Meet Phred

Posted by Chuck at 3/23/2008 7:34 PM
Categories: First House, desert, Back Yard, Birds of The AV
Back home in Upstate New York, all the humming birds I ever saw were tiny, ethereal little pixies who appeared at random for fleeting moments and then were gone,  off toward the treetops, and another sprite may not be spotted there for hours or days.

Phred's not like that.



He's bigger than any humming bird I've ever seen. He also comes back every 10 minutes all day long. He's fearless and curious. Twice, he's hovered arms length from my face and made eye contact with me. He doesn't seem to care if I'm right next to or under the feeder either.

Phred is smart too, he's the only one of the four individual birds that I've seen to figure out that there is a rest bar on which to perch while fueling up.



I've also seen him drinking water drops from the hose connector.

He also isn't a very stealthy aircraft, since I usually detect his audio signature before seeing him. I want a placard for the feeder that says "JP-7 ONLY" (jet fuel).

The back yard at our house has a steep slope that leads up to the next row of houses where it meets the neighbor on the next street's backyard fence. The area has been planted with a few native or drought-resistant plants and then left alone, except for some watering from the irrigation system. I think there are several bird's nests (and probably some nests of other less desirable critters) there.

One really pleasant surprise in the yard is a lilac bush.



It's thin and doesn't seem to be anticipating a lot of growth, but it looks reasonably healthy. I didn't think they'd grow here. I'll water it specially with the hose and see what happens. I think I read something once that plants in higher latitudes are used to having a higher proportion of nitrogen in the air than lower latitudes, so plants can travel from south to north and grow well if protected from freezing, but plants from the north lose biomass and sometimes can't grow at all, even in controlled environments, because of the relatively low nitrogen levels. 

One odd thing about it is that the leaves and flowers are opening simultaneously. I think in NY, the leaves come out at least a week or two before the flowers bud.

Move Status:

The painters started at 7:30 Saturday and today (yes, on Easter) to get the family room painted, the ceiling in the kitchen and family room painted, all the wall paper off on three of the bedrooms, repainted the master suite and preped the other two for painting.

We rented a Penske truck with a lift gate and moved every large piece of furniture and about 75% of our misc. stuff and staged it all in the foyer/living room/dining room and garage to be out of the painters' way.



We plan to move in next Saturday. Until then, we have set up our living room in the townhouse as a Liverpool Apartment v1.0 replica. Liverpool Apartment v1.0 (my first of two apartment in Liverpool, NY, a suburb of Syracuse) was a SMALL studio that is about half the size of our new master suite. See below, that's our living room/eat-in kitchen area, the table used to be just to Kelly's left on the laminate floor.  



So we brought everything that we need for the week here down to the living room and are just living there. So I'm writing from the floor at the foot of the bed in the living room. It sucks because we're sore from moving, but we have to sleep on the crappy smaller bed while out lovely king is staged in the living room in the house. It's what we have to do though because we can stay out of the painter's hair, use my weekend off to get the difficult moving done, and only need to rent a truck once. Also, Kelly is going to start working our way out of and closing down the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, cleaning and closing off so we have less to do Saturday.

The Liverpool Apartment v1.0 experience is a great reminder of how far we've come in the past 5 years.

 
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