So much to blog about...so little time.

David has been off, the weather has been beautiful.  We've been busy. 

Today was the first day we stayed home since his mini-vacation started.  He worked on my dryer (which is still malfunctioning and will likely have to be replaced) and the yard.  The yard is turning green!  Yay!  Spring!! 

It also means the grass cutting has begun.

My man and his riding lawnmower

Snow Peas!

Zoe and Molly in the "back yard."  The purple stuff is a winter wild flower in the genus scrophularia, but I can't remember the species. 

The first tomatoes are in the garden!

Potatoes looking fine, despite being nipped by the frost the other day.

I started cleaning up the flower beds around the koi pond.  I haven't posted any photos of the koi and goldfish in a while. 

Cow Koi...the great white whale.  Cali-Koi is in the foreground with an average sized sarasa comet.  The comet is about 8-9 inches long.  Tuna is cut off in the immediate foreground.  She is about 10 inches long.  She is deinitely a "she" btw.  I can tell my male goldies from the females!  Tuna is a ladyfish.

I think he has grown during the winter.  A lot.  And the other koi as well.  Jack, the orange butterfly koi is only an inch or so shorter than Cow Koi now.  I cleaned out the overgrowth of azolla so you can really see all the fish now.  It's kind of wild.  Cow Koi looks like a killer whale out in the deep parts of the pond, dragging the hyacinth along with him like it's a chew toy or something.  Crazy how big he has gotten.  I was feeding them earthworms today. The koi all come right to my hand to have their chins rubbed. The blue gill is alive and kicking.  Over the winter we had a bit of a scare with her.  She got hung up in the protective netting I keep on top of the pond (to keep the marsh birds from devouring my fish).  I really thought we would lose her.  But she bounced back.  Back to her normal demanding self.  She won't eat fish food or koi pellets, only live critters.  So I have dig earthworms or grubs for her.

I got a phone call from my aunt the other day.  She has a goldfish pond as well.  My aunt had leg perthse as a child and is requiring several surgeries.  It is basically crippling her.  To make matters worse, she injured something in her chest (the pain was so bad that she was thinking she was having a heart attack.)  It was muscular...I didn't quite catch the diagnosis but the short version of this story is that she asked me to take her pond, her fish, her lilies.    She said she can't handle the upkeep anymore.  So David and I were poking around in the pond wondering how many more fish my pond will handle (not many) and perhaps digging a second pond that flows into the existing one?  Perhaps a stream that joins the two ponds?  I dunno.  What I envision entails moving a welded pipe fence (posts cemented into the ground) and a lot of digging.   

Shoot me now.

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Yesterday we went to the zoo.  The weather was just perfect. 

The kids had a blast....I have a lot of blurry photos of Benjamin and Jonathan.  It was like somebody gave them some Mountain Dew with red dye before we got there.  They were hyped.  We climbed Monkey Hill, and when we got to the top the boys both zoomed off in opposite directions.  Benjamin went to the tree house that the zoo just built.  Jonathan went to the rope bridge.  I was left there wondering which child I should chase after.

My favorite photo from the zoo.  The male siverback gorilla.  It hurts my heart to visit the primates in the zoo.  I understand the need for people be aware of what habitats we should be conserving.  And I like zoos.  But I ethically, the primates trouble me.  Anyway.  This guy was magnificent.  He was sitting towards the back of the exhibit and I was holding Jonathan, pointing to the gorilla.  Suddenly, he got up and made a beeline to the part of the area of the exhibit we were standing.  Jonathan screamed in absolute terror and ran to David who was a safer distance, back behind the benches. 

I think the recent news story about the tiger mauling at the zoo in California had him a little bit leery about this whole zoo trip thing.  He was frightened of the big cats as well.

Jonathan wasn't the least bit concerned about the alligator snapping turtle. 

A nice shot of the gators.

The pigs at the petting zoo. 

More to write about but I am running out of daylight.  I still have a million things to do outside.  Later gators