trash or treasure . . .

After more than two years living here, I finally got around to exploring the attic of my "new" house. Amongst some old cardboard boxes, pieces of plywood, and four really heavy closet doors were two rolled up remnants of green shag carpet. I think these pieces were left over from when the house was built in the mid 1970s and have been up there all this time. They are so clean and pretty they've made me start thinking about adding more green elements to my interior decor. I'd like to use this carpet somehow, but the pieces aren't wide enough to even make runners and all those summers in a hot Texas attic have left the backing too brittle to take much wear and tear. Maybe I'll make some kind of a wall hanging - just a little something to preserve the history of the house.

In the meantime, since I've been doing a bit of Christmas decorating, I used a few of the smallest pieces to create some little trees. Don't they look like trees with my pine cones and little moose from Vermont? Maybe if I glued them to a piece of shaped plywood I could make a more permanent Christmas setting for next year.

Holidays

Call me Grinchley.
I've noticed that negative visual connotations of Christmas seem to be growing in number. Sure, many are meant to be ironic, but the underlying sentiment is one of grinchliness.

I know I myself have taken a somewhat curmudgeonly view of the season for years. I'm pretty sure it started with my first "Black Friday", probably in the mid or late 1980s.  It wasn't called "Black Friday" at the time, but it was a precursor, with early store openings, big advertised sales "from 9 to Noon only", and a horde of rude and competitive shoppers crowding the stores. What had once been a mostly peaceful Friday morning, one of my few extra days off from work during the year, became frightful. I immediately swore off holiday shopping and took my peace at home. Because I was home, it was assumed by other family members I should string decorative lights along the eaves of the house. Each year more strings of lights appeared, which I was expected to find a place for on the house or trees.

You can probably guess where I could go with this line of thinking. More cookies to bake (do people even bake cookies now?).  More sweets to consume (so as not to waste food or offend all those baking efforts). More gifts to buy (often at organized office-swaps and often to someone in another department with whom you had little or no daily interaction). Even more controversy. (Should City Hall display nativity scenes? Why is there a special season that excludes Jewish, Hindu or Muslim children? Are the atheists destroying Christmas?)

I still bake some. I give gifts to some people. Sometimes I put a few lights on the house.
Mostly I observe the Madness.

history repeats itself

apologies to Coldplay.

The song just seemed to fit my feeling about this particularly obnoxious presidential candidate.
Also on you tube: youtu.be/MUaE50ntDqM

Winter Bird

Brown Thrasher photo by Dan Pancamo

 I spotted one of these beautiful birds in the back yard this morning. First thing I noticed was how much it resembled a mockingbird. I checked my Sibley bird book, and it was as I suspected, a Brown Thrasher, and in the same family, Mimidae, as the mockingbird. I see on Wikipedia that my house is in the wintering region of the thrasher, so perhaps winter is coming sooner than expected.

It seems the hummingbirds have already deserted us, too, another sign of impending weather changes.

I finally have spider lillies!

Two and a half years ago when I moved 160 miles south from my former home I brought with me some spider lilly bulbs from my old back yard and scattered them around my new home, hoping that they would take hold in at least one spot. Two years went by and I didn't see any spider lillies bloom. I was disappointed. I decided that the soil or climate just wasn't to their liking.

A few days ago I noticed what looked like 3 spider lillies poking up in three different spots in the back yard. Now they're blooming, and there are a few dozen more about to bloom. Sometimes nature just takes longer than we expect it to. I'm so happy to welcome all these "spiders" to my yard.

These flowers should slowly multiply, and get better with each passing year, but I doubt I'll ever have a display like This! Ooh, la la!

fire man

It's Hot, but Roy is Cool.

I haven't been doing much collage, but here's a postcard I did one week when the temperatures were sizzling past 100 degrees. It's still in the upper 90s and I'm itching for a bit of cooler weather.

sunday wildlife report

I've been finding a lot of small white broken eggshells on my walks lately. I'm pretty sure they come from the nests of white-wing doves. Today I found part of a beautiful blue robin's egg. There was a time when seeing a robin in Texas seemed a rare sight. When I was little my family lived in Seattle, where robins were common, and I missed them when we moved to Texas. Now I see them in many places in North and Central Texas. I used to be sad when I saw a broken eggshell because I thought it had fallen out of the nest, then I found out it's a sign that a baby bird has hatched. The parent bird cleans the nest by throwing away the eggshell. Here's a time lapse of a baby Robin hatching and the adult bird tossing out the eggshell

Yesterday I found a good-size red-eared slider turtle in my neighbor's front yard. Its shell was about ten inches (25 cm) in diameter, so it was at least an adult. It seemed to be going somewhere, and I hope it gets there safely. I would have liked to bring it home with me, but I don't have a pond in my yard. Maybe someday.......

(c) Matthew High, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

I have a couple of Texas spiny lizards living in my back yard. I'm pretty sure one of them lives under the tool shed, but I've seen them often lately either scrambling up the wooden fence or catching bugs in the tallow tree. They will let me get fairly close, within two feet, probably because they can escape so quickly. One of these days I hope to get a good photo of one of them. They are one of my favorite little dinosaurs.