Category: 2012

Did Chief Justice Roberts change his vote on Obamacare because Justice Ginsburg offered to sleep with him if he did?

It’s high summer and we’re fighting over the water.  After a hot, dry week, Joyce has begun to get out early to water her garden without the risk of spontaneous combusting.  That’s when I’m trying to water the grass around the shop among other things so we have a conflict.  So far there has only been screaming and shouting and no blood has been drawn.

Recently I watched a program called Untamed America, a nature program as you might expect.  It showed a plant, a pitcher plant maybe, that only blooms for six days a year and its nectar is so far down the throat of the flower moths and other pollinators can’t reach it.  Ah, but there is a particular specie of bat that is two and a half inches long and has a three and a half inch tongue.  With its prodigious tongue, the bat has no problem reaching the nectar and the flower gets pollinated.  Maybe I dozed off and missed it, but where does a two and a half inch bat put a three and a half inch tongue?  It must roll up like a toilet paper.  And what does the bat do the other 359 days of the year when deep throat isn’t blooming?

One of the perils of this time of year is that one may encounter a baby bird out of the nest.  I found one just this morning in the back yard on my way to work.  It was missing its head, no doubt the work of one of the feline assassins that infest SA.  That one was easy to handle.  I just dropped it in the trash.  Then on the way home for lunch I saw another one bouncing across the meadow.  Whether it knew it or not, it had good reason to make haste lest one of the cats spy it.  It fell over on its back trying to get across a clump of grass and struggled in vain to right itself.  I think it was all tuckered out from its jog in the heat.  It seemed to be doing better the first day.  It chirped more or less continuously in the window of the man-cave.  I was able to get some chicken egg down it and it seemed to gain strength.  I did what I could but the second day it was much diminished and as the day wore it didn’t look like it was going to survive. In a last-ditch effort to save it I put it in a hanging bird seed platform on the off chance a parent was still around and would revive it.  Joyce had put it in there the first day but it got out and that’s when I saw it in the meadow.  When I put it in the feeder the second day it no longer had the energy to get out.  It slipped away not long after.  Maybe it would have been better to leave it to take its chances in the first place.  Nature is one harsh mother.

We held our annual July 4th celebration yesterday.  Max, Bruce and Sherry had previous engagements and weren’t able to make it this year but otherwise we had the usual crowd.  Barbara Howard even came over for a while.  It was dreadfully hot until early evening when some clouds came up to shield us from the sun.  That made playing volleyball a lot more enjoyable.  Some of the youngsters, Riley, Parker and Abigail, are now big enough to play so even though Bruce and Sherry who normally play weren’t here we still had plenty of participants.  A thunderstorm came up and rained on us just enough to break up the party about the time it should have been breaking up anyway.  It did not give us any otherwise useful moisture.

Joyce harvested some pretty nice plums from the tree in the meadow this week.  They have an excellent flavor.  I don’t know how they got past the birds but they did.  Joyce is chagrined that two of the plum trees she planted aren’t like the one she got fruit from this week.  The don’t bear any fruit at all.

Abigail played her last volleyball game of the spring season last Tuesday and it was a pretty good one.  In the first game her team was well on the way to losing when Abigail got the serve and held it until they got the lead.  They wound up winning that one.  The other team won the second game and the rubber match was nip and tuck all the way.  Abigail’s team had a 21-17 lead but went to sleep and wound up losing.  Abigail wasn’t on the floor at that point.  It frustrated me that they lost but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

We missed out on some potential rain this week and we’re losing the greening effect of the nice rain we got week before last.  I told Jill I thought the place would still be green when they were here for the 4th but we are supposed to have some hot, dry weather this week to it may just be greenish by next weekend.

Ever the optimist and believing the drought over, I went ahead with what I planned to do last year but didn’t because of the drought: I traded my old mower for a new one.  I’ve just finished doing some mowing with it, the first I’d had a chance to do, and I’m very pleased with its performance.  Its pretty much the same mower as the old one except that I had them put a mulching kit in it and it has four wheel steering.  The latter helps it turn very sharply so it can mow around trees easily.  That’s very handy in many places on SA and the new mower is less fatiguing than the old one.  I think it’s interesting that it cost almost the same as the old one did 20 years ago.  Anyway, I happy with it and hope that it holds up as well as the old one did.  It should since I wasn’t around the first ten years of the life the old one to see that it was serviced properly and will be for the new one.

My little friends are off visiting their cousins in Garland so I didn’t have anyone to watch a movie with in the man-cave yesterday evening or to walk to Braums for an ice cream cone with, not to mention not having anyone to watch Phoebis and Ferb with this afternoon.  I’ll be glad when they are back.

Finally.  We got some decent rain Tuesday evening.  We must have gotten a decent shower when we were gone but that was a month ago and the grass was the color of old guacamole.  We got nearly an inch and a half Tuesday night, just about a perfect amount.  It may have come down a little hard and consequently there was quite a bit of runoff, but I cavil.  Our poor mistreated grass is so thin it doesn’t hold the rain so that it soaks in well and when the sun comes out the next day it can’t shade the damp ground.  But for now all is good and maybe we won’t have to go another month before we get another shower.

Kari and the girls are heading for Garland next week to rendezvous with Auntie Jill and their cousins.  I don’t know if they will stay through Jill and Kaylee’s birthday or not.  Then the Wylies will be here the weekend before the 4th.  That’s less than three weeks away.  Summer is truckin right along.
This morning I strolled around the place with my pole trimmer taking off dead limbs.  Good ol’ Chris hauled the trimmings plus all the twig rakings I’d piled up in the south lane so next weekend I can start down the east lane trimming and raking, if I don’t have to mow. and I probably will.  I mowed around my yard last Sunday with the hand mower and may decide to do it again tomorrow.  It’s been nearly two years since I’ve had to mow that frequently.

Speaking of the runoff from the rain, I need to engineer some way of getting all the water than runs down the north and south lanes, and it can be considerable, to run into the tree line so it benefits the trees as much as possible and so it doesn’t cut gullies in the lanes.  I wonder if a series of raised elongated mounds of caliche, of which I have an ample supply readily at hand, would accomplish that?  They would have to be extended well into the tree line to keep the water from washing them out and there would have to be a series to keep too much water from building up before it hit the barriers.  Maybe I’ll work on that a little in my spare time.

And speaking of trimming trees, there are a number of dead ones, mostly elms but also the spruce east of 2005 and one I never new what was.  I took that one down last Saturday.  The elms, being large trees, are pretty unsightly.  I think the best approach will be to cut what I can safely, then hire someone to do the rest.  It will probably require a cherry picker to get up high enough to cut limbs in such a way that they don’t destroy a fence.  It’s sad to see the dead trees around town, some of them quite large.  It will take decades to replace them.  I guess one could say that most of the trees around town wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for people watering them.  Stop watering (or run out of water) and we would revert to prairie pretty fast.  But even in places where the trees grow naturally get hit by ice and snow storms that bring them down, not to mention hurricanes and fires.  I guess most things are more temporary, including ourselves, than we like to think about.

Chris rousted a toad out of the culvert under the 2005 driveway while trying to remove whatever was blocking it.  Rebecca and Abigail brought it down to the south lane where I was working to show me.  Toads are rare on SA, you see.  Chris didn’t completely succeed in removing the blockage but it will now allow water to run through it where before it was completely stopped up. Continue reading “Rare Toad” →

Our neighbors are hosting a party this evening.  Kari worked all year on a committee at Olsen Park charged with planning and raising money for an Outdoor Education Day at Ceta Canyon.  It was rained out or at least inhibited because of rain so Kari invited the committee people, about 12 families, to a party on SA expecting only a few to accept.  She has reason to believe there will be 50 attendees counting children.  I mowed her yard for her but otherwise I’m making myself scarce. Continue reading “Rainout Makeup Party” →