The Monarchs are Back!

Well, two of them, anyway. I was sitting outside this morning when I noticed these beauties fluttering around the Mexican sunflowers. They must know how well they look on the vibrant orange flowers because they lingered and returned and lingered some more while I dashed inside to get my camera with the telephoto lens, discovered that there is something wrong with it and dashed back inside for my trusty phone. These amazing flowers have provided a lot a pleasure even though the plant is five times bigger than we thought it would be. And now I am really happy to see some butterflies returning. We really haven't seen many since the huge annual wildfires began five years ago.

Dana, our garden consultant and rock curator, was here this morning and nixed 'the rock' as the wrong color and possibly too big. John and Spike and I wandered around the property, including the deep swales on either side, and found another good candidate in the field which we had overlooked before. It's at the top of the thirty steps to the veggie garden terrace and somehow has to get around to the front of the house and up the eight front steps...we'll see.

John's niece, Lindsay is here to help us install LED bulbs in about half of the 35 recessed ceiling cans. Among many other talents, she is an electrician. She came prepared to change the switches to LED compatible dimmers, but it turns out that they are already compatible  Lutron switches...something we never noticed. In fact, this house has so many windows and is so filled with light, unlike our Craftsman bungalow in Berkeley, that it took us a week after we moved in to notice that these lights  even had dimmers, and that all the lights in the house were still  dimmed from time before we bought it when it was  it was being shown.

Lindsay is also going to design and make us a unique and special ceiling fixture for our television room. She said she'd been working with all the bits and pieces for years but had recently learned how to make 'almost anything' into a light fixture. I gave her carte blanche to do whatever she'd like.  I'm quite sure I will like it too.

It's really nice to have Lindsay back in our lives again and we're looking forward to seeing the whole family when her husband Adisa and seven year old daughter Grace get back from a trip to North Carolina. We haven't seen them since BC (before Covid).

Dana and Jim and Peter are joining us for dinner and I'm sure Dana will have something to say about our latest rock choices....