What a day!

Last night a birder seeking to see an Elf Owl arrived late after getting lost, etc. I sometimes have a hard time finding this place after dark myself if I'm not paying close attention. So I settled her into the guesthouse. At 7 AM she knocked on my door. I thought she wanted the password to the wifi, but she informed me she had locked herself out of her vehicle. I made a Slim Jim as best I could by watching YouTube videos. To make a long story short, all our efforts failed, so after getting no help from local mechanics, or law enforcement, I posted on a local group that I needed help. Several came over but had no luck. Ended up breaking a window after five fruitless hours.

Funny thing is, the girl said the vehicle had been broken into three times already this year. Something's wrong when thieves have no trouble unlocking vehicles, but we can't. So here my dear neighbor Bruce is taping up the broken window. The poor girl didn't even stay to see the Lucifer Hummingbirds. Sad. (She had a spare key in her purse but that was locked inside too. We used long wires to extract both keys but they came off the wire when trying to get them through the crack in the door frame.) At first she said please don't scratch the window, but after five hours she said, please break the window.

While I had Bruce here, I got him to go into the upper dirt tank and free the intake from the mud. So I'm now pumping the water into the lower dirt tank where it holds better. I'm forever grateful to Bruce for doing that nasty job to save that water. Seeing how firmly it was buried in mud, I could never have freed it myself.  (Another rain storm raised the level back up to brimful again, so the water was almost over my head.) I'm going to have to come up with a way of preventing that from happening again.

Found this well-camouflaged Solitary Sandpiper enjoying the lower dirt tank.

Can's resist showing off my water. First is my precious dragonfly pond. I should have enough water to make sure it goes all summer without drying up. It'll yield awesome odes any day now. Mosquitoes have arrived but not so bad yet.

Here's the biggest tank that never leaks. I  hate how red the water gets since I cleaned out the pondweed. Big mistake!

When I get the water all pumped I have to go to town. Hope I get there before midnight. What a day!

UPDATE: Nothing went as planned today. I pumped water from 1 PM until around 7 PM when I went to gas up the pump (every hour or so). It was running hot and dry. No water was going through it to cool it. You're not supposed to run them at all without water. I just couldn't deal with any more today. I turned it off and headed to town. Took me 2½ hours because I had some potted plants in the back that I didn't want to damage. Ruined them anyway, even at 35 mph. They're Mexican Petunias (Ruellia) and will recover. Need too much water. Trying to go more xeric at the oasis.

I hope the pump isn't ruined. It's a brand new one and the first time it was used. Either the intake got into mud again which seems highly unlikely, or it floated to the top and lost its prime. Since I'll only have a couple feet of water left in the tank when I get back down there, it's an easy fix. Just hope the pump is OK. 

When Bruce pulled the intake out of the mud he also removed the weight on the intake. It needs a weight so it won't float, but I figured he wouldn't get enough of the hose above the mud to where it could float, at least not until the water was much lower in the tank. Then I forgot all about that possibility and went on with my normal routine. Bruce couldn't have known. He was working blindly under five feet of water on something he'd never seen before, or knew anything about. It's 100% on me.