Wildflower birthday part 3

My focus these last few posts has been on wildflowers we saw on my birthday but we saw other pretty things, too. Mesquite trees are one of my favorite trees. Their bright fernlike leaves look delicate but they must be tough to survive our harsh hot climate and inhospitable rock and clay soil. 

It was one of those rare sunny, but cool days. Though I did start to appreciate the shade as the morning advanced.

A nice view of Joe Pool lake about halfway along the Talala trail.
This cardinal sang happy birthday to me ;-) ...
Well, anyway, it did sing for a long time while we watched and admired. It might have been warning all the surrounding birds to watch out for us. But since we don't speak bird-ish we just listened and enjoyed.

And yes there were more wildflowers! 

An Indian blanket

This seemingly simple little flower is more interesting up close--as the next picture shows.

I think these are violet trout lilies. 

Later that evening, we got fajitas for dinner at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants, Plato Loco, and then went to watch the sunset over the lake. Afterward we had brownies and "ice-cream" (I had dairy free sorbet) back in the RV and watched "The Beverley Hill Billie's" (dvds of the old tv show.) 

If you know the names of any of the wildflowers I have photos of here or in any of my posts please leave a comment and let me know!

Follow these links for the first two Wildflower birthday posts:

Wildflower birthday part 1

Wildflower birthday part 2

Wildflower birthday - part 2

As I wrote in yesterday's post we went camping at Cedar Hill State Park over my birthday. 

The trail we hiked on my birthday is called the Talala trail. It's rated moderately difficult and is 2.3 miles. The trail guide says it takes two hours. But it took us a lot longer. And we didn't even do the whole 2.3 miles. There were so many wildflowers I could hardly walk a meter without stopping to take pictures. What I lacked in steps, I made up for in squats!

I noticed that a majority of the wildflowers seemed to be either yellow or purple.  Even our iconic Texas blue bonnet has a hint of purple in it so it seemed to fit. There were a few others too. 

There were so many wildflowers that I thought I would post photos of them in small batches. (See yesterday's post for the first part.)

Stay tuned for the next collection.

Please let me know in the comments if you prefer these short posts with small numbers of photos or if you like my usual longer posts with more photos.

Wildflower birthday - part 1

For my birthday this year we went camping at nearby Cedar Hill State Park. It was a delightful week. The weather was mostly very cooperative. There was one night when it rained hard and we had to wait a day or two until the trails were open again. 

But we had perfect hiking weather for my birthday. We didn't actually walk very far though because it was also great wildflower photographing weather. 

I was planning to write a thoroughly detailed post but after going through my photos this morning I thought I would share them in batches. 

Texas bluebonnet. State flower.

I got to see two of my favorite things: lady bugs and later on in the walk a male cardinal (picture to come). It felt like little extra birthday gifts.

Stay tuned for the next batch of birthday wildflowers.

New roof

Another big-ish thing that happened this Spring is that we got a new roof. We weren't planning to and didn't even know we needed to until a few days before we did. 

A couple of months ago someone came around after a mild hail storm and offered to look at our roof. Our roof was rated "class 4 impact resistant." But even if it hadn't been that hail storm was so slight it didn't seem worth worrying about. We also have a roofer friend whom we trust so we were not planning to use some random stranger who was canvassing the neighborhood looking for roofing business. We told them that (not in those words of course) but they still wanted to look at it. So we let them. 

They said the roof had some "delamination" and algae and I think something else that I can't remember and that we should have our roofer friend look at it. We said we would. I looked up delamination and it didn't seem very worrying, but I wrote John a note and put it at his place at the table to remind him to call Larry*, our roofer friend. The note sat there for a while... and then sat there some more. It turns out that it is probably a good thing we waited as long as we did. But more on that.

Then early last week John said that Larry was coming that day to look at our roof. John didn't think there was anything really wrong with it but he has been thinking about putting solar panels on the roof and he wanted to make sure it was in good enough condition before we did that. We wouldn't want to have to replace the roof soon after installing solar panels! 

It was a bit of a shock when Larry discovered that not only was it not in good enough condition to put solar panels on, but that it really needed to be replaced right away whether we put solar panels on it or not! 

It had several problems. The worst and most surprising problem was water damage and rot in some of the decking. (In case you're not familiar with the term "decking," it is the layer of wood that the shingles are nailed to.) Apparently when John and another friend, not a roofer, installed it over 20 years ago they didn't put "starters" around the edges. That allowed water to seep under the shingles around the edges. There were only a few place where that happened but any amount of water damage and rot in a roof is too much. There were several other problems that were less surprising given its age and our climate--heat stress, blistering, cracking, delamination, degranulation. 

Larry said they could come that Saturday. They worked amazingly fast.

They started early and were on the roof before I woke up just after 7:00, which is when I woke up!

Tear off phase. You can see the old white shingles in the bottom left photo.
Larry sent us these and most of the following photos. 

From inside--Stuff was raining down. I definitely wasn't going to go outside at that point! Notice the shadow of one of the workers on the side of the RV. 

Repairing one of the areas of water damage and rot.

They discovered a lot of ants there after they removed the damaged wood. The white powder is ant poison. We hoped it would be the end of the ant problems in the kitchen which is just below here.
But, alas, it wasn't. 

We actually have two layers of decking on our roof. When John and the other friend replaced the roof 20 years ago the special impact resistant roof needed a thicker layer than was on it. So they added a second layer on top of the original decking. The water damage was mostly on the top layer. I say mostly. Apparently it was starting to affect a little of the bottom layer in one place but Larry thought it wasn't bad enough to replace the bottom layer. 

The three places where they replaced the damaged decking.

They completed the tear off phase and were starting to get really noisy by the time we left for our church's weekly prayer meeting at 10:00 a.m. I was starting to feel a little loopy from the racket above our heads so was happy to get away!

As we were leaving.

We took a picnic lunch and intended to have a day out.

New shingles going on.

Larry also cleaned out as much lint from our dryer vent stack as he could reach when he replaced the pipe vent covers. He suggested I have someone come out soon to clean out the whole thing. I had been meaning to do that for a while but kept putting it off. So I took his suggestion and it has helped our clothes dryer work much better!

Installing new ridge vent cover

After prayer time, John dropped me off at for a bit of clothes shopping while he went swimming. Then he returned to the store to pick me up and did a little shopping himself. Then we found a park and had our lunch.

After lunch we went back home to get some things, thinking that we would have a few more hours to kill before they finished the roof. But they were already finished and cleaning up when we got back.  

John went up on the roof to look at it while Larry was still here.

See top of this photo for name of roof we got, if you're interested.
But this is not intended to be an advertisement!

The weather was heating up by the time they were done. John apologized that they had to work in such weather, but Larry said it was good roofing weather. 

Later I was reading the warranty from the manufacturer of our new shingles and I noticed that they need several days of strong sun and heat for the shingles to cure enough to really be as wind resistant as they are meant to be. We have had some unusually high winds this spring and quite a lot of cold weather too. So if we had replaced it a couple of months ago it likely would not have cured before the wind storms and might have been damaged. (A neighbor a couple of houses down did have wind damage to his roof from recent winds.) This new roof's warranty does not cover wind damage if the roof has not had a chance to cure properly due to weather or too much shade. So it is a good thing we waited after that other roofing company came around a couple of months ago.

* Larry Martin with Shalom Roofing