Of spiders inside and outside and webcrawlers, oh my!

If you’ve been reading Rural Ramblings for very long, you might have noticed I have a love/hate relationship with spiders.

When the spiders are outside, I often take pictures of their webs, and even of the spiders themselves.

But on the inside I was trying to get one off the ceiling not too long ago when I fell and broke a set of shelves, a full-length mirror and my finger.  Then I bombed the basement when nothing else seemed to work to get rid of the little web crawlers down there.

However, there’s yet another kind of spider on my mind these days. Webcrawling spiders. Those software programs used to index websites, and to help determine ranking on Google.

When I told a friend this was a case where I actually want spiders around, she immediately responded, “So now you LIKE spiders? You WANT spiders??? But you just bombed the spiders!!!!”

Yeah, I know.  And when I read her comment, here’s what popped in MY mind… 

SPIDERS

Spiders in the yard I find,
But on the outside I don’t mind.
Let them hunt and eat the bugs,
Just don’t come in and walk on rugs.

All these spiders have their place
As long as it’s not in my face.
Inside I say, oh no, oh no!
Outside is where you need to go.

One exception to this rule
Are spiders as a searching tool.
Inside my computer I don’t care
If spiders run just everywhere.

Googlebots crawl twice as fast,
Searching pages new and past.
Let them peek at all the code
And make my websites their abode.

Let the spiders check my sites,
Then tell Google they’re all right.
Spider over every page,
Tell Google that they’re all the rage!

Rank my sites the very best,
And leave behind all the rest!

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It’s been a busy week on the farm, but I guess that’s pretty well normal!

The first group of keets has been reduced from 22 to 11. It doesn’t surprise me. The adults wander all over the farm, and don’t slow down just because babies with very short legs are trying to keep up. I’ve found keets peeping for their mama in the bottom pasture, the back pasture and the main pasture. I’ve found them in the back yard, the front yard, and by the driveway.

I don’t think these guineas will win any parenting awards. And there’s a second batch of keets now. This group had 18 keets, so if they lose half, guess we’ll end up with 20 more guineas. I think The Farmer is going to have to give up his “let’s see how many we can get” attitude and sell some.

We also have a few peachicks.  The hatch rate in the incubators isn’t too good.  We got 10 this year, but the first five died after we put them outside with some chicks. There are 4 outside now in a pen by themselves, and one in a brooder box that’s pretty sorry looking due to spraddled legs.

But the big news is…. TA DA! One of the peahens hatched out a couple of peachicks! This is the first time that’s happened. She had about half a dozen eggs under her. A few didn’t hatch, one was DOA, and two are running around after her now.

You can only see one of the peachicks here, but another is hiding underneath Mama Peahen.

We’ve had some pretty weather this week. Down by the pond we have not only blue dragonflies, but red ones.

All we need now is some white ones, and we could be quite patriotic!

There are also some pretty flowers nearby.

There are lots of flowers blooming.  We even have a blooming idiot.

Toby may be a bit crazy, and without any herding instinct, but he’s sure good company.  As for the flower, that’s Sedum ‘Matrona’ blooming. It’s a big favorite of the bees around here. It’s usually covered with little bumblebees and lots of other insects.

The Farmer has been busy on various projects. He put the new door on the bathroom last weekend. Here he’s using the old one for a new project.

Bet you can’t guess what it’s going to be!

And for the last picture in the Friday’s Farm Fotos group, here’s Redneck Samson, with his bit of grass hanging out of his mouth.

And that’s a glimpse of the past week here on the farm!

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Putting Things Right

Yesterday I got a little mixed up with names to people pictures. The young lady getting the llama out of the van wasn’t Holly or even her friend, it’s her daughter, Hannah. They’re probably friends too, but you know what I mean. :-) And I went back and edited that goof, so if you go back you won’t see what I done wrong!

Here’s a picture of HOLLY driving around her handsome llama.

One Spotacular Cria

Almost every kind of baby animal has a special name. Guineas have keets, peafowl have peachicks, foxes have kits, bats have pups, bears have cubs and a whale has a calf. And llamas? They have crias. And this lovely llama lady, Tiger Lily, has one SPOTacular cria!

Oh wow! I wish we lived closer and I could see this little guy in person. With those markings, he looks like he should be in a jungle or even better, out on a savannah plain in Africa.

Look at him run!

Most animal babies are cute, and I surely do love crias, but this spunky little guy is cutest of the cute!

I’m sooooo cute, and don’t I just know it!
Thanks Holly, for sharing those pictures. Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not closer, or you might go out in your pasture one morning and there would be no Spotacular cria!

Cause I’d love to see that little guy on MY farm!

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I’ve been chatting back and forth via email with a nice lady in Milan, Ohio, who wants some wool.  When I visited her farm’s website, Windy Hollow Farm, I was enchanted to see pictures of two of my favorite critters - Belgian Draft Horses, and llamas with their cute little crias.

Well, it seems yesterday Holly and her daughter, Hannah, took a funny big “dog” to one of the metro parks for a nature hike.

Yes, the “dog” they took on a nature walk is in fact one large llama!

Here Hannah is getting the handsome fellow out of the van…

And here they are, all ready to set out on their nature walk.

Holly said, “The park ranger flipped when we got there. She  asked us to put him back in the van so she could take a picture , because NO ONE would believe her !”

Next they need to do the drive-through bit at McDonalds or somewhere, and see what kind of reaction they’d get when they hand out the food and see a llama looking back at them!

Everyone needs a llama in their van!

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Parrots are entertaining and lovable. They have to be or you’d wring their necks when once again you discover something they chewed up they weren’t supposed to have. African Grays are amazingly destructive little terrors with that 5-year-old intelligence and 2-year old’s emotional level. It’s like having an extra smart tot around perpetually in the Terrible Two’s.

Take the other evening for instance, when I was busy working on my desktop computer in the office while The Farmer was watching a movie on tv. All of a sudden I heard him exclaim, “Where did you come from?”

When I went to investigate, it seems my parrot went walkabout and had walked from one side of the house to the other, crept across the floor of the den, then crawled up the side of his recliner without him ever knowing she was anywhere close.

I snapped this picture before I returned the parrot to her cage. She and the Farmer have an ongoing love-to-hate-ya relationship, so I felt it best to separate them.  (You notice he has his arm put down away from the bird!)

Then just yesterday, at the same time I was pulling my hair out over a messed up blog, I was bombing our basement. Got to take my frustrations out somehow, right?

Well, actually, we’ve had some trouble with little spiders in the Cave Geeks space. We tried glue traps and spraying, but that didn’t have much effect. I figured a bug bomb ought to do the trick, and would not only get rid of spiders, but any other creepy crawlies that found their way in. So when the guys left for work Monday morning, I got bombed. Oh wait, that’s not quite right…

Okay, so what I really did was set off the bug bomb in the basement. Now that space is right under the parrot’s cage, with a couple of vents nearby. Since birds are sensitive to air pollutants (think miner’s and their canaries), I figured I’d better move her outside for the duration.

I set her travel cage on a table on the back porch, carried her out there and locked her up.

There’s a dog door to the porch, and Toby the Wonder Dog comes and goes as he pleases. He decided to come up on the porch and investigate. The parrot took exception to this.

Just in case you didn’t realize it, that is NOT the dog growling in the first half of that video. That is the PARROT growling at the dog, then saying, “What?” a couple of times.

How’s that for a turnaround? I’d never heard her do that, and have no idea where she learned it or how she knew to growl at the dog…

But it sure was funny!

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If you’ve tried to read my blog the last couple of days, it’s hard to tell what you found when you got to the site. It’s been on again, off again the last two days.

It all started with me being tired of seeing the notice that a new version of Wordpress was available, please update now. This being hosted on Go Daddy, they do updates through “The Hosting Connection.”

Only once it was updated, I couldn’t log-in.

Then it got to the point it wouldn’t connect with the database at all, and error pages were popping up instead of the front page of the site.

It took two days of frustrating, pulling my hair out, searching all over forums and asking questions of tech support before it finally got fixed. But it wasn’t anything that I did that fixed it. Or anything I found on the forums. Or anything Go Daddy’s tech support told me. They were pretty much useless.

Nope, all I can say is thank goodness for Cave Geeks. There’s something to be said for raising up your own tech support.

Youngest Son got the database, user name and passwords all connecting to each other again, and transferred a back-up of the posts to the blog. I still need to tweak some stuff to get everything back in order, but at least Rural Ramblings is up and running again.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

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After a summer of few keets, a nesting trio decided to show up their peers and produced a HUGE bunch of keets. I counted a couple of dozen running around that first day.

They sure were fun to watch running along after the adults, trying to keep up on those very short little legs!

Once they get in the grass, it’s impossible to see them. Once in a while a little head bobs up, or you can see the grass moving.

Other sights in the back 40 (actually, it’s probably more like 5), include our matron ewe, Coconut, lazing in the shade of the trees on a hot southern summer day.

Not far away, our female llama, Keira (aka Miss Crankypants), is also taking advantage of the shade. When your wool is black, it really soaks up the heat from the sun! At least she now has a lot less wool to soak up the warmth.

What are YOU lookin’ at???

Down in the bottom pasture, we’re not mowing this year, or allowing grazing. We’re just letting it grow wild.

We have more than enough pasture for the animals without it, so it’s good for growing wildflowers and butterfly grazing.

I love the nice bright red of these Cardinal Flowers. They like the bottom pasture as it has a spring keeping part of it wet.

Of course, the hummingbirds love the Cardinal Flowers too. Those tube-like flowers are just made for hummers to sip some yummy nectar.

There is also a lot of Ironweed with purple flowers, and Joe Pye Weed with lovely dusky pink flowers. The butterflies really go for these!

The Farmer mows walking paths through the weeds, so Toby and I enjoy checking things out in the mornings, and looking at spiderwebs glistening with dew, bees buzzing around the flowers, and butterflies flitting about.

It’s a nice, serene way to start the morning.

We usually end up at the pond. There are droves of dragonflies dancing through the air above the pond. They stop for a rest on a weed now and then.

They fly around so much they kind of beat their wings ragged!

Then it’s one last glimpse of serenity before going back to work.

“The Mirrormere”

If you’re a “Lord of the Rings” fan, you might recognize that reference. Anyway, the pond has lovely reflections, even though the water is way down due to drought conditions.

And that’s a glimpse of the past week here on the farm!

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