I’ve spent the first half of the day pouring large pots of boiling water on fire ant mounds. The actual carrying of large pots of boiling water is tedious and tiring, but the killing of millions of fire ants always brings me an odd sense of glee. If you live somewhere that has fire ants, you will understand. If you have never encountered a fire ant, you can’t possibly begin to comprehend the level of loathing they are worthy of having poured on them. Boiling water is barely adequate, but at least it does kill them. I haven’t finished the task, but it’s getting hot outside, which makes the ants move deeper underground, and my arms were getting tired. Tomorrow, there shall be more slaying of ants with large pots of boiling water. Die, fire ants! Die!

Last night, I massacred the fire ants that had taken up residence in two of my large pots, so this morning, I transplanted the last tomato plant into an antless pot and put it in it’s new home on the front porch. I’m hoping it gets to stay there and has enough sunlight, because if I put it back in the back yard, it will only become an ant condo again. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve had tomatoes in pots on the front porch before, and they seemed to do well enough.

The peas have started to come up in the two planters I already had on the front porch. I’m really late getting the peas started, but they do well enough in partial sunlight, so maybe we’ll get some snow peas before it gets too damn hot for peas to do their thing. Not that it isn’t already too damn hot out in the Texas sun, because it is, but by late afternoon the porch doesn’t have sunlight on it anymore, and late afternoon is when it gets REALLY hot. Anyway, here’s hoping the peas do OK, and if it looks like they aren’t, I’ll pull them up and plant something else there.

The first self-seeded basil of the season has begun to come up! This is the sign I was waiting for. It tells me the soil is now warm enough to plant anything I want to plant. Of course, it should be noted, we have not yet plowed up the new garden area, so if I want to plant anything today, it’ll have to be carrots, basil, radishes, lettuce, and things in pots. I’ll probably stick a few seeds in the ground later today when it starts to cool off again, and hopefully tomorrow we will get up off our collective butts and work in the yard. I need tilled soil … and a lot of it!

While I was working out in the back yard and running in and out of the house with large pots of ant-killing boiling water, two of the outdoor cats were doing their best to both annoy and entertain me. Sasha was being entertaining by trying to catch one of the many anoles (lizards) that hang around the back door. She had no success. She’s fast, but they are much, much faster. And they can climb walls. Meanwhile, Grumpy was busy deciding the area containing the walking onions was the perfect place to make a new cat napping location. None of the cats were at all interested with that particular spot of earth until I put bricks around it (to keep it from getting accidentally mowed over). Now, all the cats LOVE that spot. What gives?!

Speaking of Grumpy, he’s finally beginning to catch on that cuteness, niceness, and showing humans a little love gets his feeding needs fulfilled much sooner than being a mean old cat. He actually ran up to me the other day, meowed sweetly, gave me an adorable look, and rubbed against my leg. Naturally, I immediately went and got the bag of food. That sort of behavior deserves immediate rewarding! I’m really worried about him though. He’s quite old, and now he’s looking rather skinny and ill. There really isn’t much I can do about that. Trapping has been tried, and he’s quite clever (has to be to have lived so long on the streets), and even if I did manage to catch him, I don’t really have the money to spend on finding out what’s wrong and treating it. He doesn’t appear to be suffering, but I suppose if the day comes when it’s obvious he’s in really terrible shape and is suffering, I’ll have to find some way to make the right choice for him, which will be sad. He may be a grumpy, mean old thing, but he’s sort of family.

I’m not even going to tell you what the indoor beasts have been up to today. Let’s just say if I were the sort of person to beat animals when they are being insufferable pains in my butt, there would have been beatings today. It’s all Ronin’s fault today, because Ronin is apparently in a mood. A bad mood. He likes to spread his bad moods around, so basically, there are three annoyed cats milling around being somewhat evil. Hopefully, they will get tired soon and go sleep on the bed together like good kitties. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on that though. Some days, the cats are just major pains in my butt ALL day long.

Now I suppose I should go finish the dishes I started an hour ago and forgot about and stick a few seeds into garden beds. Probably wouldn’t hurt if I did some laundry too. OK, it will hurt, because I don’t feel like doing laundry at all, but it needs to be done. Clean clothes (and clean dishes) are nice things to have on hand. LOL!