Weekend trip to Chickamauga

Last weekend, we used the occasion of a Quilt Show in Chattanooga to visit Norris' family. On Saturday morning, 7-year-old great-nephew Kason had a football game on the big field at the Gordon-Lee High School. 

The players are not very big and seemed very far away, but you can pick Kason out of the crowd because he's a head taller than the rest of his team. He's in the center of the picture above, with his toes on the 40 yard line. He played both offense and defense, and wherever he was in the line, the opposing team put two players against him. No throwing at this age: the quarterbacks just hand the ball off for running plays.

Here's another photo showing the Kason in the number 10 jersey.

We will not report the score as it was rather lopsided in favor of the visiting team. It was the first game of the season, and we'll be eager to learn how Kason does in a few more weeks.

There was other business to attend to, but we met up with most of the family on Sunday at the pizza place. Cailey and Kheley posed for a photo with their Uncle Tevin.

Norris and DeWayne spent most of the time we were there talking about radios.

 

 DeWayne had to place four phones on the table in addition to that yellow and black radio before ordering. Happily, they were all quiet so he could enjoy his meal.  But they were still talking radios all the way back to our cars.  Here Norris shows DeWayne and Marvin one of the finest of the new ones in use in our county.

After lunch, we stopped at Marvin and Marla's to admire their new deck and porch-under-construction - already useable, providing shade and place for lots of seating.

The floor and roofing are all done, just rails and screens, and maybe a finish to the ceiling of this very large new space to enjoy and entertain outside.

When we got home, we noticed our meadow of Coreopsis and Cosmos had pretty much given way to a Yellow Zinnia show - this is the view from our deck

 Here's a closeup as the sun finally reaches the lower half of the field. You can see there are a few stray orange and pink zinnias in the mix along with the maroon centers of the Plains Coreopsis, but overall it's an impressive show of yellow and green.

Old and new topics

I know at least a couple of our readers liked reading about the little ducks we saw about 10 days ago. We were a little nervous to update you because we thought the news was pretty sad - we went back to the lake for an evening walk about a week later and saw only three little yellow ducks.  (these are not very sharp photos, taken in late evening with a phone camera).

We circled the lake four times as usual, and by the last time around, we had seen how the little duck family go about on the banks looking for late day bugs in the grass.  We never saw any other babies, and there would not have been any place for them to hide.  We also saw Momma Muscovy put the babies to sleep for the night, tucking them under herself, sitting under a street lamp. 

But she was not the only bird of her kind - this one, paired with a white duck, was also seen on the lake that evening.

We went back again on Friday and of course looked for Momma and the babies - and were happily surprised to see her two babies from the opposite shore.  It appeared that a darker bird was following along behind them, but when we got up close, we saw that there were still three babies -

(that's an unrelated adult duck you can see over Momma Muscovy's back).  So we've been trying to figure out if the yellow ducklings can change colors before they get their real feathers, or how this happened.  It's definitely the same Momma - they followed the same routine we'd seen a week earlier, and she put them to bed underneath herself in the light of the same street lamp.

The second Muscovy was also there again paired up with a white duck.

Writing of small things, a neighbor with better gardening conditions than we have has given us various produce. Last week, they left a sack of these unusual little things - note the quarter in the bag for size.

They go by a variety of names - Mexican Sour Gherkins for one, but also Mouse Melons. In this closeup you can see why they got that second name.  One blogger commented "you can just imagine a mouse pushing them along in a little wheelbarrow."

Norris can't eat them, but I tried one plain, then read some recipes and tried in them in salads a couple of times.  I was willing to let the taste grow on me, but it hasn't. They are rather like a cucumber, only sour with a slight bitterness, and the flesh is more translucent than a cucumber's. They are probably best pickled, but we have never tried pickling.

In 2009 for my birthday, we drove the 20 miles it takes to get to Douglas Falls, about 7 miles from here.  This past weekend was Norris' birthday and we thought we'd go back.  We realized, half way up the 8.5 mile gravel road that limits your speed to about 17-18 mph, why we haven't been back more often.

We haven't had much rain, so the falls were not as pretty as they were then.  Here's our 2009 photo -

 

... compared to this year's - 

 

 This is the view looking out from behind the water - we had a lot more company on this Labor Day weekend than we did for our early June hike 6 years ago.

The falls are about 1/2 mile from the parking lot and since we try to walk at least two miles, we went up the trail from the falls toward Craggy.  It was hot and rain was predicted, so we stopped going  upwards after maybe 3/4 of a mile.  Back at home the rain came on quite suddenly, and violently in some places nearby, with a lot of lightning.