Su Doku

Sorry if it seems a bit like "Rurality Lite" lately. This is the week of 5 million appointments and projects.

Too much going on today so I'm just leaving this link for an addictive puzzle.

It's called Su Doku, which in Japanese means "number place". (Don't worry, you won't have to perform mathmatics.)

The newspaper (The Times from the UK) posts a new puzzle each day, increasing in difficulty as the week progresses.

We got hooked in a hurry. We downloaded the Su Doku program so we could play on the computer too.

Highly recommended!

Bugs!

Crouching spider,



Hidden grasshopper.



A female spider with her spiffy egg sac.

Sorry, don't have time to ID the bugs this morning! If anyone knows, please leave a comment or email and I'll add the info. I'm thinking that the last one may be a wolf spider.

Edited to add:
Thanks so much to Thingfish23 who has identified the first "spider" above as, well, not a spider but a Harvestman. (I really should have known that. His body didn't look quite right for a spider.)
Order Opiliones.

The second one's a Northern Green-Striped Grasshopper (Chortophaga viridifasciata), according to this site and this one. (Thanks again Thingfish23.)

Thingfish23 also says that the third image above is of a "nursery web spider" (Pisaurina mira).

Edited again:
Sisu says the third one is a wolf spider.

Get ready for the Battle of the arachnophiles!

If anyone else has an opinion on the identity of the spider in question, please email or leave a comment.

Church people

At a fast food restaurant. A group of churchgoers in their Sunday finest were given their food and ours as well. They realized it but said nothing.

"Think that's what they just learned in church?" my husband asked.

"What's that?"

"Just eat it and shut up."

*

At the grocery store - the one where, annoyingly, there are no cart corrals. You must walk your cart back to the store (me) or leave it sitting in the middle of the lot so it can damage other people's cars (almost everyone else).

A parking lot evangelist. Quizzing shoppers on their salvation. Wanting to know what church I attend.

How much more highly would I have thought of his church, if he'd offered to return my cart for me instead of scurrying off to the next possible convert?

Leunig

An agent for Michael Leunig emailed me with new information, so I decided to update this entry. Justin Combs says, "www.leunig.com.au is a tribute site that should in time become Michael’s official site." He also notes that you can see Leunig's artwork at artloft.

Below is the original post, with broken links fixed.

------

The worst thing about egg-eating snakes is that they are kind of difficult to top.

So today I'm just going to point at some other sites. They all have to do with Michael Leunig, an Australian cartoonist.

I have no idea how I found him originally... just one of those internet things.

His cartoons appear sporadically in the Melbourne newspaper The Age. (Click over to BugMeNot if any of the newspaper links below require registration and you don't have or want your own.)

At this point I would have liked to show you this picture of one of his cartoons, saying "reproduced with the kind permission of...", but I can't. To a huge Australian newspaper I'm an insignificant flea. An insignificant American flea. Oh well. Just click it. It's not titled but I call it Mysterious or Unusual.

Here are some other recent cartoons from The Age:
What has happened to your life?
Banana mules of suburbia

Leunig draws a lot of political cartoons, which you may or may not agree with. I have political views but have decided that Rurality the blog is apolitical so I'm not going to discuss them here.

His "everyday life" cartoons speak to everyone, regardless of politics. Many good ones, including The Guru (a personal favorite), are here on a site that reviews his book The Travelling Leunig. (Edited to remove broken link. You can find The Guru here and others here.)

More cartoons, including my other favorite, The Plodder.

Curly Flat has background info.

The list of his books, at amazon.com.

His artwork. Sadly, Rurality can't invite you up to see its Leunig etchings at this time, since they start at around US$500 and Rurality still has many unmet fencing needs.

Another place that sells his art.

Hope you like Leunig as much as I do.


Edited to add:
One more. This one has lots of Leunig's prayers.

You might guess that I enjoy the one that begins, "We rejoice and give thanks for earthworms, bees, ladybirds and broody hens"!

And also this, if it's not too mushy for a Friday:

God help us to live slowly:
To move simply:
To look softly:
To allow emptiness:
To let the heart create for us.

You again!

Yesterday morning Jasmine sounded her "Snake! It's a snake!" bark again. This time at least she had the sense to be angry with the non-biting end of the gray rat snake. His mouth was otherwise occupied anyway.



Wayne from Niches asked in previous comments if rat snakes ate eggs. Yes they do.



The blue one he's swallowing is a Mallard egg, which is a bit larger and heavier than a chicken egg.



Pretty amazing.



Tell-tale lump:



While his business end was busy, I sneaked a peek at his belly.



And got a closer look at his scales. I hadn't noticed the slight ridges the other day.



Not too hard to get into the duck pen.



Obviously I need to start removing the duck eggs first thing in the morning. We feed them to the dog so it's not a big loss, I just don't want the snake getting into the habit. If he keeps it up I'm afraid he's going to find the chicken coop.

Of course I'm not really sure if this is the same individual from earlier in the week - not sure how territorial they are. (I tried Googling it but kept coming up with herpetophile Fred from Fragments from Floyd instead.)

We saw another large gray rat snake close to the creek last night. They must be doing well this year.

More wildflowery

Yesterday I spent time with other wildflower nuts in the woods. We plucked a few where there were many, and rescued some from kudzu, Japanese honeysuckle, and men with bulldozers.



I came across this plant that I was not familiar with. I believe it may be a spider lily, Hymenocallis caroliniana.



Saw this guy. Eastern Box Turtle, Terrapene carolina.



Saw a couple of groundhog dens in the kudzu but didn't photograph them, as I was in danger of being left behind and it was too sunny anyway.

When we were done we appreciated Dan's beautiful garden.

OK we were just nosy.



Inside a foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) there are secret messages to bumblebees.



An unusual dogwood.



Sweet Williams (Dianthus).



Clematis.



Another Clematis. Most people around here seem to say it with the accent on the first syllable, but to me it sounds better on the second.

Parseltongue

Jasmine is the first dog I've had since I was a kid, but it didn't take long to learn that there is a definite difference in her barks. When I first heard her yesterday I thought, "meter reader at the gate". But no, it was more like a "you're new to me but I know you really don't belong here" kind of bark. And not in a cow sort of way.

So I grabbed the camera on the way out.



I saw this guy coiled up on the shop porch and striking at Jasmine, who was acting as if she didn't have the good sense to realize that a snakebite to the nose was really going to hurt.



After I tied her up, the snake relaxed a little, but he still kept a wary eye on me (and vice versa). I think that he's a gray rat snake, Pantherophis obsoleta spiloides. (The old name, Elaphe obsoleta spiloides, was apparently updated just a few years ago. It is more difficult than I would have imagined to ID snakes via the internet, so please correct me if I'm wrong about this.)



At the time I thought he must have just had a meal of several mice, but after examining more of the pictures I'm thinking it may just be his bunched up muscles that give that effect.

I tried to snap a shot when he was scoping me out with his tongue, but none of them turned out too well, and after a while he quit doing it.



His scales were fascinating - here you can see the orange skin underneath them.

I tried to prod him into leaving, but by that time he'd become too relaxed and didn't want to leave. So I picked him up on a long long stick to transport him to the bramble where the rats hang out. He was pretty heavy. About 6 feet long I think. There were a few attempts to wriggle off the stick, but he seemed fairly happy to slither off into the brush once I got him there.

Hollow

We were at the Homestead Hollow Spring Festival over the weekend. Sold a bunch of soap, ate too much, heard some good music, scoped out everyone else's cameras, and met several blog readers. Thanks for coming by!


There's a sheep under there somewhere.

One of my favorite parts of Homestead is watching the Burrells' demonstrations. I forgot my camera and thought I'd missed the sheep shearing, but they did another one on Sunday.


The proverbial black sheep, Malachi.


Fleeced!


The previous days' work.


She was clearly trying to tell me something, I just don't know what.


Their eyes are fascinating.


The uncorrupted offspring of the ewes and rams.*


Nothing to do with sheep, I just loved this rhododendron.

*Every time I saw the lamb it reminded me of this line from a John Wesley Harding song.

Mother's Day

My mother, in her youth.

My mother is the nicest person I have ever known.

Some things about my mother:

She grew up on a farm, and had to work in the fields every day. But her father believed strongly in education. So if the kids were studying, they didn't have to work. (They did a lot of studying.)

When she was a little girl, she had Scarlet Fever, a disease in which (among other things) your skin turns red and peels. She thought that when all the old skin peeled off, she’d get a new name. The name she wanted was “Marthateen".

She left home at age 15.

She was the first in her family to earn a college degree.

My father used to say that he had to pester her into marrying him.

She first worked at the Power company, then was a high school teacher until I was born.

She is very crafty, but can also do things like building cabinets, laying rock for patios, and repairing garage doors.

Until recently, she did all her own yard work, and always got up on the roof to clean the gutters... well into her 70s.

She can run rings around me.

Digging through my grandmother's closets as a teenager, I learned two things about my mother that she'd never told me:

She learned to fly an airplane before she learned to drive a car.

She did, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, have a middle name. One she despised. Since I hated my middle name through all of grade school, I could relate. (Hers was way worse than mine.)

Flowery

Waterleaf


Coreopsis


Rattlesnake Fern


Tuberous Stoneseed (Lithospermum tuberosum)


Bluebells (a white one)

Tuesday

Another early morning frog encounter!



This little Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor or possibly Hyla chrysoscelis), hiding in a crevice on the porch, was cold and not about to move.



After reading Swamp Things lately, I thought that's what he was, but wasn't sure.

So I pried him up to look underneath, to make sure he wasn't a Bird-voiced Treefrog (he was orange, so he wasn't). He didn't seem to mind much.



What a wonderful bird the frog are!
When he stand he sit almost;
When he hop he fly almost.
He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got almost.

-Anonymous


Of local note:
We'll be at Springfest at Homestead Hollow in Springville Friday - Sunday, so come buy some handmade soap.

Also, the Golden Temple Natural Grocery in Birmingham (Five Points South location) is now carrying our soaps. I love it - they're such a Birmingham tradition.

Life's a ditch

There is a ditch in here somewhere.

But it's clogged with trees, sediment, and years of the neighbors' trash, so when it rains heavily our driveway washes out.



The previous tenants told us that the county worked the road for them, but in our moment of need it was pronounced a private road. All my "but the water is coming from your county road" reasoning did not prevail.



This was the other problem. A storm had washed some debris and huge dead trees to rest against some very large culverts. It did not enter our minds that industrious beavers would see this as a gift, and make the situation even worse.

But they did, and the neighbor's property began to flood. (It was putting some of my favorite wildflowers underwater too!)




Ahh.




Ahhhhhh. I feel better now.

When backhoe work starts at $70 an hour, it's easy to believe that time is money.

"He's been here $140 and it seems like he's just started," I fretted.

I was gone running errands for $210.

"My husband will be home in about $175," I realized at one point.

Actually we feel lucky to have had both problems fixed in just under ten hours. It could have been a lot worse.

Chick progression

Since we moved the little chicks out to the coop, it's been harder to get them to sit still for their close-ups.

They don't want to sit in my hand any more. It would embarrass them in front of their peers.

The only time they're interested in me is when I'm feeding them. Teenagers!

Weekend food blogging

With everything that's gone wrong this week, at least the squash came out well.




If only there were a Photoshop button for "make it look like I didn't put quite so much butter on it".

Take some summer squash or zucchini, and boil them until the skin pierces easily with a fork. Cut the stem end off, slice in half lengthwise, and make a few light cross-cuts on the open faces. Spread with butter and sprinkle with seasoned salt and a little shredded cheese (Parmesan or Mozzarella). Broil until the cheese is browned, about 5 minutes.