by September 2 It was time for a quarterly visit to Alibates National Monument to check on it for Texas Parks and Wildlife, just to make sure nothing had changed that would impact the Great Texas Trails map. Kari accompanied me and we found that the road to the visitor center was closed for replacing. It being a temporary condition, I don’t think it needed to affect the map. It was a nice cool morning and we hiked the Mullinaw trail that runs along the river. Flies were a nuisance but we had a nice hike nevertheless. After an early lunch in McBride Canyon next to the rock house, we headed home.
A plant sprouted up east of the shop early in the summer and it looked sort of familiar but I didn’t know what it was. I let it grow out of curiosity and now it is blooming. I’m told it is called Spanish Gold, which seems like a good name for it. Driving down through McBride Canyon to the Mullinaw trailhead, we saw a lot of it in bloom like my specimen and putting on quite a show along the roads. Maybe I’ll harvest the seeds from my volunteer and seed the mounds with it. I let wild sunflowers grow there already and Chris has his bees there so maybe it could work out nicely. On the other hand, I might be making more work for myself.
September 16 This past week at the Bluff I saw a box turtle frolicking in the man-made creek that runs into the pond. You know those box turtles, they can really kick up some dust when the frolic, only this one was in the water so there wasn’t much dust. And I saw a toad about the size of my thumbnail. He was loping across the sidewalk until I snatched him up and put him under a plant in the BF garden where I was running a sprinkler. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a toad of any size, but they must be around and proliferating now and then.
When I got to the Bluff, I saw that the dumpster was full, which sort of limits what I can do, since what I do tends to generate a lot of dumpster fodder. Miss Kai fessed up, said she filled it with the weeds from the sand dune in the corner of the parking lot. Heck, I didn’t even know there was a sand dune there. I had never wandered down there since I could find sufficient weeding to be done on other parts of the nature center. Credit to Kai for having the initiative to tackle such a job. She said she saw some interesting lizards that apparently called the dune home, don’t know why she’d lie about a thing like that.
It cooled down to fall-like temps this week and we accumulated over nearly an inch of rain over several days. It looked like we weren’t going to get much as the week went along, and, though we didn’t get as much as we would have liked, what we got was not nothing, especially as cool as it has been. If it doesn’t turn around and heat up and we don’t have to go a couple of more months without any moisture, this wet spell will have been worth something.
We went to the symphony Friday evening. The Amarillo Symphony is celebrating its 100th anniversary this season. This performance featured pianist Michelle Cann playing Rhapsody In Blue. I was impressed . She really banged it out, so lively I was worried at times she was going to fall off her bench but she never did. Interesting how some people are imbued with so much talent while the rest of us are, well, just ordinary.
Farmer plows his field
Wind turbines still
Flags drooping
Dust hanging in the air
We have been to a volleyball game. Vivian played well. Most of the players on her team haven’t been playing long but they still managed to win the second game but lost the tie breaker by a couple of points. We watched Sophia and the Sachse band perform at halftime of her school’s football game. Jill, Vivian and I visited a Guatemalan store and bought papusa for Vivian’s birthday get-together , then watched Kaylee’s band compete in a marching band competition. And we worked in a trip to the Dallas arboretum where we met Kathryn and Devon. Haven’t been there in a long time and much has changed. I was particularly impressed by realistic streams tumbling over rocks. I guess they were real, that is the rocks were and so were the streams, only combined they were man-made.
