all before breakfast...

NOTHING like a little snake wrangling before breakfast to whet one's appetite...

This young Eastern Phoebe  was looking for breakfast in the yard this morning..

Hopefully Milo will soon be joining him in the yard, he just had his spray bath  before breakfast and he loved it!! He has been practicing flying in the screen porch a couple times a day...he is learning!!

WHERE'S MY PHOTOS?

I need to learn how to relax like Milo....here's my breakfast..

PEACE

Memorial Weekend

Hooray it was a long weekend....no work today...the Boss said ILL BE OPEN IF YA'll want to work....and when I asked around NO ONE was gonna work, (but the boss)....they all said the same thing "I could use the money, but I need a day off more"...so THERE YOU GO, 4 outta 5 take freedom over money!!!! YEAH we are the 99%.

MILO the Mockingbird is doing great I moved him to bigger digs and he is just loving more room to stretch his wings---and squawk!

I went to the race track and dug this tub full of horse manure and its full of RED WIGGLERS..so his diet is more what it should be now...

THIS tub should last him his entire childhood! HE BEGS for food constantly. I bet I fed him 15 worms today! And he hasnt had his night feed yet.

We had this swell fellow come to visit our Aster flowers...I worked in the yard getting things done on Saturday and Sunday,,,,and made this Veggie-Tarian Pizza for dinner, with Veggie Cheese and TOFUKRY (tofu)I plucked some fresh basil and tossed on top wow it was good!

I like to have little whimsy's around this one and this one, and the birds planted a sunflower for us...

and in the garden I found this....Have no idea what it is, it came up from the compost I made..,.SO I hope it lives to maturity so I can see what it is...could be a winter squash, or some kind of melon?

 

AND today is the last day of my 3 day weekend, and I spent it cleaning up both my Vehicles...boy there were dirty...but now they are shining and looking good!!

        

                                                                         The DLEX

                                                                       The Silver Bullet

So its back to work tomorrow...although I never stopped all weekend so I guess its just more of the same...ONE of these days IM gonna learn how to completely relax like Milo!!




 

PEACE

When Progress Clashes with Nature!

There is a vacant lot behind the building where I work...many of the businesses on the main street and the street where I work are backed by this lot and so its used for parking...and the main trash dumpster is there.

The city has been working on replacing a collapsed drain line since February. First they had to move all sorts of buried electrical wires, gas lines, cable lines, water lines its been a realy PIA for us......and then last week they started at the back of the lot where an alley runs up and they are installing huge 4 foot diameter cement pipes...    WELL this spring between the initial phase of the work and the final stage, a Northern Mockingbird build a nest in the trumpet vine that clumps around this ONE lone Utility pole in the middle of the vacant lot...last yr I took a photo of the trumpet vine when it was in bloom. 
My coworker and I take our folding chairs out back and sit in the shade and enjoy our lunch on nice days...and we watched the Mockingbird feed her new chicks...THEN disaster!!
THE city moved all their heavy equipment into the lot and started digging a huge trench to bury the huge pipes...SO there was big dump trucks, earth movers, big bucket trucks the whole lot was like Ground Zero...

You can just see the pole in the middle of these machines with the dangling vine where the nest was....at the time I took this photo the chicks were still in the nest...

the pole in right in the center of the photo with a man standing beside it

The 2 chicks in the nest were scared to death...not quite ready for fledging but almost they clung to the edge of the nest as the huge movers and shakers rumbled past sometimes within inches of them....I told the crew boss about the chicks and he said they would try to NOT harm the birds...so for 3 days straight they endured this onslought of construction  the mother was so stressed but she continued to feed them THEN one chick was gone from the nest when I arrived on Thrusday morning...I watched the lone chick thru the widow while I worked... checking on him every 20 minutes or so via binoculars.....he screamed all day, but mother didnt come. I think the other chick must have jumped from the nest  when the men knocked off about 6:30 on Wednesday evening, because when I left at 5 that evening,  I checked and both chicks were hanging in there....SO maybe mother was able to coax the one chick to the heavy brush cover behind a fence in a safe area on the adjoining lot...but the lone chick was left behind--- Mother never showed all day while he barely clung to the edge of the nest, I had to go out once and ask them to pull the huge dump truck up as they had it sitting with the motor running and the exhaust pipe aimed right at the nest..

By the end of the day I realized this little bird was doomed So I got a ladder and rescued the bird and got the nest too....there had been a third chick in the beginning...but it was dead.

SO I brought it home...

Its feathered as you can see but no primary feathers at all....some flapping of wings but thats it...
SO for now Im keeping it in my "sick bay" box where I keep the house finches when they have conjunctivites...but now its the weekend I plan to move him to a bigger cage I have in storage.

HE IS eating good, canned dog food!! So I hope I can finish raising this chick..if the mother had continued to feed it no problem..but with all that work going on she Flew The Coop with the other chick...I did look for the other chick in case he fell and got run down but it was impossible to tell with all the frehsly moved earth...I hope he did make it.

I am really sorry I didnt get them the day before but mom bird was still flying in and doing her best to feed them...SHE just got overrun, I was afraid to go out there myself when all that equipment was there,,,the photo up there is only the dump truck and the big scoop, they had many other machines there as the day progressed!!

SO Wish me luck...

I was a volunteer bird rehabber in the past so I have some experience in helping wild animals...not usually so young is all...

PEACE

Sic Daze

Blogger seems to have decided to let me keep the old Interface a little longer...yeah!

WELL after my weekend in the mountains, I came home and have been quite sick! I did the working sick thing for a week, then basically died on Saturday spent an entire 48 hrs in jammies and slippers and ate pbj sandwiches to stay alive, okay Im exaggerating a wee bit but thats about how bad Ive been feeling.  Then another week of dragging myself to work on days when I would rather stay home in bed!!   Hope now Im on the mend a bit,,,,body aches, like crazy, and I had a mega fever of 104!!! Chills the whole nine., trust me you dont want it!! 

Ive been eating out of my garden, and NO that's now the cause of the illness, the illness came in before the Beans did,  my first "mess" as we say its a MESS OF BEANS....they were good for sure right off the bush into the pot and then on my plate!

I hope after all the rain of this week another Mess will be on the bush by weekend.. I also picked this fancy lettuce and its quite tangy...

 I also have fresh basil, parsley, spring onions, some small carrots and the cherry tomatoes are clustering again....the deer came by and topped all my bushes when I first set them out so they've had to catch up...

All the plants on the deck are making me happy, Im especially happy with the prickly pear cactus I put it in this pot 2 yrs ago, and this yr it bloomed...  Prickly Pear grows wild here and I never realized how well they will grow in pots too!! SOME get quite HUGE so Im gonna try for a BIG One...

and this FRIENDLY SUN is one of my deck buddies...

The little brown headed nuthatch had a visitor knocking on the foot of his tall pine...so he came down to investigate...do you see him there on the upper left?

KNOCK- KNOCK

Who's there?

Pileated Woodpecker that's Who!

SO, as we say in the deep south Good Lord Willing and the creeks dont rise,  I will be cleaning up the yard its about 4 weeks past due and just chllin in my little piece of the American Dream better known as HOME this weekend.

Hope you're all doing the same.



PEACE

GOOD LUCK!!

GOOD LUCK!!, originally uploaded by Dixxe's Pixel's.

HEY look what I found, maybe my luck is gonna change...Hopefully it will be for the better! HA!

Fun Weekend

IT was an exciting weekend for me, I packed up the DixxeLand Express, the girls jumped in, picked up my best friend and away we went--to the BALL GAME.

Friday night we had dinner in the city and later we went to the game, the Greenville Drive at Flour Field..it was great, unfortunately the Drive lost in the 9th inning, 6 to 5. A fantastic Fireworks display followed the game...

We drove to the Clemson Experimental Forest, a beautiful wilderness area...The DixxeLand Express had to make the stream crossing, we didnt get a shot of US crossing but we got a shot of these people as they crossed...they had a 4 wheel drive we DIDNT but the DixxeLand handled it better than I thought..

Then Saturday we went on a short waterfall hike, to a very small falls on Wild Cat Creek.  We had a nice picnic before the hike you can barely see the picnic shelter on the left on this shot...this was taken from the other side of the stream after we had started our hike.

...which took us to this small waterfall/feature its listing in my Waterfall Hikes of Upstate SC guidebook, we had intended to hike to Riley Moore Falls but we NEVER FOUND THAT ONE...duh..so we saved the day by selecting this one that was in the area of where WE were..lol

 on Wild Cat Creek.  Such a pretty area...we saw several Louisiana Waterthrush some of them newly fledged, it was fun to watch them....

Another highlight of the hike was seeing some really cool forest flora, like this Verigated Milkweed

and this Indian Pink, it has a little vine wrapped around it so it may look like too many leaves...

always good to see one of these around when hiking in the woods!!

PEACE