Fair warning: the reason I wrote nothing in any of my blogs yesterday is that even when I was resting I was doing stuff! Since I’m not at the computer yet, I’ll just summarize and write more later.
Vehicles
Friday was spent driving all over the county with Lee and Mandi looking for a good used car for her, and seeing if we could find a replacement for our huge diesel truck that we could actually use around Cameron.
We found that I like a Chevy Traverse and Lee likes Suburbans, which are still too giant for me. Unfortunately Lee couldn’t get the trade-in he wanted on the truck, so we walked away. But al least I realized that a smaller SUV was okay for me and at least some Chevy vehicles aren’t plasticky.
The drive was worth it, though, because the countryside on the back road to Rockdale was gorgeous.
Enjoying Spring
Most of the weekend so far has been busy, but we also have taken lots of time to sit on the porch and enjoy the beautiful weather. Finally it flooded during the week and not on Saturday!
While sitting, we’ve watched a barn swallow couple work on their nest. They go to a mud puddle, gather a bit of mud, fly to the nest, and carefully apply it to the nest or wall. It takes a while! The nest has doubled in size since last week.
They keep working when just Lee and I are there, but Mandi must sit too close to them, because they just swoop for her. The little video shows the bird as she leaves the nest. Action shot!
The meadow
Since both lawn mowers are broken at the moment, our house is surrounded by tall grass and flowers. The pasture behind us is resting, and its grass is so tall that the Vrazels in their huge truck looked like a boat floating on a sea of grass this morning. You couldn’t see the tires.
After a stressful but fun time at the Master Naturalist Earth Day Celebration (more on that later), I needed to de-stress and strolled through the high grass and flowers with the dogs.
Wow, there was so much to see! Many pipevine swallowtails and black swallowtails were out, along with lots of those huge, loud native carpenter bees. We have many native bees here in addition to lots of honeybees.
I also found two flowers I’d never seen before. One is a tiny flower that iNaturalist insists is a dwarf blue-eyed grass. It’s rather pink and hides in the grass, which may be why I missed it before. The regular blue-eyed grass is very showy, and a joy to see.
The other one is Texas prairie parsley. We only have one plant, but it’s quite striking. It would have been mown if the mowers were working!
I also found our winecups, looking good.
The paintbrushes are spectacular still, so I got a good picture for our Facebook page.
Thankful for Nature’s restorative powers today. And I wish those of you who celebrated Passover this weekend or Easter today, much peace and love.
