Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A turtle that lurks under furniture.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Coffee mugs and espresso muglets by Stephen Kilborn of Taos, New Mexico.

Spring brings a burst of new life!

Spring: the time of renewal, of new beginnings.

In Spring the gopher population explodes. Last Spring I posted some videos of gophers being taken care of by crows and egrets.

This morning I noticed a gopher running along the side of the garage. I think it is a youngster who has been kicked out of the den by its mother. It's time for him to be on his own. He rounded the corner and went in front of the garage door. We went out to see what's happening.

Little gophers are fearless. I expected him to run in fear but he was ready to fight to the death. It would have been easy to Whac-a-Gopher but neither of us is able to do that. So we herded it off to the other side of the driveway toward the neighbors' yard.

Since the little monster was standing his ground we had time for Jerry to fetch the camera. We made a movie of our little friend being encouraged to move out. Enjoy it!

Happy Bloomin' Spring!

The Tabebuia is putting on a better display than last year's.


I wonder if it will get even better in the next few weeks.

Happy, hic, St. Patrick's Day!

There seems to be an interest in beer around St. Patrick's Day. There was quite a spike in views of my Making a Black and Tan YouTube video in the days leading up to that solemn occasion.

Here is a graph of the number of times the video has been watched in the past week.  It became very popular on the 17th.

Mmmmmm.  Black and Tan.

8 bananas, 1 peel

It's banana dehydrating time again. This time I decided to do something new: peel all eight bananas of a bunch and leave the peel intact.

I was successful!

When I took them off the hook some of the ends started falling off. But, for a few minutes eight bananas were out of a single piece of peel!

I am so talented!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A pewter turtle on an agate (?) base.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

To celebrate Spring Ahead, here is yet another turtle clock. It's hanging above the laundry area in the garage.

Just hanging around

Last year, you might remember, we had our trees and oleanders trimmed. The oleanders are between our driveway and our neighbors' driveway. The neighbors got inspired by this and had more of the oleanders trimmed that are along their driveway and our backyard fence.

When we moved here in 1988, the Johnsons had left behind their horseshoes stakes and a pair of horseshoes. The horseshoes were left hanging on the fence near the stakes. The stakes were in the way and got pulled out of the ground and thrown away. The horseshoes were out of the way and hidden by the oleanders and trumpet vine. After more than 20 years they're still hanging on the fence.

Once the oleanders and trumpet vines got trimmed, these relics of the Johnsonian Era were exposed for all the world to see.

What should we do with the horseshoes? Poll in the sidebar.

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Poll Results

Option	Votes	WINNER
Pitch them	1
Leave them hanging	5	X
Store them safely in the garage (they're sacred relics after all!)	0
Send them to Mom...she can't throw anything away!	3

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So we'll leave them hanging! Thanks for all your votes! (Mom lucked out this time.)

The Party's Over, Take 2

There have been two obituaries in the news in rapid succession for people with connections to "Bells Are Ringing."

First, I mentioned the death of Mary Printz in my previous post. Today, I heard of Sydney Chaplin's death. He and Judy Holliday both won Tonys for their performances in "Bells Are Ringing."

Of course, I knew of Mr. Chaplin more for his performance of Nick Arnstein in "Funny Girl" with Barbra Streisand.

I'll have to watch again "Bells Are Ringing" sometime soon.

The Party's Over

Several years ago the Broadway channel on Sirius Satellite Radio had songs from the musical "Bells are Ringing" featured heavily on their playlist. I enjoyed them no matter how many times they played them. Most of these songs have been dropped from Sirius's playlist. Silly them.

The heroine of the show is an operator at an answering service who does more than just take messages for the clients. She solves problems for them. And she falls in love with one of them. She's never met him and has only heard his voice but she knows all about him from the messages she gives him and the binds she gets him out of. She decides that she has to meet him and madcap romance ensues.

You should rent the movie version if you've never seen it. (At least if you like musicals.) It's got fun songs and a zany story. Several of the songs are standards you can sing along with.

The main character of the show was based on a real answering service operator, Mary Printz, who recently died. Her obituary is one of those that makes me smile. It's the sort of obituary that is a mixed bag...while she's living there's no knowing about her, but on her death I'm happy to have heard of her.

In case you're interested, here are some of the songs from "Bells Are Ringing." If it hadn't been for Mary Printz, we might never have gotten to hear them. They're a delight (just as Ms. Printz seems to have been). Vincente Minnelli's direction is rather dull. It looks like a camera was put in a theater where the play was performed. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Judy Holliday — The Party's Over

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A Miocene turtle coprolite.

The information that came with it.

I hope we weren't had. This looks a lot like the pseudocoprolite in the pseudofossil article and is from the same area as that one.