Ooof, I'm supposed to blogging more, and I haven't been. With the time shift, it seems so late all the time when I get home. I've been very busy babysitting, seeing MacBeth performed in the round (Bravo!), driving...
We did manage to visit Jonathan and Bev in South Padre Island, where we didn't get to spend enough time being beachy. The four of us spent a day in Mexico doing some paperwork for Charley, and having lunch with my Grandparents. We also had a day to spend just with my Grandparents, and we geeked out over postcards for most of the day and enjoyed all the delicious homestyle cooking at Chez Dittmer.
We're currently packing and preparing for a paddling trip down the Rio Guayalejo somwheres abouts Ciudad Mante and Valles, south of Ciudad Victoria at the tail end of Taumalipas (maybe even into San Louis Potosi, my favorite Mexican State?)We're travelling on Friday and I have a whole week off to enjoy life! There will be many pictures from that trip - hopefully even some butterflies! We won't be too far north of Gomez Farias, I think. I'm excited to put my fancy new PFD and gloves to use.
It has been dry here - as dry as it was wet this summer. The trees have dropped the majority of their leaves, with the pines and the live oaks the only hangers-on. The mesquites were slow to lose their greenery, too, but are mostly bare twiggy sculpures now. The grass that's allowed to grow is all waist-deep and golden, purple at the base. It waves and swishes around and adds to the warm feeling of desolate prairie I love so much. The landscape is stark and brown right now. There are a few flowers blooming in the yard - a small brown-eyed susan, a patch of some other yellow flower shaped similarly. Spiders abound - especially jumping spiders. There are still some grasshoppers, and on warmer, humid nights, a few gekos still gather on the screen. It's been weeks since we've seen toads, and no butterflies lately. I know a little rain would liven things up. We had a cold snap, and now, unseasonably warm temps - almost record setters. Mexico will be warmer during the day, and about the same as here at night. I'm curious to see what kind of vegetation is blooming and green down there, but they likely have had more rainfall recently, although we'll be dry all week. It's been pretty boring here at the casa, and we haven't worked on the house much - we only got the utility trenches as far along as we needed to hook up the internet in the house and set up the new computer!
Charley's headed to China about Christmas time - with the holidays and stuff, I'm not sure we'll get the hot water in the kitchen hooked up until spring! But we're comfortable and functional for now. The house is feeling much more lived in these days.
Showing posts with label dry hard ground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dry hard ground. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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.
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.
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