Prison Break

It is a beautiful SoGa morning - not too much heat or humidity, no rain, no snakes (although we did have a three foot *baby* white oak snake peek at us through the French doors from the porch and into the living room - how did he navigate through all those corgi hair tumbleweeds?).  My furry friends and I just got back from our walk where we admired the growing piles of hair at every corner (got to pull out the molting fur while the dogs are marking territory) and the landscaping work of the local prisoners.  Yes, maybe it is a southern thing, but little Q'town uses prison labor for various tasks.  This week the guys are trimming the azaleas which grow in the median of our main historic residential street.  They are out there in black and white striped prison togs wielding trimmers, blowers, and chain saws.  And in fact, are doing a beautiful job.  These particular guys seem to know how to get a nice shape out the the plants and are not just beheading them, but actually removing the weedy stuff growing through and around the bushes. 

A sweet deer hanging out at my parents' house.  This one was crossing the street when I pulled up one afternoon, walked through a neighbor's yard, ate some plants, then posed for me.  We don't see any deer in our yard - they prefer to stay in the 40 acre woods.

My Town

Here are a few things that I have discovered or observed during the past week:

 Billboard along I-75 between Valdosta, GA and Tifton, GA

1. Desiccated frogs and lizards are a reality in my life.  I don't flinch anymore when I find a dried out creature tangled in corgi hair in some forgotten corner.  Yesterday a dime-sized frog mummy was in the middle of the living room floor, probably dropped there by a dog who discovered it and transported it to a spot more convenient for play.  I just scooped it up with bare hands and disposed of it.

2. There is no end to the growing season, the mosquito season, the wasp season, the fly season.  All annoyances continue to grow year round.  On New Year's Day the weeds are greener than the grass and I've been bitten by mosquitoes on Valentine's Day.  The vines grow here like something out of the Little Shop of Horrors.  We use a 16" machete and carry a file to keep it properly sharpened when doing a little light weeding.

3. There is truth in the saying, "...like a deer in headlights..."  A few blasts on the car horn will scare away deer standing at the side of the road.  It is the deer you cannot see before they leap across your path that will nearly give you a coronary.  Ten foot tall deer fence means nothing more than a ten foot jump for our Bambis here.  I've seen this height cleared in a single bound without the slightest break in stride.

4. Never shop at a grocery store that stocks Kilz-Em-Dead rat bait right next to the fried pork rinds and cheese curls and carries 13 different varieties of snuff.  However, if you do find yourself there because the only other grocery in town is out of something you need for dinner and a 36 mile round trip to the nearest town just for a lime seems excessive, do not look in the meat case.  I repeat, do not look in the meat case.  Feet from all manner of beasts and fowl, intestines, stomachs, and a variety of fish that would sell better at the bait store.  All this scenery nicely rounded out by an odor that says that the pull date is not a deadline, but merely a suggestion.

5. Forget Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster - we've got Hogzilla and the Skunk Ape.  Hogzilla is old news here - there is even a movie and a National Geographic special about it (totally worth waiting through the ad to see - SoGa is my neck of the woods - and the hog was in the papers for months after this happened).  The Skunk Ape has been around for awhile also, but it is only this spring that the local paper in a nearby town started printing stories about it and publishing accounts of sightings.  My neighbor first told me about the Skunk Ape which I only vaguely remember hearing about (I'm a much bigger Chupacabras fan).  But here in Q'town, one little boy told me, the Skunk Ape is real.