I swear he's smiling

Visiting my country friends yesterday, my host broke into my creative time by announcing his dragonfly model was here. Grabbing my camera, I went out shooting. My host had already had some gorgeous photos printed of this creature and I was thrilled to have a chance to get a few shots.

The dragonfly was very cooperative and seemed to have an innate sense of his best side. I'm convinced he knew and enjoyed the photo shoot.

See . . . he's smiling.

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.

ranch rodeo

I may live in Texas, but I'm not a fan of rodeos.

But a few days ago, a friend called and asked me to accompany her to a ranch rodeo in celebration of the National Day of the American Cowboy. I had never been to a ranch rodeo and it was supposed to be different.

It was. Interesting. Slow. Amusing. Dusty.

The cowboys and cowgirls (some teams were mixed and one was all women) formed teams of about five members and participated in the events of their choice: steer-tying, branding, stampede, 2 rescue races, wild horse ride. The all-female team won the trophy.

In the steer tying event, the team had to head (lasso the horns or neck) and heel (lasso the back legs or leg) an about 800-pound steer, while other team members had to bring the take the uncooperative steer to the ground and immobilize him by tying three legs together.

The header ropes the horns and turns the cow so the heeler can lasso the hind legs.

This was the point the steer turned and bumped hard into the heeler's horse. The horse just absorbed the shock and kept after the steer. I'm not sure the first heeler was successful, but notice that a second team member is ready just in case.

My favorite thing to watch were the horses: how athletic they were, how well trained, how they acted when their rider just left them. One riderless horse actually helped herd a steer into the holding pens, while another showed his displeasure of no saddle pad by bucking with his rider across the arena. Oh, the cowboys were nice eye candy too.

A captured steer signaled the others to finish the job.


The steer got its revenge for the treatment. This one chased one of the unhorsed cowboys up the arena fence before the officials could get it back into the pens. Someone sitting nearby commented, "Ya gotta watch out for those Brahmas, they don't forget."

One event was call a rescue, but I don't think I would want to be rescued this way. But it was exciting. The participants could choose a shovel or a cowhide to be pulled behind a horse to the other side of the arena where the pulled person was dumped off and another jumped on and was dragged racing across the arena. Several lost their hold on the shovel and were dragged across the finish. (As long as you were dragged across the line, you were still in the game.) OUCH.

The thing I will remember most about the event was that I kept missing the significant photo moments. It's been so long since I've had a good camera, I keep forgetting to put it up to my face. Maybe next time . . .

IT RAINED!!!!

Amazing how exciting a bit of water falling from the sky can make one positively giddy. Giddy enough to try to take photos from inside a car (didn't turn out, what a surprise). Giddy enough to squeal with delight as one is trying to unpack the car in the midst of a deluge.

And then to see this in my backyard after the hard, quick rain:

It may not have been enough to relieve drought conditions, but it was nice being reminded what a thunderstorm is like. And how awesome is it to see a rainbow in your backyard?

struggle and hope

If you don't know this by now, it is HOT in Texas. Triple digit temperatures and it is supposed to be 2-3 degrees less in the Hill Country. It's not. This is what my backyard looks like:
Ten years I have been here and it's never been this dry.

So today I was sneaking buckets of water to my poor burr oak (water restrictions) and the pampas grass in the far corner. The oak has sprouted new branches and leaves at the bottom.

As I was crunching my way across the dry brittle grass I came upon this:

A bright spot amidst all the brown.