Lady Tiger

This is the third Eastern Tiger Swallowtail I've blipped this summer - it is awfully hard to pass up taking photos of them, to be fair.  They are big, showy creatures who tend to nectar with their wings spread wide open like this.  I crept around the flowers to get the butterfly with our lawn in the background to give this a clean look.  And cloudy skies were my friend.  This is a female, identified by the blue on her lower wings, although in her case, the blue is quite faded.  

We had some unwanted excitement this morning when Jax discovered a smallish rabbit inside our fence.  Once he'd started chasing it, there was no calling him off.  The rabbit raced the perimeter of the yard with Jax in hot pursuit and me trying to keep up.  He eventually grabbed the rabbit (something I have utterly dreaded happening).  Miraculously, the rabbit wisely played dead and Jax quickly brought it to me.  I picked the poor creature up and ascertained that it was not bleeding or in any way damaged as far as I could see (other than some slobber).  I carefully carried it to the gate and put it on the ground on the other side - at which point, it leapt up and ran away as fast as it could.  Jax now has a renewed interest in chasing the squirrels who come in the yard, which is to be expected.  Fortunately, the squirrels are adept at flinging themselves up and over the fence so I really don't think he has much of a chance to get one.  Let's hope.  Jax is a mix of hunting breeds and definitely has a prey drive so this isn't his fault in any way.  Nor am I likely to train him not to chase things that run outside.  I'm just thankful he mostly ignores the birds and insects.  

It looks like we are going to have to move forward with the roof and have put ourselves on the list.  The company says it will probably be 2 weeks before they can do it which is okay.  And, then, because we haven't had enough home-ownership excitement, one of the vanity lights in the master bath has started doing some very peculiar things that indicate that we need to replace it sooner than later.  And of course, the model we have is no longer made so we will have to replace both vanity lights in the bathroom.  We went to the local lighting store and looked around but they didn't have a huge inventory so we came home with some web sites to look at to select what we want.  Hubs is comfortable doing the installation himself so all we need is to select and order what we want.  What could possibly go wrong???

One more hot day tomorrow and then we are going to cool down into the 70's during the day which should be delightful!

xo
Debbi