Hay Season

"She'll be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes."

It's hay-mowing season all over Texas.  Thanks to winter and early-spring rains, in our area at least the drought is declared to be over and farmers are knee deep in grass - which means hay for the cattle!

The mower came to cut our meadow on Saturday.  We don't produce much hay here on our little place.  We have a lot of pasturage but that's where the cows graze about 10 months out of the year and our 15-acre front yard basically constitutes our only hay meadow.

You may have heard me describe Deep East Texas as a land of green pine trees and rolling hills.  Well, those trees in the background are mostly oaks and sweet gums, but you can see the rolling hill in this photo. The cattle egrets have returned just in time for hay season.  They love to follow the mowers because all that cutting stirs up lots of insects - gourmet treats for the egrets!

After the cut grass dries for a few days the raker and the baler will come by and - voila- we will have bales of hay to feed the cattle next winter when there's little or no grass for foraging.

35/100 Dogs ~ Rhodesian Ridgeback

A patient, well-mannered boy

Five Camellias for Leontien

One for Hope

Two for Joy

Three for Health

Four for Resilience

Five for Love

HUGS

Rural East Texas Morning

Yesterday I had to go to town (an hour and a half round trip just getting there and back, not counting any stops I make while there.  It was a wasted trip.  I had a broken truck window, the new window was supposed to have been delivered, and the office girl had failed to call to tell me the day before as instructed that it would not be in.  So I did my errands because I knew I had a busy rest of the week.  This morning I went back bright and early because I knew I had just enough time to get the new window, get home and have lunch before returning again in the afternoon to take my mom for a medical consultation.  This was a meadow and the sky above it that I encountered.  It was absolutely lovely with those wisps of dark clouds which threatened just a tad of rain, which never developed, and the meadow with hay that's just itching to be cut and the thicket of trees outlining the Naconiche Bayou in the background, and of course a mailbox just waiting for the rural route carrier to bring mail later in the day, along with the newspaper containing the grocery store ads, the comics, and the news of the young man who got throw from a horse into a highway and run over and killed by one of his own relatives yesterday.

I got the new window, rushed back home, had lunch, combed my hair again and took Mom.  We didn't get home until after 5 p.m.  I feel like I've been hit by a baling machine!  Tomorrow my cousin and his wife are coming for dinner (known as lunch in other areas of the civilized world - dinner here is called supper).  My mother made mustard greens - I was supposed to get turnip greens but I goofed!  Then tomorrow afternoon is Mother's hair appointment.  Friday I'm leaving at 6 a.m. to go to Longview (only 60 miles but it takes 88 minutes to get there because it's all pretty much two-lane roads until the last 10 miles) to get the oil changed in Truck and then I'm heading north another 100 miles to photograph an historic courthouse.  Maybe I'll get some new barn photos while I'm out scouting the countryside.  I never drive Interstate highways on my road trips if I can help it.  There's nothing to see!  Then Monday Mother starts a four- to six-week course of radiation therapy for skin cancers five days a week!  So I may be scarce for the next month or so, dear friends, and I hope you'll be here when I do get the opportunity to get back and post and visit your blogs.  In the meantime I'll be thinking about you!

And BTW, yesterday I got the warning about a new Blogger interface.  Well, today it was bestowed upon me.  So far I've figured out everything but I'm sitting here wondering if I find a typo after I publish, how in the heck do I edit?  Oh, well, if I find a typo and you find a typo, just get creative and try to figure out what I really meant!

Relaxing at the Flea Market

I don't know if this guy was the vendor or just an attendee sitting down for a spell.

Help, Blogger Friends:  Today I tried out Google Chrome upon the suggestion of a blogging friend and when I tried to open my blog site it opened in my dashboard, and across the top was "The Old Blogger Interface will be removed in the coming month.  Upgrade now."

What does this mean?  If I don't upgrade my blog will go away?  What is the new interface?  Any insight anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.  Why have I not seen this when I'm working on my blog in Firefox?

My Favorite Barn

This is my favorite barn.  It's only about a half-mile down the road from us and when I was a child growing up one of my best friends lived here.  The family name was Kelly and they had a small dairy and this was their barn where they milked the cows.  They probably sold the place and left around 1954 but I still call it the Kelly Barn, although it's had many different owners since then.  It is so photogenic under those massive oak trees.  It looks different every hour of the day and in every season.  This one was obviously taken in the fall and I used a Topaz Adjust filter called Simplify to achieve this look.  Its present owners simply use it for storage.  It's somewhere between 75 and 100 years old.

LINKING TO BARN CHARM

Note:  The past few days I've had tremendous problems commenting on other blogs.  It's not a Blogger problem.  It's my satellite Internet.  It's on and off intermittently 24/7 the past two to three weeks.  I'm not having any problems in uploading; it's only opening websites.  I try to open blogs and I get 20 percent of a picture or I can't get the comments section to open.  So if I don't comment on your post, it's not because I haven't tried.  Perhaps this problem will be resolved soon, so I'll be back to visit you as soon as I possibly can.

Old Maricopa County, Arizona, Courthouse ~ Phoenix, AZ

It's been a trying two days with some family conflicts, the kind that leave you exhausted.  That's the way I feel right now.  This picture was originally scheduled to go on MY OTHER BLOG and the one that appears there was to have been here.  But by the time I realized the mistake I made, I didn't have the energy to fix it, so there you have it.

But this old courthouse, which is still in use for some county offices, although the interior was pretty dreary the last time I went inside, is one of my favorite buildings in downtown Phoenix.  The new courthouse facility has no character, is just concrete and glass.  I think justice was just dispensed better when the architecture was better.  I love courthouses and I've been mapping out a couple of short road trips to visit some of the more beautiful ones in Texas.  There are 254 counties in this state, and I figured I've already photo'd 17 of the more historic courthouses.  I only have 78 more to go!  The 159 remaining are just too darned ugly or without any character so I will leave them to someone else! 

Mercado

Mexican food differs from region to region, not only in Mexico but in the Southwestern states.  I have had a difficult time finding what I consider "good" Mexican food since coming to Texas a couple years ago. I had, after all, been living the past 40 years in Arizona and had acquired a taste for the cuisine of the Sonoran region.  A shopping trip to Tyler recently though proved tasty when I lunched at the Mercado.  From what I can determine it is not part of a chain and should not be confused with Mercado Juarez or Viva Mercado's.  One thing I have found in the Tex-Mex restaurants is something they call sour cream sauce that they pour over most anything and everything.  Don't be fooled.  It's not sour cream!  It may have sour cream in it but it's not sour cream.  Also some dishes which are traditionally served with guacamole are complemented with guacamole mixed with sour cream and if you want REAL guac, you gotta pay extra for it even though the fake guac may be served with that particular dish.  So sorry, fellow Texans, but your Mexican food I can only rate as a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10.  If you want the real stuff, you must go to New Mexico or Arizona.

But as far as restaurant ambiance and service goes, the Mercado easily ranks a 9.5 out of 10!

No One Is Safe

from me and my camera.

Perfect Pedicure

And who is your nail tech?

I have a thing about lizards.  I'm afraid of them.  It's not so much that I'm afraid of them, but I don't like looking at them.  It's the same thing with frogs, salamanders, snakes (now I AM afraid of snakes).  When I lived in Phoenix I had a wet bar with a sink on my outdoor patio.  One spring day while cleaning out the leaves and dead bugs that had accumulated in the sink over the winter I discovered a tiny gecko lizard caught in the stainless steel sink.  I was running water and was so freaked out that I couldn't even shut the faucet off.  My solution?  I turned the water off at the main shut-off valve until a neighbor arrived home from work and could get the lizard out of the sink.  But there's something about pictures of these creatures that I really like.  So go figure.

When I visited the Phoenix Zoo during my last trip in February, I was looking forward to seeing the Komodo Dragons.  But in February, even in Phoenix, it was much too cool for these cold-blooded animals and they were off exhibit.  The next best thing was the Komodo Dragon sculpture at their habitat.  I love the gold toenails!

Cropping Close

Rebecca at The Art of Capturing the Moment has a new monthly challenge featured on her blog.  She starts the month off with an interview of a talented photographer, followed the next week by a tutorial from that photographer, and then a competition to be judged by - you guessed it - that talented photographer.  This month the featured photographer is Adrienne Brand whose tutorial was cropping close to improve photographic competition.  To participate in the competition, visit Rebecca's site above, crop a current picture or even find one from your archives (like I had to do!) and link it up!  It's that easy and it's fun to see what others are submitting.  Even if you don't win the competition, you'll at least learn something from participating.

Flea Market Food

Part of the fun of attending a flea market is to indulge in all those guilty pleasures called food!

First Monday Trade Days

Canton, Texas

Texas Red Barn

Red barns are few and far between in Texas 

but I found this one perched on a hillside not far from our farm near Martinsville, Texas.

LINKING TO BARN CHARM

Civil War Reenactors

Henderson, Texas