Just Wanna Have Fu-un

Oh, Joy! 

Oh, Rapture! 

Joe took an actual vacation! That is to say, he took a week off of work on purpose, and not because he had to fix a transmission or build a chimney or whatever else he usually has to do during extended absences from work. Not that we went off to Belize or anything. I don't even know where that is. And who would want to go to Belize if they could vacation the way that we do? We started the week with cleaning up all the accumulated junk that has been around our house. If that sounds like work, it's because I haven't gotten to the payoff. Old logs too hard to split, and all the cardboard we could find made for a couple of very impressive bonfires. It had been so long since I'd sat by a bonfire in the dark that I had forgotten how it can melt tension off of you. It was the old adage about the cleansing nature of fire given a whole new meaning. Also, miniature marshmallows (which were all that we had) roast in about 1.7 seconds flat and are much less messy than the big ones. I may never go back. The second night we so perfect that we almost all fell asleep on the blanket in the yard. We might have had it not been for the mental image of waking with ticks in our ears.

Burning things isn't the only way that we know how to have fun and it also isn't the only way we know how to pick up ticks. We also took a trip over to our favorite new Poison Ivy Paradise. I don't mean to be sarcastic, except about the state of Kentucky's total lack of care-taking of the place, because I really do like Quiet Trails Nature Preserve. It boasts at least one (because I saw it!) Scarlet Tanager and a field full of very pale yellow Sweet Pea vines. There are also a couple of ponds with some unnaturally non-skittish bullfrogs, a couple of fungi that I got to look up in my dandy field guide, and a box turtle. Not only that, but it's only about three miles away! For people as hodophobic as Joe and I, that's a major plus. (That's "morbid fear of travel" to anyone who doesn't want to Google it, which is how I found out the word.) And for me, any chance to use my cool military surplus hiking pack qualifies as "major fun."

Unnaturally bold bullfrog...

Stalked Scarlet Cup and old Sulfur Shelf or "Chicken Mushroom"

Sweet Pea and Daisies at Quiet Trails

Ghetto telephoto of what I think is a female Widow Skimmer

Juvenile Northern Water Snake

Our vacation week involved more than a little bit of not cleaning anything up that normally gets cleaned up and watching The Hobbit and Captain Jack Sparrow for the umpteenth time. (By the way, even people who don't have kids should see Wreck It Ralph because it's just really clever.) But the real coup de vacances was that we got Joe to go to our favorite swimming place at the river. Funny how fire and water can both have the same effect on me. Nothing that was wrong seems wrong any more when I am at the river. The river has shiny shells and cliff swallows with a mud nest colony under the bridge. It has Killdeers and tree roots and dragonflies. It has tiny fish and huge fish and crawdads that bump into your feet when they go zooming backwards to escape. It even has the occasional tiny snake, empty turtle shell, or giant grub thingie that turns out to be a larval Dobsonfly. I know you'll be crushed that I didn't take a picture of that one. Mostly, the river has flowing water, blowing breeze, and all my men with smiles on their faces at the same time. And that, my friends, is really something... something that it seems is only ever accomplished by fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies on a normal day. We're simple people.

I wrapped up the vacation by trying to kill Joe. That is to say that we finished building, shoveling dirt into, and planting our box garden all in one day. Before I forget, I really should thank KYDOT for all that loose chip-n-seal gravel that they cover our road with every year before snow plow season. They dump it out just in time for the plows to throw it into my front yard where I cheerfully harvest it for many uses, including a drainage base for a 50 square foot box garden. Who says they don't put our tax dollars to good use? I digress. A box garden really is kind of the most awesome way to go. I have two small raised bed gardens totalling probably somewhere around 75 square feet. That's really not much space. That's less than a 10 foot by 10 foot bedroom. And in that space, I have 8 strawberry plants, 14 tomatoes of different kinds, 9 pepper plants, 4 rows of beans, 1 row each of tennis ball lettuce (definitely recommend!) and spinach, and more carrots than Bugs Bunny could crunch in all his years of animated life. Oh, and some marigolds. I weed, hoe, water, prune, and harvest by hand, fertilize once a month, and decorate excessively. Seriously, I think I need to go back on my meds. Since we put the thing in, I painted two gourds to hang by it, made bead flowers to attract hummingbirds to my feeder there, and made a wind chime for it with old keys and dog tags. Between that and all my bird feeders and houses, I'm going to turn into the world's dumbest looking lawn gnome from all the time I spend standing out in my yard with a goofy smile on my face.

 

 

If all that doesn't sound like a vacation to you, I can only conclude that 1) you're probably more normal than I am and 2) I don't get out much. Still, I was well content. Bring on canning season!

Project Oriole

Have you noticed how, whenever any group wants their initiative to sound cutting-edge, they drop the article and change the juxtaposition of the words "project" and whatever the project is about? I think the government started it. If that's the case, then the cutting-edginess is really laughable. I mean, when was the last time the government was on the cutting edge of anything? And anyway, what does everyone have against the "the?" Not the band. Never mind.

Well, I am on the cutting edge of birding. Oh, yes. Not because I am any kind of record holding birder (see movie The Big Year) or because I have any kind of really special equipment. As a matter of fact, my equipment is laughable. I took this picture of the heron who fishes at our pond by holding my digital camera up to one side of my binoculars. No, I'm on the cutting edge because in pursuit of birds, I have been doing a lot of cutting up of string. It started like this: I kept seeing something to large to be a Goldfinch and too orange to be a Western Meadowlark. I never got a solid enough glimpse of it to figure out what it was, and it was driving me bazonkers, as we say around here. There were several possibilities in my bird field guide, but I never got a long enough, close enough look to be sure. I even took to wearing binoculars everywhere I went. Washing dishes without dipping ones binoculars is a real acrobatic act, by the way. 

Then last weekend, we were working on digging the post holes for our raised bed garden and I caught sight of it in the nearby pine tree tugging at a piece of twine the boys had left tied there. Was it a Kentucky Warbler? No, too yellow. A Yellow Warbler? Not yellow enough. ARG! The next day, I was in the laundry room, when I noticed out the window the same bird landing at our construction site, tugging at the guide strings we had placed. I got a good look at it when it flew over to the swing set to tug on a string left tied there by some crazy scheme of the boys' and mine. Ah-ha moment! 

Checking me out while I check her out...

Being coy on the side of the pine....

This was a female Northern "Baltimore" Oriole, gathering string for her nest. I was delighted. In the past, I have seen only one Oriole around my yard. All attempts to attract them failed. Only hummingbirds came to my "oriole feeder." Only ants came when I nailed an orange to a tree. Nothing but raccoons and opossums came when  I left out dried fruit pieces; and since I think opossums are the creepiest animal to walk the earth, I gave up. But now, with renewed hope, I started leaving bits of twine about 12-18 inches long stuck to trees all over my yard. It worked like magic. Like. Magic. Suddenly I had not one, but about three separate pairs of orioles regularly visiting to tug on my strings and flit away again. I found that the males will come if the females do, much to my great delight, and I have spent the last week being distracted by a whole new, living set of shiny (orange!) objects. 

During this process, other lovely discoveries have come about. For one thing, my lovely Mockingbird friend has two fuzzy babies in her nest now instead of brown speckled blue green eggs. She had three eggs, but one seems to have been a dud. I was going to collect it and preserve it until I read that I could get fined $500 just for having it. If I'm going to pay $500 for the privilege of having an egg, it'll be made of gold or perhaps Faberge. Right... those things are priceless... 

Also, I have seen four Zebra Swallowtail butterflies this spring when, in the last six years altogether of living here, I had only ever seen one.

And while battening down the hatches for a storm that was blowing in, I found this little fellow who, after meeting us, will never mistake a roll of bird netting for a good log hiding place again. While I'm glad we found him and put him safely in a tree, I will miss his really loud, close trills whenever I am outside working under the canopy of our porch. Last, but far from least, I've found that our decrepit old marten house has been taken up, not by martens, but by a sweet little family of Eastern Bluebirds. Whether or not I'm setting any records, this has been a Big Year so far for me.

 Happy May from this tiny viola that volunteers in my yard....

Head over to http://aimlessmindpoemlesslines.blogspot.com to read a May poem or two!

Battling the Evil Forces of Rhus Toxicodendron

For starters, I feel it only right to update you on our family's urushiol induced dermatitis. There seems to be unlimited lore about how to deal with poison ivy if one is not content to sit on the couch all summer or to venture outside only in a full body contamination suit. Myself, I am a firm believer in Ajax, Epsom Salts, and Tecnu. While Abe recovered nicely with the help of corticosteroids, I got rid of all my little patches from the battle with the hydra (i.e. the fence row) by washing several times a day with the above combination. The most annoying spot, which was between two fingers on my right hand, required an Epsom Salt/Tecnu paste held in place by bandages. That one seems to be thinking about leaving a scar. But I WIN THE PRIZE! I got a poison ivy rash on my face from, best that I can figure, urushiol oil on clothes I was putting in the laundry. Where's my cookie!? No, I meant the cookie I don't have to bake myself. Where's that cookie?

Most of my experience with poison ivy has been how to deal with it after the fact. Baking soda paste. Oatmeal paste. Tecnu. Epsom Salts. Meditation. Sacrifice of a young goat under the full moon. You know the drill. But my Brilliant and Venerable Father (official title) told me of a preventative method passed down to him by his grandfather. For this approach you will need water, Ivory bar soap, and probably some serious lotion for afterward. When you know you're going to be venturing into the rhus toxicodendron danger zone, you lather any skin you intend to leave exposed with Ivory soap and don't rinse. Make the lather heavy and let it dry. Multiple layers of lathering will ensure no missed spots on the skin. Once you have let your Ivory shield dry you can go to Toxicodendrontown with no worries. After you're done for the day, take a shower, and any urushiol oil that has stuck to the soap layer on your skin will rinse away without effect. I haven't had a chance to test this one myself, but I will theorize that 1) the Ivory shield itself will be irritating at first, and 2) may dry your skin after you've rinsed it off. Thus the lotion. I'll report back once I've tried it.

Polyphemus, Voletaire, and the Hydra

What an exciting time Spring is; everything bursting into life! If you really think about it, that's a very weird expression: bursting into life. Usually, things that burst are either explosive or rotten; but I digress. So... flowers and baby animals are positively everywhere! Butterflies and moths are testing their wings. And everyone in my family is sampling the delights of urushiol oil. We know how to have a good time in Kentucky.

The first person to kick off poison ivy season was Abe, and he did it in style. We went for a walk in the back twenty, which is  not technically a back twenty at all since it doesn't belong to us. It's okay, though, because this time I didn't trespass. We actually have permission to do as we please on this neighbor's property, which includes the pond, field, and woods often shown in the background of my pictures. Honestly, the lawfulness of the jaunt just takes some of the fun out of it. Anyway, we were walking in the woods, and I was having a fine time spotting different species of violets. There are an absurd number of violet species, so I won't name them. I'm sure you'd quit reading if you haven't already...  While I was ground-gazing, Abe must've performed the trifecta of woodland walk no-no's. 1) Do not walk straight into brambles. 2) Do not take revenge on the brambles if you do walk into them. See former entry. 3) Do not rub poison ivy leaves over the scratches you receive from the brambles. Okay, so that's probably not how it happened, but somehow Abe ended up with a nice, long scratch neatly outlined with poison ivy rash. Yay, Prednisolone!!

On the way back from the poison ivy--I mean the woods--we saw the Canada geese who seem to have made a nest somewhere around the pond. They boys went off to catch them, which totally worked--no, it didn't--and I followed at a much more sedate mosey. When I rounded the end of the pond, Abe was trying to stomp on something just a the edge of the water. Upon closer inspection, I found that what he thought deserved to die was actually a million tadpoles. Once I explained to him that these were baby frogs and not mutant bugs, he changed his plan from amphibicide to PETS! The result is that we have about three hundred tadpoles in a tiny terrarium. Every day, Charlie asks me, "How long does it take tadpoles to turn into frogs?" Every day, I try not to completely lose my cool, answering, "As I told you yesterday, assuming we don't kill them, we will see how long it takes." We haven't killed them yet, I think.

On Saturday, the weather was perfectly cool, breezy, and overcast--just the right weather for slaying the Hydra. "Slaying the Hydra" is the name I have given to our ongoing battle with "seedlings" and brambles in the fence row. Call me overly dramatic if you like, but you didn't see the scratches, bruises, and rashes the rest of us had after only six hours of ripping woody vegetation out of the fence row. After a while it did begin to seem like a monster that grew more heads after each one was cut. The seedlings were more like young trees, and you can see in this picture the size of the thorny bushes we had to cut out. Not only that, but a mouse that was literally the size of a chipmunk ran out of the hedge and yelled at me twice for screwing up its habitat. Being myself, I tried to catch it. No luck.

Charlie has decided his favorite activity is mowing the lawn. I have decided not to tell him that this is what most people call work. As he was finishing his mowing, and I was burning out the dead grass along the fence, I came upon another rodent that wasn't, for whatever reason, fast enough to escape me. I thought it was a dead adolescent mouse, but when I picked it up--of course I picked it up; haven't you been paying attention these last six years?-- it squeaked. Then, obviously, I had to put it in an old fish tank and show it to the boys and feed it until I could figure out what it was, because once I picked it up, I saw it couldn't be a mouse. Its ears were flat to its head, and its tail looked chopped off. Its nose wasn't the right shape either. It was a vole! You should know by now that the total inability to avoid puns is genetically ingrained in the Crum side of my heritage. Thus the name: Voletaire. Sadly, Voletaire's luck hasn't been as good as the tadpoles'. Either I poisoned him by feeding him apples, or the boys hugged him too hard, or maybe he was already hurt. He was only with us two days before going to grub for worms in the Great Lawn in the Sky. Thus our rodent friend was not a robust as his French sort-of-forefather, who lived to be 83.

And today, nursing our itchies and scratchies, we decided to annoy Mama Robin to see how her little family is coming along. She has two naked aliens, one cracked egg, and one whole egg in her nest now. She seems quite fiercely committed to them. She flitted about her net like a ninja, screeching at us so much that the daddy robin joined in, and then plopped back down on her babies the moment we vacated the tree. If my children were that ugly, I'd probably sit on them too.

While Charlie and I were performing our clown act otherwise known as "yard-schooling," Abe was digging for buried treasure in the front yard. His optimism seems to have paid off, as he found this fellow:

A beautiful Polyphemus moth the size of my open palm, which I have never before had the luck to photograph in the daytime. Hurrah, my tiny explorers!

I will leave you with a parting thought, just in case you aren't as glib about poison ivy as we seem to be: when hiking, carry a small bottle of Ajax dish soap. If you know you've just brushed up against our urushiol-wielding friends, promptly wash the spot with Ajax and rinse well. Ajax is cheap and designed to remove oils from dishes. It will also remove the oil from your skin if you don't let it sit too long.

I myself have tested this theory in several ways. First, while canning jalapeno peppers last summer, I thought it would be fun to wipe their oils into my eyes! I told you we Kentuckians know how to party. Blind and saying words my mother would have liked to treat with Ajax, I stumbled to the shower. Charlie brought me the dish soap with which I washed my face quite thoroughly. Oil removed! Then, just yesterday, while foraging for pretty perennial bulbs in the waste across the road, I blithely pulled aside a vine which, upon closer examination had those telltale "leaves of three." With my bare hand. You can take it to the bank when I tell you I fairly teleported into the kitchen to access the Ajax. Today, no blisters. It works, my fellow outdoorspeople! And in my experience, it's either that or a full body contamination suit. If you're going to set foot off the beaten path, there's no avoiding the ivy. Viva la Ajax! (I'll be expecting my ad money from your company within the week, thank you...)

The Missing Months

So, I was supposed to be cleaning the bathroom today. We'll pretend I did. Okay, that's settled. Now...

A quick warning about this post. If you are seriously arachnophobic, you do not want to scroll all the way down to the last picture. Seriously. I cannot be held responsible for any heart palpitations or soiled shorts that may result if you ignore this warning.

So, the last time I posted anything was in February. Shame on me. In my defense, I have been writing a lot of poems... which might not actually be much of a defense to you. Philistines.

We had more of a winter in 2012-13 than the prior one, and Winter's last hurrah was a pretty impressive. It waited until the third week of March, gave us a lovely sixty-something degree day, and then the next day... HA HA HA! Here are six inches of snow, SUCKERS! The daffodils were unfazed, however, and the boys and I tried to build an igloo. It didn't work. They got too wet and cold before we got more than two layers high. Well, there's always next March. I'm onto Winter's tricks now.

After that, mud and gloom kept us living roomed (which is like being closeted, only with a bit more space) for a couple more weeks until April showed itself with a sudden leap into the 80s. Degrees, not high tops, horrible neon clothing, big hair, and shoulder pads. I quickly planted all of my "cold weather" plants, hoping that that would result in a return of sixty degree weather. Got forty degrees instead, then eighty again. Apparently this Spring is delivering desired temperatures by median. Regardless of reasoning, it made quick work of the spring flowers, and the boys and I have already been to and in the river once this year, gleaning even more shells that will eventually be jewelry. I think I even found a flower I haven't catalogued yet. It looks like an anemone, but what exact kind, I can't be sure. My flower book doesn't have one just like it and now that I don't work at the library any more, I can't sneak off during work and identify plants.

The bonny weather brought a fit of high spirits amongst us Pearsons, so we decided to go hiking. Joe bid me find a place to go, and behold, a discovery! Quiet Trails Nature Preserve, nestled in a quiet corner of Harrison County, KY... three miles from our house. This spit of land was donated to the state in 1990, and made into a nature preserve with hiking trails and little nature-observation shacks... and an old tobacco barn. Kentucky--go figure. The things you never know are there if you don't enjoy getting lost on narrow, windy Kentucky back roads! Actually, I do enjoy getting lost on back roads, and have even gotten lost on this very road, but still somehow never realized Pugh's Ferry housed a hiking destination. Rawr!

Why, Rawr? No idea.

In the last couple of weeks, I have been very Amish. I turned the soil in my little garden by hand and made a pea trellis. I planted greens, carrots, peas, and flowers, and started tomatoes and peppers in a flat. I even planted trees! I'm so green! Now I spend a lot of time staring hard at dirt, which leads to the discovery unplanned of bugs. I think this is a dung beetle of some kind, which makes me worry about the efficacy of my septic tank right next to my garden. And who knew dung beetles were pretty?

Besides dung beetles and wood anemones, I have also seen the second ever Zebra Swallowtail to visit my yard, and seen and identified what I believe to be a fine specimen of a Western Meadowlark. Yes, Western.... They range this far, according to my book.

Charlie has been begging to mow for weeks now. On Saturday, while Daddy was fixing the mower (which prompted more poetry, but that's for another day) Charlie was literally climbing the trees in anticipation. Good thing, because he found this:

.
She was not very pleased, but the kids and I thought it was cool.

While Charlie looks skyward, and I look dirtward, Abe looks at the swing set and finds... this is the part where arachnophobes will want to stop... Phidippus Mystaceus! This was the best picture I could get, but he/she was very pretty, with iridescent blue fangs and fluffy, white thingies that he seemed to use to clean his eyes. I studied this critter for quite a while, and decided that spiders in jars are charming. He really looked hard for a way out, the clever little fellow, testing the magnifying glass I had atop the jar. He would poke, poke, then clean his eyes with his fuzzy things as if to say, "What is this hard air!? I can't be seeing this... Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that really shiny bug... I seem to be hallucinating." Yes, spiders in jars, I can dig. When I let him out of the jar, he jumped at me and I screamed like a little girly and ran away, though; So spiders outside of jars, I can still do without...