Grungy

Remember how my house looked last weekend?

Like this? During the Great Nor'Easter (i.e. slush storm) of aught seven:




Well, this weekend is GORGEOUS. It's been chilly at night, since the skies are so clear, but yesterday it went above seventy. Today we're well on our way. So, I made it my goal to get my rose bed put in against our shed.

The materials I've needed have been waiting for three or four weeks by now. I covered the ground that would become the bed with weed cloth, in hopes that the black color might help warm the ground up a bit.




Yesterday, I started by taking down the trellises that I installed on the front of the house last year. Other tall, pretty things are going in that bed this year.



Next, I installed all of the trellises on the new shed. There was some swearing and gnashing of teeth, but I got it done without major injury to me or the trellises:




Next I borrowed the little gas-powered tiller that our neighbor has. It took me a bunch of wrestling to get it done, but I got the ground tilled up. Then I ground in some peat moss and rose fertilizer. I took a short break. My forearms were already killing me what with the drilling and hammering and vibrations from tilling. Back to work, I installed the bed edging blocks to match the other beds I've already got in the yard.



After lunch, it was time to transplant the roses! I dug the four holes for my climbing roses and sprinkled in a bit more fertilizer. Then I gently dug out the three roses from my beds last year. I planted them and my new climber so that they'll be easily tied to the trellises. Then, it was three more holes for my bush roses, and a bit of agonizing over the color progression.

After I got the roses in the ground, I put the weed cloth back down around them. Now I just have to decide if I'm going to mulch on top of it, or put in something else like pea gravel. I'll have to go browse Lowe's here in a bit.

This is what the bed looks like now. I did add a fence, since some of the mutts around here have a penchant for digging in freshly turned dirt.

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Hopefully, soon, it'll be bearing flowers that look like the glossy catalog photos of my plants.

Climbing roses:

Blaze



Golden Showers



Show Garden



and Blue Girl




Bush roses:

JFK



Double Delight



and Mojave

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Of course, I couldn't play in the dirt all day long without Quinn trying to help me (notice the dirt on her nose and paws from her own excavations out in the woods).

Spring Break Summary

We're all home now, safely ensconced in our cozy house while the SNOW flies outside. Brian and I got in last night and crashed out immediately after a 13 hour drive. This morning we retrieved the dogs, who have now been thoroughly scrubbed and are both snuggled down drying in the living room and munching on chewies.







Now I'm procrastinating on school work while photos upload. Hey, a girl can hope for a snow day in April, can't she? April 15 and we're getting a blizzard. The lake is still frozen solid. RIDICULOUS, I say.

Anyways, highlights of our vacation:

Round trip we drove 5076 miles. We passed through eleven states and saw 46 state license plates, plus District of Columbia, any number of Federal Government cars, and a consul plate. We saw four different Canadian province plates, as well as five Mexican state plates. Our tally came to 53 new species of birds, though each of us got one bird that the other missed. We ate about a million pounds of fast food, had some fabulous local food in Texas and New Orleans, and talked to some really nice people. We're already more than half sold on the idea of going back to the same RV park for spring break next year, while trying to recruit Brian's friend Mark to come with us. With him along, we'd probably get another twenty kinds of shorebird alone that we couldn't identify on our own.

In all, it was a smashing success.

On Friday of last week, this is what our yard looked like:


As we drove south, it slowly warmed up, though there was still snow on the ground in Virginia and Tennessee:








As we entered Alabama, it climbed into the 50s, and even though we hit Mississippi at night, it finally broke into the 60s.








It stayed in the 60s as we drove across Louisiana and into Texas. It didn't really warm up much even when we got to Houston.










We stayed in a cute little mini-RV at the Bentsen Palm Village RV Park. It was fabulous, and we'll definitely stay there again.

Here's our first little trailer:








In the middle of the night, the water heater sprung a tiny leak. I put some towels down, and went back to bed. By morning, it was a complete gusher, and hand transformed our kitchen into a large lake of warm water. Brian and I bailed water until the office opened.







Then they moved us to our second home-away-from-home, which was slightly larger and had a spare bedroom.










Our Bird List (in no particular order):

Kreider's hawk (red-tail variant)
anhinga
eurasian collared dove
fish crow
bronzed cowbird
lark sparrow
black necked stilt



crested caracara



horned lark
green jay
great kiskadee
common chachalaca





common moorhen
pied-billed grebe
northern shoveler
broadwing hawk
ringed kingfisher
clay-colored robin



common ground dove
white tipped dove
white winged dove
inca dove
ladder-backed woodpecker
golden-fronted woodpecker





harris's hawk
blue winged teal
lesser yellowlegs
roadrunner



white ibis
fulvuous whistling duck
tri-colored heron



gull-billed tern
reddish egret (white morph)



mountain plover
whimbrel



long billed thrasher
curve billed thrasher
prothonotary warbler
altamira oriole
black crested titmouse (Brian)
roseate spoonbill (Leah)
black bellied whistling duck
buff-bellied hummingbird
gray hawk
cactus wren


Bullock's oriole
ash-throated flycatcher
black-throated sparrow
pyrrhuloxia
cave swallow
scarlet tanager
yellow-throated warbler

Keep in mind that many of my birdy photos were taken through our birding scope or through one eyepiece of my binoculars. We dream of someday having decent birding-photography equipment, but for now our choice is between traveling to SEE the birds, or being able to take PHOTOS of the birds. Traveling wins!

A few other fun photos of our trip:

We ran into a pecarry a few times during our jaunts into the state park. This particular morning, he was having himself a filling breakfast of dropped birdseed at one of the feeding stations.







The cacti were all in bloom down there, and you can probably tell that the trees were in full leaf, too. In fact, we drove back through a 60-degree temperature change. It was 94 when we left Texas, and now it's hovering around 34 degrees here.

A few reminders of how warm it was there:

A cactus that was as big as my living room.



and some of the blooms. I was obsessed with taking photos of these.








But now it's back to the real world, which looks a whole lot like this:



(and still snowing)