No, it wasn’t our summer vacation, it was our kids’. But we were part of it, and anyway, I love that song (oh oh oh oh oh oh)!
Now that the kids — our son Gregory, daughter in law Beth, and grandchildren Taylor and Quentin — have piled into the Family Truckster and hit the road again, we’re slowly getting back into our normal sedentary and quiet groove. It takes a while to adjust.
On the last full day the kids were here, I enlisted Gregory’s help with our huge woodpile. A couple of months back we hired a landscaper to trim tree branches and dead brush on our property. He left us with a big stack of long mesquite limbs and branches. With Gregory’s help (“help” meaning “he did all the work”) the woodpile is now a three-year supply of firewood.
The job took most of the morning, and toward the end a quail flew out from under the woodpile. When we lifted the last few logs we exposed the nest she’d been guarding, so without moving it we built a little shelter around it with twigs and bricks. I hope she’ll still able to raise her brood.
As long as we’re talking about birds, it is my sad duty to inform you that our baby hummingbird did not survive. A hummingbird built a nest on an old bicycle hook hanging down from our patio roof — same place as last year — and laid two eggs. I discovered the eggs on the 2nd of June; on the 20th one hatched. I guess the other one died in the egg. Anyway, the chick grew and grew, and by the 1st of July we could see it fluttering its wings, getting ready to leave the nest.
It left the nest on the 2nd of July, 11 days after hatching, but it wasn’t ready to really fly, or fly far enough. I found it hiding in Donna’s flowerbed, only a few feet from the nest. We locked the cat and dog in the house in order to give it a fighting chance, but two hours later it was dead. The mother hummingbird stayed nearby the entire time, and for the next two days we’d see her hovering outside our sliding glass patio door, looking inside. That was quite affecting. Maybe next year we’ll hang a net below the nest.
The grandkids were here for both events, the death of the hummingbird chick and the discovery of the quail eggs. Taylor’s a teenager now and has probably seen it all before, but it was good for Quentin to start learning about life and death, I suppose.
Back to happier news. Later that evening we drug the kids and grandkids downtown for a walk, followed by dinner. Tuesday morning they hit the road for a vacation in Los Angeles and Palm Springs. Taylor has a softball tournament in Palm Springs today, and then I imagine they’ll be heading back to Las Vegas.
We had a great visit, and the kids and grandkids did too.
If you’d like to see more photos of the kids’ visit, I put a bunch up on Photobucket, here and here. Click here for more photos of the baby hummingbird.