Bluebird babies

Today all the scaffolding, supports, and "band-aids" were removed from the basement walls so the structure looks much more whole and tidy ... since the house sits on a slope, the upper half of what you see here will be below ground level soon. The next picture is the view out our rental house kitchen window ... it's a nice view first thing in the morning. Sunday morning our neighbor Dom knocked on the door bright and early with a bouquet of beautiful flowers for Chris because he had heard that Chris' mother had passed away ... so on the spur of the moment we invited him and his wife Wendy over for dinner that night. They hail from Texas and are renting a few doors down from us here "in town" and building a house in Eureka Ranch, just like we are. Nice folks! It will be great to have friends to share the building experience with ... celebrate when things go well, and commiserate when the going gets tough.

The story of the day however is about blue birds. A big yellow front-end loader has been parked at our site for several weeks and a few days ago we realized that a family of blue bird babies was living in the battery box of the loader. Mama (drab gray color) and Papa bird (gorgeous iridescent blue) were taking turns flying into a small hole in the battery box ... probably delivering tasty morsels to the kids. This afternoon the big bad contractor came to remove his loader ... oh, no!! ... you can't do that, said I, the birds won't be able to find their babies! So we (Chris, me, and Brian) rushed into action and carefully scooped the nest out as carefully as possible without actually touching the little ones ... there appeared to be 5 or 6 fuzz balls all snuggled together ... and moved them into a bucket that Chris had drilled a hole in, put a board on top and wedged it into the dirt pile next to where the front-end loader had been. Then we backed off and waited. Mama sat atop a pine tree for a long time and looked around, then after we came back from a walk, we were delighted to see both Mama and Papa flying in and out of the bucket repeatedly. Whew! What a relief!