Birds, Bees, and Alien cucumbers

Today’s mystery photo:

To hopefully confuse you further, this is related:

We had a nice visit with Noah who came for Helen’s Birthday.   He also gave a nice piano concert to a local Russian group:

Helen’s co-worker gave her cake with 50 no-blow-out candles.  Irena helped and after much smoke they finally got them out

We discovered a use for a vegetable called Bitter Cucumber.   It is far too bitter to eat, so instead you use Ketchup and Mustard, turn them into Aliens, then make them do your bidding, which in our case was posing for photographs:

They are much more obedient than our Giant Jewish Bear, who despite our pleas constantly harasses the poor little pink ex-ball-chair (it got punctured by one of our cactus, and despite my best efforts, seems irreparable):

Figured out the mystery photos yet?  Here is a clue … it has little to do with this amazing Orchid, given to us by our Real Estate guy when we moved in.   The flowers lasted till last week, 7 months! 

Last weekend there was a professional staged bicycle race that went down 11th Ave a few blocks from our house.   Those guys are amazing, 10 laps between the U and the Capital, 6k feet of altitude gain, 80 miles, all in <  4 hours, up to 50 mph!

I was humbled.  I can’t even figure out how to get my bike through one of those people only gates … I had it stuck here for 10 minutes:

I’ve been having fun biking and hiking the local foothills.  This is a 150 year old lime kiln the Mormons made when they first moved here.  They used lime powder for all kinds of things, like cement, water softening, reducing acidity in milk/butter, tanning, sanitizing outhouses, and destroying dead bodies. 

I stepped off the beaten trail once and in an instant I got beaten by a hoard of mini-Velcro monsters:

Some of our new Salt Lake friends took us on a hike to some high mountain lakes a couple of weekends ago:

Many of these lakes had 100+ year old man made dams, made with rocks and dirt by hand by early settlers, to preserve snow melt runoff for irrigation:

My nice pocket camera broke last month when the boys and I took it swimming, so we bought a cheap waterproof camera to hold us over while it got repaired.  This is guy is at the bottom of the pool, is the logo of the painting company of the original owner of the house:

This is a photo from the bottom of the pool, looking up at a floating tennis ball aspiring to be the sun:

My repaired camera, with 10x zoom, came back on Friday, so I took it to the backyard and had fun with it.  Yet another Quail photo, my closest yet (I swim up under them while they perch on the tv cable):

And I chased this praying mantis around our backyard for 30 minutes until he found a tree to climb up into:

And the bees are going crazy.  I counted 20 busy bees in just one flowering bush!

And this guy was was busy on a Black Eyed Susan flower:

Finally, those mystery photos?  They are the sex organs of this Hibiscus:

The round red photo is the female part (stigma) and the yellow pollen producing photo is the male part (anther, connected by a filament to form the stamen).   And so ends your birds and bees lesson for today <grin>.

Bruce