oh, I'd love to have some anna's or black-chinned or buff-bellied or calliope here, too, patrick, but I sure love the rubies! sarah, I was holding the camera, and was seated about 8 feet from the feeder. I was indoors, looking through the window. the optics and zoom on the canon s1-is are great, but already I want more pixels. this one is 3.2 megapixels. I sure am having fun with it, though. I hope my visitor is here again tomorrow!

A week is too long to be left alone. I don't have family or friends nearby so I asked at our vet's office for a pet sitter recommendation. They gave me the name of one of their longtime clients who did pet sitting. I spoke with the pet sitter over the phone and got references. I phoned the references and they were SO happy with the pet sitting services they'd been getting from this woman for years. I invited the sitter to our home to meet with our cats and tour our house. Hubby and I both immediately liked her. Gave her a house key and our travel dates and we've been delighted with her ever since. We've been using her services for well over 10 years. She keeps our house key and when I need her help we communicate via email. On her last day of sitting she leaves her invoice on our table and I mail her a check. We've arranged that she comes over once per day, brings in our newspaper and mail, leaves tire tracks and footprints in the snow so our place doesn't look abandoned. She keeps the cat food bowls filled, water bowls filled and scoops our multiple cat litter pans. I like the idea of having a responsible adult in our house every 24 hours. During one of our Christmas trips she phoned me to say our furnace wasn't working and our house was cold. I arranged for our furnace man to meet our pet sitter at our house and we had a working furnace within a half hour. Had we left our house alone with no one checking on it we could have returned to frozen pipes and really cold housecats! Our sitter charges $15 per visit. We have four housecats she tends to. I give her a bonus at Christmas. Never would I leave a house with animals in it for a week. Kessala

Got nothing done in the garden today except raking the courtyard. My kitchen cabinets are coming tomorrow and I cleared that path for the cabinetmaker to come in the back yard and use the back door which is closest to the kitchen. Plus the cement guy and the gloppida-gloppida machine is coming to build a form and pour a new front walkway at 7am, the freight line is delivering via 18 wheeler a pallet loaded with a parrot cage, and I know the friend will come by to mount the TV on the wall and wire the electronics through the attic and into the new hall closet. It will be SO NICE to have dinner and a movie with a real stove cooked meal again.....I threw the old electric range out of the house about 7 years ago, and have cooked on a 2 burner Waring pro hotplate, an electric fry pan, a rice cooker, a slow cooker, a microwave/convection oven, and an electric hot pot for coffee. I cannot WAIT for my stove! And the dishwasher to be reconnected, and my new sink...sigh....but back to hosta gardening after they are done. Bear with me. I'm rather distracted these days. Babka, I'll turn around twice blindfolded and see which hosta in hand feels rugose-er.

Jen, I bet is has been a crazy week with extra furbabies underfoot. I hope it was a fun one. Nancy, Thanks for the photo of the rain. I've just about forgotten what rain looks like. We're hoping to get some on Sunday or Monday although the amount the 7-day QPF is forecasting for us keeps dropping, choking out hope of getting good rain with each update. Last night's/this morning's rain went both north and south of us (naturally) but we got a few drops.....8' rain....one raindrop every 8 feet. This so-called rain fell for a couple of hours (in theory, because we did have wind, thunder and lightning for the entire time) but the ground still looked dry when it was done, and the rain gauge had less than 1/100th of an inch in it...so we called it a "trace" of rain. It is probable rain fell from the clouds higher above but evaporated as it came through the drier air layer down near the ground because it looked like it was raining, but we literally were not feeling it or seeing it at the ground level. Virga. That's the story of our lives lately. That is so terrible about the ping pong ball sized hail. Hail that size can do a lot of damage. The worst hail I've been in personally myself was baseball to softball sized, and experiencing that once in a lifetime was one time too many. Larry, I'm sorry for all your troubles with the incompetent medical folks who have wasted three months of your time. I know that sort of thing is very frustrating. Jennifer, I am doing my best to hang in there, thinking that if only rain...real rain, not evaporating rain, not rain that falls 3 miles north or 1/2 mile south, but actual real rain that falls on our land and wets everything down....if only.....if only it will fall in the next few days, than maybe I can keep watering and keep the blooms going for the birds, bees, butterflies, etc. We're still hitting 100 every day (105 Thursday at our house, 103 yesterday, 101 today) and not getting the rain, so the garden just roasts and roasts in this heat and dryness. We were out at a fire again yesterday...a really bad one....a 6,000 s.f. barn with animals temporarily trapped by the flames. That big metal barn was like an oven and the firefighters suffered tremendously while fighting that fire. They are tough and never quit, but a person can only take so much heat. For the second day in a row, they already had a firefighter in the ambulance by the time we arrived on the scene with water, Gatorade and more....and we were not that slow to arrive either. The heat is just that bad. I had cooked fire food (still had some in the oven when the pagers went off) all morning long, and spent the whole afternoon at the fire, so never stepped foot in my garden yesterday. I finally went in there around 7:30 or 8:00 pm tonight just to water tomatoes in containers. That is all I could manage to do today. I couldn't go to today's fire (because, of course, there was one....but Tim went) because we have the 3 year old granddaughter this weekend. Instead of playing in the dirt, I've been playing with Play Dough and Softee Dough. I know you all are jealous. Megan, If every weather guy in the state stood on their head and swore that August would be more mild....I still wouldn't believe it. Not for us. Being this far south, we rarely get the cool-downs that hit points further north, so I don't expect much relief. We usually go anywhere from 2 to 5 degrees higher than forecast anyway, so even if they forecast cooler weather, we do not necessarily see it happen. Tomorrow is supposed to be our last 100+ degree day for a week or so, and I hope they are right. Even the low 90s would feel good compared to what we've been having. They just don't seem to do a very good job forecast our high temperatures down here. We also get a lot of compressional heating as fronts pass or are approaching or whatever, and inevitably the compressional heating pushes us to higher temperatures than what was forecast. I didn't even known what compressional heating was when we moved here, but I sure do know what it is now. Y'all know how much trouble I have with venomous snakes slithering out of the woods and into the garden to eat frogs and toads and whatever.....well, yesterday, at the fire, towards the end when the firefighters were doing overhaul, they brought out a charred crispy snake, burned and blackened so badly that you couldn't tell what sort of snake it had been, but it had the pointed head......so, I felt right at home with...the snake of the day. See there, I don't even have to step foot into the garden to see snakes. We ate lunch early today at Caddo Street BBQ in Ardmore, which is a really new place. I think it opened for business on July 4th. It was amazing---the food all tasted home-made, and I do mean home-made, not like the restaurant version of home-made but like true grandma-cooked-it-in-the-kitchen home-made. They're only open from 10:30 a.m. until approximately 2:30 p.m. (closing earlier if the meat sells out early, but staying open later if they still have meat available) and we were there early to guarantee we would get fed before the place turned into a standing-room-only situation. So, if you're in line ordering your food at 10:30 a.m., I guess it is brunch more than breakfast or lunch. I would gladly eat our first meal of the day there each Saturday for the rest of our lives. It all was so good, and Saturday seems to be the one day that Tim, Chris, Jana and I all can get together. We met the owner who seems like a fine person (and he sure knows how to smoke meat) and Chris won a free t-shirt for being the first customer in line this morning (which surprised and thrilled him---he will wear that shirt with pride). So, my weekend hasn't been about gardening at all, really, and I don't care. I need a break. Whether I want a break or not is a moot point---the daily fires (which I knew were coming at some point due to the drought) will ensure I pretty much stay out of the garden for a while, I guess. I do hope I can get back into some sort of gardening schedule on Monday and at least manage to harvest daily. I think that all that is really waiting to be harvested now is a few watermelons and some okra. Thankfully, I'm growing Stewart's Zeebest---and you can let it can really long and it doesn't get woody right away like some other okra varieties do. I'll try to start the weekly thread on time in the morning because the three year old usually sleeps in late and that should give me some computer time. I hope you all get whatever wonderful weather is in your forecast....rain, cooler temperatures....all of the above. Dawn