Why not cram three completely different stories in one blog post? Sure, I’m a wordy person, after all. Plus, I have stuff to do and it’s a beautiful day, so here goes.
Mad!
So, we need to wear scrubs at the Hearts Homes and Hands office much of the time, and the first ones I ordered supposedly fit right, but were a bit form-fitting to me. I ordered some more, including some of the incredibly comfy scrub yoga pants in happy colors.
They arrived today. I excitedly opened the package. Hmm. This looks pretty somber. What the heck?
Pretty consistent.
In the delivery were five black scrub shirts. A couple are pretty cute and they ARE in my size (or at least the size I prefer). But, hey, I wanted DC Action Heroes, some sloths, and some paisley! And no lime green pants! Hmph.
Customer Support said to send an email with a photo of the delivery and the packing slip (which had the right stuff on it). I sure hope I see my actual order soon. According to Kathleen and Lee, they’ve messed up most of our orders. Maybe we should try another company?
Glad!
There is more I am glad about than I am mad about today. First, I asked the Alexa thing to play “the Who” and instead it is playing WHO. Well, GEEZ, no one told me they had a new album in December! And it’s so Pete Townshend in its lyrics. I am one happy person. If this is their last album, it will be a great way to go. (Still missing the half of the band who are no longer with us, of course.)
After a long day of working through my mental paralysis, I came home to do the usual chicken and horse chores. I decided to really look hard at what I saw on the path and just live in the moment.
Beautiful crow poison blossom
It helped more than I thought it would to immerse myself in the life on the ranch. There were so many bees in the blooming clover and so many butterflies on the flowers and so many birds and so many bugs! The 5 Vitamin Bs: Blossoms, bees, butterflies, birds, and bugs.
evening primrose
these look like stars
fetching vetch
spider web blown by wind
shiny
The most common butterflies were Buckeyes, checkered whites, and sulphurs. I also saw a hairstreak.
buckeye and little wasp
checkered white
upside down
mating
And in the bird department, I was extra excited to hear a familiar call. The dickcissels are back! They’re one of those birds whose numbers are dwindling, so it makes me happy to know they like it here.
dickcissel
Sparrow of some sort
Blackbird flying
I also enjoyed the sounds of sparrows rushing out of the grass and the red winged blackbirds calling and flying around. They’re everywhere right now.
I enjoyed a lot of interesting bugs, but my favorite is this Texas flower scarab. It was vigorously digging away in this thistle.
Thistles have friends
Just enjoying the light on the grass, along with my friends the butterflies, bees, birds, and bugs got me in a better frame of mind. Thanks, Mother Nature!
Do you care about our planet and the life it supports? Then, stop reading this blog post and go order this book: Nature at Its Best: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, by Douglas W. Tallamy. Consider it an early Earth Day present to yourself and the Earth. Get ready for some gushing now.
Why encourage caterpillars? Birds need them to make more birds!
Wow, this is a great book, which you might guess, given that I devoured it in a weekend. It’s got proper footnotes and references and such, but is written more for a lay audience than Behave! was. (Since I really don’t want to take pictures of the pictures in the book, I’ll share my own happy nature pictures from the weekend to encourage readers to make environments where they can see these for themselves, like the book describes!)
This is the book you want to give people who are not naturalists or environmental activists to explain to them that a) all those horrid weeds and bugs are what’s keeping the world alive and b) you can make a beautiful planting area on your property that encourages birds and other wildlife without going to a lot of trouble and effort.
While not part of creating a landscape of natives, donkeys and horses have a place, at least in my heart. (Spice and Fiona)
Tallamy makes so much sense in this book! Wow! He calls using native plants in naturalistic, yet attractive, settings creating Homegrown National Park. The main point of the book is that if people did this instead of planting endless swaths of turfgrass and non-native plants, we would be well on our way to saving the beauty all around us, benefiting us (we get to watch birds, butterflies, and animals) and the planet (diversity will be maintained, etc.). And Tallamy points out that turfgrass does have its place, for making nice paths.
Urban wildlife! Duck party at the Pope Residence.
I especially enjoyed all the beautiful photos he includes in Nature at Its Best, to show the kinds of sights you can see if you just make an appropriate setting. And that’s important, because exposing kids (and adults) to the natural world right where they live will make such a huge impact (as opposed to visiting nature in very carefully structured short trips). I say yes to all this, as do my fellow Master Naturalists.
Engelman Daisy
Texas Yellow Star
By not mowing the entire roadside, we get to enjoy these flowers on walks. This is verbena.
You just can’t help but get all fired up and ready to drag in some native trees and shrubs and stick a rotting log or two around the place for moths to pupate in. And, conveniently, Tallamy provides links to two excellent websites to help you select what you should plant where YOU live:
Native Plant Finder: uses your postal code to help you find trees and herbaceous plants for hosting caterpillars. This is EXTREMELY cool.
Plants for Birds: same deal, but for hosting birds. I’ve already looked up both my houses.
Don’t worry, we are just using up the last of the red hummingbird food. We’ll make more of the correct kind!
I’m impressed that the work of one person, Kimberly Shropshire, created the original database for these, working with Tallamy. She must be an amazing person!
Honest, this book encourages citizen science at its BEST. I’d really like to spread the word about this resource. If you know people who enjoy nature and gardening, please share this post or the name of the book. And order it, even if just for the pretty pictures!
Those of you who prefer novels to nonfiction, rest easy. My next book is a fun historical novel.
I’m not entirely sure how it was accomplished, but yesterday Easton went to a Buc-Ees parking lot and got a whole lot more f crawfish and oysters, along with traditional sides. I’m told there was a lot of mask wearing and social distancing involved, which relieved me.
Yum.
While the mud bugs we’re getting fetched, Kathleen and I found ripe dewberries and picked enough for a cobbler. I’m looking forward to more dewberry creations! There are lots more ripening.
More yum.
I was pretty happy to eat lots and lots of my favorite dishes.
Happy me.
The chickens got corn cobs, which they also liked a lot (no photo of that).
Happy Kathleen.
I enjoyed watching Kathleen play with crawfish. She also set some free in a pond (where there already are some).
Very happy Kathleen.
It was just great to relax and have some fun to break up all our working and isolating. I feel really, really lucky.
Fun being had by me and Chris.
Since there’s not much else to say, I’d like to thank everyone for being kind for me and treating me like one of the gang, while Lee stayed upstairs not feeling great (but not coronavirus symptoms). Enjoy the pictures.
Many many crustaceans. The cooking broth was really good. It had citrus in it. The dogs wanted some. Always happy when I have oysters.
Ya know, it’s been a long time since we got Penney. We need another dog. Look, it’s Gracie Lou!
A white dog in a white garage.
Stop laughing. It’s actually Kathleen’s dog that they brought back from Yorktown. She’s getting up there in age, bit still perky and cute. She’s a dachshund mixed with maybe a Maltese.
Hey!
We are so glad she’s with people again rather than just getting fed every day. Right now she’s living with the “kids” in the garage while we wait for Penney to be nice. Of course, she’s the problem!
I just want to rest and be cute. Make Penney go away.
All the other dogs like her just fine. Vlassic really likes having a fellow small dog. They’re opposites, with his short black hair and her long white hair.
Nicole introduces the two sausage dogs.
I think we’ll have fun together until Kathleen and Chris go to the Ross house. Welcome, Gracie!
That’s how I’m getting by right now. How about you? I celebrated finishing that 40-day project by not writing anything yesterday. I was blissfully involved in a work project that takes all my concentration and passes time quickly, which was a real relief, but left no time for blogging here. Everyone needs an occasional break.
I’ll just keep fiddling while the boat goes down. At least the sunset’s pretty.
As if the days didn’t blur together badly enough these days, I’m in a holding pattern on lots of things right now. Just taking one step at a time is not only all I’m able to do, but the right thing to do right now. I’ll get back to figuring out the future plans and options later, when my head’s clearer (all my stuff is just related to various jobs and their various stresses, nothing horrible).
Randomness and Birds
It’s been nice to have Kathleen doing “stress cooking.” I like it when someone cooks to take their mind off things. She made me the best baked chicken on a bed of collard greens last night. I truly love collard greens (weird southern girl thing), and these may be the best I ever ate. I’m so grateful that she and Chris are here helping me and Lee out right now.
The spring air is making everyone sniffly here, but it’s really been nice to see what kinds of creatures are doing their regular things. My friend Donna, who is not a tech person, wrote a little blog on this topic, if you want some more nice photos. I’m really happy to see her getting out of her comfort zone.
I’m not sure what kind of moth this little guy will grow up to be, but wow, what a pretty caterpillar!
In fact, just this morning I was thrilled to see that bluebirds are nesting in the dead tree by the road again this year. There used to be woodpeckers in there, so I guess they made a nice house. The phoebes are nesting in our garage and spend most of their days screeching PHOEBE at each other and eating bugs. They are a lot of fun to watch.
The phoebes ate dozens of bugs while I was on the phone at my ranch office last evening.
The bug population is doomed around the Hermits’ Rest, or at least less awful than it could be, thanks to the handy birds. The scissortails are back at work, and there’s nothing prettier than watching a male go after a bug. The swallows are in full force, as well as those phoebes. I watch the little sparrows go after bugs every afternoon when I go feed the horses. Just think how many mosquitoes and other bugs we’d have after all this rain if we didn’t have our avian buddies!
Producing pollen this week is the prickly ash. Go tree, go!
Today I’ll head out and see what new is blooming. I’ve seen a couple of winecups, and we have our eyes on the dewberries. Yum. Back to basics. It’s good for you.
Yeah, it was a long night here. We are rejoicing to be here and making Easter dinner. And rejoice is, predictably, the final UU Lent word.
It started around 9 pm, when Chris and Kathleen were sitting on the front porch with the dogs. Carlton and Penney suddenly took off. There were barks, then a yelp, and they came back. Penney was rolling around. She’d been skunked.
We are faster than a waddling skunk.
Then everyone ran around trying to keep her off the furniture. Kathleen bathed her in ketchup, which was really nice of her. Carlton only stank a little. He’s so fast he can avoid skunk spray.
Those of you who haven’t been quarantined your whole lives have probably heard this saying before. It’s the first thing that popped into my head when I saw that today’s UU Lent word is bloom.
Let’s see how to do that. Image by @dmotif via Twenty20.
It being spring in glorious central Texas, you see blossoms everywhere. They look especially vibrant this year, since it’s been cloudy or rainy most of the time, and there is a lot of very green grass to contrast with it. I don’t think they are what I’m going to talk about today.
Bloom is a verb. When a plant blooms, it puts all its energy into reaching out to other plants, insects, birds, and animals. It sends pollen out to make seeds. Then the females put even more energy into taking what they got and making fruit.
That’s how I see the idea of blooming where you’re planted. Just like a plant, we don’t get to choose where we do our growing. Some of us get nice rich soil and lots of nurturing, others of us get placed on the sidewalks of life.
Burr clover can bloom on the driveway.
Right now a lot of us are planted in an isolated place. I’m even in a basement, for heaven’s sake. What is helping me a lot is taking the situation I’m in and learning from it. While I’m all cozy in here, I’m thinking of ways to be a better person, do my work better, and contribute to my community.
Blue-eyed grass is one of my favorite signs of spring at the ranch.
I’m planted right here, Mommy. I’ll bloom later, okay? I’m also metaphorically exhausted.
When I bloom, I’ll be able to make the best possible flower, and we can all do that, no matter where we’re starting from. You take what you’re given and make the best of it, or not, I guess.
Let’s hope that the fruit we eventually make from all the introspecting, preparation, and hard work we are doing to grow and bloom will be sweet, nutritious, and strong, so we can plant more ideas.
I’m metaphorically worn out now. Are you? What do you think about when you think of blooming?
For some reason, I seem to do worse blogging about these “churchy” words like grace and mercy than I do with stuff like rain. But today I got mercy. All I’ve got done so that we all deserve some mercy right now, from each other and our spiritual leaders.
Hmm, I don’t think this is the right holiday.
Oh yeah, Palm Sunday greetings to my Christian friends.
Now I’ll tell you about the mercy I received today, which was that kind Easton saw me struggling to build our new patio furniture for the balcony at the Pope house. He made all four chairs in the time it took me to make two tables. How merciful.
Little rocking chairs. And a tiny table.
I did manage to build rolling drawers and a filing cabinet for my office all by myself. When Chris gave me an electric screwdriver I sped up.
I need help getting the drawers in. But I built it!
I got matching bookcases for my office and Lee’s. They still need to get built, and will require two people. We must be getting close to move-in time if I’m building furniture!
Drawers already in use holding my printer.
So, I’m looking for stories about mercy, if you have any, because I’m all out of stories. I do like patio furniture, though.
Today’s UU Lent word is rain. Let’s see if it’s as unpopular as “reach” was (yesterday was my lowest number of blog visitors in a LONG time). It’s all good, though, that’s the least of my worried! As for rain…
Rainy morning this morning in a strangely empty Round Rock, Texas. Photo by Amy Mathews-Muttwill, whose husband Thomas has a birthday today, so she was going to get donuts.
It’s been raining a lot for the past month or so. Here in the middle of Texas, we hope that happens every spring, so the tanks (ponds) fill up and the creeks flow for a while. The trees get their yearly long drink of water, and everything gets ready for two or three months of no rain come summer.
I spotted all these raindrops yesterday. I like them as much as “old greenbeans” (who is really Elaine) does.
Last year was the wettest year Lee ever recorded in our gauge, until the rain totally stopped for quite a while. We’ve learned to enjoy the intense green and all the wildflowers in March and April, then to have a different kind of enjoyment as it gets all brown and crispy later.
When it rains this much, I’m okay with it stopping. This is Walker’s Creek by the ranch doing its imitation of a river, April 11 2018 (the day I started this blog). Waterfront living at its finest.
I Like Rain
Lee and I used to always say, “I like rain,” to each other, after we said it at the same time early in our courtship. It was a bonding moment. I have one of those personalities that would be fine living in a damp environment, like Seattle or Ireland. Back when I had Irish inlaws, they’d apologize for the rain there, but it was mostly a light drizzle that made all the roses grow and kept the fields green. I loved it.
Rainbow in Northern Ireland. This is the kind of sight I remember from further south. Image by @joemelendez via Twenty20
And when it rains a lot, there’s always a chance of a beautiful rainbow! When the kids were little and we’d drive all over Ireland, we saw some doozies in places like the Dingle Peninsula. Good memories!
When I was a kid in Gainesville, Florida, we’d love it after tropical storms came through. We would have really big puddles and lots of water in the ditches in front of our yards. We’d get pieces of plywood and spend hours skimming in the water. Our parents would repeatedly tell us there were bad things in the water, but hey, a little ringworm was a small price to pay for all that fun.
Nope, none of these ever wandered up the ditches in Gainesville. We had a canal behind our house in south Florida, though, and it featured gators and water moccasins and such.
In high school, I lived in south Florida (Plantation, yeah I know it’s a dumb name for a town). There it also rained a lot. The typical pattern was to be all nice and sunny until later afternoon, when thunderstorms would come through for an hour or two. That always coincided with the time that 70s teen girls wanted to lay out in their bikinis and get their suntans. Probably it was Nature’s way of trying to prevent our future wrinkles and skin cancers. That rain was always warm, and if it wasn’t thundering, we’d often stay in the pool and enjoy the rain there (almost everyone had a pool back then, even the lower-middle class families like us).
A familiar sight from when I was a teen. You’d watch the rain coming down the street. Image by @cr819081 via Twenty20
No wonder I like rain. I have no idea where all those memories came from, but since I typed them, I’ll leave them here. It’s nice to think about good times in the past, anyway. It’s a good distraction.
Penney loves her little pond, which is all full thanks to the rain for the past few weeks.
So, go ahead! Share your memories about rain. Are you like Pickle, Anita’s dog, who truly loathes rain and wetness? Or are you more like Penney, who is grateful rain makes her swimming hole bigger?
The Hermits' Rest 