The hummingbirds are swarming, the deer and raccoons make their daily visits. I got a clear dark sky view of the Venus, Mars, Jupiter conjunction the other night and the Perseids will be peaking in just a few nights. Add to that my friends have left on a two week vacation, taking the dog but leaving the cat and you can see why visiting Mt. Shasta this time of year is perfectly timed.
OK, technically I am in Weed, even more precisely I am visiting the Lake Shastina Golf Resort. The point is that I am not in Berkeley for a couple of weeks and will be periodically commenting on the set and setting of my travels (again).
Once again I have friends with the decency to invite me to visit them and then up after a brief visit they up and leave. So I have a nice big house with a view of the mountain, a big black affectionate cat, a sparkling hot tub plus heaps & gobs of peace and quiet. You can't get better friends than these. I may even stay around a few days when they return, just to be friendly.
I brought a small load of summer reading material, there is a year's worth of Discovery and National Geographic here to catch up on. Being a modern nest, I have a great wi-fi connection, dish television and their great music collection. I stopped at a roadside stand on the drive up, so I have fresh white peaches, dapple dandy pluots, fantasia nectarines and a bottle of Amaretto for a never-ending crock of fruit salad.
The hummingbirds swarm around a feeder that is about five feet from where I write. At the moment about half a dozen are jockeying for landing rights at breakfast. I can go out on the deck and stand quietly and become part of the landscape. Aside from one or two agitated chirping in-my-face lectures, I am ignored and the feeding frenzy goes on. This happens late summer each year as the local population fattens up for the southern migration. During the spring and summer there are only two or three hummers around but now as many as a dozen live in the pine trees on the property and sip as much nectar as we provide from early morning until late twilight.
Speaking a nectar, a beaker of apricot velvet nectar awaits me, before I launch into some serious writing for the day.
