Today marks the 12th year that we have been open for blogging. We don’t blog as much or regularly these days, well, because retirement finds so many ways to use your time and efforts otherwise. The following was our opening statement after converting from our old format to Wordpress:

We’re now completely converted from the old stuff and functioning as an online diary/weblog (”blog”). We decided to convert our old website to the blog format of the WordPress Publishing Platform.

As we continue to add new posts here, we also plan to add new gadgets and features to this format. Most all of the features from the old website have been converted and are available in the left sidebar. Check out some of the Potpourri items or our “stuff.”

We’re spending our holiday right here at home with the puppies. We had a wonderful dinner this afternoon and are relaxing indoors (it’s 105° outside).

We posed for this photo a couple of days ago in the courtyard. Ain’t we cute? Click on the image to enlarge.

The little birdhouse given to us in May of 2012 by our late friend “River Ron” (RIP) fell off of the palo verde tree out front last week. Today, I screwed the broken parts back together and hung it back up. Click on either image to enlarge. Images courtesy of Verna.

The little fishhook cactus that we rescued from down the road when they were doing construction a couple of years ago seems to be very happy in its little pot. These are the second set of flowers to open this season. Click on the image to enlarge.

One of the little antelope ground squirrels in the area has been making itself a bit of a pest by digging up Verna’s bulbs and roots in the courtyard. Earlier today, I set up the Havahart small animal trap with a piece of bread and peanut butter for bait. It wasn’t more than a half hour later that Cabela let us know the trap had been sprung.

Ever since we unwittingly caught a cactus wren in a rat trap by the trash barrels, it has been our policy to catch and release the pests. We caught this little guy in the courtyard and released it at Tractor Supply, about a mile away. That should work to keep it away from Verna’s garden for a while.

Click on either image to enlarge.

Late spring of 2018 has been quite the saguaro flower show in our Sonoran Desert. Our big cactus out front has had many and will have many more flowers opening.

From Wikipedia:

Flowers appear in April through June. They are white and open well after sunset and close in mid-afternoon. They continue to produce nectar after sunrise.[8] Flowers are self-incompatible, thus require cross-pollination. Large quantities of pollen are required for complete pollination because many ovules are present. This pollen is produced by the extremely numerous stamens which in one case totaled 3,482 in a single flower. A well-pollinated fruit contains several thousand tiny seeds. Saguaros have a redundant pollination system, i.e. full fruit set is possible even if only a fraction of the pollinating species are present.

Main pollinators are honey bees, bats, and white-winged doves. In most years, diurnal visitors are the main contributors for fruit, most of them honey bees. Other diurnal pollinators are birds such as Costa’s hummingbird, the black-chinned hummingbird, the broad-billed hummingbird, the hooded oriole, Scott’s oriole, the Gila woodpecker, the gilded flicker, the verdin, and the house finch.

We have enjoyed the “Bumper Crop” of flowers this year. Click on the image to enlarge.

It’s late spring and the Red Bird of Paradise colors are coming back to the courtyard. A.k.a Pride of Barbados, our Caesalpinia pulcherrima shrubs are beginning to show their summer colors of red, orange and yellow.

Flowers are currently open on the western most shrub but with others rapidly forming on the other two shrubs in the courtyard. Click on either image to enlarge.