Ummmm 7-31

I can't think of a title.  I have nothing much to say.  We are having a wonderful visit with Larry's Mom...she'll be here at least a week.  She is enjoying the peaceful setting and our nature, oh and of course the many ways I've cooked zucchini...lucky her and lucky for us she likes it too.

see how hard it is to see these fruits!  There are two cantaloupe in this picture

Bread 7-30

Today I made zucchini bread for the first time in a bazillion years, it turned out really good, froze one loaf.  We had breakfast on the deck with Mom and then she and Larry went through a pile of old pictures figuring out who was who...again, if you have piles of your pictures you haven't put peoples names and dates on...DO IT NOW!  While you have your memory!  I puttered in the garden a bit...harvested zucchini...there's a surprise and watched the birds antics.  One California Towhee commandeered the largest bird bath for his own personal bathing tub and chased off any other birds stopping by for a drink.  At one point the fight turned violent...jeez.  Also the hummers were fighting each other all afternoon and one even took out after a butterfly...crazy birds.  A deer was studying on the garden today...I even caught her making her way around to the gate while I was at the other end of the garden....one of these days I'm going to look up and there will be one in there with me.  I don't usually latch the gate closed while I'm in there working.  It was a warm day but a tetch cooler than yesterday.  This is a series of hummingbird pictures from today and notice the little hummingbird claw scratches on the gladiolus flower in the last picture.

 

Company! 7-29

Larry's Mom arrived today and is staying for a week or so....fun.  So we visited all day and I didn't take a picture.  I did pick a few zucchini. :) 

These are from yesterday.

snapdragons

Incoming 7-28

It is hot and humid here, I've kind of adjusted to the heat, but dislike the humidity.  I whacked the heck out of the tomato plants again...6 feet + tall is just ridiulous and they need to get busy getting ripe.  I have two burpless cucumber plants that are rivaling zucchini for having them magically appear after I've already been through the vine.  I picked two way oversize ones this morning wondering how I missed them and then this evening I ran across four ready for picking....I didn't even see them this morning...scary.



This is the way all the following pictures were from the camera
and then I cropped them on the computer so you could
see the birds better, surprisingly clear.




Watching for incoming!



Mine, Mine, Mine!

I'll try from this side!

Fun Day 7-27

First thing this morning I spotted the twins and their Mama out back.  The doe's don't mind us, but the babies are skittish, I was able to slink out the sliding door and stand on the deck and get a bunch of pictures of the little family.  The babes have grown really fast.

"Are YOU looking at ME?"

Then it was out to the garden to check out everything.  There is a mole out there wreaking havoc with the ground in the garden...I am sick of the mounds of dirt it pushes up...moles don't hurt the plants, they are just after worms, but mounds all over the place are a pain.  I'd like to put down bark in the paths but the mole would just keep making a mess of everything.

I took the time to get more hummingbird pictures and I picked zucchini.  Yesterday they seemed too small and today they were bigger than I usually like...  While I was buried in the zucchini plants the UPS showed up with my new purse!

I love this idea.  Michelle turned me on to them.  You buy the basic purse base and then you pick and buy a shell.  It attaches by magnets.  They are MICHE bags and wonderful.  You don't have to change your stuff from one purse to another, you just change out the shell.  You can go from casual to fancy in two seconds.  I got the mini which is a very small purse, but perfect for me.  I just carry the basics, I don't cart around make-up, a medicine chest, or tools.  Deciding on what shells you want next seems to be the hardest decision.

We spent some time down in the meadow enjoying the breezes again and watching the turkeys and jack rabbits.  Larry dug the beginnings of a squirrel nest or stash out of the Cadi's engine compartment...I saw the little bugger jump up in there the other day.

Today's zucchini side dish was spicy saute.  Sliced them up and then sauteed them in olive oil and spiced up with Mrs Dash's Extra Spicy, Cumin and Cayenne...they were really yummy...had a little ranch dressing with them to cool them down a tetch.  These days it isn't what to fix for dinner...it is how to fix the zucchini and what are we going to have with it.  In a few weeks I imagine I'll have the same problem with tomatoes.  Sadly we don't have anywhere to put a freezer.

Peaceful Day 7-26

We didn't do very much today.  Larry spent the day backing up the computers, I did some household chores, ran a couple of errands and that was about it.  We did drag a couple of chairs down into the meadow and sat down there most of the afternoon in the shade of the oak trees...it was cooler and we caught the breeze.  Whatever kind of grass is there doesn't really grow much and so far the bottom is staying green with the watering we are doing...the upper part is drying out...either to much sun or doesn't hold the water well, but it doesn't require the mowing that a lawn does. 

Today's entertainment were the jack rabbits running around, the squirrels getting attacked by woodpeckers in the pine tree and the turkeys and deer sauntering through.  One doe doesn't even look up when we are wandering around doing whatever...she stays about a dozen feet away, but we don't scare her.

To the City today 7-25

For us the big city is Roseville.  We headed down there after a stop at the library.  We needed to get new towel bars for the bathroom, we made a stop at Costco where I insulted the clerk (says Larry) as she was checking us out... 

Costco was crazy busy, they run you through like cattle and I was studying on getting my transaction done and the clerk was babbling away about something.  At first I didn't realize she was even talking to us as they always chatter amongst themselves...she turned away and I said to Larry what is she babbling about and she heard my comment, and I guess she got her back up, but I still wasn't paying attention, I just wanted out of there.  Oh well.  It wasn't an appropriate time to talk about upgrading our card or whatever...we've gotten roped into stuff like that at other places and end up taking another hour to get out of the store....my blood sugar was dropping, I was hungry and cranky and if wasn't so crazy in there I might have gone back and apologized.  Oh well.

Then we had a lovely lunch at Chili's and then back up the hill.  Larry got all the new towel bars installed and then we hung out on the deck.  Oh, before we left I baked a chocolate zucchini cake....the recipe was from our neighbor in Chester.  I've had it for years and never made it...so moist and light and rich...yummy with vanilla bean ice cream.  So we had that on the deck, a most lovely afternoon.

The squirrels have been up in the Ponderosa Pines chewing and dropping the green pinecones.  You do NOT want to be hit by one...they are weighty and drop like rocks...it almost seems as if the squirrels are pitching them out away from the tree at you.  I don't know why they are doing it because it doesn't seem that they would be edible yet.

Yesterday the hummingbirds were in fine form...whizzing all over the place, fighting, chattering etc.  I may need to go out armed with a badminton racket.  Some do the most amazing buzzing speeding and weird sounds.  If I hadn't seen some of it I would never believe it was those little tiny birds doing those sounds.

The one on the right is scolding the one landing.

They get very indignant.

Heaven on Earth

Finally Done Organizing 7-24

Woo hoo!  My rear end is thankful that I have finally finished organizing my photos sitting at the computer for days...  Larry is the one that set the system up a long time ago so we don't have to hunt endlessly for photos...I just have to make the time to name them, sort them and sometimes brutally delete them.  The problem is when I take hundreds a day for many days in a row and don't have the time to keep up with it...UGLY.  I have now lifted my moratorium on taking new photos!

Larry has been scanning family photos again...more of his side from a cousin...so nice.  Then they will be forever preserved and easier to share with others.  If you have photos thrown in a box and not names or dates on them...while you still have a brain cell dig them out and get to writing on them!  So sad when we can't figure out who the people are.  You may not care, but someone on down the road may care.

The weather has been wonderful...a tetch too warm for me, but bearable.  We have had zucchini every day in various recipes...yummy.  The burpless cucumbers have been very tasty too.  We are really enjoying having all the house projects done...a nice way to finish off the first year in the house...now we just see what's next around the corner.

Finished 7-23

One year ago today we took possession of our not so lovely, needed a lot of work home.  The first month we worked ourselves ragged but made great strides in the house and property.  This past spring Larry worked on the outside and this morning Larry did the last bit of painting in the master bath...it is finished!  Larry's next project will be doing some reworking of the shed and then getting it painted and we are trying to figure out what we want to do with the rest of the front yard.  This next year should be more relaxing without so many projects hanging over our heads, but one never knows.

Here are before and after pictures of the bathroom.  It was hideous...the green color was disgusting and the flooring was awful, the cabinets needed a lot of help and on it went.  We decided not to change out the countertop, tiles, faucets or sinks...but there was still a lot of work to be done.  Larry painted the cabinets and all the walls and scraped old paint off of everything and recaulked.  With the lovely new vinyl floor it looks like a new bathroom.

Larry took pictures of me in the garden today, I wanted you to have some perspective on the size of those tomato plants.  I washed the Cadi and took Awesome to part of the interior, that stuff cleans anything and then spent the rest of the day still working on cataloging photos.  I am closer to being finished...hopefully tomorrow.

Me and the tomato plants

365! 7-22

Today is our 365th day of owning this place and today the last room was finished!  Woo hoo, the flooring was installed in the master bathroom!  Tomorrow will be the first anniversary...we moved the trailer into the back yard and got busy getting this place torn apart and put back together.  It has been a busy year, but now we can enjoy ourselves more this next year!  I haven't gotten pictures yet of the finished bathroom, I'll post them when I do of course.  This floor feels so much better, the old floor was peel and stick tiles that would have looked okay if they didn't have gaps and the glue showing through.  We didn't replace the countertop or the tile backsplashes, just did major cleanup of them.  These people didn't believe in taping things off before painting and certainly not cleaning anything off.  I think Larry was in there with a razor blade an entire day cleaning off the mirror and tiles of old paint.

I spent an hour or so taking pictures in the garden of the hummingbirds...gotta get them while the flowers are blooming!  I also learned from our flooring installer how to pinch back my gigantor tomato plants, so I spent time pinching, pruning and tieing up the crazy vines. 

Today the turkeys, deer, rabbit and fox all cruised through at different times along with the multitudinous birds...the yard is a wild kingdom movie right now.