What if my self-propelled electric lawnmower didn’t have a big handle to push it with, but had a controller box with a joystick instead? Why are we walking back and forth across the yard with something that is already providing its own propulsion? Is it because nobody has figured out how to steer something, or switch it from forward to reverse, without being in it, on it, or next to it? I don’t think so. Why aren’t we all in lounge chairs driving the mower with a remote-control stick? Or why can’t a lawnmower learn our yard like a Roomba learns our living room and just mow by itself? “Honey, I’m going to go mow the lawn. Oh, nevermind, the Yardba already got it.”
Finally
After two months of triple digits. Today a temperature in the high eighties. Overcast. Almost rainy.
Our air conditioning kept up.
A new thing
We bought some eggs. We saw an opportunity to buy eggs from happy chickens that get to roam free versus eggs produced from chickens in cages so we went for it. Printed on the egg carton was a link to a video showing the chickens at the farm our eggs came from.
https://vitalfarms.com/farm/helms-holler/
How smart was that! They put up a video of the very chickens that laid our eggs grazing in their pasture!
The video isn’t a livestream, that wouldn’t make sense from rural locations, but it is a 360 degree view we can turn through. Sure, these eggs are a little pricier, and in the grand scheme of things probably don’t provide a giant difference in nutrition, but who wouldn’t want the baby mamas of their breakfast eggs to live this happy and free?
This is a White-lined Sphinx Moth
I think.
That would be a kind of Hummingbird Moth; they feed on nectar. They fly and hover just like a hummingbird, but they’re much smaller.
It was there, wedged between the door and the door frame of the Jeep when I opened the door in the morning. He was very tolerant of our activity while we got stuff in and out of the car. I had to scare him off on purpose before I could close the door for fear of smushing him.
Nice rodent!
A California Ground Squirrel, in fact. We saw it in Oregon.