By Chris, on March 10, 2010, at 1:21 pm
Yesterday I was out in the yard just after dark and I became aware of a sound I couldn’t quite place, sort of a wet clicking or popping all around me. My first thought was “oh no it’s sleeting again” but I quickly dismissed that because it was waaaay too warm. It couldn’t be rain, I didn’t feel anything hitting me. Could I actually be hearing the trees and plants starting to grow….? OK maybe that sounded flat-out kooky. Maybe just light rain? No, nothing on the patio, nothing I could see in the pool of light below the utility lamp by the garage. Huh.
I decided it was so nice out that I’d do a few of my Qigong exercises while I was waiting for the puppy to go potty,* and as I stretched and moved, I kept listening to the soft sounds. Gradually I also became aware of subtle motion in the grass all around me. I hunkered down in a patch of light to see what was moving: it was an earthworm! It was halfway out of the ground and probing it’s way delicately around in the dead grass. There were dozens — probably hundreds — of them, all venturing forth from the dirt and creeping around. Those soft wet sounds I heard were the worms moving around. How cool is that? 
*Puppy? What puppy? You must have misread that part of the sentence. Maybe you need an eye exam? That’s right, move along, nothing to see here… 
By Chris, on February 26, 2010, at 5:27 pm
I was walking a dog at the shelter today and ventured up the hill behind the building so we could really stretch our legs. Something caught my eye sitting on the hillside in the sun… at first I thought “wow, what an ugly cat” but then I approached for a closer look:
He or she never moved, even when we got about twenty feet away, I almost got the sense I could have just walked up and nudged it and it would have fallen over like a statue. Of course, being an opossum, it might well have done just that.
By Chris, on October 16, 2009, at 9:09 am
Even though I am currently at war with the neighborhood squirrels, I can appreciate this. Lindsy tipped me off that he/she was in the yard. Sorry the pictures, well, suck, but that’s because our camera is dying and won’t focus fast enough any more. We’re going to upgrade to a camera with a big zoom (probably to a Panasonic Lumix FZ35) at some point but in the meantime enjoy the ‘bigfoot-sighting’ quality shots…
White squirrels aren’t really rare in this area – Brevard, NC even has an annual White Squirrel Festival. They aren’t albinos, either, they have dark eyes and most of them have colored markings like this one does.
By Chris, on October 16, 2009, at 7:07 am
You never know what you are going to find while harvesting herbs…
This little girl was hiding in the sage. Joy agreed to my letting her live, providing I took her FAR away for relocation. Which means, I am aware, that if one of our animals gets bit by a spider some time in the next decade or so it will be ALL MY FAULT.
She sure was pretty, though, in a scary sort of way.
I’ve been harvesting and drying batches of herbs for a week or so now. We’re supposed to get a freeze Sunday night so I need to get the last of the basil and sage, at least. The sage I already dried and rubbed is wonderful — the stuff from the grocery store is like a sad dusty imitation by comparison.
By Chris, on September 1, 2009, at 7:53 am
No doubt everyone was as excited as I am about the arrival of the black soldier flies to our compost pile, and disappointed that no photos of the actual squirming larvae accompanied my post. So here ya go. Aren’t they beautiful?
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