Friday Picture-Rama

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this would be a looooong blog post.

We keep getting cool snaps, and I keep thinking “this one must be Blackberry Winter,” but they just keep coming. It warms up, then we get a line of thunderstorms, and it cools off, lather rinse repeat. Well, rinse anyway.

The blooms look pretty good this year, and I’ve noticed several stands in a nearby pasture. We still have plenty of jelly and jam though, so I’m sure sure I’ll do much picking come Fourth of July or not.


Upsize the vines, the thorns, and especially the flowers… and this is what you get. The vining roses are really kicking this year — much better than last. We have a dogwood that blooms twice, since there’s one of these vines crawling all through it.

But seriously, I need to get the shears a hold of the rose vines — they’re doing a fair imitation of kudzu, but with teeth!


I was going to say something like “moving from flowers to weeds,” but Big V isn’t here to defend herself. Oh well, I’m still gonna talk about her, that’s the price she pays for dragging me out of bed last weekend and driving her to Tractor Supply. She has her “permanent” prosthetic, the one that’s custom-fit for her, and she can get around on it reasonably well now. That day, she was still working on her balance, and was doing fine pushing the cart around. That is, until she had them drop about 350 pounds of horse and dog feed on it.

She gave the laden cart a push, and said, “I can’t get that going. You’ll have to push.” Then she climbed on top of it. I was a little worried about the cart’s rated maximum load, but it didn’t come apart on us. Of course, that meant I had to push her and the feed up to the cash registers and then out to the car. She hopped down and got in the seat before I had a chance to tell the guy to throw her in the trunk with the rest of it. ;-)


Of course, what would one of these photo-posts be without the World’s Cutest Grandkid? This pretty much sums things up for Mason these days. He’s crawling all over the place, pulling himself up on anything that will stand still long enough to support him, trying to free-stand, and chewing on things.

We started giving him teething biscuits this week — they’re a really hard cookie-like thing that is supposed to be hard to bite through. Mason’s beaver-chompers make pretty quick work of them, though; they don’t last more than a few minutes before he’s bit the end off and working on the loose piece. He likes some regular (i.e. not-baby) food, but definitely not fish or guacamole. He made the most hilarious face after Mrs. Fetched gave him a little home-made guacamole last night… then ejected it quick. I think he was expecting peas, which he does like. Next time, I’ll have the camera at hand and on speed-shoot mode.

Stupid gout is running at a low level at the moment. I’ve temporarily stopped drinking… when the foot is good for an entire week, I’ll resume the occasional nip at the rum bottle.