(no subject)

[which_chick]

This is my horse Meatly. She's hugely pregnant -- under normal circumstances, her belly is only about two inches further out than her hips on either side. We think she's probably got another week or so to go. *sigh*



As we can see from the above image, the mock orange has made with the flowering. Yay mock orange! You have earned a year free from the shovel. It'd be nice, though, if you expanded your efforts to beyond two small branches. You *are* an entire seven-foot shrubbery, you know. This hyar smacks of a half-vast effort, if you ask me. Sure, you're only REQUIRED to have seventeen pieces of flair...



This is a gallica rose called Charles de Mills. In wet or humid weather, he's prone to balling (Not what you may be thinking. Balling, for roses, is when instead of blooming into intricate blossoms of a gazillion petals, a rose's buds make intricate gobs of undifferentiated icky mildewed slimy ick.) but this year looks to be a good one for him. Note his interesting purple-red color. Rest assured that my camera is having trouble with the color. It's more maroon and darker than you see here, though it does fade to bluer tones on the outer petals. Catalog descriptions claim that gallica roses don't have any scent to them, but he has one. He's also incredibly healthy and winter hardy. Let's all have a big round of applause for Charles, with whom I am well pleased.

Today I also discovered that the allegedly striped rose from the plant swap is NOT striped. It is a pale (insipid) pink. It is NOT a single (five-petaled) rose. It is fully double. It's also appallingly healthy and hardy with a heavy, spicy scent that can knock over small mammals at three feet. While not what I expected and not what I had hoped for, I like it enough that it can stay.

Also, I'd just shut off the computer and was about to head to bed when I opened the front door to call Tumnah (the preferred cat) in -- she hadn't come in for dinner like Tine (the annoying, less-preferred, snot-nosed cat) had, when I was struck, STRUCK by this animal not ten feet from my door. Unlike people who claim they have seen the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot or whatever, I actually have decent footage of what it was I saw when I opened my door because it did not run off and I had ample time to boot up the camera and take a couple of shots of it wandering around my freaking back yard (which, admittedly, is only "yard" by virtue of being herbaceous instead of woody).







On that last shot, the white in the lower left corner is the window frame. This was not very far from my house at all.

Comments

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted to see a bear, I'm so jealous! I mean okay, it was awfully close--and have you seen your cat, I mean I hope the bear didn't get it. Though that's really silly because bears aren't hunter/stalker type carnivores for the most part. But how cool! A bear!

P.S. Meatly is *huge*! I hope she is about a week from foaling, poor thing. I bet she'll have a pretty baby.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

The cat's fine. After I was done taking pictures, I went back to the front door and called the cat and she came right in. The cats generally hide under the car when cat-unfriendly things approach (other cars, ATVs, german shepherds, bears, etc.) so I wasn't horribly worried on that front.

I've seen bears (in real life, not in zoos) twice before. One ran across the road in front of my car -- they're surprisingly fast. I didn't think they could go very fast, but they do a hell of a lot better than I thought they could. The other time I saw a bear, it was tearing down my neighbor's bird feeder and eating the bird food out of it. I was out walking and I turned right around and walked myself home. The bear was too busy paying attention to the bird feeder to pay much attention to me.

Bear

[ardvaark99999.livejournal.com]

I had my laptop screen tilted a bit when I tried to look at the bear photos. All I could see was black. I was pretty sure that the photos were great examples of "Loch Ness Monster" photos, and I sort of thought that you were joking around. Not about the bear's existence, but rather about having photos.

Comments from other folks here indicated to me that there was actually a bear in the photo, so I tried again. Lo and behold, I see the bear! Kind of like the "Magic Eye" photos that people used to get a few years back.

This is probably the bear that people were saying looked like a 400 pounder. Ha. It's maybe 120. It's a little bear by the looks of it. People always overestimate their size. I looks like it's comparable to a really big dog.