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.
Worse weather has passed, but more is coming. No trip to San Antonio today.
Okay. This picture is from a week in the future (when the post published on this site). The Walker’s Creek bank is normally on the other side of those trees. The fence going up from the left is our property line.
This post originated on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment blog on 2016-05-19.
In one of her songs, Mary Chapin Carpenter says, “Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug.” And while I don’t relish the idea of being the windshield, I work very hard not to be the bug. Very hard, indeed.
So despite my previous statement about redevelopment and wimps, I’m wimping out. Larry and I decided to cancel our trip to San Antonio to review progress on St. John’s house. Even the GC who lives there said traveling hundreds of miles under a flash flood advisory was not a good idea. I’m staying dry and (hopefully) safe in Round Rock today, and Larry is doing the same in Cameron.
We’ll go to San Antonio another day, and you’ll get to see more pictures then. Until then, I’m going to parrot Paul Simon: “I’d rather be….”
The grass is turning crunchy and brown.Photo by: Suna
Brody is learning how to negotiate the stairs.Photo by: Suna
She patrols that fence of his
To a Latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns
—John Guerin and Joni Mitchell
It’s freakin’ hot outside—more than 100°F. The grass has turned its summer brown. When we go for walks, we experience the crunching of summer lawns.
With it being this hot, of course it’s time to start some really difficult outside work. The sand and mortar mix have been delivered, so Raul can start putting the stone on the side of the house. It’s really getting close to being finished.
But we’re enjoying the porch now that we’ve cleaned it up. Suna says even with the heat, the front porch is fairly comfortable. In the late afternoon, we can sit on the front porch and enjoy the shade and the breeze. I’m glad we had the eaves insulted. That helps keep the heat off of us.
The panoramic feature of the iPhone makes for some interesting distortions. I would love it if Villa Park B were really curved.
Rain, rain, go away
Come again some other day
The rain has finally let up enough to allow work to resume on Villa Park B. The problem was the trenches for the new foundation. They filled with water, and we had to wait for it to drain.
There was also a concern that the ground would be soft enough to cause the entire unit, which is supported on temporary footings and walls, to fall. It didn’t.
Every day construction is delayed costs me tons of money.
Taxes continue to accrue.
The mortgage has to be paid.
Financing costs for the renovation mount.
All that while neither unit is bringing in any income. I can’t rent the main house while the back unit is in such a precarious stage of renovation. #FirstWorldProblems.
Yup. That’s me watering the sagging sunflowers while Ike inundates the Texas coast. Just shows to go ya how big this state is.
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.
September is in the air. You could feel it at the football game last Friday: a cool breeze. And you can feel the same thing in the back yard today. We’re still getting highs in the upper 90s, but that beats the crap out of the lower 100s. And there is even a chance of rain for the next couple of days.
I’m working outside today, searching the Internet for work rather than doing yard work. The thermometer shows about 80° in the back yard, which is about where we keep the thermostat set in the house. The breeze makes it so much nicer outdoors.
Once again (as every Spring and Fall), I’m struck by how warm 70 feels in March and how cool 80 feels in September. Relativity at work.
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.
Just four days after ranting against mosquitoes, I have something good to write about. I am not usually a big fan of summer in Texas. My motto has always been that two hundred years of evolving on the shores of the North Sea did not prepare this German boy for here. Bug again, I have nice things to say about the heat.
And it has been hot. Yesterday’s official high was 103° F. That would be about 39.4° in most of the rest of the world. On the ride home, the sign at the neighborhood community center read 115.3° (46.3°).
But the low last night was in the mid-70s, and it’s been dry. So it felt even cooler. I was able to enjoy my morning coffee on the back porch listening to the birds and watching the dogs snorful around the yard. It was very nice.
“But what about the mosquitoes?” you may ask. I think the heat got ’em. I only killed three in about a half-hour of bliss, and those were teeny. Four straight days past the century mark (Sunday, too!) seems to have been more than they could take. I’ll take the heat—appreciate it, even, until the light bill hits—if it kills off the mosquitoes.
I met this little guy this morning. We had some terrible storms blow through last night, and they must have pushed him along with them. He was at least a hundred miles east of his normal migratory path from Central America to the forests of the American and Canadian West.
I’m sad to say that he didn’t make it this year. The storms were just too much for him. I found him on the front porch. I said a few nice words over him and buried him in the flowerbed where I hope he rests well.
He was a truly beautiful bird. He had a brilliant yellow underbelly. His head and cape are supposed to be slate gray, but his head looked almost purple (as seen in the painting). The gray cape had almost a greenish tint.
Other than the little MacGillivray’s warbler, we came through very lucky. A funnel cloud was spotted in our neighborhood about the time we were coming home from choir practice, but it didn’t touch down. Beccano is terrified of tornadoes, so he had a bit of a rough patch. I am proud of the way he handled himself. Not being afraid is stupid. Learning to work through your fear is what courage is all about.
We had a lot of wind and hail, but no downed branches on our block anyway. (Suna says the University campus took quite a bit of damage.) And the hail at our house was apparently small. It didn’t even stay on the ground long enough for me to measure it after the second wave. I didn’t see any hail damage or even any shredded leaves. Other places in town reported hailstones up to 4”—the largest ever recorded in the Austin metroplex, according to News8.
We did get about 1.5” of rain over night. (That’s on top of about .6” the night before.) I am worried that one of our plants is so top-heavy from the rain that it may have damaged its stem. I’ll check it out when I get back home.
Salad: What’s the scariest weather situation you’ve experienced?
I can’t think of one. When I was a kid, I used to really enjoy hurricanes because we got out of school. I didn’t know to be afraid of them. Actually, I am more afraid today of the things engineers do to protect us from storms than of the storms themselves.
Main Course: If you could wake up tomorrow morning in another country, where would you want to be?
I loved Canada and Panamá, but I would have to say that waking up next to Suna is more important to me than which country we are in.
Dessert: What do you usually wear to sleep?
I’m like an actress whose name I can’t remember. She said, “I used to sleep in the nude…before the earthquake.” No earthquake, but I learned my lesson when a drunk slammed his pickup into the light pole outside my bedroom one night. Fumbling around for clothes before I could go make sure nobody died slowed me down too much. BTW: nobody was even seriously hurt, although the guy whose sister was in the truck was not happy with the driver. Mayhem may have ensued at a later date.
