Nature

I went on a nice long walk yesterday.  It was abut 45 degrees out, the warmest it's been in a few weeks!  It's been snowy, rainy, and cold the last week and a half.  Before that week and a half we were taunted with 2 weeks of GREAT weather!  It was in the 60's and 70's, sunny, and we just knew spring was here!  Then we got cold weather, and snow, and now it's starting to get warmer!  So, the dogs and I went out yesterday, and here is what we saw!

This is a picture of te leaves on one of our apple trees!  Yum to fresh apples!!

These are also little leaf bud/flower buds on an apple tree.  Well, I'm pretty sure it's an apple tree.  It could be a cherry tree.  But I'm really leaning to apple.  Don't you like how specifc I can be?! 

This, is the most annoying plant ever!  It's a thistle.  It is covered with tons of "prickles" on them.  When I was about 5 years old, I was walking in the garden with my mom and grandpa.  I stepped on a huge one of these!  Of course I was barefooted.  My mom spent about an hour getting prickles out of my foot, and what she didn't get out I just had to deal with.  You would think after that I would have wore shoes more.  But I didn't.

This is a very common sight around here.  Cow skulls are randomly scattered about.  Theres not a ton, but you are never surprised to find one.  You can also find other bones.  In fact, one day my dog, Dutchess, wandered off into the field.  I called her, and called her and finally I saw her running towards me with something in her mouth.  It was the hoof of a cow.  Lovely.

These are cockleburrs.  They can be annoying.  They'll get on your clothes.  They are really bad if you have dogs with soft, fine hair, like a yorkie or cocker spaniel.  My dogs are fairly immue because they have short coats.  My dad told me cockleburrs are also called porcupine eggs!  How cute is that?!

This is a woolly bear caterpillar.  We see tons of these during the fall and spring.  You can actually try to predict the weather with them.  The wider the brown part the milder the winter, and the shorter it is the more harsh of a winter you'll get.

This is right by our creek.  They are raccoon footprints.  Surprisingly I've never seen or had any altercation with a racoon before.  However, I do have an awesome story about raccoons I will post below my pictures as it's kinda lengthy.

My two dogs, Duke is on the left, Dutchess on the right.  They are digging for gophers.  To make everyone feel better, no gophers were actually harmed...this time.

Ok, so I said I had a good raccon story and I do!  Growing corn around here is very difficult, not because it doesn't grow, but because deer and raccoons LOVE it.  My dad told me a story of when him and my grandpa tried to rig up something to keep the racoons away.  Apparently they used a spot light, as raccoons supposedly don't like light, and they had a radio going all night as the people sound would help keep them away as well.  My dad and grandpa set everything up one night and went to bed.  The next morning they got up and got dressed and went out to check the corn.  Apparently their ideas really didn't work.  The raccoons had changed the radio station channel and it was just playing static, AND they had picked the corn they wanted, drug it over to the spot light and ate it in the light!!  How crazy is that?!  I can only imagine the difficulties I'll have trying to grow corn.  We will see.

Thanks for reading!!