Well I was going to call this "raining on sunday", but it's not rainy or Sunday, sooo, I need to think something better...

This is what it was doing yesterday morning, but now it's bright and sunny with a few clouds lurking. Yay! The hay will finally get a chance to dry! It's so nice to walk outside and wear a tee shirt without getting wet, or too cold!

Look at all of those swallows!! When it's a dry day, that is their morning perch from about 8:30 to 10:00, or so. You can't really tell from the picture, but the peak of the shop roof is about eighty feet long. I bet that there is at least one hundred twenty swallows sitting up there.

Trace: "ahhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Melvin: "Is he done yet!?"

Trace: "Oooh, is that a Siamese cat over there??"

Me: "Uh, no, there's nothing over there. Come on, Trace, lets go this way, before you yank my arm off!" Contrary to what I was telling Trace, there actually was a Siamese cat hiding out in the hay field, but I managed to convince him nothing was there and just barely avoided getting my arm ripped out of its socket...

Misc of the last couple days...

Yesterday, we finished hauling the last of the "fourteen acre field", which is the second to the last field, and then we are done.

This is a nice short load of sixty bales, so I didn't have to go five high, I could do four stacks of fifteen instead of two and a half stacks of twenty-five, which would then need to be tied on.

Because it would be too much trouble, and it would just waste gas to make another trip, we towed the "Donald" back to the house with the hay truck.

This is the of the last field, partially cut. It's going to be a devil because there are so many obstacles to go around, putting big wows in the rounds.

While I was putting the horse out this morning, I heard some cutters start felling trees to the north, and twenty minutes earlier, I had seen a logger's pickup go up the mountain.

It'll be nice to have log trucks going by again. After they finished their job and moved out in late spring, we missed hearing the tower(it was a canyon that was being logged), and the loader, and the trucks going by.

My Mom and I were are so good at recognizing engines, that we made a game of guessing which truck was coming by, just by the engine and the driver's driving habits.

With it being so hot and the humility in the mid twenties, when you step outside, you don't even have to take a deep breath and you can smell the woods/trees. Everything is a dry as a tinder box. When the woods are like that, the loggers are on one o'clock shut down, and then someone has to stay for a couple hours on fire watch. I have already smelled a couple fires so far.

When I got up this morning, it was already 60* Fahrenheit. In preparation of the heatwave, Melvin got his pants trimmed, so that he will be a little cooler and won't overheat, hopefully.

In other news, I ate the first blackberry of the year this morning. It was a little sour, but delicious!

This was a luck shot, of the swallows sitting in the big, dead cherry tree. They usually sit on the top of the shop roof. I counted fifteen in this picture and about ten more on another branch.

The high for today was 102* Fahrenheit, and as of now - 8:20pm - the temptature has went down to 83*. The weather man is forcasting even hotter for tomorrow.

Found this spider on the way up to the greenhouse this morning. I can't tell what it has caught...maybe a crane fly or something like that.

Red-tailed hawks, bees, and barn ornaments

Yesterday morning when I was in the house, putting away the laundry, and Mom was going over to water the cows with the pickup, she backed back into the driveway and whistled for me. I went out to see what was the matter, and she told me to grab the camera, there was a Red-tail hawk out in the Four Acre field. I got a couple pictures of him before he flew off to one of his favorite dead cherry trees on the other side the field, right next to were we're going to start cutting hay in a day or two. I got a picture of him in the tree before he noticed me and flew away. Out in the field, he had been eating a rabbit, or maybe a Graydigger (I think they may also be called Columbian Ground Squirrels), but I looked right around were he had been standing and I couldn't find a trace of anything, even though I had seen him eating.

After I took the pictures of the Red-tail, I was walking back into the driveway, and noticed that that the two huge chestnut trees framing the end of the drive way were literally abuzz with bees going about their business. This is my failed attempt at videoing the sound. The bees seemed loud to me, but the camera didn't pick it up, unfortunately. But it did pick up the sound of the baby Red-tail screeching in the background...

The front of the Horse Barn is covered with a solar system, stars, two or three suns, and a moon or two, and swallow house that the swallows don't use anymore.

The swallows used their house for a year or two, but then they quit because they prefer to build their nests of hay and feathers on the sill plates of the barn. I think that the yellow jackets are using the swallow house as of now.