Bad Blogger

I hate it when people don't do this stuff regularly. And I'm certainly not being regular here. I'm having some technical difficulties with those aforementioned pictures, and I've been really busy!Paddling the Lampassas River, Antique and estate sale-ing like crazy, caving, postcard show-ing, going to yoga again. But it is paying off - Charley is sleeping on our new couch and I need to pack my caving bag for a beginners trip that I'm leading tomorrow yet before hitting the sack! I do think I'll get more stuff up here soon. We've continued to have lots of Bee Balm, Brown-eyed Susans everywhere, Rose gentian, spiders, ants, and butterflies - buckeyes, painted ladies, tiger swollowtails, questions marks and commas. We finally had a hot summer day - in June, our first hot summer day! That's an excellent begining to summer in Texas.

I finally got some pictures of all these plants I've been babbling about. I tried to get some really great pictures of a whole bunch of butterflies nectaring on some bee balm on the side of the road, but I got attacked by damn fire ants while I was standing still, trying to get a good shot. You know they crawl all over you (which you can't feel, because they are so small) and then they emit a chemical signal so that they can bite you all at the same time, don't you? And it really does feel like fire. Like very itchy fire, all over your feet. I know better than to walk into a patch of sandy grass in flats and a skirt and stand still without looking at my feet, but as I have related time and time again, I just don't learn.
I was walking by the side of the road with the camera because Charley brought home a Tiger Swallowtail Caterpillar on Wednesday! I had to walk a few blocks into town - which would be Lytton Springs, our town - to the house with the magnolia tree and steal some leaves so it would have something to eat. I took some pictures during my walk, and returned with a few fire ant blisters, too. As it turns out, it never ate the leaves, but - it pooped a whole lot, affixed itself to a stick inside the plastic jug we put it in, and turned brown and shriveled up. Isn't that great??!!That's exactly what they do before they pupate. So we are awaiting a full blown crysalis and eventually and really beautiful butterfly. Hooray!
In the last few days our kitchen has been completely screened in, the screen doors have been hung, painted and affixed with springs and latches, and our kitchen has been put back together. Of course, this didn't happen on its own, Charley and our friend Phillip and even our friend and tenent John have worked their butts off, making individual screen frames for each space in the wall, and cleaning up sawdust and putting all the bowls and cups and odds and ends back in place.. I merely experimented with cooking a roast and veggies in the crockpot to feed them. I have to admit, the screen project came out better than the roast. The roast turned out pretty bland. Tender, but bland. I think I have identified a few things I need to do in the future. For one thing, I need to make more of an attempt to marinate the meat beforehand. I need to cook stuff longer, and also I need to use flavored liquids to cook in, whether it be broth or just worschester sauce spiked water. I'm certainly open to suggestions. I did love how easy it was to put it all in the pot in the morning and come home to a hot, hearty dinner. We accompanied it with some bakery rye bread and butter. It was a pretty good meal, after some bbq sauce and aforementioned worschester sauce was applied to jazz it up some, but I think I can do better.
Our house has become positively homey with the addition of the screened in kitchen. I took some time tonight to marvel again at the amount of space we have to live in now (after spending a year in a cabin 10x20 feet) and how beautiful it looks painted, and furnished.
I walked our lane this evening when I got home - Questionmark butterflies, and more Red Admirals were all over the place. There was a remarkable number of buzzards flying overhead - there must be something dead somewhere, that's the only conclusion one can draw from that. The rose gentian is going crazy, but you can't see the bright pink star blossoms unless you look down into the weedy grasses. When you do, though, they are absolutely carpeting the front acre. I found a black egg, probably a moth or butterfly, hanging from the underside of one of the leaves of the mystery green plant that's all over everywhere right now. I'll have to keep an eye on it, and see what comes out. We're expecting rain tonight, probably, or sometime by this weekend. We're also going to make our sales debut at the local flea market - me with my jewelry and Charley with his junk, and try to go paddling on the Lampassas River on Sunday. I'm sure I'll have some reports to make on the flip side.
Lke I said, I do have pictures. They are pending a charged battery swap and some other computer voo-doo. Soon! For now, I'm just baiting you, so you'll come back and keep reading! Hah! I have strategery on you!
Have a great extra long holiday weekend, everyone!

I've come inside early tonight to seek refuge from the mosquitoes, which have become quite a nusiance. I didn't escape without some welts, they are itchy and burning. I've been eaten alive in the last couple of days, with or without bug spray. The only real solution is long pants and long sleeves, and if you can't tell, that's a stretch for me. I hate getting all covered up like that to go outside. Besides, it is hot. The thermometer says the hottest temp today was 94, making May 15th the hottest day of the year so far. We're supposed to get a cold front tonight and cool off to be in the 80's for the weekend. I'll believe it when I see it. If it rains tonight, we could get there. Despite the heat, some very spring-like flowers are hanging in there like champs. I noticed the Day Flower - sometimes called Widow's Tears - was blooming yesterday, but they are gone since Charley has come home and done some much-needed weed-eating around the house. (yay! Charley is home!) There are some winecups still going at it, and Texas Paintbrush, and the Beebalm is blooming like crazy, all stacked up like cakes. The firewheel are still chugging along, and the Rose Gentian is probably the most beautiful bloomin' thing we've got right now. The cows spend most of the day around the big tree in the next-over field, but by the time I got home, it was cooling off and they were spread out. I moo'd at them in their flower-dotted field and they looked at me funny. I should be able to put some pictures of these plants up soon, because the camera came home with Charley. We're going to spend the weekend boating and seeing a friend who is leaving Texas for Alaska, and going to a birthday party, but also getting our Media organized, so fresh pictures will be more available soon.
I also saw another fuzzy caterpillar, 3 Comma Butterflies, 2 Questionmarks, a couple buckeyes and several Painted Ladies, one of which was obviously freshly hatched and vibrantly colored. Charley and I also spotted a big green metalic fly that moved as though it was animated, and someone hadn't drawn quite enough frames to make it move smoothly enough. I walked around with the Amdro for a while, looking for ant mounds to kill. I probably would have found more if I was just out for a wander, but I found the two I definately remembered and cheerfully sprinkled my poison around for them to find. It might rain tonight, but I thought I would at least give it a try, and it was an excuse to walk around the land for a bit. We've also moistened and covered the compost with a black tarp, just to give it some encouragement. It is filled with Rolly-pollys and turning into rich, black fluff at the bottom.
Needless to say, its been wonderful to have Charley home. He brings such a spark of life to the house, is motivation incarnate, and with his newspaper spread out around the easy chair and his reading glasses left nearby, makes the house even more homey that it was. He's all culture shocky, and so every convenience is a little piece of heaven to him. He's really appreciating having a wife, air conditioning, a comfy bed, and no need for a machete. It's very cute. We had friends over last night, and we both mentioned later how we savored having our wonderful new house filled with laughter and food and people and candlelight. He cleaned out the shed today, a big job! Now we have a caving and camping shed, and a separate tool/workshop shed. We even threw a bunch of trash away and put some stuff in the scrap metal pile to sell in town to the junkman. He sure works hard. I endured a day of meetings at work today, so I was happy to come home and help put the last few things away in the shed, and not be sitting at a table analyzing my reports. I did my wifely part by bugging him about seeing his travel doctor and wearing his arm brace. Back to domestic bliss....

A Two-fer-one Day

Spring is indeed lingering in Texas. Today was beautiful, a swirling mix of warm with sunshine and cool with shaded, cloud-dappled skies. As one flower droops, another bursts into floresence. Everything is long and tall and weedy these days. Today I noticed the weedy lands were covered in Rose Gentian blooms, hiding below the bobbing seed heads on foxtail grasses and fading firewheels. I saw a Questionmark Butterfly manically skidding around the Agarita in the last sun patches of the day, as I pulled in tonight after work. It lured me out for a walk, even in my knee-length, sleeveless dress. This time I had the presence of mind, at least , to spray a little DEET-y spray on my legs before my wander. I am sick of so many itchy bumps, especially since the last time I went berry-picking I ended up with the large, puffy, insanely itchy red welts that herald the long-suffering of the chigger bite.
I watched the clouds form boiling pink and orange towers, the dark threat of rain in the opposite corner of the sky from the sinking sun. I couldn't help but take a quick step in every newly discovered ant heap I found, staring at the resulting chaos I just can't seem to resist creating for every colony I come across. I need to get out into the yard with the Amdro again, during a rain-free spell, whenever that comes, to put the ants down once again. They are the only critter I enjoy getting rid of, because they might eat you if you fall down into one of their mounds.
I found a plump, fuzzy, black caterpillar clinging to a bobbing blade of tall grass. I'm always pretty proud of myself when I find a caterpillar. I love the whole transformative life cycle of those squishy little bags of bug guts. I particularly enjoy identifying butterflies, by watching their unique flight patterns and flashes of colors, scanning with my eyes and quickly changing my range of focus to follow a specimen long enough to get a lock on the genus, if not the species. I am not very good at finding caterpillars or crystalises, however. So, woohoo! Score one for me.
There is a light green, stalky, soft, leafy plant that is taking over the yard. I do not know what it is, and I would like to. It seems really useless and is crowding out the more interesting stuff right now. I would like to know what it is, because I would like to love it more, since there is a lot of it. I also spotted lots of slender, glittery-eyed spiders with furry, light-colored limbs and tiny, weed-colored, almost perfectly camoflauged grasshoppers. They always seem like paranoid little weirdos to me, with their ridged carapace and their large eyes that extend into the back of their head segment. They make a lot of noise.
The ground is dry and hard, except for a few regular marshy spots on the back acre, even though we've a had a few nights with pretty good rain showers lately. Ruts, carved when the ground was more like frosting, have remained however, now crusty and likely to trip a wanderer like myself. But ending up with my hands in the dirt and my face down near that strip of grass that grows down the middle of all country lanes, I was reminded of one of my favorite flowers, the wild honeysuckle, still blooming like crazy, like it has for months, nestled among the long weedy grasses. The wild honeysuckle always tickles my fancy because it is so delicate, but blooms so steadily on that punished strip of grass I'm talking about. It amazes me that it continues to bloom here, because I know my exhaust system cuts right over it, and the bumper of our friend's truck slices right into its space, too. Wild Honeysuckle might be small, but I could smell it, pitched over onto two hands and only one foot, head down, and only one delicate, tiny, half-inch bloom inches from my face. I could smell it like it was a hedge of star jasmine, not just clusters of white and pink eyelash-like petals arrayed on a slender stem. I picked it, and carried it around with me, smelling it constantly. They wither quickly, and it is all stem and curled up petals by now, like a miniscule columbine flower. I admire these little beauties, for being so perfect and delicate and strong blooming in the dangerzone, the middle of the road, where even grass only dares to grow so high. I took a deep breath and noticed it was getting duskier by the moment.
When I returned to the house to putter inside, the Indigo Girls were on the radio, singing "...when God made me born a Yankee he was teasing" ... a song about springtime in the southlands. Amen, sisters.