Macro Morning

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I got out my macro lens this morning and René and I started crawling around under squash leaves to get photos of a bee inside a squash blossom. The bee was pretty cute, but after several snaps it got tired of having a lens in its face and showed me a hefty pair of bee fangs. I can’t resist doing macro shots of damselflies and dragonflies. I sneak up on them until they fly, freeze in place and wait for them to come back (they often do), sneak up a little closer — they fly, I freeze, they come back — and the process continues until I either get the shots I want or they decide I’m too close and don’t come back.

Mama Manx has a cave in the cucumber patch where she lays on the cool mulch under the shade of the cucumber leaves. When one of us gets too close to the entrance of her cucumber cave, she darts out like a moray eel, chatters at us, then retreats back into her cave.

Puck is working on his memoirs, “Don’t Puck With Me”, and while he was taking a break he pestered Laurie for some attention while she was reading. Guildenstern was intently playing with clover under my chair while I sat on the deck enjoying the fine summer morning.

 

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Cool of the Evening

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I finally got to irrigate after 7 weeks, so the wet soil and mulch made for a cool evening for the kitties, bumblebees and damselflies to hangout in the clover. Laurie was sketching the yard, sans power poles, and Mama Manx was using her head to help Laurie hold up her sketchpad.

 

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Lighted Tulips

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We worked on the property all day yesterday, which included putting in soaker hoses on the rose beds where it’s hard to check the dippers, and to have as backups since we can only get irrigation waster every three weeks now. We finally got all the branches picked up from pruning the fruit trees — I think the branches double when you cut them, I took down the last of the chain-link fence that was now in front of our neighbor’s wood fence, and no longer needed. I pulled up several metal posts we had holding up trellis at one point, but since we are reconfiguring the beds, they needed to come out. I went ahead and set up the swamp cooler, although it might be a little early. Springtime is really difficult on our property because it still freezes almost every night and it was 82 F this afternoon. The new water hose will probably crack a few times before it stops freezing. After I got all the other stuff done, I went down and dug out 75 feet of our main irrigation ditch and built up the bank on the south of the ditch in an attempt to keep the water from running into the access between us and the neighbor. The digging was difficult because there are mostly tree roots under the ditch.

 

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iPhone 5 & Snaked by Gray

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Laurie and Tristan finally talked me into dumping my dumb phone for a smart iPhone 5. I think the smart ones in this matter are T-mobile and Apple, because the monthly service and the iPhone 5 work out to be 7.5 times higher than the service for my old dumb phone.

When I went out to the ditch late this afternoon to check on irrigation water, I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I looked I saw the wild, gray kitty “snaking” me like Stretch used to do when it was time to waterboard him. This kitty hangs around a lot, but I normally only see glimpses of it running away from me. This was the first time it was still and let me talk to it and photograph it for a few minutes before it ran off.

The rest of the photos are of the tulips blooming along the fence on the west side of the house.

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The Matrix

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The water droplets on a spider web reminded me of a matrix. Patti came back to my office this afternoon and said there was a good photo op on Gold in front of Cafe Giuseppe. So I grabbed my camera and went to the front of the building and got the photo of the scooter and the police motorcycle. If I worked at the front front desk in the office instead of the “meat locker” in the back, I would get endless photo ops — but then I probably wouldn’t get much else done. I got another drive by with the low sun behind the Old Town sculptured tower landmark at westbound I-40 and Rio Grande Blvd.

 

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New Tulips and a Dirty Cat

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The new tulips I planted last fall are coming up — big yellow, red/yellow and peachy-red tulips. I’ll have to wait and see if there were other colors in the mix, as I’ve forgotten what all I planted. Guildenstern was out rolling in the dirt, and wanted to be held, of course.

 

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