Periodic review of life on Six Acres
by rakeeter It’s just Joyce, me, Max the dog, the cats and the fowl keeping the barbarians at bay here on SA. The neighbors left Wednesday on the first leg of their trip to Switzerland. They left after Chris got off work and drove to Garland where they spent the day with the Wylies. Friday they flew first to New York and from there to Zurich. I’m sure by now they are safely in the welcoming arms of Omi and Opi. Continue reading “Our Lonely Struggle”
by rakeeter One appreciates air conditioning this time of year, and even more when the a/c goes out as ours did last Wednesday. The compressor had been getting steadily noisier at least as long ago as last year so I wasn’t surprised when I came for lunch Wednesday and Joyce said she didn’t think the A/C was working. I called the outfit that handled the heating and air on the 2003 remodel and they confirmed my suspicions. The compressor was DOA. Continue reading “A/C Compressor DOA”
by rakeeter Yesterday evening a mallard hen made a quack landing in the pond, the first time I’ve seen a duck visit in a while. I got in the pond week before last, pulled up some of the cattails and cleared some of the moss so there was a little open water. Perhaps that’s what encouraged ms. duck to visit, that and the fact that there is precious little water for ducks other places. The playas in our part of the panhandle are dry. Anyway, I always experience gratification when the wild folk visit us. Continue reading “Quack Landing”
by rakeeter by rakeeter 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.