unemployed kitty

Jake takes Luna to the pond

I'm just a girl!

bees with oregano

golden late afternoon

dusk approaches, sw view from my pasture

Rest in peace my sweet little Cookie Monster

He escaped the pen tonight and Luna got him, just seconds before I was going to bring them in for the night. I felt his last heartbeat in my hand.

After a swim

The bunnies are big enough to stay in their pen now

They've already started exploring the ramp too! Two of them made it back into the mobile hutch...

7 trees pond

Jerry, my 22 year old senegal parrot

Back in February '92 I rescued a canary yellow-vested senegal parrot named Barnie. He was living alone in a mud room, subject to icy drafts whenever family members opened doors, due to their daughter's allergies. They had rescued him from a relative who kept him in a basement. Yes, I believe his feathers were sooty. You couldn't see the soot, but the first day I had him, I nuzzled him a bit and whatever I inhaled from his feathers literally burned my sinuses and airways. He was mature; I have no idea how old he was or how long he'd lived like this. When I met him he didn't respond at all to the name Barnie. While left alone with him for a few minutes, I tried calling him Bennie instead. His eyes brightened and pupils started dilating and constricting. Bennie it was, short for Benedicite, my favorite choral piece.

Bennie was wildcaught. I was laid off that summer and spent the next 18 months or so free-lancing. Bennie would sit on the arched overhang of my desk lamp while I worked. Once I was hired back, he started picking at his chest feathers. I hadn't realized how bonded he'd become to me. A short time later, a juvenile senegal turned up in the local exotic bird store. I immediately brought him home and called him Jerry. I'll never forget the look he gave me when I opened the little box I'd brought him home in. To that point in my life, nobody had ever looked at me with such love. Ever. He reconciled himself to being Bennie's companion.

Bennie passed back in the spring of 2011 on the day of my blood banking final exam. After a horrific day, I came home to find him clinging to his perch with his eyes squeezed shut. I wrapped him in a towel and ran around taking care of all the animals. And then sat down and held him to my chest. He died about 5 hours later.

After some 20 years, Jerry's "job" as Bennie's companion was over, and now he lives free in the house during the day, free to fly to my shoulder pretty much whenever he likes.

DAMMIT I HATE YOPLAIT! AND LITTERERS!

Their stupid, upside-down container design is an obvious ploy to leave a maximum impossible to scrape out yogurt behind. This is what I found walking my dogs this evening, running around, desperately, in the streets, in driveways, in somebody's front yard:

Fortunately, I was able to free the poor baby. Even better, although he showed me his butt, I was able to back away quickly enough that he didn't feel too threatened even after his harrowing experience.

When I left him, he was scarfing down grass. No idea how long the guy was running around, blind, panicked, desperate, and unable to eat or drink!

bunny bath

NEVER HILLARY

So in the view of the FBI, Hillary Clinton is a blundering fool who compromised national security but not a provable arch-criminal. This is not what the country needs in a president. “Dangerously negligent but never indicted” is an extremely low bar to set for the leadership of the free world. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/05/fbi-comey-clinton-email-trump-bernie-politics-campaign-column/86712780/

Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey painted a devastating picture of Hillary Clinton’s reckless lawbreaking with her emails and the damage it likely caused http://nypost.com/2016/07/05/fbi-boss-outrageous-double-standard-in-letting-hillary-skate/

It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/05/hillary-clintons-email-problems-might-be-even-worse-than-we-thought/

James B. Comey…all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday — two vital pillars of her presidential candidacy — and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year.   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/politics/clinton-campaign-trump.html?_r=0

funny bird!

Lining up my ducks in a row...not unlike herding cats!

The Owl that supervised my barn-raising and other miscellaneous pix

 

Punta Sur in Cozumel, Mexico

Best pic of me evah, Grand Canyon

 

First daylily and the milkweeds just starting too...