Nice Nature Pics, Rock Painting, and More (Mar. and Apr. 2016)

This was neat to see these two different spider species sitting in our garden tub.  The cellar spider (Pholcus Pholangiodes) was no surprise.  It's all I can do to keep them out. But the fishing spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus)
I didn't much like to think about where it had been before it got into our tub. Cree-py! At this point, though, we've seen so many different creatures in our tub.  Welcome to the woods.  Haha!

It's been sooooo nice to see an abundance of deer again in our yard and across the road, since Atlas has been gone. Atlas is a good dog, but he was not the right kind of dog for our liking.  I love, love, love seeing wildlife, and that dog kept it all away.

This was so neat!  William described what I thought might be a snowberry clearwing that you might remember my identifying in the past.  Trusten took me out to try to find one, though, and I saw this!  I knew it was some sort of moth.  It's abdomen reminded me of a yellow hornet.  Well lo and behold, it's commonly called a hornet moth (Sesia apiformis).  These two pictures are the best I could get of the fast-flying creature.

 Chubby ol' groundhog! (Marmota monax)  I LOVE these pics I got!

I wanted so much to get a decent turkey(s) picture this year.  It was my top priority nature photograph.  Well, technically I did get a "decent" one.  This is it.  I wish it was better.  It was very far away, and I zoomed to the max.  I do not know whether it is female or juvenile.  I don't yet know how to properly identify turkeys, unless it's an adult male.

I just thought this scene in our yard was absolutely gorgeous.  There was that beautiful stormy-blue sky background, all that greenery, and the magnificently beautiful purple irises (Iris sp.).

 This. Color. I'm in awe.

 Mesmerizing.

Remember these mushrooms when not dried out, and they were covered with silken web?

 A tumor or a mutated leaf?

A pair of mullein! (Verbascum blattaria)

 Stars-of-Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum)

I always see at least one four-leafed clover.  These were my first of the year, a pair right next to each other.

I didn't buy any plants for my pots this year.  I planted seeds, and Trust and Liv helped me.  I showed them how to add different collections of soil and such that I had in different containers.

My hens-and-chicks that my friend Shana gave to me three years (or four?) had once again outgrown their pot. I moved them to my widest container.  I sacrificed three to five of them, and I had to separate others and spread them out.  They're all doing very well again now.  Such hearty plants!  They're perfect for me.

Dianthus?  I'd have to look this up, but I think that's the name of these flowers.  Anyway, these are offspring of the plant I had last year.  They lived all through winter and then started blooming this spring.  I'm impressed.  We had a mild winter, though.  

I decided it was time for us to paint rocks again.  I got down my collection from a bag that was collecting dust on top of the refrigerator.  I cleaned the rocks and let them dry.  Then we waited a few days.  

This is my male mallard duck.  I have no idea why I used orange for the bill and not yellow.  I will add a white ring around the neck when I get white paint.  

 These were Elizabeth's and maybe Olivia's, too??? 

 Bianca spent the night with the kids, and these two are hers.

This is William's puffin, which will look really great once we get white paint!  He really needed the white paint on there at the beginning.  What a shame we were out of it.  

 Nathan's birthday ice cream cake.  

 Beef pepperoni (I slice summer sausage) and mushrooms

 SO good!  Taziki's Greek restaurant recipe for their chicken lemon soup.  I ran low on liquid.

One Saturday we ate at a friend's restaurant and then went driving down Butler Hollow in Seligman.  I wanted to go down there.  

Nathan was engaged, talking to his friend Dave the electrician.

How I wished I'd taken my camera!  Ugh!  But I didn't, so these blurry pictures are what I got.  This is how much of the road that got washed away.  Then the picture below shows what is to the right of this.  You can see people on four-wheelers driving down there.  We were in Nathan's truck and took a muddy route on the other side of the road and came out on the other section of the road.  This is more damage from the December flood that washed out a great deal of our yard and the bridge on the highway (that they're just now fixing, as of May 28). 

When Bianca spent the night, I took them all to the park before taking Bianca back home.  They were thrilled.  Poor Elizabeth did not want to leave.  She loves sliding.  She enjoyed swinging, too.

 William got buried in the sand!

 Girls playing with puzzles in optometrist's waiting room.

Wow!!!!!  I'm actually CAUGHT UP!  FINALLY!  Ok, so in a few days I will post May's post and then just review what we did for school and what summer plans and fall plans are. 

Until next time...

Amazeum and Dinosaurs for Elizabeth's Birthday, Winter Flood, and More (December 2015)

It was a warm December, as you can tell by the fact the kids are in short sleeves, shirtless, and in shorts in some of the following pictures.  Elizabeth's fourth birthday was on the 17th.  My parents came up to visit, and we all went to the Amazeum in Bentonville, AR for Elizabeth's birthday, since they had dinosaur models temporarily.  Elizabeth so badly wanted to see "T-Rex bones."  Unfortunately, there was a robot model that sorely frightened her, so she didn't really get to enjoy seeing the dinosaur models.  However, she did enjoy some other things.  Some pictures may be out of order, but I've attempted this post with pictures a few different times now with various uploading problems, so this is it.  I don't have time to fool with it anymore.  I need to catch up!  ;-)

Oh!  And the pictures of our Amazuem trip were all taken with my iPhone with the messed-up camera, so they're a bit blurry.  I forgot my camera!

I was so disappointed that I went to wrap her dinosaur suit, only to find that it was the wrong size!!!  I gave it to her anyway to enjoy the first day, but then I sent it back and got them to correct it.  Below she is wearing the correct size that should fit her for a year or two, maybe longer.

Elizabeth had also been going on about wanting to pet a cow for quite some time.  I thought maybe this stuffed fabric model would help sate her temporarily. 

We visited our friends Casey and Shana, and Elizabeth got very close to being able to pet a real cow.  Not until just past week, as I write this (in April), did she get to actually go inside the fence and successfully pet a cow.  She came running to me and excitedly told me how she'd gotten to pet the cow.  I wish I'd have seen it, but it was good to just see how happy she was and to know she got to pet one.

The next pictures were ones I took of the kids as they all did their things outside, and I really like them.  The boys didn't know at all that I was photographing them out by the AC units that William works on taking apart for scrap.  You can see in the first picture of him and in the last picture that he spied me taking pictures.  ;-)

 

Keeping happy in winter:

The mushrooms above are deadly galerinas (Galerina marginata).  They're toxic, as the name implies.  

 We normally get spring floods, but then we got that summer flood not long ago, and now we got a winter flood.  Pretty crazy.  Still, nearly four months later, the highway is not completely fixed from the damage caused from this flood.  We lost a large portion of ground at the edge of our yard that Nathan had filled in maybe three years before, and then some.  It took more ground at the sides.  You can see that the electric pole is no longer surrounded by ground. 

The board is one piece of our neighbors' bridge.  They had to go searching everywhere for their boards so that they could rebuild it.

William got excited and said that this is rose quartz.  I honestly do not know, but he's probably right.  Rocks and minerals are one of the things he's deeply studied.  He planned to go back later to dig it up so he could bust it up and tumble up a bunch of it, but when he went back, he couldn't locate it!  Maybe he'll soon find it, if he thinks to look for it again.

We had to go out through the back of our property and cross a neighbor's property.  Some had to cut through our property, too.  (Well, we let them, of course.)  I made a stop at the base of our forest trail and let William hop out to go check the status of the saplings we planted.  Not all of them survived.  He's trying to avoid getting his picture taken.  Haha.

If it wasn't for Nathan and his tractor, neither we nor our neighbors would have been able to go out the normal way for a long time.  It was a very long time before a road grader came down our road, and there was also a large pile of gravel blocking the road at the creek.  You can see ruts in the yard there where Nathan came home one day down the road, and he drove up the incline.  He did not enjoy doing that work; he got very frustrated.  But we sure love him for getting it all fixed.  :-)

Elizabeth loves to pick and eat wild onions.  I loved how silly she was acting here.  :-)  Once she finished, she ran out to pick more.

I honestly cannot remember what all William explained to me that day, but he got whatever that is from one of the AC units, and clearly he was showing me that it was coiled.  

This was a day that I only had Elizabeth, and she and I went to work with Nathan on this day and another.  One day was service, and we drove around a lot, and Elizabeth went on and on about how she wanted to pet a cow.  Poor baby girl.   Then on this other day, Nathan and Casey did a change-out.  It was SO cold that day, though.  They had to work in the shade.  Elizabeth and I spent a great deal of time in the truck. 

Above is a pic I took of Elizabeth when we ate at Shogun.  She very often uses her left hand to eat and do other things, but she also uses her right hand, as you can see in the pictures below where she is helping me make muffins.  I'm not sure, yet, but I think she may end up being fully ambidextrous.  My sister is cross-dominant (writes with left hand, does most other things right-handed).  I'm right-handed, but I shoot guns and bat baseballs and such "left-handed," which is to really say "left-eyed," because the reason I do it is because, unlike in most right-handed individuals, my left eye is my dominant eye. 

The kids and I visited with our friends Tanya and daughter Bianca at the Barnes and Noble.   The youngest three kids had not met Tanya, and none of us had met Bianca.  So Trusten was shy at first and did what he normally does not do—read books.  William loves coffees and cheesecake, so he was sure to go buy a cheesecake of some sort and a cappuccino or something while I checked out with some bookmarks.

I finished another college course.  My streak of 100s came to an end.  LOL  I got a 100+ in the first three courses since returning to college.  I got a 98 in Advanced English Composition.  I got through it without having to read much of anything in the book, though, since I'm well-acquainted with things pertaining to writing.  There was a lot of writing, though, plus I spent a thorough amount of time on peer reviews (proofreading and editing two students' papers each time a paper was due), since editing is my forte.  I got bonus points on every single peer review.  I was pretty ticked that I had to take this course, to be honest, and my instructor told me that she thought I needed a more challenging school, but it made me feel better at the end when a couple of my fellow students wrote to me and thanked me for all of my help, that I was a good writer and really helped them get good grades because of my reviews.  Also, there was something from which I ended up benefiting.  I came to realize very quickly that I write passively more than I realized.  I would get counted off for it in places in my early papers.  It didn't take long at all for me to recognize when I was doing it, and I also was able to spot it very easily in other students' papers and suggest alternate active ways of conveying their messages. 

I'm very glad I'm past that now, and I chose to not take any courses this semester due to the stress and time I endured on this one.  I am planning two more CLEP exams very soon, and then I'm going to attempt one more (Algebra, of all things) after I go through high school algebra with William (to refresh, of course).  Getting a passing CLEP score in Algebra is my best bet.  According to the school's rules, I'm not even qualified to take college algebra until I take a remedial. My math scores are not good enough.  I also took the algebra course at ASU and had to withdraw, because I had a D and was failing every test. :-(

Okay, the next post will combine January and February and will go over where the kids are in their studies, what they're studying, etc. 

Until next time...