Yes It Will!

I'm feeling good today.  This song is playing in my head, so I thought I'd share it with you.  Have a good weekend, everybody.

Bunny Theater

Some of my readers who have been coming around here for a while may remember the bunny nest and baby bunnies that were in my yard a couple of summers ago.  Well, a new family has arrived.


A mother bunny was building a nest in my front yard right out by the sidewalk over this past weekend.  I made a video of her.  My camera is an inexpensive one and the video is not good quality, but I enjoyed watching her and thought maybe some of you might enjoy it too.  

Before the video starts, she spent quite a bit of time digging the hole.  In this video, you will see her pulling big mouthfuls of grass up by the roots and then carrying them over to the nest.  She lines the hole that she dug with the grass to make it soft for the baby bunnies.  She also uses the grass to cover up the babies to protect and hide them.


If you turn up the volume, you can hear the early morning noises from my neighborhood---a neighbor vacuuming out his car, a train in the distance, lots of songbirds singing, a dog barking, and so forth.  You will see a bird or two make a cameo appearance too. This is six minutes long but two or three minutes of it will give you enough to see how she makes her nest if you don't have time to watch it all.

This is what the nest looks like now.  It is a hole filled with grass and dirt.  I imagine the babies are down in there in the deeper side of the hole on the left side, but I didn't uncover them.  I didn't want to disturb the nest.

I kept my distance from the mother bunny while she was working because I didn't want to scare her off.  

In a closer view of the photo above, you can see a stick she has in her mouth while she is making the nest.  It almost looks like she is smoking a cigar, which seems wrong somehow!  HA!

I am hoping I'll be able to get some pictures of the babies in the days to come, but that remains to be seen.

What's Going On?

"What's going on in Daisyland?" you ask.  OK, so you didn't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway.  Quite a bit has been happening, actually.  I'll see if I can catch you up.


My older son got home from college for the summer last night.  This photo is a bit fuzzy, but I liked his smile in it.

Along with him came all the stuff he has been accumulating the last two years.  Who would think that a dorm room could hold so much?  Until things get arranged a bit better, we have boxes and miscellaneous things piled in the living room and kitchen.   We're in a rather cluttered, messy state right now because we also have some boxes here of things from my Mom's house.  Her house is being sold at auction on June 5, so that has been on my mind and keeping me busy.


Back to my son, he pulled a 3.75 grade average this quarter, and he starts his summer job on Monday.  He will also be taking an online course over the summer and doing a research practicum having to do with the job he has to get him closer to graduation.  Because of these extra hours, and if he also takes a course next summer, he will be able to graduate from college for his undergraduate degree in three years instead of four.  


He's carrying a double major in psychology and sociology and hopes to be a counselor for troubled youth after graduate school.  The graduate school he is most interested in is in Florida.  I'm not particularly happy about that choice because it is so far away, but his decision isn't final yet, and there are others he is considering.  Much will depend on where he applies and where he is accepted.


In addition to the "stuff" from college from the older son and the boxes from my Mom's house that has taken up residence in the living room, there is an upright bass from the high school too. Younger son has it home from school because he needs it for a concert with the Toledo Youth Symphony tomorrow.  The students are performing along with trumpet player Doc Severinsen and some other folks.  It is the final concert of the season for the Toledo Youth Symphony.  The new season will begin again in the fall.  


Here he is all smiles with his girlfriend.

Today is his sixteenth birthday!  That doesn't seem quite right or possible, but there it is just the same.  He has his temporary driver's permit and has been practicing driving with us.  He will be taking Driver's Training courses in June.  (Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi!)

Max our ten year old toy poodle had a rough day yesterday.  He had to have some teeth pulled.  He is doing a little better today after a good night's sleep and some pain medication.

We've had an overabundance of rain this week.  So much so, in fact, that we now have a flooded basement once again, and some of the roads in the county have washed away in places.  This happens generally once or twice a year in the spring when we have heavy, continuous rains.  It's quite an aggravation to get it mopped up and dried out again.  I am hoping to be able to store some of my older son's college things down there, but we are going to have to get it dried out first.


The rain we've had has made everything grow and be abundantly green. It would be fine with me if we had some sunny weather for a while now though.  The day was overcast when I took this picture of a Buckeye Tree in the park.  It's pretty, don't you think?

My daisies in the back yard are doing very well too.  I took bouquets of these and of some purple iris to my Mom when I visited her recently.  There's not much I can do for her, but at least I can bring her flowers to brighten her room.

For those who have inquired, my Mom is doing OK. I generally go out to visit her three times a week. She continues to have some days that are very good and other days that aren't so good, and she has great trouble communicating at times.  We just do the best that we can because that's all that we can do.

My new job is going well so far.  I really love it, although I've been much busier than I was expecting. I do the promotional work for the main library here along with all five of our branches.  I've been working on flyers, handouts, door signs, and press releases for the summer reading programs of all of the above.  In addition to that, we recently held some special events at our library.  We held a community read and book discussion, in conjunction with the city schools, of the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and we hosted an appearance by a Mark Twain impersonator.  Both events went very well.  

Along with the publicity for those events, I worked on a project where patrons can adopt a flower pot to fill with flowers to help decorate the library for the summer.  So I've been keeping very busy and trying to learn as much as I can.  The woman I am replacing will be with me for one more week before she retires.  Then I am on my own!  (That's a bit scary to think about.)  I received my own set of business cards this week too.  I've never had business cards before. HA!

I traveled to Bowling Green for the day yesterday for a seminar on trends in marketing for my job.  It was interesting and I learned quite a bit, but many of the ideas they talked about and suggested are things our library can't afford at this time.  Still, it was nice to do something a little different, and I did glean some valuable information.

Blogging Blues

Hello folks.  Just wanted to leave a note here.  For some reason Blogger has stopped publishing any new comments on my posts on both of my blogs at the moment.  For older posts when I try to moderate comments on them, I just get an error message from Blogger.  New messages aren't showing up at all. So if you have commented here or on my other blog and your comment didn't show up, that is why.  I didn't delete your comments.  I am still able to read them in my email, and I greatly appreciate them, but they aren't showing up on my blog.  According to the Blogger Help Forum, my blogs aren't the only ones this is happening to.  I hope that this is a temporary problem and the Blogger gets it fixed soon.  Thanks.

Nature by the Numbers? -- Spectacular!

I saw this video on Sandy's blog and loved it so much I wanted to share it with my readers here.  It reveals a little bit about the part that math plays in nature. 


I really don't understand how someone can take a look at nature, and I mean really look, and doubt that there is a God.  Such precision, such beauty, the patterns, the symmetry--- it is all so complex and amazing that it simply boggles my mind.  Thanks, Sandy, for sharing this.

Psalm 139:14  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

Buds and Blooms

My new job is keeping me very busy, but I am enjoying it.  As with anything new, there is a lot for me to learn.  My walks through the park in the evening are even more important to me now to help me fight stress and unwind at the end of the day.  I want to share with you a few pictures from my yard and from the park from this week.


The first of my daisies have begun to bloom.

From the number of buds on the plants, it looks like I will have an abundance of them very soon.

These two shrubs (or maybe one's a shrub and one's a tree?  I'm not sure.) are blooming now. 

The light pink one on the right has been out for quite a while and the blooms are starting to fade. 

Just as they are fading, the darker pink buds and blooms of the shrub on the left are just opening.

This is what the shrubs looked like during the winter.

By the time I am home from work and have had dinner with my family, it is often starting to get dark before I head out for a walk.


We've had a lot of rain lately, and there is still standing water in places.  I liked the way the light from the lamp post reflected off the puddle along the walking path in the park.  I tried different settings on the camera to see how it would affect the photos.  These three photos were all taken within moments of each other.

The fragrance from the lilacs as I walked past them was heavenly (In my imagination, in my own personal view of heaven, there will definitely be lilacs).

I wanted to get a picture of these flowers earlier in the week, but didn't have my camera then.  Now they have been through several hard rains, and they have taken quite a beating.  They are soggy and hanging their heads now as a result.  The color is still pretty at least.

Every once in a while, I like to look up when I am walking just to see what I will see.  I liked the way the leaves of this tree stood out against the dark sky on my way back home.

Thank you, Mom!

I have so many good memories of my Mom from when I was a child that I hardly know where to begin when listing them. 

She was the glue that held our family together.  She took care of us all.  She was the organizer and the keeper of all the daily details.  She was a stay at home mom, and she was always there for us when we needed her.  She did all the cooking and cleaning and laundry and much of the gardening too.  


Every summer she put package after package of corn, peas, green beans, lima beans, and carrots into the freezer for us for over the winter.  She canned tomato juice.  She lined the shelves in the basement with jars of her homemade strawberry and raspberry jam and cherry jelly from the fruits we grew in our yard.


She made sure we had a good breakfast each morning before we caught the bus to school and quite often had warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies and a cold glass of milk waiting for us when we came back home.  This after school snack would tide us over until Dad came home from work.  She would then have a hot dinner prepared for us to share together as a family---EVERY night.   


She was there to get us to and from our after school activities.  Whatever we needed for school, whether it was to have permission forms signed for field trips, cupcakes for a class party, or materials on hand for school projects, she made sure we had them.  She read to us and encouraged us to read on our own.  She bought us whatever books we wanted from the Scholastic reader flyers that were sent home by the school.  We always had shelves full of books on hand to read whenever we wanted.  She firmly believed in the importance of reading and education.


I remember one year in middle school, each student was assigned a state for a rather extensive report.  I was assigned the state of Utah.  The teacher I had came up with the brilliant (?) idea to have us all make and bring in a bas-relief sculptured map of our assigned state.  She gave us a recipe to make a sort of  gritty play dough from flour, salt, water and food coloring.  Oh my, what a mess that whole project was!  My Mom was a trooper though.  She helped me make the dough and admired the monstrosity that I created.  It was supposed to be a map of Utah showing the terrain of the state.  She drove me to and from school with it so I wouldn't have to carry it on the bus.  I was afraid the bigger kids would make fun of my project (and believe me, there were plenty of reasons why they might have done so!).


No matter what my brother, sister, and I did, or what our interests were, Mom was our biggest supporter and fan.  She was there for us through marching band and pep club for my sister, through football and wrestling for my brother, and through Future Homemakers of America, drama club, and working on the school newspaper for me.  She kept track of schedules and uniforms and practices for us all.


She made holidays and birthdays memorable with decorating and cookies and presents and special meals.  She remembered them all.


She was creative and shared her talents with me.  She made more afghans and sweaters than I can count down through the years.  She taught me how to sew and crochet and cook.  


I learned many things from her---more than I can list here.  Most importantly,  I learned from her example how to be a mother to my own children when the time came.  If I am even half as good of a Mom as she was, I will  know that I did my job well.


Happy Mother's Day, Mom!   Thank you for all that you have done for me.  I love you!

Petals and Puddles

Last weekend, we had nothing but rain and wind and more rain.  The next day as I walked through the park, I found two things. I found flower petals from the trees on the ground everywhere I looked.  I also found puddles.  It was kind of sad that so many of the petals from the flowering trees were knocked down so quickly after they appeared, but it was inevitable.


After the rain, a carpet of pink petals had been spread out underneath the crabapple trees.

The rain came down so fast that it took a while for it to drain off and soak into the ground.  It was standing in a big puddle above the underground drain in the park.

There was another big puddle behind one of the baseball fields underneath some pine trees.

Everywhere I looked there were petals on the ground.  Pink and white ones were spread like confetti over the parking lots.

Yellow ones were spread out underneath the forsythia bushes too.

More pink petals lined the street along the curb

and were littered over the sidewalks too.

I did find some trees that still had blooms on them.  I found these white tinged in pink ones.  

This tree had a bird's nest in it.  Sweet location for a home in the midst of all those flowers, don't you think?  As they say in the real estate business, "Location!  Location!  Location!"

I saw this pretty tree in the neighborhood on the way home that was still holding onto its blooms too.  I liked the way it was framed by the black and brown lines of the corner fence on the left and tree trunk and branch to the right of it too.

Happy Sunday to you all!