prairie point

design changes

You may notice that I've tweaked the design of this site a little. It's something I had been wanting to do for a while, but when I got a complaint from a reader that my pictures were not showing up I decided it was time to take action.

Mainly I just wanted a clean, simple look and a consistent look on the main page and the archive pages. The pictures needed to be integrated into the text better.

While I was doing it I went back and edited the way pictures were formatted in some of the previous entries. I've been told that that violates one of the commandments of blogging. If so I guess I'll have to beg forgiveness. If it makes any difference I didn't change any text and it's actually the way I intended the pictures to appear all along.

You'll let me know if any of it doesn't work with your software I hope.

heat

What a difference a week can make. Last weekend the weather was so cool and mild; today it was hitting the triple digits. The forecast is for it to be a little cooler over the weekend though.

The heat is beginning to make itself felt in the garden. The cilantro has been flowering all week and this afternoon I saw that it was beginning to go to seed. When it flowers it looks a lot like Queen Anne's Lace. Cilantro is one of my favorite tastes. It always seems such a pity that it is already gone by the time the peppers and tomatoes are ready to make salsa.

We've picked a few peppers already and there are more coming along. There are tomatoes too but they are all still green. We had some more potatoes from the garden last night and we've been eating carrots too.

Of course the oregano stays green all year but I noticed this afternoon how tall and healthy it looked. Time for some spaghetti.

more riki

My story about the crippled raccoon who spent a winter in our garden is included in this weeks' Carnival of the Vanities.

Meanwhile I dug around and found this photo of Riki. I guess all raccoons pretty much look alike, huh? Actually if you look closely you can see that her hind leg juts out at an extreme angle.

I have pictures of her with the pups too if I can find them.

cactus flower

Most of the plants I have tried on the south side of the house have not survived. The conditions are harsh. There is only a narrow bed between the brick wall and the concrete driveway and no shade. It's a good place for a cactus though.

This one came with me from Houston, where I had kept it in a pot on a windowsill. For years it had stayed exactly the same size in that pot. It took a year or so for it to take hold here and since then it has grown exponentially. In addition it has started to reward me with these blossoms, each of which lasts only a day.

I never was all that good with houseplants and this may be the only one left of the collection I once had. That makes it the plant that has survived the longest in my care.

garlic flowers

The weekend was mostly cloudy and cool, and thanks to the fact that it's been pretty dry up till now, relatively insect-free. Ideal for being outside and we took advantage of it to grill some steaks and invite a few people over.

We did get some rain though along with the cool spell, which will likely bring out the mosquitoes. They don't bite me as much as they do Tricia, perhaps because I eat more garlic than she does.

We decided to wait to hear more opinions before seeing the new Matrix movie; instead we went to see The Man on the Train which was a good decision.

memorial day

I've always liked flags. I got my American flag back when I was still living with my parents. It was a special the newspaper was running one 4th of July. I vaguely remember using it as a decoration briefly in my bedroom, but mostly it has stayed in a drawer, folded in a triangle the way I was taught as a cub scout. Later I went through a period when I liked to burn incense which I happened to keep stored in that same drawer. The essence of patchouli and sandlewood somehow became permanently embedded in the cotton fibers. We don't have a flag pole but I have it hanging vertically from the eaves of the front porch today.

About this time of the year my garden starts to have lots of the little blue flowers called Commelina, or "widow's tears", part of the spiderwort family. They are morning flowers and tend to have a little drop of dew on them, hence the name. They really are a wildflower I think; at least I did not plant them and I don't know anyone who does.

mexican hat

Click for a larger image. This and Echinacea are our predominant blooms at the moment. The larkspur has mostly gone to seed and I am trying to collect some of the seeds so that I can redistribute it.

the silencing of dissent

This story about Chris Hedges being booed off the stage while giving a commencement address really depressed me. I keep expecting to hear that it was not students but Republican dirty tricksters. Then I saw the one about the Dixie Chicks being booed again yesterday at an awards ceremony. I thought that was already over.

UPDATE: Steve Bates also suspects dirty tricks may have been involved in the Chris Hedges scene.

blazing star

I've been reading up on liatris. You may recall my mentioning that I brought home one of those from the native plant sale last week. I've never planted one of those before and I didn't know much about it. It's sometimes called gayfeather and sometimes blazing star and was apparently a common sight on the native prairie hereabouts around 150 years ago.

According to the book Pasture and Range Plants the roots of this plant can go down as much as 16 feet! Pretty impressive when you consider that the above-ground portion only gets to be 2 to 3 feet. It also mentions that the roots were eaten by Indians and the leaves were used as a medicine, but it doesn't say what ailment it treated.

Sally Wasowski lists numerous species native to Texas but says only a few them are good for "black gumbo" soil, which is what I have. The one I bought was not labeled but I am hoping that it does work in my soil. Most of the specimens at the plant sale were grown by members of the local plant society who generally live pretty near here.

This plant does not bloom until Fall and from what I read does not always bloom until its second or third year, so unless I am lucky enough to have one that is right for my soil I won't get to see it bloom. The kind of black clay soil I have does not drain well, so in the wet months of winter a lot of dry soil plants will just rot.

With a name like blazing star it's sure got me expecting a nice flower, so I hope I get to see it.

quiltcat

Meet Silky Sam. Our oldest cat, he lived with Tricia before we merged households. He was injured by a car while still a kitten and found by a co-worker of Tricia's who thought he was Siamese. Tricia was looking for a Siamese and went to see him. Though she knew immediately that he was not, she took him in anyway. He does have pale blue eyes.

When I first got to know Sam he was the timidest cat I had known. He seemed to spend most of the time either in a closet or under the bed. There were two dominating females living with him who kept him in his place.

I wasn't sure what would happen when Sam came to live with my two cats. We gave him his own room upstairs. Well almost his own room. It's Tricia's sewing studio and gets called into service as a guest bedroom on occasion too. It's a big room with wide window ledges. There is also a wide flat table in the middle of the room next to the sewing machine right under a ceiling fan. Sam spends a lot of time there on top of whatever quilt project Tricia happens to be working on. That's her "bug jar" quilt in the picture above. For the longest time Sam had that domain pretty much to himself because Sapphire and Julie didn't like the sound of the sewing machine. Eventually Sapphire's curiousity overcame her fear though and now she and Sam have become rivals for this spot when Tricia is working upstairs.

Sam really came into his own after moving here. Although he is still the number three cat he is accepted by the others and is a lot more outgoing than he was before. It helps that he has his own place to retreat to.

But what is really interesting to me about Sam is his behavior outdoors. He had always been an indoor cat before he came here; whereas my two had always been permitted out in the garden. When we first let Sam out with them he didn't quite know what to do and five years later he still doesn't. But he watches the other cats and copies their behavior. Ever once in a while he will be stalking something in the grass and he will suddenly seem unsure of what it is that he needs to do next and start looking around for cues.

Lately there has been a strange black cat interloping in the garden. Our two females hiss at it but generally keep their distance. Sam though seems to have decided to make a stand against it and we've had to intercede a few times. It's like some remnant of his masculinity is finally asserting itself.

yarrow

I like the way that the white flowers of yarrow seem to kind of float above everything in the late evening. Yarrow has a nice clean smell to it and the foliage is so lacy and ferny.

I got in my truck to drive home after work today and something seemed different. It was several blocks before I realized what was wrong. There was no rearview mirror. I looked around and found it on the floor; it had come unglued from the windshield. When I got home I found some glue in the garage and stuck it back on. Hope it stays on.

saturday

Put my three new plant acquisitions in the ground this morning, refilled the bird feeder and then did a little weeding. The soil is very dry even though we had rain showers several times this week. It's looking as if more rain could be in store for us today. It's cloudy and there are cool breezes. I opened the house windows and let the wind blow through.

Last night we met some friends for dinner after work and then went to see a show at the Dallas Theatre Center. My expectations were not high, but it had some good moments. We used to have season tickets but gave them up because the plays just did not seem to have much life to them. Fifty years ago they had quite a reputation and enough of a budget to build a theater building by Frank Lloyd Wright on a choice wooded creekside setting. The theater is still nice but a little threadbare.

I've got several projects that need to be done around the house this afternoon but I will have to go to the hardware store first. Tomorrow my mother's side of the family is having a family reunion which will take up most of our day.

we visit a plant sale

Tricia and I went to a plant sale this evening held by the local native plant society. We were both actually hoping to find some trees. I wanted to find an Eve's necklace to replace one that failed to make it through the winter in my yard. She was looking for a desert willow for a friend.

We didn't find either of those but we did bring home some liatris, coralberry and sweet autumn clematis. There was also a good presentation by a man named Mark Chapin, who lives on 20 acres near the town of Argyle. He is basically letting it go wild and documenting with a camera all the changes that take place on it through the seasons. It's a project that would seem a natural to me for a web blog but he doesn't have a web site of any kind. He did have lots of slides though of wildflowers. Although it has only been a few years since the land was grazed by cattle and he has not brought in any plants himself he already has dozens of different wildflowers and native grasses coming up in his prairie.

photo upload problems, cont'd

I found the extra photo memory card and tested it in my card reader and it didn't work; so I still have no way to upload photos. Since neither of the memory cards work, I figure that must mean the problem is with the card reader or with an adapter I use to hold the Smart Media cards. My card reader is built into my printer but the printer part still works. I now need to go shopping for a new card reader, I suppose.

organization

When I was in college I could pack everything I owned into a VW beetle. And that included my books and quite a few albums (LPs - yes, I am that old).

I am searching through my belongings now looking for an extra memory card for my camera. I need it because all of a sudden I can't transfer my photos to the PC and I can't tell what part of the process is broken. I remember someone telling me once that a card can get damaged from being inserted frequently into the card reader. If I can find the extra card I can test whether that is the problem.

So I have been fondly recalling the days when my clutter was so much less extensive. In my heart I am really a neatness freak. I prefer having a clean desk and a clean garage and toolshed and knowing exactly where everything is. I just don't have a clue how to achieve that. I think the problem is having too many things and not enough places to keep them.

The trouble with that theory is my wife. She must own just as much stuff as I do and I assume has an equal amount of space, yet she apparently seems to know where everything is.

Part of the blame lies with preferences. My desk is littered with papers which could be filed away in a perfectly good file cabinet, but who would want to spend their time doing that?

I read once about how Andy Warhol solved the problem of clutter. Every five or six weeks or so he would get a cardboard box, carry it around and sweep everything into it off the coffetables and desktops, then seal it up and store it in one of those storage buildings you can rent. There is some college back East that got all this stuff in his will and they are going through it box by box, cataloging it. They are finding letters, checks, bills, loose change, books, videos, everything you can imagine.

With me things seem to get stuffed into drawers. Searching through the small drawer at the top of my bureau I find a tangled mess of credit card receipts, business cards, scraps of paper with important reminders, ballpoint pens, and pay check stubs. This is where I empty my pockets at the end of the day. At least there are not any real checks here. When I first began working they gave out real checks instead of using direct deposit. I would stuff those in a drawer too until I got notices from the bank that I was overdrawn. Also in here are handkerchiefs and an envelope full of some kind of seeds that I have collected, an old pair of eyeglasses, a pocket knife, a wristwatch with a dead battery, a small assortment of nails and screws left over from household projects, cough drops, some kind of cold medicine, chapstick, a Star Trek communicator badge, a couple of floppy disks, and keys to a car I no longer own.

I have decided that this is one of the two most likely places to find the card. The other is my desk drawer which has a different but similar collection of items. Another option is that it could be in the box that the camera came in. In that case it would be packed away somewhere in a closet. I am going to save that option for last.

rain

We finally got some rain. It has been very hot and humid and many of the plant leaves were starting to get mildew on them. At the same time the soil has gotten hard and dry. I have been afraid of watering much though, except for the vegetable garden. Then Sunday it cooled off and since then it has been really pleasant.

I wanted to post some pictures of the wildflowers but I am having technical trouble. I don't know if it's the card reader or the software, but I can't get anything to transfer. Usually this is practically instantaneous but nothing at all is happening.

killer d's

If you are not from Texas you may not have heard about the Democrat lawmakers who are hiding out in Ardmore, OK, in order to prevent the Texas legislature from achieving a quorum and voting on a redistricting plan put forth by Tom Delay. There are others who can tell the story better than me, so read Charles Kuffner's posts at the Political State Report and also on his own site. You can read more about it here and of course you need to read Molly Ivin's comments.

garden blooms

Here's some of the things coming into their own in the flower garden now: zexmenia, four-nerve daisy, shasta daisies, black-foot daisies, primroses, wine cups, yarrow, mexican hat, echinacea, day lillies, penstemon, mexican oregano, larkspur, and gauro. We still have a few roses and salvia greggii blooming too.

One of my favorite kinds of tree is the Eve's necklace and I had put one in the back yard a few years ago. Unfortunately it seems to have unexpectedly died. I am going to try to find another. There is a native plant sale coming up this Thursday at one of the garden societies and I might find one there.

veggie garden

This is our vegetable garden. Those are potatoes in front. There is a row of carrots behind them which you can't see. That is rebar sticking up in the back with 2-liter soda bottles hanging on them. There is a tomato plant at the bottom of each one. Later we will use the rebar as tomato stakes and tie the plants to them with twist ties. We don't need the soda bottles any more but we were using them as mini-greenhouses to keep the plants warm at night. The peppers are kind of interspersed with the tomatoes this year. There are a few other things in there too. You can see some onions at the extreme left.

We started the garden about five years ago using a series of 6 by 6 foot boxes built with cedar fence pickets. Then it evolved into this. Tricia likes to walk out barefooted to pick the veggies before dinner, so she wanted a paved path to walk on. Building the path around all four sides of the garden was a chore in itself.

reality

I wish I could develop my CSS skills more. I want to apply CSS to other everyday objects, like my car. With a click of a button I could be cruising in my classic Mustang convertible, or hauling compost in an old beater pickup. It could also solve my closet space problem. I could get by with just one set of clothes. I could click a button when I arrive at work and I would look all business in a coat and tie. After my meetings I could click again and be ready to relax in my jeans and Grateful Dead t-shirt.

riki's story

Most of the people I work with would say I live "downtown", or at least in the "inner city." But there is still a lot of nature left here, and actually not as much concrete as there is in some of the new suburban developments. Partly that is because there is a good size creek not so far away along with some estate-sized wooded lots.

One day as I was approaching home at the end of the day I saw a red-tailed hawk on my neighbor's lawn with a squirrel in its talons. I pulled on in to my driveway and rushed inside for the camera, but as I went running back the hawk flew away still holding the squirrel.

On a winter night a couple years ago we looked out the back door to see a raccoon gobbling down the cat food Tricia had left on the covered back porch. With the light on inside we could stand close to the glass and watch unobserved. We saw that the raccoon was terribly injured. The right back leg was splayed out at an extreme angle and it walked very slowly. Every few steps its bad leg would give way and it would go sprawling. I have mentioned before what a soft heart Tricia has for anything in distress. Of course there was food out every night after that.

We wanted to help the raccoon but we did not know how. We contacted a rescue site we found on the internet but they wanted to put it down. They thought the symptoms sounded like a disease, and in any case it was a poor candidate for rescue. By this time the raccoon had been named Riki and we were feeding it with the back door open. The cats and the raccoon seemed not to mind each other. The cats would walk out the back door without a glance and Riki would not even look up from its dish. As it got colder Tricia fixed up a place for it to stay warm on the back porch.

I am usually the first to get home in the afternoon and Riki got to waiting for me in the front garden. Once or twice I would leave the door open as I went in and Riki would follow. The cats did not like that however. That was crossing into their territory. Riki grew plump and almost tame.

Then we started seeing less of her and realized that she had some pups somewhere that she was nursing. She would arrive just at dusk for food and then hurry off. Before long she started to bring the pups with her, and all that spring we watched them grow. There were four of them each with its own personality. There was a really friendly one whom Tricia dubbed Rascal who would eat out of her hand. There was a big male who liked to arrive by climbing over the roof. There was a small female and a shy one with a very white face. It was funny to watch them all follow Riki because with her limp she was the slowest of them all.

As the summer wore on we got to seeing less and less of them. They didn't always show up together and often did not show up at all. By Winter we were not seeing any of them. Of course we knew that wild raccoons had been living in our midst all along but we had become emotionally attached to these and we worried about them. Some of our neighbors did not look as benignly on them as we did, and there are a lot of other dangers for them, cars and dogs in particular.

In early Spring Tricia called me to the back door again. There was a raccoon on the back porch. She thought it looked like the small female. I wasn't as sure. We did not see her again. But it made us feel better.

larkspurs and primroses

This is the view out our dining room window. Click on it to see a bigger image. Five years ago it was a bermuda grass lawn. Then while I added a wall of windows to what we now call our "sun room" this area became a repository for lumber and construction debris. That was when the sunflowers moved in.

Several years before that a sunflower came up in a nearby shady bed. It had probably been a stowaway on a plant we had received from a friend. It only got a foot or so tall but there was always another one or two every year. But when I stopped mowing around the construction debris, lo and behold we had a whole crop of sunflowers springing up around it and they got to be 8 feet tall! They provided lots of entertainment during the hot summer. Insects loved them. Birds loved to dive down and pick the insects off. There was a big grasshopper invasion that year and we were thankful that they preferred the sunflowers to anything in our nearby vegetable garden.

This area is one of the sunniest spots in our yard. It also has a slight drainage problem when it rains. So I got the idea of developing a dry creek bed there that would help carry away the rainfall. The next spring I pulled up the sunflower seedlings, dug a trench for my creek bed and planted native plants around it. We still had a few sunflowers come up there but they had now spread to every corner of the yard. We always let a few survive in one place or another.

Now these larkspurs have moved in. They came from a seed mixture that I had sowed in the back part of the yard. There are a few back there now too but I guess they have decided they like it here better.

late bloomer

This will probably be the last iris of the season. We went around to all the beds this afternoon and cut off the stalks with the withered flowers. The roses are beginning to diminish too, especially the ones with the most sun, and the annual wildflowers are starting to come out. Afternoons are getting hot now, although they've been tempered a little with some clouds and showers.

In our vegetable garden we've got a lone tomato and quite a few peppers. The potatoes are thriving and the carrots are coming along, but somebody is eating our lettuce.

peonies

This is the time for the peonies. One of the things I like about living in a 57-year-old house is the things that come up in the garden that were planted by previous owners. The first year I was here I did not know what was happening when bright red shoots suddenly erupted from the bare ground. Now I know to look forward to these pink and white displays. Unfortunately there are only a few flowers and they don't last long. And why do they always have those ants on them?

Click on the thumbnail for a bigger image.

top gun

Better writers than me, including Aziz Poonawalla and Joe Conason have already reviewed the recent remake of Top Gun.