This is what I saw this morning as I left the house to go to town. The rain and hot weather have the grass greened up and growing quickly. It needs to be mowed already. All the white irises that grow around the stump in the front yard have bloomed at once. Their fragile white petals are so delicate they are transparent--yet wind gusts of over 30 mph blew them around and the blooms didn't blow off. Awesome. Beautiful composite of fragility and strength.
Dogwood, wisteria and the miniature azaleas are blooming now also.

At the end of the driveway, the wind had blown over the full trashcan. The lid was in the road, and one bag of trash was in the ditch. So I gathered the lid and the bag and put it all where it was supposed to be, then went back to the driveway I have lined with big chunks of granite rock, got a 10 pound chunk of rock and put it on top of the lid. Let's see that blow off now!

On the way to town, through the woods, saw smoke billowing from the rear of a house. As a do gooder, I thought it might be on fire and I better check it out. So I turned around and went down a backroad and came to the house, where a woman came from the back and said she was burning some railroad ties. With 30mph wind gusts? With a burn ban in place? She said everything was okay, so I left.

Down the road there was a snake writhing in a ball on the road. I went around it, and the SUV who had run over it up ahead of me turned around and went back and parked his wife and kids in the middle of the road in the WRONG direction. I turned and went back too and the guy asked "Did I kill it?" I said all I saw was it in the road . So this guy goes down the embankment (while an 18 wheeler brakes and goes around him), and pulls out a pistol and fires "POW POW POW POW", then holds up the snake on a stick as his kids scream. The little boy was saying "It's a diamondback, daddy!"

I don't know what the h*ll it was but everybody was glad it was dead. People who like snakes are weirdo's. The best snake is a dead snake.
But I am left to wonder about this man carrying a pistol in his pocket. Geeze, is everybody armed nowadays? Maybe I better get one. It'd be just the thing if a snake comes along.

susil