And Now, a Few Random Pictures

I finally got around to uploading pictures off the camera this afternoon . . . let's see what we have . . .
Well, what do we have here? A picture to trot out for the high school boyfriends, I'm thinking! These are self-described "cowboy princesses". They are indeed wearing cowboy boots and riding stick horses in their princess dress-up gowns. The girls in the middle is Kenna, Beverly's daughter (they were the company we had last weekend). She's the same age as Grace. They were all so cute, dressing up and playing together!

Here they are in a more natural state. Kenna has very short hair, due to her giving herself a haricut one night after her brothers had gotten cuts. But she looked so cute with short hair, and she really fit in with our girls! At church everyone commented on how she looked like she was related!

Moving on to more recent pictures, these are 2 roses from our rose bush. Bob planted the bush earlier this summer to hopefully eventually hide our air conditioner units outside. So far it has produced several very beautiful roses! Nathan brought these buds in yesterday, and they really opened up and looked lovely on the island today for our church small group meeting! Anna loves that they are pink, which of course is exactly why Bob picked that particular plant!

This is the other lovely "arrangement" we have gracing our counter. We went on a little nature walk down the path behind our neighborhood Friday so I could search for some things I needed for science this week. I needed to get some pond water, since we hoping to look at algae and protozoa this Tuesday. We have more of a creek, but there was a pool of standing water off to the side, so I scooped up some of that and am hoping for the best. I'll get out the microscope tomorrow to see what there is to see. I put some grains of brown rice in one small tub of it, to hopefully encourage more protozoa growth, and a few drops of plant food (in complete sun, although it's been rainy lately) to hopefully encourage algae growth. I know I can use water from our rain barrel, which does have some algae, if the one doesn't work, but I didn't see very many protozoa in the rain water last time I looked.

As I was scooping out the water while on a little concrete bridge, I was noticing how terribly smelly it was down by the water. I assumed it was the standing water, so I tried to be done as quickly as possible. Anna had been going back and forth across the bridge, and as she came back over, she sort of stumbled over this big pile of leaves and sticks which had washed onto the bridge with all the torrential rains we had last week. As I helped her up, I all of a sudden noticed TEETH in the pile of leaves! Ack! There was a dead weasel staring at me! It gave me quite a shock! No wonder it smelled so bad, LOL. And it is only going to get worse, as it didn't appear too badly decomposed yet. We won't be getting anything more from that creek anytime soon.

The other thing I collected was moss, and it wasn't until I got back home, proudly displaying my find, that I realized we actually are studying moss NEXT Tuesday. So now I am trying to keep the moss alive in the tupperware tub of water until then. They were some great samples, with visible spore-producing stalks and everything! I hope they make it . . .

The last thing in my tub are some mushroom samples. I need to do 2 spore prints, which I am hoping to do tomorrow. On our walks, we've been scouting the neighborhood for fresh mushrooms so I can have each boy dissect one Tuesday. Fortuitously, this has been a very rainy week, so there are mushrooms popping up all around us! I think I should have plenty of samples to choose from! The mushrooms in my tub are not really doing so well, actually, so I might just go get 2 more fresh ones tomorrow morning for the spore prints. I guess they don't grow well hydroponically, LOL. I actually can't stand eating mushrooms, so I have never paid much attention to them and their likes and dislikes whatsoever, to be honest! I won't be starting a mushroom farm, that's for sure.

So that's a small sample of what was on our camera memory card. Actually, that was really about all. We haven't been taking too many pictures lately!