoozenGaarde.
The Festival attracts over 400,000 visitors annually and pumps almost $65 million into the local economy from restaurants, hotels, etc. So you can imagine the panic the pandemic caused the new entrepreneurs with the cancellation of the 2020 Festival.
And then it was compounded with a dramatic drop in floral gifts given to Mom’s on Mother’s Day, one of the biggest flower-gifting days of the year along with Valentine’s Day, because of the pandemic-induced stay-at-home order. People simply were not going to risk heading out to buy flowers.
But the newbies had one advantage – they weren’t beholding to any “old” way of doing business.
Their first innovation last year was when Festival regulars started calling to say how disappointed they were about missing out on the 2020 celebration – but wondered if they could get some of their flowers anyway.
The previous owners had not focused on shipping actual bouquets, but they did have some boxes stored away. The new crew thought they’d get requests for 100 to 200 boxes of bouquets – but they did that in just their first day of taking orders!
When the season ended, they had boxed and sold over 8,000 bouquets! So a new business line was born.
While the pandemic was raging (thanks to Donnie’s incompetence), American patriots started searching for ways to show their appreciation to frontline workers. The newbies thought people might be happy to send a bouquet of tulips as a donation or statement of support. That’s when their “Color for Courage” came into being – and they took more than 4,700 orders for a $15 bouquet.
Then one of their group thought they could keep in touch with the regular Festivalgoers with a 360-degree app letting them visit the fields that they couldn’t view in person.
All these new ideas kept their heads above water during the pandemic, and they are looking forward to once again welcoming visitors back this spring, although at a reduced capacity with mask and social distancing required.
So from April 1st to the 30th (and maybe into May if the weather holds) there’ll be lots of smiles from taking a tour of Tulip Town. You just won’t be able to see them under the masks!
While not wanting to diminish our country’s Tulip Festivals this spring, I think we’d all agree that Holland holds the title for tulips. I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Amsterdam twice – once in the fall and once in the spring. And their tulip gardens are truly a site to behold! So I’ll close with some of their stupendous displays:
Still, it’s hard to beat a gorgeous floral American sunset in Skagit County … 
I’m having my 80-foot tall hickory tree taken down today, so I’ll be “supervising”.
While it’s still healthy, it largely overhangs the roof and is starting to drop branches. Plus I’m tired of dealing with all the hickory nuts. They’re the reason that part of the lawn has turned to weeds.
But Nike will miss watching & chatting to all his squirrel friends!
After a year of being COVID-cooped up at home, many of us feel like butterflies emerging from our cocoons and spreading our wings again. At long last we’re putting away our daily ensembles of sweatpants and pajama bottoms so we could at least be presentable (and comfortable) at Zoom meetings or Skype chats with friends and family.
Dr. La Verne Ford Wimberly of Tulsa, OK at first thought that the lockdown would only be a matter of a few weeks. She did not want to get out of the habit of dressing in her Sunday finest for church. So the 82-year-old retired teacher, Principal and Superintendent decided from the very get-go that she was NOT going to let COVID interfere with her deeply held spiritual routine of celebrating Sundays in high fashion.
While it’s true that her Metropolitan Baptist Church in Tulsa moved their services to the virtual realm, Dr. Wimberly continued her tradition of combining Faith and Fashion even if she had to do it at home.
Dr. Wimberly explains: “I just decided at that point, I was just going to get dressed as if I was going to church, so I would not get in the habit of just slouching around.”
When weeks stretched to months, she decided it’d be fun to share her adventure by posting her weekly selfies in her gorgeous chapeaus and finery on Facebook. And she’s kept that routine for 52 Sundays in a row!
Time to have your socks knocked off with some of her outfits.
But soon she felt her friends and fellow parishioners were paying too much attention to her millinery finery and clothes, so she started adding Bible verses and devotional messages to her posts. This is her latest post from last Sunday:
Dr. Wimberly: “I wanted not only to keep myself motivated, but I wanted to help keep others motivated as well, to inspire them, encourage them, and kind of eradicate some types and forms of depression, isolation, fear and despair.”
Amazingly, to date she has not repeated a single outfit. Dr. Wimberly admits that when she began work in 1963 as a teacher back in Chicago, she decided she would buy only quality clothes that would stand the test of time.
Dr. Wimberly also keeps a calendar journal of what she’s worn to avoid repeats. But when interviewed she admits she hadn’t made her April calendar yet – so we’ll just have to wait and see what she wears for Easter.
But in the meantime – more amazing outfits!
Even if you don’t celebrate Easter, I suspect most of you will enjoy listening to Bing Crosby croon a seasonal tune:
No matter what you think of Tucker Carlson, we can all agree that his facial expressions run the gamut of emotions from A to B.
I thought that since he’s now the leading prevaricator for Fox “news” he could add a second one – but I was wrong!
Whenever I’ve see a photo of Tucker he always has the expression a dog makes when you try to explain quantum physics to him.
So it made perfect sense in Fox world to feature a live Picture-in-Picture of Carlson’s “panoply” of reactions during Pres. Biden’s recent address to the nation on the anniversary of the COVID lockdown.
The Twitterverse started mocking Fox’s decision, and soon it was clear to even Fox that it was a huge mistake. So they started running chyrons trying to convince viewers to stick around because Tucker was actually going to lie again say something shortly.
Sadly, they ran out of chyrons and started recycling them:
You would think that Fox and Tucker would have learned their lesson from a previous incident …
But obviously they did not.
Oh, well – it’s always fun to make fun of Tucker.