Penny Sanford Designs

A Pretty Shrub as Invasive as Kudzu!

Quick post on pictures I posted (now) last night on Facebook...a mystery flowering shrub that we HATE around here. Can you recognize what it is?

Gordon took this picture back on May 8th. Neither Unc nor I recognized the flower laden branches, so Gordon took Unc out to where he had taken the photo. Unc came back in laughing!

Take a closer look at the dainty fairy like blossoms. How could we possibly hate this flowering shrub? Granted, neither Unc nor I remember this shrub every blooming so profusely before. This must be special year for it!

Grandma requested a start of this shrub from one of her friends in Kilmichael, back in the 1940's. The lady said, "OK, but you will regret it". Truer words have never been spoken.

The stuff has the nature of a terrorist! It sneaks into your lovely fence plantings of roses or other shrubs or flower beds and puts down an extensive root system and then seemingly overnight, it shoots up six, eight, ten feet tall...or MORE! Extracting the darned things sometimes requires a tractor to pull it out by the roots!

We've cut it to the ground and saturated the stump with Root-B-Gone only to have it spring back to life the next year!

It is the common privet hedge, (LIGUSTRUM vulgare). Read how much this guy does NOT love this shrub either!  Garden centers still sell the stuff at ridiculously low prices, like 99 cents per plant or less. That should be a red flag as well!

So briefly what I learned about this plant that I rank among my most hated growing things along with Dock weed, cockleburr, Johnson grass, nut grass and Kudzu...is that the common privet hedge is HORRIBLE for people with allergies!

There are some vague herbal medicinal uses for this plant, but other herbs can do the same jobs, probably much better. The raw berries are poisonous for humans and probably pets.

Sure the birds love the berries, but that is how the darned thing is spread so far and wide, through bird poop. I'd rather plant something else for our birds!

If you want a hedge, think boxwood, think roses, think bamboo...ANYthing but the common privet hedge! (Unless you really dislike the people in your neighborhood and want to vex the neighborhood for generations to come!)

As you know, a post like this is not usual for me. I even love dandelions and many plants other people consider weeds. Some pretty flowering plants that I DO adore will be in a blog post very soon...to catch you up on what has been blooming around here this spring.

Bedtime!
Fondly,
Penny

THE most truthful commercial I've ever seen

I just heard a new Allstate Insurance Company slogan in one of their commercials:

"Just because you are insured does not mean you are covered".

Give Allstate an F+ for attempted honesty. They are no different than the rest of the insurance companies out there. It is like watching a bunch of grafters point spread disinformation and point fingers at each other!

The insurance industry made OBSCENE profits in the year of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2005.

"The companies that provide Americans with their homeowners and auto insurance made a record $44.8-billion profit last year even after accounting for the claims of policyholders wiped out by Hurricane Katrina and the other big storms of 2005, according to the firms’ filings with state regulators.

Top executives described the profit – an 18.7% increase over the previous year – as a fluke, the product of gains in other lines of insurance besides homeowners and a very good year for their investments.

They said that even with the increase, insurers face deep problems that can be fixed only by substantial premium hikes, a scaling back of commitments by several firms to the most disaster-prone portions of the country and, according to some, a greatly expanded role for the state and federal governments in insuring individuals against the largest of catastrophes."

That is an excerpt from a 2006 Los Angeles Times article.

Many of my friends and acquaintances were hit hard by Katrina. Loss of life, loss of health, loss of homes... so much loss. The insurance companies were so shrewd in wriggling out of their responsibilities.

"You are covered for wind damage, but your home was not turned into toothpicks by wind damage. It was the storm surge, and you are not insured for storm surge."

A Category 5 - landing at Cat 3 - Hurricane does not have wind???

Here on the farm in the early 1990's we survived Insurance Company Dishonesty and Fraud after a freak hail storm that destroyed all the crops and damaged all the farm structures. I won't even get into the shenanigans pulled on us, but it soured me on insurance companies for life.

Our experience came after 30 plus years of paying this company money for vehicle and building insurance on several houses and farm buildings. We had two lightning strike claims in that entire 30 years.

We would have been better served to put the premiums in a simple savings account. At least we would have had that 30 years of premiums to make repairs, far more than we received from the company.

I don't want to turn this blog into a bunch of rants, but that commercial was so arrogant for disaster survivors all over the country! I just had to blog it.

Ah, gee, this has boiled up all my anger and disgust from that insurance agent's dishonorable conduct so long ago. Forgiveness, letting go of the angst is an area, is something that I have to work on ALL the time.

Harboring that anger and unforgiveness only hurts me, not the one who did the dastardly deed. I have to repeatedly hand my unforgiveness over to God and ask for forgiveness for myself and then pray for my enemy. This area is truly HARD work for me.

"Lord, I pray for your VERY BEST for that insurance company and for the man who was very dishonest in his business dealings with us after the hail storm."

Forgiving him does not mean I have to forget what he did. It is also ok for us to choose to have no contact with the shyster or the company he represented.

... Shaking off the dust from the bottom of my shoes ... and moving forward.

After 26 years as faithful customer

i've been a loyal customer of Shell Oil Company for 26 years, since 1982.

No more.

Hubby has told me not to blog about this in anger. He's right... which is why I just deleted my rant after a few days of cooling off.

Buckle your seat belts folks, the next four, eight or 12 years are going to be very bumpy.

Now, I am looking for a gas company that is predominantly owned by Americans or that primarily sells gas made from American oil. If you know of one, please share with me!

Update: One of my readers emailed this site where many we can learn which  countries own which oil companies doing business in the US. Take it a step further and look here to learn whether the gas station you frequent gets that gas from a Terrorist-supporting country.

While you are all fired up and feeling patriotic, look here for many, many American-made products. Gordon and I will be making a concerted effort to Buy American as much as possible in the future, even if American made costs a bit more!

Someone, not Shell Oil, will get our business from now on. We're small consumers, but we have put 96,000 miles on the van since late 2004, so we probably use more gas than some folks.  Little customers like us do add up to make a company big.

I wonder how many of Shell's customers have been with them for 26 years? Oil company profits are so high that they don't give a thought to losing a customer like us.

Who wrote/sang the popular tune from the 70's, "It's a Crazy World"?  This site attributes the songwriting to Mac Mac Anally.  The part that plays often in my mind is this:

"Girls seem to think that they're the chosen ones
"Women choose to let well enough alone
"And it's their business til you stick your nose in once
"And then you've got yourself some problems of your own

"Chorus

"And it's a crazy world but I live here
"And if you can hear me singing so do you
"I'm turning out my nitelite feeling satisfied
"That there's nothing any one of US can do
"There's nothing any one of us can do"

Well, I do differ with the last two lines. We can pray. I've seen prayer work.

God says to pray for my enemies (like Shell Oil Company), so I'm gonna pray for "God's Best" for Shell Oil. "God's Best" hopefuy means Shell will have a humbling journey toward the goal of treating its customers with honesty and  respect!

I'm anything but a perfect Christian. Now I have to go back and ask Gordon to forgive me for exploding a MAD Grenade on him...and I need to forgive Shell Oil in my heart, defiantly tap my shoes to make the tainted dust fall off (figuratively, folks) and move on.

Shell who? Sea shells? I love sea shells!.......*wink*