This and That

Pretty quiet weekend, which was wonderful. It's Kerry's last one before school starts so he's busy doing stuff around the property. It's still really cold. Our upper pond has been frozen for three days and this morning the lower one was about one-third iced over. We are hoping that the freeze in the upper pond will kill the parrot feather. It generally grows in aquariums but someone many years ago dumped their aquarium, plants and all, into the irrigation ditch. We are at the end of the ditch so we get lots of things we don't necessarily want. Parrot feather is nearly impossible to kill. Here's a picture of it. It slowly eats up your pond until all you have left are these green things.

Went to see "The Queen" last night. Great movie. Helen Mirren is wonderfully stoic as Elizabeth II. It's takes place around the time when Princess Diana died. It shows how the royal family behaved or rather misbehaved badly in dealing with her death. Well worth seeing. There is a new biography out on QEII which I've ordered from the library. She became queen when she was only 27 and now she is 80. Her husband, Prince Phillip, comes across as especially obnoxious.

I'm struggling with slugs in my raised flower bed, particularly where the ranunculus are starting to come up. The tender little shoots get eaten before they can emerge from the ground. The nursery today had some copper tape that they said would get rid of them. I rigged up an area around the ranunculus where I could put the adhesive copper tape. If it weren't so damn cold at night I'd go out and pour salt on the little buggers. We don't seem to get snails. We just get slugs. Apparently they get a mild electric shock when their slime touches the copper. I hope I find lots of dazed slugs in the morning. I can't use the snail poison. We have too many cats roaming around here at night. We already killed a possum with rat poison.

We had 55 Canada geese and one Grebe on the lower pond today. Grebes are small and the geese are huge. They were actually bullying the poor little thing. They kept trying to take away the fish he had in his beak. They don't even eat fish. Here's a picture of the Grebe (stolen from Google). For some reason it got posted first. Go figure. That's all for now.