@Lookout I have seen rat snakes on trees, just never in the fence. With all the rain we have had, I expect frogs and snakes in abundance.
Lots of mowing to do today. i am going to the office and move a large fallen limb to a brush pile. Thank goodness it broke into small pieces that I can carry.
On one of my final probate appearances, I discovered some parties had not been notified, as my clients had not given me their addresses, so I had to take the case off the docket. Well, my client and her 2 witnesses started screaming at me, accusing my secretary as passing herself off as a lawyer, a felony in Texas, and the bailiff had to step out into the hallway to tell them to be quiet. I apologized for the inconvenience, but the raging went on and on. And this morning at 4 am, it hit me why it happened. The decedent's 2 daughters were not notified. If they come and contest the will, it will no doubt be on the basis that the hand written will was not in the decedent's handwriting.
My client neglected to furnish me the daughter's addresses for 6 weeks. No other request for information was not furnished. Just those 2 addresses.
I am just so damn done with this shit, LO.
Get to work making your Holler a paradise, my friend!

Those black snakes are good to have around for rat and varmint control.

Good luck wrapping up all your cases.

Loved the "distraction for the epsteinth time" meme.

Been plenty to do here with mowing, hauling brush, and road maintenance. Always something.

Hope every one has a good weekend, and thanks for the OT!

@soryang So, you are saying other countries have controversies over honest elections, just like we do? LOL!
And propaganda? Paid shills? Not just us? Omigod!
Plus, I read that Malaysia has ordered all Jews out of the country. I will try to verify that today.
Interesting times, my friend.
I absolutely remember your snake photo. It is creepy to see them, but as one who was bitten by a copperhead hidden in the grass, I will take it.
Have a great weekend!

....last year OtC. I posted the picture then. It was at our old apartment. There was a large field behind it. The snakes sought relief from the heat under the foundation and bushes around the apartment buildings. The second pic is probably something they found to eat in the area. Smokey once got bit in the butt by a pigmy rattlesnake in the yard at the old house. He was sick for a couple of days after but survived.

Raphael Rashid has a great thread he posted concerning a Taiwan media source Mnews, a Mirror News organization product. This is establishment media in Taiwan. The interesting thing I found after looking into Mirror News is that the founder used to work for a Jimmy Lai publication out of Hong Kong. Gee, I wonder what that connection could possibly suggest? The X thread is worth a look.

1/ Update: Mnews (鏡新聞), the Taiwanese broadcaster that amplified South Korean far-right election fraud conspiracies to its audience without challenge or fact-checking, has now completed a farcical internal review and cleared itself of any wrongdoing.https://t.co/USlJL9OsGh https://t.co/2oYDcB7hSh pic.twitter.com/CHeKiGhu8E

— Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) July 16, 2026

Hope all are doing well. Beautiful yard by the way! Thanks for the O&E!

@ban nock So, the videos are "nice"?

https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2078391827598623180?s=20
I haven't been following too closely as things seem to have settled into a predictable state. Ukraine hits a couple of oil refineries every night in hopes of degrading them faster than they can be repaired.

Although the big smokey fires with big flames make good videos hitting a distiller or cracking tower is much more productive as they take months and perhaps forever to repair. Refineries are built such that storage tanks maybe don't catch each other on fire. Each one holds typically enough petro for a couple hundred tanks of gas in a car.

The front lines are a horror show, and very static. Ukraine defends with drones and Russia tries to advance with infantry that must walk 20 to 40 km to even reach the Ukrainians, vulnerable to those small drones the entire time. Forgetting winning and losing for a second the idea of 1000 to 1500 Russian casualties per week is horrendous loss of life. People are people, and a Russian soldier is no different than any other person in that all life is valuable.

Ukraine tabulates casualties via drone video, allocating more drones and supplies to those units that are more successful.

Terrible.

@orlbucfan @orlbucfan JtC is from Illinois. Most people he has met here pronounce the "s" in Illinois. He gets a big kick out of it. He also lived a short while in Tennessee, and spent several of his summers in his high school years in Dallas.
I was born and raised in this town where we live, but lived and worked 7 or 8 years in Houston while attending college for various post-grad programs. It was actually my intent to work for the DOJ in DC, but a family asked me to take a case for them before I moved. Well, I won it, got flooded with clients overnight, and never left.
My 12 acres is a legacy plot that was part of a family's enormous ranch. It was thousands of acres, situated in 3 counties, created during Reconstruction. Over decades, and a century, a few descendants of the family held on to 33 acre plots of the old ranch. My late husband inherited 12 acres, and left it to me in his will. The creek that forms the rear property boundary begins at a spring 3 miles away, and it runs into a huge, man-made lake. The sounds of the shallow creek trickling along is mesmerizing. When I was a kid, before fencing was a thing, I would ride my horse for miles alongside it. Arrowheads everywhere.
I have done my best for for 4 decades to keep it as a little nature preserve, resisting offers to purchase it for development.
Enjoy your weekend, chica!

edit: I have seen Willie so many times, I've lost count! The performer we met at Albert Dance Hall and Ice House a few weeks ago had played in Willie's band, as well as David Allen Coe's. Willie had called him to tell him of Coe's passing. He and I swapped a few Willie stories.
Outlaw Country is very unique, and he was the main driver to get it going.

What a gorgeous casa! Now, I am really glad you are retiring!! Are you a TX native? Your Other Half has indicated he is not. Sounds like where I live. I am not not a big C&W fan, but Willie is an exception.

You both stay safe! Rec'd!!

@Dawn's Meta @Dawn's Meta We experienced a tiny ant invasion, and I used some ant poison traps I bought at a local Dollar store, and they were gone the next day. I feel your pain! Been there!
I don't know how those big mowers and combines will keep running as diesel becomes more scarce. Best of luck to your farmers and ranchers.
Now, I think wearing a wet towel around your neck shows the public you have a brain and a desire to maintain your health, but I'm not French, of course.
Your garden is a learning experience. Your seeds and starters are different, seasons start and end differently, pests are different, fertilizers and water sources are different, so any good yield you get is a real achievement. Kudos!
I think your idea of picking out a room to cool is very smart. We can only find shade or a gentle breeze for a time, then it is cool room to the rescue.
I have always found staying warm so much easier than staying cool. And by Wednesday, our temperature here will reach ad stay at 99 deg. for a while. August should be a perfect hell on earth this year. Oh, well, it hasn't killed me in 74 years, so there's that.
Well, you have me wanting to listen to kd lang. Thanks for bringing her to our attention, chica!
Enjoy your food, neighbors, your music, and any temperature drop that happens your way!

from the 49th Parallel and Ingenue. I bought my first CD before I had a CD player: Ingenue.
Boy does she have breath control and syncopation. One could learn to sing by listening to her.

Our break from the worst heat ever was a spit here in Bourgogne. But not far away near Saint Etienne there was a small tornado and very large grelle (hail). The heat is knocking the poop out of all of us. We go to parks and high altitude forested hills for a little less heat. We meet strangers and talk about how we are doing with all this. Anyone with a stone house says they are cool until the stone warms up then we are in an oven.

Mon mari put up window awnings (kd is singing Wash Me Clean. She moves from regular voice to over her break into falsetto so effortlessly.) on the five fenêtres and porte fenêtre facing southeast. It helps keep sun off of window boxes of flowers (ahem, we have priorities) and the glass into the house à l'étage (second floor).

Although we have a pellet stove/boiler and now an Italian wood stove/oven (oh is this a nice wood stove with a 78 litre oven) we have no ac. So the internet is our friend. We now have all the pieces to put in a Mitsubishi mini split including the copper tubing. We are DIY in a land where everyone defers to "experts". Our willingness to tackle almost any project is a wonder to French people. They clutch.

The mini split will be in our chambre parentale (master bedroom) and has the reversing ability to heat in winter. The electricity rates are going up 2.?% so our wood fired heat will be our first resort. But in the heat we need to cool one space down.

We are feeding birds and keeping water in dishes fresh daily. They really need it. We do live next to a nice stream, but for little birds it's too far. We've seen a fox just across the country lane in the pasture doing the diving jump after a small critter. We saw a blaireau (European Badger) not far from home the other evening. Rabbits and hares, large and small deer. All of this in the last two weeks.

The second round of super heat brought out many butterflies, but the last two hot spells brought legions of ants into the house and flies. Oh the insults. Trying high percent Hydrogen pyroxide in a spray bottle on ants, which seems to be working. If we spray their entrances and runways for a week persistently they seem to give up. I can't see a thing without glasses and was grossed out by the huge ant parade in my nightly shower. Well it's a week and we have a very clean Italienne douche and no ants. One small victory.

The cows are still out in pastures but the grasses are pretty done, so bales of hay are now brought daily along with tankers of water drawn from local streams which are declining rapidly. I don't know how white thin hided cows (Charolais) stand the heat or lack of water.

Farmers who raise animals are enleveurs; farmers who raise crops are agriculteurs. The latter have been steadily havesting grains and are on their first haying cycle. Before the storms arrived across France the agriculteurs were racing to get the very dry wheat in. We have watched New Holland combine/harvesters up close. They are huge machines even on small holdings. Amazing machines. Kites almost always follow the mowing closely. Earlier we saw lots of Storks who seem to really know their farm equipment.

In our own small jardin, we have early tassling corn both Bantam and Sequoia. We took an ear a couple of days ago from the first Bantams. It was smallish and even though I hand pollinated the silks there were 50-60% undeveloped kernals but those that did make it are so, so good. We had early but nice broccoli; some nice lettuce.

Tonight we had our first Caprese salad with a very nice tomato. The plants have had a hard time taking hold, but are finally developing. The peppers are not doing very well: quite spare and very little flowering. If a nice fruit shows up it's us versus some critter which loves to make a hole and crawl in to eat at leisure.

Nasturtiums really bit it. The Marigolds were almost disappeared by slugs but are struggling to restart.

The beans and peas in the cabbage bed have also struggled. But a success is the squashes of all types interplanted with corn and then the beans and peas there are doing very well. Both summer and fall squash love the heat as long as we water. We have a 450 litre cistern fed by a source (spring). We have also acquired a 1000 litre ubc tote. We tried to fill it but even with only morning sun the water developed the green algae. We need to somehow shade the cube. And add some H2O2 to keep it clean. Ideas welcome.

Without the source we would be using chlorinated city water at great expense to have a garden and it would probably be a deal breaker. We are so lucky to have this cistern which refills in about three hours.

Many of us gather in small groups for a pot luck or a small concert. It has been difficult to go out after noon and before 9pm. So these are gatherings that require marshaling our energy.

Staying home when it hit 43°C was a mistake. I took a hit (melted my brain) and just now am getting most of my systems back. Highest priority on good food, homemade Kefir, homemade natural fermented veggies (cabbage, veggies, ginger, salt + age of 10 - 20 days) and a tea of grated ginger root, grated curcuma, cloves and pepper corns with dried mint tea leaves. Good hot or cold.

I no longer care how I look if I go to a store or out in public I'm wearing a wet hand towel around my neck and carry an umbrella. I'm just now resuming my part of the daily watering.

The stout member of the family is Teddy. Le petit chien is a rough and tough easy going soul. Except as happens this time of year, there is a lady who accompanies her owner a cow raising person. Said lady chienne is looking for a fella. Teddy now is howling at anything that gets his attention: tractors, cars passing in the lane; motorcycles; us if we're noisy. This too shall pass. The stream is so low that the little dog a Teckel poil dur can cross in a heart beat and hardly dampen his belly. His sorties are of some concern as he will take on huge tractors as wild animals. No sense around big machines.

So that's our current status in the heat. What we wouldn't give for a downpour.

I hope everyone who is feeling poorly, can get relief and recovery. Sending my wish into the universe.

Take care OTC and C99.