Summer Goodness

Here are a few photos from around the house and family this spring and summer.

Black swallowtails aren't nearly as shy as their tiger swallowtail cousins.



I did get some shots of a tiger swallowtail.

There were three family weddings this spring:

My niece Angela and Suhail married in New York.

My niece Sarah and Chris married in Cancun, Mexico.

And their mother Mary married Bobby in Texas after parachuting to the venue.



My nephew Daniel graduated from high school. Here my father helps him tie his tie.

I think Dad's wondering if someone who can't tie a tie is ready to graduate.




We had the nosebleed seats.



Here he is afterwards with my parents.



The grand finale to the graduation:



Back home the garden is doing better than ever.



The Virginia Creeper leaves have already turned.




That's all for today!

Raccoons, Snakes, and Adventures in the Garden

Every year I (mostly successfully) grow some tomatoes and a few other things in our garden. The garden consists of some raised beds at the edge of our yard along the road. Our yard is mostly trees, so only the edges near the road get enough sun.

One bed is a permanent bee, hummingbird, butterfly garden. This year I also have two beds of tomatoes with a few hot banana pepper plants, and a bed of zucchini. I used to plant snow peas but the grasshoppers cured me of that. One year they ate the pea plants down to nothing in about two hours. There were so many grasshoppers on each plant that they flattened them down to the ground while they munched away.



I took these photos a while back so everything is lots bigger now.




You can't even see the zucchini bed now.




Last night some raccoons raided the tomato beds and generally made a mess while ruining several large tomatoes. These are likely the culprits. Mom raccoon brought them up in the middle of the day to munch on the cat food.



Scrappy isn't nearly as afraid of them as he should be.



I got some repellent spray and treated the wood on the beds with it. Hopefully that will work.

Stefan and I found this fellow in the yard and relocated him to the woods before Scrappy found him. He's a ringneck snake and was about ten inches long. He's in a yellow trash can which was the handiest thing to capture him in.



Our turtle is back. I can tell he's the same one that's been around in previous years because of the scar on his shell. Here's he's escaping with some cat food in his mouth.



Here's Scrappy and the turtle in 2006. Note the turtle had cat food in his mouth that time, too.



I've also had two very large snakes in the gold fish pond. I knew something was up because the fish weren't their usual happy, come-feed-me, selves. And then some of them disappeared.


The first snake was a 4.5 foot cottonmouth water moccasin. Unlike many water moccasins he wasn't territorial and wasn't aggressive toward me. He cleverly hid in a fold in the pond liner. My plan was to chase him around the pond so he would leave on his own. Mr. Snake foiled this plan by swimming into my net when I poked at him. I wasn't really expecting to catch him and wasn't prepared. The snake couldn't figure out how to get out of the net. I couldn't figure out how to get hold of anything to kill him with without him escaping.

I yelled for Stefan to bring a hoe. Obviously Stefan's practical education has been lacking because he couldn't figure out which tool was a hoe. Finally he brought me a four tined hard rake. I supposed if you could manage to hit a snake with one of the tines you could kill it, but hitting it would be a problem.

I carried the snake up the road to the big pond and let him go. Probably there are three dozen more just like him there. A few days later another big one got in the pond. Hubby was home this time and he shot it. I couldn't tell if it was a water moccasin or one of the look-alikes, but it was a shorter snake.

Click on any of the photos to go to my flickr page to see the photos in more detail.

Home Again, Home Again

I've been out of town for the better part of two weeks. In addition to doing Dallas CityArts 2008 in Dallas last weekend, I was out of town before and after helping out my parents. Dad had some minor surgeries so Stefan and I went to help out. It was great getting to spend the time with my parents, and Dad did very well with the surgeries.

While I was gone my husband upgraded my computer with a big humongous hard drive. (He is a handy guy to have around.) I've been waiting for the new drive to install the software for my new Canon Rebel Xti. I got the camera in April and have already filled up one 2GB CF card and half of a second one. That's about 800 photos. I can't believe I've taken that many photos. I really like this camera though. The only draw back is that I can't use the display screen to frame shots.

While I was out of town I didn't have access to a computer and I think I went into withdrawal pains when I couldn't blog, or read my favorite blogs. I've been thinking about how to organize what I'm doing, or trying to do, on the blog. So look for some changes in the future. One thing I'm going to do is post some photography once a week. These will be pictures that I took just because I like taking pictures.

The other thing I've been doing is gardening. I planted a couple of raised beds with various types of tomatoes, and a couple of hot banana plants. Something ate the leaves off one banana plant the day after I planted it, but everything else is doing great. Our 3/4 acre is heavily wooded so we don't have much sun. I put four raised beds out by the road where there is enough sun. One has my bee-hummingbird-butterfly garden in it and two others have the "crops." I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the fourth. Yesterday I picked my second pepper and the first tomatoes. I'm pretty happy with the tomatoes.





One of the raised beds.





My first ripe tomatoes of the season!






A really, really big tomato.