Progress

I just shared this in Nextdoor.

I live in Heritage Oaks. I have a trail cam and I like to see what animals show up on it. I keep track for fun on a spreadsheet. I had a feeling I was seeing fewer animals than I used to so I took a very ROUGH look at the trend.

The animals I tally are basically anything besides rabbits and deer. So examples are raccoon, coyote, etc. If there's more than one of an animal on a given day, I just count it as one sighting. The data begins in December 2020.

So the first year I tallied 278 animals.
The second year I tallied 155 animals.
The third year I tallied 119 animals.

I don't have the fourth year's worth of data complete yet but you can see where this is going :(

Heritage Oaks itself appears to me mostly the same over the last few years, but of course everywhere around us has been developed more. And we're right by 290. So I assume the surrounding development is the main cause. I guess that speaks to how animals can't do well in an "island" situation. So even if a given raccoon, say, lives its whole life in Heritage Oaks, I guess the ecosystem as a whole suffers because it's totally cutoff. Or maybe I have that wrong. Anyway, just sharing.

UTI's, Doctors, and Inmates

I should have included one more thing on my last post. I’ve been working on resolving my tendency to get UTI’s, which is not interesting to write about here except to say I’m pretty sure this is what would have killed me if I had been on this planet before the advent of modern medicine. Or who knows maybe it would have been suicide because probably I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it long enough for it to kill me.

So anyway, recently I was in my primary care doctor’s waiting room. This clinic has various locations throughout Austin. I’ve been going there ever since we moved to Austin. I’ve been to various locations—and they are all very “sketch”. The rooms often feel repurposed or like a temporary, chaotic clinic space, the walls are covered with various health awareness tips, and most people speak English as a second language. I haven’t looked into it but maybe this is where people with little or no health coverage go? I’ve also sometimes had annoyances with the back-end processes, but I have a feeling this could happen at any clinic. The thing that keeps me loyal is MY DOCTOR! She actually listens to me and takes what I’m saying seriously. She’s like a normal person! This is invaluable of course as you all know. I haven’t seen loads of doctors in my life (yet) but I have seen them be dismissive of my comments and just so arrogant! Besides, it seems to me that doctors at clinics which see such variety of patients if anything are probably better than doctors in privileged areas!

Sorry, that was tangential. So I’m sitting in the waiting room and a cop comes in and double checks with the front desk that this is “the right place”—I totally understand having to do this because as I described, the clinic feels so sketch and confusing and not even clearly marked!

So a few minutes later, there’s two cops escorting an apparent inmate into the room! I say inmate because she had a chain connecting her ankles! (Also during checkin I heard mention “jail”). So after a bit extra discussion to get her checked in, the inmate and the one lady cop fell into normal conversation and really, just like regular people in a waiting room. I was thinking, is that whole chain really necessary? How do you even walk with that on? Seems more like a scarlet letter inspired thing than actually the best way to ensure security, you know? So anway, it was kind of an eye opener and weird. Maybe this is a Texas-specific thing?

No pics because obviously I don’t go around taking pictures in the doctor’s office.

Summer!

A highlight this summer was having Raine, Paige, and Paige’s friend Sarah come visit over July 4 weekend. We really felt validated about our choice to stay in this location (we considered moving), as we could enjoy our large yard/pool, but the kids took time to explore the city which is still easily accessible.

Raine brought me an amazing gift featuring a fabric tarantula! Lots of leisure time was had including some art time! I introduced Sarah to gelli printing and hardcover books, and we all played around with jewelry making with some long-lost supplies from the garage and a plant we grew this year in the garden.. Job’s Tears! They are like natural beads with a hole in the middle! Rob made me earrings with them, Paige made a necklace, and I’m hoping to make a bunch of bracelets to sell. I only have a handful of bracelets so far, so not sure if I’ll get more out of the plant now that the August scorching season has begun.

We tried out a splash pad this summer. I was hoping one of the various animals would like to play in it. Well, after a bunch of treat offerings, Woody eventually did go in and maybe kind of was OK with it. Stoney still won’t venture in though.

The challenge with the garden is now that true summer has hit, everything is like Fire-Blasted with Heat every day. I did get a couple of shade cloths which are draped over my favorite things, the Job’s Tears and the Sour Gherkins.

We didn’t plant the Sour Gherkins this year, they just self-seeded from last year. Same with the Chili Petin plant in the front. The melon plant has actually been generating amazing melons which we are eating! And weirdly we’ve harvested a couple of cucumbers but I’m not clear what plant is making them because we didn’t plant any cucumbers.

And I’m still obsessed with edible flowers. The blue bachelor buttons are amazing, but also we have Turk’s Cap (a native), and endless Petunias. I have a cookbook which features edible flowers and just plants in general, and I tried making a beet terrine which came out OK but not that great. It was basically layers of sliced beets with goat cheese and edible flowers on top.

Out of nowhere, Zsa Zsa dropped dead in July. No apparent reason, just dead in the middle of the yard. Poor Zsa Zsa always had it rough being the lowest in the pecking order. And Rock Star suffered an injury to her foot which prevented her from walking almost at all for a couple of days. I tried to watch out for her (I fed her “poultry cell” with oats) and eventually we realized she was improving. It’s been weeks now and she mostly seems fine, but I do think the incident took away her general fearlessness.

To attend Rachel’s surprise engagement party in Minneapolis, we asked Nicole, a young gal we met through Raine, to house and pet sit for us overnight. This was a huge step for all of us! Nicole did awesome, even though Stoney, in particular, made it difficult. He refused to come in the house! So in the evening, Nicole cleverly setup the privacy wall outside her bedroom so that Stoney couldn’t actually see her- this totally worked and she soon saw that he was resting in his kennel!

The trip to Minneapolis is kind of a story unto itself, as it was during the Crowdstrike software crisis, and we were flying Delta, so…ya, Rob was unable to fly out as planned for the first leg. So he was unable to kickoff Rachel’s surprise scavenger hunt :( However, we both were able to fly out the following day (which was when I was originally planning to go). We made it just in time for the party! And we sure got lucky to be able to actually fly home the following day! I could go into more detail about the trip itself, but this blog is about our goings on in Austin so I’ll just include a pic or two:)

Pangea had a checkup and she’s mostly doing great. The vet said that even the flowers I like to feed her from the plants outside should be reserved as “treats” and she really needs to just have grass and hay. We also need to start target training (which is a time we should use “treats”).

For the Art League this summer I’ve been doing the monthly newsletter because the gal that normally does it is out of the country. So that’s been fun as I like doing that kind of stuff. Also there are going to be workshops at the library in town with teens after school this fall so I’ve metup with the coordinator there and so far we’re planing zine-making and gelli-printing. I made some sample zines for this. They’re pretty basic but I feel like that’s a good place to start, as we can always work toward more complicated things. And I can bring in samples of other stuff I’ve collected as inspiration/future workshop ideas.

One day coming back from a jog I noticed a free tricycle at the base of someone’s driveway. The front tire was flat, but otherwise it looked pretty fun, and adult-sized (or at least big enough for me). So I brought it home and Rob fixed the tire, and now I ride it to the mailbox everyday instead of Jenny, my longboard, because it’s safer and actually it’s even more fun to ride!! I’ve named it Billy Bob.

As far as my art goes, I made some more of those sketchbooks and I finally put those crumpled gelli prints together onto a trellis I got from Hope Depot! Is it great? Um, maybe not, but it’s DONE! I’m thinking I may submit it to a future “call for art” in public spaces through the art league. Perhaps someone will find it interesting.

Free garlic from a neighbor- the cloves are as big an entire bulb!!

Rob has a new stand mixer which is super cool and can do lots of different things. So far, he’s made empanadas which were amazing!

More pics below.

Suprises in the Backyard

In scrolling my Reddit I came across jumping spiders and over time I’ve come to realize that many people have them as pets. I had no idea. And you can just find them in the wild anywhere. So recently as I was wiping our glass table on the deck I saw one! It watched me for awhile and hung out while we ate dinner but then I lost track. I don’t plan to have one as a pet, but it’s kind of got me interested in spotting them outside. I was thinking that it would be a fun game to see who could find a spider first in the backyard. You might think it would be hard, but if you try to find itty bitty ones, like smaller than your fingernail, they’re plentiful.

I’ve started to appreciate how they can be “cute”

While we’re in the backyard, we may as well do an egg hunt. The chickens have been laying them ALL OVER the place! Jimmy’s spot these days is under a corner of a tarp covering one of the raised gardenbeds. And Jokić still prefers next to the pool pump under the deck. Sometimes eggs are in the old wooden barrels in the middle of the yard, sometimes in the coop but not necessarily in the roosts, and often hidden amid the shiso in the flowerbed. Not as many eggs in general which we attribute to the changing seasons. Cici is broody and I just leave her alone. Zsa Zsa is still treated poorly so she hangs out all day in the roost. Twice a day I take her out and set her by the water if the coast is clear (no other chickens nearby).

Jimmy looking sharp

The fruit trees are finally bearing fruit this year. We had quite a flew plums, which tasted great, but many had been ravaged by a beetle. Next year we plan to put nets around them to protect them. We have LOTS of peaches on the way, and we already had a couple, so we’re hoping we can eat a lot of them before they too are preyed upon. As this was our first year of stone fruit, we consider this a big win.

The raised beds have been interesting too because everything is a surprise! Some things start growing that I didn’t even plant this year, like the sour gherkin which apparently seeded itself from last year! And some things that I think are weeds are actually something I planted, like the Bachelor Buttons. The funniest example is when I finally realized that an odd-looking plant was something I planted (Jacob’s Tears) and so I started to weed around it and to my dismay realized I pulled up some carrots prematurely!

While small, they were tasty!

I’m continuing to plant a lot of edible flowers, because I love the idea of eating flowers for some reason. We have a great set of Petunias I’ve been using as garnish. And I’m looking foward to using the Bachelor’s Buttons as well. Oh and we had nice nasturtiums for a while this spring but they puckered out.

Petunias constantly generating flowers

One last thing about raised beds- we bought a baby melon plant at Natural Gardener but so far the only gourd-like produce we’ve harvested is one pickling cucumber. Um, how? Because what I’m seeing on the vines now looks like maybe small melons. So weird!

It is now officially shiso season, so we make this amazing beverage from the leaves of this plant. Mostly we use it as a mixer for our gin and tonics.

A big decision we made recently is to replace the semi-above-ground pool with a “proper” pool. It’ll be a ways out as we still haven’t signed the agreement yet but the plan has been mostly finalized. It’ll be neat to look at and also good for lap swimming. I am also looking forward to having plants around it.

I’ve slowed down making handmade books, although I did make a couple of all-black books. I would make more because I think it’s a cool idea but the paper I ordered isn’t as heavyweight as I’d like.

But my big adventure was in something ridiculously simple, crumpling paper. I had been doing specific things using plain paper based on the design book I bought, but I decided to try crumpling my gelli prints and this proved to be super cool (in my opinion). Now the “lousy” prints became cool looking! I started to brush on some clear acrylic stuff on the final crumple in order to retain the crumples, and then I did a whole set of these embroidered onto nice paper which had varied embroidered backgrounds. I made about 30 I believe(?) and next I’m hoping Rob can help me get them all mounted in a grid like pattern for hanging on the wall.

Here’s a few of the items to be in the “installation” grid

Then after all that things got really meta because I was like wait how about if I use crumpled paper to make more gelli prints? And once again, I was like, “whooooah”. See pics below: on far left is the crumpled papers I used and the other pictures are the resulting gelli prints.

I prefer these results to many other gelli prints which is hilarious since crumpling paper is so much simpler than so many of the other random objects I’ve accumulated for printing!

I had an amazing Mother’s Day because I set out for a jog that morning and came across not one, but two tarantulas! I got some sweet pics and video and shared it in the master naturalist feed. For some reason I tied it to the Twas the Night Before Xmas poem. Haha I had a BALL that day! You can see the footage in the link (recommended).

I’ll put some other pics in gallery below.

The Eclipse and other Springtime Things

So the Jester King pop-up art event turned out far better than expected. The first people that bought something were an apparent mother/daughter pair. The daughter was quiet, maybe early teen. After the mom had a look around, the daughter pointed out one of my “emo” embroidery pieces involving a bloody doll and I believe she was holding a bat on a leash…and that’s the one they bought!

I liked the pic this person took and it was nice of her to mention me in her social media post.

I had good sales during the whole day, and one lady from South Africa paid in cash ($175) for one of my botanical prints! The Grahams came and it was super nice of them to show up!

Of course, Rob setup the entire grid thingy and helped me hang all the art. And of course he did all the same in reverse at the end!

I actually sold over $1,000 of my art so I was shocked! I do plan to do one again, but not for a while as I don’t actually like doing it that much and it takes a lot of effort. I’m aware that I’ll likely NEVER sell that much stuff again LOL.

But the whole effort was thanks to the encouragement of the Dripping Springs Art League (DSAL), so I’m now doing a lot of volunteering for them and I’m Membership Co-Chair or something like that. I do admin on-line things but also show up to live stuff too.

After meeting some of the DSAL members I ended up also being invited into a “crochet circle” which is pretty much like it sounds but I figured I should give it a go just so I know some people. Also it is right across 290 so really close. So I occasionally go and bring some kind of art thing to do as I no longer crochet.

Meanwhile, at some point I got a UTI and went across town to see doc (it was on weekend as always) and they said it wasn’t a UTI so I came home disappointed. Over night of course it got worse, and on way from one of many bathroom trips I hit my toe on the dresser and apparently broke it. So then the next day I went again across town to see doctor (not for the toe because I knew there’s nothing that can be done for that) and this time they said well yes, you do have a UTI. Ugh, those things are the worst! So anyway it took a few weeks for the toe to heal.

I’m still doing rust marks art with embroidery and botanical prints but also I got a book which explains some paper folding and crumpling things which is very cool but not sure how to use it. See 3 pics below.

Also for some reason I started making more handmade books, usually with sewn binding and putting gelli print or rust marks stuff on the cover.

DSAL has a monthly artist of the month and I think they have trouble finding willing participants so they asked me to do it and so I did last month. You get featured in the newsletter and they trumpet your name in social media. Oh and last night I was gifted a DSAL mug LOL.

So we were in the perfect location for the eclipse and we were excited that the Weinshels came along with friends to view it! It all turned out so well as they stayed downtown and got to do stuff there, but the day of the eclipse they picked me up and we went west of here to a winery for lunch and eclipse viewing! Although there were clouds we could still see it pretty well. Meanwhile, Rob was home (also a terrific view of the eclipse) and prepared our dinner which was his amazing gumbo! It was fun showing everyone around our place and also we visited the botanical gardens with them! What blew me away is that Kathy made me a handmade CHICKEN!! It is so cool and VERY huggable!! See two pics below.

Rob and I did an outing with the naturalists earlier in the spring to learn about trees, and we also volunteered for a Driftwood Festival which involved kid activities. I’ve also made a couple of videos for social media.

This spring has been wetter and cooler than all our previous ones here. Which is good as we need the rain and we don’t need it like 110 degrees all the time. But it wasn’t the best kind of weather for a road trip, and it sounds like Rob endured lots of storms during his road trip to Tulsa where he met friends and enjoyed live music. At least he got home safe!

Occasionally we get a nice pic of the dogs and I realized recently that they could be becoming minor league stars in the Austin subreddit as they had a great picture in the bluebonnets (everyone here always takes pics of their pooches in the bluebonnets) and then recently they were looking quite concerned during a thunderstorm and it is fun to see their exact same expressions! See these 3 pics below.

The situation with Zsa Zsa is very sad. Without her Hashbrown pal, she just sits in a roost in the coop all day until I pull her out and set her out by the water dish. If the other chickens are around, they will chase her back inside. The only possible remedy, recommended by the Broody Bunch group, is to put Zsa Zsa and one of our other hens into a separate area for a like a week. Supposedly then the other hen will bond or something with Zsa Zsa and she will no longer be the total outcast. We haven’t done this because it would involve reviving the chicken tractor and basically be a lot of work and we have our doubts that even this would actually work.

We are getting hopeful about our fruit trees this year as the peach trees are loaded with young fruits, the Mexican Plum has quite a few too, and we already harvested several loquats which were quite nice! We’re sure the pomegranate will fruit nicely too as it is full of flowers and we had fruit last year.

I had just about given up but we finally got some baby bluebirds at the feeder, like last year! See below 1 pic.

I’m sure there’s more but anyhow I’m putting some more pictures in gallery below.

Holiday Hashing

Paige visited over Thanksgiving and we focused on the basics: eating and jigsaw puzzles. Paige and I ran the Turkey Trot again, and we ended up doing fine despite a couple of hiccups…the parking was backed up and we couldn’t get out and I thought we should bail but we finally got out of the traffic and found parking and ran to the starting area and joined into the race. Also, I tripped and fell due to a sandbag inexplicably in the middle of the course and invisible because of the hordes of people running in front of us.

Paige also has a fun activity with the dogs where she hides pieces of kibble around the deck/yard and then the dogs have to go find and eat them.

I took a class about making biomaterials and although it wasn’t directly engaging, I found a recipe as a result and made a batch of egg-based material since we have lots of eggshells. It involved using a large syringe where you squeeze out the material and it was super super cool and satisfying. I ended up with long, tangly strands. Haven’t figured out a good use, but this deserves more tinkering.

Meanwhile, I came across a couple of things in the neighborhood and ended up making little videos about them for the master naturalists: mistletoe and frostweed.

For Christmas we welcomed Raine, Paige, and Ananth so we were all excited for a full house! Once everyone had arrived, we opened a Santa gift which was a UV light and we tried it outside in the evening and sure enough, we saw a scorpion when we ventured outside the yard into a rock pile- it was glow-in-the-dark under the UV light!! Super cool, want to try again once winter is over.

Soon after that I felt a bit sick and so I tested and I had COVID! First time! So I isolated for most of the rest of the time we had guests. No one else was sick through Christmas Day at least, so they all could hang out and do presents and meals and all that. I believe only Ananth managed to escape that holiday without getting COVID.

At some point when Paige was visiting she decided to try out the dog beds again. Up until now, we only used kennels because it was chaos when we tried to allow regular beds. But this time, it seemed to work out and so now we use both beds and kennels. The dogs LOVE their beds!!

I also took a class involving using rust to stain paper and cloth. So now I’m adding embroidery to them as I have done with gelli prints.

I took a trip to California to help out my parents and to see Raine. It was fun to cook using some of the stuff they had growing in the yard including dino kale and kumquats. Won’t go into the details of that trip as this blog is about Austin stuff, but we did setup a Bird Buddy feeder so now my Mom can view pics from the feeder on her phone. Oh and also I counted the number of fake birds in their house (3-D birds, not 2-D) and I counted 12 if you include salt & pepper shakers.

One pic from Sonoma

While I was out of town Rob had to inform me that the Hash Brown died. She was one of the original chickens that lived on the property before us! We believe she died of “old age”. Rob said one day she just kind of stopped getting up and doing normal stuff and by the next morning she was dead. We were concerned about how Zsa Zsa would take it, since the Hash Brown was her only pal. But she seems to be doing OK, albeit basically on her own.

After a coffee gathering with the Dripping Springs Art League, I showed them some of my art and they urged me to sign up for the art vending event at Jester King Brewery (Feb 24) so I did. So as a result, Rob has been helping me prepare. This involves having a metal grid thingy to hang art on, getting framed art hangable, finalizing some pieces (some things we mount on wood and Rob does this for me), etc.

We ran out of hooks so are ordering more!

We talked to the guy at Primal Gallery and he informed us that he never sells anything at those events. He said at Jester King you’ll find tourists and not only will they not want to buy art, but they will be rude. Ha-ha-ha well, it’ll be OK if that happens. I plan to bring a book.

Some more pics below!

Autumn Allergies, Activities, and Art

Do you ever wonder what would happen if you ran your dishwasher for weeks and weeks, even months, without any detergent? Well I’m here to tell you that you’ll be fine. No one gets sick, but your drinking glasses will be cloudy and unattractive.

I finally figured out the obvious, which is that our automatically-dispensing-dishwasher wasn’t actually dispensing any detergent! I was thinking it had to do with hardness/softness of water or something like that, since I had been using the auto-dispenser for quite a while with no problem. Well, turns out that when you insert a new pod the dishwasher must be ON or it won’t “recognize” it. Hahahahaha so ya, it’s nice to actually have clean dishware again :)

Let’s not forget how burning hot it was all summer. It became a daily thing where I set out ice water in the flowerbed for the chickens.

We had a fun time hosting Raine, Paige, and Paige’s boyfriend, Ananth for a weekend. As suspected, Ananth is super nice and easy to hang with. We had yummy barbeque, played games, and went to Jester King of course!

A big change for us is that we (actually Rob) setup the front yard so that Pangea can roam inside the fenced area freely! Just the fencing wasn’t enough because if she can see beyond the fence, she will try to get out (and probably succeed as they can push/dig/find a way). So anyway we have the lower part of the fence covered with landscaping cloth. For now, she comes in every night for shelter. Also, if it is too cold we keep her inside. She definitely looks like she owns the place out there!

She likes certain flowers a lot such as hibiscus, Rose of Sharon, climbing rose flowers (not regular roses), Rock Rose, Mexican Petunia.

Summer was so burning hot we almost lost all our garden plants, but the basil was great. We got the loquat and sour gherkins through the heat but then we had a nasty cold snap early fall which I think has probably killed those off which is super sad because we had lots more loofah growing and millions of gherkins!

At least we did harvest a couple of loofah earlier in the season.

We had some more classes and field trips for the Master Naturalists. At one of them, scientists trawled the bottom of a creek to find what lives there and they even used electrofishing to temporarily stun the fish so they could be caught!

Last night we both attended our graduation! Each table had a River Cooter themed centerpiece (River Cooter is our class’ mascot - each year has a different animal/plant) and I got to take one home! That was my favorite part of the evening.

I’ve been occasionally making quick videos for the social media team, including a series called Nom Nom Natives, Haiku of the Day, and possibly going to do one called Let’s Ask AI. Anyway, if you follow Hays County Master Naturalists on social media you can view them. Meanwhile, someone suggested we do a podcast where we read articles from our newsletter (Hays Humm) and I was like Oh, great idea! so naturally I’m tasked to look into how to do that. Rob has already investigated how we could do this on the logistical/technical side, so now we really just have to decide if we want to push this and take it on ourselves :)

Also the coloring book team is rolling out their book to 3rd graders, and I helped out several classes recently at the Meadows Center. At my station we made sun dials, which went pretty well considering we only had like 10 minutes per class to get it done!

I submitted a bunch of entries to this year’s Texas Master Naturalist Art, Photo, and Media Contest and I actually won 3rd place in the digitally enhanced category! If you follow that link you can see it in there, and also you can see that the coloring book team won 2nd place in Exemplary Project Awards.

I attended the Climate Scientist Conference too which was down in San Marcos as well. It was somewhat interesting. I actually kind of liked this guy the most as he seemed most controversial- I hope he’s not right!

I also finally attended a Dripping Springs Art League gathering and joined. Now I have to decide if I want to join a committee.

I took an on-line class involving using rusty objects to make stained paper and cloth. Haven’t figured out how to use the cloth yet, but generally it is nice to have another option in making cool designs.

I’m also looking at biomaterials, and I’m gonna try a couple of “recipes’ involving eggshells since we have plenty of those. Not sure what I’d use them for but maybe I’ll have an idea when I see the end result.

This fall I made a recipe for dinner which had tahini as a main ingredient. Then since we had tahini lying around, I made a salad dressing with it, and then by the end of that week I noticed a had a gigantic rash covering my entire torso! It got worse over a couple of days (but didn’t itch), so then I applied Benadryl and it got better. So anyway I concluded I must be somewhat allergic to sesame seeds!

I shopped around and finally bought new eyeglasses. It’s been something like 8 years. But I am gonna update my old frames too so I will have two pairs.

auto tinting in the sun. these cost like a million dollars

I’m just gonna plop some more pictures below. It was a lot of ground to try to cover this time.

Summer Sizzle

So the most notable thing about this summer has been the heat. Most days reach at least 100 degrees, and there’s really been no break. We’ve had power the whole time so far, so it’s fine as we can keep house air conditioned, but I have been a bit worried for the chickens.

We’ve tried misters in the past but the chickens didn’t use them. So this year we put an evaporative cooler in the run, which I tend to run as a fan only as it uses a ton of water when it’s doing the evaporation. In addition to the fan, we have a tub of water that we add ice to. They really like this as it is in the flowerbed where they like to hang out under the plants in the dirt.

Rock Star

We had a great time when Rachel and Elizabeth came to visit. Given the heat, much time was required in the pool and otherwise we celebrated Rob’s birthday and there was shopping downtown. Even the dogs were pretty well behaved

Rachel made an egg holder for Rob’s birthday and it’s constantly in use!

I’ve continued to do some art junk, and if you want to view any of that you should just go to my Instagram.

The new chickens have been completely absorbed into the flock. Rock Star is quite a standout as she is very social with the humans. Sometimes in the morning when I’m cutting grass for Pangea she hops up on my back just for fun! The new chickens are lower in pecking order than Isis and Sisi but Zsa Zsa still is at the bottom :( The new chickens are already laying eggs.

I have prepared a project for the Charro Park event (which is an extension of the coloring book for Hays County Master Naturalists (HCMN)) which is a sundial. It took quite a bit of time to prepare because most simple designs you find on-line don’t actually work. Eventually I found one I liked on Instructables which I tweaked. So anyway that event comes up in September.

I’m also helping with social media and somehow on the last call someone mentioned haikus so now I got it in my head to write a Haiku a day and use those hopefully for our HCMN tik toks. The plan is to gather 90 videos and then release them in a cluster.

We’ve seen the ratsnake a few times in the coop. He’s quite mellow and one time I even touched him! I named him and I can’t remember what it was now but something hum-drum like ‘Mel’.

See up top his neck is all stretched from the egg

The trail cam was dead all summer until just recently when there was a racoon and fox. Similarly, bird recordings were kind of steady until recently when it caught a scissor-tailed flycatcher. Birds are already migrating.

At this moment I’m in California visiting Raine and my parents. Rob is home tending to the animals! We hope to eventually setup a house/pet sitter but we haven’t managed to get that figured out yet.

Plus, it will be easier once Pangea lives mostly in the yard. At her recent 2-year-old check-up the vet actually told us she is about ready to live outside (during the day anyway) as she’s already big enough not to be considered prey! So now we are brainstorming how to make this work. Rob’s had some great ideas about how to get the front-yard workable, which mostly means how to keep her from breaking free of the fence. So that’s kind of in the works now and once we set something up we’ll starting leaving here there for a few hours each day! Eventually, she’ll live outside with a shelter and stuff but that will be later stage.

She rings her chime a lot for food, but the vet advised me not to give her too much lettuce because she’d get too much protein, so now it’s hard because she’s disappointed with just grass & hay. She also bangs around in her enclosure and is getting too rowdy for it!!

We had an OK start to the garden, but given the excessive heat and watering restrictions we gave up trying to keep some things alive. In particular, we had a huge vine with little baby sour gherkins but this has been neglected. On the other hand, our basil is surviving and we’ve also got a loofah plant with some quite sizeable loofahs! I’m waiting to harvest until they are drier as I want to use them as “sponges” and/or gelli art textures.

Baby sour gherkins

One of our recent HCMN classes was about herps (amphibians and reptiles). Texas has the most diverse group of herps than any other state! Anyhow, one of the master naturalists brought in his many pet corn snakes which was hilarious. We all got to hold one! He also brought in his pet blue-tonged skink (I think this animal is native to Australia).

One time I was swimming and I felt something on my skin and I tried to bat it away and I saw it was a gigantic bug swimming around and I was like WHAAAAAAA! Anyway, after I jumped out of the pool Rob got it out using a net and it turned out to be some kind of Giant Water Bug. Like HUGE sized. I surely hope not to run into one again.

Meanwhile, Rob took a little road trip to Iowa to celebrate some mutual 60th birthdays. They all had a very swell time! Pic below.

We actually harvested our first two peaches this year and they were delicious. The little lemon tree was also growing a few lemons but they started falling off as weee little guys. Then I started to water it more and now there’s one left and it’s still growing!

The second biggest local news after the weather is the opening of the new H-E-B on Nutty Brown Road! It’s like 2 minutes from our house!

we really can’t complain

More pics below.

Spring Bonanza

Spring’s been fairly eventful around here. We had Paige visit for about a week which was great as we focused on eating and relaxing. I’m not going to elaborate as I have a lot to cover in this post and we didn’t do any big special outings or anything. Oh, except that we picked out 3 pullets at Callahan’s! One of them is a Barred Rock (a breed known for being less shy of people), and the others are Wyandottes- a silver-laced and a gold-laced.

I have this new set of 'Wild Gears’ which is like spirograph and Paige managed to make a whole slew of them turn at the same time!

The pullets had been living in the chicken tractor that Rob made out in the front yard for quarantining and just today we moved the tractor to the backyard. Now all the chickens can see each other. In a few days we will let the pullets out to hang out during the day with the other chickens. Supposed to do this gradually to minimize in-fighting. It worked with the last round so hopefully this will work too. This batch of pullets is a little older than the prior set we got. As for names, the Barred Rock goes by Rock Star and the other two are named after NBA players, so the gold-laced one is Jimmy (Butler) and the silver-laced is Jokić.

We set up this chicken memorial honoring the chickens we’ve lost.

On the naturalist front, we’ve had some field trips including one to Spring Lake Park in San Marcos. We rode in glass-bottomed boats and viewed the action of springs from below and saw lots of fish and turtles. The history of the lake is hilarious involving weird entertainment with swimming pigs and mermaids.

We also attended the annual naturalist reunion where various business was covered, lunch was served, we toured of the preserve, and door prizes were randomly drawn! I was super excited to get a door prize but maybe that jinxed us as practically everyone at our table got one except us :(

While I was attending a field trip recently (where I learned about brush piles, land management, and wildlife epidemiology), Rob was volunteering with a biologist who set up an aquarium exhibit that had crayfish and fish. Ask him more about that next time you see him!

Another cool field trip we took was to Westcave Preserve. It was a pretty riparian setting with water dripping down cliffside walls, ferns, and real caves!

I am helping out with the social media aspect of the naturalist group. I managed to very basically animate the logo in order to use it in the beginning of the videos in an effort to standardize them some more.

I also am going to help out with the recently released coloring book project. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the group during its development, but they are going to be distributing these books all over the parks and using them in 3rd grader curriculum and they need people to help with the associated projects at the parks. I showed the lady in charge my idea I had which was weirdly similar in that it encouraged people to visit a set of parks and then if that is achieved you can get some sort of “award” or whatever. Anyway, I think that all resumes in the fall.

No shortage of cool pics with the birdfeeder, although a squirrel discovered the feeder so Rob installed one of those lampshade-shaped thingies that has worked to keep him out so far.

The trail cam had mostly the usual things but my favorite set was pics showing an owl hunting rabbits!! Below are the two pics. In first, you can see the owl eyes on the right and rabbits running on the left. In second pic, owl is in flight.

Pangea seems to be thriving. Her growth rate has skyrocketed, and she’s pretty audible much of the day, especially in the morning, as she bulldozes around her enclosure and also rings her wind chime often which is my cue to go find her more food. I sometimes cut her stuff like grass, dandelions, and thistle from the yard, also cut roses and hibiscus flowers, and lettuce and cucumber. She is supposed to like cactus pads but so far she doesn’t seem real keen on those.

We’ve started to go to Ghost Note Brewery a lot because not only do they have good beer and always at least one food truck, but they have live music on Sunday afternoons which is usually something pretty good. In fact, we made it over there when our guests, Chris and Lisa came to visit for a long weekend. We also took them to Jester King and a walk along Barton Creek. It was a very fun time for all of us.

I’ve been temporarily fooling around with Midjourney to make weird pics. Here’s a few I’ll put in a mini-gallery below.

Spring has been seemingly a good season for a comeback for lizards and snakes. Maybe thanks to the rain we’ve been getting? I’m not going to elaborate, but take my word for it. Ask Paige about it too!

We recently competed in the regional Klask tournament at a bar in North Austin. In the qualifying rounds, both of us went undefeated. Then things got serious, and I lost to a nice guy named Isaac, who had driven from Houston to attend the tournament. Rob played Isaac in the finals and also lost to him. So Rob and I got 2nd and 3rd place. Isaac gets to move on to Nationals!! I’m super jealous and hope to compete again next year.

More pics in gallery below.

Bird is WAY up there!

There's something there...

Brainscans and Bluebonnets

I have confidently stated many times that our remaining Hash Brown is too old to lay eggs, but turns out I was wrong! This spring she is miraculously laying again after what seems like forever! I kind of wonder if she was mourning the loss of the other Hash Brown for a long time, and she’s finally recovered and found a new best friend in Zsa Zsa so her peace is restored.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the grocery store no longer is carrying the tortilla chip that was AMAZING and I can’t find any others that come close to it. This actually diminishes my quality of life.

In other news, Raine came to visit! We had a really swell time having nice meals, took a little hike, did some gelli printing, and of course hung out at Jester King! Also she did amazing with the dogs which is a very hard thing to accomplish.

I was hoping to find a fossil here because there’s apparently lots to be found in our area but I failed.

Spring weather has been a mix of warm and cold, which is probably normal but we did attempt to cover our garden plants at one point which was haphazard but kinda did work. And I found a lifeless gecko on the deck one morning and I kept it inside overnight and when I let it go again it seemed active and happy!

I added a bunch of hay and stuff so it could hide and be comfortable.

We’ve had lots of outings and volunteerings for our Master Naturalist Class. We went to Jacob’s Hole which is neat in concept as it is super deep and full of caves, but these days all the waterways are really low from drought so it wasn’t as neat as normal. Similar for Honey Creek field trip, except it still had some really need vegetation and was overall more impressive a setting. I was pretty excited when I learned that our group was being led into areas that weren’t even on the map of the preserve!

People scuba down there and explore caves. Several have died.

We also helped out in the search for Horned Lizards, in an area where a bunch had been released a while back. It was cool that they even employed a dog to sniff them out! While we saw no evidence of the lizards, the dog did succeed. Kind of fun to encounter some horses at the end.

Sniffing out horned lizards

I also sat in a bird blind and tallied up birds at Charro Park. I plan to do more of this to rack up hours as we have to do a lot, but not sure birding is up my alley. In fact, on a recent outing with the group, the focus was birds and my favorite part of the entire trip was seeing a red-eared slider turtle!

I did get an inexpensive pair of binoculars, though, and sometimes look at stuff around the house with them. I saw some hawks tearing up prey up in an oak tree which was pretty cool.

I also helped out at Bamberger Preserve to take 3rd graders on a nature walk. Fortunately, they paired me up with another volunteer who has done it before who had tons of knowledge of all the trees and plants. I guess I could do it again but I’m really more interested in the research and whatnot side of volunteering rather than “education and outreach”. I contacted people at Westcave Preserve and although I indicated I’d be interested in the research I promptly got an email from the outreach person hoping I’d volunteer. So I suppose they just need way more people to help with field trips, man the front desk, etc. so it’s understandable.

Rob spent a long day doing an archeological dig which turned out well. They were finding evidence of human habitation. It is a long day partially because it’s a bit of a drive to get there but anyway it’s a nice way for him to log loads of hours at a time :) Rob also setup a rain gauge so he logs that data daily.

I whipped up a couple of booklets with perforated pages inside for the two of us so that when we complete different parts of the naturalist program, we can TEAR OFF a section! Happy with how they turned out.

I actually own a perforator now which is super fun to use.

The hair salon nearby recently had an art opening (loads of hallways connecting hairdresser rooms that are filled with art) which I attended and it was actually pretty cool. The lady who curates it has only been here like a year and she seems to have gathered all kinds of people to put art up here. The art is quite varied and some looks like amazing (with high prices) and others seem more amateur. So I may try to get a few of my prints or whatever in one of the upcoming rounds. The bar doesn’t appear that high to me :)

I won this door prize at the hair salon gallery. Apparently the artist uses compressed air and alcohol inks.

We got together with the Grahams at Jester King and we played $20,000 pyramid which actually was hilarious.

I ordered some clothes from this retailer that sells STEM-themed clothes. It was hard to pick!

Brainscans skirt!!

Meanwhile, the parade of wildflowers has begun which was kicked off by Tenpetal Anemones. I love saying Tenpetal Anemones. So now there’s all kinds of flowers coming up including the very very famous bluebonnets! So all this spurred me to try out my dye pot which has been growing mold all winter. I had already prepped some papers early this spring with the mordant and stuff. I used some “false dandelions” and other things on it which had worked last year and…it came out great! That was a big relief because I didn’t know the pot would still work and I didn’t know I had prepped the papers OK either. So now I’m excited to make more this spring. And also I had an idea of how to display them and Rob did it for me on a practice one (my least favorite one) and it looks great! Basically it is glued to a board that is hung on the wall. The board is basically invisible so it kind of looks like it is floating an inch from the wall.

They’re EVERYWHERE!

More pics below.

I hate Winter!

It’s been a month since the big ice storm ravaged Austin. The weight of the ice caused SO MANY branches and entire trees to fall. We didn’t venture out hardly at all during the event (just to let out the chickens) as so many branches would fall like constantly! No one slept well, not just because it was cold due to no power, but because you could hear the crashes of falling branches all night :(

And meanwhile Pangea didn’t have a heat source which was scary as she really needs a heat source to stay healthy! So Rob and I took turns slipping her under our sweaters during the day. One night she slept my in my bed next to me and the next night she stayed over at our neighbor’s dad’s place as he had power so his place was warm.

You can see some of Pangea’s shell in this pic.

We had power sometimes and then it would go out again for longer. Anyhow, once we got through the storm, every day you hear chain saws and smell the piles of burning branches. We cleaned up a little of our backyard and stacked branches all the way down our long driveway, and we have waited now for a month for tree professionals to come and do the full cleanup. As these trees are mostly live oaks, they need to be immediately “painted” wherever there are fresh cuts or they will likely succumb to oak wilt. Crew is here working today and for sure our yard will look completely different. Some trees are just practically stubs!

Finally with spring we have all 3 potential laying hens laying again! Even so, we still are planning to get pullets later this spring.

The bird buddy camera continues to provide some nice pics and video, and sometimes I post them in my Instagram. Birds we’ve had visit include: Titmouse, Cardinal, Sparrows (possibly various kinds), Bluebirds, Orange-crowned Warbler, Chickadee, Lesser Goldfinch, Carolina Wren, Yellow-rumped Warbler, and House Finch.

Trail cam having a bit more action with spring too, including lots of skunk activity as well as fox, raccoon, and possum.

We’ve attended our first three classes for Texas Master Naturalist which have gone well. They usually have a couple of speakers each class who are pretty good. Topics ranged from botany to citizen science to laws and ethics. This weekend is our first field trip to Jacob’s Well.

Meanwhile, I recently prepared some more nice papers so they’re ready for dye pot printing this spring. This process is a bit of an effort as you soak in an “alum” mixture first and then dry them, and then you have to soak in soy milk baths three times and fully dry them inbetween. I saved the contents of my dye pot from last year and so I’m hoping to use it again even though there’s mold on it. Don’t think that’ll matter and starting up a new dye pot is a lot of effort. I’ll probably wait until we have more wildflowers around to start making these. So far I’ve only seen Tenpetal Anemones and beginnings of bluebonnets.

More pics below.

Bird Buddy Business

Before Paige left we managed to do something I was kind of dying to do for awhile. We jogged to Jester King! It’s a lot closer by foot than by car because you can walk through a narrow opening in a stone wall at the end of our neighborhood which leads you to a fairly straight road to the brewery. By car you have to go much further. So anyway, it was about a 3 mile jog and Rob met us there with the dogs!

It’s winter here so until recently only Isis was laying eggs but now Sisi is back on board. Can’t recall the last time Zsa Zsa laid an egg but hopefully one of these days she’ll deign to do so. Despite occasional frosts, we still see plenty of butterflies which kind of amazes me.

Variegated Fritillary

Recently we headed back to Riverside Farms and hung out with Pat and Bob, our former neighbors, and listened to some live music outside. Apparently there were a few mosquitos but I didn’t notice them. I thought it was cool that you could hear the coyotes behind us as the sky darkened and we had the lit-up stage in front of us. The street is much the same, except for a large, cleared empty lot at the front of the road which will have condos on it eventually. There are other things threatening the road too, and we all wonder how long this little microverse will survive. We noticed someone has goats now and there’s also a new pair of donkeys!

Other than that, not a lot has changed since last post except that Rob setup our new Bird Buddy. At first, we were worried it wasn’t working as it didn’t snap a photo if you waved your hand in front of it. But it turns out it only snaps if it determines the thing is likely a bird…so Rob used one of his Dad’s hand-carved birds to test it…and sure enough, SNAP! Not only that, it correctly identified it LOL.

The feeder has taken pics of several species so far including Cardinal, Tufted Titmouse, Chickadee, Eastern Bluebird, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Mockingbird, and more. It also takes videos so it’s fun to clip those and fool with them :)

Since this was taken, we’ve spun around the feeder so trees are in the background rather than a house :)

Doing same junk with gelli prints, embroidery. For my last one, I used the old, dried paint from the brayers and glued them on a gelli print and added embroidery.

Sometimes I fool around with doll images and human faces and stuff, which is just a thing I like. I was talking to Rob and recalled the phrase “uncanny valley” which is definitely a place I like to hang out.

Recently I noticed empty shelves at the grocery for the cold medicine. A lot of people sick right now. And our Master Naturalist class begins tomorrow night so likely we’ll be in masks…hopefully we won’t be the only ones to do so! We aren’t sure but we think there are 40 of us in the class.

Uh oh

A few more pics below.

Mostly Pictures

By the end of October, I had a birthday and one of the gifts from Rob was a “Tempest” weather device that we mounted on our fence. It has a real knack, we discovered, for detecting lightning in the area. That’s kind of a joke but it’s actually true. In any case, it is neat to know the exact temperature in our little microclimate.

We still tend to be home much of the time and cook our own meals. We often eat outside on the back patio and it is only now, almost Christmas, that we have stopped. In fact, I swam in our pool at least twice IN DECEMBER! Not sure if I explained how we recovered from the never-ending pool saga but basically it turned out the filter was long overdue to be changed. So we removed all the sand ourselves (very difficult because it was hard-as-rock and also you have to work through narrow opening) and refilled with fresh substrate.

Paige visited for Thanksgiving so the dogs had a ball. Woody though would all of a sudden forget she’s been in the house for days and growl or bark. But that’s just Woody. We made a tick tock video during her visit featuring the dogs (credit to Paige). Also, Paige and I ran in the annual Turkey Trot which fortunately I was able to finish as it was 5 miles and I normally only run 3. We met a another Williams alum there but unfortunately our attempt to connect in social media failed.

Rob’s apple galette we had on Thanksgiving

Also I’ve been able to take Pangea out on walkabouts pretty regularly even into December. It needs to be at least 50’s and sunny or I won’t take her outside. The other thing I’ve noticed is that there are tons of butterflies and bees all over well into December.

Fruit trees are alive anyway and we even got two tasty pomegranates this fall! The loquat blossomed recently and so we hope to have some loquats in March or so.

We did see a couple of friends over the fall, but mostly didn’t do a whole lot of socializing. Rob and I both applied and were accepted into the Hays County Master Naturalist program. Classes will start in January.

It’s true that if classes end at 9:00 then it’s gonna be a late bedtime for me! Especially since some venues are kinda far from us. But I can do it if I have to!

We made the nameplate portions of the chicken memorial so now we just have to figure out how to mount them and put it outside or in the coop.

I’m also continuing to make lots of gelli prints. Halloween was super fun for making gelli prints/doll cutouts/embroidery, but there’s always more junk to try. I want to try suspending a gelli print by thread inside a frame. I already made one with cardboard.

I guess that’s not a lot of content for this blog considering it’s been a couple of months but I did distill it quite a bit. There’s plenty of pictures anyhow below in the gallery. Oh and I kinda like these videos of chickens just walking across the deck. Isis in the first one and then a Hash Brown with Zsa Zsa behind. Zsa Zsa is hilarious. She also hasn’t been laying any eggs for like months now! Actually, because the days are so short, we only have one chicken laying any eggs at the moment and that’s Isis.

Dirty Water

It sure has been awhile since my last post and paging through the photos on my phone it’s a bit daunting to make this post but I’ll just grab a few so I can say we’re caught up!

Summer was extra hot this year in central Texas. One thing that’s nice to have is a pool, however, we had big problems with it starting mid-summer. The green (algae) and stuff started to become harder and harder to avoid. Part of it may be that we used Baquicil rather than chlorine (as prior homeowner used it) but turns out also the sand filter is due to be replaced. Anyway, we kept taking samples in to test and getting advice from the pool place. Rob explains things very thoroughly every time. But basically, the pool people don’t actually seem to know what they are talking about. We’d get different advice, sometimes contradictory…especially as our saga carried on over several weeks. This was end-of-summer which would have been peak pool time but alas, between the green and the chemicals we were pouring in we didn’t get in.

We got to see many chemical reactions. This is one of the more dramatic periods :)

Sometimes we’d get our hopes up that THIS time we’d get it solved but nothing was working. Finally, we decided to switchover to chlorine but even that wasn’t fully working as it was cloudy for awhile. It was like 3 weeks before they mentioned adding flocculent or whatever. There’s even more drama in the details, but I will spare you. Just FYI, as Rob mentioned to me this morning, The Pool is now a source of mild PTSD.

Today our pool is finally blue and we are back to using it! We will reassess what it needs in the spring, such as new sand for filter and what system to use, etc. Theoretically we could just call someone else and get answers. Or get regular maintenance. But it’s not that simple, because of things like:

• Most businesses, including pool places, don’t bother to call you back

• We have an above-ground pool, and if you can pick and choose your clients, we end up bottom of the list

• We were not using the typical stuff, chlorine, and no one seems to understand Baquicil. And transitioning from one to the other….just forget it

• They may “help” but the advice is wrong.

You get the idea but anyway, hopefully we’ll get off to the right start in the spring. We also plan to watch youtube videos which apparently give you all the information you need to do it yourself.

Chickens very broody all summer but now no one is broody and Isis and Sisi are laying eggs.

The other backyard hassle was the trees that needed trimming. One tree was in bad shape due to the dirt pile the former owners left which had suffocated the tree’s roots. Anyway, Rob got on a ladder and started to trim but a big branch fell and then bounced up and kind of knocked him off the ladder which sounds crazy/awful but I didn’t see it!! He wasn’t “hurt” seriously but he sure got a big BRUISE! After that incident we hired an arborist and his team to finish that job and trim all the other trees in the yard (mostly live oaks).

Using the Merlin app I’m up to well over 70 bird species! Currently many are migrating over this area. I recently looked up in the sky and saw tons of birds passing over which I later learned were about 2,000 Swainson’s Hawks migrating to Argentina! Eventually we hope to take the data and make it into a cool data visualzation on a poster.

One day I found a baby rabbit that the dogs had found before me and it died. So I moved it over by the trail cam and the next day when reviewing the trail cam images I saw that a raccoon found it!

I have kept up using the gelli plate for image prints (and image transfers) which I like to glue cut-out-images on and then embroidery on. Made SO many of them! Then recently at a trip to Half Price Books I got a huge book about dolls and so I’ve been trying to focus on using these to make a series of Halloween pieces. I’m kinda of stuck now but I’ve done several and they’re in my Instagram.

One challenge when adding embroidery on paper is if you put the holes too close the paper tears.

I did one more botanical print using the dye pot because I want to keep the dye pot active and not throw it away. It had mold or whatever but I just boiled it and it worked fine. Not so many wildflowers now so I don’t think I’ll do much of that again until springtime.

This is not the pool. It’s the dye pot but they do kind of look similar at times.

I saw a paper microscope mentioned on the internet so I ordered one and had fun using it. Mostly though I want to look at more stuff that lives in pond water so I put stuff in my purse so the next time I see a creek or whatever I can grab a sample. What I like is that you can place your phone on it and take pictures.

Not a planet

Pangea had a vet checkup and all went well although the vet never could see past her shell and she kept herself inside the whole time. She’s steadily gaining weight. In fact, she’s almost to where she can no longer fit through the fence gaps which is handy when we’re on walkabout.

Dogs are fine, we hope to get them out for walks outside the neighborhood soon. We weren’t doing that this summer as it was so burning hot. We would like to now but the pickup is in the shop for some kind of recall and they keep having to delay completion because of parts they need and whatnot. We prefer not to put the dogs in the other car as they’ll get it yucky straightaway.

Rob made a super dart board cover out of wood which he painted black and then we put the Austin FC logo on the front! Makes the whole room look super cool! And now when we play my misses will hit the inside of the case rather than damage the wall :)

Notice Woody’s tail. He follows me EVERYWHERE. Stoney doesn’t do this.

We have new neighbors who are a young couple with a 1.5 year old daughter. They seem nice. Further afield, along 290 even closer than Suds Monkey, they are building a bunch of new buildings- all of them will be fast food! Across from this there is already a sub place, chick fil a, tacos but soon we will have a P Terry’s , chinese, and I don’t know I forget, some other fast food we’ll never use. It’s already difficult for the existing places to staff their places so who knows how they’ll find employees. Anyway, not places we’ll probably ever visit.

I saw on-line where an adult tortoise would purposefully hit the wind chimes in the yard. So naturally, we hung a small set of chimes in Pangea’s habitat and sure enough, she chimes them! The first day she did them many times. Nowadays, we’ll hear them on and off. Yesterday she rang them several times, today not at all. So I guess just when she’s in the mood.

The usual cooking happens around here. One of our newer additions is homemade pizza that Rob puts on the big green egg. We used to get pizza from Suds Monkey or Pizza Cave or Jester King but honestly we’re disappointed with all of them so now we usually do it ourselves.

I was recently flipping through a community mag and liked the cover art which was a collage done by a local artist. In checking her out, I learned that she also curates an art space across 290 from us. It turns out that this hair salon, Salon Mystique, has an art gallery space throughout! I decided to go check it out and I found that the hairstylists all have separate rooms and work independently. So there’s long hallways connecting them all and that’s where the art is. Many artists were represented and some were selling for like a lot of money!

Anyway, I ended up messaging her and she said they will have a call out for work in the spring. Perhaps I could slap a frame on some of these gelli/embroidery things and see if they could hang in there? One thing I’d say is these gelli prints are not like the other art they have in there now. Most of the stuff is more traditional painting. Probably my favorite one I’ve made so far is this fish. I had glued an image of a fish down and then embroidered over it. I think the paper tore a little in places but you can’t tell. ;)

Gee I think my embroidery has gotten worse since I did this. Not sure I could do this again. Ugh.

More images below. By the way, Pangea was just ringing her chimes!

Disappearing Acts

This summer has taken a toll on our birds, and not just because it’s crazy hot. It started when Nessa decided to nest somewhere outside of our fence. She had been showing up in the yard about once a day to honk and eat/drink, but otherwise was nesting (she nests on the ground) somewhere outside the safe zone.

One morning when I was checking the trail cam, I saw this picture of a coyote carrying something, and I was like, uh-oh, that could be Nessa.

We never saw her again.

It’s sad, but then again, she was never really “ours” and she sure had it good while she hung out here. It was super fun for us too.

And more recently, I opened the coop one morning and….no chickens came out! Super weird as normally they all race out to eat. Well, three of our hens (the young ones) are broody, so they don’t move off the roosts, but normally Matt and the Hash Brown come out. So I was like uh-oh. I looked inside and…there was no Matt. Apparently she never made it in the night before. We had been noticing that she was always the last one in at night and she often will be off somewhere on her own. So likely a raptor or something took her.

Matt was super special, especially as we tended to her during a terrible fowl pox episode when we were sure she was gonna die. Ever since then, she has been 100% not scared of me whereas all the other chickens are wary. So it was really sad that Matt was taken, on the other hand, just a bit weird for us because there was no sign of the attack- no feathers or anything! So it didn’t feel as traumatic as it should. I like to imagine she was swept up and died before she even registered what was happening.

In fact, strangely, I’ve been feeling more badly for the Hash Brown, who is now the last remaining older hen. In the morning, she doesn’t come out for food because she hangs around all the other hens who are all broody and sitting in roosts! The Hash Brown used to follow Matt to the food and during they day they had each other and would cool off under the pool deck. The poor Hash Brown must be feeling really lost right now.

As for the broody hens, I take them out of the roost one-at-a-time a few times a day, often setting them into cool water as it’s burning hot out. Except for SiSi, because she has a mega fit every time and flies out of my arms when I get near the water. I’m sick of them all being broody but I suspect the heat makes it more likely and so this may go on all summer. At least they are still alive- I know a lot of chicken owners have been losing hens to the heat.

So we are zero egg production right now (broody hens don’t lay and the Hash Brown is too old to lay). But earlier this summer, Zsa Zsa laid an egg that was perfectly half-and-half colored! I guess the bloom was heavier on one end than the other.

Rob took a Shakespeare class recently (how to properly deliver the lines aloud) and after that he tried out for the next play the Wimberley Players are putting on, Romeo & Juliet. He is pleased that he got the part for Father Lawrence, and now he’s got a whole lot of lines to memorize! And starting next week he’ll be at rehearsals a few times during the week. I think then it’s a couple of months before the play is actually performed.

We ordered a self-refilling animal waterer which pretty much changed my life. It took a couple days to get the chickens used to it (in picture I sprinkled treats on it to lure them over). But now it works great! No more manually refilling the water! I do put ice cubes in though these days due to the extreme heat.

I’m tracking bird sounds every day and so far I have 49 types of birds on the spreadsheet!

We have a few things in the garden but the heat has baked most things except various peppers. In the front flowerbed our chili petin plant is growing like CRAZY!! Not sure what to do with them all.

We have a new game that’s SO much fun called Klask. It’s fast-paced and about action rather than a lot of rules. Recommend.

Somewhere in my social media there was an ad for a class on Domestika which I bought (real cheap) which is about embroidery on photography. So I kind of learned how to do basic embroidery but I was thinking it would look cool on gelli prints so I’ve done some of that. I’ll put a couple of pics below. Eventually I might embroider on my own pics but I kind of feel like it’s a better fit on gelli prints for some reason.

More pics below.

Always About Animals and Art

I’m still making botanical prints but not quite as often because, for one thing, the appearance of brand new wildflowers has waned, so I don’t have as many new things to try. I did make a couple of things with my prints though. I made a double-accordion book with one and with another one I made a hand-operated scrolling viewer so you can focus on one section at a time. I’ll put those pics below. Proud of those.

But another reason I haven’t done as many as that obsession has been replaced by a different one. I ordered a gelli plate and some acrylic paints and I’ve been playing around with them. I started with leaves and textures from around the house, and then I learned how to do image transfers. Super cool, just not sure what to do with all of the prints I’m making! Also, a lot of the stuff comes out yucky as I haven’t quite figured out how to get the layering to work well yet. I did make one collage so far. A couple pics below and then more at the end.

I also recently started using an app I’ve had for awhile but I didn’t realize how fun it is. It’s the Merlin Bird ID app. Just step outside and press record and it’ll identify bird songs in real-time, including the image of the bird species and the visual of the soundwaves. If I just step outside for like 5-10 minutes, I’ll get at least 10 or so bird species! I started a spreadsheet and I was thinking I could log the stuff I hear once in a while and after a year I could do a data visualization of it maybe. So far, it has identified 35 species!

Around the house, we’ve been eating flower petals from the calendula plants and the whitemouth dayflowers. Lots of baby deer around and recently I noticed one that was apparently stuck in our fence! I got the dogs inside and asked Rob to help, and he moved her over to a shady spot and within minutes the mom deer was back by her side. Phew!

She looks all broken but really she was fine. Rob said she weighed about the same as a piece of paper!

I was standing in the yard not long ago and watched a deer come up to the fence looking into the yard, waiting for a dog to see her. So Stoney runs over, and next thing they do is deer and dog are racing along the fence together! At the corner, they turn around and go back. Woody joined in and I watched for easily 5 solid minutes of top speed racetrack! This has happened more than once. Super hilarious. I finally went in for my phone and caught the last two laps on video but by then they weren’t going as fast.

Dogs are doing well overall. Rob ordered a tool that can grind the dogs’ nails rather than clip them since its super hard to cut their nails especially as they move at just the wrong time. And Woody’s are extra impossible since the quick of his nail is really far down so you can hardly cut at all before causing bleeding! (And his are always super sharp- we call them talons). So anyway we have done this a couple of times on the front paws and the grinding does seem better. Doesn’t cause them to freak out as much, but it still requires both of us for restraint and dogs panicking and crying, etc.

And I’m trying to decide this week if we should bring Woody in to the vet because he’s itching a lot and his underside is pretty reddish. They recently renewed their flea and tick medicine but all kinds of other things can be causing itching these days, including chiggers, which I have all the time. Stony itches a lot too but it seems like Woody’s condition is worse. At least to me. Woody is always worse about everything ;)

It’s crazy hot out, like 100 every day and even higher. Concerned for chickens so I have an extra bin of water in the shady part of yard and I put ice in it and the drinking water in the afternoon a couple of times. I know other chicken folks have lost chickens this week from heat so we are keeping our fingers crossed. We believe that they have cool dugouts under the pool deck which helps. There’s also two hens broody right now so when I pull them out of the roosts a few times a day I stick them in the tub of water which serves to cool them a little.

What I used to consider short jogs I now refer to as animal conservation tours because I inevitably find a critter that needs to be coaxed off of the street before it gets run over. Twice there were little baby checkered garter snakes - super cute! And literally one day in front of me a gentle tarantula was just walking across the street, no big deal! I was very pleased to get a picture and video of it. Not scary at all, just doing its thing and not really minding me taking a few glamour shots.

I recently participated in Game of Shrooms 2022 and I hid my “art” at Jester King Brewery (I got permission first). Unfortunately, no one bothered to go get it lol. That’s OK, but maybe next year I’ll make something cooler that’ll be desirable to hunt for! More pics below.

Spring Printing

One highlight recently was that Sarah & Bob were in town and so since it also happened to be Louise’s birthday weekend, we invited the clan over (a total of 10 of us) and we served pozole and enchiladas and picked up a birthday cake for Louise! Super fun to have everyone, and to meet Becca, Neil, and Ruth. Not sure they want to be pictured on my blog, so you’ll just have to visualize all the smiling faces :)

Our uncharacteristically social month continued when we hosted a friend of Rob’s for dinner, John, along with his wife, Mary, who were visiting Austin for the weekend. And most recently we met Susan & David at a Thai restaurant, Sway, that was roughly located between our homes as they live north and we are west of the city. Definitely will want to go back there.

John & Mary

Speaking of food, we have recently been using our chicken eggs primarily for omelets at lunch. Rob has the method down (I haven’t tried to do it myself—looks too hard!) and I always generously sprinkle them with garlic chives we have growing out back!

And on the topic of eggs, the other day when I went in the coop I saw a VERY large, white egg on the floor. It was apparently Nessa’s! It sat on the kitchen counter a couple of days until I got up the courage to EAT IT FOR LUNCH! It was obviously larger than a chicken egg, and the yolk was a higher percentage of the egg than in chicken eggs. To me, it tasted like the chicken eggs :) Hopefully we’ll discover more of those in the future.

Raine gave me a set of animal postcards she made and I finally found a fun way to show off the frog. I mounted it on a painted strip I had around, and then I glued a dead scorpion to the other end! It was fun to do an asynchronous collab!

With spring barreling along, there’s a lot of new flora and fauna. Trail cam sightings include skunk, fox, and armadillo. Saw a fawn on the side of the road this week, and the wildflowers come out one after the next, week after week. One plant I hadn’t really noticed until Regi pointed it out is called a sensitive plant. It grows low to the ground with purple spherical flowers and when you touch the leaves they fold in immediately! Super cool.

Of course there’s loads of these growing all over the neighborhood.

Our fruit trees are looking pretty good and the peach trees have small peaches already and there’s even a couple of plums on the plum tree!

Rob has just started attending a class in Wimberley once a week to learn how to better recite Shakespeare passages. It is good preparation for auditions. He doesn’t know if he’s gonna take it that far; for now it’s just a thing to explore and get to know the folks in the area involved with this kind of stuff.

So my focus has been making botanical prints. First because I have all the stuff now, but also as I mentioned, there are new wildflowers every week so I figure I need to try them all! Some plants are duds and not only make no mark, but are impossible to scrape off the paper afterwards. Can’t predict what will be good. So I just have to try everything.

Among the great performers are redbud tree leaves (come out yellow) and false dandelion (come out fiery orange). Some of the other wildflowers I’ve included in “bundles” include: antelope milkweed, groundsel, evening primrose, mexican hat, indian blanket, rain lily, agave, verbena, lantana, and ones from flowerbeds/pots like hibiscus, roses. Bluebonnets are all over but I’m too scared to cut one or who knows maybe someone will shoot me (and we don’t happen to have any in our yard). Of course I also throw in various leaves from trees, weeds, vines, etc. It’s endless and it also varies throughout the year. On top of that, I’m soaking rusty things to make iron acetate and I soaked some agarita leaves in that before a print and they came out nice and blackish. Eventually I’ll try out the copper acetate which hopefully will make leaves turn blue-ish.

Redbud tree leaf

current obsession

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current obsession 〰️

Now that the prints are coming out better, I’m not real inclined to embellish them with watercolor/pen or whatever (even though the instructor encourages it). She applies “matte medium” to hers to finish them off which I may do but I don’t really know what product to use. Maybe a couple layers of mod podge? And sure I could just hang one up as-is but maybe I’ll do something else.

I already ruled out placemats. Also découpage as that makes me feel all cheesy. I may want to make a table lamp by curling the paper into a cylinder and lighting it up from the inside but for one thing the strips are kinda small for this. I recently found a couple of broken tiki torches in a neighbor’s garbage and I thought maybe I could use the top part with my paper inside and light it up from inside??

Of course I can use it for cards too.

Recently Regi came over with a bunch of leaves and we BOTH made a bundle which was super fun.

More images below.

Double, double toil and trouble

Things are really picking up around here with spring’s arrival. Today, in fact, we are cleaning the chicken coop (for the first time ever). I mean, every day I do a quick poop clean-up, but we’ve never taken out all the hay and everything and hosed it down. We’re now waiting for it all to dry before adding fresh hay and stuff. The chickens have been in there despite it being empty and Zsa Zsa even laid an egg!

Before Paige came to visit we felt we needed to trim the dogs’ toenails—especially Woody’s as his are like talons! If we are to trim nails, then Woody will likely pee all over everywhere which means we really may as well give them baths as well. So using the hose we managed the bath part pretty well, and we even remembered that Woody gets “cold-water-tail” so we used a pail of warm water on his tail which worked to prevent it! But the nail-clipping was crazy difficult and Woody jerked his paw at exactly wrong moment and so he had one bleeding toenail for awhile. And then the annoying thing is that even after a trimming, Woody has crazy big sharp nails!

So Paige came to visit and it was nice and relaxing. We just ate stuff like shrimp tacos, tofu bowl, went to Jester King once, and did jigsaw puzzles. Paige and dogs were very happy to reunite! The airport was a mess at drop-off due to SXSW but she got home OK.

On the trail cam we caught our first RINGTAIL! Very exciting.

Regi recently invited me over and we plunged into “crafts”. She heard me mention that I had a large shell collection I could do something with, so she gathered up some extra glasses and vases and we pooled together all our shells, and warmed up our glue guns! It was pretty fun, we made some stuff. When you light up Regi’s from underneath, it’s the coolest thing.

So back at the house, I finally gathered the necessary materials to start working on botanical printing. The first step is to prepare your paper. I had ordered some very fancy, thick watercolor paper and tore them into thinner strips. These strips soaked in a bath of Aluminum Acetate and were hung to dry. This is the “mordant” which makes the dye stick to the paper. Then, in order to add protein to the paper, I soaked them all in a soy milk bath and hung to dry. Then I did the soy milk bath AGAIN and hung to dry.

Rob devised this clever clothesline which I can easily put up and dismantle. Of course, this day was SUPER WINDY so it was stressful trying to keep the papers from flying all over.

The papers had accumulated some concerning attributes by now: the pan I was using for soaking was a little rusty inside which got on the some of the paper, the soy had clung at certain places to the paper making it blotchy (maybe because I had created the soy milk from a powder??), and the papers weren’t flat. By the second soy milk bath, I was trying to squeegee them when I hung them up to get some of the clumpy bits of soy milk off. Anyway, none of this seemed to matter by the end anyhow. At least on the one strip I have done.

So next I had to prepare the dye pot! This is the extra weird part as the instructor fills it with eucalyptus leaves and branches and water and something rusty. I used some agarita leaves and stems, black tea, and a rusty chain. Super weird. So it all goes in a big pot and boils for awhile. All of this, by the way, is done outside because you don’t want to be inhaling the fumes. Then the next day you simmer the dye pot again. Then it is ready to use!

Generally one wears a witch’s hat when boiling the dye pot.

So finally I went ahead and soaked my strip of paper in water, patted it dry, and laid several different leaves and things on it. Wanted to try as various kinds to see what they’d do. Some were older ones which had soaked in water to get them to soften.

Then I rolled the paper tightly on a metal rod and tied it all up with string. Then placed it in the pot for like 90 minutes to simmer.

Then I “unbundled”! I hung it to dry. Then I ironed it flat. Below is the result.

So first off, it worked. In fact, it was bound so tightly that very little dye seeped in. On the other hand, I was hoping some of the leaves would generate MORE color than they did. Partially that’s because I was using brown, old ones. As spring is arriving, soon I’ll be able to use fresher ones and more variety. So I posted my result on-line where the class is and the instructor commented on it and basically said it was great for a first attempt.

So then for the heck of it I decided to try to embellish it (the instructor does this) and so I went overboard and tried out watercolor, marker, pen. I don’t like it but I felt like I should experiment. It overall still looks like something you’d have in a kindergarten school window but I feel in time I could start to make more interesting ones. I also would prefer to not even do any embellishing, but we’ll see how future ones go. I’m kind of waiting now until we see more spring growth before trying again.

More pics below.

Winter's End

I declared Spring this year in early February during a nice patch of weather. I just really wanted to move the plants outside that I had lined up in weird places by windows in the kitchen, bathrooms, and my bedroom. I hate winter, for one thing, and then I just was impatient about it all.

Now I’m blaming the plants for losing all their leaves and appearing to be dead. Shouldn’t they be able to handle a few light frosts? I feel like now that damage is done they’ll just have to stick it out (we are currently in one more, probably last, winter blast). I do believe a couple of plants will revive but no doubt I killed most of them. I don’t know why I get so impatient. Two of them were plants I started from seeds: pineapple and avocado. The pineapple was doing really well, so I hope I can start up another one.

The frogs around here, on the other hand, know how to deal with winter. A few days ago I recorded what sounded like frogs. But frogs when there are still below freezing temps? Yep, the audio was identified as Strecker’s Chorus Frogs (via iNaturalist). Apparently this is their most active part of the year!

Trail cam activity has lessened over winter. Fox was steady but otherwise just the usual rabbits and deer. But just in the last few days we see more including skunk and armadillos!

Check out this picture of Pangea…photobombed by a ladybug!

Other than that, we’ve been busy not doing anything to avoid omicron. Austin is still in Stage 5, but finally we seem to have reached peak so it should start to get better. We just saw our friends, Regi & Sean, at their place last night. It’s been literally months since we last saw them! Other than that, I’ve done a handful of “projects” to amuse myself.

Inspired by the Olympics, I built Pangea a cardboard maze. I placed her favorite foods at the finish line. Unfortunately, she barely moved and when she did, she hid in the nearest corner. Sulcatas don’t like change so if she’s ever gonna do the maze I’m going to have to make it part of the routine.

I have a pile of wood-like pieces and so I took one and painted on it hoping to do a mockery of the “live laugh love” crap. But it was poorly executed and just isn’t funny at all. I also made a few more things with eggshells and probably will do more of those in the future.

I thought I could make it funny :(

I’ve also purchased an on-line class in botanical printmaking on paper. This is going to take time. Currently I’m assembling the necessary materials. If I can get it to work at all, I think it will be interesting as the woman who teaches the class lives in Australia, so she uses Eucalyptus leaves and other native plants, and so I’ll be using a totally different palette here in central Texas.

Finally, we have all three of the young hens laying at the same time! And Nessa’s still very much here, in fact she stares at me through the living room window in the morning, reminding me to come out and open the coop so she can eat breakfast!

I’ve already spotted the first wildflowers of the season and the redbud tree is just starting to bud, so spring is literally right around the corner.

More pics below.

Home. And Home Some More

Paige came to visit over Thanksgiving which was swell. She loves the dogs and it was very mellow and low key.

Zsa Zsa and Cici have taken turns being broody. I was thinking it was all 3 of the young ones, but Rob pointed out it was just the two of them, but the thing is it FEELS like all three! After weeks and weeks of this then….Zsa Zsa is broody again! So it just goes round and round. There was a brief time when all three were laying, but it didn’t last long (the 3 older hens seem to be done laying for life). I decided the one silver lining of having to yank them out of the coop all the time is that it’s a fine opportunity for a selfie together.

Zsa Zsa is so fluffy

I was noticing that the coop was littered with feathers as many of the hens were molting this fall. So I gathered up a bunch of them and glued them to make a wreath. It came out OK- it actually looked best early on with just the fluffy feathers so I was thinking maybe next year I’d try again and just use those. We were both kind of thinking the feathers may be kind a gross/bug infested so anyhow we ended up hanging it in the chicken coop!

I was in California for Christmas so Rob held the fort while I was gone, about a week. For a few days we were concerned that Pangea hadn’t pooped in her daily soak like she usually does. We decided that maybe she just wasn’t used to Rob yet being the main caretaker. Sure enough, she finally pooped which caused minor celebration.

This blog is about our life in Austin, so not gonna talk about my trip but I will include a picture of the amazing squid earrings that Raine made for me!

By the time I returned, we were realizing how omicron was everywhere and we really don’t want to get it (I’m really concerned about long covid) so anyway we’ve basically been hunkering down ever since. We hope to resume sort of normal once omicron fades, maybe in a couple weeks from now.

Oh and in December I got in the pool and swam 4 times! It was cold, but I just kept moving. Now I’m afraid it’s too cold for me until Spring.

I guess sometime before omicron kept us from doing anything, we had dinner over at Susan & David’s place along with Karen & Doug Murray who were visiting Austin that weekend (from Minneapolis). So it was really fun to see their place and get to hang out with Karen & Doug again.

I was noticing recently that the little air plant that I stuck into a large-ish hole in our front stonework is actually still alive! I hope it makes it through the winter—I can’t recall for sure if it survived last winter or not but that seems hardly possible with the prolonged extra cold weather we had.

IT’S ALIVE!

Occasionally Nessa puts up her back feathers which looks really weird. Not clear why. Hard to catch her in those moments but I finally did the other day.

Most recently I used eggshell pieces and assembled them to make the United States (representing how fragile it is right now). I did Alaska and Hawaii too but the pic looked better just with continental U.S. They are just laying on posterboard so I will just wipe them away soon. But maybe I’ll do another thing like that and see if I can glue them down somehow? It will be hard as they are teeny weeny and fragile. Perhaps.

Gallery of more pics below. There’s been a lot of fun cooking that you’ll notice.