hummedydummedy

I had a minor epiphany yesterday. As tough as life can be at times, I wouldn't change places with anybody, for real.

Don't care how handsome, smart, rich or thin you may be, I am content with what I have been granted. We all have our own rows to hoe.

Because no one else is as qualified as we are to live the lives we have carved out for ourselves. I have become rather expert these past sixty years, in living this particular one.

Really a full time job. And we are all unique, sums of ancestral genetics, blind luck and past experiences.

I spent an hour or two in my garden yesterday afternoon, enraptured in the phenomenal piece of ground I have been permitted to live in and lazily tend these many years.

Spartan, wild, overgrown but so very special. A place where one can be relatively free, if you will. I love my home, in all its humility. And the birds seem to love it too.

I have also been blessed and granted with a spouse who may be the only person on this earth that could put up with my many deficiencies and limitations and visa versa. Hoorah!

Things could be a hell of a lot better but also much worse,  I am/we are still in the game.

Put the tripod up and attached the big lens and just chilled in a deck chair. And waited. Listened to the beautiful song of nature.

The scrub jays, doves, finches and grosbeaks have been ravenous of late, going through a feeder's worth of seed every day now.

I like to shoot hummingbirds but sometimes feel like a chump doing so.

Because they are so fast and furtive that any shot I get is only with their blessing.

I can lay in wait hunting for the perfect shot and they will buzz right by my ear, essentially laughing at my clumsiness.

Leslie got buzzed by a hummingbird today, said she felt the wings in the small of her back.

They make the weirdest clicking sounds, almost synthetic.

Occasionally I will turn a sprinkler on to entice them, every hummer loving a romp in the bathtub now and again.

I have so many shots of hummingbirds now that I have stopped caring about what I might miss.

More like trying to raise the bar now. Chill and wait for that one special shot. And if it doesn't present itself, that's fine too.

Always tomorrow. When I saw this anna's hummingbird flashing its colors in the caesilpinia I knew that I would get a good capture. I did.