I have loved our pollinator friendly garden ever since we started it many years ago. It’s so much fun to see all the butterflies and bees it brings to the yard. We finally had a butterfly chrysalis survive.
Jerry happened to notice it on the bottom of the gate to the front porch. It seemed like a very odd place, but reading more about them, it isn’t. They can attach anywhere and to any hard surface. We left the gate open to keep it from moving to often and getting knocked off.
Monarch butterflies go through four stages during one life cycle and through four generations in one year. The four stages of the monarch butterfly life cycle are the egg, the larvae (caterpillar), the pupa (chrysalis), and the adult butterfly.
While waiting patiently for that last stage we saw this in the chrysalis.
It was so interesting to see this so close up.
We also now have a carpenter bee making a hole to lay her eggs in our ‘guardian of the deck’ gate in the driveway. It’s a carved wood African tribal figure we bought in Quartzite back when we went every year. It’s supposed to protect your property from evil spirits. I think it works since we have had no evil spirits come in. Yet.
We were stumped when we sawdust ⬆️ keep showing up in the driveway. That is one days work. It lasted over a week. So Google to the rescue to tell us what it was.
This is the hole we found. It’s so precise, like a drill had done it. Jerry has seen the bee only once so far.
And the neighborhood scrub jay family that Jerry has been giving peanuts to for years have now discovered Midas’s cat food and help themselves to it. He doesn’t mind.
I finished my Mother’s Day puzzle💗Utah is in it six times?
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I have some very sad news. We lost our beloved cousin and dear friend Ray to cancer. He fought a hard battle and frequently got encouraging reports. But it wasn’t to be. The disease had gotten a foothold before treatment began. We are all going to miss him terribly 😢
I mention this here because of how sad it will be without him in our lives. Not only of the joy and laughter he brought us, but we were in our fourth season, of eight, of the Castle series reruns. Shame on you for leaving us, it won’t be the same without you 😟. But I know you want us to carry on with Martha, so we will.
It also means I will no longer have his witty, sometimes cryptic, comments here on the blog. I will miss that 😭if it weren’t for him I never would have found this way to share our travels. I have thanked him profusely for that.
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Once in awhile-now and again-this is us 