Beastly Hot

I had to go outside to take pictures of my weedy retaining wall for the guy I was trying to hire to send a crew to come and weed the thing. Mercy, it was hot out there. Humid too. He quoted me a price, I agreed, and they're coming on Thursday morning to do the job. I just hope it's a little cooler and not raining. Also they'll haul away some water-ruined wood that's leaning on the wall in my garage that has a habit of falling onto my car every once in a while. I suspect I'll be glad I found these guys. They've gotten rave reviews on Nextdoor.

 

The roses don't mind the heat. They're out there perky as ever and spreading their beauty to all.

 

I decided to try drawing a Rose today. It turned out okay. Even the coloring is okay. Maybe I'll try painting a rose tomorrow. That should be a challenge. I think I've got a painting lesson online and one in a book to help me not make too big a mess of it.

 

A Downy Woodpecker landed on the suet nuggets and stayed on my side of the feeder long enough for me to take its picture. Naturally the camera focused more on the Oriole feeder between the Downy and me but you can still see the bird and it's beauty.

 

Then a couple House Finches landed on the grape jelly. When I took the picture I noticed that another House Finch was on the orange half. At first I thought this was a polygamous relationship, but then I realized that the third bird was probably a juvenile from this year's nest tagging along with Mom and Dad hoping for a handout. 

 

One of the young squirrels leaped from a patio chair to the top of the square green feeder. It looked at all four sides, trying to figure out how to access the seed that was so temptingly near and yet inaccessible. It finally dropped off without ever getting to the goodies.

 

I got smart today and wrote an email page telling my newsletter subscribers about the two sales promos I'm in this month. I've put them both on my personal Facebook and my author Facebook pages and will do it again, probably Sunday, but I need to share the links with my subscribers to fulfill the requirements of the promos. Then I shipped it off to KM so she can send it out. Her help is worth every penny. I have a meeting scheduled with her on Wednesday morning so she can help me figure out the last step of getting BookFunnel and Square totally connected.

Then I listened to the end of an audiobook and they directed listeners to the author's webpage for a recipe from the book. That reminded me that I have recipes published in the back of Open For Business so I sent KM an email with the six recipes attached asking her to make a page on my site for them. People like recipes, right?

The Hummingbird feeder needed refilling yesterday so I did that. I still haven't seen one but something's sipping the nectar. I looked up how much a feeder with a camera attached is. Um, nevermind. It'd be great to have but not for that much money, especially not since I'll be paying the weed guys in three days and they won't be cheap.

--Barbara