"A comedy where a sharp-witted suburban wife (Joan Allen) is left to raise her four headstrong daughters when her husband unexpectedly disappears. Sinking into anger, resentment and alcohol, things get even more hectic when her neighbor Denny (Kevin Costner), a once-great baseball star turned radio d.j., enters her life as a drinking buddy and romantic interest. The daughters are forced to deal with their mom's anger as well as their own problems."While the movie revolves around the mother and daughter relationships, on the DVD commentary track, the writer/director (surprisingly a man) said he had added the Kevin Costner character in order to have a male viewpoint/counterpoint. Else the movie would have been totally estrogen like the movie, "Steel Magnolias". As a guy I agree the male character was needed to balance the movie somewhat.
I liked the movie. However after reading some of the user's comments on the imdb web site, I have to agree with a number of plot holes and characterizations. Still, when watching the movie I didn't think about them. That is probably due to Joan Allen's and Kevin Costner's performances in the movie. Be careful in reading reviews of the movie as a number of them have spoilers and reveal stuff that would better appreciated by learning about them when watching the movie instead of prior to the movie.
Grape plants
While riding uptown the man who has quite a number of grape plants inside his deer proof fence on River Road was outside in his driveway. I stopped to ask him about growing grape plants and how his fared over the winter. Only today have I seen some signs of life in his plants. He said the reason his plants are fairing poorly is that he pruned them at the wrong time after he returned from wintering in Arizona. He told me the first few years of planting grape plants are critical as the winter is tough on the young plants until they get their root system established.
He has the deer fence because one year the deer came in and ate his entire grape crop. We also talked about beavers and trees he lost. His backyard borders the Whitefish River.
He is a landlord and was loading carpet and carpet pads into his pickup to take to the landfill. His previous renters, two women, trashed the place and he had lots of repair work to do. He said the best renters are single men. They don't trash the place and are clean.
Ear tags
Dan stopped by to check on how we can immobilize my "girls" in order to place ear tags on them. As I don't have a squeeze chute or head gate we'll try to squeeze a number of cattle into the end of my corral's loading chute and go from there. Dan recommended I return the two-piece tags and get a one-piece tag as the cattle won't be immobile and a two-piece tag has a greater chance of losing one of the pieces before the cattle is tagged.
Unlike the other day with Jan, while the heifers were initially cautious of Dan, they didn't run to the far side of the corral when Dan appeared.
After Dan left I let the cattle out into the yard. After sundown I herded them back into the corral. Again no problems herding them back into the corral. Today is the last they'll be in the yard as they ate all the grass down short. Hardly anything for me to mow with a lawn mower. (They did leave behind some fertilizer for my lawn!
)As the grass was very short by the end of the night the cattle started to look elsewhere in the yard for taller grass. I had a problem with a few of them pushing down and stepping over the simple fence around the well shed and where I had planted asparagus. At least they ignored the few asparagus plants that have come back this year and concentrated on the grass inside the fence.
Still I can't complain. Some of you may remember all the mischief the cattle got into last year when let into the yard. Today I forgot I had put the starting containers for my bell pepper plants outside on the patio. Fortunately the cattle ignored them.
While working in my garden I pulled the tall grass between the garden and the fence on two sides. I tossed the grass over to the cattle who quickly ate it up. They would follow along on the other side of the fence as I moved from one end to the other. A slight breeze was from behind the cattle and I got to smell their grassy cattle breath as they followed me. Their tongues were stained green by the juicy fresh grass that I tossed their way. I pulled some of the weeds growing in the part of the garden I hadn't dug yet but the cattle weren't as enamored with the weeds.
Beets
Tonight I ate the last of my garden beets from last year. I love beets, but I am glad I have finished all of them.
Garden
I finally started to plant my garden. I planted part of the lettuce. The rest of the lettuce will go in the ring by the well shed (and not planted with asparagus) as this area is close to a large pine tree and more shaded than the garden. I planted radishes, green onions, yellow-sweet onions, beets (another long row!
), carrots, parsnips, peas, pole beans, corn, and sunflowers. I had 10 sunflower plants pre-started in the house and those are the sunflowers I planted in the garden. Once I dig the rest of the garden I will plant a few more sunflowers from seed.It was getting dark (10 pm) when I finished watering what I had planted. I had to run the water slowly so as not to rearrange the seeds all over the place. Even so, each year I find plants growing in clusters with open gaps. *sigh*
Weather
Another hot day. 86 F - a new record high. I am so looking forward to cooler temperatures next week. I like 70 F - the 80s are just too darn hot.
Hang on... just as I am about to post this at 3 am it started to rain. That's a surprise! And welcome as it hasn't rained in a number of weeks, and with the hot weather it has been getting dry and a little smoky/hazy. The views of the mountains haven't been as clear the past few days. Oopps... well, that was short lived. The rain has quit just as I finished typing this.
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