Friday's Hunt v 4.07

Really cutting it close this week - just not having the best of weeks.

Starts with G
Marc is really coming along with the garage project.  He thinks it will be completed this fall.

The upper vertical pieces of wood are pallet wood, which he has planed and cut to size.  The lower horizontal boards are barn boards from my old collapsed barn at the NS farm.

Candy
My most frequently consumed "candy" is a handful of these.  I try not to keep candy in the house since it is too tempting.

Latch
I went around the house and yard looking for latches.  There really aren't any.  Instead, I give you some barnacles who are latched onto sandstone.  Barnacles will latch onto many surfaces - boats, rocks, shells, and anything else that gives them a spot where they can feed.  The water snail isn't latched onto the rock like the barnacles - not sure if that one is an actual snail or it may be a snail shell that is inhabited by a hermit crab.  You can see the older barnacles are a sort of yellowish-green colour - probably they have a bit of algae on them - and they are much larger than the younger ones.

Here's another interesting bit of latching - this water snail shell has developed a "hairstyle" of some kind of seaweed which has latched on to the shell and grown a little forest of white.  This snail was still living in the shell so I suppose the seaweed doesn't do it any harm.

Friday's Hunt v 3.16

Another busy week for me, but I managed to get myself organized for Friday's Hunt with Eden Hills. This week the prompts are:  Starts with P, Week's Favourite, and Feet (or foot).  

Starts with P
P is for pink!  This is the first non-crocus flower that has begun to appear in my garden.  It is the flower of Daphne mezereum, which has a common name in some places of February Daphne.  It would be really nice if we had flowers in February here, but we don't.  So it's April Daphne to me!  Also, the flowers are in a format that is called a panicle.  A panicle is a group or cluster of flowers, rather than a single flower form. You often see panicles on grass crops like oats.

Daphne mezereum is native to all of Europe, as well as the Caucasus, Turkey, northern Iran, and parts of Siberia.  It is very hardy, which is why it does well here. The flowers come out first and the leaves will follow later in the spring. Unfortunately, all parts of this plant are very toxic, so I need to be sure the goats and sheep never get to it!

P is also for purple.  The purple crocuses are really spectacular now - in large groups and sporting their lovely orange stigma - the bees love them at this time of year.

Week's Favourite
So, I was very excited today because I finally (FINALLY!) got a picture of an owl.  I had it in my head that today was the letter O, and I thought it was just perfect.  Then when I went to check the prompts, I realized that today was letter P.  So, my owl picture has become my week's favourite.  I have been trying for many weeks to take a picture of an owl.  I keep hearing them in my woods and even wrote a separate blog post about the owls thwarting my efforts.  Today, my effort finally paid off.  I was actually helped by some crows who were mobbing this poor owl, so they tipped me off to its location.  I had been hearing a barred owl in the woods, but this one is actually a great horned owl. It was very high in the tree, and there were a lot of intervening branches, so it was a difficult shot, but at least it's recognizable.  I hope to get a better picture in the future.  The owl was watching me and I knew it was already upset by the crows, so I didn't want to stress it out even more.  I took my picture from a distance and thanked the universe for such a wonderful gift.

Feet
Today I took a picture of Marc's feet.  He was up on the ladder working in the garage, so his feet were at my eye level.  That made them a convenient photo subject!

He is continuing his work on the outbuilding that will become his workshop.  Today he was installing two lamps that will be over a workbench.  They are vintage lamps that he purchased at an antique shop.

Hopefully they will be just what he needs for proper illumination.  Bulbs will help, I'm sure!

Friday's Hunt v 3.13

Here we are again for Friday's Hunt with Eden Hills.  Today the prompts are:  Starts with M, Week's Favourite, and Water.

Starts with M
I have a few M words for today's post.  First of all, here's my marvelous husband Marc, who is outside in the garage working on his project to insulate and finish the inside walls of this outbuilding so it can be his motorcycle workshop.

Here are some of his motorcycles, all covered in dust from the wood planing he has been doing, but they will be cleaned off when the season arrives for using them.  You can see the planer on the floor at the lower right.

It is a bit of a mess in there right now.  He is using pallet wood to create the ceiling of the workshop. Here's the outside edge where he's started, but the next step is to put up vapour barrier.  He can't go further with the wood until that's done.

However, the pallets have been outside this winter so they have a lot of moisture in them.  After he planes each board, he is letting them dry out.  It's an ongoing project.  He hopes to have it finished by the fall of this year.

Week's Favourite
I took this picture of Lucky Nickel through the fence, by mistake - she got in the way of my shot. However, I rather liked this picture, even though it wasn't my intended one.

After that picture, I took another of her horns, showing the texture on them.  I like it too, so I'm sharing both these goat close-ups for my favourites this week.

Water
My birds have water in their heated birdbath.

My sheep and goat have water in their heated bucket.

Most of the rest of the water around here is in the form of snow and ice.  Here's a picture of my back deck from this week.  When I say there is snow, I mean a lot!  Although, this is far less than was there earlier this month.

I did find a puddle in the driveway, since we are a little above freezing today, and there was a reflection of a pine tree in the water's surface.

Marc also pointed out that there was a little puddle at the bottom of the slope by the garage.  There is even some green-ish looking grass around it.  That will be frozen tonight though.  We have plenty of winter left to go.