A Beautiful Day 8-30

Up at 6 this morning...jeez the sun isn't even up then.  The gutter guys were coming to install our rain gutters and they wanted to beat the heat.  It was actually a bit chilly.  They finished in two hours.  I baked more zucchini bread.  It was a perfect weather day, crept up into the high 80's and every once in awhile a lovely breeze would blow through.  Larry found a fire weather outlook that said there would be another couple thunderstorms,  and a couple more heating trends into the 90's and then early rains this winter...ho hum.  I just hope we don't get snow here again this winter...pretty but a drag.

My garden has peaked and is heading into the pre fall down slide.  The glads all finished a few weeks ago, the zucchs have slowed down, the tomatoes are finally ripening, my sweet peas are gone, my red dahlias became inundated with mites so they are looking peaked though they are still blooming and the yellow dahlias are still going strong.  With the birds eating the bugs and the praying mantis all over the place I hate to use bug sprays...but some times they have to come out.

My large flower bed that I planted the cosmos and bachelor buttons is just starting its first bloom cycle so I'll have lots of color for another month at least.  The roses are all still blooming and several are getting ready to bloom again here shortly, I even had a couple more blooms on my clematis vines.

We are pondering what to do and plant in the garden next year.  The squirrels have slowly confiscated or bitten into almost all of the small crop of asian pears that we have this year.  It is discouraging to know you are doing all this work for the wildlife.  If that keeps up I may just plant fruitless ornamental trees and keep to flowers....at least we won't be attracting the bears because once they find that we have yummy stuff inside that fence it is all over.  They have impeccible memories when it comes to food and those fence posts would be like toothpicks if they decided they wanted in.

So here are the owl pictures.  We were so surprised to see it in the middle of the day and when you see its coloring you see how hard they would be to spot if you didn't know they were there.  Such large beautiful birds. 

Look at the size of those magnificent oaks!  The owl is in the center, I had Larry keep his eye on it as I changed lenses so we wouldn't lose it.  Keep in mind that is as close as my camera would bring it in...the following were cropped on the computer so can see it better.

Its coloring just makes it disappear.

Enough of being admired it turns to lift off.

I just kept the shutter snapping until it was out of view.

This is the uncropped version of the previous shot.