Some creatures great and small

Last month as we sat on the patio, resting our sore muscles from hours of wood chopping, Marian looked around and said, "This house is missing a dog."
I understood exactly what he meant and in theory I agree—a dog would be a wonderful addition. But on another evening, while we were hanging out with another group of friends on their patio, the subject of dogs came up and the valid point was raised: dogs take a lot of time and energy. That's more time and energy than I currently have.
There are also logistical factors that prohibit us from having a dog, the main one is who will care for it when we travel, it's not as if we have family just around the corner. Sure our neighbors are very generous when it comes to providing cherry juice and cucumbers, but that's different than asking someone to dog watch.
There may come a time when we won't be regularly going back and forth to Craiova but until then, a dog is off the table.
For reasons stated above, we thought that all animals were off the table, but things have a way of happening and that thing was stray cats.
A few local strays have adopted our yard and not long ago one of them gave birth to three kittens. Sadly, the mother died this week. (I'm no vet but from her injuries it looked like a dog got ahold of her). Obviously we're not going to let those kittens starve so we've begun leaving food and water out. They're extremely shy and so far haven't allowed us to get close enough to pet them but if they survive, the chance is good that we've now got three cats.

We also have a lot of birds in our yard (I'm sure from the birds' perspective it's their yard). I'm no ornithologist but I believe they're wrens, sparrows, finches and such (Karen, maybe you can show these photos to Chris and he can tell us). In any case, it seems they love my wildflower beds as much as I do, which I find delightful.
"Observe intently..." yes, it's easy to do here.

That's it for the small creatures. As for the big ones, each time our neighbor Maria sees us heading out for a walk, she is sure to warn us about the bears. We've seen plenty of sheep, goats, donkeys, and horses but never bears and the idea of them showing up in this landscape seemed pretty far-fetched.

However, recently we heard about a couple of incidents of bear/human encounters (not all were violent) and so I started asking around and lo and behold, yes, the bears do come down from the mountains because they like to eat whatever corn is left after the harvest. As you can see from the photo below, a portion of our favorite route is in close proximity to the corn.

While up-close photos of kittens and birds are great, I'm not interested in an up-close encounter with a bear so once the corn harvest begins, we'll start taking a different route.

The last bit of news from the week is that we've officially broken ground on the greenhouse! It's a bit of a process involving one crew to set the foundation and another to build the structure and we've also got to work around vacation schedules, delivery schedules and our own trips to Craiova but work is underway.
In not many more weeks we should be able to migrate from our little random rectangle of a vegetable patch to a full-fledged green-house.

I would also like to mention that today we reached the milestone of 100 days living in Romania. We will celebrate with our usual Aperol spritz on the patio this evening and then tomorrow we'll head down to Obedin and get our fix of both sweltering heat (it's supposed to be 103F/39C) and dogs.
I hope that you are enjoying whatever pets you have, or, if you don't have any, that you can go out into nature and observe whatever joyful critters that live near you.
Thank you for reading.
Be well.