hot spot

Working on two full weeks with our Pepita!  She has somehow taught herself to fetch...

...and is working hard on SIT and COME HERE.  Still no house accidents, still sleeping through the night in the office crate, and now she rests quietly in her living room playpen for 4 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon, allowing us to get work done.  When not in the playpen, she is actively working with one or both of us.  Frances supervises from a safe distance.  He knows that she's been good, but cats are so interesting and new!

Pepita made her first trip to PetSmart this week...

...and managed her first 15-minute trail walk this morning!  She's making amazing progress.  

So is Claudia!  Her tubes come out tomorrow and I think she'll finally be able to leave the crate she's been living in and roam around the barn.  Todd has been spoon-feeding her (because of her cone), cleaning her crate and litter box, cleaning her incision and drain tubes, and making sure that she has plenty of pets and reassurances.  We'll both be glad for her to gain a little bit of independence!

Meanwhile, our hot weather stretch continues.  I open the windows every morning, no matter what, for a bit of fresh air.  It doesn't take long for our floors to become actually wet from the humidity and after we slide around for awhile, I grumpily close them.

 I keep trying to rouse myself to work in the garden, but between the heat/humidity and Pepita, I can't seem to get time to get anything done.  I did get the pumpkins planted, at least.

But the cutting garden (hangs head in shame)...we've got the saddest 4-foot sunflowers ever, and despite the fact that I spent an insane amount of time weeding at regular intervals until just two weeks ago, weeds are bursting out everywhere.  I'm definitely writing it off for the year.  At least the perennial garden has a ton of color...

daylilies

...and a ton of visitors!  The bee balm, especially, has drawn all sorts of butterflies...

eastern tiger swallowtail

zebra swallowtail

great spangled frittilary

pipevine swallowtail

...but also one of my favorites, the snowberry clearwing hummingbird moth.

They used to be a rarity, but now the garden is FULL of them.

You can see why they're called flying lobsters!

They're great pollinators and I love to see them around.  I also saw two really cool sphinx moths this week...the blinded sphinx moth (so named for a coloration quirk - they are not actually blind, but they don't have mouthparts and don't feed...just breed quickly and die!)...

...and the elm sphinx moth.

A couple of beauties!  

We're still catching lots of action on the trail cams.  Bobcats, coyotes, possums, deer, squirrels, skunks, turkeys, turkey vultures, herons, and so...many...raccoons.  I counted five in this video!

Todd has only seen two ticks so far this year, and I haven't seen any.  Our winter was especially cold (I wistfully remember) and that helps keep the population down.  However, seeing this deer on one of our cameras reminds me to continue to be vigilant.  There are still ticks around.  See those lumps on the backs of her ears and bridging the space between?  Those are ALL TICKS.  Yuck!!

Between trying to keep up with Pepita and Claudia, get work done, keep the house in order, and generally keep things moving forward while trying to survive in 90 degree heat, there isn't a lot of time left for leisure.  However, I'm going to try to take a cue from Pepita...

...and the cats...

a typical Frances nap

...and take a break every once in a while!  

Have a great week!  

the fungus among us

My unfinished to-do list is growing longer every day and the blog has fallen by the wayside!  I will try to keep caught up, because I have a massive photo backlog.

We've had an insane amount of rain.

The weather has been delightfully cool - 70s during the day and 50s at night (it was 57 degrees this morning when I woke up!).  This is great for heat-hating humans like me, but terrible for small seedlings.  I got fairly nice germination, at last, and then the rain and the cool...everything stagnated.  And it's too late in the season to play more.  Thankfully celosia filled in the holes in the annual garden, but it does look like I will mostly have a million pink celosia plants despite all my work this year...sigh.  

One interesting garden anomaly...I did not plant sunflowers this year because it was so cool for so long and sunflowers hate cold, wet soil.  I repeat:  I didn't plant ONE SINGLE SUNFLOWER SEED.  Sunflower seeds are large and distinctive...it's not like I could've planted them by mistake. Yet...dozens and dozens of sunflowers sprang up in my greenhouses.  I used NEW soil that rarely had old soil from old greenhouses mixed in.  This old soil sat outside in the freezing snow all winter long.  Sunflower seeds do not last in weather like that.  They rot easily, and our many little animals would've rooted out any that lasted.  Squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, even birds.  Yet...somehow...I have almost a hundred sunflowers.

I planted one last set of greenhouses last week and unbelievably, MORE sunflowers grew.  How is this possible?  Where are they coming from?  Well, in a sea of hot pink celosia...I will take it. 

At least the yellows have filled in in the perennial garden.

...and in all the other gardens around the house.

In front of the garage

Along the front walkway

one of the front-facing beds

I got the very last peonies this week for house bouquets.  They didn't last long...they know that it's June.

Our tree frogs are LOVING all the rain.

Cope's grey tree frog

Our wild animals are loving it, too, from new fawns to a gaggle of raccoons!  :)

The spillway from our back pond to the forest streams that run from it are roaring loud all the time from so much rain!

A rabbit can have 40 babies in a breeding season, and we're seeing it!!  These rabbits were playing in the side yard the other morning.  It was too dark to get a good picture, though!

Wild strawberries are ripening...

...ditto with blackberries.

Lots of busy insects...

winged carpenter ant

leafcutter bee

fall webworm moths mating

chrysophilus velutinus mating

...and insects whose lives have run their course, like this fly infected with the entomophthora muscae fungus.

The name in Latin literally means "insect destroyer."  It infects their brains, kills them, and compels the corpse to climb to a high location for maximum spore dispersal.  Pretty cool!  

The cold and wet has kept me out of the garden...and the rain has interrupted a lot of our walks.

Even bundled up in a sweater and wearing jeans yesterday, I 10000% prefer it to a normal Indiana June.  

Have a great week!  

hibernation tendon-cy

Photos that I've taken this week:  three.  

One, when we had a freakishly warm day and made Claudia come outside for some fresh air:

Two, when said warm day created beautiful ice cracks in the front pond:

And three, a really beautiful late-afternoon sky that I observed from INSIDE the house.

Late January is tough.  It's cold, and I don't like to be outside in the cold much.  It's grey and wet, and there's just not much to photograph.  Not much going on inside, either.  I've developed tendonitis in both Achilles tendons and both shoulders...so no repetitive-motion activities right now.  No sewing, no embroidery, no puzzles, and minimal lifting heavy camera lenses.  I've started physical therapy and am hoping to get back to normal activities - on a limited basis - within a week or so.  Meanwhile, I've looked at some old photos from the late fall that didn't make the blog cut.  Still, I think they're worth remembering.  When the flowers, the leaves, and the green grass has faded for the season, sometimes the fungus that remains can provide both color and interest.

crown-tipped coral fungus

pink-mottle woodwax

unknown fungus

slime puffball

cantharellus lateritius

mushrooms forcing up through a crack in the concrete

mushroom unknown

Now, this LOOKS like a fungus, but it's actually a wool-sower gall.

The wool sower is a type of wasp which lays eggs in white oak trees.  The larvae develop inside these woolly balls.  They don't hurt the oak trees, and I think the galls are quite pretty!  

I like seeing these interesting shapes and splotches of color during fall hikes.  Speaking of hikes, we've got a big one planned this week, so hopefully I'll have some photo diversity soon!

Until then, more cats...

...and trail cams.  This one is from early January...the date is incorrect on the video.  One, two, three raccoons!  We're also feeding a couple of raccoons on our front porch every night.  They're huge!!

Here's to more interesting times in the next week!