Andrew Williams Dies at Age 80

Andrew Williams died this past Wednesday at the age of 80. His son, Ricky, drives the school bus out here at Hobbs. The Williams are known as an upstanding family and one of the historical families in Fisher County. Details can be found in this Abilene Reporter News article.

Scarlet Globemallow...

is the name of the little orange flower I posted about previously. I finally found the information at NCRS, the USDA's Plants Database. I was able to download a list of the plants that grow just in Fisher County, and got lucky enough that this flower was just about number five on the list. I say download, but all I had to do was cut and past into Excel. Lots of plant info!

Small Beauty

I've searched for the name of this flower for a couple of hours, but I haven't come up with anything. These are fairly common here in Fisher County. Out here in this semi-arid country, where everything seems to have a fang or a thorn, you have to take beauty where you can find it. Some of the flowers aren't even as large as a pencil eraser, but a closer look will show intricate design.

A couple of good sites for viewing Texas wildflowers are Maddog'n'Miracles, which has a jillion thumbnails that come up quickly, even with dial-up, and Wild About Texas Wildflowers, which has neat little pop-up pictures that have all the information, including the scientific name, in a caption below the photo.

Spring Signs

We've spotted a buzzard, a scissortail and budding mesquites in the past few weeks, so we can be pretty sure that Spring is here. Some folks are worrying about drought, but my sources say that the cattle are indicating good times ahead, which, for this area, equals to rain.

There's a building in Rotan that I think is interesting and I finally snapped a photo of it today. It's around the east corner from the Lance Theatre. I believe it's at the back of the building that used to be the bank, but I sometimes get these things confused. If anyone out there knows which building this is, give me a holler.