City car on a country road...

... and the city car was mine.

There I was this afternoon, driving down our hill on my way to the post office. As soon as I pulled out of our driveway, I saw the neighbor's goats on the road and heading towards the grass around our pond. Give me a blessed break.

I honked the car horn to get the goats' attention, and then I used my car to herd them back towards their own property. Which usually works just fine. However, I forgot about the mounds of gravel that are underneath the grass on the neighbor's side of the road. The problem with the gravel is that it's on an incline which goes down towards the drainage ditch which runs to the drainage pipe that's underneath the road. And the problem with that is my car is definitely a city car... two-seater sports car, low to the ground, and even though it's a heavy car, the tires got hold of that gravel and just slid a little bit towards that incline on the side of the road.

As I was sliding towards the drainage ditch, the goats were jumping back over the neighbor's fence and onto their own property. Smart goats.... they know enough to get out of the way of a city car being driven by a city girl.

When I realized what was happening, I slammed on my brakes, said a not-nice word or two, and felt the wheels of that car burying themselves deeper into that gravel. The goats were on their side of the fence, in their own field, watching me and my car.

Another not-nice word or two followed that... and then I was determined to get myself and my car back onto the road without having to walk back to the house and get my husband to push the car out. (And then have to listen to him saying "How in the world did you manage to do that?")  Details... men are always looking for details.

I tried to drive the car backwards onto the road, not once but twice. Didn't work. More not-nice words were bouncing off the inside of my car. Then I drove closer to the neighbor's fence, thinking that I could back up more easily if I got those tires away from the gravel. The goats saw my car getting very close to their fence and then ran off into the field. As I said--- smart goats.  Getting closer to the fence didn't work... it only got my car deeper into the very tall grass that's probably filled with all kinds of crawling and slithering things. No way was I going to get out of my car in all of that grass and go get my husband.

Only one thing to do.... drive the car down further into the incline, drive past the drainage pipe, and then drive the car up and over the incline through the grass on the other side of the drainage pipe which I knew to be gravel-free.  So that's what I did with my pretty little city car.... drove it into and through all of that tall grass (probably ran over half a dozen mice) and then gave it some gas when I passed that drainage pipe and that got my car out of the drainage ditch, up and over the incline and the tall grass, and back on the blasted road.

I stopped on the road and looked back at the spot where my car had been stuck, and then thanked my lucky stars that we didn't get the pouring rain that soaked the center of our town yesterday, because that drainage ditch would have been filled with at least two feet of water. And then the inside of my car would have really been filled with not-nice words.

That orange cat...

Orange Kitty is still around the property... sleeping under the bushes in the heat of the day, hiding under the gazebo when the lawn mower is going, standing guard by the back steps at night.  And still, he's being too aggressive to either pet him or catch him.... and catch him is what I'd like to do, followed by a trip to the local animal shelter. Surely, someone else in this town needs an orange and white cat to catch mice and keep snakes from coming up on the porch.

Our mostly-outside cat Gatsby doesn't howl at the orange cat all that much anymore... except, of course, if Orange Kitty is eating the Meow Mix at the very minute that Gatsby wants a snack. Then Gatsby's howls will have that orange cat running for cover underneath the cottage.

There are days when that orange cat looks at the bowl of Meow Mix and won't go near it. How can a stray cat be picky about the food that's put in front of him?  'Free' food that he doesn't have to hunt down!  I've tried cans of Fancy Feast with that orange cat... flavors that our other cats don't like and won't eat (but there's no way of knowing that until the cans are bought and paid for and opened up, of course). To date, that orange cat doesn't like any of the Fancy Feast cans, and tonight he has decided that he doesn't like Meow Mix either.

Well, so be it. I don't leave food out on the porch at night.... after Orange Kitty turned his whiskers up at the bowl of Meow Mix not once but twice, I brought the bowl into the house when he walked away from it. Off he went, down the steps of the porch, heading towards the field by the barn would be my guess.

Unless that orange cat gets his paws on a mouse tonight, he's going to be hungry. And then maybe in the morning he will decide that the Meow Mix isn't such a bad thing after all.  Stupid cat.

We've tried  not feeding that cat, in an attempt to get him to go away, but that just doesn't work, not in the beginning of his 'stay' here, and it doesn't work now. That orange cat just got thinner and thinner when we weren't feeding him, and he spent all of his time meowing on the back porch... too pitiful for words, and I just gave in and fed him.

Too aggressive to pet, too smart to be caught. And I've been saying from the beginning that we don't need another cat around here. Especially a stray cat who turns his nose up at a bowl of Meow Mix. Stupid cat.

Up a tree....

... and that's exactly what the tree guys did today--- climbed up into our ancient pecan trees and gave them all a very good trimming and thinning out.  And, wonder of wonders, these two tree guys showed up on time last week to give me an estimate, and then they showed up today, right on time, to do the work. It's not often that such blissfully perfect things happen with workmen out here, so it was a nice surprise.

The cats weren't happy with the tree guys though..... I had to confine Mickey inside the garage and the attached coop, and Gatsby came into the house for the afternoon.... and Sweet Pea kept going from window to window, making sure the workman who was climbing the tree was doing it correctly. As long as Sweet Pea is inside the house and watching the world through the windows, he is one fearless cat.

Now that the pecan trees are trimmed, I'm hoping that branches don't keep falling from those trees every time a breeze blows through them. The brush piles are filled with sticks and branches and small limbs that I've been carrying to those piles for the past couple of years.  Now that I've found such a great tree-guy, I'll be calling him once a year to keep everything in check.

On the road...

Literally, on the road this morning---- one exquisitely squished armadillo and one very long curled-up and pancake-squashed brown snake.  And those two dead creatures were on the road which runs through our hills here, before reaching the main highway.  On the way into town this morning, there were also assorted mashed piles of flesh, bone, and fur, but they were so torn up and eaten up that I wouldn't have been able to identify them even if I had been up close (which is not an option for me).

On the drive back from town, the pile of snake was gone, probably carried off by the vultures. Very easy for them to just pick up a flattened snake and whisk it away into the woods so they can eat in the shade of the trees and not have to scatter every time a car approaches their dining place. That particular snake wasn't as big and heavy as some of the dead snakes I've seen on that road. The heavier the snake, the more of it the vultures have to consume before they're able to transfer it from paved road to grass-coated earth.

As for the armadillo.... when I was driving towards town, the armadillo was face-first into the road, his four little paws flattened out as if he'd run himself into a glass door.  When I came back from town, the armadillo was turned completely over, with his paws nearly reaching for the sky and his dead eyes not seeing that his underside had been ripped apart by the vultures.  Seven vultures had to scatter as I drove down that road towards my house, and I saw in my rear-view mirror that they went right back to their feast as soon as the tail lights of my car were ten inches away from that poor armadillo.

And so concludes today's wildlife/roadkill adventure. I tried to just state the facts, without adding any unnecessary complaints about the disgusting and nerve-numbing emotional trauma that goes hand-in-hand with getting into one's car and driving into town for a few hours.

Give me a blessed break.

Lost dogs, baby birds, and mice.

The stray dog was walking up our road this morning, but he turned right around and headed back down the hill as soon as he saw us. Very thin and starved-looking dog, sort of Greyhound-sleek, with a tail that never did raise up towards the sky.

I wish people would be more considerate with their pets.... when you no longer want to care for a dog or a cat, the most humane thing to do is bring them to a shelter. At least they will get food and water, and have a chance of finding another home. Be nice, people.... to one another AND to your pets, for goodness sake.

The last two baby birds are just about ready to fly out of their nests. We've had a record number of baby barn swallows this year, and I can't even begin to count the number of birds that are in our yard at any given time of day.  I have lost count of how many times I've had to hose off the porch furniture because of the bird droppings.

My husband bought a huge sack of birdseed a couple of weeks ago and he was filling up the bird feeder in the backyard. Not only did the birds enjoy the seeds, but a mouse or two must have found its way up to the feeder and was storing the large sunflower seeds in a corner of the guest cottage. This weekend, my husband sealed up the space near the tub in the cottage, and hopefully, the mice will keep themselves in the fields instead of discovering new ways to enter the house, the cottage, and the barn. Seems that all the mice need is one teeny tiny little space and they can squeeze themselves inside and have a grand time exploring.  Three cats on this property, and still we have mice.

Manicure? What manicure?!

Chipped nail polish once again, and we've barely been home for even 24 hours. Give me a blessed break.

The tree guy showed up right on time this afternoon, but only to have a look-see at the trees he needed to prune and cut back... to see what kind of tools he would need, and to figure out how many men he would need for the job, which won't be done until the end of next week. Seems that a lot of trees got damaged during last week's wind and rain storm, and he's a busy tree guy. And also the most reasonable, which is why we'll wait for him to do the work.

So there went the tree guy this afternoon, down our driveway and then down the hill... and there I was, looking at all those branches scattered all over the side yard underneath the pecan trees. I couldn't just leave all the branches there till a week from this Saturday.  I started out to pick up just a couple of them, thinking my husband would be on his way home in a few minutes.

Two branches became ten, which turned into eighteen, which multiplied into thirty... which translates into a dozen trips to two of the brush piles in two different pastures. By that time, mostly everything was picked up and my husband wasn't home yet. I looked at three chipped fingernails, and decided that the rest of the little branches and twigs could just wait till tomorrow.

My husband's car pulled into the driveway just as I was washing my hands and getting a drink of water. Timing is everything. Welcome back to the Hill Country.

Back home...

We were traveling for a week, into the tip of New Jersey, part of Pennsylvania, and down into Maryland.... mostly rural areas, but nothing as country-ish as where we live.  In all the places we stayed, not once did I look under the bed for scorpions.

While we were away, one of the neighbor's cows got into our pasture and feasted on the grasses by our pond. Which is fine with me, being that it was just the one cow, but the other neighbor got worried because he didn't want his bull breaking the fence down to get at the cow by our pond.  When we got home, the wayward cow was nowhere to be found, so I'm guessing the bull-owning neighbor took care of the cow.

Someone apparently dropped off a dog while we were gone, and my friend C who was taking care of the house and the cats for me got a doggie-surprise one morning. (Can't someone drop off a cute little fluffy dog once in a while? We always get these mangy looking huge dogs suddenly appearing on our property.)  Our sort-of-outside cat Mickey was safely inside the fenced kitty-coop and the closed garage while we were gone, so the stray dog didn't have a chance to hurt Mickey at all..... and our other really-outside cat Gatsby is smart enough to head for the upper reaches of the barn when anything or anyone 'strange' comes onto the property (not exactly an attack cat). And our inside cat Sweet Pea was probably watching all the festivities with the dog from the windows of the TV room.  When we got home, the stray dog was nowhere to be found on our property, but our neighbor across the road had also seen that dog while we were gone.

No scorpions under the bed last night (of course I checked), but there were two dead wasps in my sitting room (I think they might be attracted to the pink velvet sofa).  A tiny mouse (very much dead) was on one of the glue traps in the utility closet, and there was a slowly-moving scorpion in the breakfast room this morning (the vacuum took care of him quite nicely).

Across the front doorway (which we hardly ever use) there was a huge brown spider sleeping in the middle of his doorway-wide web. Very nicely constructed, I must say, but the broom took care of that this morning. (I don't usually disrupt the spiders unless they're in my way, and even if I don't use that front door, I don't want to be looking out into a giant spider web every time I look out the front door.

While we were enjoying warm 80-degree weather in Maryland, a storm blew through this part of the hills and knocked down a huge limb from the pecan tree, plus lots of small limbs. Time to seriously get those two pecan trees trimmed up, so I've already called a tree guy and he'll be here this afternoon to trim, prune, cut, and clean up the branches. For once, I'm not going out into the yard to pick up all the branches that fell during that storm. I'll just let the tree guy do that job, and I'll sit inside and protect my manicure.

I've been up and awake since 5:30 this morning... got the laundry done, did the ironing, the suitcases are back in the storage closet.  At some point tomorrow, I will have to go shopping for groceries. One thing about being back home in the hills here.... no restaurants, diners, and cafes on every corner, so I guess I'll have to start cooking again.  (That's when I know the vacation is really over...)

Golden Weavers

That's the fancy name for 'banana spiders' -- golden weavers. Whatever you choose to call them, this particular black and yellow spider is larger than any other I've seen around here, except for the tarantula.

The banana spiders, as with all other crawling things, seem to like this house. At the moment, we have three webs built by the golden weavers.... one by the back steps, one by the front porch, and one that's suspended between a fence and a bird house that's on a twenty-foot-high pole near the cottage.

I've left those three webs alone, being that they're not blocking a walking path, they're not in my way, and so far, the golden weavers haven't made any little sacks and filled them with hundreds (possibly thousands) of eggs.  When I see those sacks, I destroy them before anything has a chance to hatch.

I also thought that maybe some of the wasps would fly into those webs and be eaten by the spiders. Not a chance........ I've seen every other bug caught in those webs, but not one wasp. And those three golden weavers are getting quite plump, so they're eating well out there. They're just not feasting on the wasps.

The six cans of wasp spray that I bought last week are nearly all gone..... two are left, and one of those is only half full.  Without a doubt, for every wasp nest that we find, there are probably two or three that are going un-noticed.

When we first moved into this house, we used to have breakfast and lunch on the front porch in the warm (but not broiling) weather, unless it was too windy. These days, you couldn't pay me to eat out there.... it's not too windy, but it definitely is too waspy.... with a few spiders tossed in to make sure we're paying attention.