Cheese Club, Chestnuts and My Umbrella Adventure

I recently lost the most awesome umbrella ever – short when folded up, but large and sturdy when open – so I currently only have this golf umbrella my dad lent me.  It’s a nice enough umbrella except for one thing: it really never stops being large and sturdy and even folded is approximately half my height.  So I spent all day Tuesday carrying this ridiculously large umbrella everywhere I went in anticipation of rain.  It didn’t rain.  And it didn’t rain.  And finally I got to my lab at the end of the day, completely exhausted, propped my umbrella against the wall and promptly left it there.  Of course, when I got downstairs it was raining.  I seriously considered going back for it, but I was just too ready to be home.  Luckily the rain wasn’t too bad, so I when I showed up at cheese club later that evening I at least didn’t look like a drowned rat on top of showing up by my self.

Iowa Bird Watching

As I mentioned in my Monday Musings, I’ve already started to have birds show up on my balcony!  In hopes of attracting more I’ve decided to prioritize getting a feeder up, although I don’t know if it will get much use until I have some plants out there to provide shelter for more cautious birds.  This week’s book, Iowa Bird Watching, was a great introductory resource for a beginning Iowa bird-watcher or for someone like me who is mostly hoping to watch birds from home.  The book includes lists of the best places to go birding and of the top ten must-see birds in Iowa.  In addition, there are beautiful pictures provided for the 100 most common birds in Iowa.  The sections I found most helpful were the bits on what to feed different birds and a list of bird-friendly plants.

A Great Wildlife-Friendly Gardening Book

This week I’ve been reading Welcoming Wildlife to the Garden and I can’t wait for warm weather so I can try some of their suggestions on my balcony!  The first thing I noticed about this book was that it had a lot more in common with A Spring Without Bees than I expected, even knowing they’re neighbors in the dewey decimal system, because this book was incredibly eco-friendly.  The authors counsel against using pesticides, suggest Integrated Pest management (using natural predators to get rid of unwanted bugs, as suggested in A Spring Without Bees), and clearly love all animals – even the creepy crawly ones.  Personally, I’ve always loved all animals and even think flies are cute when they wash their faces with their legs, kind of the way cats do.  So finding a book which seemed to see the best in all animals was like finding a kindred spirit.  They even explain how to attract snakes and spiders, which I think a lot of people really wouldn’t go for.  I was ready to draw the line when they started talking about Crocodilians, but fortunately the authors didn’t suggest attracting crocodiles and alligators to your yard!  Instead they observed that if these animals visit your backyard “that may be wildlife enough”, which made me laugh 🙂

A Spring Without Bees

This weekend, I finally finished A Spring Without Bees.  This was definitely not a book which took a while because I wasn’t into it, but because I was busy.  Plus I had to restrain myself from stopping every few sentences to write down interesting facts about bees!  Did you know, bees travel approximately 7 million miles per gallon of honey they produce?  All I can say is that if people did that much work for a gallon of honey, it would probably be worth its weight in gold.

Photography Friday

This week I stayed a little closer to home for my photography and finally got the perfect lighting to take a picture of this interesting shadow created by my balcony rail.  The Ames Camera Club abstract photography competition is coming up next week and I think I may enter this picture as well (everyone may enter up to 3), so wish me luck!  I hope everyone is having a great weekend 🙂

The Cheese Experiment

First, a few brief blog updates.  For subscribes who haven’t stopped by the blog in a while, there is now a description of my rating system and a blog roll available in the side bar.  I’ve also started using Twitter for the first time after reading a post by Kelly at Call Me Bookish about why she finds tweeting worthwhile, so you can now find me there as well.  And finally, I also received a Pintrest invite from Gretchen at The Happiness Project and I would be happy to pass on the favor, so if you’d like an invitation just e-mail me at kxw116 [at] gmail.com.  Alright now… on to the cheese!