Another nesting turtle

Last night I saw this 4" spotted turtle presumably nesting in our yard. When I was looking up what kind of turtle she is, I happened upon The Turtle Conservation Project which has turtle info, and an opportunity to report turtle sightings at the website http://www.turtleatlas.org/.

Peony

Momma Snapper Update

Just got this email from D (who works from home):

As I was making lunch today I noticed the turtle was back (in the mulch area of the back yard). This time I could only see between 1/2 to 2/3 of her as the back end was in a hole she was sitting in. 20 minutes later when I started cleaning up after lunch she was still there.


From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Snapping_Turtle)

--Snappers will travel extensively overland to reach new habitat or to lay eggs. Pollution, habitat destruction, food scarcity, overcrowding and other factors will drive snappers to move overland; it is quite common to find them traveling far from the nearest water source. This species mates from April through November, with their peak laying season in June and July. The female can hold sperm for several seasons, utilizing it as necessary. Females travel over land to find sandy soil in which to lay their eggs, often some distance from the water. After digging a hole,the female typically deposits 25 to 80 eggs each year, guiding them into the nest with her hind feet and covering them with sand for incubation and protection. Incubation time is temperature-dependent, ranging from 9 to 18 weeks. In cooler climates, hatchlings overwinter in the nest.

So, depending on the tempertaures this summer, her babies could hatch at the same time as mine!

9 weeks=August 6th
18 weeks=October 8th

I'm due September 20th!

Small World of Bloggers

I read the blog Hank & Willie on a regular basis. It's written by a woman I know from a program I did in college. Today she posted a link to this post where a fellow blogger has an unusual request (check it out, it's pretty unique). So, having many experiences to share with her regarding the request, I sent her an email. She emailed my back telling my my experiences were most valuable to her cause, and asked if I had taken a yoga class with her nearly 7 years ago. Well, I did! Turns out she and I sat next to each other for a month at a job I held for 4 months in 2001/2002 and we took a yoga class together through the local adult ed!! I love coincidences like this!

What's you're strangest coincidence? I think this might be my strangest to date, though I have had fun experiences running into people from summer camp (one in NYC outside the theatre where I saw Blue Man Group, a few at a Grateful Dead show in Vermont, one was my roommate when I worked at a resort, one did a very small college program with me, and one has worked at 2 different jobs with my friend Wendy). Do any of you know me from a past life??

Momma Snapper

As promised, here's a picture of a snapping turtle that was walking across my street into the cul de sac island on Saturday morning. Apparently, she has laid her eggs on the island in past years and the neighbors have seen 30 little baby turtles crossing the street to get back to the wetlands behind our house! Picture below with my size 9 garden clog is for scale.

A Busy Weekend

What a busy weekend I had for a 6 month preggo. On Friday afternoon I weeded the front flower beds. They look awful because of the lack of flowers, deer-eaten shrubs, and dying bulbs, but at least they're weed free now. Our goal is to pull out or trim down the remaining mature shrubs and then shrink the size of the beds by planting grass. The beds are just so big that they're unmanageable.

On Saturday morning before a thunderstorm I quickly pruned the "azalea hedge" on the right side of the front door (can be seen in the pictures in this post). It's actually 3 very large azaleas that had been pruned into a hedge. I very much prefer naturally bushy azaleas so I hacked the things back like crazy. D had hacked the back of the "hedge" last summer to get it off the house, and there's some nice new growth from that. So, the bushes will be ugly all summer, but by next spring they should be looking good (and much more in proportion to the size of the other plantings).

On Sunday D and I did some more gardening. He pulled out all of the deer-eaten euonymous from around the lamp post. It looked really bad, and last year we had considered pulling it out, but never got to it. The deer made the decision to get rid of it very easy. Below are some pictures of just how bad it looked.

Now, since the front of our house is looking like such a mess (it's a work in progress), I decided that we needed at least one part of it to look good, so I decided to do a little bed around the lamp post. At the nursery I choose a Sarah Bernhardt pink peony, a mountain sage (perennial salvia), a coreopsis 'moonbeam', and a creeping bellflower (campenula birch hybrid). I was going to get a clematis to climb the lamp post, but couldn't find one I like, so I chose a couple of morning glories for this summer.

I defined a bed area in the big pile of dirt and planted the plants with some cow manure and Cockadoodle Doo fertilizer (chicken shit pellets). I also moved some alyssum D's grandmother gave me last summer into this area too. D then picked up some nice dark brown mulch, and I finished off the little garden. Now all we need to do is grass in the rest of the dirt. I'm pretty happy with how my new lamp post garden turned out.

This weekend also marked the near completion of the master bedroom. On Saturday our furniture was delivered, we bought a celing fan, and we finally bought a mattress. On Wednesday night we'll sleep in the finished bedroom (the only other time we slept in that room was the night we closed on the house a year ago). When the whole bedroom is complete I do a blog post of the "reveal." Check out this post for what it used to look like. The transformation astounds me!

This weekend we also looked at nursery furniture and a car. This time the Honda CRV. Unfortunately I was too beat on Saturday afternoon to take it for a test drive. After looking at it/sitting in it, it's still on our short list along with the Subaru Forrester and a Volvo V70 wagon. We wish that Toyota still made a Camry wagon--if they did we would buy one in a heartbeat. D's 1998 Camry has 200K miles and still runs like a champ!

And, the weekend was not all work and no play. On Sunday am we went to church at 8am (D's been going since March, this was my first time--8am is completely killer for me) and I met the couple that D runs into at the country store after church each week. They are a super nice couple who live in a nearby town and have been doing lots of work and gardening at their house. We sat and chatted with them for a while and I ate my 2nd breakfast. Then, I rushed out to meet my friend Karen (a friend I met through the newcomer's club last fall) for my 3rd breakfast of the day. I'm starting to make friends who live nearby which is a huge plus. All of my other friends live a minimum of 1/2 hour away or as far as across the country!

That pretty much wraps up the weekend, though I'll post tomorrow about the wildlife that visited us on Saturday. Oh how I love living in suburbia!!! (seriously, I do)

Baby's Room Decorating

I was having trouble finding just the right gender-neutral baby bedding to go with our yellow nursery with green rug (the previous owners painted it that way as their nursery). I didn't want anything too cutesy or too pastel, or too boring. I was thinking of polka dots from Pottery Barn or Company Kids since they sell the bedding a la carte (I don't need a quilt and they now say the bumper isn't to be used very long). Then, I hit the jackpot!

I found the perfect fabric at Fabric Place, the local fabric store. I saw it and I knew it was exactly the right choice, so when they were having a 20% off sale, I picked up about 7 yards so my mom can make a crib skirt and valance. The fabric is "Sweet Dreams" by R Kaufmann. I also found a coordinating stripe that can be used as trim/border on both items.

For the sheets and bumper I'll just go solid green or yellow.