natural beauty

I love dusk clouds. As the sun goes down on the horizon, the rays of the lowering sun hit the clouds with this beautiful pink on the edges. The rest of the cloud deepens to a rich blue gray. The light casts a golden glow on the landscape. Even in the east, the clouds get the same pink lining. What a great way to end a day!

This is what greeted me when I cracked open an egg for breakfast. Over 50 years and I have never seen a double yolk. Fascinating. If it had been fertilized, would the chicks have survived? Would there actually been two? Seems the shell would have been unforgiving...

My next thought was, what's the folklore surrounding the double yolk. I discovered it depended on which folklore. Several cultures believed the double yolk meant pregnancy. (Definitely not me!) For another, it portended bad luck, for another good luck. Yet another, it meant a wedding and there was a reference to a death in the family.

For me, at least for breakfast, it meant good pancakes.

Texas critters

This is a striped back scorpion.

It was crawling up my calf late last night while I was enjoying movie night.

This is the actual one, only after I killed it and one of the cats played with it. I was surprised how calm I was when I flicked it off my leg. For the next half hour, I was doing an "OMG" dance around the bedroom trying to find it and visualizing a nest of them under my bed. When I did find it scurrying around the baseboards, I squealed and slapped it with my sandal, which brought my terrier to the rescue.

Pushing the eager terrier back and slamming the critter with my sandal, I wondered why not one of my cats had alerted me to it. Why else would you have multiple, critter-killing kitties if not to take care of the creepy crawlies? Certainly not for the joys of litterbox cleaning, shedding hair clumps and hairballs?

It took me a while to overcome my fear and crawl into bed. This was only after tucking the sheets in tightly and then tearing them up just making sure no scorpion had taken refuge there.

I've heard some people keep scorpions as pets. Not me. Few critters make me cringe and scorpions are one of them. They look prehistorically dangerous and I have experience in how frightfully painful the sting is. Yet now as I sit here recalling the experience, I wished I hadn't panicked, had captured the scorpion alive and taken it outside - far from the house - and released it.

Some would think that silly, but as scary as they are, they do eat bugs. They do serve a purpose, just not in my house.

On the other hand, I have yet to find any redeemable quality for fire ants. I take vengeful glee in kicking a nest mound and dropping fire ant killing stuff on it. (I've learned never to kick a fire ant mound twice.) Since I moved to central Texas 10 years ago, spring has always been heralded by fire ant bites. This year they are harder to locate because of the dryness, but they are here. I have the festering, itching bites to prove it.

reminder

A mourning dove was just outside my window on the ground. So I took a photo. Not because the bird was so close, but because it reminds me of a faraway friend who decided when she sees these doves, she says "chocolate." We would laugh deciding that the dove is a sign we should have chocolate. So I took the photo -- to remind me of a friend.