Freakwency

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.

Lingering

Summer is lingering. It has been somewhat like high summer in Iowa here in Texas these last few days. The ground is drying out, even cracking in places. All of the weeds and prairie grasses are towering over my head. It is humid, warm, even hot in the middle of the day, and there's a drowsy buzzing that accompanies the sunset each night. The frogs start up their chorus and the fireflies flicker above all the greenness into the night. Now, I should mention that Texas doesn't really get fireflies. It's a new phenomenon, what with all the rain. It has warmed up a little again, and the humidity shrouds the rolling hills and leafy green trees each morning in a thick blanket of cottony fog. It gives the illusion that our house is an island, a secret Avalon, each morning as I walk Charley and his lunch cooler out to his truck to kiss him goodbye for the day. As he dissapears down the lane, I sometime imagine he's gone to the land of the humans!
I came home in the daylight today, a rare treat. I cooked a huge homey meal and we had John, our tenant, over for dinner. The guys were most excited about the warm fluffy biscuits, and I was most happy with the salad topped with a florette of cucumber and a crisp red pepper strip. Before they got home, while the potatoes were roasting, I walked around a little bit. My volunteer garden has gone kaput. There have been some really spectacular spider webs,by one Banana Spider I spotted, and some other plump, 25-cent-piece-sized arachnid, that have been put up in corners and across neglected paths. The Agalinis and the Parralena are still blooming, although the Agalinis is drooping. There are often little tiny sulfer butterflies at the base of the weeds. There is a 20% chance of rain tomorrow, and Autumn usually brings to us another rainy season. Who knows what it will bring us this year - it may continue to be unusual in weather patterns as the rain was to the height of summer.
We're headed to Connecticut on Friday, and I'm going to enjoy the 75 degree weather, although it is hard imagine right now what it will feel like to wear long sleeves. But if it is chilly, and I do get to wear long sleeves, you can bet I'll linger a bit longer than the others, outside in the Northeastern evening.

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.

This morning my alarm went off at 7, and it confused me. What the hell is that noise? The alarm? Do I need to go to work? Why? Can't I sleep some more? Oh yeah... we set the alarm for the ungodly Saturday morning time of 7 so we could make the farmer's market and do some estate sale shopping. Damn.
So we got up, went to the corner store for coffee with Prisilla, our friend who works at the corner store and runs the flea market on the last Saturday of each month, which we have a booth on reserve for this month. We had some questions about tables and stuffs, and we just like to go have coffee with her. We usually walk there, but today we drove. We stopped in quickly, got some coffee and squared away our table needs for next week, and agreed to do a plant trade at the market next week. She has some passionflower vines I want to plant to grow on our lattice over by the kitchen, and we have some exotic pepper seeds she wants to grow.
We zipped into town, and I drove to where I assumed the Farmer's Market was. I do this a lot. I think I know where something is, and when I get there, find out I'm wrong. A half hour later, we had gone to my office and found directions on the internet, and made our way there. We had never been very far away, afterall. I had just confused two very similar downtown parks. We started by having some breakfast tacos at the Market, and walked around to look at produce. Charley wants some sauteed greens for dinner, and I wanted some of the fresh local peaches that were for sale. We got what we wanted, and even tried some Buffalo Jerky and got some local honey to boot. We met a nice lady from Turkey and tried her spanikopita and beet salad. It was pretty good. Frankly, I make a better beet salad, with fennel and apples and feta and yoghurt and a wee bit of vinegar and lemon juice. It all turns a wonderful beet purple color and tastes so fresh and delicious, I could eat it by the bucketfull. We were really suprised at the prices of produce at the Farmer's Market. Granted, we were in Austin. But we spent $50 on squash, beans, chard, peaches, & honey! I do beleive in buying locally, but I think that was a bit on the expensive side. I think we'll start looking around in the smaller communities out by us and see if we can't find something a little more reasonably priced and similarly chemical free, locally grown, and delicious.
Then, we headed out for the Estate sale. What an excellent time we had there! I found a beautiful hand knitted shawl for $1.50, and we found a really comfortable chair for $10! It's somewhat hideously floral and green, but I think a slipcover will fix that. It was REALLY comfortable, and it is probably going to be 'my' chair. What we really need now are some side tables so there are surfaces near the chairs we have. We will be on the hunt in the next few weeks. Charley also got some antique papergoods and I picked up a lovely orange linen tablecloth ($1) that will match the placemats and cloth napkins Charley brought back from Guatemala for me. They are purple and orange and pink and really cool. I also got to use the bag he got for me in Guatemala, a really psychedelic blue woven pattern, at the Market for the vegetables. At various other garage sales we found some star wars figurines for a friend, Charley got an old cigarette tin, and I picked up a set of really fabulous fake eyelashes for my mermaid costume, and a wall map of Guatemala.
Our real goal of the day was to end up at Sears, and Charley got himself a brandnew table saw. The old one was failing, and taking way too long cut stuff, and lordy, do we need to cut stuff. So, we got him a new one with my favorite feature - an attached bag to catch the pile of sawdust that comes out at the bottom! Within 5 minutes of getting it home, he had it put together and started to rip apart the wood for the kitchen screen project. I won't be able to tear him way until they are finished! I understand, though, I like to play with my new toys right away, too.
We have to head into town for a birthday party next. I took a few minutes to wander in the yard and saw the following butterflies: Questionmark, Comma, Red Admiral, Painted Ladies, and a huge Yellow Swollowtail! There are spiders on all of our Agaves with striped legs, that make a web with a zig-zag stitch in the middle. They are really cool little spiders, and one of them was feeding on a rolly polly. The flowers are beautiful, still blooming like crazy, all sorts of colors everywhere, and it did actually get down into the high 70's and low 80's today! Hooray! I"m going to grab my sun hat and see if I can get Charley to put on a Party Shirt and head back out! Good day to you!

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.