20200828

Went outside for the first time in a couple of weeks. I’d been trying to take Casper out for a while every morning. It’s usually cool enough to be nice for a couple of hours in the morning. But it’s heated up and gotten really humid for the past couple of weeks so I haven’t gone out. Casper’s been mad at me. He loves his morning out in the garden. As do I. So this morning we sat outside and enjoyed the butterfly parade. Casper enjoyed my orchids.

I got some new fish for the pond recently. I’ve had one for several years and think she’s been lonely, judging by the eggs she’s been laying. I had one fish for a long time before. I bought several at once and then all of them died but the one. This time I decided I quarantine them for a couple of days before I put them in the pond. This time everyone seems to be doing OK. I named them before I got them home; I don’t know why. Blanche, Lucy and Coppertop. I’ve had the other fish for 3 years and never called it anything but fish. At first the newcomers hid from Fish. No wonder, she’s 3 times the size of the others. But as of now they’re schooling around the pot, acting like fish. So far so good.

20200814 – His Majesty

This gallery contains 1 photo.

20200812 – Morning in the garden

There are lots of caterpillars right now.

Big ones

Small ones

And ones so tiny I have a hard time holding the phone still enough to get a decent picture. All of the passion flower vines are ragged and the butterflies are ragged from fighting over territory.

Casper and I go out in the mornings when it’s still cool and the onshore breeze is blowing. Usually I’m outside about 3 minutes before I see something that needs to be done. Taking Casper out is just the motivation I need to get me moving on the yard work. I sit down and read between chores and he sits by my chair and watches the butterflies. After a dirt bath.

Cat in a 8 foot jungle

The atrium has been Casper’s new favorite spot. He plays, he prowls, he pounces. He’s my lion in a 8 foot jungle.

He loves it because it’s outdoors, with breezes and sunshine, but it’s also away from people and delivery trucks because he’s terrified of them. He’s a big, hairy chicken.

Dirt bomb

Casper always finds the biggest pile of dirt to roll in.

20200210 Random cat photo

Casper likes to play on the stairs. I think he likes being on the same level.

My Small Family

The mammalian members, anyway. Spud’s big enough now that he makes rather an uncomfortable lap sitter. Not to mention he’ll bite anything that he likes the look or smell of, and his beak is sharp!

Random cat photo 20160928

Mice

We have had a mouse issue lately. A while back a field adjacent to our neighborhood was cleared and since then there have been mouse sightings at night. We also had a couple of entry points where we’ve made changes to plumbing, etc. and it appears that they moved into the garage. I first noticed them on the patio, when I would go out to take something to the trash at night.

Then the wind chimes in the atrium started ringing on nights when there wasn’t wind enough to move them. Besides, wind chimes blowing in the wind sound much different than wind chimes clanging because something has landed on the pole. The Spouse saw them jumping onto the pole late one night.

Soon bad things started happening to my plants:

They started to eat the leaves off of everything. They ate my tomatoes. They ate all the leaves off of my hyacinth beans. They ate the new growth off of almost everything. They started eating my precious succulents. Ack!

After that I started blocking off the entrance/exits to the garage. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get them all filled in at once. It gave them a chance to get out of the garage. I’m not really interested in having a garage full of mummified mouse corpses.

We’ve also had help in reducing the rodent population from the cats and other predators. The cats have caught two and we’ve found a couple more partial (ew) corpses in the yard. I think that would be our local owl family. Go owls! I’m hoping that between no longer providing a cozy home, the cats and other predators that the mice will decide that they’ll live longer elsewhere. They don’t appear to be getting into the atrium anymore. Plants once eaten to nubs are putting up new growth. Now if they will abandon the main part of the yard I will be much happier.

20160819 Random cat photo

Can anyone tell that I love our cats? They each have their own chair on the patio, good for keeping cat tails out of tortoise range, and they lounge on the patio with us when we go out in the evening. No free range cats here. Between cars and coyotes, outdoor cats don’t last long in Southern California. Fortunately for us, our patio is enclosed all around.