Home front

I just had a strange epiphany. I have been live streaming my life to you for going on nineteen years. How very strange. What possessed me? What the hell, too late to stop now.

My wife is visiting kin back east. So I have the ranch to myself and a list of various tasks that I have to accomplish to keep the motor running here. Damn, she does a lot. She stayed up until three in the morning the day before she left so I would have clean clothes. Bless her.

I watered the hay line this morning, she had already ran all the other sets, watered the flowers, fed the cats, fed the birds, did everything but clean the catbox, which I hate doing and am saving for last. The best parts.

Marriage is somewhat of a compromise, as we all know. You stop doing things you might enjoy if your partner does not favor them. Due to the cancer drug, I have not had an appetite this week, a quite  unfamiliar feeling for me. 

I decided to make myself a couple soft boiled eggs. And I realized that I haven't made hard or soft boiled eggs in over thirty years because my wife doesn't like them. She likes her eggs scrambled.

So I did. Showed my newfound liberation. Didn't do the best cracking job on the eggs but hey, I am out of practice. In a further show of my independence I am going to not shave today. If I can stand it anyway.

I am staying home today, continuing to recharge the battery. 

Want to take a short walk around the place?

I took a little tour of the property this morning and noticed some things. I have several trees that have tried to commit suicide repeatedly over the last thirty something years. But they just keep coming back. 

Like this mimosa tree. 

It has split at least twice in the past but now is getting a classical asian flat top canopy shape.

Same with the Chinese pistachio. 

Has split so many times I can't count but always comes back looking beautiful, although it is not in its most presentable form right now.

Ranch is in various states of entropy but holding together and I still really enjoy it.

Leslie does most of the work and so does our arborist, Todd.

Not a fashion plate but we aren't trying to impress anybody either.

An old house and an old ranch but it is home and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

The lemon tree is a beaut and has a most unusual squat and sprawling shape but man does it bear fruit.

What else?

I stuck these epiphytes on the old butia capitata about thirty five years ago, can't even begin to see the trunk now.

I get quite the incredible cereus flower show throughout the year but man it must be a lot of weight to carry.

A true symbiotic relationship.

Here's an old pic of Leslie standing beneath its boughs.

The plant is getting crowded out below by another plant which I love and my wife can't stand.

"Why does everything you buy have sharp points?"

My bromeliad ballensae.

It is blooming again. 

It is a green plant sitting there minding its own business and then one day it wakes up with a red center and then starts growing this enormous and beautiful center flower spike.

This plant is taking over and it is large, about five or six foot wide. 

It loves my shady habitat, underneath the butia and a fuerte tree with a really nice fruit set right now.

How could I remove something so beautiful?

I was fixated on this one and didn't notice that the plant next to it was even farther along.

The peppermint stripe center flower will continue to grow and it is pretty magnificent.

Anyway we need to make it over to the bird feeders now.

The birds here live a plush existence.

Leslie puts out quite a buffet.

Peanuts for the scrub jays, nijer for the lesser goldfinches, seed for the house finches, grape jelly for the orioles and sunflower seeds for everybody else.

It was quite a day today.

I had the California thrasher stop by with his long beak, very terrestrial, always good to see him. 

A rare sighting for me anyway of a brown headed cowbird, actually a very pretty bird with its blue base.

We have a huge resident covey of quail, they were there. Bushtits, scrubjays, grosbeaks, finches, California towhees, no spotted towhees today but they have been around of late.

All these guys.

We have at least two mature male hooded orioles living in the Washingtonia with a female. 

They are always pretty furtive but getting less squeamish than they once were.

Still there is a definite pecking order at the feeder and these small birds know their place and tread lightly.

They wait for the bullies and pigs to eat, the scrub jays and doves.

I was just complaining that we never get bullocks orioles at the feeder although I see them in the wild and an immature male visited this morning.

I just had to ask!

Anyway, that's the tour, going to take a nap, you should too,