Will Dance for Food

Here's Daisy-hamming it up as usual for a potato chip.

A Coincidence?

...I think not. If you will recall Zorro was first seen scampering in the yard with Pip on April 30. Pip has 6 new babies today. You do the math.

Don't worry they will take the scent of the nest back on by tonight when Pip comes to feed them.


All snuggled in under the apple tree.

Royal River Cruiser

One of the odonata larvae in the garage lab hatched last night. This one, aptly named the Royal River Cruiser, is one of the largest species of dragonfly in our area, up to four inches long. Andrew overwintered the larva in the garage feeding them small guppies (that he gets at the pet store), and then as they hatch in the spring he photographs them, makes notes and releases them back to the habitat where they were collected. Each species of dragonfly has a tiny identifying characteristic and being able to identify them takes hours of careful study and a lot of patience. In my opinion this is not one of the most spectacular ones I have seen in regard to color but it's size makes it somewhat special.


Sometimes tiny parts near the wings are used to identify the individual.

Other times the abdomen or wings have an identifying characteristic.

Who Needs TV?

Pip and Zorro were scampering about the yard tonight jumping into the air, chasing each other and being their usual charming selves. I had a friend over who wanted to see the angoras and Pip joined us in the rabbitry. It was unreal. Zorro, who is always a bit wary, hung around on the outskirts. Later I saw Andrew photographing Pip using a tripod. She let him get really close. Later I laid down on the ground and talked to her about the rain drops while she was digging a new nest!

Pip is the one lounging

Here she is posing for Andrew

Talking about the weather.


A nest under the apple tree.

Wool in the Works

Today I spun up all the roving that I bought on Saturday at Wooster and washed and dried the BFL fleece that I bought from Lisa at Somerhill. The BFL is the cleanest (almost no VM) fleece I have ever seen and it washed up so nice. I will be sending the BFL, along with a pound of red and fawn and white angora that I just got this week from clipping some of the buns down for the summer, to Stonehedge for processing. The roving came from Wooley Knob in Indiana and it is merino with bits and pieces of fabric and whatnot mixed in it. It spun into the coolest novelty yarn ever. The yellow will become a felted purse and the purple and blue are going into hats.

Blue Faced Leicester fleece

Prime angora rabbit wool

Merino novelty yarn

Busy Birds

We have a nest of chickadee's and a nest of robins in the backyard. It has been so much fun watching the adult birds go to and from the nests in the past few days busily feeding their young. It's amazing how many different bugs and larva they are procuring this early in the season. Mama robin, as I mentioned previously, made her nest above our back porch light which means she gets disrupted several times a day when we go outdoors. So far she has been ok about it but she does protest vocally and we are starting to get a complex. LOL Both of the male birds have been on the nest as well working together the female to accomplish the feeding chores. Mama chickadee made her nest in a decorative bird house that I bought a JoAnn's. It's working so well I'm thinking about picking up a few more of them. We had a pop up storm yesterday afternoon with ferocious lighting and 1/2 inch of rain in less than an hour. All birds were high and dry.

Mama chickadee has a yellow larva in her beak.

All the baby chickadee's poised to be fed.

Mama robin has a larva too.

Earlier in the week.


Today their were 3 hatch lings.

Blues at the Wool Show...

and a whole spectrum of other colors...

I went to the Sheep and Wool Festival in Wooster today. My friend Lisa had a booth and I went up to keep her company and do a bit of shopping. It was a lot of fun. I bought some small balls of roving, some novelty thread and some dyed BFL locks. In the photo below the light blue merino has bits of blue jean material processed in it.


Chillin at the wool show.

Our Anniversary

2009

1999

Andrew and I celebrated our 10th anniversary today with a trip back to Clearcreek, which is where we got married. Unlike today our wedding day was during a monsoon which started about 10 days prior to the wedding and lasted through the day of. The above photos were taken in the same place - it just looks different from the angle and the amount of moisture. LOL

Pip's Back

Note: Unbelievably there was not one fish in the traps at Lake Emily so the continuation of that story (from yesterday) and photos will have to wait until a later date.

Pip's been missing since May 15th. Every morning and every evening I have called for her and she has been nowhere to be found. It crossed my mind that she had moved on. Dinner discussion had turned to speculation about where she could be and whether she was coming back. Tonight when I got home from work I opened the back door and stepped on to the deck there she was lounging in the grass just below and she didn't even bother to get up. Daisy went over and sniffed her and eventually Pip joined me in the rabbitry where she continued to lounge while I gave Phazana a haircut and fed everyone else. Later I figured out that she hadn't gone far after all because I found one of her babies (about 3 weeks old) running around under the hydrangea bush. She's a Pip alright. Fooled us with the nest too. All spring she hung out in the hydrangea and then dug not one but two nests in the middle of the yard about as far away from the hydranga as she could get and then went and had the babies under the hydranga. A diversionary tactic if I've ever seen one :-)

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A Day in the Trenches

Andrew and his colleagues spent the day doing a biotic survey of Lake Emily located within Clearcreek Metro Park in Rockbridge, Ohio today. Look at all the cool things they found in the vicinity while setting up their hoop nets for trapping fish (so they can be measured, weighed and returned to the lake).

Leopard frog (cute isn't he?)

Close up-Swamp Darner (dragonfly)

Common Water Snake

Ichneumon wasp Click for more details on this interesting insect.

The elusive Pink Lady Slipper orchid

Stay tuned - tomorrow's post will be the fish of Lake Emily.

Bevy of Beauties

We lined up all our Satin does at the show in Canton today. They sure are striking. Poor Howard Keller didn't know what we were up to when we asked if we could leave them all on the table after judging.

Here's me with Howard and Phazana who won Best of Breed in Show A. She now has a second leg toward her grand champion status.

I took a photo of Sienna while I was grooming her yesterday for today's show. She took Best of Breed in Show B judged by Bill Patrick. There were breeders today in French, Satin, and English.

In Flight and Coming In for a Landing

Look - it's the incredible flying Bichon. (We are so easily entertained). Daisy just had her bath and as soon as she has been toweled off and I open the bathroom door she makes a beeline for the couch so she can waller.

Some Days Are Diamonds

Take today for example. After dragging myself out of bed this morning still groggy from cleaning blue gill into the wee hours of the night I went in to work knowing I would find an empty office because all the faculty were out this morning for various reasons. None of the students came in to use the computer room either. It was like a ghost town and although I won’t complain about the quiet it I do find it to be less of an odd environment when there are people present. When I came back from my lunch break, which was quite nice by the way, there were 5 or 6 students hanging around talking and finishing up their class work. Sometimes I just want to ring the necks of some of our students. Like when they wait until the last minute to ask for something or hang out at my desk for no reason when I am clearly working on a project. Most of the time though I really enjoy having them around. I told them, since they were congregated in my office, how quiet it had been this morning and how happy I was to see them now. One of the guys was just sitting in the lobby and I asked him if he needed some help and he said no he had been to class and was actually waiting for me. Then he handed me a gift bag that contained one of those huge Yankee jar candles. He said he just had to get it for me because he remembered I had mentioned (in the course of conversation a couple weeks ago that a bunch of us were having about the fact that he and his brothers were getting their mom Yankee candles for Mother's Day) that I loved Yankee candles too. I kind of think it was his way of saying thanks because I spent some extra time helping him to get oriented at OC at the beginning of the quarter. In any case the gesture made my day a diamond day for sure.

Gone Fishin'

My friend and co-worker Patti called me at work around 4:45 pm and asked if we wanted to go fishing with her and her son. She's been talking about this sweet fishing spot for weeks; she knows everyone in the world and obtained permission to fish in a pond on someone's private property not far from where we both live. We were there by 6:30 pm and the 4 of us caught around 80 bluegill (average size 8 inches) and 6 large mouth bass. After awhile we just caught them and threw them back because Patti didn't want any of them and I didn't want to be cleaning fish until 2 am. It was a blast. We will save the fish to fry during a cookout in June.
The only thing better than fishing is catching.

Now there's some good eating.

Should we measure this one? LOL

Mason brings in a bass. (All that time he's spent in fishing club has paid off).

View of the pond.

Andrew and Patti are serious about their fishing.

Look What I Found on the Sidewalk

One of the neighbor kids drew a chalk bunny. I thought it was cute so I took a photo. There were several other drawings as well but of course this was the one I was interested in.

All About Angoras

My friend Lisa and I have been talking for months about making an angora display (and what to include and who our target audience would be) to take with us to fiber festivals and rabbit shows to promote the angora breed. I put the finishing touches on it this morning and it will make its debut at the Canton show on Sunday. Hopefully it will educate viewers on the different breeds of angoras and about their individual wool characteristics and how they are cared for. General angora care is about the same as with other rabbits with a few exceptions; in particular their need for extra cage space due to their size and that they should be kept under observation when molting so they don't develop wool block.

It's A Jungle Out There

Here's an updated photo of the rascally raccoons.
They are approximately 4 weeks old in this photo.

This is a Gray Tree Frog who lives at a private butterfly preserve in Delaware County.

This is mama robin building her nest above our back porch light and the subsequent laying of eggs in it. She flies away and then sits on a nearby tree branch and gripes at us when we open the back door. Some other bird built a nest there earlier this spring and abandoned it because we were coming and going too much. We also have another robin nest in the crook of our downspout in the front and she too flys away when we open the front door even though we are at the other end of the house from her nest. Goofy birds.

Happy Mother's Day

Me and mom at Cox Arboretum in Dayton.

Andrew back from his 200 mile bike tour (TOSRV) from Columbus to Portsmouth.

Enjoying the Garden

It sure is windy today. But the garden is still a beautiful place to be.