Let’s get this out of the way first—we lost Rock Star. She was one of our most outgoing and social chickens that we ever had. She’d eat out of your hand, she’d always interact in some way like vocalizing back when she was spoken to. She’s also the chicken that learned to walk the pool perimeter each morning to nibble on beetles and bugs. Once we we realized how ill she was, we actually brought her in to the vet which we had never done with a chicken before, but I guess it was too late as she didn’t live through the night. Likely something went wrong with an egg inside which caused infection and the cascade of bad things from there. So we were very sad about this. And without Rock Star, the remaining 6 chickens just seem…like a bunch of chickens. Rock Star had the personality in the group. Jokic is the alpha chicken now, but honestly she doesn’t really act like it.
I noticed over the summer that after the Texas Mountain Laurels finished blooming they grew pods on them. We don’t have this plant in our yard but a lot of people have them in our neighborhood which we notice when we take walks. The pods were cool looking so I asked the neighborhood via Nextdoor if anyone could spare some pods and next thing I know I had a huge grocery bag full of them! So I fooled around with them a bit…they have really cool red seeds inside. You can easily make jewelry with them which is fine but I feel like I’ve done a lot of that and I don’t really want to make jewelry all that much. So finally I made a thing with them which came out cool so now I’m trying to do it again. It’s a bit of a process but basically you take a little board and then you use sculpt a mold to create an uneven surface. I just thought that would be more interesting than flat. And while it is still wet, I took a bunch of pods that I had sanded down and removed the seeds from and pushed them into the mold to make little spots for each one, and also I did this with the seeds, and then quickly removed them all. Then you have to wait several days for the sculpt a mold to dry. Then I painted it. Then I glued the pods and seeds back on. This is very tricky because you have to try to figure out where each one goes!! I take pics of it but still it is very hard! So I am crossing my fingers that I can do it again successfully. Last time I just used Elmer’s glue since it’s all I had around at the time but next time around I’m going to use something that seems more powerful. Mini slide show below.
Over the summer I started a new “club” in the art league (there are a lot of clubs and I hadn’t really joined into one yet) about Nature & Environment with a fellow member that has like interests. We met indoors the first couple of meetups due to summer heat, but now we just meet outside each month. We did a couple of activities at those indoors meetups, but since then we’ve been more focused on exploring whatever location we go to. The other co-lead is interested in actual art in the outdoors (“environmental art”) and long-term that’s something the art league will be planning with the city. I suspect members want more planned activities but I don’t know if I’m going to be the person to organize that. I guess what I really like is field trips!
This was the first meetup at our house where we learned cordage from yucca strands.
One of the places we met up at was Camp Ben, which was a pretty cool spot with pretty scenery along Onion Creek. Mini slide show below.
One gal in the club has been rock collecting her whole life and now I am looking out for cool rocks whenever I am out and about. I’ve already been aware of the neat karst we have here (limestone with holes and indentations from water) but I hadn’t really noticed other stuff. I found a really cool rock recently in our front yard!
In the middle of September Rob had a couple of guy friends visit and I took a weekend trip to Rockport which is down on the coast. It happened to be the same weekend as the Hummingbird Festival in that town but I chose that location because it was surrounded by parks I could visit. So I explored Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Goose Island State Park, and other local trails. I also went on a boat tour which was to see birds basically but for me the only really cool part was seeing the dolphins that were swimming around the boat for like 30 minutes! I kept hoping to see an alligator that weekend but unfortunately never saw one. I saw many turtles and also what I believe was an osprey with prey in its talons in flight. Lots and lots of butterflies and one GIGANTIC moth which flew away before I could identify it. Mini slide show below.
Oh and then I also happened to come across a native passionflower plant which was super surprising because earlier this summer I found a different kind of native passionflower plant in our yard! In Rockport I spotted a Scarletfruit Passionflower and in our yard we have Birdwing Passionflower. The leaves supposedly resemble birdwings. Apparently there are seven native passionflower species in Texas so I guess there’s more to look forward to :)
Other random things I did included trying out phytograms, painting on rocks, and doing more paper folding structures. For a while I was inspired by the book “Dictionary of the Illegible” so I was making pictogram adjacent things and “secret” codes haha. And I made wreaths from the Virginia Creeper vines that I pulled off the house and on one of them I glued yucca pods which looked kinda neat so I hung it outside on the porch but after awhile it seems to have mold or something growing on them so now it doesn’t look so good :( And I also tried phytograms which was vaguely interesting but not sure I’ll do a whole lot more of those.
As you know I check the trail cam pics every day and for a couple weeks I saw what I believe was the neighbor’s cat roaming around at night. I was kinda wondering how it could stay alive that way given all the predators. And then…
I haven’t mentioned this to the neighbors because first of all, I don’t actually know it was their cat (but I’m pretty certain it was). And also we never really talk to them. And also we constantly are picking up candy wrappers and such that blow into our yard from their yard/car with open doors (???) so they aren’t exactly our favorite people. If they ask me about the cat, I will share these images with them.
And Rob and I have just started to learn pickleball, as a place has opened up closeby, which is mostly really fun. The only problem is that by necessity we have to start as Beginners, as we have zero experience with actual games and such, but the problem is then we have to play with Beginners, and since we have strong racket skills, it isn’t so fun. We will have to figure out how to join an event or two where we can get “rated” or something so we can join into Intermediates or I’m going to go crazy.
I’ve also just started to help out again with the Hays County Master Naturalists. The team on the Hays Humm, the monthly on-line newsletter, needs help with coordination and general assistance. I haven’t actually done much yet, but hopefully as time goes by I will figure out my role. I’ll probably do a story in next month’s issue. One problem they have is too few contributors, but also the gal who is the lead editor is swamped as she also has full time job(s).
I’m going to place remaining pics in below slide show. One pic is of a vintage vending machine that I bought for $200 that we’d like to use to vend art for the art league. A guy came out and took a look at it from Innovation Treehouse, which seemed hopeful, but apparently no one was interested in helping us tackle this job which will involve mechanical problem solving even before layering on the vending software part. So it just sits for now but hopefully we’ll find a way eventually.
Oh and also we have a new game which is called So Clover, which involves writing a one-word clue to pairs of words and the other person guessing the arrangement on a card. It’s not officially a two-person game but we like to play it this way. I bet it will be very fun with more people.
One morning I opened the front door and to my surprise Pangea was sitting right outside it! There is a short rock wall Rob created that typically prevents him from getting this close to the house but he found a weak spot haha. Oh and we took him in for a check up and the vet remarked on how normally sulcatas can act like a breadbox but Pangea was quite animated (not liking the poking from the vet) so after that I started to call him Spicy Boy. Another vet trip involved taking Woody in because he was having pain in his back paw for a couple of days… but no broken bone was detected and we left with pain meds and instructions to leash walk him only (even in yard) for 10 days so he would “rest” it but after like two days he seemed all better so we just stopped the meds and the restricted walking after like 3 or 4 days as it wasn’t even helping because he’d just push off hard anyhow. Oh and in the slide show you can see the dogs jumping up in the yard and that’s when the Texas Persimmons were ripe so they’d jump up to try to snag the ripe ones haha.
And did I mention that for Rob b’day we got a giant device in the kitchen? It’s basically a giant Android tablet. We use it to view our calendars, use apps such as controlling the music in the house, and most importantly, to have recipes up on the screen when we are both cooking!! And we can use the split screen so there is a recipe and a set of timers!! The rest of the day it has a slide show going which is pretty cool. It is in the kitchen but it is on wheels so in theory we could roll it into another room and watch a movie or something on it but we haven’t done anything like that yet.
Oh and also in the pics below: we went to a music performance with Louise and John which was very cool - the drumming was AMAZING! And also Rob has basically finished doing stuff in the music room where he’s mounted the record player onto a beautiful piece of wood and he’s got the other components in a nice arrangement including a reel-to-reel! OK finally now the last slide show below.
