Our Yard..... Do Over

This is blooming in my front garden (I use the word very loosly) right now. Now the newspaper said yesterday that things are blooming because of stressful conditions in the spring so they are compensating. I think that is giving plant life too much credit. I think the things are just confused because of the Indian summer. Do you have anything blooming in your yard?

That little red thingy in the picture is another sign of Indian summer. It's a wild strawberry. We have a bunch of them growing wild all up and down our street, but I haven't seen any for a long time. I just happened to spot this one on the side of our house.



Well, I've been telling a few different people that I was gonna post pics of the black squirrels we have here in our perfect little town for months now. Today, after I dropped Bee off at school, I headed out to the yard with my camera, and since I had no small child with me to scare them off, I got a few pics of them finally. These squirrels are actually black. I know some of you will think nothing of this, but those of us from the midwest and most of the south have probably never seen a black squirel. I hadn't before I came here. You see, we have a small, prestigious (read hoity, toity and expensive) college in our town, and rumor has it that years and years ago someone from said college smuggled in these black squirels to live amongst the natives. They have since multiplied by the 1000's. I have never seen an area with so many squirells. We have them all.... your basic red squirel, your basic gray squirel, your not-so-basic black squirel, then because of the call of nature we also have your basic red and gray squirels, your basic red and black squirels, your basic gray and black squirels, and your basic red, gray, and black squirells.

Here's pics of one of backyard buddies.





Here's our backyard, left to right. We have lots of trees for the squirels and other wild things to jump around in. Most of the time, if you look out our back windows, you can spot something climbing around back there. This may not seem that amazing to some of you to have all these trees in our backyard, but our house in IN was in a new subdivision and had not a single tree with more than about 50 leaves on it because they were all young trees. We love all the trees!