Stink Eye.

My niece can give anyone the stink eye like NONE other. It's hilarious.

She can also be freakin' cute...sometimes. :)

The greatest wall of all.

I get to go to here.

I get to go to there Tuesday. Like...tomorrow. I know!!! And that very may well be what it looks like when I see it. Two weeks ago it was SNOWING in Beijing and the high temp was in the 20's. The forecast says (and we all know how weathermen generally suck) that it will be in the upper 40's. But as my brother said, perhaps the forecast will change and I will get to experience a Siberian cold front! Thanks, bro. That sounds like tons of fun.

I am generally excited, then sudden fits of anxiety make me feel like I could throw up, then I feel fine, and then the cycle starts over again. Anxiety about the whole plane thing if you were wondering. Woo-sah.

For some reason Asia doesn't believe in free wi-fi, so you will not be getting an update from me for two weeks. I know you can live without my crazy until then. Don't worry. Tons of pictures will be made available for your viewing upon my return...assuming my memory cards don't crash and certain officials don't feel like confiscating my camera. **PRAY!!!**

Newma the cat.

"I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life!!!"

That's what I think the cat is saying. I went up to my cousin's this evening to take some portraits. This is one of the outtakes with one of her daughters holding the cat. Anyway, the cat totally looks like she loves being held like that, right?!

"Say what?!"

I think I have a super power. Super Hearing! But it only applies in eavesdropping situations. Allow me to explain.
In normal conversations my hearing is average to sub-par. I usually have to ask, "What?" or "Huh?" a few times during any given conversation because at some point my ears just can't decipher what message left a person's mouth. So much so that friends often make fun of me for being deaf. I don't know what it is about close range conversation that makes my ears malfunction. If I miss out on part of your monologue, it's either one of two things. Maybe sometimes both.
One: I have an attention span of a two year old and if the crap subject you decide to converse to me about isn't uber-riveting, the sanity preservation department in my brain puts my ears into automatic shutdown mode and then I have to work to override the order to catch up to what you're talkin' 'bout, therefore I have to ask you again, "Wait...what?"
Two: My hearing is genuinely awful and I really didn't understand what you just said.
There is one situation when my hearing is absolutely brilliant. The aforementioned eavesdropping situation. It doesn't matter if you're behind a shut door, five tables over in a crowded restaurant, across the room, or across the house...if my ears pick up the slightest hint of an argument, or a juicy-fied scandal, consider them tuned in. Don't think I go around purposely eavesdropping. No. It's not my fault the super ears pick up on gossip keywords like "cheating manwhore" or "skankified slut" wherever they go. They just do. And once they start listening, they don't stop until every last detail is divulged, only then do they move on. And unless you happen to be speaking in a nano-whipsper, your story is mine. Beware the super ears.
Okay. So maybe it's not a super power, so much as selective listening. Maybe?

Reflections.

Sunset in my back backyard. Nice one, Jesus! Not Jesus the cricket (<-- read to figure out what the hey I'm talkin' 'bout)...the actual, ya know, Jesus. Him. Capital "h". The Man upstairs. Yeah. Got it? Great...

The cutest girl I know.

My niece!

Katydid it.

Here's another lesson for you, class. Meet the Katydid. It's actual name is something I can't pronounce = Tettigoniidae. Tetris. Tetanus. Tet-a-gone-a-day? I have no idea.

I found it on my car this afternoon. So of course I ran to grab my camera. I put it 2 inches away from the bug's face. I don't think he liked it, because he started to crawl towards me. I was like, "Please, Jesus! Do NOT jump on me. I will scream bloody murder." And yes, if you were wondering, I named the bug Jesus. Jesus stayed put, though, and allowed me to photograph him. Jesus was about 3 inches long and his antennae were about 4 inches long. Jesus looked like a leaf.

My 2 month headache.

I, crazy person, thought it would be a fun and challenging idea to work a 3000 piece puzzle. Three THOUSAND. Yeah. Translation = headache! All the pieces look exactly. The freaking. SAME. It's going to be a 4 foot by 3 foot-ish Caribbean masterpiece when it's done, which will hopefully be by the end of the year. Two months to finish should be plenty of time, you say? Well. Considering that I spent 3 hours putting a section of 50 pieces together, and spent an hour staring at 200 pieces of just plain blue and got nothing done, I think two months will be a bless-ed miracle. I've already spent two months on it, and it's about half done, and even then I've only done the pieces that had identifying markers on them. I've not even attempted the pieces that have no distinguishable characteristics. Consider that I actually got this thing 2 years ago, opened it, tried to separate the colors, couldn't put anything together, put it back in the box, had it sit on the shelf for 2 years, reopened it 2 months ago because I was bored on a Saturday and now I've done too much to put it away again and I WILL. Stubbornly. Freaking. FINISH IT. I'm a nerd, yes. I'm doing a 3000 piece puzzle to torture myself. And when I DO finish it, oh I am SO not taking it apart. It's going to get slathered in 2 quarts of puzzle glue and be stuffed in a giant frame so I can have a piece of giant artwork hanging on my wall so everyone can revel in my nerd-dom. Yeah. Like I said. Crazy.

Insert captions here...

No, really. If you could insert a caption, what would it say?

She got very angry when I tried to take it away from her. Apparently she had not licked every last drop.

Lightning...

There was a thunderstorm that came through tonight. It came with a pretty lightning show. I was lucky enough to get a few good shots. I like it when the lightning is symmetrical (image 3). Boom Boom Pow.

Another turtle

I was doing dishes yesterday, when I looked out the kitchen window and saw this massive turtle crawling across the front yard. Mom and I went out to inspect and we both came to the conclusion that this was the ugliest turtle we had ever seen. Not that it mattered, because his size and the "I'll bite your hand off if you get near me" look on his face instantly made him cool. I went and got my camera to take some pictures and he put his head as low to the ground as he could, as if to say, "The lower I get, the less you can see me." He never full on retracted into his shell though, which suggests to me that either: (a)he's a bad ass and isn't afraid of anything, or (b)he's too old to give a !@#$, i.e. "Great. More people staring at me. Again."

While taking pictures I discovered something very odd about this turtle that made him look a little bit diabolical. His eyelids were white! First of all, I never thought of turtles blinking before. Second, shouldn't the lids match his face? I don't know the scientific reasoning behind this but it is an oddity indeed. Quite frankly, it made him look possessed.

Grumpy old turtle.

Half blink. Weird, I know. I guess he was keeping an eye on me. Ha. Haha.

Possessed turtle.

I took this from inside the house, hence his bravery at sticking his head way out, which by the way, his head was effing huge! It reminding me of Jabba the Hut.

When I first saw him, he was full on moving across the front yard. After he came in contact with people and we went back inside, he proceeded to sit there and wait. And wait. And wait some more. I guess he was making sure we weren't coming back to bother him? So then he'd move two feet, and wait again. He ended up crawling into our front garden where he spent the rest of the day. We went back outside with Babe later in the afternoon and she'd want to get close to sniff it but we had to keep shouting, "No!" because the curmudgeonly turtle was totally giving her this, "Closer...come a little closer, that's it, look into my eyes, just a little bit closer..." look. I think he wanted to inhale her whole or something. He probably could have done it, too.

I couldn't find him this morning. Hopefully he went on his slow merry way. Although, I have this sense of foreboding that he's probably still in the garden waiting silently to strike.

Green Lynx

So, I get home, get out of the car, walk to the back door, open the screen door and have myself a very good scream. Why? A huge ugly hairy spider I have never seen before in my life was hanging out on the edge of the door. So gross.

It's called a Green Lynx Spider. It likes to live in the plants and live off of insects and will bite a human when threatened. When bitten, the human will feel pain, burning and itching accompanied by swelling of the bite area in a diameter of 7 to 10 inches.

I, of course, only learned all this after I felt compelled to swat the thing on the floor and capture it under a glass vase. What if it had been a brand new spider species never discovered before?! ($$$)
I needed to capture it alive. Though now that I know it's common, I don't know what to do with it. I could kill it but I don't want to hear the crunch, and I could let it go but I don't want it to go make spider spawn that will infest the front garden.

Maybe I'll go put it in Amber's front yard. Muahahaha.

{eye roll}

So, dove hunting season started this week. My brother, K, brought down his 4 year old son, C, for his first hunting trip. My dad, K, and C all went out together for a lovely all morning kill-fest. They all took a break in the middle of the day. In the late afternoon K and C were playing NCAA football on Play Station, dad decided to go out hunting again - by himself. About 30 minutes later K and C head out to join him for round 2 of "kill birds that are life partners". Ten minutes later I get a call from my dad. For brevity d=Dad, k=me. The following is how our conversation transpired:

ring-ring!

k:hello?
d: bring me more shotgun shells
k: i don't know where the shot gun shells are
d: look in the kitchen
k: not there, i think they're in K's truck
d: where's K?
k: i thought he was down there with you
d: oh, damn, there go some more! {that would be doves flying over his head}
d:i need more shot gun shells! i only have a few more!
k: i don't know what to tell you

d: {blah blah blah, ramble ramble}
d: uh-oh
k: what?
d: hang on
{pause}
d: i'm standing next to a rattlesnake

k: what?!!!

d: {shotgun pops going off}

k: dad?!
d: it's ok, it doesn't have a head anymore
k: oh, well that's good

-end of call after more chitchat and assurance that i indeed do not have the shotgun shells-

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you my father. The man who has the inane talent of getting within life threatening distances of poisonous reptiles. This was round two, by the way. A couple of months ago he stuck his hand within five inches (unknowlingly) of a rattlesnake that was taking a nap in the flower garden. This time he manages to be standing within a couple of feet of one. At least he saw it, at least this snake, too, was napping, and at least he was armed. The snake was about four feet long, and had maybe 15 rattles on it. At least we don't live in India where cobras decide to nap in people's laundry baskets. Gosh.

What's That Noise?

Let me preface this by saying that I am afraid of tornadoes. Really afraid.

I'm visiting my friend, V, for a few days in Blooming Grove, Texas, which is somewhere in between Hillsboro and Corsicana, (the part of Texas where it actually rains). We have had great fun so far. We stayed up late last night watching Fast and Furious, the fourth one, and eating Chili's left overs. Yum. So we go to bed at 2 in the morning, I think, with thoughts of getting to sleep in until late. Yay.

Yeah, not so much. V's mom comes in the room to wake us up at 6 in the morning and tells her that there's a tornado warning in Navarro County and that she should probably turn her computer off so it doesn't get zapped by lightning. Okay.
I'm waking up and I ask V, "Where's Navarro County?"
She replies, "This is Navarro County..."
Lovely. So she turns her computer off, and we're laying there letting that information simmer. I see lightning, hear thunder, and my blood pressure is rising by the second because the word "tornado" was mentioned. I also hear this faint distant low rumbling noise that doesn't seem to quit.
Not thunder.
I say, "Do you hear that?"
"Yes..."
We get up to see what's going on, I'm starting to get into full panic mode, the house is dark, rain is falling on the tin roof. I walk down the hallway to go see what it looks like outside from the living room window and freeze. I barely hear it over the airconditioning vent that I'm standing next to. A tornado siren.
Vanessa came up behind me and I said, "Do you HEAR that?!"
The siren had just quit.
She says, "What? The airconditioning?"
The siren starts up again.
"No, THAT!"
We hear it loud and clear, now, and look at each other and our eyes get real wide and my heart feels like it wants to jump out of my chest and I don't know what to do. Yes, the thought of hiding in the bath tub crossed my mind, but I looked outside and it didn't seem too ominous...besides the purple lightning, loud thunder and sheets of rain.
I go to her mom's room where the weatherman is on the TV going on about the thunderstorms in Dallas county, but admits, yes, there is a tornado warning in Navarro County and briefly shows the weather map that is full of red, yellow and green colors. And then we lost satellite. But only for a few minutes.
Her aunt and mom are sitting on the covered front porch watching it rain, because they had the informed impression that the worst of it had already passed us. Which it had, thank God. But I wasn't convinced yet and proceeded to let my heart beat really fast and my entire body to shake uncontrollably. Really scared, I tell you. At one point I thought I was going to be sick. As I said before, I really don't like tornadoes.
I called my mommy long distance so she could look up a weathermap on the internet and assure me that the storm had passed through the area. And to tell me that it would be okay. Which it was. All ended well. The storm went away and I layed back down and was able to fall back asleep eventually to the sound of falling rain on a tin roof.

It wasn't the worst experience ever. The wind wasn't even blowing that hard and the thunder wasn't that loud. But hearing that tornado siren in the dark of night really scared the heck out of me. If by some miracle you've never heard a tornado siren before (the movie Twister? come on) I invite to listen to one here. Tornado Siren

R.I.P.

I killed a bird today. I don't think it's murder, because I didn't intentionally set out to kill the thing...I swear. So would it be manslaughter? Birdslaughter, rather? If they had court hearings for roadkill I might be convicted of vehicular birdslaughter.

I was driving at 10 in the morning, which is a rarity. I wasn't entirely awake yet. I'm driving along, minding my own business, when I see this bird flying. It lands in the road in front of me. It hops into my lane to grab something, a bug, something to build a nest, I don't know. The distance between us is getting shorter and shorter. It turns and looks right at me. Our eyes meet. I think he was entranced by my Gucci knock-off sunglasses because he just sat there staring at me wasting precious seconds. My right front wheel hit him right when he decided it would be a fantastic idea to take the heck off.

This all happened in a matter of 3-4 seconds. Yes, I cringed when it hit my wheel. No, it never occurred to me to swerve. There wasn't a whole lot of room anyway. I wonder if it was grabbing food for some babies? Did I just orphan a nest of baby birds? Did I just rack up a child endangerment charge? Hopefully the baby mama bird will be able to be a single parent. Oh, Jesus! Do they mate for life?! Did I kill her one true love?! I need to quit thinking about this.

I forgot to check if there were feathers stuck in my wheel. Hmm.

Zoology

I went to the Fort Worth Zoo a couple of weeks ago with the fam...

Blue and Yellow Macaw "love birds"...

A young adult lion who was looking at me like I was dinner...

A giraffe that looked like he had a serious pain in the neck...

I can't tell you how much I would love to be this hippo.
To be fat and happy sitting in a cool clear pool of water avoiding the 100+ degree Texas heat all day...priceless!

The Turtle and the Hound

Babe and I found a turtle in the yard. He/She didn't want to come out to play.

Swallowtail butterflies and a possible tornado...

I found this Swallowtail butterfly in my yard the other afternoon...

This was yesterday. I could have sworn a tornado was going to pop out of it,
but that never happened. Thank God.

chasing rats

Babe was chasing rats again. In our dirty storage room. I thought I'd share how this goes down:

Babe enters the store room. Babe catches scent of a rat. Babe pin points rat's location. Babe shrieks (barks) for rat to come out. Woofer and Sophie stare at Babe wondering what's going on. Babe continues her sad excuse for a bark. The rat sits in it's hiding spot refusing to come out. Babe shrieks some more. Babe hyperventilates.

Sometimes the rat wins. Sometimes she does.

Today the rat eluded her, but only because I dragged her away from it so she wouldn't have a doggy heart attack.

Sophie was only hunting a rabbit...

She was sniffing around in the woodpile trying to force out the rabbit that resides there, but she found a poisonous snake instead. Her snout is puffy and there's this drainage stuff collecting around her neck. I took her to the vet, he gave her a shot, she seems to be in good spirits, so I suppose she will be fine. The size of her swelling makes me nervous, though. The picture doesn't do it justice. See the two prick marks to the left of her nose? Snake bite, baby.

Whoops?

Did y'all hear that the 4 corners monument is in the wrong spot?! It's 2 miles from where it should be, according to some surveyors with their fancy shmancy satellite mapping and imaging system. That means that millions of people, including my dad and myself, thought they were in 4 places at once, but actually weren't. Bummer. Even though it's in the wrong spot, the 4 states have legally adopted the monument as the meeting places of the corners, so to them it doesn't really matter. So they say. Read the MSN article, if you want. That place was literally in the middle of NO where. I still enjoy the memory, though.

Starry Night

Last night there was supposed to be a Leonid meteor shower. The best viewing time was supposed to be 2-3 hours before sunrise, so I guess 4-5 AM. I'm not sure, I never see the sunrise. I was only able to stay awake until 3 AM. I star-gazed for about 30 minutes, and I had my camera with me, doing long exposures hoping to have a meteor shoot across my view. But alas, it never happened. I never saw ONE! Oh well. You can kind of see the big dipper in this shot.

poor Babe

My dad has been in the hospital a week now. Babe is going crazy, she misses him so much. Whenever Mom leaves in the morning, Babe wakes me up with a round of despondent howling...that lasts for hours. Why?
(1) She thinks she's all alone.
(2) She misses Mom.
(3) She misses Dad.
(4) She REALLY misses Dad.
She jumps at every noise that could be the door opening, or that could be a car pulling in the garage, any noise that could mean Dad's finally coming back.
My only refuge from the howling is to get up from bed and groggily stumble around the house in the early morning to find her and bring her back to bed with me where she will stay at peace for 30 minutes until she pricks her ears up and listens for any sound that could belong to Dad, thinks she hears something, begs me to let her go, and upon the moment she leaves my room finds he is not there, commences another round of howling.
He should come home this weekend. I pray for her sake that this is true.

Over the rainbow!

It hailed the other day when a storm cell that used to have a tornado in it moved over the area. Here's a video of it! Shoestring is the white cow that didn't know to go to the barn, and Hershey is the black calf following his mom. You can't tell, but when I'm talking about Babe, she's shaking like a leaf she's so scared. Then my dog, Woofer, just hyperventilates whenever it even begins to sprinkle, so he was on the verge of a heart attack. Then after all of that a lovely double rainbow appeared! I didn't have a wide enough lense to get a picture of the whole thing, and even then it was only there for a couple of minutes before it went back to a single...

Nature Day

Yesterday I made the good mistake of going back to the step class at my gym. Good in the sense that I got a work out, mistake in the sense that my legs were rendered practically useless today. My calf muscles are SO sore. Walking is a chore. So, I decided to chill today and do some photography around the house. All the images ended up being nature shots.

Monarch Butterfly

Busy Bee

Woodpecker

Cardinal

Mr. & Mrs. Cardinal

Some dirty birds taking a bath...

The newest baby calf...

Poor mouse.

Forgive the morbidity of putting a picture of a dead mouse up here. But it was so sad! This little tiny mouse thought he got away with running out into the open to get his little dog food morsel, only to get killed by a mouse trap. He died with the morsel lodged in his mouth. You'd think it would have popped out with the force of the bar on the trap slamming down. Kind of messed up, if you ask me.

NO!!! Fishy!!!

Remember the little girl from Finding Nemo who has a problem with killing fish before they even get out of the bag from the store? Darla is her name. I totally felt like her today! I didn't go buy a fish from the store or anything and have it in that bag, but I definitely almost killed my mom's pet fish, Spike, this afternoon.

My Mom left a note for me to change the water in his fish bowl, which involves scooping Spike out of the water in a blue plastic cup and letting him hang out there while his new water is cleaned by the chemical drops I put in there. So, after a minute of him resisting the process of getting into the cup, I finally catch him, clean out the old bowl, use the faucet from the bath tub to fill the bowl because his "bowl" is really a 2 foot tall jar that can't fit under a regular sink, add the drops of cleaner that need to do their work for 30 minutes, pull the jar out of the tub and leave it sitting on the edge of the bath. I left Spike alone to swirl in the blue plastic cup, next to the jar, on the edge of the tub. The EDGE of the tub. As I walked away I thought to myself, "Should I take some of the water out of the cup? It's filled to the top, surely he wouldn't be a moron and decide to jump out." Famous last words.

I came back two hours later...

I walked into the bathroom, the blue cup slowly came into view, first I could just see the top, he wasn't there, I figured he was hangin' out at the bottom, as I finally stood right above the cup able to see into the whole thing, he wasn't there! My gaze ventured into the tub... "AH!!! FISHY!!!" I had no idea how long he had been out of the water. He looked like he was in an air-locked vacuum, gasping for air (water) desperately all to no avail! I quickly took the blue cup and poured water on him and tried to get him into the cup so I could get him in his jar, but I guess he assumed I was the enemy because it took me several tries before he would cooperate. I dumped him in the jar and he enthusiastically swam in circles all the way to the bottom of the jar. Where he just laid on his side. Seeming to exert extra effort to breathe. For the next hour. I just sat there staring, hoping he wouldn't float to the top, belly up. He stared back, gasping. As we stared at each other I wondered if he was blaming me for his predicament, I was indeed the one who left the cup full of water by the edge. I told him it was his own lame-ass idea to jump out of the cup in the first place.

Eight hours later, he's still alive. And yes, I talk to my fish. :)

Ha HA! I was right!

So I was at my brother's house this past weekend for my niece's first birthday party, which was super neat, the cake was AH-mazing! But that's not the point of this story. Saturday night, which was really cold, in the 30's or so, I went outside to get my suitcase from my car and I just happened to look up at the sky and notice this giant ring around the moon. I had only seen one or two others before this one in my life, and the difference between this one and the others is that this one was huge. Huge! The other ones I had seen were closer to the moon, not this one. My camera lens didn't do it justice, but this ring was not close to the moon at all and took up a good portion of the sky. After staring at it for a good while I got all scientifically curious as to why a ring like that would form around the moon. My guess was that the air in the atmosphere was so cold that there was an ice layer, or something to that effect, which was acting like a filter to the moon's light. And whadduya know. I looked it up this evening off of an educational site and here is their reasoning behind the aforementioned moon ring:

"The ring around the Moon is caused by the refraction of Moonlight (which of course is reflected sunlight) from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring."

Bet ya didn't know that, did ya? Ya learn something new every day.

God made a pretty this evening!

There was a very pretty sunset this evening! My photo editor kind of fudged the colors a little bit, but there were the most vibrant reds and oranges against an awesome blue sky. I can't decided whether the clouds look like fire or ocean. Either way they look like brush strokes from a Monet painting.