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Twenty-seven pages today. Wow. I’ve actually made an outline for the rest of the book. We topped five hundred pages today. We, at the end of a book I usually start saying ‘we’, because I’ve spent the day writing first person narration. I’ve spent the day writing, I and we, and it’s hard to stop. Nearly thirty pages and I am fried. I had this blog planned where I’d talk about the red tail hawks that have taken up residence in our yard, but I’m too tired to do it justice. It’s a parent, we think female, and her baby. The baby is a biiig baby, but he has spent days sitting in trees crying for her to feed him. Like any baby bird he’s been trying to follow her around and beg for food. I’m just used to seeing songbirds do it, not birds of prey. It’s been very cool. I’ll try to do a more complete hawk blog later, maybe Jon will help, since the hawks have become a group activity. If Darla, or one of us hear the hawks outside, work sometimes stops and we go out to see if we can spot them. We saw a female oriole this week, and the hummingbirds are really loving the feeders. The goldfinches have almost decimated the sunflowers in the flower garden. Mockingbirds, Brown Thrashers, Cardinals, are just a few of the birds that are visiting the Choke Cherry. The House Sparrows have come back from where ever they vanished to, and are looking over the purple martin house, which has never held a purple martin. It’s held starlings and sparrows, and at one point wasps, but never what it was intended for. It was up when we bought the house, I knew the martin condo was doomed. It wasn’t close enough to a body of water for one of many problems. I hated the sparrrows when they took over our bird feeders but the sparrows will at least share the feeders with everybody else, the starlings chase everybody off, but themselves. When I saw the cloud of sparrows dash past my windows and land on the martin house, I was actually happy to see them. They hopped around the house talking back and forth, looking for all the world like a family that left the summer cottage and came back to find it trashed by wind, rain, and neglect. Can we fix it up? How much work will it be? Can we get it ready in time? You can complain about sparrows and we do, but they are such unremittingly cheerful birds. There are moments when I actually understand how a homesick Englishman could want to bring them over, so he’d have some sounds of home.