Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I spent most of the day yesterday planting trees.  The crew from Zollinger's showed up right on time, at 9 am, in a big truck with an even bigger trailer – and 39 trees and shrubs for us.  They have a nifty little rubber-tracked forklift that makes moving even the larger trees really easy.  In under an hour, they had placed the eight large trees (weeping willows and paper birches) in their holes (which I'd already dug) and unloaded the potted plants (lilacs and sumac).  Then they gave me a gallon of their famous cider (delicious!), picked up a check, and took off.

Now it was my turn.  I needed to position the trees, fill in the holes, clean up the grass (where it had dirt piled on it), and water the trees.  I couldn't finish it all yesterday; it was too much work for my poor old body to do.  I did get all the tree roots covered, and three of the trees are completely finished.  That leaves me with five to do today, but three of those are not on the grass, so there's no cleanup (which is actually the hardest part of the entire job!).  I'll finish off the big trees today, and hopefully get the lilacs in as well.  They're in little two-gallon pots, so they're a piece of cake to plant.

Yesterday while I was working out in the yard, I saw a few interesting things (photos below).

The flowers were pretty splashes of colors in the fall.  The yellow flower was about the size of a quarter; the violet/blue ones about the size of a match head.  The fellow in the middle is a rattlesnake – first one we've seen on our property.  But it was a teensy little rattlesnake, only about 9 or 10 inches long and very zippy.  After I chased it all over the yard, it got tired and stopped – and then very vigorously tried to attack my boot :)  Debbie was all for me killing it (worried about our dogs), but I know from my reading and from talking with our vet that rattlesnake bites on dogs are very rare for dogs in the valley – and not particularly threatening, as the rattlesnakes here are less venomous than the ones we had down in California.

Finally, I'll leave you with this.  The photo at right I took last night as we were leaving our dinner at Jack's pizza (wonderful as always).  The display in that window clearly says “LEER”, and to the right of that is the word “READ” written sideways.  You can see that LEER has a sort of Mexican motif to it.  What's up with that?  Well, it turns out that “leer” is Spanish for “read”.  It doesn't mean what my dirty old man's mind thought it meant.  And here I thought I was going to be surprised by an unexpected aspect of Mormon culture!