Nature and the Staycation

Saturday I found a lovely, big, beautiful butterfly in my garage when I came home.

I'd gone by the Murphy Oil gas station, and bought 17 gallons of gas (in my cans) and filled the truck up for $3.69 a gallon. The station just opened, they are promising to sell gas for 20 cents cheaper than anywhere else. We'll see how long that lasts! :-) The other stations around here have already been forced to drop their prices from $4.05 a gallon to $3.77 and $3.75 to try and compete. That's awesome. Imagine if other stations and gas producers got into that spirit and started a price war versus the collusion they all seem to have in pricing their gas with only a one to two cent difference.

The butterfly was happy to crawl onto my hand, and I took the butterfly to the front porch and placed it on the bench. I didn't want it getting trapped in the garage and dying.

I'm off this week, it's a Staycation for me. Resting my back, and just relaxing for a change. It's kind of nice actually. Today I got up, went to the bank, checked my mail, did some grocery shopping at the new Wal-mart Neighborhood Market (it so does not look like the old Harvest Foods). I wonder if the Neighborhood market is going to be like Wal-mart. (Sorry Amy! :-) I do like shopping at Wal-mart and Sam's Club!) Nothing ever seems to be on sale in the grocery department at Walmart, whereas at Kroger there are always sales. Sliced cheese never varies in price at Walmart, versus Kroger where they always have specials. Maybe Wal-mart doesn't think they need to run specials. I dunno. The neighborhood market was definitely VERY nice. I liked being able to buy Pollenta so close to home. Dinner tonight, if I have dinner might be Pollenta, some Kimchi, and some chicken and spinach sausage. It's getting late, and I'm not really hungry.

The weeping willow died above the line where the label from the nursery was. I'm still waiting in eBurgess to make good on their warranty, and send me replacement plants for the ones which died. I trimmed off the top of the willow. The bottoms have already grown new branches, and it's really healthy. I transplanted it into the yard well away from the house, and the entire pot (HUGE POT) was full of roots from it. I watered it after I got it into the ground and added some plant fertilizer stakes for what must have been forty five minutes. I also took cuttings from some plants in the neighborhood and my hibiscuses and used rooting hormone on them and then planted them (so we'll see if they do well). All of the plants out back, the four fruit trees and the four hibiscuses, the weeping willow, and one other all got 2.5 gallons of rainwater a piece from the rain barrels. We only got a 1/4" of rain when it rained this weekend. Not enough.