Dog Days of Summer

When the sprinklers come on, Katie goes wild! I'm not sure if she's trying to attack them or just getting a drink of water. Probably a little of both.


She learned this behavior from her previous owner. Whenever I would water the flowers at the Breseman Street house, she would come after the hose in the same way.


But it's great fun. Attack...


...and then run away to fight another day.

Houses Then and Now

This is the first house Julie and I lived in, the parsonage in Walkerton. Jill snapped this picture as she passed through the little town. Looks kinda drab and unimpressive now, but when it was built in the late 1950's this would have been a very nice home. In fact, when we lived there in 1977, there were doctors and other professionals living on this street. The house was about 1200 square feet in size, had a one car garage, three bedrooms, one and a half baths for a family of four (and Michael on the way).


How times have changed. 3 car garage, five bedrooms (if you count my office), four baths, 4000 square feet for the two of us. And our place is modest compared to many where we live. Is it affluence or just easy credit that has changed the average American's expectations of housing? The more you make, the more you expect, and the more you spend. Who is shaping our consumer expectations anyway?

Hummer!

I snapped this picture of one of our hummingbirds. This is a female ruby-throated hummingbird. We have three of them who regularly visit our feeder in the cool of the morning and late in the afternoon.

We Have a Contract to Buy Our Cedar Hill House

On Friday we received an offer on our Cedar Hill house. It was a little low, so we decided to counter-offer. This morning the other party accepted. Of course, the mortgage business being what it is today, you really can't say you've sold the house until you've got the cashier's check in your hand.

But we have a buyer and we are moving toward a closing within the month.

Again, God has answered our prayers in his perfect timing.

Plecko Disappears

This is a picture of my new plecostymus because my old one disappeared from the aquarium. Maybe a pre-plecko rapture? But as I looked more closely, I did spot the remains of a a rib cage and parts of a spine on the bottom. I learned today that pleckos can starve to death and not show it because so much of their body is armor. Apparently my previous plecko had gotten lazy. They will eat the food the other fish eat rather than gnaw away at the algae because they don't have to work so hard. But then they don't compete for the food and so they starve. (There's a political lesson in there somewhere, don't ya' think?) I think other fish probably feasted on his remains. (Like most of life, it's only pretty from a safe distance.) So I bought Leo, a leopard plecosymous. He's much larger than the old one and probably a lot harder to miss.

But here's the thing for you fish lovers with pleckos: they love to eat zucchini. The guy at the fish store said you can cut a small zucchini in half lengthwise, fasten it with a rubber band to a rock so it sinks, the plecko will have it hollowed out by the next morning. I also learned that pleckos can live 20 years.


Here's a bala shark swimming just ahead of a red-tail tinfoil barb. My tank has two sharks and three red-tails.


The red-tail tinfoil barbs are really pretty. These have grown considerably since I brought them home nearly six months ago. They are about 4-5 inches long and will grow another inch or two.


The smallest inhabitants of my 72 gallon tank are the tiger barbs like the one on the left. Some of these have also disappeared. I started with five and am down to three.

I like my aquarium. It's not a lot of work, but it's pretty (from a safe distance) and relaxing.

Granbury's Only Steakhouse

Took Julie to Granbury's only steakhouse, and it's in Tolar. The Line Camp Steak House is about 10 miles out in the country, under a grove of trees. Driving in there reminds me alot of going to camp meeting as a kid. No parking lot, just park your car under the trees and smell the steaks cookin' on the grill. Yum! The food is really good. I had a great ribeye and sweet potato fries.


I didn't know it until we showed up, but Thursday night is "Battle of the Bands" night. You can see the stage in the background of the above picture. Whole families come out, like these kids eating hamburgers in the shade waiting for the first country-western act to get started.


The Line Camp is pretty rustic, including real cowboys in cowboy hats. I took these pictures with my iPhone so they're a little fuzzy. We left before the band battle got started. As we were pulling out lots of cars were driving into the Line Camp Steakhouse.

Odds 'n .. Just Odd

This was what I looked like when I went to work at the mission project in Guatemala. The locals burned cedar in their stoves and I'm very allergic to cedar. I can't think what those little kids must have thought when they saw this alien coming into their village.


My nephew, Luke, really, really likes ketchup.


Julie and I decided to use our heads outside Schmidt's restaurant in Columbus, Ohio.


I call this "Bad Taco in Sombrero."