8/30/11 – Tuesday

Over at Daily Dose, Chrystal is taking orders for bricks to create a memorial walkway (Winnie’s Walkway) to the cathouse. All proceeds for brick orders will go to help with her rescue work (spay and neuters, supplies for the cats).

There are a last few days of August, which is Winnie’s Wish month – you can read about Winnie starting here or read an overview of what Winnie’s Wish is all about here; there are links at the top of each page, click on the one to the right to go to the next post – and Chrystal is absolutely flooded right now with cats and kittens who need loving homes. She’s at full capacity right now, and concerned because September always brings more kittens who need help. If you might be thinking about adding another cat to your home, go check out her sidebar and fall in love, or see her Cathouse Kittens and Crowded Cathouse posts or, really, there are a bunch of cats and kittens in her August posts, you can scroll through them.

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This past weekend, I worked in the garden on Saturday morning instead of Sunday.

I KNOW, right? Total anarchy!

There’s not a lot of gardening to be done right now, aside from picking tomatoes, okra, and peppers. And watering, constant watering. I can’t remember the last time we had rain – two weeks ago? Three? – and it’s super dry around here. I’ve been watering twice a week, but decided this weekend, after the squash started getting wilty on Sunday when I’d just watered on Thursday, to bump it up to every other day.

So, Saturday morning I had finished picking tomatoes, okra, and peppers, and tossed the crappy tomatoes to the chickens. I had just watered the few baby cabbage that sprouted (I didn’t get a very good germination rate for some reason, maybe because the seedlings were sitting in full, all-day sunlight and I think they were sprouting and then promptly frying to death in the sun. I moved them so they’ll get afternoon shade; we’ll see how that goes.) and I glanced into the wood shed. Fred had pointed out that yellowjackets had started building a nest in the back of the wood shed, and that reminded me that I’d been wanting to check something.

Beside the wood shed is an enclosed hose reel, like such. There’s not actually a hose on it – the hose is kind of tossed on the ground because we’re constantly moving it to water the garden. Since anything you leave stationary for more than ten minutes around here ends up with a huge ant nest built up under it, I wanted to look in the hose reel and see if there was one there.

(Seriously – last week I left two empty buckets, one inside the other, sitting on a garden cart for six hours, and when I picked the top one up, there was a flurry of ants trying to save their, uh, whatever the fuck those white things they carry around when the nest is threatened are. They’d built a nest between the bottom of the top bucket and the bottom of the bottom bucket.)

I lifted up the lid, and found to my utter amazement that there was a goddamn YELLOWJACKET NEST, CRAWLING WITH YELLOWJACKETS attached to the lid of the hose reel cabinet. As I am not, I have mentioned 358 times in the past, very good in emergencies, what I did was drop the lid and utter a short bark of a scream.

Immediately, I got the idea in my head that those goddamn YELLOWJACKETS were going to SWARM out of that nest and come straight for the idiot who’d disturbed them.

Now, this is what I wear when I work in the garden: a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, a long-sleeved shirt over the t-shirt (there are prickly things on the okra plants that make me itchy if they touch any of the skin on my arms), and a pair of mid-shin-high boots that are slightly too big for my summer-sock-wearing feet (they fit perfectly in the winter when I wear thick socks).

So, to recap: I lifted the lid, saw the nest, dropped the lid whilst screaming. Then I began running like a great big dork in my big ol’ clomping boots. Fred was a few feet away, filling a bucket with water, and as I ran past him I yelled “OH MY GOD, RUN!”

To his credit, Fred didn’t start up with the “What? Why? What’s going on?” He just started running. And in fact, he ran past me. We ran in silence (except for the clomping of my boots) for about thirty feet. Then Fred stopped and turned around and looked at me.

“Why are we running?” he asked.

I stopped, turned around to look at the hose reel, saw a couple of things flying in our general direction, and yelled “RUN! I DON’T WANT TO DIE LIKE MACAULEY CULKIN IN MY GIRL!”

He joined me in running again, and we ran until we were at the front of the house, whereupon he stopped again.

“WHY are we running?” he demanded. I finally told him, and we stood at the corner of the house and watched for an angry cloud of yellowjackets to fly toward us. They never did – maybe, it being early morning, they were still sleepy. Or maybe yellowjackets don’t swarm.

We went into the house and Fred got the wasp spray and went out and sprayed both nests. That stuff works so quickly that he didn’t get stung by a single yellowjacket.

I sure never felt like there was always something trying to kill me when we lived in the ‘burbs, but here it seems to be an every day occurrence!

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Playful Peppers.

You can probably tell that I was waving a feather teaser around over their heads to get their attention. Lucy in the back was complaining that I wasn’t letting her grab it.

Everett’s all “I’ve got it, bro!”

“What?”

Molly monkey walked right into a belly flop.

“Hey! The lady’s here! Go tell her to give us snacks!”

Such a gorgeous girl.

Harlan and the spotted belly.

Sweet Lucy in the sun.

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Smilin’ Joe (Bob). I know I always say it, but it bears repeating: sweetest boy EVER.

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Previously
2010: Don’t make me say it, we don’t need to be talking in detail about that stuff so early in the morning, so early in the week, right?
2009: No entry.
2008: No entry.
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: Jessica Simpson, if I want to see you doing the Tush Push for an entire song, I will go out and buy Nick & Jessica porn that your father will SURELY be flogging any day now.
2004: “SOMEWHERE WHERE I CAN GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE SOUND OF THAT TELEVISION!” I bellowed.
2003: Sometimes.
2002: Basically, I’m just a freak.
2001: Now I’ll never know if Lance was going to put the moves on me!
2000: Insects are invading our house at an alarming rate.