Grumble bumble wobble whee!

I have promised not to grumble about the heat so I won't even mention that the air conditioning in two cars is currently on the fritz (of course the air conditioning would go on strike during the hottest week of the year!) or that the humidity has reached full steam-bath mode before 9 a.m. every day this week. Besides, the cold sweet watermelon we ate for supper felt like a plunge into a glacier-fed mountain stream, so I'm just not capable of thinking about the heat. So I won't mention it.

Instead, let's think about birds. In the past week I have seen an oriole and an indigo bunting hovering around the feeder stations, which is highly unusual. We've seen them around the more remote edges of the property before but never right up by the house. And then the other day an indigo bunting tried to fly right through my living-room picture window. It fortunately survived the impact, although its flight path became a bit wobbly afterward. A chipmunk figured out how to climb up to one of the feeders, so the resident Feeder Maintenance Engineer greased the pole with vaseline. We're waiting to see what charming chipmunk antics ensue.

While the early birds have been getting their worms and the early chipmunks their birdseed, I've been hustling off all week to catch emerging ideas at a teaching workshop featuring interesting speakers and some of my favorite colleagues. I come home exhausted and exhilarated and sometimes too distracted to notice that the resident young people have been slaving away with the weed-eater or the garden trowel or the iron all day long. This afternoon I came home and bumbled around too dazed and confused to notice the results of all their hard word, banging into freshly-cleaned windows and then wobbling off like a confused bunting. For that condition the only solution is cold sweet watermelon--and when we toss out the rinds, even the birds will enjoy the feast.