I drink a lot of ice sweet tea. It’s common in the southeastern USA. It’s less sweet than others but typically now days I don’t like straight black tea. At least a teaspoon to 12 ounces of tea. I sometimes use soymilk but not often. I drink a lot of water. Even at home I will often mix 12 ounces of water with some apple slices, strawberries or blueberries and blend it up to a sort of juice.
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When we’ve picked up 1% I haven’t had any complaints. But 2% still seems preferable, both in my tea and in my oatmeal.
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That is something I have to make sure to drink more of, straight water. As a kid I drank a lot of it and it was something I preferred. But now I can go all day and never get any unless I plan around it. Whenever I get on the exercise bike I’ll fill one of our largest glasses and finish it no problem. Being retired means it is never too much trouble to make a cup of tea or grab a soft drink instead.
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Back in June I posted some photos of Neomarica caerulea, the Walking Iris from Brasil. Since then that plant is like a fireworks show, everytime you think the show must be over it puts up a dozen more flowers! I took some photos of it yesterday just before sunset and they’re okay but none of them shows the color as well as a video I took a month ago. There is something about the way the surface reflects the color which can make it look deeper into the blue or into the red end of violet.
Apparently it can be a real pest in tropical locations as it produces by seeds, runners and plantlets. https://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/119832#tomeansOfMovementAndDispersal
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Personally, I resolved a while ago that life is to short not to enjoy three simple pleasures in life.
- Fresh ground coffee (preferable from an Italian stove pot, black, no sugar).
- Real butter
- Full fat milk.
Each to their own 
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I do construction and landscaping in south Alabama and so I drink a little over a gallon a day at work over 10-12 hours. Then after work I go on a 10 mile hike and drink about another 2 quarts of sparkling flavored water then. I drink a decent amount. Like right now it’s 99°f. Before the day is over around 3-4pm it will be a few degrees warmer. But we are on the downward slide. I still enjoy it. I prefer 85°f.
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Man I wish I’d gotten into plants and gardens when I was younger. Now the flesh isn’t always up to carrying out my ideas. E.g., I probably shouldn’t be doing pruning very high up in trees anymore. But they don’t stop growing. I know a lot of botanists and horticulturalists and often get to see their work. One of my favorites lives just a few blocks from me and grows plants no one has seen before from his time living in Brazil. Back in the day I did do some carpentry working for my contractor brother before going to college and then teaching. But if I had made it into landscaping that would have been it.
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While initially posting I started hearing some sounds and realized a little baby 9 banded armadillo was eating my banana xd. Luckily it was the only thing sitting out. All my grapes, blueberries, and strawberries was in the ice chest.
It was only about 8 inch body and a few inches of tail.
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I was raised on margarine but my wife has civilized me into only using butter. I’m not a huge fan of whole milk but I kept half and half around just for tea. I’ll bet your kitchen smells great from grinding your own coffee. Around here you can’t get decent tea if you go out so we only get coffee when we’re out. We don’t make coffee at home put we have a pod thingy for guests.
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We visited a local botanical garden specializing in California natives when they opened this morning. This grove of Sequoiadendron gigantea was planted in the 1940’s.
I don’t know all the plants here but there are a number of buckwheats and manzanitas.
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Thanks for the scale measure. 
Had to get digit-al to get the web in focus.
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What precision!
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Oh, sure. Autofocus would be tough with just the web. Duh.
Found some wild pears. Collected only about seven and some right off the tree. It’s obviously not native but they don’t seem to propagate that easily. Probably something planted by someone a long time ago.
Found a handful of oyster mushrooms as well. Cooking them now for mushroom, onion, jalapeño and potato hashbrowns. Not that hungry because I also ate like 10 handful of wild grapes I found a few handfuls of late summer blueberries, and bunch of ripe elderberries. So later on, or early in the morning, I’m going to go collect like 10 handfuls worth and boil them. Then rinse it and crush them and make some fruit rolls for breakfast mixed with strawberries.
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As a warning some people get sick and almost drunk like dizzy off of fresh elderberry juice. Luckily I don’t but I grew up with them being picked and made into syrup and eating things like pokeweed salat which is prepared wrong can send you to the hospital.
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We were always told uncooked elderberry is poisonous! My son, when very young, would impetuously grab pokeweed and eat it on our walks (bad parents) and we wound up in ER for a chocolate milk-charcoal slurry that he be we forgot…we were just reminiscing about that this morning.
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Same here. But even when boiled, some still seem to react badly to it.
Also a cool yellow fringed orchid I saw today.
Also the largest crawfish castle I’ve seen too lol.
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One crawfish will build that?!
Yep. A single one builds these mounds. What’s crazy is that once inside, they often have more than one escape route and can be 20+ feet long changing elevation.
I wish I could live ten lives on this earth and dedicate the next one just to crawfish and freshwater fish. We have over 100 species of crawfish in Alabama. Some endemic to a single branch off a river.
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