Hours of drama without a TV

Thanks to Kurt's Weblog for the image.

We don't have a television, we get far more done without it and they are an unnecessary expense. Besides we can find most anything we want to watch online on the rare occasion that we feel it necessary. Even without a TV we still get drama. You may recall from a recent post that we have a cardinal nest just off our front porch. We have been carefully avoiding disturbing the little family by not using the nearby door and never turning on the tap beneath it.

Episode 1 of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises. "Mother Nature, since day one, always there when you need her."
  I've dragged another hosepipe around the house from a different tap in order to irrigate as needed and yesterday afternoon I was watering our seedlings when I noticed the male and female cardinals frantically dashing back and forth from the ground beneath the nest to a nearby maple tree. I slowly approached and when about 10 feet away saw the baby on the ground. He saw me at the same time and took off lickitysplit towards the parents who were calling from the maple tree. Running like a little drunken chicken and flapping his (we've decided it must be a little boy for being so naughty as to fall out of the nest) proto-wings and chirping all the while. I immediately walked the other direction in order to minimize stress in an already frantic family crisis and went to fetch Jacqui, but she was deep into her afternoon nap. I settled onto the porch to watch the drama unfold.

Episode 2 - of the "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, commercial free from the same vantage point, 30 minutes later. "Mother Nature, clean, reliable, and comforting"
 I watched from the porch for abit and it was evident that the parents were trying to entice the youngster out of the open into some cover. I eventually spotted the little creature below the maple and watched as he made his way along the row of holly bushes toward the magnolia tree. He rested up in the last holly bush for a while before jumping down and, following his parents lead, scurried into the magnolia leaf litter. Here he stayed, the parents spent the next hour aggressively chasing off blue jays twice their size with the assistance of another male cardinal, last years chick perhaps, and stopping to catch their breath on the power lines above. I fancied them saying ;

Mum "Your son is driving me around the bend!"
Dad "OH, now he's my son is he, who taught him that he could go anywhere in life, be anything he wanted to be?"
Mum "Well I certainly didn't encourage him to stand on the edge of the nest and show off."
Dad "Well....well....be that as it may, what are we gonna do now? It'll be dark soon and that cat will be prowling round and that'll be the end of your little 'be all you can be' toddler."
Mum "While you are sitting here yakking that damn Jay is back"
Dad "I'm on it"

Jacqui arose and I left her in charge of keeping track of their actions while I showered and made a cuppa.

Episode 3 -"The Cardinals"  brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, "Mother Nature, yuck what's all this black stuff on my dress!"
We began to worry that the little chap wouldn't make it through the night on the ground and considered putting him back in his nest. Consulting with a neighbor, who grabbed a net, we decided to capture the chick and return it home. As I walked under the magnolia, Jacq and the neighbor poised to catch the little blighter if he ran towards the road, I heard him chirp and located him on a very low branch.

The concluding episode of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, will return in a moment, right after your local news and weather. "Mother Nature, How much longer will she be there for you?"

The noise from the road a few blocks away is noticeable now as rush hour is getting under way, the tea has gone cold in the mug, the ambient temperature is about 78ºF, no rain is expected for the next 12 hours. We now return you to the concluding episode of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises with no commercial interruptions.


Episode 4 - "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises. "Mother Nature, too busy trying to survive to provide for you right now."
He must have been exhausted, junior just sat there looking at me as I gently scooped him up. We walked him across the yard, after a brief gaze at his bug eyed naughty little self, and placed him back on the nest. The parents were still looking around in the magnolia, then he chirped. Mum immediately returned to the nest to check out who was chirping from her nest. Dad kept looking in the magnolia. We were worried that they would reject him as he must now smell of me. Mum checked him out and eventually decided he wasn't an imposter, Dad kept looking in the  magnolia. Mum started feeding the little one, Dad kept looking in the magnolia. Eventually Dad decided junior really wasn't there any longer and took Mum's lead, the happy family reunited.

So after about 4 hours of family drama, no cable bill required, we toddled off to bed.

Sunshine, plants, and baby birds.

 It's been chilly the last few days, down to 44F at night and lovely and cool during the day. This was a welcome development after several days of over 80F, not that I'm complaining, the warmth has been delicious. Until this morning we hadn't had a drop of rain since we arrived, which has been great from getting work done but it was pretty dry. Yesterday, I started putting in the first raised bed and the ground is rock hard, admittedly this strip of land, see picture, on the north east side of the house was used as an extra driveway by the last tenant. The plan is to fit 5 beds in there. All my beds will be 8x5 so that I can build an 8x5 chicken coop  to set on top of each in turn.

Meanwhile Jacqui took somewhat of a break from cleaning,  she needed to give her arms and hands a chance to recover from 3 days of vigorous scrubbing, and potted up some of our seedlings. The rest will go in the bed; tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers. We've got cantaloupe, watermelon, and squash for a separate area where they can spread out.

I've also gotten the leaf mold pile up and running. I tossed in some half rotten split logs to help it along.

You'll notice from the pictures just how incredibly white our legs are. As we were walking recently we were accosted by a local gendarme on suspicion of being foreigners. Just the fact that we were walking instead of driving is suspicious enough but no this was due simply ti prejudice. Our white skin gave us away. This type of profiling based on skin color, now the law in Arizona, is heinous in the extreme. I can understand that we might prove a hazard to all the people going by in their tanks (locally known as SUV's) because the extreme whiteness of our skin temporarily blinds them, but that is no excuse for treating us as something special. Fortunately we were able to produce our passports and he let us off with a warning to "get a tan.... and a car" and we were on our merry way, thankful for our freedom as legal, if marginal, people. Of course that never happened but gosh aren't our legs white!

We have a nest with baby cardinals just outside our dining room window. Wonderful!