pink rain

It's hard not to spend one's time looking at the sky here - partly for practical reasons (will it rain?) but largely because of its sheer beauty. This evening we were eating dinner out front (the nesting bluebirds still mean that effectively we're banished from the back yard: the chicks are now, I reckon, about nine or ten days old: their beaks are just starting to appear at the hole. But oh - the stress of worrying about attacks from house sparrows, and dashing out when one sees one of the murderous little brutes around. I realize that English readers may think that I am being cruel here, but these are Non Native Birds and have a peculiar, obsessive, and predatory loathing of bluebirds). Our dinner spot allowed us a perfect view of a perfect sunset (as below - courtesy of the wonderful panorama view in Photoshop, which matches everything up and blends it without one doing anything other than drag a few images into a box and click on a button). And then David, our neighbor, appeared, and asked if we knew that there was Pink Rain behind our house. And so there was.