Tired today

Guillermo was up a lot of the night last night observing the raccoons.  He watched as they actually climbed that narrow little pole and even hung around on the top of it.  And here we thought that there was no way a raccoon would be able to navigate that skinny pole.  But they put their feet flat against the pole and work their way up.

Guess it's now on to Plan J..........  Well, not really.  He hasn't tried that many times, but it SEEMS like it.

Before living in this house, I would always admire all the homes that had oak trees in their yards.  Oak trees always seemed so majestic.  We had Ash trees at our old house and while they were nice, Ash trees have problems and during the spring they drop stuff and coat everything with pollen.  Well, Oak trees do the exact same thing!

We have one Oak tree in our front yard - a very nice one.  First it was all the little oak leaves that fell day after day after day.  Filling up our pots and getting in the gardens and making everything look messy.  Raking our own yard would help some, but leaves from the neighbor's yards and trees usually made their way into our yard anyway.  Now the Oaks have stopped dropping leaves and instead are now coating everything with yellow pollen and dropping old flower blossoms.   Look at the pollen all over our table and chair!

And unlike Ash trees, we have been told that Oak trees go through all that process TWO times a year.  We shall see.......

Raccoons = relentless

The score may be Guillermo 5 - Raccoons 25 now.  Those raccoons have figured out a way to get to Guillermo's latest set up that he was pretty sure was going to foil them.  This problem is not going away anytime soon, apparently.  So, he re-configured the setup of the feeders and we'll see how round 10 goes tonight.

Here's Guillermo working on making those feeders more difficult to reach.

So, we'll see how THIS works.

Garden's growing nicely, the peach tree is no longer blooming and has small peaches on it and to the left of the peach tree you can see the new little tree that Guillermo planted.  A persimmon.  AND, he ALMOST chopped another TV cable digging the hole for that tree.  We're not sure if it's part of our other cable or if it is the cable to the neighbor's house.  But he saw this one in time.  Whew!

There's the new little Fuyu Persimmon.  The garden behind it by the fence is the garden Guillermo was digging when he chopped the cable last week.

We've got a few little blackberries on the way.  Hope they stay on till they're ripe.

Blueberries waiting to be planted, with an artichoke plant between them.

And Guillermo just planted a little Celeste Fig tree next to our lantanas.

Guillermo cleaned up the side yard where he stores most of his gardening stuff so it looks a lot neater.  He also planted a Lady Banks Rose all the way to the back of this picture (which is actually towards the front of our house).  We're hoping the Lady Banks rose takes off and covers that wooden fence.

Big MAJOR oops

Guillermo and I enjoyed yesterday a lot.  The weather was nice and warm with the promise of some good rain later on in the evening.  We did a lot of stuff outside such as raking up leaves, repotting plants and then deciding to dig up another area for a new garden.

Oops.  Well, in the late afternoon Guillermo is out there hacking away a line in the grass with his pick axe.  I'm inside getting ready to transfer some money online into our savings.  Next thing I know the internet is off and the TV quits working.  Ok, the internet goes out sometimes, so hopefully it'll be back on soon.  Nope.  Guillermo comes in a little while later saying he has some bad news.  Yep.  He chopped the cable line.  So THAT'S why the TV went out and the internet left.  I went outside to see and sure enough, the line is chopped in half.  It figures that the very line he was cutting in to the dirt to create the border of the garden was along the exact same path that the cable line was running.  Crazy thing is, this cable line was like only two inches under the dirt.

When we moved in, we had the utility company out to our house to show us where the electric lines are and the gas lines are.  Those are all marked and we know the depth of those - 18 inches.  We just had no idea that the cable line was running where it was and that it would be so shallow.

Oh well.  No internet or TV now until Thursday morning.  That's the earliest they could come out.  At LEAST we have a USB modem that we keep so that we can have internet at my mom's house.  Thankfully. It sure came in handy yesterday and today.  At least with that, I was able to keep track of those storms last night, and we were still able to chat with Fernando a little bit.

Today, it looks like those storms are firing up again.  It's gotten quite dark outside (at 10:45am) and we hear thunder.  Here we go again!
It rained pretty much all day, sometimes really hard.  It was quite cool today, too, as the rain ushered in a little cold front.
So, not being able to watch TV while we ate dinner, we had dinner at the table in the room by the back deck.  It's a great place to eat while watching whatever is going on outside.  As we were finishing dinner, Guillermo focuses on something outside and realizes that it is an opossum.  This opossum was fairly big and really white!  It ambled around out in the field for quite a while and it decided to checked out the trash pile, too.  It climbed up and around on the old, certainly sopping wet, carpet just checking all that junk out.  Then we lost sight of it for a little while but not too much later, we noticed it ambling around at the bottom of a tree.  We chuckled when we saw it start climbing the tree - this little opossum was great entertainment!  The tree it decided to climb has a good sized hole in it so we figured its destination was the hole, which is about 15 or 20 feet above the ground.  It got to the hole and almost slipped as it tried to get in the hole.  Then it kept struggling around the hole (since it was getting kind of dark, we couldn't see all that well what its problem was), and we wondered why it wasn't just going right into the hole.  For all we knew, there was another animal in the hole that wasn't allowing it to get in.  The next thing we know, the opossum is falling to the ground!  That was quite a fall for the poor guy and it landed right on its back.  We don't know what the opossum did next since it was hidden in the grass at the bottom of the tree.  But I still have the image of that opossum falling the 15 or 20 feet to the ground, feet sticking up in the air.  Sorry, but yeah, it was a little funny......

Anyway, who knows WHAT we miss sometimes because we watch TV while we eat!  But we really do like  watching a show while we have dinner.  We just finished the series called "Breaking Bad" which we really liked although it sometimes was not the best thing to watch while eating.  We look forward to when Season 5 is available to stream.

Right now, when the TV is working that is, we are watching "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  We were very pleasantly surprised to find that the movie actually is in Swedish with subtitles, so we are looking forward to watching more of the movie and trying to catch and understand as much as we can without looking at the subtitles!

Garden looking good

Guillermo put some of his tomato plants into the raised bed that he has been saving for them.  He had been waiting for this day for a long time.  Watching the weather forecast and seeing that it wasn't going to get below 46 at night now, he feels confident that the tomato plants will be ok.

Some extra tomato plants just sitting against the wall of the house.

Just a nice view from the deck.

Not so nice a view from the deck.

Gerbera daisies on our deck

Guillermo found this neat moth by one of the raised beds.  It apparently was fresh out of its cocoon.  

A picture of two ferns hanging from our oak tree out front.  It looks like the leaves are starting to come out on our oak tree now and that is good news because that means no more leaves are going to be falling.  Oak trees drop SO many leaves and they've been cluttering up our gardens and potted plants.  Maybe now we can keep all our nice plants clean of leaves.

Guillermo looking for an empty spot to put some squash plants.  Notice how green the trees are in the background!

Our Satsuma Orange tree is really blooming!  Lots of little tangerines coming!

Disgusting

On Monday, we saw a truck in the field behind our house with a load of brush in the trailer it was pulling.  We thought, "hey, that's nice, they are cleaning up the field!"  Ha - Wrong!  Next thing we know, the load of brush is dumped in a little clearing and they drive off.  Ok, we didn't like that, but I guess brush is ok.  We can live with brush being piled out there.
Unfortunately, though, the truck was back a little while later with a new load, but this time the load was old carpet, an old stove, an old bucket, a bunch of metal and what looks like an old car bumper.  Now that was disgusting.  Sure, spring clean around your own place but don't go putting all the stuff you didn't want around YOUR place by someone ELSE'S place.  If YOU didn't want it, we sure don't want it either!!!

But what can we do?  It's their private property and I guess they can do whatever they want.  At the very least, at least they didn't put it right directly behind our property.  It's over to the left a little more, right behind the neighbor's house.  All we can do is hope they don't add too much more to the pile already there.

Baby Shower and day with Rebeca

Everything went smoothly today for Laura's baby shower.  Guillermo went out and got us breakfast tacos while Rebeca and I were setting up and getting ready for the shower.  Rebeca's co-host for the shower (Meredith) came at around 10am and the two of them set up the final things for the shower.  Guests started arriving at 11am.  We ate, then played a few games, then had cake and then Laura opened presents.  The last guests left around 2pm.  We cleaned up a little and then Rebeca and I went to Kohl's so that Rebeca could buy a sweater since a cold front was supposed to hit that night.  A few pictures of the shower:

This is what people saw as they came in the front door.  Rebeca did a great job of making the banner, decorating our little lamp and making the table look so inviting.

The cake was from Costco and Rebeca and I made the cupcakes.

Playing a baby shower game - guessing the contents of a diaper.  Even though we all knew it was only melted chocolate candy bars in each diaper, we all still couldn't get past what it really looked like.

The look on their faces says it all....

Laura opening presents.

 Meredith, Jennifer, Rebeca, Laura and Katie.  All friends from high school.

Then around 5, we drove to Oma's house and took her out to eat at Cracker Barrel - where we met Linda and Jacob.  We had a nice dinner together then took Oma back home.  I'm glad Rebeca was able to visit with her grandmother, aunt and nephew!

Rebeca is here!

We picked up Rebeca from the airport today and we spent the evening getting ready for Laura's baby shower tomorrow.

I also saw 4 deer running through the trees behind our house.  They were really close!