A Little Afternoon Habitat Distruction

Dandelion likes to maroon her bike -- the back wheel suspended over a rut, bike held up by the training wheels -- to turn it into an exercise bike. If you look closely, you can see that her back wheel and her legs are the only things moving in this picture.

She was 'exercising' while Matthew tinkered with a problem that has greatly impeded Star's bike-riding enjoyment. He's a pretty resourceful bike repairman.

While those two were busy, I tackled another outside issue:

That's a pile of landscape timber that, once upon a time, made it much much harder to maintain our lawn. I removed them (and the 2' stakes keeping them in place) earlier this spring, and then piled them up the way you see them in the picture.

Don't confuse this with the first batch of timbers I dug up earlier in the year. Those are well and truly gone. These are the second wave of useless landscape timber that I have disencumbered from our garden.

Anyway, slowly, steadily, it became clear just how bad an idea it is to have a pile of wood right next to the house. Oh, I'm sure it isn't THAT big a deal, you just wouldn't want to have that situation long term. So I moved them, and hopefully, in a few days, I'll have disposed of them.

You'll never believe what was living under those timbers, though.


I just had to show the kids, even though the toad was hard to see under all those leaves. Dandelion named him 'toady boady' almost as quickly as I decided he was a boy, and she then declared him to be "so cutie" and ran back to her exercise bike.

Now that the timbers are gone, I have no idea where toady boady will live. There are lots of other shady spots in the garden, but none that will protect him from the neighbors' cat quite so well as a huge pile of timber.