The House and Our Backyard

The bathroom still isn't painted, but the tub, sink, and floor are clean, and the walls were finally primered last night. We also picked out the paint color, which is a light brown, that has a slight red tone to it. I tried to find something online to show the color, but I couldn't find anything I liked. But I'll be posting pictures as soon as I get them. Hopefully I'll be going over to the house tonight after working at Geek Squad.

I'm happy to say that many things will be happening at the house this evening other than just painting! Scott wants to finish taking down the wall between the living room and the kitchen, and the downstairs floor is finally going to get a good scrubbing. Supposedly there is going to be a small work party at the house, and I'm excited to see the results!

Oh, and before I go, here are some pics that I took outside this weekend, while Scott was working hard on the house...

Even though they're weeds, I still think they are pretty! I'm not sure what type of weed/flower these are, but they can stick around.

I've also already let Scott know that I think dandelions are fun, and I enjoy blowing dandelion seeds all over. I think he took this bit of news pretty well, and hopefully I won't be finding a bottle of Round-Up in the shed any time soon.


We also have lots of pretty little purple flowers that grow in our yard. They have a lot of character, wouldn't you say?

We also have bright little red berries, that kind of look like strawberries, but I'm calling them the "much debated snakeberry." Why much debated? Because when trying to identify the little red buggers, I called them snakeberries, remembering back to the days when I saw them growing in our yard, and wanted to eat them, and my mother told me not to, because they were snakeberries, and very poisonous.

My mom does not remember any of this. She even stated at one point in the discussion, that she had never even seen such a berry before in her life! She has since retracted that statement, and is starting to remember them, and she vaguely remembers giving us those warnings. I always find it funny how something that can stand out so vividly in my mind, can be so easily forgotten by others... I guess it was just a highlight of my childhood, and more of a lowlight for my mom, haha.

After some research, it would appear that my "much debated snakeberries" are also known as mock strawberries, and indian strawberries. Real snakeberries are seperate little red berries, and are in fact poisonous, whereas the much debated variety are not poisonous.


This is a baby "snakeberry"... not quite yet, how should I say, bloomed? I'm not sure if berries bloom like flowers or not. But whatever they do, this one isn't quite there yet.


Snakeberry, mock strawberry, indian strawberry... oh my.

I'll continue to call them snakeberries, and maybe add a side note that they can be referred to as indian berries as well. And I would like it to also be know that if you do an image search for snakeberries with Google, the first images that come up will be the mock strawberry, so I'm not the only one out there who believed that is what they were.

Let us now move away from the berries, and onto the critters. We found lots of things living in our yard, while we raked leaves and cleaned up. But my favorite is this little guy:




The millipede.

This was lucky number seven that we found, and therefore he got a mini-photo shoot. He was a fast mover, but I got some good pictures, with the above picture being my favorite.


He was pretty cute, but sometimes I thought he had too much resemblance to a cockroach... ick. And his legs were somewhere between creepy, and amazingly awesome. I wish I had video of them moving.


He was pretty much built like a tank. He kind of just pushed his way right on through his environment. Supposedly millipedes are burrowers, and so maybe he was just looking for a good spot to start digging, so he could hide from my pestering him.

After taking the millipede's picture multiple times, I finally carried him across the street, and let him go between some fallen logs, where there were lots of leaves. This way he was safe from Scott's rake, and from being smooshed. I'm sure we will find plenty more just like him as we continue to clean up all the leaves and branches that are cluttering our yard.


And I can't forget the final pictures of the day. This I found whilst snapping photos of the millipede. It was a large snail shell, that was empty of life, except for the little baby snail that had suckered itself to the inside.


And this was my favorite pic of this set. I loved the lighting, and the browns and greens. How could anyone say this world was created by anything but an intelligent creator? I just cannot believe that all of this world evolved from a puddle of mud. There is just too much detail for this to all be a cosmic accident.

So this is what lives in our backyard; part of God's creation, His own personal design.