Summertime we should see deep blue skies, but here the air is pretty heavy with smoke. Even though the fires are a long way from here, this morning you’d think you were singing songs around the campfire.
The colors of summer, cool blue sky, deep blue shadows, smokey blue... well... smoke.
So far we’ve gotten enough rains from the thunderstorms which roll through to keep the hills green. This is a more “normal” summer weather pattern this year, unlike the prior three summers we’ve lived here where the hills were dry and the grasses were crunchy by the end of June at the latest. Summer temperatures have arrived, however. Yesterday we saw a high of 92F (33.3C) and today is forecast for at least that hot. We won’t see any relief from high heat until the end of this week when more thunderstorms are predicted. Hopefully they will contain rain and not just dry lightning as the green grass we’re seeing will not be green much longer.
Serviceberries are blue when ripe. These few remaining berries have some sort of mold covering them, perhaps from all the rains we've seen this summer.
Elderberries are also blue, a more powder-smoke blue. Several bushes along the road up to our house are loaded with the berries, a favorite of all sorts of bird species. All sorts of berries are blue this time of year, and my most favorite of all is blueberries. I froze the berries I bought and we’ll have pancakes and muffins all winter. I smile about that whenever it crosses my mind.
"It's shiny, Captain."
My new computer 🙂 Dan is getting it all set up for me. I’m such a lucky girl, I have in-home tech support and an admin on hand at all times. Yes, I’m spoiled. This is as it should be.
A half box of fresh totally tree-ripened peaches.
They have a very faint blue tinted fuzz, hence they fit into the category of all things blue. We picked these up yesterday when we made a trip to our favorite fruit stand. We also brought home three small seedless watermelons, Queen Anne cherries, and ears of corn. All of these are more sure signs of summer.
We were feeling blue until Dan found this cookbook. This totally solved our lack of bread in the house.
I love to bake things on Sunday, and that’s my plan for the day, to play in the kitchen. Yesterday I made two kinds of muffins, a banana-walnut-cinnamon muffin, and a lemon-coconut muffin. They were both absolutely delicious. I still have four bananas which are perfectly ripe and I will make two more batches of muffins for the freezer so we have them over the coming month.
A baby Calliope Hummingbird. We will be blue shortly as these little guys will leave our mountains within the next several weeks.
The adults are all gone, for the most part, leaving behind the babies to find their way south. Migration is such a miraculous annual event. Truly astounding that these tiny creatures can go so far in such a small amount of time.
He thinks hot weather is interesting.
How does he fit into a blue category? He’s a Russian Blue, or at least partly that color variety. Last night he was so hot. He was laying flat on the floor unside down and completely stretched out with his paws above his head and back legs stretched out straight by his tail. He looks dead until his belly gets tickled, and then he comes alive. He gives us a dirty look if we disturb his cooling off postures but it obviously takes too much energy to do anything about it.
This morning a Snowshoe Hare came up to the sliding glass door where Mish was sitting, and they got nose-to-nose before the bunny left the porch. I’m not entirely sure he even saw the cat; it was more like he was admiring his reflection in a mirror or wondering who that really good-looking bunny was. Mish got a hugely fluffed tail out of the encounter. He was feeling blue that he couldn’t go chase.