Growing Her Wings

 Whew!!  I have been really busy lately!  Which is a great thing.  We are beginning the height of our growing season here and have lots of stuff coming in from the garden now.  So, you know that means picking, canning, freezing, drying and so on.

 Most of the garden is doing well but some things got off to a real slow staart, like the tomatoes and okra.  We've had plenty of rain!  But that's makes for not so much sunshine...at that slows down some veggies.  We are finally starting to get a little of everything now.

 I guess I put this up mainly for the little birds!  They are about the only ones that ever see it!  The little phoebes and bluebirds have been working their little hearts out this year though...catching lots of bugs for me.

 I think we will have a much better corn crop this year.  We added amendments to this plot all winter long and it seems to have helped a lot.  Can't wait for some fresh, hot buttered corn on the cob!!

 Just a little sampling of what we are getting so far. 

 We also did a bit of landscaping while we had the neighbor's backhoe.  This area was really lumping and horrible; filled with rocks and stumps.  It was about impossible to mow, so I had Allen dig up all the stumps and grade everything.  We also expanded the little wet weather stream bed and I am slowly lining it with flat rocks to make it more attractive when it's dry.  It looks pretty nice actually but this photo isn't very good.  The edges are lined with irises in places.
We also cut out several old, crappy trees and expanded the cleared area, which you can't really seee here.  We intend to plant another apple tree and possibly a plum and cherry.

My annual row of zinnias in the garden is finally  blooming!  There are a few other flowers mixed in but the zinnias kinda dominate.

Thank you for all the kind comments in the last post.  I wanted to respond here to a couple of the last ones made, so to be sure they would be seen.  And also, please, please note this:  my blog is set so that all comments made after 3 days of the post publishing, must be moderated by me.  I have to physically post them.  Blogger does NOT always tell me when some people comment.   I don't know why.  So....I don't always know that I a comment has been left unless I go to the blog dashboard and check specifically for that.  I forget to do this frequently because not a lot goes on here anymore.  I recently discovered a comment from last year!! that I never knew about and never published!  I would never skip a comment on purpose (unless the person was just being a total and complete, useless ass in their comment), so if this ever happens, please know it is not on purpose.  My memory is just not what it was and sometimes I forget to look.

Since March the doctor has had me trying a couple of different meds and dosage amounts etc. and it's had me all over the place at times.  But that's just natural.  They have to try lots of different things for each person to find the right combo.  Anyway, he doubled my dose of Mirapex lately and I had a very bad reaction to that and went I dropped back down to my low dose it seemed to throw me in a another horrible direction!  It was quite unpleasant.  So, after wrangling around with the cost of another drug (there was no way I could begin to afford it) he put me on a very, very low dose of Sinemet.  This is actually helping a lot and I feel much better.  I still have a lot of pain and stiffness but the brain fog is better and just feeling more like doing things and with a better outlook.  My skin has cleared up great and doesn't hurt all the time and I can swallow food easily now.

Tammy asked about a support group and I have looked into that.  Unfortunately, there is only one anywhere around me and that's at UAB, of course.  On a good day... UAB is at least 45 minutes away, usually 50-60 minutes, so that's not really something that would work well.  I still don't often feel "clear" or "on" enough to drive in Birmingham traffic. If you've ever been or lived here you'll know what I mean! lol!  So.  I did find a good online support group though, that I like very much and is very helpful.  So, that allows me some contact with folks that truly understand my condition.  They are very encouraging and a lot of them have some pretty wicked sense of humor, so it's fun.

So, that's part of what's going on.  Hopefully I will be back soon with some more activity!!  I hope you all are enjoying your summer!!

Low Profile

Thought I'd share a few photos of some sneaky critters that I've spied around here lately.  I know I've been laying low too.  Not felt real good these past couple of weeks, plus, my old decrepit desktop 'puter finally gasped it's last breath and so I've had to transition over to my laptop that mostly sat unused.  It had been acting up for some time, so I had enough sense to get all my photos off the desktop and onto another drive but had not quite cleared all my documents off when it finally gave up the ghost.

I had a few more pics of these dragonflies but they have been misplaced somewhere in the move.  And...although I was able to transfer all my photos to this laptop, it somehow (or I did) just dumped ALL of them (a couple thousand photos) into one big folder, all jumbled up.  On the desktop I had everything in various folders, such as all chicken photos and so on, but now everything is just in a wad.  *sigh*  I may never get all that straightened out.

So anyway.  I'm here.  I am slowly making progress.  Some days I feel better and some days I feel like hammered hell.  I'll try to post again soon.  I do have a few little things to show yall.

Oh, and if there are any locals that want to drop by, I am selling the last of my pottery!  Some good deals here!  Well, no sales tax anyway..Haha!  I have mostly dinnerware type stuff...bowls, plates, a few mugs etc.  Let me know if you wanna come take a look.  It may be the last stuff I make (pottery wise) for a looong time.

Hunting Bears

 Over the last several years I've read quite a bit about numerous wild animal species making comebacks in population or starting to appear in areas that they previously were though to be gone from.  Not necessarily extinct but just far removed from those original areas.  This is all good news to me.  I'm happy to see many wild animals growing in population.  I know when I was a kid we never saw deer around the area I grew up.  That was something that existed far, far away in other parts of Alabama.  Now, when I go down in the pastures when I visit Mama, deer trails and tracks are a dime a dozen.  Unfortunately, coyotes have come with them, but so far they tend to stay far away from houses.  Fox are common now, as are ground hogs and various hawks and other wild fowl.
Knowing all this did not prepare me for what I recently found in my driveway though.  A couple of weeks ago, on my daily trek to the mailbox, I spied some very large and very deep claw marks right in the drive, which is hard-packed chert and gravel.  I came back and took several photos, as you see below.  At first I thought, it must just be a very large dog.  But after measuring them....I thought, that'd have to be one big ass dog.  There were four claw marks with the outer ones being a good 4 inches apart and about 1 1/2" between each claw.  That's just the claws, you see.  The paw would be even larger.

 There were actually several marks but this was the one most clearly defined.  The scratch was over 2 feet in length also and, as I mentioned, in some very hard gravel and dirt.. We had not had much rain in a while when this was done and the ground was just baked.  In fact, we have had several very heavy rains since I took these photos and some of the marks are still slightly visible, they were so deep.

 I suspected it was a black bear but figured everyone would think I was nutty.  I mean, Alabama does have black bears.  They travel quite frequently through our state on their way to and from the Smokies and Florida.  But they normally stay over on the east side of the state because they can make a great deal of the trip within the confines of the Talledega National Forest.  It's a little unusual to see them over this way.

 Then, I found this tuft of hair not far from the claw marks a few days later.  It's very matted and coarse.  I suppose it could very well be dog hair but it just didn't seem like it.  So.  I got all my stuff together and paid a visit to our local county extension officer.  He's real nice and likes to chat so we dropped in his office and I showed him all my evidence.  To be honest, I expected him to laugh at me.  But...he looked over everything and said, 'Yep, looks like you have a bear!'  I wanted to not be thought a nut but I also didn't want to know I had a bear on my land!  Mainly it scared me for my chickens and for Chigger.  I don't think she's courageous enough to go after a bear, by any means, but I encouraged her to stay up by the house as much as possible and made sure the girls were locked up way before dark.  The county guy said he figured the bear had well moved on by now; that it was probably just passing through, but I wasn't so sure.  I haven't seen any signs of anything lately though, so hopefully he's right! 

In other rare sightings, I actually won 2 prizes at the art show that I was recently accepted into!  I got 2nd for the metal sculpture I showed ya'll a few posts back and got an Honorable Mention for another small sculpture.  I won a little money with that too, so that was nice!  I was very happy and grateful to finally have some success.  At the end of the reception, the judge (a professor from the U of A in Huntsville) made a point to stop me to talk and compliment me on all my work.  He claimed to be very impressed with the welding, which I thought was kinda humorous.  However, he did understand that it's a bit tricky to weld cast iron to mild steel and he appreciated my efforts.  Of course, I told him who my professor was that taught me how to weld and he understood then.  Where I went to school, craftsmanship was of great importance, as it should be.  Didn't matter how great of an artistic concept, if it looked like shit then it was shit in their eyes.  "The craftsmanship should always be appropriate to the piece".  I might as well as had that tattooed on my forehead as often as we were told in school! They weren't kidding either.  If you couldn't muster the craft of building things (or painting etc), there was none of this, "oh, it's the concept of the piece blah, blah, blah." They would tell you to get your shit and get out of their class.
At any rate, from this show I was also offered two other opportunities to exhibit my art and I am very excited about that.  I'll tell ya'll about that in a later post.

Alive An' Kickin'

 Yes, we are all still here and with the living!  We just got back from a week long vacation down in St. Andrew's State Park, in the sunny state of Florida, where we had a fabulous time!  As you can see, I finally got to try paddle boarding, which I had wanted to do for some time now, and it was great!  I enjoyed the hell out of that.

 It is a little harder to stay upright that some might think; I was just mildly surprised.  But it's not terribly hard.  It is a great workout on your legs and stomach though. I did fall off one time, in shallow water, and my big butt went straight to the bottom and hit pretty hard!  That didn't do a whole lot of good for my hips and tailbone but it didn't seem to bother me too much later.

 The waters are beautiful and so clear at St. Andrew's so I could see all sorts of sealife below me.  Fortunately, no sharks but I did have 2 dolphins swim right under me!!  and several large schools of fish and a stingray.  The dolphins were feeding on the fish so we all went back and forth and round in circles.  It was great!

 Since we were camping in the park we had time to do all sorts of other things, like hiking.  Their trails are very short but it was interesting and we saw lots of stuff.  I was trying to photograph a squirrel here and just almost got an unintended shot of said squirrel being snatched up by a hawk.  Me and the squirrel were both very surprised!

 Tons of dragonflies but I was not able to get a good shot of any really.

 The beaches here are some of the prettiest I've seen anywhere in the U.S. and I've been to both seas and all around the Gulf.  I also did a fair amount of snorkeling and swimming and had a little group of my own fishes that followed me around anytime I did.  They apparently liked for me to stir up the sand for them because there was something there they liked to eat I guess.  At any rate, they stayed with me every step of the way.

There are tons of various wildlife at SA, as you can see in the following photos.  Most of the creatures are fairly used to humans too, so you can get some good pics.

Did I mention we had a great time? lol!

Our mattresses stayed blown up, we had a nice, shady, quiet camping spot, the amenities here are great; nice showers etc.  The weather was outstanding.  Warm in the day and just cool enough at night to sleep good.  I cooked a nice breakfast each morning but we had dinner out each night so I got lots of great seafood!

And to top it all off, we saw this bald eagle on our last day there!  Almost everyone else on the beach was too busy checking their phones or taking selfies to notice it,

One thing I really enjoyed about being there was actually....no internet, no electronics of any kind.  I'll tell you I did not miss it one bit.

I'll be back soon with another post I think with what little has been going on around here..  Honestly, I have not had a lot of interest in posting this past month, for various reasons I guess, but I think I have a couple of updates for ya'll.  Just lots of busy work getting out of clay and cleaning up, checking out new work leads etc. and the regular yard, garden and chicken work.

Hummingbird Heartbeat

I always keep one hummingbird feeder out during the warm months even though the most of 'em I've ever seen around here was maybe two.  But for some reason, this year has been a boom for us.  We were getting six, seven or eight....so I fished out another rarely used feeder and filled it up.

This one I hung from the end of the rafter tails right in front of the kitchen windows so we enjoy a show every day now. 

These are not great but they are somewhat passable anyway.  I'm still learning this fancy camera too.  Maybe I can get it all figured out one day.

So, I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Honey Bee

 Not a lot to report on around here lately....other than I am still on the very low starch diet and so far I have not gone to jail.  It was looking kinda iffy there for a while but all I can say is thank God for chocolate and coffee, otherwise I'm not sure where we'd be.  This diet is a special kind of hell in case you're wondering or would like to get back at someone at some point.  The first few days I was sure I could, and possibly would, chew the siding off the house but things have calmed down now.  I guess it was just my body adjusting to getting part of it's energy somewhere else but for now at least, I am able to go for several hours without having to cram any non-starch food I can get my hands on into my face.
I have even been experimenting with baking with coconut flour!  and I managed to make some "biscuits" tonight that were.....not horrible.  With a little pat of butter they were actually fairly edible.  Chigger on the other hand, seems to really like coconut flour .....creations....errr....eggy things.  She also had to stop and poo about 3 times today on a 15 minute walk, so I guess maybe I should spread the "love" between her and the chickens a bit more.  So far I have not felt any particularly noticeable pain relief but they say it can take 3-4 weeks before you notice anything.  If it works...it will be totally worth it.  If it doesn't....well...I'm gonna be one pissed @#^%*&*(%&^$%!!.

 In some wonderful news though, the honeybees have been massive this year!!  There are just tons of them on my corn (which I can't !$%&*^*% eat now!) and on the catnip.  Yay!  Just hundreds of them it seems.

 I don't think I have seen this many honey bees the whole time I've lived here.  I know these pictures don't seem that impressive but I assure you, there are scads of them!  I missed getting a really good shot of about 6 on one tassel of corn when the battery in my camera went dead but I did manage to eek out these few on the catnip.  I wonder if somebody on the area has added or started hives?

 The little bitties are not bitties anymore..they are well on their way to young adult chickens.  This is Wingnut, one of the little pullets, enjoying some overgrown cucumbers from the garden.  She has one feather on each side, in exactly the same spot, that appears to grow wrong side out, so that's why I call her Wingnut.  That's what she looks like from the front.

 These three stick together like peanut butter and jelly.  I don't know why they were picking on this little dead tree in a pot but for some reason they found it interesting.

 I tried to get some new pics of the dragonflies but they were not in the mood.  I managed to get this one mediocre shot however.

The little Silkies are still doing fine and the broody one FINALLY got over herself and gave it up.  Now she goes outside everyday with the other one and they pal around together.  My big hens don't bully these two but the little silkies are still kinda scared of the big hens so they stay to themselves.  I don't know if you can see or not but here one had caught her a vole and was trying her best to eat it.  I think she finally gave up but I have seen the large hens eat a mouse in one big swallow.  I take them various treat during the day though, so the little girls get plenty of nice things to eat. 

Batdance

Hopefully, the bat saga has now come to an end.  It finally got hot enough this year that the attic louver became too uncomfortable for the clan and they moved out to cooler sleeping quarters.  We set the BIG ladder up so I could reach the louver from the outside and I gritted my teeth to the heat and began the process of screening them out.  First I had to clean the louver because they had pooped all over it and down the side of the house even.  I washed all that, touched up the paint and redid a little of the caulking.  Of course, in the process I managed to poke a hole in the screen that is secured on the inside face of the louver so I had to go in there and patch that good.  I needed to clean up some in the attic anyway, under the louver so it was as good excuse as any to get it all done at once.  It was pretty freaking hot but not as bad as I thought it was going to be.  Regardless, I was soaked by the time I was finished. 

Today was kinda cloudy and I finally had all my materials together and ready so I checked to make sure there were no stragglers up there and started to screen off the front.  Well, of course, there were two bats that had come back so I had to go back into the attic and scare them out.  Wasn't too bad...I just blew on them and tapped the screen until they got mad and left.  So, back outside and up the ladder.  I stapled 1/2" hardware clothe over the face of the louver so nothing (but bugs) can now get into the slats.  Of course, you can't see anything from this crappy photo but it doesn't look bad.  I was afraid the hardware clothe would stick out like a sore thumb but you really don't notice it.  Now, I did spray paint it with a reddish primer so that helps greatly.

The photo above was taken a couple of months ago and I wanted to show ya'll because....if you click on it to enlarge it, you may be able to see the bat on the far right is in the process of having a baby!!    The others (there were more) all had babies under their wings.  Some of them had two!  One under each wing.  I know they were making a mess but this was SO cool!  So, we let the babies grow up and everybody get out before I put the screen up.

The bats are not so easily deterred however.  Of course, they can't get back into the louver but they apparently really like my house, so they just went to the other end.  Now, it's cooler on that end too, so I suspect that's why they went down there, and there is no attic on that end, but they still managed to find a nook to cram into.  I was walking up to the door today and heard all this screeching and such and knew they were up to something.  Bats have a very distinct sound so I recognized it right away.  I looked up just in time to see a dozen bats or more come billowing out of the crack between the regular roof and where the clerestory roof joins it.  I have a (maybe) 16 inch soffit on the sides of the clerestory roof and where it joins the normal roof it makes a large bird's mouth.  They were stuffed in there and maybe even under the metal ridge cap (only about 16 inches of that too).  That side faces the rising sun and I think the metal roof had finally heated up enough to start burning their little furry buns so they came hauling ass out of there.  I kept hearing some others though and climbed up on the roof to see there were still three or four hanging on to the spot.  I don't know if they ever did leave.  That area is not so bad though.  They can't really get into anything there and their poop will just get washed off when it rains.  Besides, that being a pretty much open area, I don't know anyway I could stop them from roosting there anyway.  I am going to put up a large bat house, in a tree, and just hope they find that a more desirable place to sleep.  I really like having the bats around as they are great for pest control and of course, I'm a softie for them because they are often misunderstood.  But I don't want them messing up my house!  I'll build them two houses, or more!, of their own if they'll use them.

And the bats are not the only critters that really like my house!  The phoebes just love the outriggers that hold the verge rafters up.  Of course, I love the phoebes too.  They are really great pest control also, so I don't want to run them off.  I do want to remove their nests as they abandon them though and lay some copper flashing down on the tops of the outriggers so that future nests don't rot the wood.  I don't know that they would now but better safe than sorry.  A lot of people fuss about the looks and think it's nasty to have bird's nest around but I just love them.  I'm glad my house can provide a safe place for the babies and I hope many generations (of bats and birds) will call this valley their home.

Grow Your Own

 Not the best of photos I know, but maybe you can make out what I'm so excited about.  The asparagus has started to come up!  Hopefully, it will soon be coming up in a bit more quantity, so that it doesn't take me a week to get one batch.  This is the main reason I added another row this year.  The shoots that do come up are doing well and fat but there is just not enough at one time.  Ahhh, patience weedhopper...

 Since our cold frame is currently disassembled (meaning non-existent), I decided to just sow some lettuce in the one available, clear area that I knew would not get messed with.  It could sort of act like mulch for the asparagus also.  I will sow the rest of this row in about a week so I can stagger my lettuce harvest a bit.  It is about worthless in my opinion to buy loose leaf lettuce at the grocery.  It's expensive, it always goes bad before I can eat it all, plus, it's incredibly easy to grow yourself (and cheap), even with a teeny bit of space and it just sits there until you are ready to harvest a salad amount at a time.  Of course, it will eventually bolt but in cooler weather that takes awhile and you can get many servings before that happens.

Here is a few examples of the shrub starts that I did from prunings.  You can see in front, with the teeny yellow buds, is one forsythia shrub and to the right and behind is 2 blueberry bushes.  Just prune them off and stick 'em in the ground.  Of course, not all take but many do and it's free.  And yes, they are very small at first, just kinda like sticks, but they grow pretty fast, especially if you keep them in rich soil.  Since I know these are rooted well now I'll transfer them soon.

And one of the most wonderful surprises of this week!!!  The morels are starting!!!  I am officially hooked on these things now.

I found enough for a nice supper and we pigged out.  We celebrated their annual return again with a bit of steak and wine but I stuffed myself so on these that I honestly didn't end up eating much steak.  Oh well.  It makes a good breakfast.  Hopefully, I caught these at the beginning of the season here, so I'm hoping to find more in the next couple of weeks.  The Earth has a bounty if you know where to look!

Oh, and I meant to show ya'll these in the last post and forgot!  When we were up at my Mom's for Easter and were outside taking those photos, I noticed a small flock of birds that settled in a great big oak tree right by us.  My brother did not appear to notice but I knew immediately that there was something different about these birds.

Their soft, muted colors and just the way they landed all around us seemed foreign somehow.  Upon closer inspection with my telephoto lens I then knew that I had never seen these before!  Unfortunately, I did not have my most powerful lens (I figured I wouldn't need it! ha!) and so I could not get real close or detailed shots but these are enough that I'm pretty certain that these are Cedar Waxwings.  I was just mesmerized by them.  I would guess there were about 20-25 in this group.

They sat around preening and just enjoying the sun.  Didn't seem bothered by us at all.  Which made me happy.  It was fantastic to get to observe them so such a long time.

I wish a group would come by the house so I could get a better shot (maybe) but I'm ecstatic to have seen them and gotten these.  I really had no idea that Waxwings ever came down here, so it was a real surprise for me.