'Tis the season

Yesterday was Memorial Day, which here in America is traditionally the beginning of summer. And in America, the summer is Grilling Season.

So behold, our new gas grill, with Alan at the helm. Note the Margarita held in Alan's hand - no grill chef should be without one ;-)



Y'all will be happy to know the grill works very well. Visitors should be primed to the prospect of eating plenty of burgers and sausages from this fine outdoor kitchen.

We are looking forward to being able to do more outdoors cooking. The advantage of a gas burner is that you don't have to wait for a barbeque to heat up, which makes it more useful on a weekday evening.


Other things that occurred this weekend - rain. Lots of rain. It was a bank holiday, after all. However we did go into town on Saturday night in my Jeep, with the top down, after the clouds had threatened all day but not actually done anything. We met Peggy and Lloyd at their trailer, which just happens to be right next door to Austin's new brew pub. We felt it was our duty to go and sample some of their beers, which turned out to be very drinkable. After a very pleasant evening with our friends, we drove back just in time - the heavens opened just as we got back to the ranch! We managed to get the Jeep under cover before we got too wet but some rain did get in. All part of the fun ;-)

Summer officially starts now!

Despite the current forecast, which shows 10 days of thunderstorms, I don't care. The nice UPS man brought my Jeep transmogrification kit.

The hardtop is off! I got a mesh screen to shade the sun:


This morning I took my first drive in an open-top vehicle. It's breezy fun!

Summer is started :-)

Settling in

Well, we're all moved in and getting boxes unpacked slowly. The last few weeks have been taken up with sorting things out, shopping, getting used to the new place etc.

We've also taken in a couple of airshows and a very splendid fly-in - pics in the usual place.

The new house is very nice. It's quite big too. However the garden is even bigger. It gets very dark at night; the nearest streetlights are not that close and hidden by trees. There are all manner of unfamiliar wildlife noises too.

Anyway, the rest of this is mainly pictures of things in our garden...

First up, the truck that brought all our furniture and boxes:



This is a Cardinal. We have several pairs that seem to inhabit the garden. This is a male - the female is a lot browner in colour. This isn't a great picture - in real life they are brighter red. They also seem to know when a camera is pointed at them so you don't get much of a chance to get the picture...



Here's a baby deer with its mother. I've only seen this the once, they showed up a couple of weeks ago but haven't been back since.



Flowers are in riotous bloom at the moment. Extra rain this Spring has brought them all out. Here's some Prickly Pear cactus flowers. These smell really nice too.



These are thistles of some kind with delicate white flowers. They seem to be very short lived bloomers; the flower patterns change each day. This one has a big green spider in it.



Here's an often-seen visitor :-) She has a couple of friends, too. I know she's a female because her friends made it very obvious the other day, ifyouknowwhatImean...



Here's an example of the roadsides in the area right now. The whole place is festooned with various flowers, most of them red or yellow, some purple, some yellow and black. They really light up the whole state with colour. The red ones here are Indian Blankets, not sure about the yellow ones.