More of the Yetman Trail and Yard Work

Yesterday we went out on a hike in the lowlands because it was so steeeeeeeenking windy.  We decided to go out towards the Yetman trail and walk through the valley formed by the Bobcat and Ringtail ridges.  Our end point was the same as the other day's hike.  It's a very pleasant walk through the desert.

There were poppies planted by nature.

The number of saguaro cactus is just amazing.  Clearly they are very happy here.

Can you see the crested cactus?  Look center in the photo.

A larger view.  Not only is he crested, he's wavy.

Someone spent a fair amount of time and effort building this cairn.  The balanced rocks are pretty slick.

It was enough hike.  The feet were yelping a bit.

Today was a rest day.  Hah!  We dug in the dirt.  The first task was to remove a 20 year old bougainvillea that was near death.  It had been planted under a down spout, and I think excessive water did him in.  I'm glad it's gone, covering him during the freezes was a pain because of said down spout and the post behind him.  Now we have a minimalist tableau.

Next up was the removal of the Pygmy Date Palm.  It was the wrong plant in the wrong place and was being burned alive by too much sun.  We put a King Sago Palm in instead.  I really like the way they look.  They're very toxic to dogs, which we don't have.  It's a King because it's a male plant.  They're slow growing, and the males don't get as big as the females.  Hopefully it will do better.  If not, we'll try something else.

The Hop Seeds are blooming more.  They have a weird growth pattern.  If you trim them back, that's where they'll sprout new growth.  So far, we're just letting them grow.  They are wildly excited about being watered.  It doesn't take much, but they look so much better than when we bought the house.

The neighbor's Mountain Laurel is blooming.  They're a great hedge plant, and the deer do not like them.  We may replace the sour orange trees with a couple of these.  They have three plants, two are blooming on the front side and one is blooming on the back.  Plants are weird.

This is a volunteer Saguaro I found under the bougainvillea we took out.  He's about 1.5 inches tall and is about 10 years old.  I moved him, and hopefully he'll like his new location.  Baby cactus need shade, if you look under all of the Palo Verde trees in the desert you'll find baby Cardons and Saguaros.  Eventually they grow up and kill the nurse tree.  They're ungrateful wretches.

We were out in the yard a lot, bothering Her Majesty the hummingbird.  We made an effort to walk the long way around the house and stay out of her sight, but there was some disturbance of her.  I was out in front, trying to balance a rock I found on top of the decorative boulder when she approached me and flew around my head a couple of times.  Then she moved to where she was just off my elbow and hovered.  I'm pretty sure that was her telling me that I should just move along so she could get some incubating done.  I moved.

The Garage Saga is Over

The garage guys did show up on Wednesday to do the sealer coat on the floor.  If you're ever contemplating this for your house, plan on staying in a hotel for both nights they are working.  The sealer coat is so much worse than the first layer.  Despite putting blue tape across the door and the frame on the door to the garage, opening doors and windows for cross ventilation, and running fans - it was brutal.  I'm pretty sure my brain shrunk a little during the process from the chemicals.

Here is is, in all of its loveliness.

Wednesday we took Jim's cross bike over to BICAS.  The garage is tiny and having a 5th bike in the space was becoming annoying.  Jim doesn't ride it anymore, and BICAS will find a good recipient for it.  I think the shift levers are going to have to be replaced, since Shimanos can not be re-built or fixed, and we did not want to spend the money on it.  It was kind of sad, we put a lot of miles in Europe on those bikes.  There were also many miles with fenders and mudflaps for riding in the winter in Seattle, back in the days when we were crazy.

The wind continues to howl in our area.  We had planned to go up to Second Ridge today, but given the wind speeds, I think we'll stay on lower trails.  It's very annoying.

Like some other bloggers, we're having trouble mustering enthusiasm for planning the summer.  We have the usual three months in Issaquah booked, but after last year's heat, humidity and wild fire smoke, we're viewing it with a jaundiced eye.  I just do not have an alternative.  We could go back to Capitol Reef in June, but then that forces us to travel through Boise which has become difficult due to too few RV parks and too many people.  There are days when I'm pretty sure my head is going to explode thinking about it.

The hummer is still on the nest, which she has so beautifully lined with down which came from other birds.

One of the neighbors mentioned that the hummingbirds have been flying erratically.  They're eating bugs.  Apparently they can snatch them out of the air, or out of a flower, and swallow them whole.

This is How it Starts

When we bought the house, we knew it would need new HVAC and a water heater because of its age.  What we did not know was that the driveway would become a basket case.  I took this last October, things still looked pretty good.

However, this started happening.  The end of the driveway is breaking up.

Cracks are forming, running across the width and length of the driveway.  They're actually much worse than this picture, but it's too cold and too windy to go out and take better photos.  Here's a better look at the cracks. 

Anyway, in May we're having pavers installed over the driveway.  The concrete forms a very good base for the pavers.  It is the nature of house projects that they snowball.  Since they're doing the driveway, we thought maybe it would be good to have the garage floor epoxied first, since they run the pavers up to the garage floor.  Then we thought, well maybe we should paint before the garage floor guys get here.   So we did that.

A previous owner painted this floor with an inappropriate paint.  It's coming up.  

It's an epoxy coating - which smells terrible.  They did the first coat Monday, after they ground off all of the old paint.  That was really noisy.  The hummingbird did not stick around for any of that process.  I am happy to report that even though the floor guys were three hours late and left after dark, she did return to the nest.  Here is where much of my cling wrap is residing.  We had to seal that door to keep the epoxy odor out.

Tuesday it rained and they could not do any work.  Allegedly they're returning at noon today for the sealer coat.  In 48 hours we'll be able to see how much paint dust is stuck to everything and how much washing of the garage will be required. Meanwhile the contents of the garage are distributed through out the house and on the patio.

Knowing what I know now, I would have done this before we moved in to the house, when we were still living in the RV.  Masking the floor before painting would have been the lesser of the pains in the butt.

Despite the bone chilling temperatures and the high winds, the new lemon tree we planted is flowering.   It started the blooming process back when nights were going below freezing, so the tenting with flannel was a success.  Next year we may need more flannel.  Before leaving for the summer, we're going to have to put up a deer fence to keep the tree from being eaten.

I read a really interesting article about how the western diet has derailed our modern gut biome.  There is actually science involved in determining the effects of diet on what's happening in the gut.  It has implications for auto-immune diseases, diabetes, and other ills of the western world.  Here is a teaser from the beginning of the article.

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

 It's a lot of words, but it's an interesting read.

Sunset

Sunsets have been less impressive lately because of the sun's movement from the back of the house toward the front of the house.  Last night was pretty good, though. 

More Hike and Hummer Plus Painting

ARGH!  The weather is driving me nuts.  We had high winds today, the palm trees are swaying like crazy, I'm surprised the hummingbird on the nest is not vomiting from motion sickness.  And it's not warm.  Wednesday is predicted to go down to 36 35.  What the heck?  It's March!

Anyway, yesterday was cloudy but warm enough to hike in shorts and tee shirts.  We went back up onto Ringtail Ridge.  Some of the ocotillos are leafing out.  It seems like they're late this year, probably because it's been so steeeenking cold.

We went left for a bit on the ridge trail.  This is what you see.  We've been told there is a trail that loops around Bren peak, and we think we spotted it, but it's a long walk and we should have started earlier if we were going to do that.

Then we went right on the trail for a bit.  It was really windy.  After getting bashed about by the wind, we decided to go back down where it might be calmer.  Our neighbors have done the entire length of the ridge, apparently there is no trail to get off it, one has to bush whack down a steep face to get back into the valley and the Yetman trail.  I doubt if we'll do that, either.  My feet start yelping after about four or five miles, and it's longer than that.

Here is Jim coming down the trail off the ridge.

Cactus are really survivors.  Here he is, growing out of a rubble pile.

Today we got up and prepped food for the crock pot.  That was a really good idea.  Then we masked and painted two walls in the garage.  I can't believe how many places required blue tape.  It took for ever to get it done.  Tomorrow we have to do it again because it needs two coats.  We're not doing the wall that has shelves on it, it's pretty much covered up, and getting those shelves down would take monumental effort.

Here I am cutting in the walls.

Jim is painting around our new water heater.  Despite our best efforts and getting every single off-white paint chip in the area, we did not get a perfect match on the paint.  The off-white we bought has more of a pink tone than was suggested by the paint chip.  However, I do not believe I care.  It's a garage!

The hummer spent a lot of time on the nest today.  It's not warm and it's windy, so I guess she had to keep heat on the eggs.  If you look dead center you can see her hovering in front of the agave.  The new palm we bought is still in the plastic bucket from Home Depot and the wind blew it over today.  My going out to pick it up disturbed her.  She frequently goes to the agave when she's disturbed.

Here she is on the nest.  I'm taking pictures from the house so they're not that good.

I assume since she is on the nest that the eggs are still intact.  I didn't look today, we're trying to stay out of her line of sight.  Of course all that will be undone Monday and Tuesday when the people come to epoxy the dismal looking garage floor.  Hopefully there will be sun on the nest if she's off of it.

Hummingbird in the Front Yard

We have two eggs.  Well, actually, she has two eggs.  The internet tells us they are the size of jelly beans.

I still wish she had done this somewhere else.  Every time the garage door goes up, or we walk out the front door, she flies away.  Maybe it will be ok, the males don't help, so the female has to leave anyway to find something to eat.  We put the feeder up on the front window, but so far she is spurning our offerings of food.
That's it, other than trips to Home Depot, the grocery store and like that, there is zippity doo-dah all to report.