Fire Ants, How Do I Hate Thee?

Let me count the ways:

Never mind.
I lost count...

Science Project

One day I looked out my back door window and saw that there were no leaves left on my pentas.  I went out to investigate and found no less than 8 hornworms (6 green and 2 brown) trying to live off the four plants in my pot.  These were pretty impressively big caterpillars, so we saved them and did a little research.  We determined that they would become tersa sphinx moths.  So we made a little habitat for two of them and released the rest.  I just didn't have enough penta plants left to feed more than two!  For about a week they lived in my glass cookie jar.  (But I promise I sanitized it really well afterward, so it's safe to eat cookies next time you come to my house!)  Then the caterpillars went into their chrysalises for a couple weeks.  One morning, we woke up to this:

We Sure Know How to Party!

All last week we had family in town and M took some vacation. We took the opportunity to focus on important things. Things like making really big bubbles:

I Preferred It When They Only Cost Us a Few Tomatoes

My mom left town this morning. Today was the real start of me being a mother of three. You know, where I actually do it by myself during the day. *GULP*

While my mom was still here, she bought some steaks for us to grill this last Wednesday. These were Costco steaks. So, needless to say, we were pretty excited to eat them.

M got home from work and fired up the grill. We got the four huge steaks cooking and then we noticed something down inside the grill next to the burners.

Rat poison.

Last year we didn't actually get to eat any of the tomatoes from our garden because something was getting to them before us. And since I saw a rat along our back fence once when we first moved into this house, I'm betting the culprit was rats. Pleasant thought, no? I suppose it could be squirrels, but what's the difference really? Squirrels are practically rats with bushy tails.

After we lost two bell peppers in the garden this year, M decided to try some rat poison. M and Scott came back from Home Depot with it and the first thing Scott announced as he burst through the front door was, "Mom! We bought rat food!" That's right Scott, we bought those rats the only kind of food we want to share with them. M put out three little chunks and two chunks disappeared. I guess some little critter wanted to eat his poison lightly tossed with rancid grill fat. When it had its fill, it decided to leave its little "treat" inside the grill for safe keeping. That is, until (hopefully) it keeled over and never returned! Bwa ha ha!

Hmmmm... wonder where the third chunk of poison went? (Please let the rat have taken it home to its friends. Please let the rat have taken it home to its friends. And please don't let it turn up somewhere like inside our Brita pitcher. I have this nagging fear that in reality our neighborhood has super-intelligent evil rats that escaped from some science experiment gone awry and that are now trying to exact their revenge by poisoning people. "My name is Ratty McRat. You killed my father. Prepare to die.")

But the steaks. Ah! I weep for those steaks. Considering the warning labels on that rat bait (Can you say cerebral edema?), there was no choice but to throw those neurotoxin smoked beauties away and scramble for something else to eat. I WANT to be ready to laugh about this. Not sure I'm there. I think I'll go caress our steak knives and sigh wistfully some more.

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UNRELATED UPDATE: I snagged Kate's umbilical stump yesterday with my hand while doing a diaper change and that sucker just popped right off. Phew! Not too bad. In the end it took 23 days to fall off (or get accidentally pulled off - po-tay-to, po-tah-to). I knew complaining to the wwworld would do the trick. There was a tiny bit of bleeding, but nothing that wasn't a "variation of normal."

New Addition

There's a new addition. No, no, not the baby yet. Seriously, come on. Remember what I said? Claire and Scott were induced well past my due date with my body showing no signs of being close to labor on my own. It would be absurd to expect an uninduced early arrival with Kate.

Check out the sidebar. (No really, click on over from Google Reader and scroll down there toward the bottom.)

Everyone's favorite feature is back! You know you've missed the slideshow of the rock pile, haven't you? Well, rest assured, rock harvesting season has returned and our bounteous harvest will be highlighted once again in the sidebar. We might even put some new trees into the holes left behind.

Check back soon for more, including mandarin orange tree flavored rocks!

The Patio Chair: Between a Rock and a Bigger Rock

For those of you blissfully unaware off in Google Reader land, I thought I'd draw your attention to two things.

First of all, our rock pile is growing. I have kindly refrained from posting about every added picture (because I'm nice like that), but I've been adding new photos to the slideshow nonetheless. So feel free to take the extra few seconds to click on over to the actual site and check it out. Heck, since you've already invested ALL THAT TIME coming, go ahead and leave a comment. I don't care if you don't have anything to say. It wouldn't kill you to say hi. Speechlessness at my amazing posts is no excuse.

The other item of rock pile business is that I've decided it was time to add something in the images for scale. It was starting to get hard to tell how big the rocks were. The latest rock photo is of a real doozy so I wanted you to appreciate it. Old patio chair to the rescue. So, yes, the ugly white chair is in the picture on purpose.

The chair will really come in handy when we unveil the next rock in all it's resplendent glory. We were planting another tree and dug one loose a couple days ago. I'll totally get a photo -- if we can ever figure out how to lift the thing out of the hole it's in.

Some Things Make You Question Your Priorities

Do I have so many awesome photos from my trip to Japan that I filled my camera's memory card?

YES

Am I posting any of those today?

NO

What am I posting today?

ANOTHER PHOTO IN THE SLIDESHOW OF OUR STUPID ROCK PILE

Go figure.

Does This Count as a Man-Made Beach?

We could have gone on a tropical vacation, but instead we dropped $7 on a kiddie pool to go with the sandbox. Isn't this how everyone's mid-March evenings are?

Maybe it's just a Texas thing...

The Sandman

For Scott's birthday we got a sandbox in the back yard. The kids love it and I love that they'll actually play in the backyard now. Of course, the mess is significant.

I know, I know. I brought this upon myself. But please indulge my whining for just a moment. Claire is no big deal, but Scott. Oh, Scott. I have to make sure I empty Scott's pockets before he comes inside since he dumps sand over his head and it fills them up. The front pockets on his shirts sag under the load. The sand is nearly impossible to get out of his hair, so I've practically stopped trying. I'm sure people think my two year old has a severe dandruff problem. The kids' bathtub perpetually has a thin layer of sand in it. The other day when I changed Scott's diaper after a little romp in the sand, I felt like I should go check the sandbox. I wanted to make sure there was any sand left in it because it looked like he'd smuggled it all inside in his diaper. Trying to wipe him off was more like sanding his behind. I felt like telling him that while his crotch is not antique furniture, it was ready for a coat of polyurethane. (Hmmm. That might make future diaper changes easier...)

Okay, I'm done complaining. They love it and I have all tile floors downstairs. It's all good.

It's ALIVE!!!

Our stick is sprouting! Look!

That's hard to see. EXTREME CLOSE UP!!!

Rock Slide

So I decided to get as close as possible to the flip book idea without having to expend too much effort. You will no longer be bored to tears by individual posts dedicated to the growing rock pile. I will just add another photo to the slideshow over yonder on the sidebar. Don't forget to check in every now and then to see our progress! (As if you care about a bunch of rocks...)

Just Be Glad It's Not a Live Webcam!

A Monument to an Arbitrary Milestone

Blogger says this is my 100th post (but it's sorta wrong because it includes all my drafts that are eternal works in progress). Let's commemorate this occasion with a picture of a pile of rocks.


Thrilling, no? We started stripping what sod we have and turning soil for a quarter of one of our four garden plots. So Saturday afternoon's labor resulted in 1/16 of our future garden area. The progress was slow thanks to several additions to our future waterfall stonework, as seen in the above photo. And so the pile grows... I confess that really it was all M's doing. I did a great job wandering around barefoot and distracting him when I wasn't in the garage painting a bookshelf.

Because Everything is Better in Color

Check it out!

(I promise this will be the last braggy backyard post for at least a week or so...)

The Little Tomato Plant That Could

I have to pay tribute to our tomato plant that finally gave up for the winter just a couple weeks ago. These were the last few tomatoes we managed to harvest from it.

Back in the spring/early summer we bought some tomato plants and a big half-barrel to plant them outside our apartment. (When we were drilling drainage holes in the bottom, we noticed a distinct smell. In a previous life our half-barrel and been a full-barrel filled with Jack Daniels. Maybe that's why the plants did so well?) The tomato plants got so big that M rigged up an elaborate trellis-like setup involving a large piece of wood, some string, and a neighboring tree. It was so trashy looking, it was great. I bet our neighbors were not sad to see us go.

We got a fair number of tomatoes out of it (except for the ones the neighbor boys pulled off when they were green). Then we bought our house and we had to move in July. There were still lots of tomatoes that weren't ready yet, but oh well. There was no way to move this Frankenstein's monster in one piece. But M went ahead and cut the tops off of a few of the best branches and when we got to the house, we put new soil in the barrel, crossed our fingers, and stuck the cut pieces into the dirt. One of them actually grew!!! It kept producing pitiful little tomatoes up until late December. I still can't believe that it worked. That's the kind of thing that only happens to my plant goddess sister.

Our Little Stick

Saturday we had beautiful weather, so we employed our slave labor:

(Don't ya just love that Scott isn't wearing shoes outside in January? In my defense, it was about 75 degrees out and the fire ants aren't out this time of year.)

All that digging was to plant another tree near the back fence:

Can you even see it in the photo? You have to look closely. It's about 18 inches tall and looks dead. A little anti-climatic, huh? Supposedly it's just dormant for the winter. I keep wondering if we got scammed and it's really just a dead stick. But if so, no big deal. It was free from our community center. The real cost was the amount of rock we (okay, M) had to remove from the hole:

Tune in next time for "As the Rock Pile Grows"!

THE Plan

You'll probably have to click on that sucker to actually see anything. That was one monstrous file. I deserve a gold star for editing, converting to jpg, and resizing that thing just for your viewing pleasure. I'm sorry I didn't have a electronic copy of the color version. It's pretty, but you'll cope in black and white.

Do you like how I'm sitting around reading on a lounge chair? I'm holding my sister to the fact that finishing our yard means that will happen. And apparently nothing will change for M, because he will still forget to change out of a shirt and tie before he does something dirty like grill in the backyard.

We actually took some baby steps toward this suburban utopia. While my sister and her husband were here, we painted the basic outlines to get a feel for everything:


Also, we bought one tree (On sale because it was a "living Christmas tree" and Christmas was over! They even threw in a free poinsettia!). One microscopic little tree. We planted it along the back fence. But at least we did SOMETHING!

Grow tree, GROW!!!

Backyard Dreams

Right now, our backyard looks like this:

Except nix the patio furniture, it belonged to the previous owner. Instead add more brown to the grass, 2 plastic patio chairs, a couple dying potted plants, and a gas grill (at least the gas grill is nice!).

This is the almost final draft of the plan my sister is doing for our backyard:

If you need help interpreting:
- WF = water feature
- There's a shed and garden in the back right corner, and an "open use" area for whatever (sand box, hammock, play equipment, hot tub, stuff that will "grow" with our family) and a 2nd sitting area in the back left
- To the left of the patio and to the right and up from the 2nd sitting area are 2 woodland garden areas
- The pokey trees are evergreens and the rest are deciduous.
- The only big change to this will be that the tree above the deck will be gone

Oh, how my sister rocks. She'll bring the big, detailed, final one at Christmas. I'm so excited. You like? I can't wait to "dig in."