This Day, Tuesday

Wild, Wild Life

It has been gray all day long and raining on and off all day long.

The hummingbirds came dutifully to the feeder every so often, but they weren't their usual exuberant selves. I imagine that they, much like I did, stayed in their nests and only ventured out to top off with sugar water.

A family of four finches came in the rain to eat the aphids off the cottonwood trees on the patio. They hop around in the tree and nibble at the clusters of aphids that form at the ends of the branches.Yesterday and the day before I noticed that the ladybugs that inhabit those same trees are growing fat from feasting on those same aphids. Fat ladybugs get very wide, cartoonishly wide, but their spots stay the same size.

Last night I let Saba out onto the patio and as soon as I closed the door, she began crying, almost wailing, to come back inside. I opened the door and she ran in and a huge grasshopper, like four inches long, jumped off her back and onto the pillow on the bed. I had to take the pillow out and scrape the grasshopper off it.

On Sunday one of the women at the studio told us about living on the Navaho reservation in the '70s. One year the grasshoppers were so bad that they ate everything in her yard, every bit of greenery including the pampas grass. She was so frustrated with them that when they climbed the outside walls of the house at night, she would go out with scissors and cut their heads off. "They drove me crazy," she said. And they lived for days after, headless little grasshoppers crawling around in the yard.

There is a fat little black-and-gold orb weaver in the garden. Her web spans all four of the overgrown eggplant plants. (The bees know to avoid her web as they collect pollen from the flowers of the surrounding bolted arugula. The bees are also quite happy with the blooming basil plants and the New Mexico sunflowers.) I hope our little orb weaver avoids the birds and finds a mate and leaves an egg sac for next year. I love spiders.

Oh! And I forgot to say about the tiny jumping spider that I saw on the cottonwood tree yesterday. Tiny thing, jumping from leaf to leaf, my favorite kind of spider.

A week or more ago, very early in the morning, pre-dawn, a skunk visited the patio. I didn't see it, but Dave did. They peered at each other through the kitchen window. I like the way skunks waddle about, but I don't want to have one on the patio. Nor do I want the cats to encounter one on the patio.

I had a dream a few nights ago. A small, golden snake was loose in the casita. It slithered under the bed. Good omen, that.

Food

Breakfast was Quorn nuggets with a mixture of BBQ sauce and ketchup. Lunch was a toasted cheese sandwich with tomato and plain Greek yogurt with a sliced up banana mixed in. My afternoon snack was more Quorn and ketchup.

For dinner I had a hotdog (mustard, ketchup, relish, onions) and a diet Pepsi. Dessert was two slices of cheesecake (one plain, one with strawberries, blueberries, and kiwi fruit) and a large bottle of San Pellegrino.

After dinner, I made ratatouille from the eggplants in the garden. We grew two varieties, the long, intensely purple Japanese type, and an Italian type called Rosa Bianca that looks like the typical white eggplant streaked with soft purple. Both went into the ratatouille, along with onions, garlic, carrots, red and orange peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, and two hunks of Parmesan cheese rind. It came out really well. We'll have it for dinner tomorrow over cous-cous or pasta.

Books

I'm in the middle of Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? It's kicking my ass, it's so intense.

Prior to starting that, I finished William McInnes's memoir, A Man's Got to Have A Hobby: Long Summers with My Dad.

I might be memoir-ed out after this.

People

Tonight we cruised the aisles of Costco with my older brother. I haven't seen him for a few weeks. We had planned a Costco trip before I hurt my back. He's been working a lot of hours recently, but we planned to go to dinner at a new pizza place on his next day off.

I went to the studio with Judi yesterday. We didn't stay long. Later, I looked up some information on the Mayo Clinic website and sent her the links.

On the weekend Dave and I went to the studio. Blake was there, and Lara, Anna, Lynn, and Mike. We made plans to have dinner with Lynn on Friday evening.

Work
Masks and ollas mainly.