“On the Hunt, and ... Gotcha!”

Well, I guess I need to start with an update.  See, I began to receive multiple offers of sympathy and help after yesterrday’s blog got out.  But here’s the thing.  It was a joke, my faithful, blog-reading friends.  A good, old-fashioned April Fool’s Day joke.  Th evidence was all there.  Go back and read it again.  But let me reassure you all.  The fence is fine.  Freddy is high and dry.  We haven’t heard, nor do we expect to hear, from any real city inspectors.  As I explained to a concerned friend yesterday when she asked if any of that stuff really happened:
Well, let’s see ... John did burr off some screws.  Chris did get a gate latch.  There is a pile of old concrete.  It did rain.  Chris did prank Nathan about the inspector.  We are getting out of town for a few days.  I guess I was just “inspired by true events,” as Hollywood would say, to an enhanced level of embellishment.

Now ... we are going on a wildflower hunt.  Chris loves bluebonnets, and she read that we are in the midst of a massive blooming season.  Somewhere.  We weren’t really sure where to start, but that’s never stopped us before.  We stopped for gas at WalMart before we left town, and realized that we forgot to pick up our Texas map book.  Yes, we still use one of those.  Old school.  We went back home for it.

Here’s a list of things we saw as we drove along the way.
Flowers of red, yellow, white, and YES, blue.
Owls, hawks, vultures
An operating oil well and some four-legged cows.
Pink azaleas
Some kind of white lilies with a flower that looks like a star.
The Vulture Tree (A rather frightening sight.  One of those old, dead trees with numerous vultures perched on every available branch.  The stuff of fright movies).
Longhorns

We passed through the stretch of land near Bastrop where some of our GFD guys were deployed during the big fire there.  You can still see some of the old burnt trees, but they are surrounded by lots of new growth.  Quite the image to behold.

Our first stop (if you don’t count Buc-ees), was a place Chris had stumbled across in one of her wild and crazy research binges, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Refuge in South Austin.  I’m pretty sure Chris got her fill of wildflowers.  Bluebonnets, especially.  She took at least a hundred pictures.  Glad I cleaned off the memory card before we left home.  The most interesting thing to me was the nesting Great Horned Owl.  She was perched back in a corner of one of their structures, just sitting around, staring back at all the crazy tourists that were staring at her.  I’m pretty sure her name was Odine.  If not, it should have been.  We found her husband in the gift shop.  Orville.  He didn’t like us staring at his wife.  He decided to teach us a lesson.  For a small fee, he joined us for the rest of our trip, sitting in the back seat ... staring at Chris in the rear view mirror.  Won’t he be a fun addition to our menagerie?

Today we will ... I don’t know.  It’s 37 degrees outside where we are.  It is supposed to warm up to the 60’s later.  Let’s just start with a warm cup of coffee, shall we?

John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Father, watch over Odine Owl and her little babies, especially in this cold weather.  Amen.