several days of brief forays in the yard and evil and despicable men

It is just too hot to be outside.

We got an unexpected 3/4" of rain Monday. I left shortly after it stopped to go to the post office and the streets were steaming. Literally. What else did I do Monday, I did the grocery shopping, I went to yoga. The grocery store has taken down it's 'masks required' banner and the employees were all mask free as were about half the customers. I still wore mine though and probably will for awhile with the more contagious and more virulent Delta variant of covid showing up in the US.

Speaking of covid, research is confirming that it was here long before it 'officially' arrived. We're pretty sure that's what my sister had in December 2019 amid reports of people being diagnosed with an unknown coronavirus with all the symptoms of covid as far back as October/November 2019. One of the blogs I read is Interim Arrangements written by Sabine who is connected to the scientific community in Germany and she translated an article by a German virologist who has been involved in covid research from the beginning. In this article he address its possible/probable origin (and no not in a lab) and also the concept of 'herd immunity' which he says does not apply to the human population. Bottom line is the only way you will get immunity to covid is through vaccination or surviving the virus and that if you don't get vaccinated you will eventually get covid. The problem with surviving the virus is that survival comes with serious other health issues later so get vaccinated. Anyway, here's a link to her post with the article.

I've only been keeping a cursory eye on the political machinations of the Republicans Party of Insurrection, you know, keeping my blood pressure down, but they are still being completely who they are. Locally, in Texas, ERCOT, who is in charge of our unregulated power grid, is asking people to conserve electricity during this heatwave...set your thermostat to 78, don't use your oven, turn off lights...because not only did it fail with extreme cold weather, it will likely fail with extreme hot weather. So is our governor concerned about that and doing something, anything, to fix the problems with our independent power grid? No, his big concern is the non-existent crisis at the border. If Biden won't continue building Trump's wall, then he will build it in Texas and he is asking Texans to pony up with the cash to do it. Nationally, McConnell has proclaimed bipartisanship dead and is still saying out loud and in public that his only focus is obstruction of any and all Biden's policies and if republicans get control of the Senate in 2022 and a seat on the Supreme court comes up in 2024 he will not allow Biden to appoint a judge even though he pushed through Barrett during the 2020 election and he probably wouldn't allow Biden to appoint a judge if a seat became available in 2023. And the #3 Senate republican Barrasso has vowed to make Biden a half term president. I take that to mean if they get control of the House and the Senate in 2022, they will impeach and convict Biden regardless of the fact there have been no impeachable offenses committed by Biden. So as usual, republicans have no intention of governing and no intention of letting the democrats govern no matter what Americans want.

Back to the fun stuff. Tuesday I took the recycling to the containers, took some of the orange cosmos over to friend, went to Walmart  the Evil Empire (which also has removed it's 'masks required' notice) because HEB didn't have two things I needed, took my youngest grandgirl to get her first vaccination shot, and we got another unexpected rain, almost 2” Tuesday night.

Did I mention I'm not getting any day lily blooms? Few and far between so that's disappointing. But other things are being beautiful out there. After those two weeks of rain every step scares up a baby toad or two, from 1/2" to 3/4".

This is the third attempt of these wasps to build a nest in that particular spot on the succulent. I spray them away with the hose and then remove the nest.

My datura (jimsonweed) in the pot bloomed. It is also called moonflower because they bloom at dusk and close up in the morning.

This plumeria has started blooming. It has 10 bloom stalks. I put it in a bigger pot this spring and fertilized it but it's a dependable bloomer anyway. I had one I finally put in the ground when I still lived in the city because it had gotten too big for me to bring in. We were going through a spell of no real winter (but it didn't get as hot as now) and it grew into a small tree that bloomed profusely all summer, survived at least 5 years in the ground, and then we had the snow and winter in the 20s for two weeks that killed it. I knew it would not survive so I made many cuttings and this is one of them. In fact all the ones like this that I have are from that one tree.

Expect a few more pictures of the red crinum lilies while they're blooming.

I know you can't see them but there are baby wrens in this birdhouse. I saw one of the parents enter and could hear the cheeping babies...feed me!

And this morning there were 6 whistling ducks in one of the pecan trees. I had seen them several times before further down the street flying into a neighbor's tree when I walk the dog but this is the first time we've seen them in our trees.

So cool, and yes they were whistling little tunes, not a quack to be heard. 

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.

punch list, sweat, red velvet ant, and blog fix

Well, my dedicated week with Rocky lasted three days but he did have a good excuse. Gunnar's girlfriend went in to have their baby early Thursday morning (Gunnar is Rocky's son) and ended up having to have a C-section, poor thing, and delivered an 8 1/2 pound baby boy, a chunky little thing Rocky says. Rocky did show up yesterday (Saturday) and is back today. We're down to a little caulking, painting touch-up, and some grouting touch-up in the shower, oh, and switching the water pipes around in the attic so I have cold water to the toilet. No pictures though until they are completely finished which should be Monday after Gunnar touches up the paint for the last time. Finished whether all the picky details are attended to or not. Whatever is left I can take care of myself.

Yesterday I got out in the yard and cut back the climbing roses against the fence which were just canes with almost no foliage late morning and then early evening trundled the wheelbarrow full of plant trash to the burn pile, tidied up the burn pile since the last time Marc torched it only the center burned so all the small and large branches had to be moved into one neat pile, filled the wheelbarrow again with the squash and tomato trash and dumped it on the burn pile, plus my almost daily watering morning and evening and by the time I finished I was dripping sweat and by that I mean my hair was soaked, my clothes were soaked and sweat was running off me as if I had just stepped out of a pool.

A couple of weeks ago I was picking that big pile of dead plant material that I had made clearing the clasping leaved coneflowers out of the mini-wildflower meadow and putting it in the wheelbarrow when I unknowingly stepped on one of these...

It's a female red velvet ant, which is really a ground based wingless wasp (the male has wings and does not sting), and they say that the sting is the most painful of all the wasp stings and I'm here to tell you it's the truth. It stung me on the bottom of my left foot (yes I was barefoot) in the middle of the soft part of the arch. Holy fucking cow that hurt but after a couple of hours the pain had subsided and the next day the spot was a little tender but no further pain...for about a week until one evening it was feeling a little tender and I pressed on it and felt a hard lump at the insertion point with a two inch hard line radiating out towards my swollen instep and the whole bottom of my foot was on fire and itching like mad. Over the next week, any stimulation would produce the same result so I soaked it in the hottest water I could stand with epsom salt several times a day and it gradually got better. Today, the hard line has softened considerably as has the lump and the swelling has mostly gone down and while it will still itch a bit if stimulated, it subsides quickly. Will this finally teach me to wear shoes out in the yard? Probably not.

So, here's something totally unrelated. Many of us have noticed that comments on our blogs are no longer sent to our email even though we have it set for that. I learned on another blog that the way to fix that is to go to your settings for email notification and delete your email address, save the new setting, add your email address again and save the setting and it will start sending comments to your inbox again. I did it and it works.

resolution of the blues and other matters

I'm having to keep the back door closed. I would rather it was open but the damn dirt daubers will not stay out! I finally gave up. I chased three of them out about mid-day and closed the door and while I was standing there looking out through the glass here came one of them back, buzzing around, looking for a way in, banging on the glass. I have to get a screen door.

I moved or it did but it didn't appreciate getting its picture taken and left

I've been getting my garden that I wasn't going to plant this year, planted. So far 8 tomatoes, 46 onions, 1 japanese eggplant, 1 bell pepper, 1 banana pepper (I threw away armloads of banana peppers from 4 plants last year). Still have part of the white bed and the whole big one.

I've put away the model making for now as it's hard to work while construction is going on and since the spring open house fizzled out, there's no rush to finish anything and I can't really get to the functioning kiln anyway with the garage full of construction materials and it's spring and the garden needs to be planted and the flower beds and landscaping need attending to, and things in pots need refreshing all before the interminable hot dry summer sets in and I'm going to be gone for most of the month of May.

And so because I gave in and planted a small garden at least and had Marc turn the water back on over at the shop which had been turned off for the weeks of lows in the 20s and just never turned back on, and hooked up the hose and...nothing, bubkis. Went around to the back corner faucet where it connects to the shop and some water came out, not great pressure and then it trickled to a stop. So, the clog is somewhere between the meter and the faucet. Underground. It's a long way from the faucet to the fence. In the meantime, I'm having to haul water over in buckets in the garden cart to water my newly planted garden. 

So, back to the blues, Rocky and Gunner came by Thursday morning to see if they were going to start painting or not. Gunner finished the ceiling and beadboard early Wednesday afternoon which gave me a chance to test out the two blue samples I had on some scrap pieces of sheetrock and then I held them up to the wall above the bead board and WHOA! Way too dark. So when the Rocky and Gunner Show showed up Thursday morning and Rocky asked me what color, I told him to go on with the yellow, that these were way too dark. So you're giving up on the blue, he asked? I shrugged. I'd have to waste another day picking a new color or two. If I want to do that, he says, he has to replace a bathtub in this other house and they could take care of that and get done there and paint on Friday. It seemed to be what Rocky wanted so I agreed.

Back to the paint store where I picked a nice light blue, a little grayer than baby blue, painted the piece of sheet rock and carried it in there and held it up above the painted beadboard and...the tint is good but it didn't thrill me, so yellow it is. All that's left is the trim, then the glass, then the floor. 

progress as of end of day Friday

I really like the blue color though, so I tested it out with the tile samples for the floor and shower and they go very well together. Now the plan is to paint the beadboard in the bathroom blue and the walls above it in one of the whites I'm looking at. 

Currently waiting to rise to the top of the plumbers list.