#canker

The chives are bouncing back. This is all new growth since the snow melted a few days ago: 

We got a little rain today: 

Jam: 

Roly: 

Poly: 

We’ve got a rat in the attic. We can hear it scratching at night. The Red Menace & Silverback go apeshit because they know what it is, where it is & are frustrated they can’t get to it & murder it. We know it comes out at night to feed in the garden & steal bird seed from our feeders so I picked up a live trap to place in the garden. I don’t use kill traps outside anymore because, no matter how cleverly I thought I had placed them, I’ve inadvertently killed wrens in the past with them & that just hurts my soul: 

It looks like our Yoshino cherry has canker on some of its limbs so I’ll need to do some pruning & treatment once things dry out from the rain: 

What I imagine the “body” of a gelatinous cube looks like: 

Earthworm making for higher ground so it doesn’t drown: 

As soon as I saw the photo, I could not resist drawing them together. <3

Black Hat character of Alan Ituriel

We are still of use though the gash smells sour,

amethyst rot. We're twitching devices ---

sanded bones and stitches. The worms devour

all that the obsidian knife slices:

meaty scads and sheaves of skin. This butcher's

love of gristle, of grotesqueness, of boils

that one picks at when they wish the blisters

to burst. The mirror knows how darkness spoils

when cast from its surface. We are of use

because we dream. The stone scalpel cannot.

The hand behind it won't. Dreams of clabber.

Dreams of grubs in the lesion. We seduce

all that the suture holds dear: curdle, clot,

September 20th - The conker (or horse chestnut to be formal for non-UK readers) harvest this year is ample, which is excellent to see considering so many of these marvellous, noble trees are having their foliage ravaged by leaf  miners and cankers.

Here at Darlaston, the nuts are so copious, even though the kids gather around, there are loads of them left on the verge, a bounty I could only ever dream of as a kid.