oh, happy day!

Over a week's worth of entries in one wodge:


Wednesday 12 October


I had almost given up hope for rain Saturday by 9:30 at night when a tap-tap-tap started on the roof. For an hour or so it was like when the popcorn is nearly finished -- there’s a pop, and then a long pause, and you think it’s all done. Then a pop-pop as a few more go. This rain was like this, I kept thinking it was stopping, then a few more drops. Then after an hour or so it settled into a steady drizzle that lasted almost all night.


That gave us about an inch. Didn’t do much for the tank, because there was almost no runoff, but increased it a bit. Then about 9am it started up again, somewhat harder, till early afternoon, and added another inch to the total. I took a fairly unremarkable picture of the front yard, and Buddy in the background, in the rain at noon.


Monday afternoon on the way to the bee meeting, Carolyn couldn’t get over how washed and sparkling everything was, and how lovely the day felt.


Back in the early spring, when I was getting the new hive stand ready for the split that didn’t happen, I grubbed several dozen extremely crowded bulbs out of the fencerow where they were going to be right under it. A patch of garlic, and about 80 of what I thought were the Schoolhouse Lilies or Oxblood Lilies, the red rain lilies of September. I evidently missed a few, because three Red Spider Lilies (Lycoris), to my surprise, squeezed themselves up out of the corner of the space to bloom. The bulbs that I dug up had been in a paper bag by the front door all summer. They were still plump and healthy, so I took seven bags of ten each to bee meeting, as well as the cut flowers.

Gave some to Carolyn and Kay, and Kurt raffled off the rest.



Yesterday, Tuesday, I didn’t even look at the forecast, so I was astonished to wake up about 3:30 this morning to more rain. For half an hour it was very gentle, though distant lightning was flickering. Then suddenly the lightning and thunder were on top of us, and the rain a downpour. Eventually I went back to sleep. This morning is sunny and cool, the broken clouds have all blown on off, and we got another 1-3/4 inches! Now the tank is quite noticeably bigger; ought to be good for another month of drought at least (not that I am hoping for any such thing).

The pond margin has come up to pretty much cover all of the flat cracked plain that I about lost my shoe in before.


At least one crawdad has survived and excavated a new chimney.






There are tiny little white flowers blooming on tho silt flats around the water.






The hillside of bare dirt and dead straw is covered with green dots of germinated seeds. Don’t know what KIND of seeds, but green, anyway.







Back before the rain, when the path to the pond was just dust, Alabaster could turn from a pretty white cat into a goblin in an instant. All it took was a quick wriggle in the dust on her back.












The younger red chicken has hurt her right leg and is limping very badly. Up around the middle of the leg there is a big clumpy scab. I can’t tell just what is wrong. I don’t see how it can possibly be a varmint bite. I wonder if she could have gotten herself caught behind a tie rod or something. She is eating scratch eagerly. Undecided what to do, if anything.





Tuesday 18 Oct

Chilly this morning, down near or below 50° - a cold front blew through energetically about nine last night, with wind and thunder and lots of lightning, and a fairly vigorous, if brief, rain. Less than a quarter of an inch, but a nice reinforcement. It comes to nearly four inches for October so far. It’s still pretty windy this morning. Still below 60° at noon. So odd to actually welcome the sunny spots on the floor for putting one’s feet into.

Now I am going to go into the library and FINALLY get these posts up.



Oh, and one more wildlife photo. This is the second scorpion that has shown up in the sink. This one was evidently killed by the hot water I was running to wash dishes before I got the sink cleared out and saw it. Some arthropods (roaches, for instance) are very sensitive to hot tap water.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was hastily rinsing out the dishes to give the cats "gushie-fud" before going off to Ikea with Mary, I felt a sharp pain in the side of my fingertip as I started scrubbing with the scratcher. Turned out to be an inch-long scorpion on it. I had a dish of soda right there, so I immediately plastered it with wet soda, shortly reinforced with aloe vera. It hurt for maybe ten minutes, not very badly, and then was virtually unnoticeable. Never made any mark to speak of. I'm sure a bigger one would be worse, but I was fairly relieved to discover that they are not nearly as dangerous as I had feared.