Juvenile Raven?

Perhaps. We are quite entertained by these birds which are quite common here and seem to travel in groups. This one was attacking the suet feeder hanging from a tree with great ingenuity and, seen through the telephoto is either a juvenile or has met with some sort of mishap. It looks a lot like a rook but they are rare in North America. There are three of them that sit in the tree and seem to be crooning to each other...a sound we hear every spring which leads to believe that perhaps they are young siblings. If anyboody has any thoughts about this bird I'd love to know as we speculate about what they are every year. 

We took down the beanstalk today and got about 10 pounds of beans from it. Some of them were hidden in the leaves and are quite, er,  mature. I may have to cook them like John's grandmother used to cook them for Thanksgiving dinner...for about four hours with bacon or a ham hock!

I made a banana bread for Sunday supper with Dana and Jim and the boys, remembering only as I was stirring them into the batter that the boys don't like nuts. I added some dried cherries I found in the bottom of the larder hoping maybe the boys wouldn't notice the nuts.

We had a lovely Zoom meeting with Lady Fndhorn this morning, a wide ranging conversation on the fate of humanity, the behavior of different segments and where our place exists in it all. There is great concern about people in nursing homes where Covid cases are rampant, but those of us who are older but self sufficient are being left more or less to our own devices. Lady F has sent me a detailed picture of the dancing stars quilt and I'm pleased that I'm on the right track when it comes to drafting a pattern to recreate it. In fact, I think I have ironed out most of the glitches and will be able to move along a bit faster now....

The following is just a recount of what the grandchildren's educations will look like this year. It isn't particularly interesting to anybody but me, but I'm including it for the record of this extraordinary time and the extraordinary efforts being made....feel free to skip it.

The schools in Santa Rosa are opening remotely on August 17th with some sort of vague plan to reopen in person to smaller groups two days a week if and when the health department numbers warrant it. Of course, before they decide that, the health department has some reporting glitches to sort out so that they can have an accurate count. The teachers, including Dana, are supposed to show up at the school and teach remotely from there. Peter has rented a house in Santa Barbara with nine others, although classes, which don't start until the end of September will probably be all remote. Will will be living at home and working at the golf course until his job begins, now postponed from October to January.

It seems that even if it means learning from a bedroom rather than a classroom, most university students would prefer the bedroom to be close to university and not in their parents' house. Claire goes directly back to Vasser tomorrow where she will be virtually incarcerated until Thanksgiving when the first quarter will end and the second one won't begin until after the new year. They will live, study and eat in 'cohorts'. They will be tested once a week and sent to a special dorm if they test positive. 

Julia has a similar arrangement at Connecticut College. Those students who are returning  from 'high risk' states like California will have to quarantine in an AirBnB in Mystic Connecticut for two weeks. They also will be confined to campus until Thanksgiving. When they left for spring break they didn't know they wouldn't be returning until the fall.  Those who lived far away and couldn't return to vacate their rooms had to pay to have their belongings either shipped to them  or put in storage until they knew what room they would be assigned in the fall.  It turns out, Julia was assigned the same room.

We don't really know what is happening with Maya and Owen's schools. Maya starts high school and Owen is supposed to start middle school, but he has been home schooling for several years because of anxiety issues in school. He's probably the only one of the lot who will be better off getting classes on the computer.