Snail mucus… And someone has used some of it. Clearly has something to do with La Kid. As she would put it: Yuckers.
[see post below this one for a pic from yesterday afternoon]
… seems to have tossed some Deep Red Hibiscus seeds into a pot awhile back. Do not remember this, and am not even sure I’m correctly identifying the three feet tall stalk with massively about to bloom flowers all over it.
Once I realized it had big plans for itself, I moved it to a bigger pot and an even sunnier spot on the deck. Plus I’ve put some bracing on the stalk. Now I sit back and watch enormous flowers unfold.
Even so… UD has always preferred the recitative to the aria, the prelude to the fugue. She already knows that this phase – the slow velvety emergence – will be more exciting than the full bloom.
… in UD‘s Bethesda, but at least in her own wooded half acre we do get tree falls, like the big one that startled her last night as she sat in bed with her laptop. It was a still-light summer night, and she looked up when she heard the strange groan she’s come to recognize as limbs and bark suddenly shearing off.
And there it crashed, right there in the middle of her forest, with a house-jolting thud, followed by the rustle of leaves and small branches. Not the whole stable world at once shatteringly kinetic, as in avalanches and earthquakes, but a small stability in an instant unstabled, with all the strangeness and mild alarm (could have fallen on the house) of such moments.
At once UD sprayed herself with insect repellent, grabbed her pruning saw, and got to work clearing her paths of it all. The picture I took shows two large neat woodpecker holes in one of the limbs I rolled aside.
… stands enthralled on a DC rooftop, watching last night’s fireworks.
… gaze from the back of Dave Almy‘s iconic green truck at parade spectactors. First Fourth I can remember when the weather was not just bearable, but actually pleasant. Photo: Bennett Roth.
… to see exactly what UD sees almost every time she looks out the window. It’s always a female ruby throated.
As the photographer writes, bee balm is a “magnet” for hummingbirds.
