What did you do with your weekend?
As should be obvious, I spent WAAAAAAAY too much time lifting, carrying, sorting, storing and ending the weekend (AGAIN) feeling like I just did ten rounds with Mike Tyson.
Now we’ll see how many appointments and days it takes for PODS to pick up this unit.
Filed under Forever Home, Photography
The pictures, when viewed in detail, show a slightly different picture (literally), but to the naked eye, the squirrel stealing bird food this morning seemed to be decidedly two-toned, with a light brown, almost “dirty blonde” coloration accompanied by a white collar around his neck and forward shoulders.
You can see the basic pattern as described in this thumbnail above, but if you click on it and view the full-sized picture, you’ll see a lot more detail that is lost at first. I particularly like the white polka dot or speckled pattern on the back 2/3 of its body.
Not the sharpest picture I’ve ever taken, but the only one where I caught it more head on, proving that it wasn’t eating the bird seed from the ground, but was instead filling his cheeks with it.
Hilarious. Then it got in trouble and pissed me off.
Filed under Critters, Forever Home, Photography
Yesterday I was working and knew that there were light off & on showers about, but I heard the thunder as my first sign that something more substantial was near.
It wasn’t quite overhead and we never got a real downpour or hard rain from it, but the rumbling announced its presence with authority!
Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Weather
We again had a bit of weather pass through today. Nothing too violent or wet, although there were showers and some thunder heard.
By sunset it was broken clouds, with multiple layers at different altitudes, with holes here and there, so I could watch different layers fly by in different directions and speeds.
Best of all was the view where, while it was just past sunset here, off to the east probably 25-30 miles there were thunderheads towering up over the horizon, brightly lit in brilliant white.
Then in just a few minutes (4 minutes between pictures to be exact) that blinding white started to turn pink and orange. (No extra charge for the blurry hummingbird zipping by on the right – it was pissed that I was standing next to its favorite feeder.)
My vision of a boring, hot, windy, unchanging weather environment have (fortunately) been disproven by three fascinating rain storms in less than two months.
Variety *IS* the spice of life!
Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets, Weather
And, no, I’m not talking about the Fall of Western Civilization and the collapse of the American government and the Second Civil War – although we most certainly can’t rule those things out, as batshit insane as that might be.
No, I’m talking about the season. Fall. Autumn.
We might be living in the middle of a gazillion acres of desert with dirt, tumbleweeds, Joshua trees, creosote, and the odd cactus, but inside the tract walls, in our front yards, mixed in with all of the rock and talm trees and “drought resistant landscaping,” they put a few oddball, water-sucking decorative trees. Our neighbor’s yard has a white birch. We (on the right) have a very nice maple tree.
Very, VERY FEW native maples found in the SoCal desert. Or anywhere else in SoCal. Maybe a few in the mountains. Maybe.
But here we have one and having spent formative years in the forests of Vermont, I’m loving this decorative addition to our yard. In two months in might be fully engulfed in yellows and reds and oranges. For now, there are a handful of pioneer leaves, hinting at the autumnal glories to come.
The Fall is coming!
Filed under Forever Home, Photography
One thing I’ve noticed in refilling the birdseed feeders is that the bottom is always full of these little, round, red seeds:
I don’t know what’s wrong with them – do they not taste good? Are they difficult to pick up? Are they hard and a pain to crack open?
It’s yet another mystery.
Maybe the squirrels will eat them? Waste not, want not!
Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography
I wish that I could stop watching the news. It’s bad out there. Scary shit going on and I have no idea how to deal with it or make it better.
There were some nice things today on a personal level. Trying to focus on those.
Watching “Field of Dreams” (with commercials, unfortunately) helps. What a perfect movie. The whole story arc at the end with Archie Graham…
Tuesday awaits.
Filed under Paul
I still haven’t found all of my tripods out the the PODS following the move, but with the almost full Moon near the horizon a couple of days ago and the back wall there to set the lens on (and very, very short exposure times for the very, very bright moon), the results didn’t suck.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
I refilled the birdseed feeder AGAIN – two days this cycle. And I updated my Chewy “Autoship” order to once every three weeks instead of once every twelve weeks.
As we’ve brought patio furniture, some shelves, a BBQ, chairs, and other stuff onto the large back patio near the pergola, after dining the birds are retiring to rest in the shade on the new resting and roosting locations. I haven’t seen any nest building activity yet (that’s more of a spring thing) but I really would prefer they stay off of the telescope at least. There may be a BBQ cover in the telescope’s near future. (Form follows function!)
They’re also starting to peck at the small apples growing on the apple tree, but they seem to be leaving the pears alone. We’ll see what’s left to harvest in a couple of weeks.
GO TEAM BIRDS!
Filed under Birds, Forever Home
Critical deadlines met. One way or the other. In this case, the “other” meant a marathon, 20-hour-plus work session yesterday with the final draft reports being emailed out at 03:15.
I checked with my Oura Ring to see what it thought of my two hours of sleep and the message was, “DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE!!! WTF!!!???”
Maybe there is something to this AI thing?
I may sleep in and sit on my ass all weekend. I trust that the remaining stuff in the one PODS container will still be there on Monday. As will be the empty PODS container that was scheduled to be picked up last Wednesday, then yesterday, then… There are certain local managers and member of the PODS C-suite that would not get my vote for a performance bonus this year. In fact, I would recommend clawing back any performance bonus they got last year!
Filed under Forever Home, Health, Paul
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