A Pretty Day

It really is a pretty day, if maybe a little overly windy. Bright sunshine, blue sky, nearly perfect temperature. The cats have been outside enjoying it. And for the first time since the black demon cat began his territorial terrorizing of my cats, both cats were outside for an extended period of time. Zoe even laid out under the peach tree checking out the birds. She hasn't done that for more than a year thanks to that black tom. The limbs of the peach hang low anyway and when they're growing peaches they tend to drag on the ground. Zoe loves to hide out there amidst the limbs and watch everything. I have some blue jays in the area that are less than happy while she's out there, but she manages to ignore them fairly well. This picture is of her hiding out there. You can see she's fairly successful at it. (Yes, she's there!) Lower down is a picture of her emerging when she realized I had come outside. Hiding and watching birds takes a backseat to the possibility of strokes or brushing.

The little swallows are definitely nesting now. One of the pair is always on the nest, so I guess eggs are laid. About the only time when they're not sitting on the nest is mid- to late afternoon when it's hot on the front porch. They'll be gone or be standing on the edge of the nest rather than sitting on the eggs. I haven't bothered to try to see the eggs. I'm even going in and out through the garage or back door, so I don't disturb the swallows too much. I'll get to see them plenty after the babies hatch.

My roses are blooming like crazy as you can see. Again I have big, full red roses and clusters of smaller roses, as if I have two separate rose bushes. I only planted one the year after I moved in, but a couple of years ago it began to put out the two different types of roses. You can also see that my little yellow rose from last year may not make it. It's been struggling since it began putting on leaves before the multiple freezes.

Much of north Texas has been in bloom recently. The blue bonnets are past their prime blooming now, but everything has been really pretty. We've been getting rain fairly often, so things are nice and green and colorful. I was at my sister's place yesterday and she has flowers blooming everywhere, roses, iris, marigolds, snap dragons, and others that I don't know the names for. It's all really pretty. Unlike me, Lynne has a green thumb and does a fair amount of working in the garden. She's also got tomatoes planted and banana peppers. Yay! I'll be getting home grown tomatoes from her later in the year. Yum!!!

Yesterday my sister and I went with her son, her daughter and granddaughter to play at the Main Event. It was lots of fun. I don't see these folks too often, and we had a good time. We played arcade games and glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, and just generally visited a lot.

The hole in my jaw from the extracted tooth is healing well. No dry socket. Actually it's pretty well healed over but has left a nice little hole that traps food particles like a magnet traps iron filings. It's going to be a pain removing trapped food from that hole until it fills in. Not a painful pain, just a hassle pain. It's weird. Back a long time ago when I had all my wisdom teeth removed, there was nerve damage to the nerve to the left lower jaw, which left me with some permanent numbness to the lower lip and jaw on that side. This is the side where I've now had an implant and am having another one done currently. For about 4 days after the extraction, the numbness on that side was really bothering me. It's like the new Novocaine injections had aggravated the nerve or something. Besides the usual numbness that I've lived with for 30 years, there was increased tingling and numbness in the front lower teeth, lip and side of my tongue and stiffness in the corner of my mouth, like it was hard to smile. Luckily, it's gone away, and I'm back to the numbness I was used to from before. I was concerned for awhile that I was going to be drooling from that corner of my mouth. I'm glad it's back to 'normal'.

Not much else going on. I'm not traveling for awhile so I'm looking forward to spending some time kicking back and doing nothing. The next house project will probably be the roof, but I think I'll pay off the flooring first. I may have somebody come and trim the dead limbs from the back half of the peach tree. You can see from these pictures of Zoe hiding, that the front of the tree is doing well. We'll see how the peaches do this year.

Definitely Spring .... FINALLY!

This has been such a cold winter for this area. I've been waiting, relatively patiently, for Spring to make it's appearance. Just about the time I think it's going to be warm we get snow again, but I have some good signs that it's really here now.

One sign is the growing small peaches on my peach tree. Yes, they survived despite that snow when they were blooming. Another sign is that I mowed my lawn for the first time. It's growing well now.

The best sign though is that the barn swallows came back and are nesting over my front porch!!! They had been nesting there every year since I moved in here, but about 4 years ago I had siding put on the house. I didn't realize that when they put the siding on, they closed off a small ledge over my front porch where the swallows had always nested. When the swallows arrived that Spring they had nowhere to nest and went elsewhere. So that summer I put some small open boxes up there where the ledge used to be. The first year they ignored them. Last year they were around checking them out but didn't nest there. Later in the summer a small bird, house wren I think, built a twig nest in one of the boxes. This year a pair of swallows have built their mud nest on top of the twig nest in that box! I'm so delighted to have them back nesting there. I can watch them clearly from the small window by my front door. If course they make a mess of my front porch, between the mud for the nest and the usual bird droppings, but a messy porch to clean is worth watching them nest and watching the babies grow up. I've seen them have anywhere from 2 to 5 babies in a nest. One year I had two pair nest up there, but not at the same time. The second pair actually waited until the first pair had raised their young and left. The second pair didn't do well though, probably because it was so late in the year by then. My house faces west and the front porch gets very hot during the summer. They only had one baby and it didn't survive. This year, there's just the one pair and they're happily building on top of the twigs and staying there at night. They haven't laid eggs yet, but I imagine they will soon. This is a picture I found on the web of what these little birds look like.

Today its raining. It started yesterday and last night with some heavier rain, but now it's a light, steady soaking rain. My grass will need mowing again by the time it dries out. This is now the massive growth time of year for lawns, when mowing more than once a week is necessary.

Thursday I had a molar extracted. It was a crowned tooth that had decayed up under the crown. I'm going to have it replaced with an implant, but the first step is extracting the decaying tooth. The oral surgeon I went to was fast. He shot me up with Novocaine at 11:21 am and at 11:46 I was getting into my car to drive home. Amazing. I have a gaping hole in my jaw, but so far it hasn't been too bad. A couple Advil every 6-ish hours has been enough to keep it from hurting. I did take a prescription pain-killer Thursday afternoon when the numbness wore off, and half of one at midnight that first night, but since then Advil has been enough. I've been following post-extraction instructions religiously. I had a dry socket after extraction of my wisdom teeth a few millenia ago, and I'm hoping to prevent a repeat of that. NOT fun.

This will be my second implant. The molar behind this molar went through the same thing 6 years ago. A crown with the tooth decayed up under it. We tried to save that one ... remove the crown, drill out the decay and replace with a new crown, but the tooth was too far gone. There wasn't enough left to re-crown, so I had it removed and an implant done. The whole process takes 6 to 9 months, giving time for healing of the jaw bone, placing of the implant, various impressions, etc, etc. But I've never had a day of trouble with my other implant. It's just like having a good tooth back there. So I'm having another one done. Yes, it's more expensive than dentures or partials or bridges, but it's permanent and you don't have all the extra care you have to take with those things. You brush, floss, etc, along with all your other teeth.

Time to do the usual Sunday chores. I'll keep you up to date on how the nesting swallows do this year.

Grenada

I'm back from my vacation to Grenada, and it was a blast! I really enjoyed it, and the best part was getting to spend time with my friend who's going to school down there. It was so much fun.

The only travel issues I had were on the trip down there. I flew from DFW to Miami, Miami to San Juan and then San Juan to Grenada. They delayed us leaving DFW for about 40 minutes because they had too much fuel on the plane and had to off-load a bunch. True. Then on final descent into Miami there was a plane on the runway, so our pilot hit the gas and began climbing. We had to go around and try again. All of which would have been just typical travel events, except that I only had an hour between flights in Miami. Luckily my Miami-to-San Juan flight was also delayed.

I arrived in Grenada at about 8:30 at night and my friend picked me up at the airport and for the next week we played. Well, I played the whole week. Two of those days she had to go to classes, but the other days we ran around. She lives at a resort which sits up above a beach (BBC beach?). We spent time strolling the beach and also swimming, generally in the morning before it got too hot. The climb back to the hotel is steep and in the heat it's not very fun. There are a million flowering plants along the way though, so it's beautiful and sweet smelling. It doesn't matter if you take your time. The bird in the picture above is a little blue heron who was hunting from the rocks along the shoreline. He was polite enough to stay still and let us take pictures. The bird later down in the blog is a night heron and he was hunting up on the shore. You can also see in this top picture that the sky was grey rather than blue. I'll talk about that later.

One of the days I was there we took a car and drove to the "Seven Sisters" Falls in Grand Etang Forest Reserve. We took the 'scenic' route since roads are ... less than well marked, but it was a lot of fun and I got to see a fair amount of the island. Grand Etang is a reserve in the center of the island. It is tropical rain forest and it includes the highest peak on the island, which is just under 3000 feet high. One of the things to do in Grenada is to 'jump' the Seven Sisters, which means to jump off each of the seven falls into the pool below. We didn't do this. One of those falls is said to be a 35 foot drop and I'm kind of a chicken. So we hiked out to the last two falls you jump and waded in the pools below them. We also hiked to Honeymoon Falls which is shown in the picture to the right. Hiking in tropical jungle was a fun adventure and I'm glad to have done it, but all told, I think I prefer the mountains, and less heat.

We also saw part of the birth of a calf. A cow was giving birth on a small farm near the trail, so we saw the front legs and nose emerging as we hiked in, and arrived in time to see the afterbirth and watch the calf take it's first steps and drink it's first meal. We kind of wanted to watch the whole thing, but didn't know how long it would take. We had a guide for this hike, and he identified and showed all sorts of plants to us, including cinnamon and nutmeg trees. It was totally fun.

An interesting phenomenon was taking place while I was in Grenada. I thought that it was really foggy and wondered why the fog wasn't burning off. Come to find out, it was Sahara dust. At times dust from the Sahara Desert crosses the Atlantic and blankets the eastern Caribbean. It was amazing. Of course the sky wasn't it's usual brilliant blue, but also the sun wasn't beating down on us continuously, so I felt like it was a fair trade-off. That explains the grey sky in the first picture.

We also went to St. George University where my friend goes to medical school and toured the school. The campus itself is absolutely gorgeous, as well as being surrounded by the most amazing scenery and views.

I had to laugh, though. Grenada has the usual laid-back, get-to-it-when-you-get-to-it lifestyle, and into that you put all these type A medical students. I can see why my friend occasionally gets really frustrated trying to get things done. Luckily for me, on vacation things just aren't urgent. We could take things as they came.

The last night I was there we went to a restaurant called Aquarium. The food was great and you sit out on an open veranda. It was night so we couldn't see the undoubtedly gorgeous view, but there was a lovely breeze off the ocean and the whole thing felt special. Actually, the whole trip felt that way. I hope to do it again some time.