surprise!

Yesterday was full of surprises. I left the house at 7:30 to go with my friend who is battling cancer to her doctor’s appointment two hours away. I do this to keep her company on the long drive there and the long drive back, plus it gives us extended girl time but it pretty much takes up the whole day. 

When she dropped me off at home I came in through the garage door and glanced to my right to see this IN MY HOUSE!

I keep the door to the fenced little backyard open when the weather is nice to get fresh air and listen to the birds and since I don’t have a screen door it allows the cat and dog to come and go as they please. And also, apparently, snakes. Now, I’m not afraid of snakes, by far the majority are harmless to humans, but I still get that automatic jolt of fear that seems inherent in humans when I come up on them unexpectedly. So when I saw this one just chillin’ about 8’ in from the open back door my immediate reaction was to yell ‘there’s a snake in the house’ which brought Marc into the room. We were pretty sure at first look that it was a harmless rat snake but rat snakes and copperheads have similar coloring. Copperheads which are venomous have a distinctive patterning, a triangular shaped head, vertical eye slit pupils, and only get about 30” long. Rat snakes vary in color and pattern, have round eye pupils and can get up to 7’ long but I wasn’t going to get close enough to see its pupils.

At this point the snake had not moved remaining motionless so I got a long walking stick and nudged it to see if it would strike. It didn’t but it did unwind enough to see that it was at least 4’ long so yeah, rat snake. I very gently and slowly used the walking stick to slide it towards and out the door. It didn’t object and it moved under the metal plant stand against the side of the house where it stayed for about 20 minutes and the next time I looked it was gone.

A very handsome specimen.

This is not the first time I’ve found a snake in the house. It’s happened at least twice before. The first time was soon after we had bought this place, same room, a much smaller and similarly colored snake I saw when I looked down from the couch where I was sitting with my feet up. The second time was a few years ago when a green ribbon snake found its way in through the open back door.

The second surprise of the day was when the mail came. I got a letter from Frank Hofer, a consultant and accounts manager with a reputable Investment Bank in Canada. He found my name in a search for the next of kin of a deceased customer of his bank, one Allan Abbott, a real estate investor and precious stone dealer, who lived and died in London, a Cancer Victim from a COVID 19 attack in 2020. Since no one has come forward to claim the $9,500,200.00 in his estate and all efforts to find next of kin have failed, Frank, out of the goodness of his heart, proposes to present me as next of kin to claim this money and it will only cost me 50% of the $9+M. Only fair, you know, since he’ll be doing all the work. I need only reply via his email for further clarification and details. Seems legit. Here’s Frank’s not sketchy at all signature.

All my worries are over! $4 1/2 million transferred directly into my account! 

a dream and spring in the yard

I dream. We all do. I used to be better at remembering my dreams but now the first conscious thought after I start to wake and poof, the dream is gone. This morning though, I managed to hang onto the last part of the dream at least. I say last part. It’s an assumption that there was more that preceded what I remember. This is what I remember…There was a small group of us, all women, in my bedroom and I was walking around naked. We were all going to go to a beach or bay or something and I said I guess I should put some clothes on and one of the women told me I should put some underpants on at least and they all left without waiting for me to get dressed. It took me some time to find and put on clothes and when I finally got there I was so annoyed I didn't go sit with them but decided to walk around the perimeter of this beach and ran into my brother and his wife and, separately, some other people I knew. Then I was leaving with someone and a woman was following after us but she was walking slower and we were about 20’ ahead of her when she called to us to wait for her to catch up. I turned around and said, you mean like y’all waited for me. I think it was the woman who told me to at least put on some underwear. I haven’t dreamed about being naked in decades but I didn’t seem to be concerned about it.

Today is cold and overcast which makes me not want to play outside. 

The rest of this post is pictures of the yard and what’s in it. Several of the photos are cropped way down to eliminate the rude ass words the wicked bitch of the west wrote on the side of her container facing my yard after accusing me of stealing her stupid bricks and tomato cages (I didn’t) and calling the sheriff on me which went nowhere. I would have just used a color fill to block out the offending message but I lost my Photoshop Elements when I switched to the Mac mini and don’t feel like buying it again.

Views of the big garden in the back.

Last spring my sister brought me a plant in a small pot that was left over after the garden club plant sale labeled  ‘purple porterweed’. After it developed buds I knew it wasn’t porterweed. Google image search has identified it as brazilian button flower (centratherum).

Blue flag iris bud.

This clump of amaryllis bulbs did not bloom last year but this year it has sent up 8 bloom stalks.

Another yellow surprise, this beaded iris, so at least one of the rhizomes I planted isn’t white.

The penstemon is blooming.

The mock dogwood/mock orange is in full bloom.

This guy wasn’t in the yard but on the driveway between the car and truck and I almost stepped on it. It’s about 2’ long and was motionless so I thought it was dead at first but when I poked at it gently with a long stick it slowly moved away snugging up against the wheel of the truck. Ten minutes later it was gone. Once again google image search identified it…a broad banded water snake, non venomous.

and now back to our regular programming

Once again I've been AWOL for the past three days. Well, I'm always absent on Thursdays since that's my volunteer day and I have no time in the morning and that's when I read and write. Friday we had three major errands to do; stop at Spec's and stock up on liquor on our way into the city to procure a different indulgence and then CostCo to stock up on the stuff we buy there. And yes we did go on the very worst day one can possibly choose to go to CostCo...a Friday (which is bad enough) before a holiday weekend. Yikes! But, you know, CostCo has it down and we were in and out with a minimum wait time.

Yesterday though I went to a baby shower for my great niece, my sister's daughter's daughter. My sister's other daughter is here from Albuquerque visiting her mom so the three of us piled in my name sake's car (Denise's first name is Ellen) and headed to Goliad where the mother to be's mother lives and where the party was held. Vickie, my great niece and her husband live in San Antonio. I got her a baby food grinder so she can make her own baby food. I had one and our kids ate what we ate. This way their food was always fresh, I could control the quality, no chemicals etc. I don't think I ever bought a single jar of baby food, not for at home at any rate. Vickie was thrilled. She also got all the standard baby shower gifts and when little Dean Edward is born in about two months I'll have a great great nephew.

Remember when I remarked that I hadn't seen any squirrels in weeks, maybe even nearly two months? I asked my neighbor Gary if he had seen any yet since we had been talking about their absence previously and he mentioned he had seen one and figured they were coming back since we all had pecans on our trees this year. I looked up a minute ago to see two squirrels in the tallow tree outside my window. Those little fuckers better leave my pecans alone when they have cracked corn and peanuts offered.

It was overcast this morning when I got up, completely different than the clear low humidity blue sky days we've been having, low enough that my lips were starting to feel a bit chapped yesterday. Still cloudy, tall billowing cumulus with enough patches of blue for the sun to come streaming through. Probably still won't rain but at least there's some moisture up there that might want to fall. Still I was out this morning setting and moving the sprinkler around, deadheading the zinnias, and cutting back the very last of the purple coneflowers, cutting down all the volunteer rain trees from around the native peach tree and pulling wild grape vine down and out as best I could as it's starting to reach for the closest pecan tree, no no no no no, and was drenched by the time I came in. I'm going to have to get the ladder to reach the thick vine that is reaching out from the wild space.

Well, I had to bring the bird feeder back in. One or two grackles I can tolerate but now the word went out and there are five or six out there squabbling and tossing seed out left and right, intimidating the other birds. They're still not convinced it's gone, keep flying to the platform it sits on in between hogging the bird bath and splashing all the water out of it. It's like a day at the pool for them.

So now we're to the what's happening in the yard part of the program. My definitely pink new crinum lilies,

the agapanthus (nile lily) that I thought I wasn't going to get any blooms from this year has given me two,

pecans getting bigger on the trees,

and then this happened yesterday while I was gone. Marc was sitting at the dining table where he faces the window looking out over the deck when he heard a big thump, thought a branch had fallen until he looked up and saw that it was a 5' maybe a little bigger rat snake that had fallen out of the yew tree and onto the deck. He took a video through the window of it moving off and, I suppose, under the deck. It's a bit blurry but here's a frame of the video.

Big but harmless to humans. I love those big ole rat snakes. No rats around here. Having lived in an old house for over 40 years in the inner city with rats in the walls, it can live here as long as it wants. I've only seen one snake so far this year, a pretty little ribbon snake. Didn't have my device on me but it moved too fast for a picture anyway.

more yard work and encounters with the local wildlife

Work on the drawings have been set aside since I finally got my butt moving outside. Wednesday I raked all the pecan tree debris from under the azaleas around the tree, watered them, spread fertilizer, laid down a thick layer of pine bark mulch, and watered them again. I had my second snake encounter of the year when I went to turn on the faucet. A 3'+ ribbon snake was resting there against the house and took off like a shot around the corner and into the shrubs there. It was so fast no way I could have gotten a picture even if I'd had my phone on me which I did not. First time I've seen one of those out here. (Ribbon snake picture from the internet.)

Then I did the four azaleas and the camellia alongside the west side of the house but instead of pecan tree debris, it was oak leaves, and had another encounter with wildlife. I opened a new bag of mulch and after scooping out several handfuls this guy emerged.

I don't know if it had been in there since it was packaged or if it got in at some point through the quarter sized hole in the side but I have never seen a striped lizard like that out here either.

I still have one azalea to do but I ran out of mulch which I got yesterday. After lunch on Wednesday I took a volunteer of the Texas star hibiscus to a neighbor that I dug up last fall and wintered over til it started to sprout new growth and came away with some magenta petunias and some hollyhocks.

Thursday, of course was my SHARE day but after lunch I finally cut back the banana trees and did some watering. It is so dry here because we haven't been getting any rain but also because it's been windy with exceptionally dry air like around 19% humidity which is almost unheard of and so we are also under a fire watch burn ban.

Friday more weeding in the day lily bed which I had started last Monday, more watering, errand running, one of which was getting the mulch, also taking the recycling and hunting for an on/off switch for a lamp cord. I have a small one but it's too small for the gauge of wire. This is all about finally getting the chandelier hung as a swag lamp instead of directly into the ceiling. I finally had the wire, the clicker switch, and the plug so Rocky got one end of the wire spliced to the chandelier wires and the plug on the other end then cut the wire where I want the switch to be and realized that the clicker switch was too small. So now I'm trying to find a bigger clicker switch. They're available, just nowhere in this little town or El Campo which means a trip into Rosenberg. But in my search, I was sent to an electrical company here and the guy says that only half the wire is cut for that switch so now I may have to get new wire and start over.

Last weekend I had two other encounters with the local wildlife...this green frog

and a little garden snake.

Today, more work in the yard weeding 

and getting the last azalea fed and mulched and watering, filling the birdbaths and turtle pond. This dry wind just sucks the water out of everything including my already dry skin. It's looking like it did when I was doing the river guide thing in the desert. Lots of lotion is being utilized.

yard work and a little hilarity

The push is on to get everything done in the yard by the end of the month, get the beds weeded, fertilized, and mulched, get the summer annuals in, get everything repotted that have outgrown their pots, get the plumerias moved. This week I got the plumerias, the two angel trumpets, and the nun's orchid repotted, took my neighbor Gary and neighbor Judy some of the dwarf gladiolus, picked up the brick pavers bordering a small flower bed I'm giving up on (too much work to keep the baby rain trees out) and added them to the appropriate pile in the barn and dug up more dwarf gladiolus, spider lilies, day lilies, spiderwort, and amaryllis from that bed and shared them around with Pam and the neighbors. I dithered about repotting the big yellow trumpet flower or putting it in the ground and finally just put it in the biggest pot that the dead star of India was in.

Because of all this outside activity I haven't had my usual blog reading time to see what y'all are up to but I'll be back around.

Last Thursday was food delivery day at SHARE from the regional food bank and one of the things on the pallet was over 200 pounds of this candy. 

Jan sent all the volunteers home with a box and told the guys in the back to be generous with it when filling food requests and one of the guys opened one there at SHARE for us to share (see what I did there). So Thursday night while I was still finishing my dinner (slow eater eating mindfully) Marc attempted to open the plastic box of candy. He struggled with that thing for about 5 minutes and never could get the top off the box. Take a knife to it I told him. I'm about too he replied. We were feeling highly amused at this point but when he got the knife and worked on it to little effect it was getting hysterical. Finally, whatever he did busted the plastic lid with half of it popping off and candy went flying everywhere, all over the table, the floor, and even into the kitchen. OMG we were laughing so hard by this time we couldn't talk or breathe, wiping tears away. 

I have no idea why he had such a hard time opening that plastic box. Alcohol may have been involved.

Yesterday I finally repotted the tall bridal bouquet plumeria putting off pruning it back til fall or next spring. 

Believe it or not, that's a bigger pot than the one it was in. 

I got a bit more done around the yard and then my daughter and the twins, who are in town for the weekend, came by for a visit so nothing else got done and then it rained last night and is currently raining now so that's it for yard work til it dries out some.

Thursday, Marc was looking for a small tiny phillips head screwdriver and he saw a snake in the open toolbox sticking its head up from under the tray, closed it and brought it outside and took the tray out to discover a mouse nest in one corner with the snake now hiding under the small metal box he was trying to move out of the way with the stick.

Several tries later we got it moved enough to expose the little rat snake. I say little because they can get 6' long.

After encouraging it to vacate the tool box and it moved away under the truck I cleaned out the paper trash and there was a dead hairless baby mouse in there so the rat snake was doing its job. Then Saturday Marc scared up another snake while he was mowing which we are pretty sure was a copperhead in retrospect. That one I would have killed had I had a shovel handy so I picked up a long stick and herded it towards the wicked witch of the west's property. It was going that way anyway.

Some miscellaneous pics to end with...

Pam and I spied the neighborhood peacock coming back from yoga Wednesday evening.

Marc brought this magnolia blossom in yesterday and it immediately filled the room with it's scent.

A cloud with eyes.

Getting to be daylily time.

The purple coneflowers in the front are in full bloom.

a rant, more doctor shit, and attempted sedition

Well, dammitall. My new jeans arrived yesterday and they are, as I suspected they would be, the stretchy 505s. After I posted about ordering the jeans I looked at the label in my stretchy pair and it's the same in the pair that arrived yesterday...

this is the label from my older non-stretchy pair...

so once again a perfectly fine product has been changed into a not fine product. Why the fuck do women's clothes makers think that all women want stretchy pants and stretchy shirts for that matter. Couldn't they have just left 505s alone and introduced a new product? And now I'm glad I didn't buy two pairs. So now the hunt for decent jeans is on again. Am I going to have to go back to wearing men's jeans which I did for decades because I could not find a pair of women's jeans that weren't 4” too long (no, not every woman wears 4” heels all the time), weren't cinched in at the waist or so low riding they barely covered my pubic bone, weren't covered with spangly shit, or stretchy. I want my jeans the right length, the waist just above my hip bones, and not stretchy or spangly or pre-torn. Why is that so fucking impossible?

This is my month for doctor appointments I guess, get them all over with at once, so Wednesday was my follow-up with the electrophysiologist. Since the afib has settled down, especially since the election, he is content to keep the status quo so I don't see him for another six months unless it starts acting up again. Don't wait til the next appointment and to call if I start having problems, he tells me, we are partners here you and I, he says.

Next Tuesday is my dermatologist appointment but January 21^st is the soonest I could get the bone density scan scheduled. What I'm not getting this year is the boob smushing as my PCP says I only need one every other year so yay for that.

I'm not even going to address the unbelievable and unthinkable, as it was pre-Trump, lawsuit petition to the Supreme Court by Texas' AG Paxton to overturn the election results in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan and the AGs from 17 other red states and 126 House Republicans as well as Trump himself that have submitted amicus briefs in support of the petition to overturn a legal and secure election to appoint Trump as the winner after over 50 lawsuits have been thrown out of court for lack of one iota of evidence or proof of fraud. Even Barr has said there was no fraud. So many republicans willing and ready to commit sedition because their guy lost. It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court is just as willing to commit sedition and throw our democracy and constitution to the wolves.

edit: the Supreme Court turned them down.

And you know, they aren't contesting every vote on a ballot that went for Biden for president since they are perfectly happy with the votes that got them elected or re-elected to the House and Senate. Apparently only votes for Biden are fraudulent but the down ballot votes for republicans are all on the up and up. And where does Texas get off contesting how other states ran their elections?  yes, I'm a Texan but not all of us are crazy or stupid   No place, there is no train or bus stop for that destination. Paxton is being investigated for criminal activity and the FBI subpoenaed records from his office the day before he filed his petition so the conventional wisdom is that he's angling for a pardon from Trump by showing his loyalty with this ridiculous lawsuit.

And Melania apparently had a member of her staff check to see if there was a government budget dedicated to paying the expense of their move out of the White House (there isn't). OK, that's enough of something I wasn't going to write about.

So ending up with a few critter pictures piling up...this little rat snake was sheltering under one of the cookie sheets I use to put the pots on inside,

I have many bird houses that mostly the birds don't use but the frogs like them,

wasps are pollinators too,

and Big Mama coming to see if I had food (I did not).

the summer yard part 2 – the critter version

The frogs and toads are quite noisy with their singing at night since all this rain.

Saturday I looked up, or down as the case may be, to see this pretty green ribbon snake...in the house. It seemed to have trouble getting traction on the vinyl floor and I can't imagine how it got all the way across the room from the door without me being aware of it but it did. I got my back scratcher, the nearest long handled thing, and gently herded it back out the door. It was about 18” long and not even as big around as my pinky finger.

I've seen some swallowtail butterflies in the yard and some little brown skippers and this tiny little hairstreak. It's true color is grayer than this.

I watched while this young squirrel sniffed around and then dug up a pecan and started eating it.

Big Mama hanging out.

Spider webs are everywhere. In this part of the yard I quit counting at 12.

A young banana spider with her mate,

these little green spiders with their neon orange spots,

and shield back spiders which I couldn't get an in focus picture of.

Not sure what this is but I thought it was a cool picture even if it is out of focus. Maybe a shield back spider with it's egg case seen from underneath.

I'm not sure what kind of egg case this is, my best guess from searching images is a jumping spider egg case.

Wasps tending their nest under the eave. Since wasps are only aggressive when they feel threatened I generally leave these pollinators alone unless they want to build their nest somewhere inconvenient for me and then I just wait til no one is home and knock it down.

Marc called me out to see this wasp and a wolf spider battling it out. By the time I got out there the wolf spider was dead and the wasp was dragging it across the yard.