Only two hermits remain. The ninth hermit has been joined by a tenth. They live on a small ranch in Central Texas with The Dogs of Hermits’ Rest. He does not hang out in bars anywhere near as much as when he was trying to be Li Po.
Other than family and music and song writing, his interests include writing. He has authored many technical tomes, several short stories, and a novel. He does have a day job or two, and he re-publishes some of his writings for those here.
For more information, see the complete profile.
It’s been spitting rain off-and-on for a couple of days now—never raining, never being dry. We’ve had fog almost all day today. We could actually use a little rain.
January has been really dry. We’ve only had about 1.3 inches, and that follows a fairly dry December. The average for January is just over three inches. I hope we’re not seeing the start of another drought.
As Dad would say, “We’ll see….”
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hardIt’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall—Bob Dylan
I don't really know how much rain we got since the rain gauges overfilled, but we have at least 7 inches over the last two days, and it's still raining. If it had come earlier, we might not have had the cigarette induced grass fire earlier this month. But it is what it is.
Once again our climate model held up: mainly drought broken by flood. The front pond was low enough to capture all the runoff, so the dam wasn’t breached this time. But the ground is very soggy. I spread a bunch of pallets between the garage and the front porch. I could use a couple more. At the height of the rain, they were just tall enough to keep our feet out of the water.
The ponds are all full again. The cattle will like that. The flow of fresh water also cleaned out most of the pond scum growing in the front pond.
Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarettePuff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to deathTell St. Peter at the Golden GateThat you hate to make him waitYou’ve gotta have another cigarette
Here is more proof that second-hand smoke is more dangerous that smoking. Someone threw a lit cigarette out while driving down our road. It got the neighbor ranch pasture on fire. Our contractor spotted the fire. Ralph says he didn’t do anything about it except talk, which really upset Ralph.
Authorities were called and neighbors alerted. Cathy took care of the horses. All are well. Their house and cabin are fine. All in all, more than a dozen acres burned. That’s a lot of fodder for the animals that will now have to come from somewhere else. But it could have been worse.
Ever since the drought started, there have been lots of fires around here. We’re finally getting some rain, but we’re not safe yet.
Please, if you smoke, extinguish your butts! Don't burn your neighbors’ houses down. As one commenter on Suna’s Facebook page said, “Don’t be a butt.”
This will be my third attempt to post a birthday blog. Blogger ate the first attempt for an improperly closed HTML—which X2 used to pronounce “hate mail”— tag. The Blogger editor used to a little more forgiving than that, but I guess they’ve made it so easy to use that it’s extremely destructive.
Other than disgruntlement with Blogger, this has been one of the best birthdays I can remember. Unfortunately, since it’s taken so many times to get this post done, I don’t remember all of the things I was going to list. Here are some of them:
Suna and I celebrated Valentine’s Day early this year. We went to Z-Tejas, a restaurant that has some of the best food and deafening acoustics. Hopefully, the next time we go there, it will be warm enough to sit outside.
The other part of our Valentine’s Day celebration was to go to the Home Depot and buy some new patio furniture for our new patio. While we were deciding which set we wanted, we ran into the guy who built it for us. That was kind of a cool irony.
So I spent a good part of the weekend assembling the furniture. Even Ikea could learn something about packaging from Home Depot’s Hamilton Bay brand. Not only did they package all the tools required (as does Ikea), the shrink wrapped the nuts, bolts, washers, and spacers to cardboard backing that was labeled with the part reference from the assembly instructions. I was astounded.
This week, I am grateful for my special Valentine, Suna. Not to mention that I am also grateful for the new patio furniture and the patio to put it on. I’m looking forward to sitting out on the patio and sipping some cold beverages while getting to know the neighbors better.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that we got a healthy rain last night. It wasn’t enough to break the drought, but I appreciate every drop.
10 February Update: Added the picture I didn’t get to take when I was putting the furniture together.
Photo by Beccano
It’s a good thing that Friday’s Feast remains dormant this week. Most of my day seems to have been taken up with preparation for Ike. Now we knew that we wouldn’t feel much impact from the storm, so much of my preparation involved watching the radar images of Ike advancing on the coast. Oh, and there was that bit of working with kids to bring the plants and lawn furniture into the garage.
I have touched base with all my friends and family, and all of them seem to have survived. My remaining brother even evacuated to Central Texas, in spite of my dad telling me that they were going to ride it out at home. My did did, but he said the clouds never even covered the moon last night.
My heart goes out to those people whom the storm hurt.
So what happened here? Nothing. We got a little wind but not even one drop of rain. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t want to have gone through what they did on the coast; I have done enough of that in my time. But I would like have have had a little rain. This is the third storm to hit the Texas coast without giving us any rain at all—much less breaking the drought. Sigh.
It kinda bothers me when I hear the weather forecasters apologizing for rain in the forecast. I look forward to rain, and we have had a little this week. Not much—only about .7” over three or four days, depending on how you count. But that has been enough.
I was able to forgo watering the lawn this week (even if the neighbors didn’t), and I only had to water the least drought-tolerant planties once since Wednesday. The rest are doing very well indeed on the available water.
But wait! Isn’t water the new oil? Why is ELAB watering at all?
OK. Suna did a really good job picking low-maintenance (if not xeric) plants, but we have added more color this year. Some of these, particularly the lobellias that have already gone, the sweet potato vine, and the coleuses that get the most sun are thirsty buggers. I don’t water the lawn more than once a week, no matter how it complains, and I try to limit watering the garden to what is absolutely necessary. I don’t want to waste water. You won’t find runoff from the lawn watering flowing down the gutter to the storm drain, but I do water enough to keep my little planties from shriveling up and blowing away.
So that is why I am grateful for any rain we get—even when it storms and floods. This week’s rain didn’t do anything to alleviate our first stage drought, but it did let us hold our own for another week. The overcast also kept the temperatures down into the lower-to-mid-nineties. That reduced evaporation and kept the air conditioning from running quite so much. For all of that, I am grateful this Monday.
My garden is suffering under the sun’s merciless onslaught. The John Fannick phlox have withered, as would most of the other plants if I failed to give them their daily watering, and the lobelias are gone.
Mr. Stripy is still barren as is the newcomer. Shaking the plants and threatening them doesn’t do any good. I am beginning to think that the pollinators prefer the other flowers to the tomatoes. In a couple of weeks, I will pull up Mr. Stripy and plant a rank of fall tomatoes from a real nursery.
Even the sunflowers that Beccano insisted we plant (I grew up thinking of them as weeds—sorry, any Kansans who stumble on this post.) are wilting in the unrelenting solar oven we call a climate.
The remnants of the last tropical storm to hit the Texas coast brought us ¾” of rain. It took less than two days for that relief to become only a vague memory. The storm that hit yesterday brought us almost nothing. It did keep the temperatures down to the upper 90s for a couple of days, so I’m not complaining.
One star is the Jacobi, which is flowering again.
11 August Update: Added phlox photo taken at the time but not uploaded.
