JUNE

GRADUATION

This is graduation month and our family has its share of graduates. Our grandsons, Jonathan Zweig and Jesse Schmidt, are graduating from high schools here in the West. Our granddaughter, Claire Schmidt, is graduating from high school on the East Coast. It's a great time and we wish them all the best as we celebrate their achievements.




ROSES AND TOMATOES

With the allergy season still in full bloom around here, perhaps it isn't the best thing to be surrounded by roses, but there's no denying their beauty. Dickie and I are blessed with some beautiful climbers on our back fence. Here's a sample:





I promised everyone occasional updates on our progress with the barrels of tomatoes in our back yard. Maybe I do have a green thumb! Here's a comparison from last month to this. As you can see, we're making steady progress. Should have ripe tomatoes by the end of the month:





THAT KILLDEER NEST

Our killdeers are still nesting on the local schoolgrounds. The did move several feet from where they had been nesting in the rocks. Now their nest is in the bark adjacent to the rocks. We had a hard time locating this nest at first, although it's only about five or six feet from the sidewalk where everyone traipses past. I don't know how those birds manage, except that they're so hard to see, and most people who pass by probably don't even notice them. Here's what it looks like at present. There were four eggs up until a couple days ago, but now there are only three. Hatching time should be about next week:





DAY LILIES

They say that the pollen in the air these days comes mostly from the grasses. Hopefully, such beauties as this are not among the culprits that plague us. However, they're certainly in full bloom, too, and plentiful:






THE VINEYARD

Vineyards have a beauty all their own. Something else they have is an abundance of wild life. We see quail and jack rabbits almost every time we walk past our local vineyard lately. Here's a jack that kept a wary eye on us this morning:




THOSE WOODSTOCK STATUES

I'm still making forays into Santa Rosa to look for Woodstock statues. With 76 of them to locate, I expect to be busy for a while yet. So far I've captured some 22 of them on my camera smart card. Here are a couple I found the other day:






More again some other day!