Tiny Tuesday : : Texture

Although the oak trees in our gulley are festooned with lace lichen this picture is part of a twig that is only about an inch long. Tiny as it is I submit that it is nothing, if not textural!

The weather has warmed up nicely and as OilMan left the house in the dark to play golf, Ozzie and I decided to go for a leisurely walk around Spring Lake. The geese are arriving in pairs, honking loudly and staking out their nesting spots around the lake. One goose was standing on top of the service building silhouetted against the lightening sky and calling loudly to an unseen partner who could be heard but not seen some distance away.

The songbirds and the red wing blackbirds clustered in the shelter of the bramble patch next to the lake. I hate these aggressive and prickly bushes  but they do provide good cover for quail and other ground feeding birds and their tender new leaves are quite attractive in the sunlight. I wish I could say their fruit was worth the battle with the thorns, but it is mostly seeds....

As we rounded a corner, Ozzie, with newfound energy and vigor since recovering from some mysterious ailment, bounded after a pair of geese not hesitating for a moment as they dashed for the lake. The inlet to the lake was covered with a strange looking brown plant that looks more like a creeping thyme than algae, but it didn't stop Ozzie for a second. Now he is covered with it...not to mention the back seat of my car. I thought I might be able to lure him into the back, but he still refuses to jump in there. I spread a sheet on the off white leather seat, but of course he managed to plant himself in the one bit that wasn't covered....

OilMan has been occupied with building a shade cover for the herb bed outside the kitchen door. I hardly recognized him out there having ditched his fleece and his  jacket for a tee shirt. He has constructed a special section for the parsley which stopped thriving out there after we had the trees trimmed. I suggested that buying parsley at the store would be considerably cheaper than the countless trips to the hardware store, but I'm not sure it's really about the parsley....

The neighbor's large yellow cat was looking comfortable under the bird feeders, but it seems to have established some sort of détente with many of the birds who were still feeding there. Between the windows into which they regularly fly and the cats which regularly patrol their feeders, the little birds still regularly empty the feeder every day.

My car said it was 78 degrees F this afternoon...a welcome warmth after a lot of very chilly weather.
We will be able to have our wine out on the porch this evening.... 

Thanks to dibulfuco for hosting and also to all your lovely comments on my posts about the marches for gun control. It's getting so weird in Washington these days, these young people give me a reason to be proud of something again....