A Second Look--June 24, 2015

The weather has been very hot and humid recently with a thunderstorm every afternoon/evening. I feel like I'm living back in New Orleans where we had months of this kind of weather. Actually since I started to write this post, it has began to storm and the electricity has bumped off twice. Let's hope it remains on.

When I took a walk around the yard this morning, I found that the deer had been enjoying themselves. In one bed, every single coneflower bud had been eaten and in another every hosta bud was gone. Add eaten day lilies and black-eyed-susan and I started to wonder if I would have anything to take pictures of except stems. However, they did leave a few things here and there. I think I appreciate the blooms I do find even more because of this.

It is definitely mating season in the bird world as I usually see pairs of birds together visiting the feeder. The bluebird nest has two eggs in it with probably more to come. The new wren's nest looks complete, but there are no eggs in it yet. Those wren's are tricky with their decoy nests, so we'll see what happens.

Here are a few things I saw this week 

during a Second Look.

Coreopsis. This is one of the few things the deer have left alone in our yard. I don't know if they don't like it or they like the day lilies and coneflowers next to it better. Okay. I just looked up coreopsis to see if it is supposed to be deer resistant and it is. However, coneflowers were listed right along with it as being deer resistant. That has been far from my experience. They seem to love them at my house.

Day lily

Geranium, "Rozanne" 

Day lily

Lamb's ear

Assassin bug--nymph (l), adult (r)
I had no idea that the spider looking bug I saw yesterday on the astilbe was really the nymph form of the insect I saw last fall. Apparently, their bite (both forms) can be quite painful. I'm glad I didn't try to handle it, but I did watch it for awhile as it used it's feelers to navigate almost like it was blind.

Balloon flower

Cardinal and house finch

Pollen covered bee in day lily

Bluebird eggs

Goldfinch

A Trip to the Recycling Center

We are fortunate to have a good recycling center in our county along with curbside pickup. We have once a week pickup for glass, metal, plastic, paper, and yard waste. However, sometimes we have too much for pickup and we make a trip to the center itself. This is usually for yard waste and that's what we did past Saturday. Every time I go, I am amazed by the scale of the operation and this time was no exception. Below are a few pictures.

Thursday night, we had a bad thunderstorm complete with hail.

Friday when I was out weeding another bed, I noticed a very large tree limb in the neighbors yard that had come from one of our trees during the storm. We borrowed Uncle Billy's truck, and then Ward and I cut up the limb and loaded it into the truck to take to the recycling center.

The center is quite large, but there were good signs to help us find the section we needed.

In the yard waste area, they have different piles depending on what kind of waste you have. One of the employees directed us to the branch pile where we unloaded the truck.

After we unloaded, Ward decided that he wanted to watch some of the big machinery at work.

A bulldozer was loading an extra large chipper. Notice the large pile of chipped material behind the bulldozer and in the picture above.

The mulch is then available for anyone to take and use.

Thankful Sunday--June 21, 2015

Happy Father's Day

I am thankful for all of you out there who have been a father and/or a mentor to some lucky person. The value of your work is immeasurable. I have been fortunate to be associated with several wonderful fathers including Ward, his father, and my very own father. 

Below is one of the first stories I remember about my father. I have it shared with you before, but I will tell it again because it is one I often think about around Father's Day. 

_______________________________________________

The Baby

When we were growing up, my father looked like the stereotypical father from the 1960's. He worked hard as a lineman to provide for us while our mother did more of the childcare and housework. In addition, he was a man's man, who was strong and excelled at all of the things that men did in our rural area—hunting, fishing, boating, and marksmanship.

However if you looked a little deeper, you found that he was more than he appeared to be. For example, when I was a baby, he did all of the cooking for my sisters while my mother tried night and day to get me to stop crying. He let us hang out with him after work while he played cards with his buddies and held our hand as we walked home. However, there was one time in particular that he showed a sensitive and wise side that I will never forget.

The new baby and her sisters

I was four years old, the baby of the family, and the world revolved around me as far as I was concerned. That is why I was so shocked when my father woke us one morning and said, “Your mother had a baby last night.” 

How could that be? I hadn't heard anything about a new baby coming. Of course, my mother later said that we had talked about it and I had even gotten a new bed in anticipation of the coming baby. But none of that had registered with me. I guess that's how things worked in my self-absorbed four-year-old mind. At any rate, I wasn't too sure how I felt about this new situation. 

That changed, however, the day they brought my sister home from the hospital. We were all gathered around the door and I was sitting on the steps out of the way. My father was the first to enter carrying the new bundle and he immediately put her in my arms. He didn't wait until my mother was inside. He didn't hand her to my older sisters, he gave her to me. I felt so special that in that moment I decided that having this new baby around might not be so bad.

Over the years, there have been many more examples of this tenderness shining through my father's stern and no-nonsense exterior. Maybe that's why I never stopped calling him Daddy.

Happy West Virginia Day

Today we celebrate the day West Virginia became a state on June 20, 1863. As most of you know, I grew up in West Virginia--a fact that I'm very proud of. West Virginia is not large in either size or population, so not many people know much about it. Or they only "know" what they've seen on TV or in the movies. Let me see if I can give a brief summary of what West Virginia is like.

Like most other places, West Virginia has a many different kinds of people and ways of life-- especially since our two panhandles reach far into other areas. Go to the northern part of the state,and it is like the Northeast. Go to the far eastern part of the state and you'll identify with Washington, D. C. Take a trip to the southern reaches, and you are definitely in the South. And when you're in the far west, you are in the Midwest. If you grew up in the middle part of the state, like I did, you can chose whatever you want to identify with because there are bits of everything.

Also, like most other places, there are rich people and there are poor people. There are well educated people and there are poorly educated people. There are people who like grits and ramps, and others who don't like them at all (that would be me). But I'd say that almost everyone likes biscuits.

Besides biscuits, there are other things that bind the state together. People here have a connection to the land. This is where they hunt and fish and where they grow their vegetables and graze their cows or goats. They also appreciate the beauty around them. Everywhere you turn there is a feast for your eyes. Whether it is hilly terrain of hills and hollows (hollers), or long mountain ridges with long stream valleys, it's all very scenic. They are also a very resilient group of people. Life has not always been easy for many people here, but they find a way to keep going.

But the thing that strikes me the most about West Virginia is the friendliness of the people. I have found friendly people everywhere I lived, but not always the comfortable friendliness that I have experienced with the people of West Virginia. I hadn't realized this until a young Theo asked me a question one day as we were traveling back to visit his grandparents. He said, "What makes everyone so friendly where Grandad and Grandma live? It's different from where we live." I started to notice, that he was correct.

So there you have it. I have just summarized 24,230 square miles of land, 1.85 million people, and over 150 years of history of West Virginia. Maybe another time, I'll tell you more.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But wait there's more:

Want to learn some interesting facts and trivia? Visit here.

http://www.wvcommerce.org/travel/requestinformation/funfactsandtrivia/default.aspx

More about Bees

I have explained before that I don't have much knowledge about bees or wasps, but I'm very slowly learning. This week, I was finally able to document one of the differences between carpenter bees and bumble bees. Before this year big, yellow and black striped bees were all bumble bees to me. As it turns out, I learned that carpenter bees look similar to bumble bees, however carpenter bees are larger and have smoother abdomens while bumble bees have furry abdomens. And from my experience, bumbles bees move a lot faster and more often from bloom to bloom. So for a few weeks now, I thought I have been seeing bumble bees instead of carpenter bees, but they wouldn't hold still long enough to know for sure. Yesterday, I finally got a picture that confirmed my suspicions.

Notice the fuzzy abdomen of the bumble bee on the left and the smooth abdomen of the carpenter bee on the right.

So my knowledge is slowly increasing. Who knows? Maybe soon I will be able to reliably tell a bee from a wasp on first sight. Or maybe not. :)