CaradB

@caradb.bsky.social

319 Followers 199 Following

Just here in hopes of social media that still includes the *social* part

A striped mackerel tabby in a doorway that leads to a second story outdoor porch. In front of him on my wood floor is a common house sparrow with a broken neck. He looks a little smug. Please note that not only is this porch on a second story, we also have an owl statue to discourage birds from landing on the porch railing so they don’t get killed. Now I gotta dispose of the body, EW EW EW
Sassafras, a striped mackerel tabby cat, is licking a half-eaten coconut popsicle. His ears are in airplane mode, as if this was prey, and his pupils are wide with enjoyment.
A old lady tortoiseshell cat with a very pretty face and big green eyes and a tongue sticking out
A bee absolutely covered in pollen, resting on a fading red rose
A bee on lavender that’s just coming into bloom
Sassafras, a mackerel tabby cat, looking at the camera and licking his chops
A striped garden snail in the foreground on a stone wall. In the background are green leaves with big fat raindrops and a golden light (the last of the day’s sun) coming in from the upper left
A striped mackerel tabby sniffing a purple echinacea (cone flower)
A striped mackerel tabby on a red leash rolling blissfully on pavement
I don’t actually remember what the fuck this is, our downstairs neighbor handles the garden that edges the patio. It looks big and kind of scraggly right now and there are a ton of buds waiting to go so I hope it’s an on-purpose plant. It looks sort of like if a plant became a muppet.
Purple geranium family thingie, idk. I got it as a shade plant and it is, it lives happily under roses of Sharon all year and it’s sloooooowly becoming ground cover. Much slower than I wanted. Maybe if I keep up with the weeding better this year, it won’t have so much competition and it’ll spread more and faster.
Volunteer purple echinacea sprouting between the bricks on the back patio
You guessed it, it’s a pale pink peony. Not pictured: one billion ants that would turn themselves invisible if I tried to do anything like cut it and bring it inside for my desk, and make themselves visible again once inside. Ew. I hate ants.
Another dark red rose that would be a lot happier if I tied it properly to its trellis
Yet again, not much to add here
Some dark red roses amid healthy green lilac leaves and diseased yellow spotted rose leaves. I just like the lilac better, okay? So I’m allowing it to very gradually win. I think the disease is powdery mildew which the fucking peonies - why does everyone love peonies so much??? - gave to all the roses but this year it’s not a problem because it’s been really dry (except on weekends) and we’re in a level 3 drought still.
Again not much to add in alt text, it’s a closer look at the light pink roses that are my favorite
I mean I already described what’s in the picture in the post text, so I will just add that I fucked up pruning both of these roses this year and as a result they lurched all over into my neighbor’s driveway and you guys, these are the nicest neighbors EVER and I feel so bad impeding their ability to back their car into their driveway without having to brush past my flowers. Soon this bloom will be over and I’ll prune everything back and apologize yet again, I swear, every year I do some new dumb thing and my neighbors have to endure collateral damage.
Dark red roses sort of climbing the side of my house, I never tie them properly so there’s a little climbing and a lot of flopping. The yellow rose bush in front of it is full of flowers that are kinda sunset boulevard - blowsy and past their prime. (Or so I think, I’ve neither seen nor read Sunset Boulevard.)
Close up of the deeply pink rosebush which has finally stopped holding out on me and bloomed. I don’t know what its name is, it was here when we bought the house.
Part of my garden, you can see white peonies and a single blooming pink one on the middle left. Middle middle is a pink rosebush, with a couple of late purple Siberian irises behind it.
An exhuberant, even blowsy, yellow rosebush doing its thing, with some red roses (separate plant obviously!) behind
Frassy, a mackerel tabby sporting a skull patterned harness and red leash, is showing his body joy with rollies in the driveway. Outside time is the best! For him anyway because the mosquitos come for me first.
Sassafras, a mackerel tabby, is pawing at the glass part of a door. He looks cranky and also YOU CAN SEE HIS WIDDLE TOE BEANSSSSSS mashed up on the glass. Also you can kinda see me in the reflection.
No idea which yellow rose this is, it was here when we bought the place. It has a faint fragrance, minimal thorns, and it’s ravishingly pretty for the 24 hours that the blooms last. It does have a pretty good rebloom later in summer if I deadhead in a timely fashion, which is never something I can guarantee. Because it drops petals so quickly, it sucks for including in arrangements. All the roses in my garden are weak willed but polite, like this one, or strong assholes that send up 20’ whippy tendrils to take blood sacrifices from the unwilling. (No asshole roses pictured yet but I will name and shame them as soon as they bloom. They are my favorites.)
Purple rhodies, large, happy, boring for the 50 weeks a year that they aren’t in bloom.
I forget what this is actually called. My mom recommended it as gradual ground over and it’s very slowly becoming that. I think I put it in 3-4 years ago and it’s probably tripled in size. The flowers last a while and they tolerate the shade and the rich, damp soil (and also utter neglect)
Purple salvia. Not much else to say about it. It’s reliable and well behaved.
Irises. These mofos are super tough. I basically have to jackhammer them out of the ground if they spread somewhere I don’t want them to. The bloom time is fairly short but the grasses provide some interest the rest of the year. Also cover for 🐀
Sassafras, a mackerel tabby cat, is loving up on some hydrangea twigs for his own mysterious reasons.
Whitey the rat, a gangster character from Flushed Away. He’s white (as the name implies), with a high forehead and close set eyes. He’s built like a brick shithouse and (for some reason) wearing a suit reminiscent of the one work by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, complete with a heavy chain link goldfish necklace.
A striped mackerel tabby js peering out from among greenery, looking vaguely like a tiger in a jungle. Greenery = hosta on the right, I believe some kind of geranium family member on the bottommost left, maybe that’s loosestrife in bloom on the left, some kinda weed on the bottom right which might just be violets, still a weed but a friendly one.
A wildly blooming streptocarpus (cape primrose) (when did I become someone who casually uses the plant’s Latin name??), a severed leaf from said streptocarpus, and a mutilated flower. Also visible: some other plant, a sad fruit bowl, and a weird little steampunk-ish heron (or maybe it’s a crane) dangling from the fridge. I bought it for my husband decades ago (when steampunk was just getting started). He never liked it because he wasn’t a fan of steampunk so I’m not actually sure why it’s still hanging around, maybe today will finally be the day I bin it
Dark twilight sky with a fingernail moon and one star (probably a planet) off to the left. The placement makes it look sorta like a winking smiley face.
Great blue heron on a rock, waiting for lunch to swim by
Before - part of a garden bed with hostas being swallowed up by weeds
Gel pen sketch of an oriental lily in my regular working notebook (so it has grid dots, haha). I used a .5 mm black pen for the outlines of the petals and .7 mm light green, light pink and yellow gel pens to add some color to the center of the petals and to the stamens. It looks messy and fast because it was, but I’ve been trying to figure out how to loosen up my drawing for a while now. Drawing from life always accelerates this, and so does working directly with pen (no pencil outlines or anything to get proportions first). In this case, I was working from life AND using pen first, so it’s quite shaggy. But I’m happy with the way the pink and yellow gel pen colors blended. Usually there are some parts of a drawing that I’m unhappy with and some parts I am pleasantly surprised by.
Sassafras inside a dwarf spruce demonstrating how effective a mackerel tabby coat with ticking is at camouflage - you can see his eyes in this picture but without that, he’s surprisingly hard to spot
Sassafras, a mackerel tabby, is riding on my shoulder. I’m wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie. We are both smiling.
Sassafras, a mackerel tabby, shown with halter and leash, eating grass with airplane ears and a defiant expression.
Sassafras, a mackerel striped tabby, peering out from the nethermost regions of a dwarf spruce-ish thingie. You can’t see his halter or leash but they’re there. I can’t extract him without making a blood sacrifice to the roses, which I am not hungry enough to do. At least the lilacs are in bloom and smell nice while I write this alt text. Frassy always wants to go on walks and if I can get him acclimated to the front garden (where the majority of the work needs to be done), I can bring him out and get the weeding done at the same time. Win-win! Plus there are rats all over the city and a couple of days ago, a softball sized one shot between my feet while I was gardening and ran into Weed Forest right where Frassy is now, so he could protect me, which I would appreciate. Or kill some rats which would also be fine (at least until I have to dispose of the body, a disgusting chore)
A small tree filled with pink blossoms. Unfortunately it’ll never get tall enough to provide decent shade or have its lowest hanging branches stay out of the way of cars or pedestrians. Also the placement of the cutout wasn’t great - makes it hard for me to get trash and recycling bins onto the curb. On the plus side this tree is healthy AF, I have never watered it after its first summer, it takes a shitload of salt and sand in winter and keeps going, and the small size of the canopy indicates a root system that’s less likely to interfere with underground infrastructure (also small size means it won’t interfere w power lines). And it’s not that big a deal for me to trim the branches that get in the way. Doesn’t drop too much crap either - some petals in spring, leaves in fall and crabapples in winter, but far less annoying than the fireball nips that spring up constantly. It also smells reasonably nice in bloom. So basically you pays your money and you takes your chances.
A heron wading - I think it’s a great blue heron but I am not a birder
Stripey gray cat mid-lick cleaning his butthole
Bob, a spry 17 year old black and white cat. He’s down to 2 misaligned teeth, but that’s not stopping him from from gumming spring greenery
A gray striped mackerel tabby wearing a red leash and black harness chews on some pathetic early grass. His head is blurred because he’s moving and bc I took the picture in very low light, at the tail end of dusk
A fuzzy bee harvesting something (pollen? nectar? Idk) from the center of a yellow pansy, with an orange pansy and purple phlox (I think, idk much about flowers either) also in the shot
Black cat with a tiny bit of white fur on her chest and peeking out from her belly. Unusually for a black cat picture, the light is reflected off her glossy fur, defining her shape and preventing the usual black cat = void effect. Her eyes are also closed and she looks happy, which she was, because that’s a little portable heater in front of her
A close up of the Colonel Sanders on the cursed jellybean bag. He may have an inscrutable expression, now that I think about it
A bag of jellybeans with the KFC colonel sanders logo, saying “Colonel’s favorite jelly beans” - listed flavors are fried chicken, sweet corn, and gravy
A gray striped tabby with a harness and leash setup outside, in my driveway. Snow shovels and a recycling bin in the background.
A container of my favorite flavor of high protein yogurt with the top and bottom domed from the pressure of the contents
A view looking down a short staircase at a desk lying at an awkward angle braces against some trash and recycling barrels and a collection of winter snow shovels. Its legs are pointing up and out in a manner somewhat reminiscent, if you have a good imagination, of a human giving birth
A stripey cat sitting on a lap getting scritches
A pen and ink Baby Lucy surrounded by a Jesus-style flame job. above her airplane ears it says “pet me with your eyes” There’s also a rough practice Baby Lucy visible above, but with a pink and yellow flame job. Scribbles are all around the edges of the paper and it’s had a hole cut out of it, grease stains are visible, etc. vibes are extremely casual.
A full moon rising over a tree in a late winter sky. Despite the post caption, the image is cropped so there is no parking lot, ugly street lamp or brutalist architecture: you just see the bare branches of a tree (tips alight with the last of the day’s sunlight) reaching out towards the full moon in a blue blue sky.
A button made from a drawing of a stripey cat yawning - the way I drew it, he could just be yelling excitedly, not yawning. He has happy eyes. There is visible cat hair trapped between the paper and the plastic and the whole thing looks sorta shaggy, appropriate for a five minute doodle.
Video of me, a middle aged woman, shoveling out from 14 inches of snow while wearing a hat, mittens, and a sleeveless shirt. It was 40F and sunny, and I’d been working hard for a couple of hours at that point.