Made it!

Yes, one more.

Yay Friday!  Made it through another week.  Got a very early start.

Monte worked in the shop all day.   After work we picked up Julie and went out for Indian.

I’m looking forward to a relaxing weekend.  I hope yours is, as well.

My cousin and Aunt will be visiting tomorrow morning.  After that we’ll be headed to the lake.

Late tomorrow night, Saturday, August 11, and early morning Sunday, August 12,  the Perseids Meteor shower hits its peak.  In Austin the moon won’t rise until about 3AM, so I’m hoping we’ll have a great view and get to see some good burners.   There’s supposed to be 30-50 meteors an hour.  We’ll be watching from our boat, anchored up in a dark cove on the lake.  🙂  If you want to take a peek as well, here’s a link with more info on where and when to look.

The shot above is of yet another zinnia in the garden.   Have a great weekend!

Watering day.

Liriope muscari (aka lilyturf)

Austin recently relaxed the restrictions on watering that we have been under for over a year — moving from drought stage 2 to 1.  That means that we can now water 2 days a week, as opposed to 1.   Our days are Thursday and Sunday.   We can only water before 5 AM or after 7PM on those days.  We are trying to take advantage of both our scheduled days to give our trees and flowers water to thrive in this heat.   It’s been a bit of a challenge since our automatic sprinkler system has been kaput for the last 2 years.   So it means schlepping hoses.

This is a shot of one of the liriope plants on the front porch.   I replanted these this spring because the ones that used to flank our front door were wiped out from either the drought or the freezes during the winter.

I’m trying to remember to water them.  So far, so good.  They’re rewarding me with lots of flower spikes.   Very dainty.

Incoming.

Wanna come see me?!

Have you ever known of a parakeet that comes when you call it?  Monte and I think it’s a pretty cool trick.   Working from home today, I left Keeto in the kitchen on his perch in the window.  My office is all the way on the other side of the house down a hall with several doors off of it.  After a while I called Keeto…  and aimed the camera at the door.  It wasn’t too long that I heard him flapping down the hall and caught a few pics of him coming into my office… landing on my hand a couple seconds later.

The pictures aren’t too good.  He repeated the trick a few times and I used a couple of different shutter speeds.  This was the best sequence I captured.

It’s a bird… no, it’s a plane… no, it IS a bird.  Pretty bird!

Number 53.

Pho dinner.

When we came back from the lake Sunday night, I was still wearing my prescription sunglasses.  It wasn’t until after we got home that I realized that I left my eyeglasses on the boat — both my distance and my reading glasses.  *sigh*   I managed to use an old pair w/ prescription lenses from a couple years ago + a pair of drug store readers (at the same time!) to be able to see my computer screen for the last 2 days.

Tonight we planned a quick dash out to the boat to pick them up and do a couple other things.  On the way back we stopped at one of the Pho restaurants in our rotation.  Monte always gets the noodles.  I always get #53, pictured above.

For those of you that are keeping track, we’re 2/5ths of the way through the week.    Hang in there!

Basil invasion.

More basil.

The basil patch overfloweth.  We’ve started handing out basil to our neighbors.  Come and get some!

Been a long time.

Taking Nirvana out for the first time.

It’s been thirteen days since my last post here.  So, this has been my longest break in posting since I started this photoblog over 2 years ago.  I’d better catch you all up.

The week before last was busy with work.  Monte was working on a project in the woodshop.  I had to travel to Raleigh for all of last week.  A very long week, indeed.  I brought my camera with me, but given my work schedule and meetings every day starting early and ending late, the only interesting subject matter to capture ended up being TV screen shots from the Olympics (especially the women’s gymnastics team gold).  I decided to spare you and skip posting those.

While I was in Raleigh last week, Monte closed on the boat.  I got home close to midnight Friday night, so Saturday morning I was anxious to get out to the marina.

We moved in Saturday afternoon and slept on the boat for the first time Saturday night.  On Sunday morning we took Nirvana out for the first time together.   The winds were very light to non-existent, but we had a blast.   We raised both sails and ghosted along for a while.  Getting Nirvana was a big step for us, but I am very excited about this next phase of our sailing-life journey together.   This is a shot that monte took of Nirvana from the water.

At the end of the day we stopped by b-dock for a float.  By the time we got home tonight we were both pretty exhausted but somehow found the energy to split up cooking duties to make lamb chops (monte) and risotto (me) for a delicious dinner.

G’nite all!

The old and the new.

We’re gonna do it.

The marine survey was scheduled for today.  I took the day off work so that I could be there with Monte for it.  The marine surveyor was fantastic.  He spent about 10 hours on the boat with us, inspecting virtually everything on the boat while explaining how everything worked as he went along.  He didn’t find much wrong, and no surprises.  So, pending getting the final report from him, I think we will be upgrading from our beloved, homebuilt wooden catboat that we’ve been playing on for the last 8 years, to a big-kid, plastic boat that we will be enjoying for the next 15 or so years.  🙂

Humongous Morning Glory?

Big bloom.

I saw these huge blooms on a plant near the marina.  They look like Morning Glories, but the blooms are about 4 inches across!  I’ve never seen one so large.  This shot below shows the plant in its larger setting, to give you a better sense of its size.

Big blooms.

Backyard varmit.

Squirrly.

I much prefer these guys outside the house than in the attic.  They still seem a little miffed that they’ve been blocked out of getting in back in.  Sorry little buddy.

Bathing beauty baby bluejay.

Baby jay in the bird bath.

We have lots of baby bluejays around the yard.  They take turns sitting in the bird bath and splashing.  This guy paused long enough for me to get a shot before he flew off.   It’s a bit grainy due to the zoom, but I’m posting it nonetheless.

Graceful.

Grace on the back of a sanitary silverware wrapper.

We buzzed over to Chuy’s for dinner tonight.  Since we live so close, we eat there often.  We have mastered the art of timing our arrival before the after-work happy hour and dinner rush.   🙂

Chuy’s uses those old timey wax paper sanitary wrappers for their silverware.  On the back they’ve printed multi-denomenational prayers of grace.   It seems so out of place in our world today.  But it’s a reminder for us to give thanks for what we have, and for what we are about to eat.

It also caused me to reflect on the dinner times from my childhood.   In my family, we sat down for dinner together every night.   No TV, no radio.  No books or newspapers at the table.  We said grace out loud, together.  We had to have a little bit of everything on our plate.  We had to clean our plate before we were finished (or we’d sit there as long as it took until we did finish), and we had to ask “may I be excused?” before we were allowed to get up, clear our place and leave the table.

Was that really that long ago?

May we all be a little more thankful for our many blessings.

Baby broccoli!

My broccoli is growing!

I planted broccoli a few months ago.  The plants have grown to about 2 feet high, and now the floret heads are getting big.  I can’t wait for the harvest!

Orange you glad to see another zinnie pic?

Zinnie in the garden.

The rains have been sucked up by very thirsty trees, flowers and lawn.  This is a shot of one of the zinnias in the garden — a pretty fiery orange one.

Conjunction, junction, what’s your function?

Jupiter, Venus, the Moon and Aldebaran.

I awoke this morning to the sound of Monte getting up and going outside.  He had been planning on watching this morning’s quadruple conjunction of the crescent Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Aldebaran.  So, I hopped out of bed too.  I grabbed my camera and he dug out the tripod.

It was 6 AM and the sun was already starting to come up.   An hour earlier would have been better, light-wise, but the event was clearly visible from our front yard.

In the shot above, Jupiter is on the top.  Venus is below, it is at its brightest this month.  If you look closely, you can see the star Aldebaran on the right side of the frame (vertically about halfway between the Moon and Venus).  There is another faint star to the bottom left of Jupiter, but I don’t know what that one is called.

It was a pretty sight.  It is always thrilling to see the dance of the moon, planets and stars.  This morning the clouds lifted and we were treated to a great view.