Flower Friday. : : Penstemon Barbatus

It should have occurred to me yesterday morning when David said,  'It's all fixed' to ask him if he ran the battery system for longer than a couple of minutes. He hadn't, but we did and it's not fixed. It always switches on when the mains power is turned off as it is supposed to, but sometimes it runs for 10 seconds, sometimes it runs for 10 minutes and last night it ran for 45 minutes, but it always turns off while the mains power is still off. Good thing we didn't cancel Ali. The whole thing is diabolical and in danger of throwing me over the edge, and I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about it, so I will speak of it no more.

It's not as if there is any shortage of things these days to threaten one's sleep, one's equanimity, one's sanity, even. People everywhere are apparently suffering from insomnia or as it is sometimes known, 'covisomnia'.  Here, laced with the threat of more 100º+ weather, fire,  power outages and an unhinged president who will stoop at nothing to get himself re-elected,  it is no wonder that a good night's sleep is elusive. My brain seeks surcease but that seems to be impossible without chemical assistance to which I am unwilling resort...yet. Unless you count pot....it is legal here. I haven't tried it since I was in college and then not that much because it just made me comatose. Comatose would be good. I might try that as long as I don't have to smoke it....

I was wandering around the garden, and my attention was attracted by the light on the graceful bend of this penstemon stem. The bearded variety is native to the western U.S. It's 'hairiness' is one of the things that allows it to survive in wildflower habitats as varied as the Sonoran desert and the subalpine slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The unusual color of this one in a pot by our back door probably means it is a hybrid. 

Many flowers are beginning to fade, but there is still plenty of other activity in the garden. Lizards skitter or perch or do solitary pushups to warm up as the 'marine layer' is burned away by the sun. This penstemon attracts rufous hummingbirds as they migrate south. Many Annas hummingbirds stay year round and seem to prefer the grevillea I blipped on Wednesday. We are fortunate to have a lot of birds here which give us our own home theatre.