Fake Trees and Chickens in Boats...

...country living at its best.

I would love to see the warehouse where the cell phone companies store their cell phone towers that look like something else...palm trees, saguaro cacti, flagpoles, giraffes, windmills, even tree stumps. This one is at the bottom of our road. We watched them build, er, grow it a couple of years ago and wondered why our reception wasn't better. Apparently they have decided it needs to be a bit taller so they are adding a few branches.

Don't be fooled by the blue sky and puffy white clouds. We fall for that all the time and just about the time we are as far away as we can get, the heavens open and we are drenched.

The real trees are falling all over. I have three friends who have had oak trees come down on their properties Tree trimmers are being kept very busy cutting trees down (or up), trimming branches and thinning drought weakened conifers so the wind can blow through them..

We keep looking at our stand of oak trees and trying to gauge whether it would would reach the house if one fell. All three of the friends with trees that fell had had arborists look at them and pronounce them sound, so hoping for the best seems just about as effective. Maybe we should cut them all down and replace them with fake ones.
 
Some neighbors who live on a street above us built a beautifully designed chicken coop out of rustic looking boards. During the day they are let out to wander around a very large well fenced yard. I don't know what keeps them from eating everything in the raised vegetable beds. We've walked by on cold mornings when before they are let out, and they stand around and grumble.  

A house is being built across the street which seems a bit out of place...a two story pseudo Victorian with lots of gingerbread trim. Aside from a muddy yard, the house appears to be finished, but there has been no sign of anybody moving in. This morning as the hens across the street were waiting semi-patiently to be let out of their tarp covered enclosure, we noticed that  an entire chicken coop with matching paint  had been delivered to the muddy yard in front of the Victorian house. The next challenge will be to figure out how to get it through the gate in the fence which is half the size of the coop. 

My friend Tobi has a chicken coop that apparently is on top of such saturated ground that in spite of many bales of hay and layers of straw, every time it rains she starts thinking of making boats for them...