There's a There Out There

During finals, I sometimes find it hard to get outside much. I go to work, usually leaving between 7 and 7:30, and then pretty much am in my building for a long while. Sometimes I walk across to the fort for a meeting. The meeting's no fun, but our groundskeeping folks do an incredible job, and we've had already a show of daffodils, tulips, and grape hyacinth, and now we're well into salvia and getting into yarrow.

Have you ever noticed that the academic year is especially busy during the fall "clean up the yard and plant bulbs" season and the spring "omg, weed and plant something other than dandelions!" season?

This weekend, though, I have a guest, so I went out for a long walk in the wooded area, which we both enjoyed. There's one problem, though. Around here, there's no way I've figured out to escape the ticks, and ticks gross me out. I've picked one off of me (not embedded) and one off the furry one (also not embedded). It would have been worse if they'd been all swollen and full of blood, but still, I did my best self-inspection and still feel like every single moment there's a tick crawling on me.

Out there in the yard, it's a whole new flower season. These are hawthorne flowers. They're called hawthorne for a reason, by the way. And if you get really friendly with your tree trying to take pictures, you know the reason. It's way better than ticks, though!

The dogwood is almost finished blooming, I think. But look, there's an ant. That's a pretty big ant. Mostly, I have small ants (argentine, I think?) trying to take over my lawn. If anyone has a more effective solution than diatomacious earth (which at least isn't poisonous to birds and such), I'd love to hear it. Still, better than a tick!

Since I bought the macro and doubler lenses, I'm sort of loving looking closely at little flowers. This is a potentilla. Mine are fairly modest shrubs, but they flower lots, and are lovely. The thing is, because there are usually a bunch of flowers, I don't look at them up close very often. But here we go.

And finally, the tamarack cones are getting a little bigger. They never get more than an inch or so long, but they turn brown instead of pinkish after a while.