I'm so tired

Yawn.

Those lines and this picture brought to you by my sister, and my sister's new camera (Canon Rebel XT), both of whom are back safely from their Caribbean cruise.

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias).

Middle age (is all the rage)

Lady driving large SUV: "How do you like your car?"

Lady loading groceries into small compact car: "Oh, it's great!"

SUV lady: "We've been talking about getting something like that."

Compact lady: "We had an SUV too, but traded it in last year. This car is so much better..."

I just knew she was going to say something about her improved gas mileage.

"... It's so much easier to get into and out of."

Brown-eyed Susans

A friend of mine from Birmingham Southern College is trying to identify some of the wildflowers that are planted at the Southern Environmental Center's   Ecoscape.

She sent me these pictures to consider. I think it's Brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba). I told her I'd put the photos on the blog to see if any of my more knowledgeable plant friends had any better ideas.

Here's a close-up of the bloom:


And here's a view of the whole plant:

If you look closely at the base you can see the triloba part.

Compare here, here, and here.

You can take a virtual tour of the Ecoscape, or browse the Alabama meadow wildflowers.

We had a frost last night so this might be the last flowers here for a while!

Watched

Due to my recent good fortune, I've been working harder than normal.

So I was in the workshop, diligently working away...



... when suddenly I had the feeling that I was being watched.



The Blob?

The Thing?

Sinister alien invader cocoon?

Geez that window sure is dirty.

I need a better angle.



Awww.

Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea).

My cup runneth over

Our Amazing Kitchen Soap is featured in the November issue of Cooking Light magazine!

It's very exciting. My sister-in-law was nice enough to send me this scan, since I still haven't received my copy yet. (My mail lady is possibly holding it hostage.)

I knew it was coming, so made plenty of extra Kitchen soap. What I didn't anticipate was that so many people would be ordering 10 or 12 at a time.

So with that and two big craft shows coming up, I may be too busy for a lot of blog writing or reading in the upcoming weeks.

But if I'm missing from here, just imagine me as that figure on the left of the page, with a big smile of gratitude on my face.



Oh yeah, I can also report that besides garlic and onions, the Amazing Kitchen Soap works well on other smelly odors you might get on your hands... fish... bleach... smoke... that odor you absorb when trying to wrangle smelly dogs who've been rolling around in things you'd rather not think about...

Black Walnuts

We've got a lot of native Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) trees around our place.



A couple hang over the path to the chicken coop. I've started wondering if I should be wearing a hardhat when I let the chickens out in the morning.

I'm not that wild about the taste of walnuts, so I haven't shelled many of them. It's easy to get the husks off - you run over them with your car. If you're driving down a rural road and see a line of black stuff in a gravel driveway, you know that person has walnuts.

But getting the meat out of the shell is a different matter. Not easy at all. Someone told me there was a specific type of cracker that would get the nut out cleanly, but I've never seen one.

There are a lot of things you can't plant near walnut trees, due to the toxic juglone that their roots produce. I guess they don't like a lot of competition.

My sister's house, part 2

Earlier in the year I wrote about my sister's house. Here are some pictures I took at our dinner there earlier this month.

She told me once that she likes it when I mention her on the blog. Here's today's mention: When she gets home, I'm going to kill her for not calling or emailing from the cruise to let me know they're OK.

I'm hoping that they're far enough east that Hurricane Wilma isn't affecting them too badly. But still, I'm going to kill her.


She's got a green thumb


or two.


She has interesting little collections


and arranges them well.


Mom, already worried about bathing suits.

Buckeye

Buckeye butterfly (Junonia coenia)

Cruising

My sister and her family went on a Caribbean cruise and took our Mom along.

Mom, never having been on a cruise before, was nervous of three main things:
1) a tidal wave
2) a hurricane
3) having to wear a bathing suit.

I kept telling her she had nothing to worry about.

Now there's Hurricane Wilma, and I'm the one who's worried.

Solar Homes Tour

The first weekend in October, we went on a Solar Homes Tour in Blount county. There are tours all over the country that weekend, but this was the only one in Alabama.

The the tour has been getting more and more popular each year. They had to split our group into two since it was so large. Our half started at the modified yurt.


Outside of the yurt, with solar panel.


Inside the yurt. (There was a lot of glare and contrast in this picture and the next. I tried to correct for it, but as a result, ended up with a few dark blotches where they shouldn't be.)


It's open on the top. The theory is that the warm air rises and can escape. I imagine it's closed in winter. It's not difficult to heat in Alabama... cooling is the main problem.


Where the walls meet the roof.


They stressed that incorporating passive solar principles is the most important thing to do. Basically that means you design the house to take the most advantage of the sun, before you ever spend a dime on technology like solar panels. One of the ideas was to grow grapes (or something similar) over the windows for shade in the summer.


The same idea, at a different house. I think I'd prefer blinds though, so you could still look out the window if you needed to.


Some interesting space-saving stairs at the same house.


Most of the houses were heated with wood-burning stoves.


This was a ridgetop underground house. It's open on two sides and underground on the others. I think this one was my favorite of the ones we saw. We missed seeing the last house on the tour though, which was supposedly the best. (It was running late and I had to be somewhere else.)


Colorful bumper of one of the tour guides. I so wanted a Prius when I bought my car 5 years ago but hubby was vehemently against it. (He worried about repair issues.) Click for a larger image.


A stray dog came along with our group.


Zorak wanted to come too!

Toot, toot

That's my own horn you hear blowing...

Dana, who writes for the online southern journal called Dew on the Kudzu, interviewed me about our soaps. I feel like such a celebrity!

I've never met Dana before, but she grew up not far from here. She's now living in Chicago, which is why her blog is called Southern Gal Goes North.

Here's a link to the interview if you want to read it.

No autographs, please...

Almost forgot

I almost forgot to link to the new issue of "I and the Bird". (Which is fairly rude, considering they linked to one of my posts!)

So go and enjoy the feathered friends: I and the Bird.

Ready, aim...

I came across this interesting looking leaf spot during a short walk recently.



Here is is again, on a different leaf from the same tree (a Chestnut Oak).



This is the kind of thing that we got calls for all the time at the Master Gardener Hotline, where I volunteered this past summer.

But without all the Cooperative Extension's plant books and other resources, I'm at a loss. (And this is one of those occasions where Google brings up too many choices to be useful.)