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...