Category: SA Times

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” →

A,R&I watched a double-feature in the cave Friday night. The first one, Beethoven, had a dog as the protagonist and the second had a lizard, an animated chameleon I think. Not long ago we watched another dog show, this one about a Chihuahua. It was OK but I really got a kick out of the iguana and packrat duo for comic relief. The show wasn’t animated but the iguana and packrat obviously were. I say obviously, they were quite realistically drawn and their movements were reptile and rodent compliant. Only their heavy Mexican accent and their slapstick comedy gave them away. Computer-generated animation is getting very life-like.

Chris got his bees last week. He was in Austin when they arrived and they sat in their garage making an ominous buzzing. Saturday he “hived” them while Kari and the girls watched them from the island. He built the hive a year or so ago and put it on a former candy shop marble slab in the enclosure. He was hoping a passing band of gypsy bees would take up residence but when that didn’t happen he decided to shell out for queen and court. I’m told nobody got stung and Chris says he’s supposed to leave them alone for five days. What he’s supposed to do after the five days he didn’t say. I’d be inclined to leave them alone more or less indefinitely. It will be interesting to see how they get on.

Our grapevines are doing well. The bunches of grape buds started blooming yesterday. Even the young table grapes we put down east of the orchard are progressing. They are probably a couple years away from producing. We want their engergy channeled into developing the vines so we remove any fruit they try to produce. There are a couple of wine vines I planted two or three year’s ago to replace ones that had died and we’re doing the same with them. The older vines are producing new growth nicely and I spend time daily training the canes. There appears to be a least as much fruit as last year and I’m trying to do a better job of controlling the position and number of bunches for maximum grape development. I learned a lot last year and I hope that knowledge results in a better harvest, not to mention more competent wine making. I won’t be able to tend the vines for the next three weeks and I hope the growth doesn’t get too crazy in that time. Likely it will, though, but maybe I’ll be able to get it sorted out OK.

First of all, this has been just about the nicest May in a while. We did nearly hit 100 one day last week but it cooled back down the next day. It gave us a chance to run the A/C to make sure it hadn’t expired over the winter. We even got 3/8s of an inch of rain Thursday evening. It really came down and the creek bed in the front actually ran with water. Unfortunately it seemed by yesterday as though it hadn’t rained at all. When it isn’t raining, our humidity is very low and things dry out quickly. We decided to go ahead and get a load of granite Friday, the 19th and last for the current project, in spite of the previous evening’s rain. It was a good thing we did. Saturday morning I was able to finish covering the xeriscaped front yard and I don’t think it looks too bad. Last night we got 5/8s so things are looking up, moisture-wise. There is more forecast, along with large hail and damaging winds.

I’ve been over the entire place with the mower and weedeater. It looks pretty good, considering the drought, but the first parts I did are beginning to look shaggy again. The moisture we’re getting should fire up the grass, which really needs to happen. In places, especially high-traffic places, the grass is threadbare. It wouldn’t take much more to be looking at bare dirt. Besides finishing up the mowing yesterday, I went down the lane and collected a load of fallen limbs which I hauled off to the chipper site. I collected just big stuff and didn’t attempt to rake the small stuff. When I had finished that and cleaned up, I went down to the cave for a snooze. The ladies joined me and watched Garfield cartoons while I dozed. Friday night was ladies night in the man-cave and we watched Space Jam. It was fairly entertaining. We had had dinner on the neighbors patio and it was fairly late when we finished the movie. Rebecca stayed awake but needed a piggyback ride home.

Last weekend, Chris put up chicken wire around the garden and yesterday Joyce and Rebecca planted tomatoes. She wasn’t going to have a garden this year because we’ll be otherwise occupied for most of May, but Kari urged her to plant a few things and promised that they would look after them. The first step was to protect them from the fowl. They’ve enjoyed getting in those beds and scratching away, thus the chicken wire.

The grapes are doing marvelously. The fruit is so abundant I need to thin it out some. Yesterday Joyce pointed out the little apples on the tree we planted just last year and I’ve noticed peaches and cheeries in the orchard. The pecan trees had an abundance of tassles on them this spring. It seems as though it isn’t just the weeds that have come roaring back from last year’s drought. I wonder if these trees anticipate or even indicate a more normal rainfall this summer? Hope so.