Author Archives: Mark P

Scary good

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We had the appraisal of our current house on Wednesday. The appraiser had said she was coming around lunch, so we worried about not being able to get our traditional Wednesday huevos rancheros, but we managed to fit it in before she arrived. That’s a major step in the process of selling. We, of course, have no idea how she will evaluate the house. We have certainly spent enough time and effort to make it as good as possible.

With that step out of the way, the closing date of July 21 looms.

The painter says he will complete his work by this weekend. He has a regular, full-time job as a painter and is doing our work when he can, which has caused the process to drag out longer than I had hoped. The plumber installed the toilets on Wednesday and is coming back Thursday to plumb the vanity in the guest bathroom, assuming I can get holes drilled in the back so it can be pushed up into place. I’ll need help unloading the master bath vanity, which currently sits on my trailer in the garage. The electrician needs to install the exterior lights and hang the ceiling fans in the living room and master bedroom, as well as the vanity lights in the two bathrooms.

When the vanity is unloaded, I can pick up the 12 interior doors that have been waiting at the building supply store and start hanging them. Leah and I have to decide on how tall to make the baseboards. I bought a six-inch and an eight-inch board Wednesday night so we can compare them. After putting them down in the living room, I lean towards the six-inch, although several sites I read recommend eight inches for a nine-foot ceiling. After we decide and I buy a fortune in pre-primed boards, Leah and I have to throw a painting party. And then I install baseboards for a while. And trim the doors and windows.

All of this in the next two weeks. That’s why “scary good.”

Oh, yes, Leah is worried about the cat situation. I have to fit in building two cat pens sometime before we move so that we can acclimatize the cats to their new home and lessen the danger that they will take off into the woods when we move them.

Leah is afraid they will travel up the road to our current house, so we got a sign.

slow_cat_crossing_yard_sign

Cat and dog and bird

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Chloe and Zeke faced off in a friendly way on the front walk last week.

dogandcat

Chloe isn’t afraid of the dogs, and especially not Zeke. Sometimes the dogs sniff her a little too enthusiastically and she backs away or swats at them, but usually it’s a pretty casual affair.

I’m adding another picture to what is usually a cat post because a bird trapped itself in our garage on Thursday.

trappedbird

This time it wasn’t a hummingbird, although it had the same problem figuring out how to escape that the hummingbirds have. At first I thought it might be a swift since we have one nesting under our deck, but the beak doesn’t look right to me, based on comparing to images I found online. I’m not a bird expert so I can’t really identify this one. It’s small, dark on top and gray below.

It couldn’t find its way out for quite a while. We were worried that Sylvester would sit around waiting for it to tire out and then pounce, but apparently that did not happen. The bird was gone after while and we didn’t find any sign of it.

More sunset

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We walked out of a store late Tuesday evening and saw a wonderful sky.

sunset_6_28_16

I made these shots bigger than I usually do, so clicking on them should give you a larger image.

As usual, I had only my iPhone, so this is another phone shot. This sky deserved a panorama, but unfortunately when I started the pano on the left, it exposed for a relatively dark sky, which resulted in gross overexposure for the brighter parts of the sky. It’s a shame the shot has to include parking lot lights, but there was no way to avoid them or the power lines in the foreground.

This was what we saw a few minutes later on Huffaker Road.

sunset2_6_28_16

I couldn’t get enough of the sky to show all the different types of clouds that were present. When you see this kind of sunset, or any type of landscape, your mind combines all the views into an overall mental image. You can see part of the scene through a gap in the trees are you drive, and another part a few hundred yards down the road. Your mind puts it all together and you can imagine what the entire sky looks like. Trying to get that mental image into a camera can be frustrating.

A few days ago we went up to the top of the mountain to see whether we could get a better view of the sunset. Up there the sun was setting in line with the ridge, so we could not actually see the sun. I thought maybe there would be a better view if we went down into Texas Valley. Tuesday evening we did that. There isn’t. The trees are so close to the road that they obscure the sky.

Thursday sunset crepuscular rays

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A quick grab with my phone camera caught this sunset Thursday evening as we drove home from picking up some prescriptions.

crepuscularrays

This type of photo is hard to get right because of the high contrast. The phone did a reasonable job, but it had trouble capturing the shadows of the some of the clouds.

We drove up to the top of the mountain hoping to get a better view, but the sun was setting along the ridge, so it was pretty much hidden. The clouds were gone by then anyway.

I think we could get a better view of the sunset if we went down into Texas Valley. Maybe we’ll try that one day.

Spider constellation

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Wolf spiders are common around here, as well as in most of the rest of the world. Around this time of year I often see them at night, running across the concrete part of our driveway. Wednesday night when I took the dogs out for their last walk of the day, they immediately spotted one. I noticed it looked a little fuzzy.

spider_1

It was fuzzy because of the dozens of baby spiders riding piggy-back. According to Wikipedia, wolf spiders are the only spider that carry their young on their back until the babies are able to fend for themselves.

Wolf spiders may be the only spider that carry their young on their backs, but there are other arachnids that do the same thing. When I lived in Alabama, I once killed a scorpion in my house, only to see dozens of little baby scorpions scatter across the floor.

Since wolf spiders are generally nocturnal hunters, and since their eyes are reflective, I can usually spot many, many spiders out in the yard at night by shining my flashlight over the ground. Every spider eye that the beam hits looks like a glowing green jewel.

And so do their babies’ eyes.

spider_2

Some of my other shots showed more glowing eyes, but they were too blurred to use. I was shooting at night with the flash, which is what their eyes reflected, but it was hard to get a good, sharp shot.