Staying at Home for Once

I'm feeling lazy today, so I didn't want to think too hard to come up with a blog idea. Despite my lethargy, K drug me outside to pick blueberries in the boiling heat (we have boiling heat here in the swamps instead of the blistering heat elsewhere), so I decided to bring along the camera and take a few photos of my surroundings. After all, I think the only person who reads my blog and has seen my place is Hank. That basically means I'm wasting his time, but maybe the rest of you can find something of interest here.


As I set out on today's journey, I found this wasp digging in a dirt dauber's nest. This definitely wasn't a dirt dauber, so I'm guessing he was hunting for larvae to eat. I'm guessing this particular wasp would be all for stem cell research.

The sad thing is that I guess he didn't realize that I knocked this nest down last year and he's only going to find baby wasp mummies at best. Loser.

This is the view from my carport. If you could see to the right of the image, you'd see the paint-peeling visage of the trash truck. It's actually just my dad's old GMC full-size, but we keep it to take off the garbage. Trash pick-up service isn't an option this far out in the boonies so we have to haul off our own.


This is the view from the side of the house. That's the old horse and cattle barn my grandfather built. It's now mostly in ruins, but my dad stores his two tractors there. Only one of them works, but the one that doesn't work is an antique dealie that he refuses to get rid of. They're growing cotton in the fields that border our house on two sides, which sucks. They spray the crap out of cotton and I don't really like that fact. Plus, cotton leaves nothing behind for the wildlife. Peanuts and corn provide tons of food just from spillage at harvest and aren't sprayed with as many chemicals. Peanuts actually enrich the soil. Cotton sucks.

This is half of the back of the house. The pond starts there on the right and there's the chicken pens under that big flowering tree in the distance. The pens are actually empty right now.

This is the rest of the pond. You're not seeing the fenced-in portion of the yard to the right, but you're not really missing a lot.

This is the view from the other side of the house. It oddly has the best grass, although it spends parts of the year submerged by the pond when it occassionally overflows.

This is the key lime tree (left) and the blood orange tree. The lime tree is loaded with baby fruits right now, but the blood orange didn't make anything this year. I didn't get it transplanted last year like I did with the key lime and the extra time spent in the little plastic container it came in delayed it's growth a bit. It should make a few oranges for me next year.

These are my last two chickens. That's BACH (Bad Ass Chicken Hen, copyright Julie) on the left and the black araucana hen on the right. BACH is somehow still thriving after her partial neckendectomy.

Blueberries are coming into season. Anyone want to come down and visit for free blueberries? You'll have to pick them yourself, but they're tasty.

If I could include a sound file with this shot it would be the deafening drone of bees of several species. Those are the flowers of my date palms, although this bunch of flowers is a couple of weeks behind the other clusters that already look more or less like fruit.

Young dates. I'm actually going to try them fresh this year. I tasted dried ones in the past and they were too sweet for my tastes. I'm curious what they taste like before drying.

This is the beer fridge. I love my beer fridge.

Nothing but top shelf, yo. The little label on the front of the shelf says "Please pay when you take a drink out. Thanks!" It's because this fridge used to do its job in my aunt's store, but she traded it for one of my grandmother's refrigerators before I moved in. I find it funny now considering that I'm pretty much the only one taking drinks out of this fridge.

Kegs of homebrew and a liter bottle of Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout.

More beer in the door. I'm obviously a fan of Dales Pale Ale and Ten Fidy. Oskar Blues makes some of the best beer you'll ever taste in a can. I actually took photos of the freezer compartment in this fridge, but then I realized that it just looked like a freezer full of pot. There's no marijuana in the freezer, or anywhere else in the house, it's just that whole-leaf hops look a lot like the whacky tobacky and I've got a lot of hops in that freezer. I would say that I wish it was pot because I could make more money off of reselling it, but with the current hop shortage, hops may be hitting higher prices. I'll just make more beer with them.