The Conservancy has been at it again, breaking up and pulling the beaver dams out of the clearwater ditch with their evil Beaver Dam Breaker.
Below is a short video a did last night of a beaver sliding into the Rio Grande after cutting some willows to snack on along the river bank. We saw four beavers last night and six beavers the night before last.
While I was working on the schedule for NM Tech, a jumping spider named Mighty Mike dropped onto my MacBook Pro to check what condition his condition was in, and then he promptly climbed up my screen and then hung out on top of it for a while striking various spiderly poses.
Laurie’s been teaching her high school math classes from home for the past couple of months, and I’ve been mostly working from home for the past six weeks. Laurie is on video conference for several hours each day, and I have at least one video conference each day during the week. With all the video conferencing, our 12Mbps down and 896Kbps up Internet service was not cutting it. Unfortunately, our local ISP who has provided wonderful service over the past 20 years, does not have the infrastructure in our area to provide us with faster Internet service. Comcast offered Gigabit Internet, so I upgraded. Because of the restrictions in our MacBooks’ wireless, we can only get up to 400Mbps down over WiFi (generally around 300Mbps down), but when I connected my Macbook Pro to a gigabit switch with an ethernet cable I got 939Mbps down, which is close enough to gig speed for Rock & Roll when it comes to Internet download speeds.
Our power went out while we were working on our computers this afternoon. Laurie stood up, looked into the sunroom, and said: “There’s the Peacock!” I got up, looked and sure enough, the Peacock was standing on the landing looking through the sunroom door as if he wanted in. After taking a few photos, I opened the door and asked him if he wanted to come inside, but he decided he didn’t want to come inside and ran off. I followed him around the property, talked to him, and got a few photos. Our traipse through the grasses, irrigation ditches, over the shed and through some bamboo, along with our rather one-sided conversation, was interrupted by a gas company tech needing access to our gas meeter that is nestled under a large rosebush.
We both said, “the Peacock” when he was at the sunroom door because the cats woke me up at dawn scrambling over me and jumping off of me to look at the peacock as he walked by the bedroom window. I went out and got a couple of early morning photos of him before he disappeared into the thick underbrush along the south side of the property.
I don’t know who he belongs to. I called a neighbor who called people she knew who had peacocks in the past, but none of them have peacocks these days. Where he came from and how long he will stay is a mystery.
I opened the kitty door a little before sunrise. I tied up the trash and walked outside to find the sun peeking over the Sandias. All the kitties, except for Lola†, were lounging outside the house in the rising sun.
†Lola was still in bed. She sleeps late and catches sunbeams streaming through the bedroom window in the mornings.
We went out to check on the owls yesterday morning, and one of at least two, but I’m guessing there are three, owlets popped his head up and said “Hello World!” Thus we start another season of “Watching the Owlets Grow.”
As I reported on March 22, 2020, Lola has degenerative arthritis in her paws, and it’s especially bad in her right paw where the bones have separated. She has been in three different splints over the past six weeks (we changed her splint every two weeks), with the hopes that the bones would fuse back together once her paw was stabilized by the splints. Today ended the 6th week. The vet took off Lola’s splint and x-rayed her paw. Unfortunately, Lola’s bones do not show any signs of fusing back together. Therefore, we decided to put another splint on her since she seems quite comfortable with her splints, and gets around very well with her leg splinted. Without the splint, she can hardly walk and she gets a lot of pain trying to walk on what amounts to a broken paw. Our vet is looking into other long term solutions for stabilizing Lola’s paw. Lola might end up being a bionic cat.
In case you missed the music video, Lola Limp, that I posted on March 22nd, I added it to the bottom of this post.
Marina at Marina Kanavaki, who is one of Resa’s Art Gown models, claimed our Pear Tree. The pear tree is hidden between our giant Dr. Huey on the left, other rose bushes on the right, and a wall of black bamboo behind it. After it blooms and leafs out fully, it blends in with the bamboo. Marina calls it her “incognito” tree. Although it looks like a small, tree it’s currently around 10 feet tall. It’s apical dominant, and before I pruned it into it’s ball shape in February, it was double it’s current height in the shape of a cone.
Off Center & Not Even 