Doing the Off-Leash Thing!

It's been nippy and foggy here, but it only makes me friskier. So when Sierra Rose's mama invited me to play in the huge outdoor arena at the local fairgrounds, I woofed a resounding Yeah, Baby!
When Sierra and I get going, the hoomans wonder if we're fighting, heheh!
Naw... we are emphatically NOT!!!
But Sierra does a lot of bitey-face work and she is very good at it!
She's also fast and likes to chase moi!
I do what I can to accomodate her wishes!
But... occasionally, I'll do my own interpretation of "snaggling"!
En garde!

Then we kissie-face and make up!

Exit strategies

Last year I finally figured out that these were cicada exit holes. (I had mentally accused my husband... Derp.)
This was roughly the same spot where Jasmine discovered a digging armadillo at exactly 3:30 this morning. After the excitement was over, she was extremely messy but very proud of herself. Ick, but cleanup will have to wait til hubby gets home. The last time I tried washing her by myself (after the cow poop incident) it was... disagreeable.
But the extra-fun part was afterwards. We headed back to bed, only to find the bedroom door locked. Or actually, broken. A strict parakeet-protecting closed-door policy made me shut it on the way out.
Force of habit. I was still half asleep. Not my fault it decided to break, anyway. Sadly, the person who closed the door for no apparent reason usually gets the blame in these situations.
Luckily though, hubby excels at middle-of-the-night repairs.

Looking North

Edinburgh is built on a series of ridges which gradually descend to sea level at the Firth of Forth. The suburb of Craiglockhart sits high on one of these ridges, and from here you can catch glimpses of the hills beyond the River Forth. These snowy slopes are the Ochil Hills, and beyond them, out of sight but always in my mind when I look northwards, are the true Highlands.
The two curious shapes just between the skyline of the city and the hills are the two Forth bridges. The light coloured chimney-like structure is one of the towers of the Forth Road Bridge. To its left is the rust-red humped back of the Forth Rail Bridge - the never-ending painting of which is a Scottish metaphor for the myth of Sisyphus.

Bread

Tasty, if not beautiful
I don't know where my husband comes up with some of his ideas. He somehow got it into his head that he had to make bread. Or rather, that we had to make bread.
One of the scary things about getting older is some of the things that just pop out of your mouth, like "It has been 25 years since I made bread." The first time I said such an old-person thing I really shocked myself.
But it's true. Back then I was living alone for the first time, in that apartment with no air conditioning across from Vulcan's bare backside. Back before the internets. Before VCRs, or at least before most people could afford them. Due to scheduling mixups I wound up with a lot of free time that quarter. And that's the only time I've ever made bread.
To tell you the truth, it was a lot easier than I remembered. It's also very forgiving. We had an afternoon full of recipe-misreading and recriminations, punctuated with fits of hysterical laughter.
That means another 3 cups of flour, not the original 3 cups!
You said 125°, not 115°!
That's not what I'd call kneading!
When it was done it was delicious. I gorged myself. I ate so much bread that I gave myself a stomachache.
-----
Updated:
Well I was a bit embarrassed to have such a fine baker as Susan see our less-than-perfect loaves, but I think she's just happy to know that folks are baking bread. Go check out one of her special projects, A Year in Bread.

A Good Education

Darcie driving a wagon in Colorado and scraping a deer hide in Jamestown, Virginia.





"The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives."Robert Maynard Hutchins
Grandsons watching a rifle-firing demo at Yorktown, VA. Good grief, those old guns were loud!
Bauer receiving a lecture on different punishments given to wrongdoers. The 'Insubordinate' label he's holding up certainly fits.
Caed petting a turkey in the colonial settlement at Yorktown, VA.
Bauer and Caed chasing a strange-looking duck.
I think one of the best ways to self-educate is to travel. All these photos were taken on family field trips/vacations. Our family loves to learn the history of a place we visit and to do as many interesting things as we can while there. The children aren't always willing participants, but they'll thank me someday!

I Get Whimsical With a Little Help from my Friends

When the security guy pulled our daughter over to the side at the Seattle Airport back in 1993 it wasn't a total surprise. Our irresistible souvenir from Molbak's wouldn't fit in any of the suitcases, and Lily had gamely volunteered to haul it home in her backpack. The shape was unrecognizable on the screen so the guard opened the zipper and looked down at a concrete statue of a Fu Dog, sometimes called a Foo Lion. After inspection we were waved through to the plane.
We bought this small Seattle version of a ferocious guardian lion partly because he reminded us of The Fu Dog Garden at Allerton Park in Illinois and partly in tribute to Henry Michell's foo dog. Our dog~lion stood in a clump of hostas in our Illinois garden for a few years, and when we moved to Texas he came along as the dean of our whimsical objects, here guarding a wax begonia.


This wacky confection greeted the people who stopped at our Illinois garden during a garden walk in the 1990's: Philo & I turned an old broken bedframe and some chickenwire into a whimsical Garden Bed - and if you look carefully at lower right you'll see the companion piece - a open suitcase rescued from the trash, painted and planted to complete this fanciful guest suite.

These dips into garden whimsy are rare - my natural tendency is to the functional and rather plain - a metal obelisk, wooden benches and chairs, undecorated clay pots, a natural stone fountain, hypertufa troughs and things like this windchime.
Long ago at a Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin we met a vendor from Austin and fell in love with these simple tubes of metal, large and tuned to a Mongolian scale. The sounds they make are harmonizing low notes of genuine music rather than clanking or tinkling. It's my kind of wind chime.



But fear not - all is not Spartan here at Circus~Cercis! Thanks to friends and family there's no lack of whimsy in our garden. Although the attrition rate from Texas weather (and critters) is high and some decorations from friends and family have melted, faded and disintegrated, there are survivors:

A motion-detecting frog was a fun gift from one dear daughter-in-law with the turtle sundial coming from one of our sons. Our other dear daughter-in-law and and another son gave us the St Francis statue. While we still lived in Illinois one of my sisters gave us this wooden angel that has miraculously survived nearly a decade in the Texas sun.
A strong wind gust picked up the heavy ceramic St Francis and slammed him against a peach tree last year. Philo filled the decapitated statue with cement and put it back together.

Whimsy seems to gravitate toward the secret garden - My friend-of-40-years, Roberta, sent the hand-painted wildflower sign. My friend Barbara sent this young girl, who reads and dreams under the pomegranate tree. Philo reused three discarded sections of ornate white iron fence to enclose the Secret Garden and that frog bench is a memento of last spring's visit from the fairy garden consultant. The squirrels and birds take it apart once in awhile and I rebuild it.
Many small decorations from the Divas of the Dirt are scattered around inside and out - including this sign Another sign came from Roberta - when she read the word "Diva" she knew who to send it to
Carol in Indiana had better avert her eyes now - here come faces in our garden!!
Philo and I bought a terracotta sun to hang on the chimney in Illinois and this face seems even more at home in Austin Titania has led a rough life in the 15 years since Philo gave me her planter head - she's no longer pristine but bears repair marks from storms and squirrels and weather damage. Maybe someone else would evict her for being too battered, but I look weathered, too, and find her companionable.
Early this year Dawn and I spent a day together, each finding pretty pots. Now this seashell planter reminds me of days on the beach in Carolina.
Are any of us completely resistant to whimsy? Once upon a time I gave this sign to my no-nonsense, vegetable-gardener uncle and was touched that he kept it. The saying was amusing, but it turned out to be untrue - this final bit of whimsy returned to me as a sentimental legacy from an old gardener. I miss him.
This wallow in whimsy and nostalgia was written by Annie in Austin, photographed with the help of a borrowed camera- go to Gardening Gone Wild for links to other bloggers who are joining in this months Garden Design Workshop.

Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing

"Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose
The adventures may have been bloody but they were cinematic and the blood was not real in the new arthouse movie called The Fall. This visually compelling movie came with recommendations from both Roger Ebert and a trustworthy friend, so Philo and I went to see it at the Regal Arbor a couple of nights ago. We liked it a lot and were enthralled by the performances of a young Romanian girl named Catinca Untaru and by an actor who was unknown at the time this long-in-progress movie was filmed, Oklahoma's own Lee Pace. (Lee is now a favorite for those of us who have fallen under the spell of Pushing Daisies.) Lee's character is Roy, an injured stuntman confined to a Hollywood hospital in the 1920's. The wonderful Catinca plays Alexandria, also a patient, also injured, but mobile and so charming she has the run of the hospital. Roy tells Alexandria "an epic tale of love and revenge" - interrupting his story like Scheherazade in "One Thousand and One Nights". We see Roy's words inhabited by the kind of characters seen in old movies and visualized against some amazing settings. The hospital scenes were filmed first, but it took four years and location filming in 18 countries for Tarsem Singh and his brother Ajit to get this story on screen. The official site is here. A review by Reel Fanatic is here. If this looks like your kind of movie, try to get to it while it's still on the big screen.

The blood is real elsewhere. Mpst of us have discovered that deer, woodchucks, raccoons, squirrels and other animals don't share - they're able to turn an entire crop to compost by taking one bite of each fruit or tomato, or are willing to destroy a garden seemingly on a whim. Most of us just write posts in order to vent our anger and grief over lost crops or plants, but some people go after the varmints with everything from guns to hammers. Read all about it in the New York Times article on Garden Vigilantes. Philo saw the story first and brought it to my attention as soon as I woke up this morning.


Sometimes I read the paper right away with that first cup of coffee, but lately have been taking a quick run out to the tomato patch before breakfast to look for Leaf-footed stink bugs. I don't like to use pesticides anyway, but after reading the level of poison needed to control these bugs it would be out of the question - I don't want to kill off the bees, too! So I take my small bucket with a couple of inches of water in the bottom, lightly sprayed with something like Simple Green to break the surface tension, and in the other hand carry the Green Shears of Death, a pair of stainless steel garden scissors. The bugs are too fast to cut in half, but but by using the point to hold the insect's attention while stealthily moving the bucket underneath him, one jab forward and many a stink bug falls into my pail and drowns. As I scurry around the tomato frame in a nightgown, carrying a bucket and scissors and making triumphant little grunts as another bug falls to soapy death, the idea of me tending a front yard vegetable patch grows ever fainter in imagination.
Some adventures are best kept behind the garden gate.
There will be Flower Photos next time! I promise!

"Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose Blog.