June updates

So after a month of not doing anything with the geography after doing a 100% completion 3 days in a row (so no practice, no review), recall for countries was 99% and for capitals 83%.  Not bad!  I should probably decrease the testing interval to help with retention.  Countries are easier because I can use spatial memory to help with them.

Also I need to learn Turkey's new name.

Garden is coming along.  I have some extra random sunflowers, probably related to squirrels.  The radishes have all been harvested, and the corn's had its first round of nitrogen fertilizer.

Garden ca. late June

 

We lost all the pond fish this winter with the dramatic temperature swings, so after cleaning up the vines that were sucking all the water out of the pond, we got some new fish.  Last time we got two koi and four comets; this time we got four of each.  We had about thirty fish in the pond before, so hopefully in a year or two we'll see them start to multiply.

New baby fishes

May Showers

So I came home to this, which is the accumulated rain since yesterday:

Note that the rain gauge is only made to hold up to 5", so if we had gotten more before I emptied it this afternoon, who knows what the total could have been.  Four and three-quarters-ish inches of rain is nothing to sneeze at, though, especially if you have a pond in  your yard.  Mr. Frog is pretty happy, but the water is not often that high up on the rocks.

In general, that leads to this set-up:

That's actually rubber dryer pipe (crazy, I know, since you'd think it would melt) that the people who bought the washer and dryer that were here when we moved in didn't want.  Our pond has a double pump set-up, either because it was expanded, or to both pump and have a UV filter.  The UV filter unit has the splitter that allows us to take water off the pond rather than diverting it to the waterfall:

This set-up is useful to avoid undirected flooding; if we didn't attach the piping, the water cascades over the patio you can see in the earlier picture, towards the fence, which means it's heading straight for our neighbors' garage, as well as inundating their lawn.  Instead it follows the lowered sidewalk towards our backyard.  This section fills up quite often in a heavy rain but drains fairly quickly into the yard.  That hose you can see is for my sprinkler, which I'm really not going to need for a while.

The fish don't even notice.  Mr. Frog freaks out any time I get close to the pond, though, and has gone off into hiding somewhere in the foliage.

This shot got a bit washed out with the reflection from the water, but you can see the giant koi in the lower left.

Ice!

So I came home tonight and discovered that our pond is well and truly on its way to icing.

We have bubblers in it for the fish to hopefully keep them alive over the winter; you can see the four tubes pretty well in this:

Bubblers have an interesting side effect apparently:  little ice tubes, like you get in the sediment by volcanic vents in the ocean.  The flash didn't cooperate as well here, but this is a closer shot of them:

I'm curious what it will look like in a couple weeks when we've had some cold for a while.