Who'll Stop the Rain?

Ai yi yi yi yi! Rain day and night, night and day for eight hundred and sixty days already. I woke up this morning to a slamming clap of thunder and it hasn't stopped. The stormy forecast is probably why our neighbor began mowing his yard at 8:30 last night. Not even kidding. He was mowing by the light of the moon and the street lights and the phosphorus light emanating from his yard as a result of the manure-smelling weed killer he put on it yesterday morning. And he's got all these sticks and rocks in his yard so it was annoyingly loud. All while Ron and I were trying to have a nice, quiet evening meal on the patio. Mood killer. I guess it's a good thing he mowed it when he did because he travels all week and by next weekend he'd have needed a machete to make it to the back door.

About six or seven years ago Ron became an avid bird watcher. He's got the bird books with all the pretty pictures in them and he feeds them all this good stuff (sometimes I sneak some of the peanuts when he's not looking). Now, it's no secret that I'm easily excited and and it takes almost nothing to amuse me. Not so with Ron. It takes a lot to get him effusive and ebullient. But the other day he came leaping in the back door after work and said, "Get the book, get the book. We've got a red breasted grossbeak at the feeder." And sure enough, we did! The next day I hear him exclaiming, "He's back, he's back." The grossbeak again. Yesterday it was four yellow finches in our weeping willow. Today it was hummingbirds. Now this really is exciting because they usually don't show up until August. I'm thinking this little fella is on a recon mission, checking out friendly nesting trees and sources of food. Ron, right away, brewed up some hummingbird food and by golly! We had TWO! To be fair, I enjoy watching birds almost as much as Ron, but he gets real joy out of it, which is no small blessing.

The bird traffic has really picked up as of late, which I thought was kind of odd, since it's spring and there are berries and seeds and other bird delicacies all around. So I've decided that we've got the equivalent of government cheese in our back yard. For those birds who can't (or won't) get a job looking for food, they just mosey on down to Hadley and take a perch at the Martin Soup Kitchen. Pretty soon I'm going to have to start checking their papers to make sure they qualify for the free stuff. I'll have to probably get ultra-sharp bifocals to read their chicken scratch.

I'm drawing the line at giving them free smokes.