The temperature hit 100 yesterday afternoon by my thermometer.
I was out mowing the lawn by 9:30 yesterday morning, so it wasn't too bad and the wind helped make it not quite so hot. We had three days of rain last week so the lawn was in dire need of a mowing. The picture here is a good indication of what my backyard currently looks like. I have a multi-colored lawn these days. The green-green grass on the right side of the picture is thriving St. Augustine, and you can see on the bottom center of the picture where it's sending out runners to fill in the bare areas. The blue-green grass to the left and wrapping around the St. Augustine on the top of the picture is Bermuda grass. And the yellow-green patches are weeds that the TruGreen people have sprayed and are slowly dying. Altogether that makes it fairly colorful out there, but I'm happy that the grass is filling in and the weeds are going away.The little yellow rose that I planted 2 years ago is much happier this year. It's put out multiple blooms this spring and is also putting on some height this year, so it may survive after all. The red
rose bush is thriving as always. Both bushes are between blooming sprees right now, as can be seen by this picture. The two little peach seedlings I rescued from the lawn and the little dogwoods are still hanging in there. With this heat already I'll need to remember to water everything regularly if we don't get rain. I really like growing things, or I should say 'attempting" to grow things since I'm just usually fairly bad at it.Yesterday when I was mowing I was rescued by my neighbor two houses down and across the street. It was the first time we'd met, even though he and his wife have lived in their house 22 years and I've been in my house 10 years. Not very social are we? I've seen him come and go, and before yesterday morning what I knew about him is that he drives a corvette and keeps his lawn neat. He turns out to be a really nice guy named Eric. Anyway, what happened was that as I was mowing the front yard, a dog came by. He wasn't a big dog, about medium-sized, looked like a cross between a pit bull and a shepherd, but maybe pit bull size. He started following me as I mowed the lawn, and kept getting around behind me where I couldn't see him. Pretty soon I was afraid to turn my back to him because every time I turned to look at him he was rushing at me with teeth bared. I tried to yell and stomp at him to frighten him away and he would just snarl and growl and rush me again. So I stopped mowing and went to get a water hose to try and shoo him off, but he went on down the street when I quit mowing. I started mowing again and he came back and stood in the driveway watching me. I was afraid to turn my back on him so I was mowing a strip, backing up and mowing the next strip. About that time, Eric came over with a big stick in his hands and the dog went on down the street. I talked to Eric for a little bit about it and he said he'd keep an eye on me to make sure the dog didn't come back, as he'd had trouble with that dog before. He went back home, I started mowing, and the dog came back!! 10 minutes later, the police pulled up, Eric came over and the dog moved down the street a couple of houses. Eric had called the police since the dog was so aggressive. I talked to them for a bit, then went and mowed my back yard. When I finished and came back out I picked up my mail, saw Eric and talked to him again. He said there ended up being three police cars and two animal control vehicles. They didn't catch the dog, but they did locate his owner and ticketed him for the dog being loose, etc.
So I had kind of a freaky experience. I'm not normally afraid of dogs but this one was pretty aggressive. Maybe he doesn't like lawn mowers, but I don't know why was he rushing at me growling, teeth bared and tail between his legs. *shivers* I'll take cats any day. A deranged cat may do some damage but probably won't be able to kill you. You really can't say the same about a deranged dog. Well maybe you can say it about a deranged Pekingese
or Pomeranian, but are those really dogs? Anyway, it's nice to have met my neighbor and to know that another one of my neighbors is a good person who will watch out for me. For the most part, I've found that to be true in this neighborhood.I guess that's all for today. I threw in the prerequisite cat picture. As you can see, they're also chilling today. Lying in the open door (it's not yet hot) in case anything they need to know about should happen outside, but basically cat-napping. I'm going back to puttering around the house. Maybe I'll even break down and dust - my least favorite chore of all. We'll see. I'm not sure if I'm in quite that good of a mood, or maybe it's that I'm in too good of a mood for dusting.
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