usually the first

This sunflower - or, more accurately, doubtless, seeds from this sunflower - is usually the first to bloom, year after year.  However, this year it was beaten to it by a competitor next door to us: a much shorter plant, to be sure, but undoubtedly the first.  Honestly, and as I noted yesterday, it's so dry that it's amazing anything is flowering at all ...

 

camouflage

We were up and out very early this morning, getting in a walk before it warmed up.  Half way down Monte Alto a rabbit shot in front of us - and it was immediately apparent why.  I like to think we may have saved its life: the coyote was a little more apprehensive about getting close to us, and the rabbit made its escape ...

I was relieved, though: there have been a lot of rabbits, and pack rats, around this year, but this is only the second coyote I've seen.  You can see how dry it is everywhere ...coyote-colored.

 

nearly a rainbow

If one felt meteorologically optimistic, it's beginning to feel a bit like the monsoon season: all the same, it rarely feels like it did a decade or so back, with the brilliant blue skies of the morning giving way to huge thunderclouds, a storm, and a cooler evening.  Now we get a quiet and sunny morning, and then cloud coverage building up, and if we're lucky, like this afternoon, ten minutes of rain.  And it's still warm, though it smells great outside.

Of course, I can only really see this in terms of my book ... like gleams of hope that I'll finish the revisions and tidying and and and on time, but with some dark clouds periodically impinging.  But I did some good bits of rewriting (and cutting) today ... onwards ...

 

deletion

Of course, Gramsci's adorable little murder mitten looks harmless enough here - but he tried to put it to work on the keyboard quite a few times.  He particularly likes stretching around the screen when I'm typing away ... or deleting away.  I had one of those days today that involved more excision than substitution, and that, in turn, meant getting rid of what I thought were, in themselves, good paragraphs that represented a good deal of research and thought... but did they actually fit my argument?  Thematically they were relevant, indeed - but the chapter, and indeed the book, has developed a sharper focus since they first made their appearance.  So I suspect that they'll stay out, not least because the book will be pressing up tightly against its word limit.  But cutting things away is never an easy thing to do ...

 

a metaphor, this 4th of July

On the next street, an American flag attached to the mailbox, decidedly inelegantly, by some strips of duct tape.  Or duck tape.  I've never known which ... and on checking, I find it was originally duck tape, invented during WWII to tape boxes tightly so that they can be carried safely through water.  Then it started to be called duct tape, and used - well, maybe used, on ducts.  It shouldn't be used on ducts, because the heat melts it, and it turns into a sticky mess - but there again, I don't suppose it should be used on ducks.  In any case ... the flimsy precarity seems about right for this particular 250th birthday.

 

bobble head

This is the inside of a Blanket Flower (gaillardia grandiflora), after it's bloomed - it has a fringe of yellowy-range petals before hand.  It's a member, roughly speaking, of the daisy family, and it's the state flower of Oklahoma - a fact that I've known for about five minutes.  I can't claim that I particularly like it (gardening here is a compromise: Alice likes yellow flowers - as well as others - my choices are always white and blue and pale pink and purple) - on the other hand, it is, as my father would have pointed out, Cheerful.  He did, mind you, call all yellow flowers daffodils, as a matter of course.

 

a relaxed attitude

This is what I had to contend with today, by way of example, or assistance, as I tried to move onwards with book revisions.  Their sense of energy, focus, commitment ... it's not infectious.