lotsa lotsa pics...

So, Good Friday is not a good day to deliver.

Quite frankly, it's an empty day. Many places are closed, and nothing much is required, or if it is required, it was delivered earlier in the week. I only had 2 deliveries all day. Not really that big a deal, I suppose.

My first pic is this... my Episcia has decided to celebrate the season by producing its first bloom ever. Not the best pic, it was almost impossible to get it to focus on the flower istead of the leaves, but I thought I'd post it anyway...
Next, the Texas bluebonnets are beginning to bloom. They're not in their full glory yet... the fields are only occasionally dotted with blue, but they're nice, cheerful flowers...

The next pics were taken in the Mansfield Old Colored Cemetary.

I've posted about the cemetary before. Mansfield had a large African American population of freed slaves after the civil war. This cemetary was largely abandoned until a few local churches have volunteered their efforts into restoring it, and it is now being utilized again. Their aren't many stones on the older graves though... grave markers were a rather expensive investment for a financially challenged community. Many graves were marked with wooden crosses that are now long gone, others with local sandstone rocks, others with homemade cement markers.

Still others are only marked by these ancient clumps of iris...

And finally, some of the naturalized Grape Hyacynth that I talked about in a previous post.

It turns out that I got pics of these just in the nick of time... no sooner had I walked back to my truck than a truck marked with Tarrant County Justice Department rolled up hauling a trailer loaded with mowing equipment. Out strutted two guards, and a crew of four prisoners. It was interesting to watch.

The guards were a perfectly matched pair. They were wearing their uniforms... Khaki pants and black polo shirts. They were of identical height. They both were thick waisted, not fat but certainly not thin... the kind of build that high school football stars get after they've lost their glory and started selling used tires, if that makes any sense. Their waists appeared to be of identical girth though, pants held up by black belts with lots of little tool pockets, and they both had shaved heads, and black sunglasses. They literally looked like identical twins... with one major difference... one was black and one was white.

Really, no Hollywood casting director could have found a better matched pair of actors to play their roles. I seriously considered snapping a pic, but for some reason I didn't.

Out of the back of the truck jumped four men. All of them came to about the shoulders of their guards, and were wearing scruffy jeans and stained t-shirts. The guards started barking, and the workers quickly, and very efficiently, unloaded their equipment and went to work, while one of the guards stood on the bed of the pick-up and the other stood on the trailer, both staring out through their ray-bans with arms crossed across their chests... in a rather powerful pose that I presume was to impress upon any passers-by exactly who was in charge.

At one point, one of the mowers got caught on a slight rise in the ground, and the worker struggled to right it's path... provoking the guards into making loud, disgusted noises and yelling instructions. When the worker eventually righted the machine, he tuned and went the other way and went about his job.

For some reason I can't exactly fathom, the guards found this hillarious and there was much thigh slapping and roars of laughter.

I don't exactly know the point of this story, or why I found it neccesary to include it... but it's there and there we are...