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 see some on her chin.
Don has been thinning the sage brush with the "pulaski" grub hoe he bought especially for the purpose. The hoe end and the axe end are both sharp, and the forged head is heavy. Don shoves it high in the air, letting gravity put force behind the blow. He says it's easier this way, as all he has to do is guide the blade into the sage roots.
Here he uses the heavy blade to scrape away the grassy stuff on the surface, again letting the weight of the hoe do most of the work.
Once the root is mostly cut through, it breaks off easily by hand.
The "slash" piles up quickly.
Sometimes he encounters a tough root running horizontally, either on or just beneath the surface. Then he has to use the axe end instead of the hoe. This is harder, as the axe is narrower, and harder to aim. Also, it is sharper than the hoe, and sometimes sticks in the wood.
Sometimes Barbara gets into the act.
Don was wishing for a chainsaw, like the one he used to have in Washington. Then he got a better idea.
When it gets too hot to work outside, Don works inside. Here he's preparing subfloor plywood for the bathroom, using the freezer for a saw horse. Careful with that saw, Don!
Have to put the subfloor and the vinyl flooring in before we can bring in the washer and dryer.
Back to clearing sage. Here's a small pile that needs to be moved, as it's too close to the house.
After clearing the ground, raking the ground, and hauling the sage and sticker bush slash to a big pile about a hundred feet away (by hand), the ground looks much better, but Don's arms don't.
Don says when he was a Boy Scout, he looked forward all year to Scout Camp at Lake Arrowhead, where the supposedly natural ground looked just like
this:
He says he never realized that this is what had been removed from the really natural ground, to make it look like that, and for fire safety.
Barbara has been doing a LOT of grass-cutting with the weed eater. The pile at left-center is just one of many that Don raked up. Both of us just HATE "cheat grass". We are looking into other ground covers that are aggressive enough to choke it out, without taking over the world.
The last part of the balcony will be the "finials", or decorative tops for the posts. Don does not have a lathe to turn them on, so is improvising a jig.
This piece will hold the end of the workpiece in place, and must fit exactly.
Success!
The end of the bolt is too long. Fortunately, Don has a hacksaw blade for his Sawzall.
That's as far as Don got this week. Next week, he hopes to begin actually creating the finials.
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