In the Neighborhood + a Mystery Photo

Given the continuing Covid-19 pandemic and our personal risk level, we just aren’t out and about very much, hence my decision to reduce blog posts to no more than two a week… My blog site has almost always been a daily log following our life, and our life at this time is quite confined, with life experiences to match.   

So what’s been happening in our neighborhood and around our yard?

Another lot bites the dust!  A new home is about to be built diagonally across from us…about the equivalent of a half city block away.  As is the practice, the builder strips all of the trees from the lot and hauls them away. The local turkey and deer are losing ground fast in our area, despite the pandemic.

While prepping the lot for the new home, they put in a drainage pipe to allow the free flow of water along the ditch that runs along the front of the property.  Unfortunately, they also destroyed the cable that provides internet, cable TV and phone service to our home.  Of course, they denied it when I confronted them…but the Spectrum employee sent to fix the problem verified my conclusion.

On a positive note, the floral spectacle continues here in East Tennessee.  It’s Mimosa blooming time!  They are everywhere and they are beautiful.

The mimosas here in the South are native to the Middle East and Asia.  They were brought to America in 1785 by a French botanist who planted it in is garden in Charleston South Carolina.  It loved the Southern climate!  The flowers are attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds and they also appealed to colonial gardeners.  Now they are everywhere around us.

There one primary issue with mimosas.  They grow large seedpods and the trees propagate like wildfire.  These trees can be termed a ‘pioneer species’.  If you disturb the land, remove native vegetation and open the tree canopy to light, the mimosa is one of the first trees to appear.  Hence its presence along just about every road in the Southern USA! 

I’ve included this close up of an emergent magnolia blossom in our yard…just because I think that it’s a thing of beauty.  What a design!

Here’s a recent photo of our circular garden in the front yard.  Surrounding that big boulder we have roses, cone flowers, pansies and Stella De Oro day lilies.  Soon those cone flowers will lose their blooms and they’ll become feeding stations for our finches…

Laurie recently went to the local nursery and purchased a couple of bee balm plants.  We had some of these when we lived in Mt. Prospect Illinois and we loved the fact that both the bees and the butterflies loved them.  As you can see, they’ve produced a plethora of eye-catching blooms and we’ve counted as many as a dozen bees feasting on these two plants.

Bee Balm or Monarda is a genus of flowering plants in the mint family.  It is native to North America.  It is also known as horsemint, Oswego tea and bergamot.  They have a long history of use as medicinal plants by many Native Americans.  Bee balm is a natural source of the antiseptic compound thymol, the primary active ingredient in some modern commercial mouthwash products.

For our area, its street preservation time again… For two day stretches segments of streets in our various neighborhoods are closed down while contractors apply a protective coating to the existing asphalt.  It is intended to lengthen the life span of the roads. During this process residents have to park their cars on side streets that are not being worked on, unless they intend to stay home while the coating dries for two days.

First they went along the sides of the road, trying to limit overspray onto driveways, rocks, etc.  In the second photo, note the worker with the board protecting our next door neighbor’s new stone driveway.  It worked…but not so much for the lip of our much older concrete pad.  On the second day, the truck just rolls down the middle of the road and finished the coating effort…

Time for some photos of our feathered friends.  This photo was taken at dusk and it is dark but we both like the effect.  As of late, we have been inundated with what we thought were purple house finches!  Wrong!  These are house finches and when purple house finches and house finches collide, the purple variety loses.  Purple house finches breed in Canada and Northern New England, not in the Southeastern USA. 

To learn how to tell the difference between these very similar species, go to https://coleswildbird.com/how-do-you-tell-a-house-finch-from-a-purple-finch/.

I am not sure just what this little bird is looking at…but its stare is intense!  I thought that it was a house finch but after reviewing the finch identification site following the previous bird photo, I’ve discounted that idea. Laurie thinks it's an immature male tufted titmouse.

This is one of our favorite bird photos ever!  A female house finch is giving a tufted titmouse a piece of her mind!  The titmouse is paying attention but he doesn’t appear to be intimidated or impressed in any way…

The tufted titmouse is found from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska east to the Atlantic coastline.  It is a year around inhabitant that regularly visits backyard feeders.  It tends to scout out a feeder from cover, fly in and take a seed, then fly back to cover to eat it.  Unlike most birds, the offspring of tufted titmice will often stay with their parents during the winter, and even after the first year of their life.

Now for my mystery photo…which has nothing to do with birds or neighborhood happenings.

I’m looking for feedback on this photo.  I had it in my collection of old photos but I can’t remember it, the circumstances around it, or why I have it!  The photo was printed by Fox Photo in September of 1979.  It shows a significant fire in process with a fire truck responding.  There is a large Sears Store with a parking garage in the foreground and I can see both a Bank of California building and an American Airlines building in the background.

I was with a division of May Department Stores at the time but all of my stores were in the Midwest as was our headquarters.  Given the hill/slope by the parking garage, I'm guessing Northern California but to the best of my knowledge, May Company didn’t have any stores there in 1979.  Was it just a fire?  Why do I have it in my files?  It’s a mystery I’ll probably never solve.

Just click on any of the photographs to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave