Why I Must Fail

Ah, the month of June.  The beginning of summer.  New beginnings, new challenges.

Only in the blogging community can you find a blogging challenge which advertises itself as follows:

" It starts Monday, June 1. Get ready to blog daily for a month. It's an opportunity to flex your writing muscle, experiment with approaches that could fail, and share weird ideas with people who will understand."

Yes, this month, I must fail.

For new readers discovering me for the first time, let me introduce yourself, so you know why I must fail.

I started my blog in April of 2009 after a mass shooting in my upstate New York community, in an adult education classroom, that left 14 people dead and a community traumatized.   For the first two years, I blogged on, here and there, with no set schedule, and with almost no readers. I was ready to quit.  Then, on April 30, 2011, everything changed.  The then-significant other of a cousin,  a writer, told me about what was then called the WordCount Blogathon. I signed up hours before the deadline.

My first Blogathon post, on May 1, 2011, talked about the flooding of a favorite nursery of mine - a precurser to what would become a summer of flooding for a lot of upstate New York (and other parts of the Northeast).  That included the flooding of my community and my neighborhood (I was luckier than many).  My neighborhood ended up on the cover of a commemorative book published by our local newspaper, a fifteen minutes of fame none of us living in Westover, near Johnson City, New York, would have wanted. 

I would sooner forget parts of 2011, but not the Blogathon.

Now, in 2015, I face another time of decision.  If I think back on that first Blogathon, I remember how challenging it was to post something for 31 consecutive days.  More than once, I almost gave up.

The Blogathon had special theme days.  One day, I had to write a haiku.  I found I enjoyed that.  Another day was devoted to learning a software called Wordle, which makes word clouds.  I made my first word cloud for this challenge.  I even was challenged to have a guest blogger, something I never would have tried.  I succeeded.

The following year, I was challenged to join Twitter, which I did.  I am still active on Twitter.

Now, I am not growing as a blogger the way I would like.

I enjoy sharing my life in upstate New York with my readers, with pictures of flowers during our growing season and snow the rest of the time.  Farmers markets.  Discoveries during my exercise walks.  I have a seasonal feature on Wednesdays, a Local Saturday on Saturdays and Civil War Sunday on Sunday.  The 15th of the month, I join garden bloggers from around the world in a Garden Bloggers Bloom Day meme.

So now what?   I want to be able to retire in a few years (I am 62) and pursue a dream-the dream of snowbirding so I can avoid future harsh upstate New York winters.  But I need post-retirement income to do that.  I do not consider myself an entrepreneur, even though my grandfather was a businessowner, and my father was self employed for a year or two after he returned, a vet with a service connected disability, after World War II.

If they could do it, I can do it.  I can step out of my comfort zone and write.  I have several unfinished and unedited NaNoWriMo manuscripts on my computer. The time for talk is over. Intentions are nice, but only actions count.  So, follow me as I step out of my comfort zone in June.

I am seriously considering showing some of my other writing work on my blog, in addition to my normal blogging.  What I need to do is learn that I must learn to accept criticism and start to grow a thick skin.  As a blogger recently told me, "haters are going to hate."  If I fail, it means only that I haven't accomplished my goal yet.  I will not try.  I will do.

As Yoda in the Star Wars series once said, "Do, or do not.  There is no try."

Rhododendron, May 31, 2015

I leave you with one of my treasured flower pictures, a rhododendron on my property.

This is my first post for this year's Freelance Success/WordCount Blogathon.  If you would like to see me grow, please either follow me on my blog, or
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RamblinWithAm
Twitter (@RamblinGarden)

Spring Things - Lilacs and Roses

Today would have been my mother's birthday.  She passed when I was 12, back in the mid 1960's.

One thing I associate with her is the memory of the scent of the talcum powder she used - something called Lilacs and Roses.

Here in upstate New York, our lilac season is ending (the three varieties at my house are long gone) and the rose season is barely beginning.  In fact, I haven't seen any roses blooming here yet, but I did find some, this past Saturday, an hour from here on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York.

In honor of my mother's birthday, I'd like to share with you, some pictures of - what else - lilacs and roses.

This was the only lilac on my property when we purchased it over 25 years ago.  We share a hedge with a next door neighbor who, sadly, has dementia.  When he was himself, he used to let us pick lilacs from "his side" and I appreciated that so much.

This year, for some reason, it barely bloomed.

We planted this lilac some three or four years ago. It's doing well.  The only problem is, it was supposed to be yellow. It's a pale lavender but we really don't mind.  The name of the variety is lost to my memory.

We share this white lilac with our other neighbor.

Not my lilac - but I loved the color.

The scent of all these lilacs reminds me of my mother and her beloved talcum powder. But, strangely, as much as I love lilacs (and my spouse also), our son can't stand their fragrance.  To him, lilacs smell like garbage - literally.  There are some others who have the same issue.

As for roses - so many modern varieties have little or no scent.  But, at Cornell University, we found this rugosa rose just opening up - and it already had such a magical fragrance.

Scents can bring back such wonderful memories, can't they?

Happy birthday, Mom - wherever your spirit is.  I inherited my green thumb from you although there is a story behind that.  (Anyone want to read about it?)

What kind of memories does a particular scent bring back for you?

Spring Things - On The Street Where Rod Serling Lived

Roses are blooming in upstate New York, and I think writer Rod Serling would approve.

Today I spent some time photographing roses and some other flowers on and near the street where Serling, best known for his TV Series "The Twilight Zone", grew up.

And now, I have fallen in love with a house on that street.  Better yet, it's for sale! (a little out of my price range, though, alas).  I can dream though, because dreaming is a lot less work than what the upkeep of this lovely perennial garden must take.

Enter through the trellis, and on both sides, you are greeted by hostas.  But there's enough to look at even without entering the grounds, which I would never do.

This is what greeted me on the outside fence.

Fragrant roses!  I am no expert - I "think" this is what is called a cabbage rose, but am not 100% sure.

Here's another rose.  It had some fragrance, too.

Here was a variegated plant - it reminded me of a euphobia and, indeed there are variegated euphobias with pink flowers.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the street, what I think is a mock orange was in bloom. (I couldn't approach it for a sniff, however).

And finally, several blocks away, the first clematis of the season.

The house?  It's apparently listed as a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house, with lots of updates, built in 1920.  It has a huge wrap around porch.  It will be perfect for someone - a nice family, perhaps. Just not me, in this season of my life.

But, it's nice to dream, on the street where Rod Serling used to live.

Nature's Creamsicle

A creamsicle -  combine orange and vanilla. Orange sherbert and vanilla ice cream was one of my favorite combinations as a child, and it still is.

In nature, we have a lot of color schemes.  Selective breeding has given us some additional ones.

So, let's see what type of creamsicle Nature has prepared for us over the past couple of weeks here in upstate New York.

For the white, nature and man has both provided.

Unknown flowering shrub, Otsiningo Park, Binghamton, New York. (I'd love to know what this is.  The leaves looked lilac like.)

Wild blackberry, Vestal Rail Trail, Vestal, New York.

A beautiful azalea or rhododendron shrub, smothered in white flowers (Westover, near Johnson City, New York).

For the orange, we have this poppy, towards the end of its bloom.

And finally, what is probably a Mollis azalea (west side of Binghamton, NY).  The sun angle was wrong, I tried to get rid of the glare with my Photoshop Express on my iPhone. The orange doesn't display well in this retouched photo but it was definitely orange.

What's blooming where you live?

Spring at Last! Spring at Last!

Every plant in my front and back yard tells a story.  And they were out telling their stories this past weekend.

This primrose was rescued from the mid winter clearance rack of Wegmans several years ago. I planted it out when weather permitted and it has thrived since.

The first time I ever experienced primroses was during a trip to Seattle in February of 1977.  It seemed like every streetcorner had a planting of them.  Just seeing flowers in bloom in February was enough to get my heart pounding.  In Seattle, we also saw flowering cabbage and kale for the first time.  I love them, but we have a big groundhog problem, and they eat them right up.  So, all of our plants have to be groundhog-resistant.

This, another primrose, was rescued from my mother in law's yard when the overzealous lawn maintenance company who tends her property decided to go on a search-and-destroy mission, keeping things tidy at the expense of any unsuspecting plant that even remotely resembled a weed.

This is a variegated brunneria.  This came from Gibbs Garden Center in LeRaysville, Pennsylvania.  The nice thing about Gibbs is that they are in a harsher zone than we were, so anything that grows there will grow here.  I love the small blue flowers.  Much of our back yard is shady, and it can be a challenge to find perennials for that type of area.  The woman at Gibbs taught us how to garden in shade.  Unlike sun perennial gardening, you go for interesting leaf color or structure rather than large, showy flowers.  This plant is a perfect example of that principal.

 A white hyacinth, and I wish blogs had "smell-o-blog" because the scent of this flower could fill an entire room.

These are some of the daffodils we have.  Our daffodils are a mixture of early, mid season and late.  We get ours from a mail order nursery, Brecks.

Spring....I so wish the weather forecasts are wrong, the sun comes out, and the flowers continue to bloom.