
Sunset



The second evening I’ve seen this female mallard without her male companion.

The wind started blowing as Jake and I came back from our walk. The cotton was streaming from Resa’s tree.


Sunrise






A friend dropped by, and we played guitar for a while. Silver plugged in after my friend left.

Paddleboarders on the Rio Grande

Una señora pato

Blue Grosbeak on blue

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?†
†”Wishing You Were Here” by Pink Floyd.

Lonely Dove at sunrise
I replaced the cat stairs on the wall for the cats to get to the hammocks with two sets of prefab kitty stairs. The previous stairs I built from scrap would was made of mohagany. Belafante started to perch on the kitty stairs and chew on the wood. Mohagany in poisonous, so I repaced the stairs with a nno-toxic white wood. It was much less expensive to buy prefab kitty stairs than build new stairs from scratch.


America Rose






Loki trying out the new kitty stairs. Click on a photo to enlarge and view a slideshow.

Afternoon thunderheads

Spunk checking out the new stairs

Another thunderhead over Resa’s Tree.















Spunk testing the new kitty stairs

Sunset

Storm clouds at dawn
We got a downpour for about 30 minutes at 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. Several staff members stood outside under the portal at the office to watch the rain. Thunder was on a constant roll. Lightning struck close by while the rain poured and rivers ran through the parking lot. One staff member noted, “I’ll get home tonight and the weather will report 7/100 inch of rain.” I told her it would be at least a 1/10 of an inch. When I got home, our rain gauge read 0.11 inches of rain.
As I was leaving the office after the rain let up, several rescue vehicles raced down Alameda Blvd with their lights on and sirens blaring. They pulled up to the flood control channel, which you can see here: https://wp.me/p1yQyy-bGb. Water was roaring down the channel when I drove over it on my way home. I heard the news helicopter flying around above us, so I looked up the news channel and someone had been washed away by the current in town, and a body was pulled from the water where the flood control channel flows into the river. I looked up the rainfall for Albuquerque today. The report showed 0.39 inches of rain for the zip code where the person was swept away by the runoff in the channel. What might seem like little rain produces a lot of deadly runoff in our high desert.

Silver, Loki and Glenda waiting for me to give them cheese.

Jake got nailed again.