A day in the life...

I haven't had much to post about and have been so busy with work and contemplating the upcoming semester at the college that there just haven't been enough hours in the day!

Well since pictures speak louder than words, I will now bore you with images of my little funny garden area where I sit and work some days.

A deer paid it a visit and ate half my tomato plants down and my eggplant, petunias and the begonia flowers.

I didn't take any 'after deer' pictures, it was too depressing.
So here are the ones I have from July and August:
This is my little garden looking toward the table I sit at and work on my laptop. There is a great breeze that blows through in the afternoon. This was before the deer struck. Right now half of those tomatoes are gone.




Close up of my little garden.



My lemon colored begonia and petunia-both munched by the deer...



My Crouton-Age 14 last month.



pansies last hurrah!





Red vine plant and a clay snail I brought back from my Mom's house:

Isn't it cute?

I bought a bird feeder this spring and was hoping to attract lots of different types of birds. So far all I have gotten are every Plain Titmouse in Blue Bell Valley, some male and female grosbeaks and a white-bellied nuthatch that runs up and down my pine trees most of the time.
Here are the grosbeaks:
Male and female. He is the brighter colored one on the right:



The males



Female in tree- a little easier to see:



Male closer



I also have a lot of ground feeding birds but mostly brown or peach towhees. I have scrub jays,mouring doves and California quail too. The quail come at dusk usually and clean up.






This is a Moma bird feeding her full grown baby a bite to eat after she pecked a few, he pecked a few...on and on. They show up every day and evening to glean from the fallen seed out of the feeder.


Mom and baby






Plain titmouse






I also have a few squirrels that come back or at least their progeny do. This is a nice looking female and she is here daily. She rips through these cones like no tomorrow.
Here she has a scale in her mouth and in the next one she is flinging it away. It took me about 30 shots with the drive going on my camera to get this picture since she was pretty fast!



Flinging it-it's in the air!



So she entertains me and often another one comes to join her but the dog scared her away.



This is what the bottom of all our pines looks like in this county. This is called kitchen middens, which is German for kitchen garbage basically. It is the kitchen, as it were, of the squirrels and what is left over from devouring all these pine cones.I have two huge Coulter pines in my yard that were bred and planted by John Coulter in the 1800s (not my trees but the species itself). Coulterville, a little town south of me, was named after him. He was your typical Western rancher dude who liked trees. So these two trees are now about 80 ft tall. I have lived here for almost 30 yrs so you can image how much shorter they were then! I am grateful, actually,that they do this because they knock all these cones out of the tree and they are so huge that if they landed on you they would kill you. They have scales that are sharper and stronger than most knives and the cones weigh about 10 lbs apiece or more. When they land on the roof, however, it sounds like a bomb going off. I am not joking. It scares me and the animals too! Here is what I get left with.



Then a downy woodpecker comes around (I think it's a downy) and crawls all over the trees looking for bugs. It's hilarious the way the bend their necks to get into some of the hole they find.









As does the nuthatch:






But some of the most gorgeous ones are the goldfinches. I took most of these from my chair at the table but then one day I got in my hammock which is attached at one end to the tree the feeders are on. It took a while for them to forget I was there but they started coming back so I was able to get some nice close ups. At the end is one of my toe for spacial comparison about how close I was! You can see the green of the hammock in some of the shots because I would forget to move it with my foot.
So here are the goldfinches:















This is my toe at the end of the hammock. I was pretty close to the birds-about 10 ft. Not bad.


Here is what my buddies all look like when it's hot.
Crouton sacked out:



Mouse sacked out

Zinny thinking the birds will fall into her mouth:

Then giving up:

Silly cat.. so how has your summer been?
Have a good one!!