US summer

When we got to Chicagoland, it was hot and it had not rained for quite a while.  I realised how hard the mud there can get when it is dry.  I love the wood chips they put around the base of trees and around beds to help keep weeds away and keep the ground damp and I thought, if it was here, any wood chips that had been scattered around would have been dust by evening--eaten up by the aggressive termites we have here.

My son had planted some of his usual veggies, but he couldn't do as much work on it as he liked because of a bad back.  But anyway, we got to eat a few of his veggies--a large big purple eggplant, some yellow cherry tomatoes, an orange pepper, cucumber and green chillies.  He has a blackberry bush and so my grandkids and I picked blackberries too.

I got to see a skunk in the neighbourhood--at dusk, my usual walk time--hares/rabbits a-plenty, with tiny babies too and I even got to see a possum.  I saw my first chipmunk, which is exactly what our regular squirrels here are like.  The North American squirrel type we have only in our forests.

I spied a cardinal, who came two days in a row, to sit on some wires going over the back garden.  I saw what I was pretty sure was a bird of prey, but I could not identify it. In the lake, in the park near the house, there was a huge group of ducks and I also got to see a heron and of course plenty of gulls, swooping low to catch fish.

All in all it was beautiful.  But with no SLR camera, and only my iphone 4, I did not get any good pictures.  I saw recently that one can get an SLR lens to fit over a phone lens at a much cheaper price.  May be I should try to get one of those.