It’s rained a few times recently, which is a nice change from last summer.

The backyard- at least in the areas without imported soil, or plantings, or now covered by the brick patio- turns into saturated heavy clay after a rain. slowly most of it is getting covered up but previously we’d have to hose the dog’s feet off before he could come inside because it would pack up on his feet. You could ruin a pair of shoes by walking on it for any length of time.

I do NOT miss the mud.

I DO kinda miss the things we’d find in it though.

Our backyard might as well be an archeological site- the mud was always giving up something after a rain. You’d expect it to be pull-tops from 70s beer cans, but it is most often shards of really thick glass. Luckily they are never sharp, so it isn’t dangerous, but I did always find it interesting to wonder what all the glass was used for and how it ended up all over the backyard. We found other things as well:

We found 3/4 of a doormat once- green plastic with the daisy in the corner- 80s? Before? It was completely grassed over and an inch deep in the soil.

My husband found a teeny bottle, 1 inch tall, that was intact.

Countless pieces of glass.

And then this thing:

It’s one of the few metal pieces we’ve found back there. Sheer pins are designed to break once a certain level of force is reached as a failsafe to protect other parts of an engine. From a quick Google search I see them most often listed for use in snow blowers, but that surely wasn’t what they were used for here in Central Texas.

Just one of life’s mysteries and a cool benefit to living in a house from the 1910s I guess. The more we cover the less we find after rains though. Such is life?

In other news I found this picture of a cactus I got last August:

And decided to show one year’s worth of growth:

It’s starting to thin out at the tips so I will be fertilizing it soon. Here’s the thing- even online cactus forums can’t definitively tell me what this is! Everyone says it looks like a rat tail cactus… which is what I was told when I bought it, but it’s too thin as well as too upright for that- rat tail cactus are trailing plants. Is a mystery but I sure do love it- it sits on my desk in front of a south facing window.

A fairly new addition to my “funny signs” list:

Gots ta run, houses to clean, pets to feed, cluttered closets to continue to ignore…