explaining dogs

No, I can't, actually. Here is where my dog's crate usually is.

Here is where it was when I got back from the grocery yesterday. (He wasn't shut in it while I was gone.)

He must have gotten plenty of exercise.

monograms and nostalgia

One of my great aunts gave me (us?) these towels when my parents and I moved into the house we built when I was seven, in 1960. After ten or fifteen years, they migrated to the bottom of the linen closet and weren't used much. Now that I've got a white bathroom, I'm using all kinds of different colors, and these almost fifty year old towels are looking good, even if the hand towel shows signs that I didn't wash the dirt off too thoroughly as a child.

Sunday morning coffee with hummingbird

No, of course there isn't a picture of a hummingbird. I didn't have the camera when I saw the female hummer feeding from the thistles outside the living room window this morning. Me with my coffee cup and she with her beak, each of us revving up for the day.

I am a Bad, Bad Landowner for not getting out there with the weed eater or hoe or something as soon as I was off the crutches last month and getting rid of those thistles before they could flower and spread themselves all over the pastures here abouts, but I was unfairly rewarded for my slackness.

They tried

I put out four pepper plants this spring. It rained and rained and rained, so their roots were standing in water half the time, and as you can see by the cracked soil, the other half of the time it dried out fast.

I kept hoping I'd have some peppers, but when the first one turned red I knew it was time to pick them.

The still-green one was turning white at the top, so it wasn't going to get bigger.

And here they are.

I ate them both for supper.

ironweed and?

When my mother first came to Kentucky after my parents married, one of my grandmother's friends was driving her somewhere and my mother asked "What are those beautiful purple flowers?" and the reply was "Oh, that's ol' ironweed." It is a pasture weed, but it seems to be more purple than ever this year.

The yellow flower is suddenly all over the roadside and I can't remember ever seeing it before, or find it in any of my books.

turkeys and no camera

Coming home this evening, as I was coming up the driveway, past the pond and over the hill, there in the road just before the "little wood" was a family of turkeys: three adults, and ten--they were out in the open enough to count--young ones. I stopped the car, and they continued their procession down the road. When they got into the woods, I slowly moved forward and the adults got off on the verges, but the teenage turkeys continued down the middle of the road until one of the adults came back out and shooed them off into the bushes. As I drove by I could not see the adults at all, but the young ones still had their head sticking up in sight, watching me. 

Sunday morning coffee at the dog show

So I went to an obedience trial for the first time in three years, even though it meant getting up early on a Sunday when I am going to work six days this week. Deprived, that's what I've been. And I just barely got myself out the door in time to be an hour late, so I didn't even consider taking the real camera, but when I got there I tried a few things with the awful phone camera. Considering that I was facing a row of windows, and that I didn't want to get up and move around and disturb the dogs and handlers, I got a few that were all right.

It's only Monday. We'll see on Saturday night how sorry I am that I didn't stay home and rest.

There are dogs as well as humans in this picture.

That black thing is a Rottweiler about to land after retrieving the dumbbell over the jump--the white jump against the white wall. I took several shots of dark dogs against the dark ring surface.

I saw the moon

A few days ago the moon rising over the trees was so gorgeous I got the camera out. ISO 1600 allows me to shoot grainy pictures in the semi-dark.

bird on the edge

Last week this bird flew into the window, which seems to happen a lot out here--I think dodging hawks affects their flight plans--and partly stunned himself. I was surprised to see him still there when I got back with the camera, and even more surprised that I was able to get so close. I didn't quite dare take the screen out for a cleaner shot. Eventually he recovered and flew off. He seems to be an indigo bunting but the black on the wings is much more noticeable than I thought it should be.

Sunday morning coffee by the bookshelves

Everything in this picture is related to my mother or her mother. My grandmother used these cups when she had friends for a "tea"--when most of them would drink coffee--and there would be too many of them sitting around the living room for everyone to have a table to put her cup down on, so the potential for breakage was too great to use the Best Dishes, but she still wanted things to be elegant. (The ladies would all be wearing hats to this kind of party in the 1940s and 50s.) All the little nibbly things would be made small enough to fit one or two on the saucer. Since there were 18 cups and saucers to begin with, and when she gave them to me there were 14, breakage did occur.

The ivy painted tray was either painted by one of my grandmother's friends--they all painted things, some better than others--or brought back from a trip as a gift. I know my grandmother gave it to my mother along with a whole stack of commercially printed trays the same size at some time before 1960. When I'm using a mug or a glass, I put it on the tray so the condensation or spills won't get on the shelf.

The student-climbing-books bookends were a present to my mother--for no special occasion--from a friend of hers who loved books as much as she did.

The snail paperweight was given to my mother by her cousin about twenty years before they died as a tease about how slow my mother was about everything she did. (She always said how she loved dining at this cousin's house because her aunt was the only person she knew who ate slower than she did.)