short stories 9: the grandboy

the movie

Heading back to the city this week to do a quick job, a fireplace screen. We'll stay a couple of days, have a beer with a friend and then head home.

We're also returning the grandboy who has been with us all week. I enjoy spending time with him when he's not in the midst of his siblings and he likes getting away from all the girls. Too much estrogen in his tiny little house.

I rousted him up early Tuesday to help my sister and me move all those pot plants and small yard art over to her new house, 8 truck loads, then turned him loose to go hang out with his buds here in the country.

After moving my sister, we went to the movie, went to see Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It wouldn't have been my first choice, nor my second or third. In fact it would show up somewhere near the bottom of the list, but his visit isn't about me and that's what he wanted to see. Not much of a plot and in fact I only caught one word out of about 20 of the dialog, but, it turned out, I didn't need to hear the dialog to understand what was going on. It was entertaining just for the sheer amount of explosive destructive power it exhibited. Whoa. They totally trash Chicago, that alone was worth the price of admission.

the storm

Later, the boy spent a lot of time in the afternoons swimming in the collapsable pool we have, round and round and round.

oops, wrong picture

Sitting there reading, keeping him company while he circled the pool I watched this storm move in.

I had high hopes of getting some rain out of it, it was very rumbly and I could see the rain in the distance. But no such luck. It was just south enough of us that we didn't get any. Town did though.

We did get this nice sunset out of it however.

the lake

Sunday we thought we would check out Lake Texana which has a small state park on it. It's close, about a 45 minute drive and it was a very nice little park. I wouldn't mind camping out there in the fall, sometime when it is not so hot.

The grandboy was going to go swimming but the sign said 'swim at your own risk' and no one else was in the water.

This might have been why.

We rented a canoe but only stayed out on the lake for about 30 minutes. Just too damn hot. The seats were so hot, we couldn't sit on them right away, had to slowly inch our way onto them. It was his first time in a canoe. Wah wah wah. The boat is rocking, the seat is hot, my arm is tired.

the turtle

Yesterday I took Big Mama (our 21 year old red ear slider turtle) out of her pond and put her on the ground. Her pond is in the fenced little back yard and I'm reasonably sure that I have shored up all the places where she might get out. Reasonably sure. You have to remember that she is quite the escape artist. Considering all the times she has gotten out and been well down the block, I'm surprised we still have her.

She gets rangy every year. You could just see it in her little pea brain...gotta go, gotta go...so I scooped her out of the pond and put her down. In the city, she had a much smaller pond but she could get out and roam her little yard too. Now that we have moved her to the country, she has a much bigger pond but no yard. I'm working on that. Can't sink the pond because of the tree roots so somehow I have to provide her access.

Anyway, she wanted to dig. When she needs to lay eggs she digs a hole in the ground with her back legs, drops the eggs and then covers them up again, all with her back legs. I don't think she has any fertile eggs, it's been about 8 years since we had a male though they can stay fertile for years after mating. But she will still lay an egg or two I think. One year after we first gave her her yard, thinking it would be cool to get baby turtles, I inadvertently dug into two clutches of eggs, but I don't think the surviving eggs ever hatched. At least I never saw any baby turtles.

She moved all around the yard, stopping to dig now and then. Because of the drought, the ground is about as hard as a rock. No way that turtle is going to dig a hole in that. I tried putting her on a patch that I knew was mostly sand, or in the flower bed where it was more friable. Nope. Wasn't having it.

The grandboy decided that he would loosen a patch of dirt for her with the 'garden claw', a pronged device for loosening up packed dirt. Basically he followed her around and she ignored every patch he loosened. We would pick her up and put her on them. She'd sit there for a minute and then charge off for the next hard-as-concrete spot.

We finally left her alone for long enough that she dug, I hope, for long enough to satisfy whatever urge she was under. After leaving her alone for several hours, she had moved on and so I put her back in her pond.