Animal Insting

There are gobs of things to see and hear and smell when we go out walking with Mom in the springtime.  Mom thinks it's all about flowers, but to be honest, I don't care much about flowers unless some dog has peed on them, and then they are interesting to sniff.  The tulips are blooming now.  They come in lots of colors.  We used to have some yellow-and-red ones like these, but they stopped blooming, so Mom dug them up and threw them away.

The dandelions are also blooming but Mom doesn't like dandelions much, even though yellow is her favorite color.  I'm not sure why she likes yellow tulips, but not yellow dandelions.  I'll probably never understand humans!

Here's a picture of a tulip tree.  It doesn't really have tulips growing on it, but the flowers look sort of like tulips.  Some years the tulip trees start blooming, and then the weather gets really cold, and all the flowers turn brown and fall off.  Which makes them really ugly.  But that didn't happen this year.

This tree is at our house, and it's called a star magnolia.  I guess the flowers are supposed to look like stars, but they are very droopy stars.  Aunt LaDene says the flowers look more like kleenexes than like stars, and I think she is right.

Mom planted a bunch of pansies this year in 3 different pots.  This is the one she calls the "goat pot."  Mom couldn't decide which color of pansy she liked best, so she got lots of colors.

Okay, well, that's enough about boring old flowers.  Here are some other things that are happening in our neighborhood.  Some men from AT&T keep digging holes and sticking cable things in them.  There is one place down the street from us where they put in some boxes with a bunch of wires and stuff.  It has taken them a long time to do this, and there is somebody there working on it almost every day.  I don't like to walk there because it's very scary, so if we get too close, I make Mom turn around and go back the other way.

Here's a new fence that a man built around part of his yard.  A black lab lives there, and she is a nice dog.  She doesn't fence fight or anything like that.  Gabe would like to fence fight with her, but she doesn't even usually come over by the fence.  The people who used to live there before had a boxer, and he could jump right over the fence.  We saw him do it a couple of times.  But now the lab lives there, and she does not jump the fence.

We think this big, white house is probably one of the first ones built in this neighborhood.  And the reason we think that is because it looks different from all the other houses, which are mostly what is called a Tudor style.  Except in our block, where the houses are colonial or Cape Cod style.  Anyway, this big, white house is very nice-looking, and they have a really big yard.  Last summer, the people who live there built a garage, which you can see in the left side of the photo.

And here's the last thing I'm going to show you today, which is two stone lions that guard the sidewalk in front of this one house.  Mom says we don't need lions to guard our house because we have dogs to do that!