Miscellaneous pictures

We have a volunteer plant that grew in what my guys call The Bog. All the bugs love these flowers. Last summer we noticed some little yellow beetles were having a collossal orgy on them! Some of them were stacked 4 or 5 deep in a mating frenzy. This summer, I'm seeing wasps and ants as well as the horny yellow beetles. While the wasps are busy working those flowers, they don't even notice a camera looming inches from them. If I could package and sell to humans whatever it is in that plant, it would probably solve all the big world problems. No more wars. No aggression. Just slurp the nectar and spread the pollen!


Here are my guys installing a two-part garden pond that Mr. SABLE scavenged from the curbside. They all seem to enjoy endlessly moving around big piles of earth.


The Little Emperor is hoping to be accepted at the Jedi Academy. Of course, he's a little too old and has already formed strong attachments, so has the potential to be another Anakin/Darth Vader kind of Jedi. Clouded this one's future is.


The apple. This one has a backstory that goes to my childhood.

When I was a kid my parents had an aging sick apple tree in the backyard. Every year, the apples fell to the ground and rotted before ripening. My dad would occasionally get the idea that the apples needed to be picked up. It was one of my most hated chores. Ever go to pick up an apple and have your fingers squish right in to the rotten core? Multiply that by several hundred. I spent many late summer afternoons hiding way up in trees, hoping to avoid being seen, so that my dad wouldn't suddenly decide that an idle child needed a chore. Since he was a college professor, he had summers off, mostly, and was around enough to get ideas. When I was a young teen, they had the tree taken down and I was delighted to see it go.

When we bought our house here in Madison in 1997, it had an apple tree in the yard. It, too, was sick and old and dropped all its pathetic fruit before they ripened. I just let them decompose on the ground and ran the mower over them. One day I got my neighbor Chainsaw Pete to come over with his chainsaw and take it down. Problem solved!

So, that year for Mothers' Day (a holiday I hold with great antipathy) Mr. SABLE and Owen go off shopping and come home with...
an apple tree. When they asked where they should put it, I said, "Back at the store?" but they planted it anyway, in the middle of the lawn area (creating an island that I have to mow around) about 10 feet from the stump of the previous tree.

That was probably about 5 years ago? This year, the tree made its first apple. Which Mr. SABLE says is for me. I have to admit, it looks very nice hanging there, growing and ripening. It almost seems a shame to eat it.

BTW, I just added a sidebar link to a new photo album of my butterfly pictures. It's small right now, but I hope it will grow. Scroll down a bit and look under the heading Photos.