The 24th of the fifth month of Emergence

Sixty seven degrees before seven in the morning.  I've set the water sprinkler in the back and checked the bird feeders.  Suet is needed for the wrens, mocking birds, and red belly woodies but the rest seems to be in order.  No exotics yet.  Hummingbirds haven't shown up nor have the gold finches.  I am not sure that we will get either but I am busy building the back yard nature habitat just in case.  I am finding that the cardinal is the most elusive bird to capture with the camera.  They are really sensitive and all I can figure is the quantity of feral cats roaming the neighborhood keeps them nervous.  Most of the birds simply ignore the dogs when they are out and plating bombs in the yard.  Probably more accurate are mines the dogs set to capture their human keepers.  One wrong step and -----------BOOOOOOOOOOOOM---------- ya gotta wash the soul of your shoes.  So part of the morning ritual has become pooper scooper detail and I'll bet you just don't need to know all that this early in the morning.  But I have found that the plants grow better with the addition of Cow Poo and not dog stuff.  The chickadees are in the middle of growing young, as I guess are the rest of the birds, and they are looking a little rough.  Loosing feathers, molting, and just looking like most parents with young kids.  Haggard!  I think I have located a wren's nest but need to check closer.  Tomatoes seem to be coming along but if I could figure a way to eat Fennel, I would be in fat city.  Stuff grows like a weed.  Probably is.  We've eaten our way through all the lettuce, spinach, and that green internal steel wool called broccoli.  I have some green beans coming, carrots, and spuds.  Bear in mind this is all being grown in a ten by six raised garden, so if we get two servings we're lucky.  Like I said earlier, the lettuce was valued at about six dollars a pound.  But it gives an old man something to do.

I am culling, sorting, scanning, and filing old slides.  Through the first of eight or nine file boxes which represent about 30,000 slides.  It is long and tedious work, but somebody's got to do it.  Throwing out about 80% of the original attempts at being a photographer.  But I am still selling stuff and that is gratifying.  Not to mention finding things that I had long forgotten and memories which I will never forget.  Some better left alone, but I keep beating that skeleton back into the closet.   Or maybe that's plural.  Enjoy the Chickadee, here before the rages of parenthood overtook it.