Liar Pit or Fire Pit

If you live out where we do, you can do pretty much whatever you want. We wanted a Fire Pit, so we dug a hole in the lawn and made one. We were informed by our kind neighbor that around these parts they are called Liar Pits. This is to signify what type of conversations take place around it. The following are some pictures and explanation of how we made our Liar Pit.

We started by selecting a spot. Then we dug a hole. As expected when we dug we found that fire ants also liked that spot. A quick note here: Fire does not just describe the color of the ant or the sting of the ant it also describes their overall attitude. Digging a hole while avoiding the sting of about 1,000,000 angry fire ants is not a trivial feat. The more I dug the more I found, and they were not to happy about the eviction notice. So after digging the hole to the approximate desired dimensions and disposing of the former tenants we began to lay down the rocks. Where do you find rocks in central Texas? In your lawn. So we dug up the ones that were protruding above the surface. The iceberg principle applied here as the exposed portion of rock was no indiction of the actual size. I am guessing the largest one weighted about 500lbs. How do you get a 500 lb rock across your yard? With a Chevette. (see pictures) Once we got all the needed rocks close to the hole we lined the hole with the rocks. There were plenty of leftover rocks that were too big for the pit so we used them for a table and in the future for benches. I will leave it up to you to figure out how I got the 200lb table top placed by myself with no help. We had to test the Liar Pit, so that night under a star-studded sky I started a fire with flint and steel. Hot dogs and smores were on the menu. They never tasted so good after a hard days work.

Chicken Coop Completed.

So I spent a months worth of Saturdays of my life working on this chicken coop. It is mobile and the chickens seem to like it. It comes with a light and electric fence to keep out chicken poachers.

Texas Wildlife

So everything is actually bigger in Texas, except the deer. They are about the size of a great dane. They pass through our yard from time to time. I caught one one Saturday morning on our back porch. I got a few shots before it hissed at me and ran off. Notice the glowing eyes.

The bugs are bigger. This is a Rhinoceroses Beetle that flew into our garden. This explains why our grubs are so big. The centipedes are nothing to shake a stick at either.

Our Rats are bigger too. On the left we have a white tree rat. Below we have a ground rat-check out the size of this bad boy!


















And even our ant mounds are bigger. This one in our lawn is about 7 feet in diameter.





So as the late crocodile hunter said " you got to have your wits about ya" when in Texas or you might end up getting carried out of bed by some huge Texas bugs.

Chickens added to our Little Farm

I have wanted chickens ever since I was a wee lad. Now that we live far out from any city we can have almost any animal we want. So I got Chickens. 3 Rhode Island Reds and 2 Auracanas that lay blue eggs. When we bought this house we were lucky to have on our property a chicken coop and one small cage. I have them in the cage now and when they get big enough they will live in the coop and eat all our bugs. We decided not to name them because it is harder to eat them when you know their name. If all goes well we will have some fresh blue and brown eggs in 16-22 weeks. Notice thew hungry cat in the first picture. She wants to eat them.

Gardening in Texas

Our garden gives us the chance to enjoy more of what Texas has to offer, good and bad. This includes hot days with singing birds and warm nights with flashing lighting bugs and plenty of mosquitoes. It took a lot of work to get here, compare two pictures one taken in February and the other taken today. Fresh zucchini and cucumbers have already graced our salads. The Tomatoes are well on their way as well as the corn and cantaloupe. We have met some setbacks. Our electric fence cannot keep everything out. The squash vine borer took out 5 Zucchini plants already. I performed surgery to extract them from all our plants, but I obviously missed some. The cabbage worms and corn worms are having their way with their respective victims. But good will overcome. We will see if our sunflowers reach the promised 8 ft height and the watermelons really grow to 250 lbs.

Wheaties come to visit Austin

David and Jenn Wheat came to visit May 3, 2008. The tour of Austin included the capital building, (see picture). The best part of the capital building is the huge open rotunda. We found that if you stand on the star in the middle of the floor and speak you can hear yourself as if you are speaking into a loud speaker. This makes you feel like you are talking loudly but only you can hear it. This is because you are in the center of a round room and your echo returns from every direction at once. We also discovered that if you jump on the
walkways that circle the rotunda the floor shakes on the opposite side. I found this out because a big burly biker was not very happy that his floor was shaking when he was already afraid of heights. I decided to stop jumping. We also went to the Austin botanical gardens. There were plants of all shapes and sizes. The most interesting tree was a thorned tree of some sort. I guess this kind of tree does not like to be climbed.