Little Cardinal Nugget

Nummies

I made creme brûlée yesterday. It wasn't perfect but it was definitely tasty!

I have figured out a thing or two I want to tweak for next time, and there definitely will be a next time! This experiment could be very dangerous for our waistlines.

Outside Things

A Dash of Yard

Outside Things

I'm Delicious

We've had a ton of rain the past couple of weeks. Which is a good thing since the lakes are all so low and we are still in Stage 1 drought measures from summer. Added bonus, it also gives us pretty rainbows.

But lots of rain also means that lots of bugs have been making their way into the house. Most of the bugs are little centipede type things which seem to have quick (kitty-assisted?) deaths upon crossing our threshold. But we've also had at least one mosquito. And mosquitoes love me. So now I have tons of bites - mostly on my back but some on my arms and legs. Fortunately, things on the itching front have been much better since going gluten-free. Less inflammation in my body to react to the bites perhaps?

Anyway, the rain has also really helped things in our back yard grow. This is what it is currently looking like.

Lovely, isn't it? I'm hoping the grasses won't get too tall too early though. We still have at least one more good month of profuse wildflower blooms and I'd hate for them to end up hiding in the tall grass.

Speaking of wildflowers, we still have new stuff popping up almost every day. On my last two visits out there, I found lots of new things blooming.

Yes, that last picture isn't the best, but it is the season's first Firewheel (aka Indian Blanket, but Firewheel is such a fun name!) so I had to include it. If this year is like last year, the purple and yellow in the yard will give way to red and yellow soon enough and we will have lots more of these popping up!

Of course, new flowers mean new things attracted to them (and everybody still loves the antelope horn). We have tons of pollinators outside right now. Two weeks ago we were overrun with ladybugs but now, it is butterflies. Pretty much everywhere you look you'll find a tiny sulfur or a hairstreak fluttering about. And mixed in are some more unusual ones, too.

That second to last picture is of a very lucky Buckeye. I'm not sure what took a chunk out of his wings, but it didn't seem to bother him. Hopefully the birds in our yard are better behaved than that, but really, I think they just have better aim.

There are more pictures on my Flickr because I take a ton each time I go outside. Seriously, this last butterfly safari? Over 200 pictures. Most of them horrible! But in my defense, butterflies are really hard to photograph clearly so it takes me ten or twenty tries before I get it right.

More Visitors (and Blooming Things)

In other yard news, though on the horrific side of things, Dan and I mowed yesterday. Which normally wouldn't rate as horrific, but this time, I apparently mowed over some smallish rodent. I mean, I stopped the mower once to rescue a skipper that was having trouble flying away and another time to allow a ladybug to remove itself from a flower I was about to mow over, yet somehow I managed to mow a mammal.

I'm kind of horrified. Like seriously had trouble getting to sleep because I kept seeing the resulting pieces. HORRIFYING.

And to add insult onto, well, mammal-cide, when I was using the blower to clean off the patio bits, I found a chunk of bird wing on our front door mat. Not a feather. Part of a wing. Not sure where the rest of the bird went. Really hope it didn't get mowed over. Or weed whacked. But are bad as Dan can be about accidentally weed whacking my irises (HOW DO YOU DO THAT? THERE IS A SIDEWALK BETWEEN THE YARD AND MY IRISES! HOW?!?!), I doubt he'd be so careless to weed whack a bird.

So yeah, not the happiest mowing experience yesterday. On the plus side, the baby birds on our front porch are all grown up and ready to fly! And turns out there were five of them (I had only counted four.) How do I know? That's how many dive bombed me from the nest when I went out to get the mail.

The Babies are Back!

The nest on our front porch is once again host to some Eastern phoebes (I think they are). Their faces are just as delightfully grumpy as last year.

There's a lot of other nature going on in our yard, too. Thankfully, the birds are the only ones that camp out at our front door. The rest, you have to go looking for.

And naturally, there's some blooming stuff, too.