Digging in the dirt... and chasing bats

I'll start with the bat. It flew into the loft last night through an open window at about 9:30. We chased it around for 10 or 15 minutes, waving fleece blankets around to try to scare it into flying back out the window. At one point it did just that. We cheered, and it flew right back in! (Remember the scene in The Big Chill?) So we kept trying, and finally we thought convinced it to fly back outdoors. I went to bed.

Suddenly Walt noticed the bat flying around the room again. It had just landed somewhere inside to catch its breath, I guess, and then decided to start swooping the room around again. I got up and we waved blankets some more and suddenly the bat flew down the stairs into the living room. We ran after it, and I closed doors downstairs to make sure it didn't fly back up into the loft.

The bat darted into the den, where Walt has his computer and office. He chased it around in there while I held my unfolded blanket over the doorway (we took the door down years ago) to prevent it from flying back into the living room. And suddenly it found the open den window and was gone into the night. Finally we could go to bed.

All the while, Tasha calmly observed without barking (photo taken earlier in the day). Dearly departed Callie the border collie would have been barking wildly (it happened when she was still here, a couple of times).

So that was the evening. In the morning, I had gone outside and started ripping out a long strip of Sedum reflexum (stonecrop), a prickly pear cactus, and a lot of horsetail (prêle) that had taken over on the south side of the house. I'd been meaning to do it all summer, but early summer was too wet and mid-summer was too hot for doing that kind of manual labor.

You can't see it in the photo, but not only had a tangle of plants taken hold in this strip that used to be a flower bed, but there was an old border made up of dozens of big rocks that, like icebergs, were two-thirds buried in dirt and only one-third exposed above the surface. I had to use a shovel to dig them out. Who would have thought that at the age of 70 I'd be doing this kind of work?

Here's what I ended up with. I had been thinking about clearing this strip all summer, so I had had time to decide that the rock border needed to go. I'll rake gravel over it all, and next spring I might plant some tall sunflowers and/or hollyhocks here. The sedum and horsetail plants will certainly come back, so I'll spend winter and spring pulling them out before they get a chance to take over again.

The prickly pear cactus that CHM and I have been talking about all week turned out to be a huge clump of mostly buried, sad-looking cactus pads, with just a few fresh new "pear pads" growing on top. I put on thick, heavyweight gardening gloves to pull the cactus clump out, after cutting 10 or 12 pads that I can transplant into pots or a planter box to make a new plant that will look better and won't be so hard to work with.