All Day Meal

  Regardless of the time of day, I can eat what is considered breakfast food. May be that I am not particular to the sweet and syrupy stuff but hearty fare with eggs, potatoes and lots of carbs.
A new place in Keller, Texas called Devivo Bros. Eatery fits the bill. Actually run by John and Ralph Devivo, real brothers with years of food industry experience. Straight up good food with a heavy accent on desserts. One of the best cheese cakes I have ever had, but you have to start with something solid to make a good base like this Italian Eggs Benedict dish.

Italian Eggs Benedict at Devivo Bros. Eatery

Total devastation

  Living in Texas you become conditioned to having tornadoes in the spring time. Every time the storms start up you hear the warnings and the weathermen on the news go into hyper drive. It is doing this and going there, everyone run for your lives in exactly 3.2 minutes. Eventually you take it all for granted and go about your life as if it were another day, hoping and wishing that it just does not effect any of your plans.

 When you see the utter destruction that one of these storms can do it is hard to believe that you will ever take them for granted again. The randomness of the destruction by the tornado that hit Granbury on Wednesday night just leaves you shacking your head. Buildings for a square mile just wiped away and their debris left in piles as if the hand of god was used as a bulldozer. Nothing, absolutely nothing left. Matchstick size splinters abound, splinters of a door trim exposed by the streak of blue paint still left on one side and the door shoved thru a tree branch 20 feet up with a matching color. Cars that have been thru the junk yard crusher, with no heavy machinery in sight. Sounds like hyperbole or escalation to say nothing is left since the piles of wood lay two stories high.
 
  They are just that, piles of little scrapes of wood. Most of it smaller than the bits of lumber children gather from construction site discard bins to build forts. All the bits of color and slivers of insulation indicate they were once full sized homes.
 
 The New York Times used this picture of mine to try and show the rest of the country how devastating it actually is.

Fuzzy looking friends

Big eyes and furry feathers give away his age

   I walk out the back door a little bleary eyed since the sun had not made it over the horizon yet. Minor inconveniences like that have never stopped my four legged friends. They accompany me everywhere and seem to run the house regardless of my intentions. Still too dark to really see anyway, I get a sense of something passing by really quickly and heading to my left where a fence frames the backyard. Thru the gloom I can just make out a small oval figure silhouetted on the fence rail. Pointed ear tufts, rounded head with a matching rounded body almost like the old weeble wobble toys.
   The little figure can obviously see better than I since it vanishes back into the tree over his head as silently as it appeared. The dogs are restless so we head out for a quick splashing of the neighborhood to make sure no one gets the idea that this street is uninhabited or lacking a pee patrol.
    When we get back from lifting legs for every bush, post, wall and blade of grass within 20 feet of their haphazard path I make a quick survey of the tree to check the status on the little critter I saw earlier. Sure enough, I spot him in the yoke of two branches with saucer eyes looking back at me. I notice behind him another set of eyes just as big on a smaller frame staring as well. Further to the left another set. It started to feel a like a cast member in a hitchcock movie.

Adult Screech owl keeping a constant vigil

   After a few minutes of scouring the branches, the total count is two full grown Western Screech Owls and four of their half feathered offspring hiding in the elm tree in the middle of the back yard. As the sun rises and shadows start to show in the tree the young ones make a cautious exit to the  fence line behind the yard but the adult male wedges himself into his secluded yoke of branches, closes his eyes and promptly falls asleep, ignoring the dogs rushing around below him.
   In the afternoon I find the family still split but hanging out  in the trees spending the afternoon incognito waiting for the sun to set to resume their night raids on the neighborhood mouse population. Never would have expected what I have come to believe was an exotic species co-existing in my humble suburban plot with a menagerie of creatures great and small, loud and silent. Makes me rather humble in my respect for mother nature.

Three young Screech owls hanging out