Too Much of a Good Thing is....

I have spent the entire weekend down at the new house while hubby was traveling overseas. This is not my first weekend all alone in the woods, but the first since the weather has turned warm. We love living out there because of the wildlife and the closeness to nature...I think. Why does a large cockroach only show up when I am at the house alone? (Note, the best picture of another visitor is at the end of this post.)

Being a type A personality, I made a long list of things that I tasked myself to do while I was down there. I really just wanted to drink wine and watch all the TV shows I had DVD'd since they come on too late on the week nights. This was to be followed by a lovely bubble bath...but I am a Puritan at heart, and tackled my challenging worklist which also included washing the car! I never set the bar too low.

One of the tasks was getting the new landscape beds mulched. I learned two things. A bag of cedar chips (we had only one) is not too heavy. Hard bark chips are REALLY heavy. I pulled and dragged and completed the task above. I was sweating like a glass of iced tea on a Georgia summer day by the end of the project, though. We had a drip irrigation system installed and I wanted to get the hoses covered so that the system could work more effectively.

Another task was getting the new lawn watered. WE call it a lawn while someone else might call it a heartbreakingly miserable excuse to grow plants with blades. Some areas it looks like a golf course and some areas it looks like, well, dirt.

Anyway, I was moving the long hose around the corner to the back side of the house. The hose is heavy and I was concentrating on pulling it without getting a kink and trying to stay out of the way of the sprayer being too lazy to walk back and turn it off. While only slightly wet I set the sprinkler in a good location and stepped back to survey my estimation of water coverage. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a very squiggly black stick that wasn't there when I was pulling the hose. Yes, it was our black resident. Pictured below. He was moving so slowly that you only noticed if you looked away and then looked back and saw him several inches further along.



He was a still as a stick, moving so slowing that I barely noticed. I gave him ample room as I danced my barefeet across the lawn and back up the steps of the deck. When up there I grabbed my camera and I caught this interesting meeting between the snake and one of our squirrels who was doing a clean-up beneath the bird feeder. Several of the birds also hovered over him seeming distressed.

After watching this drama I soon got hungry and found that three strawberries were ripe on our little potted plant on the deck. Each day it provides me three strawberries. Funny how only three strawberries tastes much better than 30.

Spring is Full of Surprises

After one spends hundreds of dollars on landscaping and hundreds of hours on preparing the soil and then dozens of hours preparing bone meal sprinkled holes with more loose soil to bed the roots that have been gently separated with your muddy fingertips as they are pulled from their plastic pots, one must make sure that each plant is freely watered every weekend that you are down at this new house.

This past weekend while hubby was moving the hose over the new nandina shrubs he hooted (just like that old hairy owl) for me to come outside to see some signs of spring. It seems that a mother bunny had decided to make her soft hairy nest beneath the nandina plants. She had gone out for a sale at the grassy mall and left behind two little bunnies, both in substantial panic as these unusually heavy rains flooded their little nest. They came out looking very damp and lost. I tried to catch them and wipe with a towel and move to a new area, but failed. So I left them alone on the damp earth to face the cool night hoping mother bunny would return shortly to move them to a new home on drier ground.