School's Out for the Summer

School's out for the summer.  School's out forever. 

Cover of the 1972 US single, from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School's_Out_%28song%29

Anyone knowing me can probably guess I am not much of an Alice Cooper fan.  Truth be known, I did not even know who had done that song until I looked it up.  In any case, that song has been the earworm attacking me recently as I have been cleaning out my office of 35 years of all kinds of accumulated stuff junk.  Although I have filled multiple recycling bins, given away several hundred books, and lugged home many boxes of books, papers and other miscellaneous stuff, I still have more sorting to do. 

The good news is that my office is essentially finished and very little if anything more will be coming home.  Even better news is that I have found space in the book shelves at home for the books I am keeping.  The bad news is that we need to make space in the storage unit for quite a few boxes and then make the multiple trips to get them there.  Until we can do that, those boxes are stacked in the hall and in the dining room. 

Since I still have all of these tasks hanging over my head, the finality of it has not yet sunken in.  That will probably happen this fall.  Except for two years in the mid-70's, this will be the first time in 59 years that I will not be starting school in the fall.  (For those two years between undergrad and grad school I was working and not in school.  However, since I was living two blocks off of the OSU campus, I was very attuned to school and school activities.  I even remember some of those school activities:  I attended at least one of the home OSU football games and remember seeing Archie Griffin playing.  On a different occasion I walked to the stadium from my apartment after a victory over "that school up north" to see what was left of the goal posts as they made their way out of the stadium.)

No school does not mean no learning.  I am still reading a lot and taking online courses.  However, the biggest new learning experience will be learning to do vegetable gardening in Texas.  Gardening in Texas really is a totally different undertaking than gardening as I thought of it growing up.  Since it is too hot for most plants to grow here during the summer, the growing seasons are spring and fall (plus even winter for some things).

Most of our gardening adventures will need to be the subject of separate posts, but I can report that the raised bed was installed yesterday by Liberty Urban Agriculture.  Stay tuned.

Mother's Day

Yesterday was Mother's Day and it was definitely good because we got a call from Gwen.  It was so good to hear about all of the things going on in her life, much of which is centered around SCA. 

It is spring time here, so there are lots of other mothers around on this Mother's Day.  We saw this mother duck and her little ducklings in Unity Park in Highland Village while on one of our morning walks last week.  There was also another set of baby ducklings with parents along the bank, but they were all huddled together and sleeping.

One of at least two sets of baby ducklings on the fishing pond at Unity Park in Highland Village

We have also seen lots of birds with their babies in our backyard.  Several weeks ago the wrens in the birdhouse left the nest and are now everywhere.  We have seen chickadees feeding young chickadees, finches feeding young finches, and blue jays feeding young blue jays.  There are likely other young birds in the yard, but it is often hard to tell which are young birds and which are full grown unless they are going through the flapping of wings and cheeping "feed me" routine,   However, probably the best of the baby birds we have seen is in the wobbly cell phone video below from late April.

From the video you can see that the new landscaping plants are doing well.  We just recently planted the burgundy colored purple shamrock plants in front of the bird bath.  The ferns are thriving and most everything else is doing well except for perhaps the dwarf mondo grass.  In most cases the mondo grass is doing essentially nothing, but at least the squirrels have stopped trying to dig them up.  Crazy squirrels!

What may not be obvious in the video are the birds on the hanging feeder.  That feeder contains, Jim's Birdacious Bark Butter Bits, bite-sized nuggets made of rendered beef suet, soy oil, roasted peanuts, corn, oats and calcium carbonate.  Ummm....yum.  It would not be my favorite, but the Wild Bird's Unlimited website now claims that at least 138 different birds have been seen eating the stuff.

Jim, by the way, is Jim Carpenter, the founder and CEO of Wild Bird's Unlimited and the original creator of these bird treats.

We have not seen 138 different types of birds, but it is definitely a favorite among the birds in our yard.  It is especially loved by the woodpeckers, both the Downy woodpeckers and the red-bellied woodpeckers.  Shown below is a zoomed in version of a portion of the video above. 

It is very jerky in this zoomed in version since I was trying to hold my cell phone, but the opportunity to catch these two Downy woodpeckers on the feeder was just too good to pass up even if the video quality is poor.  Happy Mother's Day to mothers everywhere!