Things are starting to turn …

I’ve been making many trips back and forth to the hospital lately … wife caught a bug and it occasioned an intense regime of antibiotics. She’s in a rehab place, now, to get her strength back. She’ll be all right; I’m not concerned about that, but I’m being run ragged.
But the trips have shown me that lots of stuff is beginning to look like Autumn, and I’ve been making some pictures. Here are a few, no comments from me, unless necessary:













There you go, folks … gotta run …
Cheers, all!

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A few local odds and ends …

These are not particularly important, or even interesting, but I thought I’d put them up.
First, our Slavic Maple tree (it’s Russian the season):
And next, a few “Last of the Season” pics. First, a tomato:
Not the greatest tomato in the world, but it made it to the end of the season.
And a batch of petunias in a half-barrel … they’ve about had their day:
And last, a final opening bud in the same batch … I got lucky with the shadow:

And that’s about it …
Gotta go, now … have to make a hospital visit.
Cheers, all!

 

The fruit …

Some of you may remember my previous two posts on the blossoms on the flowering crabs in my courtyard (see https://derwandersmann.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/and-2/
and https://derwandersmann.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/closeups/
entitled “And …” and “Closeups”, respectively.).
Well, here are the ultimate results of those blossoms, first a view of the tree; observe the red fruit:
And next, a couple of closeups of the fruits themselves:


These are “crabapples”, so-called because they “bite” I suspect, not our eating apples. and this is as big as these little guys get, around ¾” to 1″, and they are not exactly tasty … VERY acid, in fact, but they are widely used in the preparation of jams and jellies, because of their high quantity of pectin (the stuff that makes jellies gel). With sufficient sugar, they are quite palatable.
When Johnny Appleseed traveled the early USA, passing out appleseeds, this is what he was handing out, not the regular eating apple of today, because apples don’t breed true through the seeds, but only through the wood. (Don’t ask me why!) The settlers made jams with them, and naturally, whiskey, which was the same as cash on the frontier.

P.S. The birds love ’em, too, and get stoned on the fermenting fruit on the ground.

Cheers, all!

 

Cat update

I dare say you folks will remember the previous posts I’ve made concerning my cat, with photographs showing the great lump of tangled hair on his back … if you don’t remember, look back in this blog at the “cat” posts, you’ll find some. Well, it got bigger and bigger … not noticeably, but over time it was evident. It at last got so big that he would scrape it when he retreated under the bed during thunderstorms or when the lawn was being cut. It started to kinda loosen up, and finally, I could see that it was fastened to him in only two places. I seized the opportunity once when he was lying on his side in the kitchen, and made a quick snip with a really sharp pair of surgical scissors that I had, and cut the rear attachment before he could move. But it startled him, and he jumped up. The “hair tumor”, for so I shall call it, being suspended from only one end, began flipping back and forth as he tried to come to grips with it, driving him even more looney than he ordinarily is. I saw that he was going to really do some damage if the condition persisted, either to himself or the furniture, or both. So I grabbed him and pinned him down, and snipped the forward attachment, and let him up. This is the result:
That’s the “tumor” in my hand, it’s as hard as a softball, and you can see the little scaper down there on the floor in the dark, trying to figure out what happened.
Here he is, a half-hour later, resting up from his ordeal:

That’s about it, folks … I thought you’d like to know.
Um … anyone want to buy a lump of cat hair?
Cheers, all!