I Caught Her

Yesterday I missed getting a picture of an Oriole on the Hummingbird feeder but not today. Today this little female House Finch spent minutes clinging on to the feeder and dipping her head down to sip nectar. I thought for a minute that she was going to hop right over to the jelly for dessert but she wiped off her beak on the crook and flew away.

This male Oriole was doing his own version of Parkour on the feeders and the crooks today. He landed on the jelly dish for a snack and then flew to one crook after the other and finally came back to the jelly for a last bite before flying off.

And for the first time in weeks a Downy Woodpecker showed up on the suet cakes. It's a good thing he came in the morning because by suppertime the suet cake was no more. The Sparrows just devoured it. There's fallen bits of it on the ground below the feeder like orange dust. I don't know what will eat that but I bet it'll be gone soon too. This is a different suet cake from the one I usually get and the birds are just mad about it. The rate that they're eating it makes me want to stop buying it. I know that sounds mean but, jeez guys, have some restraint.

Today's watercolor out of Ink & Wash is listed as a Robin. It's definitely a Danish Robin because it looks nothing like a North American Robin. Don't get me wrong, I like this bird and this painting but it's not a Robin that I recognize. And my painting looks very little like the one in the book. Oh, the shape's the same but I got the wing, tail, and belly colors wrong. According to the book anyway.

I went out to take this picture of Dad's roses in the blasting heat and humidity of the afternoon because I looked out the window and saw this little bouquet of roses on the same cane.

On the way back into the house I glanced over and saw that the reddish and yellow day lily is blooming too. I have tried and tried to paint this day lily with less than acceptable success. Maybe I'll try again.

I made rhubarb sauce again today. I really love it on my breakfast yogurt with a little granola sprinkled on top of it. I finally realized why such pretty stalks produce such odd looking sauce in a strange golden brown color--red and green paint mixed together makes brown--so red and green rhubarb cooked together makes brown too. It's so yummy. I've just about decimated the plants this summer. I read somewhere that if you pull the stalks rather than cut them off they'll grow back so I tried that today. Maybe the plant will bounce back. I don't think I can kill it unless I dig it up so I'm not really worried, I just want it to keep growing so I can keep making sauce.

 

It was raining so hard when I drove across town to see if OJ's soccer game was on that I had the wipers on as fast as they would go. There was thunder and lightning and pouring rain but when I got to the park there were people there and the rain moved off taking the lightning with it so the game went on, only delayed 15 minutes. So the game made it on to my Gratitude Journal page, along with the rhubarb sauce, working on the new manuscript, and taking a luxurious hot shower.

I finished copying and pasting pieces of the new manuscript together this afternoon. I was left wondering why I'd taken the "Rose" parts out in the first place because I just put them back in today. *head, slap* I spent a lot of time making sure that the island name is correct all through the manuscript and changed some of the locations and dive site names to fit the island change. I can see that it's going to take a lot of work to whip this thing into any kind of shape. But I'm up for the challenge!

I called the fridge fixit people today only to learn that the fridge guy is on vacation this week so I get to spend the week mopping up the water that's on the shelves in the fridge and wait until next Monday for the fixer to arrive. The appliance lady said it sounds like the drain hose is plugged and I agreed with her. Hopefully it's an easy fix.

--Barbara