On my way back from getting another sack of green chiles this morning, I stopped to photograph a Mississippi Kite that I noticed had started hanging out in a cottonwood along Dixon Road after our neighbor’s tree was downed by lighting a few weeks ago.

Just as I positioned myself where I could photograph the Kite, a juvenile landed next to the adult and started begging for food. The adult took off, and the juvenile perched on the branch squawking for the adult to come back with some food, but the adult was soaring way to the south far away from junior. After a while it started looking around, spied some prey, flew off and returned moments later with what looked to be a cicada or possibly a dragonfly. It proudly held its catch in its paw, seemingly happy with the success of obtaining food on its own.

I took Stretch in for his monthly checkup. he’s holding pretty steady, which means we still have to give him fluids every other day. The vet is going to check on Monday to see if she can get a pharmacy to put together a topical form of Benazapril, a medicine that increases blood flow to the kidneys. She said if she can get it mixed up in a topical form, then all we have to do is apply it to the inside of his ear, which is much less stressful that poking a pill down him.

Our butterfly bushes are finally starting to attract butterflies. Well, at least this monarch that allowed me to snap lots of photos while it worked its way around the bush.

I took a walk in the bosque and on the river this afternoon. One portion of the river bed that gets intermittent flow is covered with little cottonwoods. I have never seen so many cottonwood saplings on the river before. I wonder if they like the ash that washed down from the Jemez?

 

We are sitting on the deck in the middle of quite an exciting display lighting followed very shortly by booming thunder. If I had more energy I’d get out a tripod and set the camera up with the shutter open and record some of the lighting, but I had a long day and I’m trying to get the blog posted before the lighting takes out our electricity.

Laurie was a little disconcerted about the spiked lugs on the tractor rig that was rolling along side us in the traffic backed up on I-25 the other morning, and took my camera and got a photo. It reminded us of Road Warrior.

About 2:00 PM we got a major rain downtown. The alley was flooded and water was pouring off the roof of the office.

The photo of the Brown Eyed Susans was taken from inside our stand of Brown Eyed Susans that  I transplanted a couple of years ago. They’ve grown from a few straggly flowers to a small field, thick with flowers after Laurie watered them by hand every day the first season to help them get over transplant shock.

This hummingbird flew right up to my lens to check us out, but hovered too close to focus. I got it as it flew away.

This monarch butterfly showed up this afternoon while I was out scouting the garden. I wanted to get a photo of it with its wings fully open, but it wouldn’t completely turn its back to me.

 

 

I got our third sack of green chiles this morning from Wagner’s Farm.  The photo series shows the chile roasting process.  After we let them stream in the bag for a couple of hours Laurie peeled them, took out the seeds, put them in quart freezer bags and stacked them in the freezer. We are planning on putting up eight sacks this year. All we could put up last year with both of us having health crisis was four — we ran out of chiles in May.

I cut a hole in the floor in the study while Laurie was processing chiles. The floor buckled slightly, and there was a soft spot under the oak parquet, so I had to cut out the soft spot to see what was going on. The under layment had been wet, probably from when the water heater leaked and flooded the laundry room and study many years ago. Why it decided to start coming apart now, and in a place we don’t walk very often, remains a mystery. I reinforced the structure under the floor and pieced the parquet back together until I can find some new parquet to replace it with. Lowe’s didn’t have parquet when I went by late this afternoon, and I didn’t have time to check Home Depot.  I’ll probably end up ordering it from Amazon.com since it has it.

I also replaced the faucet on the kitchen sink this afternoon. It had been leaking on the outside, around where the neck swivels for quite a while; but in the last week or so it started leaking around the bottom of the faucet under the sink and got everything in the cabinet under the sink wet.

That is the question: is this a bee or a fly that looks like a bee?  This is the first time I’ve ever seen one. Its body is like a bee; its wings are like a wasp’s, and its eyes and feet are like a fly’s. It’s hairy like a bumblebee, but is the size of a honeybee. I looked for it on the Internet, but didn’t find it.

As things-breaking continues, I need to replace the faucet on the kitchen sink and the battery in the truck. I’m getting tired of fixing things.

I walked in the bosque and visited the river tonight — the first time since they closed it in June. The thunderheads were building up nicely over the Sandias; I came across a grasshopper with marking like a python, although it’s probably called a leopard grasshopper. The water was black from the runoff in the burned areas up north, a boll weevil worked on a thistle, and a yellow weed showed it self more prominently than the other wild flowers blooming in the bosque this evening.

A great horned owl landed on the top of the telephone pole that’s on the edge of the garden this evening. I could see its outline from the deck, and it allowed me to shine a flashlight on it from a distance, but when I got close enough to photograph it by the light of the flashlight, that was too much for it and it took off before I could snap a photo.

The rain has been great, especially since I’ve been getting home late every night, making it hard to remember to run the drip systems.

The server is back in full production.  We hadn’t had the server back on line for ten minutes before it was under attack from hackers in Germany and Turkey trying to break into it.   These people need to get a life.