Andrew, our grandson, got his summer box. When it comes, his dad calls us on Facebook and they open the box while we watch. We sent storybooks, toy cars, a light-up bubble gun, a water pistol, a parachute dude, window clings for the Fourth of July, cookies, and a whacky pair of red lips. Andrew liked his goodie box but guess what he really got a kick out of. The plastic red lips.
He turned his head and got a kiss from Daddy. I was a little slow on the shutter button. Then he turned and got a kiss from Mommy.
I love making boxes for Andrew and getting to share in his joy when he opens it is something that couldn't have happened when my kids were little and got boxes from the grandparents.
Monday found us pulling brush and small trees from around the pond. We pulled some brush from the front side last year and we've been working on it most mornings this week until it got too hot, or I got too tired to drag that chain anymore.
Smudge helped.
All the critters at the pond are upset. The turtles....
The frogs.
The Damselflies.
Mostly I didn't bother to stop and take pictures of things but in the case of this Ladybug nymph...
and little flower spider...
...they were on me when I was near the golf cart — and that's where my camera was. So I took their pictures.
Yeah. Wrapping the heavy chain around the roots of the willows is dirty work. My nails will never recover. Not to mention that there is a natural dye in the willows and my hands are stained.
"Peg, why don't you wear gloves?" you ask.
I do, most times. It's harder to hook the chain with gloves on, but I can do it. And I was working in the water a lot! I didn't want wet gloves. At one point I was up to my coochie in the water — and it was cold!
"What's a coochie?" you ask.
It's the point between the top of your thighs and your hips.
Needless to say, boots weren't any help at all in water that deep. Coming up on shore, water sloshed out the top of my boots with every step. I stood next to the golf cart, dumped the water out, then worked with soggy socks and squishy insoles until we were done for the day. After a few days of getting wet feet, and despite turning my boots upside down, they stink! Saturday, every time I bent over to hook a chain or unhook it, I could smell my feet! Pee-ew!
After we had pulled several small trees from their root, I wrapped the chain around the root and Mike pulled it out.
"Look at that!" I yelled to Mike who was sitting on the tractor. He shook his head indicating he couldn't hear what I was saying. He shut the tractor off.
"What?"
"Look at that!" I repeated. "It's a good example of how the trees grow out of the roots. Wait a second while I get a picture."
The pond is really starting to look good and with the removal of the willow trees we're hoping our pond won't dry up in the late summer.
Smudge has taken to riding in the golf cart with us. He doesn't seem to mind the motion and when we get to where we're working, he jumps off. Pulling brush isn't the only thing Smudge is good at. He's such a good helper in everything we do. Here he's helping me fold the laundry after I took it off the line.
And Molly!
Oh my gosh!
That girl has decided that she wants to drink straight from the tap.
She gets up on Mike's bathroom sink and yowls until someone turns it on for her. All times of the day and night I'll hear her crying. I don't always answer her either. She'll drink and drink and drink until she makes herself sick, then I have to clean that up!
Sigh.
So when I do turn it on for her I don't let it run very long before I shut it off. Besides, there's water in the water bowl in the kitchen if she was really thirsty.
"Peg!" Mike yelled from the door. Grab your camera and come here."
I jumped up, grabbed my camera and went to see what was going on. "What?" I asked.
"There's a deer over here and she doesn't seem to be in any hurry to leave."
Mike and I got on the cart and drove to the end of the barn. "There she is," he said.
"Where?" I asked.
"Right there by the corner of the barn. Can't you see her?"
"Nope," and I took a picture anyway.
The deer moved closer and closer to us, grazing her way down the hill. She could hear my shutter clicks and would raise her head to look at us but she wasn't alarmed.
At the bottom of the hill is the edge of the driveway. She turned and grazed her way along driveway before turning and going up by the pond.
"Peg, what is she eating?" you ask.
I do believe it's leaves of a fallen branch from the chokecherry tree that grows there.
"Mike, I think she has a full utter," I told him. "I wonder if she has a baby nearby."
Over the course of this past week we've seen her quite a lot. Then on Saturday she brought her baby with her. Mike saw her at the pond but by the time I got there with my camera she was gone.
In years past I believe I've called this plant wild phlox and that is one of its names but this time when I was looking it up I noticed that phlox has five petals and these only have four.
This is Dame's Rocket which comes in pale lavender, purple, and white. It's hard not to love Dame's Rocket. They smell good and last longer than most wildflowers when stuck in a jar of water. But Dame's Rocket is in the mustard family and considered invasive. They self-seed freely and drive out the native plants and we're asked to pull it wherever we find it.
Neither Dame's Rocket nor Garlic Mustard should be composted or put in paper yard waste bags because that won't stop their spread. Pulled plants should be put in plastic garbage bags and put out with your regular household garbage. Even though most state laws do not allow yard waste in with household waste, there are exemptions for diseased, infested, or invasive species plants that are part of an eradication or control program.
Growing close by were a couple of other wildflowers. This sunny yellow flower is Golden Ragwort.
And Wild Geraniums.
I picked a wildflower bouquet for the kitchen vase.
Looking down I see this little guy, narrowly missing stepping on him.
"A red newt," Miss Rosie said when I showed her the picture and she's right. This is a Red-spotted Newt.
"I thought it was a salamander," you say. "So what's the difference between a salamander and a newt?"
The simple answer is nothing. A newt is a specific kind of salamander. All newts are salamanders but not all salamanders are newts. The life cycle of this guy is aquatic larva to terrestrial red eft to aquatic adult. All grown up these guys are yellowish-green but retain their small red spots within black halos along the sides. (The photo of the adult is credited to J.D. Willson.)
Red, in the critter world, is often a warning to other critters that he's poisonous and this guy is no exception. He secretes a toxin from his skin and fish won't eat him.
Some critters piggyback on the reputations of other critters and that's what this guy is doing.
"Isn't that a Monarch Butterfly?" you ask.
No, he's not. He's a Viceroy. Monarchs have two rows of white dots on the black edge of their wings whereas the Viceroy has a row and a half.
Monarchs feed on the milkweed plant and are bitter to the birds so they don't eat them. Viceroys capitalize on the fact that the birds can't count.
The county is working on the dirt roads. Here their tractors are parked for the night.
I took pictures of the plaques on the single-lane open-grate bridge on the lower part of our road. This bridge is going to be replaced too.
Raspberry blossoms.
Black-haw.
Two Tiger Swallowtails. There were three there but I could only get two of them.
A dewy spider web.
Mr. Mister.
Ginger amongst the Buttercups and Hawkweed.
Hawkweed. It comes in orange too.
Golden Alexanders.
Look at all the white blossoms of the Black Locust tree! When you step outside the hum of all the bees is deafening.
Now the petals are falling and it's so thick it looks like snow!
These dark green wide-leaf plants are False Hellebore. They grow tall, several feet high, and get a flower on them.
We stopped at the eagle's nest this week. Most of the time that I stood there the eagle groomed herself. The babies are getting big!
Here's the doe again, this time at the neighbor's pond.
We have an off-set finish mower. We've had it for years.
You can pull it alongside your riding mower and mow twice as much grass in half the time.
"I wonder if I can use that like a brush hog?" Mike wondered. "And mow the bank of the pond with it."
We brought it down from the barn, charged the battery, replaced the fuel filter and fuel lines, and got it running. Mike hooked it behind the golf cart and backed it down over the bank of the pond. It worked but he couldn't pull the mower out with the cart. He had to drill a hole in the bucket of the tractor and hook the mower to that.
It wasn't ideal but it worked and Mike mowed some of the pond bank with that.
"I really need a brush hog," Mike said.
"Do you want to go look at that used equipment place over in Meshoppen?" I asked.
"Oh. I never thought about that. Yeah, let's go."
McCarthy has tons of equipment!
I took a few pictures.
We were looking at brush hogs when a kitty showed up.
"Here kitty-kitty," I cooed and boy was I surprised when he came over to me. Most cats are distrustful of strangers. Then Mike called him and after a nice ear scratching, he purred around Mike's feet.
"Someone dropped him and his brother off here last year. The other one's dead but this one's doing fine. Maybe because he's white the cars can see him better," Charles McCarthy speculated.
Charles McCarthy.
Boy. I'll tell you what. We went to check prices and we were there a good two hours. Now this man can talk! A solicitor called and he spent five minutes talking to her.
"How much is a six-foot brush hog?" Mike asked.
Charles pulled out his price list and started figuring in his head, mumbling under his breath then someone in the room would say something and he'd get totally side-tracked. I mean totally! It might be ten or fifteen minutes until you could get him back on track again. He had stories and stories and stories to tell! We were there longer than we intended to be but I had a good time.
Food.
Let's end this one with food.
My best girl Joanie shared a recipe for Poor Man's Shrimp with me and there isn't any shrimp in it. Wash and cut up a head of cauliflower and dip it in a mixture of ketchup and horseradish. That's it. It doesn't sound all that good but I'll tell you what, it works. The texture of the cauliflower is reminiscent of shrimp and putting horseradish on anything pretty well dominates it.
"How much horseradish?" you wonder.
It depends on how hot you like it. Start with a little and add more if you need it. Unless you do like I did and put in too much horseradish and have to add more ketchup to tame it a little.
Since my Miss Rosie is laid up with a bum arm I decided to make her some homemade peanut butter cups.
Roll into a ball and dip into chocolate if you don't want to fuss with making cups, the instructions said. That sounded easier so that's what I decided to do. The peanut butter is mixed with crushed graham crackers, butter, and powdered sugar. Since I like peanut butter and graham crackers together, I thought this would be a good recipe. I'm following the directions, made the balls and set them in the fridge while I melted the chocolate. Mix 12 ounces of chocolate chips with 4 tablespoons butter, melt, mix, dip, and set on wax paper to set, it said.
I did that. I put the chocolate chips and butter in a bowl, put it in the microwave and microwaved it for a minute, stirred it and it wasn't melted hardly at all. I put it in for another minute. When I took it out and stirred it together it was fine — for a minute, then the chocolate set on me and there wouldn't be any dipping going on with that chocolate.
Uh-oh, I thought. I cooked it too long. Luckily I had a gigantic bag of chocolate chips from Sam's Club so I could try again. But what am I going to do with this? I decided to use the same recipe and make chocolate centers. I got out the graham crackers and ran them through the food processor, mixed them with the chocolate, butter, and powdered sugar, rolled them into balls and put them in the fridge to chill while I tried again with the chocolate chips. I weighed out the chocolate chips and when I went for the butter I found out all I had left was frozen butter. Doesn't matter, I thought, I'm going to nuke it anyway.
This time I would melt the chocolate slower, minding it the whole time. I don't really have the patience to hang around the microwave, stirring the chocolate every 15 seconds, but I made myself do it. When the chocolate was melted and the butter was melted, I stirred it all together only to have it set up on me — again!
What is going on! I was getting frustrated.
I went to the computer and Googled it to see if I could figure out what the problem was. Adding anything cold to melted chocolate will cause it to seize up and become grainy, it said, even a cold spoon. Use a spatula, it advised.
Maybe because I started with frozen butter and it was still cold? I wondered. Only the chocolate I made wasn't grainy, it was smooth, it was just too thick to dip anything into.
Adding oil to chocolate that has seized will make it usable for most things except for dipping, it said was the fix.
Great!
So now I had another batch of chocolate. It's almost like fudge, I thought after I tasted it. I decided to chop some pecans and mix in with this second batch of ruined chocolate, scraped it into a bowl, and let it set up.
Then I started a third time. I measured the chocolate, melted it, melted the butter so it wasn't cold when I added it to the chocolate, mixed them together with a spatula and within a minute — it set up on me.
Okay. Now I'm totally at a loss. I didn't know what I was going to do with another batch of chocolate — nothing, that's what. I scraped it into a bowl and decided Mike would eat it that way. After all, he likes chocolate chips by themselves as a snack sometimes, he'd like this too.
I called my friend and neighbor Stephanie Robinson. I know she makes candy sometimes and she's a pretty smart lady. I wondered if she could tell me what I was doing wrong. Unfortunately, Steph was incommunicado and couldn't be reached. I thought about calling another smart and beautiful lady in my life, my sister Phyllis, but I don't know that she's ever made any candy so she probably wouldn't know.
The filling is good by itself. I wonder if I could pass them off that way. I mused.
I thought I'd overcooked the chocolate the first time. I thought the butter was too cold the second time. The third time I did everything right and ended up with the same result. I'm just going to melt the chocolate chips and not add the butter, I thought. And it worked.
The next day Mike and I stopped down and gave Rosie the candies I'd made for her. She likes the peanut butter ones better than the chocolate.
"Let Lamar eat the chocolate ones," I told her.
"The only problem is he likes the peanut butter ones too!" And I know that Rosie doesn't mind sharing.
We were taking our leave when Mike commented on the Kipp's big, beautiful rhododendron bush.
"How come their flowers are so big?" he asked me. "And how come they have flowers when ours has come and gone already?"
"Maybe they have a different kind of rhody." I'm guessing.
Lamar let me pick one for the kitchen vase.
Let's end this one with a pretty sunset picture.
Done!
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