Summer Delights

For Bow, it's the little things that matter.

In the summer, he gets Pickle Ice from his friend Charla.

Bow has been getting better at managing the Pickle Ice eating process. I give him a plastic measuring cup, and toward the end, he dumps what is left of the ice into the measuring cup and drinks it all up.

Meanwhile, I go wandering all over the property, to see what I can see.

It turns out there is more than one butterfly milkweed plant on my property, and the one that is deep within the unmown pasture is much more vital than the one by the fence line. It has many more blossoms on it.

Occasionally, a green sparkling sweat bee is attracted to the butterfly milkweed, but despite its name, I have never seen a butterfly attracted to its blooms.

The pipevine swallowtail much prefers the tall phlox by the lagoon. All the tall phlox flowers are at their loveliest, just now.

Even the sumac blossoms are lovely, once you get close enough to see them clearly.

Sometimes a tree that has been felled by a storm and chopped down, and hacked to pieces, and left by the wayside turns out to not be quite dead. "I'm not quite dead yet!" it seems to shout.

The remainder of the cottonwood tree is sprouting green new branches.

On the Fourth of July, we chose fireworks that gave off much light, but not too much noise to avoid upsetting Bow and the dogs.

The next day it rained. and in the morning an armadillo was rooting in the front yard.

Such is our quiet, domestic life. Life from death. Death from life. Beauty and decay. But there is also language.

What does Bow talk about? Not much, these days. The other day he asked for more milk, and I gave him a big lecture about how there was milk in his cereal and he hadn't finished it, and about how wasteful that was. He patiently listened, and then he spelled : טוב.

That means "good", but can also be a way of saying "okay." It took me a moment to interpret that. How did this relate to the big lecture I had just given him about not wasting food? But then I realized that by "okay", he meant: "Okay, give me the cereal bowl, and I will finish it." And so I did, and he did.

Bow does not make big speeches. But that does not mean he does not understand perfectly well how to use language effectively.  There is nothing all that brilliant or revolutionary about this kind of language use. It's what most humans use language for most of the time, too. It's a very rare occasion when any human being says something truly revolutionary. Not even on the Fourth of July.

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A Turtle as Well

Yesterday was the day of the toad. But that same day, after lunch, when I went for my walk, I saw a turtle as well.

He was out in the open, his head held high, in the southern five acres  not too far from the woods on the east and the overgrown pasture in the West.

Unlike the most recent turtle I saw, who would rather drown than let me see it moving, this turtle did not mind letting me observe it walking. It had no trouble coming out of its shell.

My friend Pam, who is a turtle expert, told me it was a male three-toed box turtle, considerably older than the one I saved from the dogs on the day when it rained. Pam thinks there is a large turtle population living on my land. She said I should consider putting out fresh corn and bread so that the wild turtles would come visit me.

The problem is I don't have any fresh corn and bread. I am trying to cut down on carbs. Why couldn't the turtles fill up on milk and bacon? Pam says reptiles can't drink milk, just because they are not mammals. But tell that to the snake charmers. I don't think milk was invented just for mammals. I think it must be a substance that pre-mammalians liked, or else we could not have gotten here from there.

Anyway, for the time being, the turtles on my land will just have to fend for themselves, and I will make do with chance encounters. It's actually more fun when seeing a turtle is a surprise.

Bow enjoyed his own outdoor time yesterday, mostly being lazy in the outer pen.

Last night, it rained, and now the outer pen is wet, and Bow does not want to go outside. I thought I would entertain him by showing him the video of the turtle on YouTube. But we got a 500 internal service error screen.

Bow thought it was his fault, so he kept randomly pressing keys, trying to correct the problem.

I had a very hard time explaining to him that there was nothing he could do to fix it.

Don't you hate it when it's not your chimp's fault, but YouTube is blaming all its technical problems on non-human primates? I told Bow it was actually the people at Google who were to blame. Eventually, he believed me.