Circling Through This Life

October is winding down.  Next Friday is the 31st! 1. The Schoolhouse Review Crew is taking applications for the 2015 crew year .  Hurry though because the applications are scheduled to close on Monday! 2. As the 2014 Crew year winds down I realized that I only have a few more reviews to write. This is bittersweet.  Bitter because it’s the end of the year and sweet because I’ve been on the crew long enough to really appreciate the break. (Yes, I’ve submitted my re-application for the 2015 year. I’ll be ready to tackle reviews again after the holidays but I am looking forward to the break between crew runs!) My very last review of the 2014 year is a game from Out of the Box Games called Snake Oil . Warning this game can be dangerous to health: we have laughed so hard that it hurt!!!  Here is a laughing Turtlegirl. I was laughing so hard I almost couldn’t get the picture! She doesn’t like the picture but I think it truly captures how hard we have laughed. I have h...

Earlier this afternoon, I peeked out the window and noticed an unexpected visitor.  I don’t know if this is the creature who visited last year . The type of creature isn’t really strange or unusual.  No, rather it is the animal’s timing. Daytime is sleep time and nighttime is hunt time.     Last year I did a little bit of blogging about some our backyard wildlife .  I think I’ll have to keep the camera close by and see who else comes to visit this summer!

Over the summer I started blogging about the wildlife that we’ve seen in our backyard.  I’ve been planning this post about birds forever (ok it just feels that way!) but haven’t taken the time to finish it. October is here.  It’s been a beautiful month so far.  An unusual month for us actually.  Lots of sunshine and little to no rain.  October heralds the wet winter season but my grass isn’t green.  It’s brown.  It looks like a strange type of science fiction alternate universe August outside.  Brown, dried out grass with leaves that are just beginning to change colors.  We have green grass most of the year.  We tend to need to mow the lawn from March through November. (Though really unless you water your lawn regularly the only thing that needs mowing in August are the weeds.) The sunshine this afternoon reminds me of the spring and that brings me back to wildlife in the backyard.  We had a bird family move into my beautiful plan...

Because our backyard is separated from a forest like area, we seem to have an abundance of wildlife visit.  Recently I wrote about raccoons coming to play.  In that post I had mentioned a snake.  Well here’s that “but that’s another post” blog post about the snake. Unlike squirrels and birds, snakes are not frequent visitors.  Thank goodness!  I’m not sure I’d want to have to deal with snakes on a regular basis.  My father’s family is from Kentucky.  There are a lot of snakes in the mountains out there.  Whenever we visited my  grandparents, Papa (pronounced poppy!) made sure we knew how to watch out  for snakes.   My father’s cousin (an adult male with children older than I am!) would tease us horribly.  We’d be walking down the dark dirt road and he’d come up behind us and pinch our heels so that we’d think a snake had gotten us.  (He really isn’t mean and he makes the BEST chicken and dumplings.  Of course h...

Because raccoons are normally nocturnal, it was quite a surprise and a shock to see this big ‘ole raccoon wandering through the yard during the afternoon.  She waddled across the lawn around the same time nearly daily. We thought this very odd.  And then she stopped coming around.  That was fine by us.  Boobear didn’t like having her trampoline time interrupted by a potentially dangerous wild animal.  After several days I noticed that the raccoon was no longer making her daily visits.  I pondered whether or not this was because someone had called animal control or perhaps the raccoon had found new territory.  I even wondered whether or not this had been the same raccoon that had made nightly visits last summer. Then one day the raccoon returned.  She returned with her  family.  Not one, not two.  Not three like we thought but FOUR.  Yes, four baby raccoons.  Running, playing, climbing, and looking adorable.  I thin...