The Gold Street Cabin In Mammoth, Utah

 We had a new visitor at our bird-feeder this week--a lazuli bunting.  Barbara loves that you can see a bird you don't recognize, put in the browser to find a small blue headed bird in Utah mountains and an exact picture of the bird in question comes up in addition to recordings of its call and songs. The following photos do not do it justice. Its bright blue head is a stark contrast to its vivid orange breast, on a white background.  It looks like a modern art painting, but it's alive and it flies!    This spotted towhee has learned to balance on this feeder.  Last week he could grab one seed and then fall off.  We are trying to decide if it is only one that can balance or it is more than one.  Barbara thinks it is at least one because the coloring of one is kind of dusky and the other is the richer blacks of one who has molted. In this picture you can see the white tail feathers of the spotted towhee.  You can only see these from the unders...

 Barbara gets a kick out of this western scrub jay trying to eat out of this bird feeder.  He does this balancing act. This one actually balanced on the feeder for a few seconds to grab a bite. Barbara has a different feeder which the jays can use more readily, but she has come to learn that they are very aggressive and greedy birds.  They will empty an entire bird feeder in a day or two and chase all other birds away. The more ready food we have available to them, the more they come. In this picture, you see the tail of a Spotted Towhee.  This bird, like the scrub jay, can't balance on the feeder.  Barbara. doesn't know if it is just one or several who have learned to fly up, grab  one seed before falling off.    The Towhee grabbing his seed. And falling off   We had some cream of wheat with weevil in it.  Barbara put it out to see if something would eat it.   Truly hadn't anticipated it would be a deer.  Here you can s...

 We are not posting every week because, sometimes, it just seems not enough is accomplished to make an interesting post.  In ways, this is because of Don's working two nights a week.  This cuts his work time down because he has to sleep the afternoon before the first night of work and then sleep all of the next two days.  One of those is Sunday so he would not have worked on the house then anyway.  Also, just getting older takes a toll. In doing the weed eating in our yard, Barbara has been seeing a lot of albino praying mantises.   At long last, Don got started working on the bathroom. Here he is test-fitting the toilet. The tank is too close to the wall; there's not enough room to put the lid on the tank. It seems that our professional plumber installed the flange it has to bolt to, an inch too close  to the wall. Here's why. The main toilet drain can't be moved to the correct position, due to two bolts in the main cantilever beam, which stick o...