Today's walk report: 061321

Another drive and walk adventure to the local botanical garden. Yesterday my back asked me to kindly skip walking to allow for some recovery from home gardening exploits which included moving 4 cu. ft. (2 x 2 cu.ft.) of potting soil to no more than 3 ft from the trunk of my car onto the garage floor. At times that's not a big deal, on other occasions it's a daunting task. Friday afternoon it was certainly challenging. There was considerable more preparation involved but I'll spare you the details. Upon rising yesterday, 5-something in the morning, I spent about the first two hours walking around like Pantalon de' Bisognosi. Gradually, I evolved from chimpanzee to Homo erectus. I then decided to move some potting soil in batches of 5 gallons or so from the garage to the backyard in order to perform several long overdue transplants. I'll tell you a little secret... Getting old sucks and you won't know it until the bastard suddenly reaches up and grabs you.

Onto some pictures from today. For the most part, there were little to no photo ops presenting themselves and I both circled the garden often and also sat patiently for quite some time looking for one. Hummingbirds were mostly darting around chasing each other and when they did finally park themselves they certainly weren't posing for pictures. For example, this rufous hummingbird... 

This may have been the same bird. I only managed to click off a few decent shots here.

Bunnies and fence lizard photos generally mean I'm a little desperate to take a picture of something.

Oh, but there were masks littering the walk again. Both of these masks were within 20 yards of a garbage can.

 Back home there was a pleasant end to the outing. Stan, Docken's and my feral cat buddy, was hanging out in the backyard. He doesn't usually hang around much after breakfast but for the last couple of days he has--late afternoon too. This picture was taken through my not so clean office window. He later took a nap there.

That's all I got. The really big deal though is yours truly getting out and roaming once again. As Stan would say, be more cat.