I heard a bird chirping this morning; I could tell the sound was coming from the porch. It was still somewhat dark out, but I could see a tiny little thing perched on the railing. As I watched, he flew up to the trailer nest in the maple and went inside. Then he flew back out, and then back in, and so on. Babies? Feeding the female? I’m not sure, but I was greatly heartened to see some activity!
I’m waking up way too early lately and it’s frustrating. I have decided to try to go with the flow (what choice do I have really?) and know that I will eventually get back to my usual patterns. I end up taking a nap during the day, which then throws me off that night. I don’t like to nap, though I used to love it, because I wake up feeling groggy and irritable. So I’m going to try to avoid napping today and see what happens.
Today I’m going to pull some weeds and mulch. And water. In addition to the seeds I’ve planted, we also have grass seed to attend to. It rained a bit yesterday but it looks like we won’t have rain for a couple of weeks, which means I have to water all that grass seed every day, in addition to everything else I water around here. Ah well.
The catalpas have begun to leaf out. I look forward to seeing those big heart-shaped leaves again. Meanwhile, it’s absolutely gorgeous out there! Spring at its finest.
We sat on the glider yesterday, watching a storm roll in. Huge dark clouds, rumbles of thunder, all the while rocking back and forth on the glider.
That’s the stuff of spring and summer.
Stay safe.
Happy Monday.
beautiful trees. i am happy someone planted them a long time ago so you have them now … and that you’ve seen someone recently using the camper-nest!
that photo gives a good perspective on where it’s located. way up there!
thanks for the photos. trees are wonderful things and we can enjoy them and learn things from them.
glad you and don enjoyed some porch-sitting. :)
hope you get to sleeping better. the past week or so i’ve woken up earlier by an hour sometimes so i just either try to get back to sleep or, more often, get up to accomplish some stuff. like cleaning the toilet before 7:00 in the morning. whoo hoo!
hope you get some rain, too. we had some rain in the forecast for this past weekend; some members of my family had a brief hard rain of maybe 15 minutes. i was nearly home (about twenty minutes to the east and used my car windshield wipers exactly three swipes. that was it. we were supposed to get some rain last night. nope. more in the forecast for this week. hope we get it. much needed (and by me much enjoyed)! if we don’t, i’ll just play some of my “rainstorm” and “ocean waves” cds (the kind without music distracting from the natural sounds), close my eyes and imagine …
here’s to better and rainier and sunnier days (whatever is needed, liked) ahead for everyone!
kathy in iowa
It is mid-May & we have neither seen nor heard any wrens. It is so strange!!
My journal shows the past many years they arrive the beginning of May. We will keep watching & listening.
We had about .01 in of rain over the weekend. We are over 5 in below normal for moisture. Might get up to an inch over the week. Every bit helps.
Remember when we were little & everyone praised us when we took naps?? Ahhhhh. Take care.
The Carolina Wrens, who return to a nesting box in the corner of my front porch, have successfully raised & fledged their first brood for 2021. Once the female has laid her eggs, incubation is 12-16 days, and then the young fledge & leave the nest about 12-14 days after hatching. Both parents will leave the nest to bring food for the nestlings.
And after a brief interlude, the parents will begin again for a 2nd brood.
Oftentimes, 3 broods will occur in the South.
With their nest box in the corner of my front porch, there are periods where the front door isn’t used at all, and that’s just fine with me. :)
We’d like a bit of rain here in NC also, but the forecast for the next 10 days or so isn’t encouraging.
Enjoy the comings & goings of the wrens… fledging is wonderfully entertaining.
Gorgeous
It is not rained much since I moved to Florida but love the egrets in mybuard and ocean of course. Best of all little grandsons.
Sounds like you are maybe getting used to entering society again and sleeping patterns have changed. Same here for awhile. Prayers
I can’t nap during the day either or it throws my nighttime sleep off kilter. Hope you get back on the sleep schedule that works best for you. A hospital aide once told me to look at my total sleep for the week and not to fret over each night. He said it usually averages out to what we need. Made sense to me! Stay safe!
Sounds nice, to be on the covered porch and watch the storm roll in. And, my goodness, you have some large, so-pretty trees on your property. All sounds … peaceful.
I haven’t been feeling very peaceful. Four days solid of conference calls between eight relatives (husband’s side of the family) for one of us couples who’s in jeopardy due to the wife’s struggle with worsening leukemia and if she’ll even make it to a bone-marrow transplant. We don’t know how much it can extend life beyond her age of 73; otherwise, she’ll probably be gone from us by July, according to her ‘team’ of oncologists. One of the roadblocks is that she and her husband just aren’t preparing for a lengthy hospital stay and being far from home in a big city (from where they live in the rural north U.S., 300 miles away). They’re overwhelmed; in a lot of denial. Completely understandable, but the other relatives needed to intervene to get some forward momentum.
While I feel terribly sorry for them, and we’re all frustrated (and frightened) over their lack of planning and preparation, I realize I just can’t take on this couple’s stress. Which makes me feel selfish; but I know that I personally have offered every suggestion I can think of (which has served to offend, never my intent or my husband’s or the other relatives); and, when it comes to the hands-on help, it won’t be me getting on a plane, it’ll be my husband (in the next weeks). So, my job is to lend ‘moral support’ to him; free his mind of any other ‘problems’ in our own life at home so that he can concentrate on the hard stuff ahead.
I have been so exhausted by these tense, info-filled, sometimes-awkward conference calls that I found myself crying too much, unable to turn off my brain, revisiting so many difficulties I had with, for instance, my own aging parents and elder caregiving, such that I didn’t get out of bed til noon today after sleeping fitfully for 15 hrs. (Groggy doesn’t even come close to defining the fog I’m in at the moment.) It feels selfish, but if I don’t take care to wind down my anxiety, I can’t ‘be there’ for my husband; so, today will change.
Not to mention that my dog just got out of surgery for a cancerous growth on her nose which has been growing in leaps and bounds over ten days, just out of the blue. She’s coming home in 45 minutes with a head cone so that she doesn’t disturb the stitching by scratching. The old girl is at the end of the road; we’ve known it for awhile. At least she got her nails clipped although I think the teeth cleaning was ridiculous to do (it’s probably her final anesthesia but you don’t have to kill all the birds with one stone [that’s a horrible expression; where do we pick these things up in our society, ancient phrases which are awful?]). We’ll monitor her for the next weeks along with the veterinarian, always making sure she’s not in pain or distress … it’s obviously about quality of life in a pet who’s lived the length of her life for her breed/size … but I know we’re losing her (she also has a spinal problem and is falling ‘way too much; big dogs often age with problems of the hips and spine) and I don’t know how my husband can take one more thing right now. Any other loving pet owner knows what this is; for us, this is our ‘child’. And, although we’re undecided, she may also be our final pet due to our age and health issues (it’s something for which we have to be sensible and responsible about in the future).
In the meantime, I’ll look at your beautiful tree photos and try to breathe deeply. And I hope you and I both get better sleep as the week progresses, Claudia!
hej, vicki …
best wishes and prayers to you and your family (of course that includes your sweet dog) for rest, relaxation, healing and lots of easy time together.
kathy in iowa
… thank you, kathy; I’m feeling weary physically and emotionally but we can always look forward to the next day and that it’ll be less taxing; sometimes it does feel like it’s pouring not just raining, though – – I spent ‘way too much time in an email in this past hour, staring blankly at the screen, where I just couldn’t think of what to say to a former school classmate who just lost his wife (I feel like I’m in a morass of illness and dying at the moment) …
… so, the dog; the Elizabethan collar/head cone stayed on about five minutes after she got home as she’s having no part of it; we’ll not leave her unsupervised because she just CANNOT be ripping out those dozen stitches on her long shepherd nose (I know it’s swollen but I’m sure she’ll have deformity, which we can deal with; however, I just don’t want it to affect her breathing [my mother had a cat whose vet convinced us to do cancer surgery on his nose {white cat, adopted from a neighbor who died; pale eye’d feline with pink nose who got a melanoma type of thing on it } and we all regretted the operation on this cat which left him with a nose that looked like a pig snout where he couldn’t control his nasal mucus, was always sneezing and indeed with what sure seemed like strained breathing thru those altered nostrils; when, in the end, it only gave him an extra year of life and it just wasn’t, to our judgment, a good quality of life for him, so I absolutely will NOT do this to my dog; this, today, is where it ends for her; no more surgeries {it’s not even about being now $1000 in the hole with this procedure today, which we can’t afford in these retirement years of fixed income; rather, it’s all about HER, and she’s in for a lot of pain in the next few days and at her age and I guess our age, it’s.just.too.much for her AND us]) …
… I’m sorry I’m being Debbie Downer; I’m sure Tuesday will be ‘sunnier’. (Mondays; they can be the worst!)
How weird that halfway thru my comment, the print became italicized. How’d I do that?!!
You are facing so many challenges.
I hope that you will be able to find some peaceful, calm moments soon. Those breaths are a good start. Enjoy the beauty around you as you are able and love that old doggie. (We have a geriatric dog too, so I know whereof you speak.)
Nurture yourself as well as your family. So easy to say, so much harder to do.
Well, Roxie, you are so kind. Thank you. Comments like yours mean a lot.
To add insult upon injury, when my husband electronically filed our taxes (at the last minute, with a finger-wagging from me), something happened wrongly, and the tax payment was auto-deducted from our checking account TWICE, which then left us in overdraft (which I take great pains to NEVER have happen); and, good luck trying to get money back from the IRS (it wasn’t a small sum; it was A LOT, and this has left us NO wiggle room for a few days yet [can you picture me biting my nails??!!]); so, my husband barely dropped the dog off to me after he picked her up at the veterinarian’s office/clinic, then had to run to the bank and try to sort things out. I still am not even sure yet as to what tomorrow’s banking day is going to reveal.
As I said to kathy in iowa, it was one of THOSE Mondays.
Positive news about the Wren family!
Thunderstorms here–we’ll take every drop of rain we can get here in the Sierra rainshadow–summer and heat are approaching way too swiftly.
I heard today that Britain is reopening some theaters and that Hamilton is back on Broadway. May that presage good news soon for you and Don and all your compatriots. Fingers crossed!