May is a good ol’ gal


memorial day
We visited the ancestors Memorial Day morning

Monday the painters started the prep work for painting the house but were interrupted Tuesday by a lovely gentle rain in the morning that gave way to a sunny afternoon.  Unlike the poor folks in Granbury and Moore, we’ve enjoyed a pleasant May, this week especially.  It got a little warm last week but cooled off nicely this week and the rain, though just a half inch, made everyone feel better.  Why, pulling weeds is just so much more pleasant when the ground doesn’t have the consistency of concrete.

As previously reported, the spring keats were placed in the big wooden box Chris previously acquired for keeping keats.  Their number dwindled rapidly but seems to have stabilized at three.  Meanwhile, it seems Mrs. Guinea, deprived of her brood, is thinking of nesting again, which has the two males all worked up and going at each other almost non-stop.  They chase each other in a loop around the shop and the garden going round and round.  Placed on some sort of squirrel cage-type generator, I’m confident they could power a small city.  It remains to be seen how many times this cycle will repeat itself before cool weather returns to calm things down for awhile.

Lonesome toad is lonesome no more.  In fact he is, well, no more, having been rendered two-dimensional on the neighbors driveway.  I guess the rain we had Tuesday put him in the mood for a stroll, or a hop as it were, which was cut short by the remorseless wheels of some vehicle.  Too bad, really.  Toads get squashed by cars all the time but this one may have been the last of the Mohicans.  Having survived, even prospered, he was a good-sized fellow, through this dreadful drought now in its third year, its an ignominious end.

Joyce and I followed our Memorial Day routine of taking flowers from SA to the cemetery.  All was well except the weeds were just as bad there as they were everywhere else.  At least they had them mowed down.  Later Chris, Art Brokenbek and I went out to Riverland to do a little shooting.  Ammunition is so scarce and expensive we didn’t do much but we had a pretty good time.  Art and I swapped childhood memories, many of them shared.

We got a nice shower Saturday evening to go with the shower we got earlier the week.  Between the two we got nearly an inch of rain and the

peonies
Peonies in bloom west side of 2005.

grass has responded rapidly.  Were it not for the nasty dead weeds, SA would have a nice green veneer, something we haven’t seen much over the last couple of years.  Let’s hope this is the start of trend.