Okay, time for cute pictures of the dog. As you can see, she sleeps a lot (she's asleep right now in the chair beside me). When not asleep, she enjoys chewing on empty soda bottles. As you can tell, the dog has TEETH! Yorkies have remarkably large teeth for their size!
This spring we had a couple of heavy rains and flooding. This was followed by almost no rain in July. It's been hot—today it's 93 degrees. So far the evaporative cooler has been able to keep up most days. We do have a window air conditioner in case the swamp cooler malfunctions or can't keep up, but other than when the pump basket clogged off (that happens from time to time) and when it was hot day after day and I had to close the curtains and hang blankets for a couple of days, we've been okay with the cooler.
My garden is hanging in there, in spite of the heat. Earwigs are another story. Looks like I'm going to have to powder the corn and so forth if I want to kill them. I've drown tons of them by putting down wet sheets at night and then throwing the sheets into a bucket of soapy water, but I can't kill enough to make a dent, it seems. I've gotten peas, the beans are almost ready and the tomatoes have tiny tomatoes forming. I also say a small zuchinni. I can't eat fried zuchinni yet because I have no bottom teeth, but it's good for other dishes.
The ducks hatched a couple of batches of ducklings. "Mama" hatched three babies around June 7th, then "Broody" hatched ten on the 26th of July. All three of Mama's are alive and one, the drake, is larger than she is now! So far, six of the ten Boody had are still alive. I added shade, a shallow water dish and a food dish to see if that helps keep the remaining six alive. It has been so very hot for the ducks. Broody is often seen panting and the babies spend much of day inside their house. We let some ducks out one day and others the next. Otherwise, they tend to fight each other. We now have one duck per cage, except the mature drake and one hen are housed together. This is much easier than trying to keep all six together. When the hens go broody, fights erupt often and I was tired of fighting ducks. So, they have their own little "happy places" and harmony rules!
The ducks hatched a couple of batches of ducklings. "Mama" hatched three babies around June 7th, then "Broody" hatched ten on the 26th of July. All three of Mama's are alive and one, the drake, is larger than she is now! So far, six of the ten Boody had are still alive. I added shade, a shallow water dish and a food dish to see if that helps keep the remaining six alive. It has been so very hot for the ducks. Broody is often seen panting and the babies spend much of day inside their house. We let some ducks out one day and others the next. Otherwise, they tend to fight each other. We now have one duck per cage, except the mature drake and one hen are housed together. This is much easier than trying to keep all six together. When the hens go broody, fights erupt often and I was tired of fighting ducks. So, they have their own little "happy places" and harmony rules!
These are two of the nighthawks that fly around during the day eating mosquitoes and other insects. There are five altogether. They do a good job of keeping the flying insect population down and they're fun to watch!
That's it for this post. More later.
