Hard days lately

Yesterday my husband needed a refrigerator moved out of a rent house to be replaced with a different one. At the last minute the guy he had hired to help couldn't make it. The tenant had already stayed home from work and emptied the refrigerator. So I volunteered my services. The new refrigerator wasn't a problem to handle but coming down the steps with the old one, I was supposed to prevent it from going down too fast. Well, it went down real fast and ripped a bunch of skin off my husband's arm. That refrigerator must have weighed twice what the new one did.

I bandaged his arm good (as in, won't get blood on the sheets). So I wanted to water at CMO and get back to town to change the bandage after his shower tonight. However, when I got here there was a bad leak in the line going out of the stucco tank. Thankfully, all the leakage went into the tank but without fixing it, the pump would either have to be turned off while I'm gone, or it would run all the time. I really want to keep the water drip going on the cottonwood tree, so I got my long-suffering son to come fix it. I still had this afternoon to water. I tried. For 3 hours I drug and forced my weary body to water, but I just couldn't finish. So I have to stay overnight and finish tomorrow. I think I'm over my bronchitis but it sure has left me weakened. Hope it's just temporary.

My plan is to head to the Rio Grande Valley in a couple of days. Once everything is watered I need to get going so I'll be back when it needs watering again. A week is about all the time I can spare so however long I hang around cuts days off my week.

The Flame Acanthus at the oasis are covered with yellow butterflies. Most, if not all, are Sleepy Oranges, Southern Dogfaces, and Cloudless Sulphurs.

I'm still fixated on amberwings. I've always been intrigued by interesting rocks, especially rocks like agates and amber, plus had a passion for stained glass. Even took classes and learned how to do it years ago. And since my place had the first documented Mexican Amberwing in Texas, that adds a level of interest. However, this year my pondweed died and amberwings love the pondweed. They land on little stems of it and forage over it. The only thing I can think of is that for a while we had back to back rains and the pondweed must have stayed submerged too long. There are a few tiny patches of it surviving but no landing stems. Today an Eastern Amberwing perched on a twig along the sides of the tank ...

...and kept making forays out over a tiny patch of pondweed. A frog lurking there looked like a good landing spot but something told the dragonfly not to do that. It came so close a few times, but realized the danger and rocketed off. It happened so fast that this is the closest to the frog that I could capture an image of it.

Different mix of hummers these day. Quite a few Anna's, a couple of Rufous, a Black-chinned, and two male Lucifers (one a juvenile).