the rich, 80, and misc pics

Beauty berries beginning to turn their glorious deep purple.

In case you ever thought rich people didn’t live in a completely different universe while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet, a rich guy in Houston who lives on River Oaks Blvd., the place for the obscenely wealthy, just bought the 15,000 sq ft mansion next door for 15.5 million dollars and plans to tear it down because…he never liked that house (though I hesitate to call it just a house). 

He plans to combine his property, an acre, with the newly acquired acre and put in an English garden and build a pool house. An English garden in Texas, on the Gulf Coast Plains. We do not have the climate for an English garden though I suppose if he went with native perennials he could get something comparable. Whatever, the guy can buy a $15.5 million mansion just to tear it down he definitely has enough money to hire a slew of gardeners to maintain it. The only saving grace is that he plans to donate $4 million in usable materials to Habitat For Humanity, that and one less mansion and more flowers and trees.

Baby steps on the new shadow box which I still haven’t received. I ordered it last week and thought it was supposed to come on Monday, but apparently not until the weekend. Meantime I transferred the individual drawings to watercolor paper.

White wing doves continue to mob the bird feeder on the days I fill it. Anywhere from 5 - 8 crowded on it with just as many on the ground and twice as many in the trees above it and when they’re not mobbing the bird feeder they’re mobbing the birdbath. 

I have to go out there every now and then and shoo them away so that the little birds have a chance. I’ve had two unusual visitors to the bird feeder today, a blue jay earlier and just now a flicker.

This is my favorite little water sprinkler. It gets moved all around the yard and when I remove it from whichever hose and am through watering for the day I try to put it back in the empty pot in the barn that I keep small misc yard stuff in so that I know where it is the next time I want to use it. I don't always remember to do that and so I spent Saturday looking all over for it. I looked in all the places in the yard it could possible be and could not find it. So Sunday I got online and ordered a new one after searching for it again even though I figured it would turn up eventually. I walked out Monday morning, turned the corner around the garage and there it was in plain sight on this overturned bucket right next to a pot with a plant in it I water nearly every day. I must have walked right past it a dozen times. Well, now I have two.

I was laying in bed last night thinking about Dolly Parton dying at 80 yesterday, the 25th (I already did one eulogy this week and so many have already written about what a shining soul Dolly was). She was only 4 years older than I am. It was a very sobering realization. And now this morning we learn that Tim Curry also died yesterday, also 80. Do I only have four more years left? Or seven, Joanne was 83. Eighty seems to be a threshold I am rapidly approaching. I looked in the mirror the other day, something I don’t really do that often besides just a glance, and I thought I looked older than I did just a few days previous. It seems that’s how it goes, maintaining a look and then overnight new wrinkles appear, bags under the eyes not there one day are there the next. While my hair still has more color than gray, the gray continues to creep in. Even so, I’m aiming for late 90s and have two women on my father’s side that bode well for that.

And last a little green tree frog hanging out on the moon. The moon being that part of the carved glass set of windows in my bedroom.