less than 24 hours later...

I just finished this garden strip yesterday, (actually, see yesterdays post all about it) and some dweeb runs off the alley and into my rock garden today! Seriously, there's over 15 feet of alley out there, if you are incapable of staying on it, you shouldn't be allowed to drive!


Look up there^


They cracked a fossil in half! It's been around for several tens of thousands of years, and this incompetent cracks it in half! Un-freaking believable!



I'm just venting, I've already rebuilt the damage, and I can only hope that nothing else happens anytime soon... Yes, it's annoying, but far worse things have happened on the planet. And as for them being an incompetent dweeb, I have no idea really... all I know is that it was fine when I left this morning and it was run over when I came home tonight.



Otherwise, it was actually a pretty good day.

There was this in the back of a warehouse I saw today... maybe it's that I've been doing too much rock gardening, but the first thing that went through my mind was... 'They need some prickly pears back there. And some agaves... maybe a few of those hardy ferocactus too... and an ocotillo...

And then, as I was sitting in my truck in a store parking lot, reading my book and waiting for my next call... I heard a little chirp and I looked up to see this guy less than 10 feet outside my drivers window... A scissortail flycatcher was sitting there waiting for me to take a pic, and getting a little impatient with me...
Then he showed off his profile...

before his wife showed up and reminded him that there were chicks to feed and he didn't have time to resume his career as a super model.
you can tell this is the female, because the tails shorter.

And that was my day...

Random stuff...

I didn't have anything around to merit a real post, but I did have to let everybody know that I was still around, so here's some random pics that are in the camera... thought I'd go ahead and post them before I deleted them...

This is Spectre... (yep, another black cat. It's been a theme since I was a kid. Grandma said 'If there's a black cat within a mile of that boy, they'll find each other!' ) Spectre is a cat that wanders the neighborhood and has decided that sleeping on top of my shade-porch is a good thing... I have a love-hate relationship with random cats... On the one hand they can cause a certain amount of trouble. On the other hand, if there aren't any cats in the neighborhood, there are rats... given the choice of cats or rats... I'll take the cats... Spectre is nice enough, as long as you don't get in her face. She tends to watch me a lot as I work in the yard, but I can't get within 6 or 7 feet of her. She may tame up eventually though...
This is the Pereskia aculeata v. godseffiana that I saved from Home Depot. I had it in a previous post when I first got it... Pereskias are cactus, even though they have leaves, and aren't succulent. The godseffiana is the more colorful cultivar of the plain green standard species. Normally, the plants bloom in the spring, but there is sometimes a second blooming in the fall... since this didn't get to bloom in the spring, I'm hoping I'll get a couple of blooms about October or November. He was barely hanging on when I first got him... but now he's recovering from the chain store... It's almost enough to make you break out into a chorus of "We Shall Overcome"

These are a couple of Scissor-tail flycatchers that I snapped when they were perching on the fence at a warehouse I delivered to... These are the state bird of Oklahoma, but they're common through Texas too... This is probably a mated pair. They hunt by sitting still till they see a bug, then swoop down and attack, a process refered to as 'hawking,' so often when people see them, they think they're seeing some type of barn swallow. However, the scissor-tail can hover in place for short periods, about 5 seconds, which I've never seen a swallow do.

And here's Phennig, sitting in the yard. He seems to be giving me an opinion on what he thinks of this unmowed grass. Obviously, I'm going to have to get to work.

And that's about it for the moment.