Some Miscellaneous Sunday Ramblings

First order of business:

I have been pretty quiet on the political comments lately. Fair Warning: That is about to change. So nobody can say that they weren't warned. My political views have not changed. Well, they might have - IF it's possible to get even more conservative than I already was.

On to other things.

After looking at the rock garden, I've decided that it is going to be worked on and extended. But I think it's going to be my Fall project. It's starting to get warm and I want to avoid the worst of the hot weather when I'm outside doing what is hot & dirty work. Also, the month of June is pretty much filled up with assorted relatives visiting which extends into July, and July itself will be pretty busy for Otter. So the rock garden redo is put off for a few months. Probably, I might still decide to get out there and start working but I don't think so.

It isn't a one-day job to rebuild the rock garden. I will have to remove all the decorations, take up all the rocks (and there are billions), the rocks will have to be laid out and washed, the dirt will have to be leveled up a bit (thanks to a couple of dogs who shall remain nameless). Then the grass will have to be dug up where it will be extended, then plastic sheets put down and this time we are going to do what we did at the old house: on top of the plastic sheets, we're going to lay chicken wire. Then all the rocks will be put back in place. Then all Otter's concrete animals and my Texas paver, along with the sandstone that we use as an edge barrier. Picking up all the rocks is the hard part, they will have to be shoveled.

I'm pretty sure that the chicken wire will work, one of the dogs we had at the old house kept digging up the rock garden I had there and after we'd put it back together a few times Bill came up with the idea for the chicken wire. It worked like a charm, dog couldn't dig past it and dog quit!

I will probably not get my May book list posted until tomorrow or so. This is going to be a busy week, and then Toadles arrives Friday. But I will try to get the list up soon. I think I've read about 10 books.

With the warmer weather, we should be seeing bats soon. However, they might have to find another place to live. Birds keep building nests in the bat house. We took one partially started nest out last week when it suddenly showed up. But the birds are determined, and they are rebuilding. So we're going to let them, and then later on when it's past baby bird time we will see about cleaning it out. But there are two really big frogs out in the dog yard, they hang out around the water dish, so maybe they will eat a lot of mosquitos. But no sign of the dove nest yet, so I'm not sure if we'll have front-porch birds or not.

Also, I am having cell phone problems. It keeps cutting off and from the way it's acting, I think it's the battery. I took it in today, the technician thinks it's probably the battery but he couldn't say for sure. Of course, they didn't have any in stock so he had to order me another one. It should be here sometime this week. If they'd had batteries in stock for my phone, he would have been able to test it with another battery.

The bamboo is doing pretty good. We lost some of it, which we expected, but we were hoping that we wouldn't lose as many as we did. But the ones that survived are starting to spread and send out shoots. We had discussed getting more, but I think we'll wait until next spring and see how it does. Hopefully, it will take off.