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.