You, More Organized: Random Happenings

It's been a few weeks since you loyal readers have had a series of updates on the goings on around here. There have been some good and not so good things going on. I'll try to have more good than bad this go round.

Spring is definitely here. I took these pictures last weekend, but never got around to posting them. I'm sure things are even better now. The first wildflowers...

and a verbena

The first bluebonnet. Thanks to great rains in January and February, I think we'll have a really good season this year.

The mountain laurel is so full of purple grape-soda smelling flowers. Bet you would love to see a picture of it. Well, I didn't remember to take one this afternoon. Sorry.

When you go for a hike around here, you have to be prepared for this to get stuck in your shoe.

Yes, you can feel the thorns through your shoe sometimes.

Two Saturday's ago our fish committed suicide.

20 years ago we had a minnow do the same thing out of the same bowl, but he fell to the carpet and we looked for him for a while before we found him. Apparently C is still sad about it. The minnow must have finally had enough of living across the street from the creek for two years and wanted to make a break for it. He didn't make it.

As for Perry, the beta fish, I'm not sure where he was headed, since he has always lived in captivity. L wanted me to be sure and point out that the last two fish have passed the day after I changed the water in their bowl. It is a fact, but I have changed the water more than twice, so it's not as if it is a direct result of my actions. It is possible I filled the bowl a little too much, but you should have seen him right after he got into the fresh water. He was so happy floating up and then swimming down. Perhaps it was just a tragic accident???? Maybe he wasn't trying to escape.

Last Saturday this adorable little gal came to visit. She did have a collar with a phone number and I called right away. Turns out she was a mile away from home and belongs to the people who live down the road.

It also turns out she was distracting me while her partner was busy having a fresh chicken dinner.

This is all that is left.

hmmm, the picture is now missing. I'm starting to think a certain blue-heeler was back at the house deleting the evidence in an attempt to make me look bad.

Anyway, when the guilty party saw me he took off and she followed. The only good news in this is that it wasn't one of the girls that was already laying. We are still waiting for the 'new' chickens to start laying. Hopefully that will happen in the next week or so. We have had them almost two months and I've seen them experimenting with eye shadow in the bathroom at school so they are definitely starting to come of age.

We finally had a nice weekend and I was able to get into the garden and start doing some work. The onions are really coming along nicely. This is the best luck I've had with onions in pretty much forever. Perhaps because I sorted them out when I started? I doubt it too.

Then there was the exercise in perseverance that I didn't pass. The garden was FULL of these little weeds.

Yes, they have a cute purple flower, but they don't belong in the garden and therefore are weeds. So I started pulling them up. J was helping by knocking them down with his hoe, but he quit on me before the job was done.

I did make it through about 60% of the garden and it looked good when I left.

I'm pretty sure I left space for everything else to take off and grow now that I made space for them. We'll see how things look in a few days.

For two weeks we had this cutie living with us. His name is Rockstar. He was a short-trem 4-H project for J.