And I caught the perpetrator on camera. Yep, there’s no denying that there is a thief in the neighborhood…
armed toothed and dangerous. Report him to authorities and you might be the one to receive a reward…
Fried squirrel with mashed potatoes and squirrel gravy. Mmmmm. Aren’t you glad you stopped by this Sunday!
All through the Garden is a pond with some beautiful Koi swimming lazily around.
The water was so still today that the fish looked like they were swimming in the limbs of the trees that were reflected all around the park… Some examples for those Koi lovers among us.
But then we turned a corner on the path and here was the biggest blessing of this turn through the Garden…
As we stroll out I will leave you with pictures of more plants and of the curved bridge. Thanks for letting me share this wonderful day with all of you. I hope that the length of this post was not offsetting and that you enjoyed this visit to the Japanese Gardens in Ft. Worth almost as much as if you were there with us.
And one more surprise as we turned another bend in the walkway…
What an incredible cycle of life.
Do you ever have those days that will stand out in your mind for ever how long you have your mind? Last Wednesday was one of those for me.
I had gone to Ft. Worth for a quickie visit to pick up my new glasses (thank you B. & D.) Diane, my s.i.l., had had to have her back injected so that left Baby Brother Ben and I to our own devices. He loaned me a new (to me) camera that can do a lot more than my current point and shoot and while you can’t change the lens it has a much better lens with wider options and way longer telephoto capabilities as well as macro capabilities. He initially loaned it to me for thirty years but then decided to make that twenty eight years because he didn’t trust me with it for thirty.
He wanted to take me to the Ft. Worth Botanical Gardens for the butterfly exhibit so we could try out the new equipment and he could show me things about the camera to get me off to a quicker start but as we got closer we realized that people were parked up to a mile out and walking in… It was spring break week, it was a beautiful day and people were out in droves with their children. We later found out that the Ft. Worth Zoo had a record day that day also, over 25,000 visitors.
So we drove on down just a little ways to the Ft. Worth Japanese Gardens. We were able to find a close in parking spot and off we went to play with our cameras for a while before meeting my sis and her husband after his chemo for lunch… What follows gives you a clue as to a few of the reasons this day was so very special to me.
To borrow a phrase from the wonderful Paul Harvey, Spud the mud puppy saga continued…
When we left, Spud, our hero (or villain, depending on how you look at it) was being hauled off to the shower.
He had a real good time playing in the mud and now came the time to pay the piper.
The alien dog has met his come-uppence… Momma has the water turned on and she is moving in with the shampoo. He is helpless to act. It is a bath or being shut up for the night instead of cuddling in the nice warm, soft bed.
The question remains… Why does Spud, the pup that gets out and swims around in the ponds biting at the bubbles so not likes getting a bath?
Saturday evening the phone rang and it was Bailey, Cuz’s youngest granddaughter… “Granny, Spud looks like an alien! He’s been up here at the dairy barn and mom and I’ve been giving Candy Cane her bath and he’s been playing in the water and got all muddy!”
Sure enough when they got through with the heifer and came down to the house here came the ‘alien’ dog…
Windows Live Writer is being stupid today. It keeps quitting so this story will be continued…
Or mornings that try women’s souls. The nights that drag by, the nights that it seems I hear every clock tick in this marvelous world of battery operated clocks that in truth, don’t… This is one of those nights that thoughts bounce around in my head like ping pong balls, one of those nights where my mind can’t really settle on one thing to lull myself to sleep with, instead I’m jerked like a fish on a hook from one thought to the next.
How much iodine did we mix with baby oil back in the day when it was far from any doctor’s mind that tanning might not be really very good for your skin, much less the possibility of being lethal…?
Have I ever written about learning to ride a bike on my big sister’s bike? The one that the seat was too high for me to sit on but I wanted to learn so badly to ride that I would stand on the pedals, my hands having to reach up above my shoulders to hold onto the handlebars…
Or about the times that we, my brother and the neighbor kids and I, would have ‘hoe-downs’ in the front yard that were nothing more than our mother’s prayers being answered that we were running off the excess energy before bedtime, wrestling or chasing fireflies to catch and put in a jar with holes carefully punched in the lid so we wouldn’t suffocate them, no matter that occasionally we would pinch their glowing butts off to make rings for our fingers or a pin on our t-shirts…
Maybe it was an evening for playing ‘statue’ when the bigger kids would whirl us around and then let our hands go and how we stopped we had to hold that position… until we were itchy from falling in the grass on sweaty summer evenings until we were called in for our baths before bedtime and how sweet and fresh the sheets smelled from being hung out on the clothesline to dry in the sunshine and summer breeze back in the day before clothes ‘dryers’ came to live in our basement.
Did I ever tell you that I could dribble a basketball one hundred times without missing a beat before I was four or that my mom had her first heart attack the summer I was twelve and I thought for years it was my fault because I had been out playing all day and she didn’t know where I was? Of course it was no different than any other summer day when my baby brother and me and the next door neighbor had been out riding our bikes, playing in our hideouts or walking to the neighborhood store three blocks away back when kids could walk to neighborhood stores but still I knew it had to be my fault…
Or about the crush I had on the cutest boy in the sixth grade class, a little blond/tow headed kid that right now I can’t remember his last name but I can remember riding bikes with around the school yard singing every song I could think of from the musical “Oklahoma” thinkin’ I could get him to fall in love with me even though I didn’t have a clue, though I thought I did, about what love really was… probably the very first crush I ever had on anyone that I can recall right now?
Or about the crush I had on my p.e. teacher the very next year that drove that little blond/tow-headed boy that had gone on to another school right out of my memory? And did each and every one of us have a crush on our p.e. teacher or band teacher or English teacher no matter what sex they were?
Thinking about how Hallie loves weiners and how I love schnauzers and how wonderful it is to have all these differences that make us each so unique and to really enjoy the facets that make us all bright and shining stars in a universe, a galaxy, a milky way of personalities and how we find each other by such random ways in our different worlds… A coincidence? The birds of a feather axiom?
All these thoughts and more… and it is now six in the morning, I’ve been to bed four times only to toss and turn, finally giving in and getting up to go read stuff on FaceBook or to play Farmville or Cafe World trying to lull myself into mind numbing stupidity to slow my brain down enough to finally fall asleep and, obviously since I’m typing this missile, it hasn’t worked and since I’m going to get my hair cut at nine I will just give up, plan on staying up and hopefully watching the sun that we haven’t seen in a day or three rise in the east only to be fighting sleep in the chair while getting my hair cut or, better yet, laying getting my hair washed and my scalp massaged and feeling totally pampered…
Or is all of this brought on by withdrawal from watching more butts that you could bounce a silver dollar off of during the past two weeks, glutes and pecs and traps that were hewn and cut by hours, weeks and years of a single pursuit, a focus and a direction that I never in my a.d.h.d. life ever knew for more than, oh, perhaps twelve minutes whether in pursuit of my next meal or Olympic Gold?
Or is this no more than the sleepless ravings of a feverish mind?
Who knows…?
The Shadow knows…
Who cares?
Hallie, when did you corner the market on Ambien and why won’t you share?
I’m not dead. I just feel like h.e. double hockey sticks. I’ve been down with the worst cold I’ve had in a long time. Started off with bubbling in my right ear. Should’ve known something was coming on because usually it’s my left ear bubbling and that’s not an unusual thing for me. My left ear is kinda stupid anyways, what with the tinnitus and partial deafness, but I digress… Don’t you love that term? There is something musical about it… I digress… much more so that I transgressed or, well, you get what I mean. Anyhow, I’ve been down for a week with the cruddy cough, sinus drainage and throat irritation that aggravated the nasty cough. I’ve been hitting the Sudafed, the Mucinex, the NyQuil and anything else that I thought might put a stop to all of the aforementioned symptoms.
The saving grace in all this was that it happened during the Olympics and I’d already put everybody on notice that I would basically be unavailable for the duration of said Winter Games. I don’t know about you, but I think a vacation every couple of years is warranted and, again, I don’t know about you but I think it flat out sucks when you get sick on vacation. That’s what you have sick days for … even retired folks are entitled to sick days where you don’t have to do “honey-dos” or “want-to dos” but, dang, on vacation???!!!
Then there is the weirdness that happens when you put all that mixture of o.t.c. meds in the feverish boiling pot of your body. I got to thinking about some strange things and for me to admit to thinking my thoughts were strange is, in and of itself, strange. I mean my friends and family all tease me about having playdays in my head anyway and are used to me coming up with off the wall thoughts.
Last night I had turned off the t.v. and was playing on the computer, a game that only required one finger to move on my mouse, not all ten fingers like to type this idiocy… I heard what sounded like someone crying, an adult, a woman, talking to someone like you would on a phone. I brushed it off that it was probably something on the t.v. in the other room and then in a minute I heard it again. It was so real to me that I got up, remember this is about 1 a.m., and looked into my cousin’s bedroom across the hall from mine to see if she was in distress about something, nope, she wasn’t even in bed yet. I walked on into the dining area and looked into the den and she was reading, nothing wrong there, and I looked at Bro and told him I’d been taking too many drugs and was hearing things. The show that he had on t.v. was one of those daily catch up the gossip “news” shows from the Olympic village and there was no crying woman on there. I explained what I had heard and he said they had done a piece on Anna Nicole after her son died and she had been crying during the interview. Whew… that explained the crying woman I was hearing…
Now if I can figure out how to solve the problem of “Indian drawers”, you know the kind, they always creep up on you, and figure out how to fix the “Free Willy” zipper on my jeans (even though I don’t have a Willy to free you know the zipper that opens up on it’s own) and get over this cold all will, once again, be right again in my zany world.
