Fourth of July Jack-o'-lantern!

I did not post last week because of the 4th of July and a root canal that started on Wednesday afternoon and still isn't finished. Apparently, I have twisted, calcified canals. Ugh.

  Anyway, right after I picked the pumpkin, I found this hole in it like a worm had chewed into it. I put clear nail polish over the hole, hoping it would smother the little bugger if it was still in there or at least prolong the pumpkin's shelf life. It didn't work. The hole just got bigger. I doubted the pumpkin would last until October, even without the worm. So, here it is: Forth of July Jack-o'-lantern!

  You know, I couldn't find that stupid worm. We ended up mulching the seeds, they were shriveled and flat, no good for roasting. I don't have much hope that they will sprout. But we finally grew a pumpkin.

   

    Thank you for reading, and have a bat-tastic day!

  

It's too hot!

Ringo is in the house right now. Normally he is an outside cat, but he's been looking very poor lately, acting like he wanted in side, and we thought that some time in the AC would help him. 

   It hasn't been that hot, mid 90's, but the heat index has been over 100 for a few days. (You know it's hot when an afternoon shower just makes it sulty.)

He's really lost a lot of weight and just looks like he's suffering. He started looking better for a couple of days when it wasn't so hot but it didn't last.

   

   I decided to bring him in today when I saw that he had pink gloop in the corner of his eyes and wasn't very frisky. He doesn't get along with the inside cats, or most cats really, so we set him up in my room. He started looking better within an hour or so. The other cats better watch out! He might be able to go out later tonight or tomorrow.

   A few of the other outside cats have been looking bad so we might have to rotate them inside so they can cool down as well.

   We are going to get more proactive about putting ice in the cats water, at least twice a day from now on instead of once a day.  Mom's going to start tossing ice around where the cats like to lay, to try and cool them down. Unless that seems to annoy them, of course. 

   We have been dumping ice in the chickens water and spraying the run with cool water nearly everyday for while now, but I didn't think we would have to worry so much about the cats since they have so many trees to lay under. I guess that just go to show that you need to watch everyone in the heat.

  Thanks for reading, I hope you have a bat-tastic day and stay cool. 

P.S. Happy 4th of July!

Summer Pumpkin

My mother and I love pumpkins. Every October we buy a pumpkin for each of us, roast the seeds, and carve faces in it for Halloween. 

  I'm not ashamed to admit that I stopped by Walmart on my way home from school on the day after last Halloween to buy a couple of one dollar pumpkins, or that I filled my trunk with pumpkins a few days after that when we went to Kroger and saw they were giving away leftover pumpkins. Or that I have a few bags of roasted pumpkin pieces in the trianglular shapes used to carve out Jack-o'-lanterns in the freezer, because the chickens were tied of pumpkin and I didn't think the mulch could handle any more. (Side note: the meat from carveing pumpkins tastes just as good as smaller pie pumpkins to me.)

  For several years we tried to grow our own pumpkins from seeds, but after a couple of years of buying seeds and, at best, only getting a few vines on which the female blooms would rot off, we gave up on trying to grow our own pumpkins.  

Que this year, in which somehow we must have missed one of the delicous seeds, and it not only grew into a vine but did what the store bought seeds could not: produce a pumpkin! A pumpkin in in the summer. It's a miracle!

  As always thank you for reading and have a bat-tastic day!

Absence

    I'm sorry it's been a long time since I posted, and I don't think I will be posting on a regular schedule anytime soon, but I am going to try to get back to work on Bats Bizarre. I have been going through a lot in my personal life over the past couple of years.
    There have been a lot of changes in my life since my last post; I have gone back to school. I am half way to an associates degree in general studies.
   I don't really want to talk about the other issues right now.
     Well that's it for now, have a bat-tastic day!