Good morning, and it's looking kinda mousie around here. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver's weather has been consistently, and abnormally, warm for the last week. We haven't broken any records, but historically high temperatures should be trending down into the 70s. Instead, we were over or near 90° for most of the week. Fortunately overnight temperatures have been dropping down in the low 50s — nearer to normal range but still about 5° high.
Meanwhile the Furman's red sage has finally come into bloom — and yeah, it's really red. It's supposed to bloom most of the season, so next year it should bloom earlier and be a great hummingbird attractant.
Update [2010-9-18 9:28:15 by Frankenoid]: Please stop by SMHRB; claude's youngest son was killed in a motorcycle accident and he can use our support.
We're supposed to cool down some today, and the forecast is for a high in the 70s — bouncing right back up into the upper 80s or higher on Sunday and Monday.
I don't know if the cooler nighttime temperatures have anything to do with it, but we've had our first occurrences of mouse herding in a long time over the past week.
Although Zasu previously hasn't been one for bringing prey, live or dead, into the house, on Tuesday she trotted through the kitchen and off into the living room with a mouse in her mouth. I didn't see it wiggling, but in an abundance of caution I followed — the mouse was indeed alive, and was looking for escape. Given the perpetually cluttered state of the living room (beyond the furniture, there always seem to be backpacks and jackets randomly dropped by Da Boys, and my own piles of projects in various stages of completion), I knew if I lost the mouse it likely would stay lost until it's desiccated corpse was eventually revealed. So I grabbed a wad of paper towels, got the mouse cornered then took it outside where it promptly scampered away. Zasu watched the process with her usual pose of curious interest, but didn't try to interfere and, when I disappeared with her mousie simply settled down and took a nap.
Caligula has been stretching his hunting muscles this year. You may recall that earlier he snagged his first bird — a flicker, of all things — and he's brought in a constant string of grasshoppers all summer.
On Thursday I discovered him under the kitchen table poking at a nice, plump mouse which was scurrying around the shoes I had discarded there (I tend to pop my shoes off wherever I sit down and generally have at least two pair under the table). Caligula found the live mouse ever so much more interesting than his dead mouse toys, and it was lasting a lot longer than his grasshoppers.
When the mouse went against a wall, I blocked it with my knitting bag which was sitting handily nearby, then bundled it into paper towels and took it outside to deposit it next to the shed.
When I came back, Caligula was looking under the table for his mouse — under the rug, by the wall, in the knitting bag — damn it, he just had the most marvelous toy and it disappeared! It had to be somewhere.
Having exhausted the easily-accessible places, he decided it must have hidden in my shoe, so he spent the next twenty minutes or so shoving his nose into the shoe, scooting it around the floor, standing up and walking a few steps with it on his face. And now when he's bored, he'll start poking at my grubby tennis shoes again, seeing if perhaps his mousie will appear again.
Caligula really is a piece of work — and you can have a piece of him. I've donated three copies of the Itteh Bitteh Book of Kittehs, the next LOLcats publication, to the Netroots Nation Auction. The book includes a photo of Caligula from when he was an itteh bitteh kitteh, and he'll put paw to inkpad to autograph (printograph?) his picture.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?
Update [2010-9-18 9:8:45 by Frankenoid]: Man, I really hate those random html errors.