The Social Pages Say I've Got The Biggest Balls Of All

Cotton balls, that is. Any other balls I may possess are strictly metaphorical in nature.




I've been documenting the growth of the cotton plants in the farmer's field behind my house. You can see past photos here and here.

This is what the field looks like right now. I love all the orangey-reds in the leaves.








Now for some pics from my yard...

A cardinal stopping by for a snack.


My honeysuckle is still popping out blooms. Hence, the hummingbirds are still around. That's a month later than they stayed last year. Saw one yesterday.


My mum plants are ENORMOUS. I have two in the back garden, this is one of them.



I really like the way the buds look when they're about to burst open :)



The back garden looks pretty much the same as when I showed it to you last month. Someone should really take that dead lily stalk out of there.

*looks over shoulder*

Really. Will someone please get that? Anyone?

*sigh*



And here's a truly scary sight, just in time for Halloween...



I'm such a lazy ass. But no one can see this atrocity but me. And that's only if I choose to open the blinds in my bedroom.

My okame cherry has filled back out with all that rain. Just in time for it to re-drop the leaves for the winter. *sigh* Love that dark, satiny bark though.



I wish my neighbour's boat wasn't in every shot of that tree. I'm just going to start telling people that it's my boat.

Last year my crepe myrtle leaves turned a fiery red-orange, and stayed that way for about a month before dropping the leaves. This year, most of the leaves are dropping without turning colour.



My poor butterfly bush got uprooted during the storms. It's only half uprooted though, so it's still growing. But it doesn't want to behave when I try and pull it back this way.



Toad lilies are going all out.



Some of the ageratum I had planted in the spring survived the temps of the summer, and bounced back.



More mums.



Some petunias. Man, I love the smell of those things. And they do really well as long as I water them every couple of days. No fuss.



And my holly bush is now covered in bright red berries!



I love it, it just looks so Christmassy!

Oh shit, I just said the C-word!

Oh shit!I just said shit!

I'm sorry!

Not really.

What a mood I'm in today, eh?

I might as well include the pics of the storms we had. I'm never going to get around to writing a blog about it.

I will say that it made my life hell at work, because I spent an entire shift trying to find enough garbage cans to catch all the leaks in the store. And that night I couldn't get home from work, because the flooding was so bad in my area that the police blocked off every route in, including all four lanes of the highway. Had to sleep on a generous co-worker's couch. Sucked. SUCKED.

The ibises loved it. Bastards.





How come pics of rain never turn out to look as bad as the weather actually is?





My neighbour's 10 year old apple tree was uprooted completely. It's still sitting in the neighbour's driveway because they don't know what to do with it. (they're just renting the house)




My house is at least up on a little higher ground than some in the area. These are pics my friend Jennifer (who lives just down the road) took at her house. Much more dramatic looking...





Her house looks like it's got a moat.



The weather THIS week has been bitchin'. Sunny. Comfortably warm. Nice cool breeze. Best. Vacation. Ever. And I still have 5 days!

Even Though You're Wearing Those Uptown High Heels...

"...I can tell from your giant step, you been walkin' through the cotton fields..."




Why is Max smiling?

He's smiling because we're getting a whole new crop planted in our back field this year!

And because he has nothing else to smile about. He's a demised feline, for goodness sake.



Every year I wait with bated breath (not baited, that would be pretty gross) to see what crop will be planted in that field.

This year, as you might have guessed from my quote, it's cotton!


Usually it's something boring like soybean. I mean really. Who cares about a tofu-field?




One year we did get corn! I felt like I was in a Stephen King movie. More than one Stephen King movie has some sort of evil field of corn in it.



Since Chuck's had this house though (which is about 7 years now), there has never been cotton. Guess it's about time in the ol' crop rotation to plant something different. Because it seems that every farmer's field in the area (probably owned by the same people) has cotton growing in it. And it seems to be doing way better in this drought than anything else is. Which is weird, because from what I understand, it usually requires a lot of water to grow.

Why do I like cotton so much? When September rolls around, it will look like a bed of snow has fallen all over the field. Like this one would have looked like if we'd waited a little while longer to take a picture of it. This one was on the way to Greenville...Chuck's hair was just growing in after the chemo. :)



I didn't even realize where cotton came from until a few years ago. Cotton growing on a plant?? Pish tosh! And I thought a Cotton Gin was a fancy drink!



No, not really. I just never really thought about where cotton came from. Being from Canada, it's weird to see something that I use to take my nail polish off with just growing on a plant outside my backyard.

Some fun facts about cotton:

~Cotton's been grown for over 5,000 years.

~The top cotton producing nation is China.

~Pesticides are heavily used with cotton. I guess to keep out these nasty little creatures, called boll weevils.


They will eat the hell out of a cotton crop. They entered from Mexico in 1892 (insert illegal immigration joke here), and caused a whole mess of destruction because they had no natural predators to take care of them. A huge effort to eradicate them came in the late 1970's, with advent of new types of pesticides.

~The English word “cotton" comes from the Arabic word qutun or kutun.

~US paper currency is 75% cotton.


~Cotton production drove the slave trade in the US (ok, so they're not all 'fun' facts). That's one of the reasons that the South was trying to hold on to slavery...they were convinced that the Southern economy would crash without slave labour to pick, gin and bale the cotton. With the invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin in 1793 (which was really an 'improvement' and not an 'invention', there were simple cotton gin-esque implements in India about 1,500 years ago), more cotton could be refined at a faster rate. So they needed more and more slaves to meet demand. Nasty, ugly, vicious cycle. Thank goodness humanity eventually won out over money.

~Cotton is a member of the Mallow family of plants.

~The leading cotton-producing states are Texas, California, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Arizona.

~ Development of synthetic fibers (especially polyester) hurt the cotton growing industry for awhile, with high demand from consumers starting in the 1960's.

That's right! That leisure suit you bought in 1976 was keepin' cotton down!


Incidentally, the world's first polyester factory is near here, just outside of Kinston, NC. We drive past it every time Chuck needs to go to a cancer appointment in Greenville. It was opened in 1953 by the DuPont family.

While I was taking pictures of the field this morning, a fire ant stung me right beneath my toenail. You can see the poison inching it's way down my whole foot in a red and puffy manner...it hurts like a mofo! My skin reacts strongly to minor insect stings.

I really suffer for my art.



Hm....someone needs a pedicuuuuure!


My title and song quote come from an old song that was remade by Old Crow Medicine Show that's called "Down Home Girl". I saw them live in early May...even if you're not a huge fan of this type of music, they put on a rollicking good show. And if you're not a fan of this music...you're crazy.

'Cause it's awesome.

Watch this video. Mistress Kyna commands it.