Wounded And Broken.

It broke my heart the other day to find one of my precious sunflowers broken and wounded. It had been snapped over, bent in half and some petal torn off and a few seeds taken out, I bet by a damn squirrel! Those things are a menace!

At first I tried to ment the poor thing by straightening it back up and seeing if I could somehow "revive" it....

Bandaged up...

Meanwhile, his neighbours are looking good so far, at least until they start seeding....

Look! Underneath are the seeds, the black things!

In the end I just decided to cut it off (it was seeding anyway and only going to get eaten more) and take out the seeds myself and dry them and save them for planting next year. F*ck those squirrels; they're not going to get my seeds! I'll use them to grow more sunflowers next spring. They can have the next lot.

Look closely you can see the seeds in there. They stand upright, tightly squeezed in there side-by-side. it's hard to pull them out but if you rub your thumb against the grain they pop out easier.

I got this many seeds just from the one smaller sunflower!

Sunflower head pretty much empty of seeds.

Empty sunflower head with seeds beside it. The cycle of life.

My breathing is also getting worse even though the humidity has lessened the past 2 days and I thought it was due to that but maybe it's something else. Now I can't lie on my left side or it hurts and now randomly several times an hour I get pain on my left side of chest just under my upper ribs, and if I inhale and take a deep breath it also hurts, sort of like when you get a "stitch" in your side only much more intense and the kind of pain that makes you gasp. I'm also still very short of breath and it feels like I'm brathing thru a straw and like there's something something heavy sitting on my chest and I've had a bad and worsening cough too so I wonder if my breathing problem's getting worse then or is it some other issue with my lungs, perhaps, like a pulmonary embolism, or maybe even something with my heart? It's always something....it could be anxiety too although with that I shouldn't have pain or a cough.....today my hubby also gets his colonoscopy,his arse gets "deflowered", so the asshole finally gets probed, ha ha!