Lost, Shmost, it's Sweeps Week on Cat TV, too, you know...

Yes, Spring means "sweeps week" for our local Cat TV stations (aka windows on the lower levels of the house).  Besides the regularly scheduled programming of Birdies, Squirrels and Chipmunks, we also get the big guns - BUNNIES!!

Though, all the hours of sweeps week excitement do tend to tire a kitteh right out............

Phriday Photo Phun Phiesta: Photos, the Next Generation

Wow, I've totally deserted my blog of late, sorry 'bout that. I have many excuses, truly I do. It appears I last posted on a Wordless Wednesday a week ago, and now here we are with a Phriday Photo Phun Phiesta. I would have phantabulous photos to share, if I hadn't had my excuse-laden week happen. (By the way, I'm totally about to plagarise myself from a comment I left over on the fantabulous Andy's blog. Oh, and she is having a giveaway right now so you might want to pop over there, but then again, *I* want to win the giveaway, so maybe never mind, not to mention then you'd see this next bit in its orginal context....) Anyhow, I’ve been hit with a double whammy this week, part one consisting of a massive allergy attack following my lawnmowing escapades of Monday afternoon, which resulted in two subsequent days of red, watery eyes, red, stuffed up, Rudolph-would-be-jealous nose and a permanent fog from massive doses of antihistamines that would only clear for a few brief seconds during “damn, I think I actually just sneezed my nose off” sneezing spells. Whammy Part Deux came the day before yesterday, when, coming off the heels of my allergy attack, I was at the gym and pulled something in my lower back. Well, okay, fine, I actually began to pull the something in the shower before going to the gym, when I dropped my little scrubby bath puff thingy and had to BEND ALL THE WAY OVER to retrieve it from the shower floor and my back said “BEND ALL THE WAY OVER? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? SOMEONE YOUNG AND LIMBER? HAHAHAHAHAHA!” and twanged ominously. But, since hurting oneself at the gym at least sounds like one isn’t utterly pathetic and my back did twang ominously again while stepping down off the elliptical machine, I’m going with that. Annnnnnyhow, however it began, I pulled something in quite a painful way two days ago, and it got progressively worse as yesterday wore on, so I’ve been hobbling around slowly and heavily, all hunched over, for the past 24 hours, cursing myself for choosing to put the ibuprofen (along with all the other medicine-type things) waaaaaaay up on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet so Kiddo can’t get to them because, as I’m presently about 2/3 of my height, I can’t reach them either. Kiddo has proved useful in other ways, though, such as fetching me icepacks from the freezer…

"Wow!" you're no doubt thinking to yourself, "this blog post claimed to be full of Photo Phun and so far all I've read is Heather whinging on about her hunchbackedy sneeziness!" (Oh, and by the by, have you ever had a massive sneezing fit while suffering from extreme lower back pain? Ouch to the nth degree, let me tell you!) "Hmmm," you further are thinking, "When and where are these phun photos going to appear?"

Well, fear not, dear reader, because Kiddo has stepped up to the plate, pinch-hitting for her Rudolph-Hunchback mama. You see, Kiddo is a shutterbug in her own right, albeit one with a fairly lame, low-quality digital camera. Kiddo has been snapping pictures like mad all week, and since *she* took 286 photos this week to my 0 photos, she is going to be featured here today.

On with the show!

Here's proof that I am, in fact, Quasimodo:

Working hard on my computer, if by "hard" one means "playing Farm Town and Farkle on Facebook" .....



Sitting at the table, trying to read, eat breakfast and remain upright all at the same time:



(You'll note the abundance of wadded up tissues next to me in each shot above; sorry her camera isn't high-quality enough to capture the Rudolphian/W.C. Fields nose itself.)

As I was turning out to be quite a boring subject, Kiddo turned her camera to more exotic species of wildlife in the form of Chompy, one of the rabbits that frequents our yard. These were from Chompy's daily visit as taken out one of the office windows:







Once Chompy had ventured on to yards beyond our own, Kiddo found herself another model. This is Buster, a member of her Stuffed Animal Entourage...

Posing on top of a TV tray,



on top of my rapidly dwindling supply of Puffs Plus in my office,



on a placemat on the dining room table,



and in EXTREME CLOSE-UP!



Kiddo also took many self portraits.... This one's my favorite.



So, there you have it. Photo Phun courtesy of the Next Generation Shutterbug in my house! Hoping you are all having a much more upright kinda Phriday, and for more Photo Phun, pop on over to Candid Carrie's!

(egg) Breaking News!!!

I just took down the petunia baskets to water them, as they're quite droopy between the sun and the brisk, hot breeze, and look who decided to pop out:



This is the baby out of the presumptive sparrow egg, (as you can see) the five matching, smaller eggs are still intact. Mama Finch was super ticked at my disruption of her motherly duties - I watered as fast (yet carefully) as I could and rehung the basket while she cheeped and cheeped at me. She went back to the nest as soon as I'd closed the front door behind me. I'm guessing we'll have more babies in the next couple of days, as the egg that hatched today wasn't the first one laid. Woo-hoo! (Also, I haven't seen the sparrow hanging around in the past couple of days, either in the front near the nest or in the back yard, where this year's birdfeeder frequenters are eating us out of house and home, or at least out of gigantic bags of seed.)

In other nature and wildlife-related news, yesterday after church I was mowing the lawn when, in the back yard along the back of the kiddo's sandbox, I came across this:



It's about two feet long, and isn't a complete specimen. I skeeved Hubby out by picking it up with my bare hands and bringing it inside to show him and the kiddo. (The kiddo who promptly requested to bring it in to school today to show to her class, which she did with great excitement this morning.) Once it was safely contained in a gallon-sized baggie and my hands had been thoroughly washed, Hubby was more inclined to inspect the snake skin. Now, we've only ever seen garter snakes around our little piece o' property, and the largest of those that we've ever spotted was maybe a foot long. Neither of us believe this came from a garter snake, and I have no idea what kind of snake it belonged to before it was shed. Here's a close-up of the skin in case there are any herpetology enthusiasts out there who might be able to identify it.




I was thinking of taking it (with the kiddo) to the zoo and seeing if anyone there might know, but with the AC issue (as described in painful detail in my previous post) I didn't want to do any extra driving today. Let's hope that whatever type of snake it is, its diet consists primarily of many, many voles and that if so, s/he sticks around for the rest of the summer. It'd be awfully nice to be vole-free, especially without having to resort to placing boxes of rodent poison way under the deck (well out of any human or feline's reach) as we've had to do a few times in previous years when the vole infestation has been particularly prolific.

We're positively brimming with wildlife 'round here! Between the birdies, the snake, the toad I almost ran over with the mower, Bunny Foo-Foo (who has munched a good portion of this year's food garden, now replanted and surrounded by organic Keep-Bunny-Away granules), the vole community under the deck and the geese, ducks, herons, deer, muskrats and what appears to be a beaver family in the pond out behind our back yard, well, call up the ghost of Marlin Perkins and have him bring a camera crew on over!

Garden 2008 plans...

The kiddo and I (presently stuck indoors with her stomach bug) have been discussing what we want to plant in our food garden this year. So far, this is the list:

• tomatoes (cherry and full-size)
• peas (usually we do sugar snap peas)
• green beans (we had much better success with pole beans than bush beans last year, so will probably do them again)
• basil
• parsley
• cucumbers
• potatoes
• watermelon
• pumpkins
• sweet corn
• spinach

Now, the last 5 are the kiddo's requests. I have a sneaking suspicion we'll wind up with very sad looking potatoes if we try them, given how craptastically the carrots turned out last year. As far as the spinach goes, I'm happy to try planting some this year, as it is presently her favorite veggie (raw, with ranch dressing for dipping), and it seems silly (and expensive) to keep buying if I can grow it myself. I had decent results the year I planted romaine lettuce, so I'm hoping that spinach will be similar. Hmm, I might even plant a few heads of romaine again this year, too...

We tried corn one other time, and it failed miserably. I'm going to have to do some research and see if there's anything I can do to grow corn that is higher than a bunny rabbit's eye. Pumpkins and watermelons similarly have not been good crops for our little garden plot, but I'm hoping to use a method I inadvertently developed last year with the cukes and see if that helps. You see, last year my cucumbers went crazy and were taking over not only their section of the garden, but the lawn surrounding it as well. Out of desperation, I stuck some tomato cages around them and wound the vines up and around the cages. Whaddya know - best cuke crop I've ever had! I've read about growing vined fruits and veggies on a trellis (with appropriate supports for the fruit as it grows) and I think I may try that for the melon and pumpkins. Maybe we'll get a few melons and a pumpkin or two out of it - something larger than a golf ball, even! I'll also need to step up my vole and Bunny Foo-foo garden defenses, as last year Bunny Foo-foo ate my tomato seedlings down to the ground overnight and the voles took out most of my melon blooms before they'd had a chance to fruitify. The netting I used to protect the berry patch from the birds worked well - I might try to do something like that over the food garden too, or at least some sort of edging/fencing to keep the critters out.

We haven't started any seeds yet, actually we haven't even bought any seeds yet. I'm thinking in another week or two, we might be ready for our first trip to the garden supply store of the year, so long as the weather stays warmish and sunny... Woo-hoo!