Ramblings...

Is a lovely evening, clear, still, frogs and birds calling, chickens doing their chicken antics. It's amazing how much entertainment can be provided by a flock of a dozen or so nearly brainless little feathery dinosaurs meandering around the yard doing their little poultry things. Our place lies in the hollow between two north-south trending ridges, so as I gaze eastwards in the evening I watch the last of the sunlight glowing red on the trees atop the ridge. Kind of a mini-alpenglow. Soon the little feathery dinosaurs will amble into their house for me to close them in, safe from the many nocturnal critters for which they would be tasty treats.

Just picked another basket of snow peas, with the help of Ruby (the hound). Evidently she likes fresh snow peas too. We wore her out over the weekend, showing her off at the Renn Faire on Sunday and setting up the equipment for lure coursing on Monday (that's the machine that drags a lure -- i.e. white plastic bag -- along the ground on a zig zag course at a high rate of speed to provide great entertainment for sighthounds like her). Big storms rolled through the night before last, much sound and fury, no damage done in our neighborhood, but one person killed just two counties over to our east. Watched the radar showing a possible tornado passing right over the hotsy totsy Cool Springs shopping district (south side of Nashville) but alas there was no twister on the ground and the malls were NOT wiped off the face of the earth. There are more tornados here than I was accustomed to in Georgia and South Carolina. I had hardly been here a month before I watched a small one travel right down my hill (same ridge I just watched the sunset glow on tonight), suck up a nice cloud of water from the neighbors pond, and pass about 20 feet west of their back porch. Probably would have done no real damage anyway, it was a dinky thang -- F0, or maybe F1, the "landspout" kind of tornado; or I guess momentarily a waterspout when it crossed the pond, eh? But still, it was a tornado passing right through my back yard...

Sunlight gone, chickens home to roost.

The other night we were watching one of the Harry Potter movies. I commented that I wanted Hagrid's job. Peggy glared at me and said "You already HAVE Hagrid's job!" Damn, she wasn't supposed to have noticed that...