The dog days of Tennessee

This is a picture of my husband and our 3 dogs. The lap dog is our miniature dachshund Lilly, the dog on the left is our pound puppy rescue dog Skippy, and the golden retiever's name is Shelby. Shelby is a K-9 drug dog. She is kenneled outside in a big enclosed area. She's like a bull in a china shop, so indoors was not an option with her. The other two are more mellow and reside inside with us.

I took Skippy to the training course at Petsmart when he was less than a year old. He does wonderfully with loose leash walking and I am working on no-leash walks as well. Shelby has been trained differently since she is a drug dog. She is a very freindly and playful dog but she is hyper and tends to hog the outdoor toys when all 3 are out. She weighs 80 lbs while Skippy is only forty lbs. So as you can imagine he gives her a wide berth.

Lilly at 10 lbs runs for cover when Shelby comes her way. Lilly is not afraid of Shelby, she will bark "the beast" down off the deck if she wants to. It's just that when Shelby comes running, she doesn't usually put on the brakes in time to stop without running over whatever she may be running toward.

Enjoy your fall day!

SkyBlueSue

Birds of a feather

On the way home from church, Sunday morning I spied a blue jay flying into the tree line along the road which I was traveling.
I don't see these birds very often in my yard. Here they tend to stay in the more wooded areas. I might get them to come to a bird feeder, but at this point in my life I don't have the consistency to maintain a feeder.

This guy is called a piliated woodpecker. I saw one of these in flight in a heavilly 

tree lined street just outside a neighborhood. Flying in the same direction I was driving, it flew down over the hood of my car,  and kept flying out in front, down the street. It is one of my more awesome bird memories. I had never seen a piliated woodpecker before and the view from below was magnificant. As you can see from the picture below, their underside is black and white and the particular bird I saw had a wonderful black and white pattern on his underbelly as well. I knew it was a woodpecker of some sort so I came home and looked it up in my bird book and learned it was the piliated! I dated the sighting in my book as my mama says my Grandma Rose taught her to do!

TTFN - SkyBlueSue

(These pictures are from  www.flickr.com which is a website where people share their photos.)

Volunteers

Portulaca

My daddy , who passed away in 2003, used to call non-perenial plants that came up on their own "volunteers." Well this year in my garden, I had an annual from last year show up half way through the summer - portulaca (some call them moss roses). In Tennessee, supposedly they don't survive the winters here to reproduce in the spring, so this year I have classified them as a volunteer.

I also had a yellow daisy show up; the main plant had died 2 years ago. My mama says that when a garden gets planted each spring, things get moved around and show up in other places. This would explain the "ta-da" of the yellow daisy suddenly the last week of August. Of course, now that I look at it closely, a week after it's debue, it is possible that instead of being the yellow daisy that died 2 years ago, it could be a hybrid of the galardia that grows near by, since it does have faint darkness in the petals. What do you think?


Yellow Daisy

  Galardia

The last flower for today is a rose. It is call "climbing Joseph's coat." I assume that the name is taken from the bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colors (Genesis 37:3) because the color of this flower is vibrant. The bud looks red orange, but when it opens it looks like a gorgeous sunset. It has not climbed much this year, but this is the first year, so we will see what happens next year.

Climbing Joseph's Coat

Well I will sign off for today. I hope these pictures and bring you some joy!

SkyBlueSue!

Hear the lively sound!!!

When I was a girl scout, growing up in Illinois, I spent a couple of weeks in the summers at Camp Tapawingo. One of the songs that we learned was "Hear the lively sound of the frogs in yonder pond: crick, crick, crickety crick, burrrrrrrrum!" (I taught preschool for a couple of years and the kids love to sing the song.)

Well, presently behind my home in the meadow here in Tennessee, there is a pond; at least it is there when there is enough rain to accummulate. Early in the spring, at night fall until late into the night, you can hear the frogs chripping. Often when I come home at night from class I announce as I enter the house "I can hear the lively song of the frogs in yonder pond!" It gets sort of old for my family - but it brings me joy to say it. It is sort of like having a moment of memory back to my days at camp.

Sometimes we have tiny little frogs come up on our windows when it is dark outside and the kitchen lights are on. You can watch them catch the bugs that are attracked to the light. Later in the summer we can often see tree frogs around the house. The little guy in the picture was on the side of the house right off the deck so I could get a really good look at him. It was so cool to look at his feet and see the little suction pads that held him to the house. Amazing!

My mama and step-daddy are farmers in Illinois. Besides growing crops, they have a garden where they grow vegetables and my mama grows flowers. My mama and I often discuss bird and flower issues of interest. She made a comment one day that stuck with me. It is a joy to live close to the land. That's where I am in my life. I take comfort from co-habitating with God's awesome creation and I am greatful for the freedom that I have to live close to the land.
Later friends! SkyBlueSue

Good Morning Glory!!!

At this point in the summer the only plants that continue to flourish are the morning glories. The picture is of the variety called "heavenly blue." Many farmers consider these a weed, as in the wild they grow and choke out other plants. In a domestic garden, they can be a thing of beauty. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this plant, they can be easily grown by buying a package of seed in the spring and planting them near something that they can climb. When the first vines begin to appear, you simply guide them to what ever you want them to climb and they literally "take off."

If you leave them to their selves for too long they will choke out whatever they can wrap themselves around. When they get overly leafy and I have seen no blooms yet, I start snapping off the wandering shoots of vines. I think this causes less plant energy to go to producing leaves and vines and results in flowers blooming. Each morning glory blossom lasts one morning. They are out when the sun rises and they fade and close when the heat of the day hits them.There are different colors, but my favorite is the big heavenly blue.

On a different issue, I have a question for you. In the night sky now there is a bright star that shines "next to" the moon. My daughter and I were speculating if it was Venus or Mars. Does any one know?
More later - SkyBlueSue :-)

The sky at night

Did anyone look at the sky last night over north central Tennessee?
The sun set like a huge red-orange ball on the horizon. It was a marvelous view as it slowly sank on the horizon and became larger and larger as it went down in the west. A couple of hours later, the moon was up in the east.It looked like a large search light shining down on everything below.

My daughter and I went out about 10 PM for a walk with one of our dogs. A walk before bed helps us unwind our brains and reconnect as a family after we both have had busy days. She is in her first week at college so her mind is racing on multiple levels.

The clouds were covering the moon as we began our walk, but the reflective light still illuminated our way as we walked around the streets of our neighborhood in the meadow. Our neighborhood used to be a farmer's field years ago. It is surrounded by trees as farmers fields usually are. I refer to it as the meadow or my home in the meadow because it is a word picture the ministers peace to me soul.

I have choosen a hecktic lifestyle as many of you probably have. I have found that when I take the time to use descriptive words for natural things it allows my mind to take a mini-vacation from the pace of my day. That's why I am blogging about nature. It is my creative outlet for ministering to my own mind.
more later - SkyBlueSue

Nature lover (rookie level)

Well this blog started out as a requirement for a technology class so it has been dormant since last spring. I decided that I needed some outlet for my love of nature so I decided to start bloggin again for that reason.
I live in north central Tennesse and of late the weather has been awsome. The past several days have been cool and a wonderful change of pace from the hot and humid summer that had previous hung over the land. With the windows open and the AC off it has been a joy. I am a fulltime graduate student taking night classes this semester, so I am at home during the day for now. I am working toward teaching grades 7-12 mathematics and will soon start 30 hours of classroom observations during the school day.

On to the joy of nature that I experienced yesterday. After several days of possible rain, as the sunset, a slow drizzle began to fall and continued for hours. I slept with the windows open so that I could listen to the soothing sound of the rain drops hitting the leaves on the bush outside my window. It is like music to my soul. It is comforting to me to listen and enjoy the "music" that God has created for those who will listen. At 4:30 AM the pace changed. Lightening struck with a loud wakeup call and the heavens unleashed the reservoir over the meadow in which I live.
I got up to close the other windows in the house. Since it was not blowing into my window, I left mine open so that I could enjoy the intense symphony of sound. It was glorious, the cracking of the thunder, the accompanying light show, the steady beat of the drops coming down. This went on until sunrise and now we are back to the calm coolness of the end of summer days.

Now as I write, I listen to the locus chirp and the occassional bird sing. This is the first day in a while that there hasn't been the sound of a neighbor mowing their lawn - that's a treat. The rain will have nurished my flower garden which was in sad need of water. Because I am mentally busy with school work, at this point in the gardening year, my flowers have to take whatever comes from the sky.

Well I need to get to doing some work. So I will close for now!
SkyBlue Sue