Weekly update!

Well, it's been a rather adventurous week...

I started Friday by being totally infuriated at work before 8 AM. I went to a delivery address. It was a wrong address. Dispatch gave me the right address. I went there. It was the warehouse, and my delivery was supposed to go to the factory. 14 miles away. So dispatch told me to take it there, but I told them it wasn't going anywhere until I got the extra $$$ for double delivery. Anyway, I got the money and I didn't have to drop any very expensive machine parts into the nearest ditch...

We had huge storms Thursday night. Some parts around here got 6 inches of rain in the space of an hour... We got about that much total. The Trinity river was almost to the top of the levees...

These oleanders aren't mine. I don't really have the room to grow them here, but these are a friend of mines down the street... I helped her repair what an overzealous yard maintenance man called pruning the other day. His idea of pruning was cutting half the canes off at ground level, then leaving the rest of them to flop around. I've done some strategic staking, and I suspect that it's going to be an ongoing project for the rest of the summer...

I got a pic of the local stray cat, Spectre, who had found herself a nice shaded spot of cool concrete to take a nap. She's starting to tame up to me now. I can get within 3 feet without causing a feline fit...

On Friday, while I was off arguing with dispatchers... one of the transformers in the neighborhood blew. I still had power, but my neighbors and everybody north of me, did not. It finally came back on today. Evidently it took all these guys to fix it....

(note: My house is directly behind that red truck... you can see the very top of my corkscrew willow at the top of the pic) Actually, these weren't all here for one transformer. They were using our street as a centralized location to dispatch out for repairs.

They were here for about 4 hours. I looked into the front yard to see 2 or 3 of the drivers closely inspecting my cactus beds, then went outside and answered a few questions about whether or not they're winter hardy here or not, what kind of soil did I use for the rock gardens, do I have to feed them with special fertilizers , etc, etc, etc. Of course I'll talk about the cactus all day, so that cheered me up... or as cheerful as I could be in this heat... officially it got up to 96 today, but the thermometer in my backyard said 103. And with all the rain lately, the humidity is about 80%.

I did manage to get some of the alley cleaned up... one of the problems with the rock garden is that on the other side of the alley, (which is all rental property... not one actual homeowner lives on that street...) there is a lot of brush and weed trees growing along the fences. People naturally are swerving in my direction to avoid them... so I decided I'd build up a little good Karma and chop out some of the stuff. That took up some time... as in the heat I tend to go slower and not give myself heat stroke.

The new neighbor showed up, and I found out that he's a driver too... for a competing company.

Hmmmm.

And that's really my day.