Monday afternoon, out front...

After work, after errands--the first thing I want to do when I get home is take my shoes off...

This afternoon, though, I kept them on, running inside to get my camera and then running back out to stay on the front patio for a few minutes: late afternoon light, bougainvillea, hummingbird:

I guess, growing up, I had taken hummingbirds a bit for granted--we would see them quite often in our backyard in Georgia...but then when I moved to Seattle and saw that even way up there, some hardy species would stay all year, even in the winter, that impressed me...and when I lived in France, it was pointed out to me that hummingbirds are native only to the Americas...In Nicaragua some of the species are so large that the locals call them 'gorrion' instead of 'colibri.'

Here in our tiny front yard, though, we have Calypte anna, "Anna's Hummingbird," which is a year-round resident in the Sonoran desert, just as it is even up in to the Pacific Northwest.

The light in the bougainvillea (wicked thorns!) was fascinating; I thought I would play with the 'color accent' feature of my camera:

The bright papery 'flowers' are actually the leaves on the end of each stalk; the actual flower is a tiny white bloom in the middle of each bundle of color.

And to round off tonight's minutiae, our citrus update:

Just a couple of weeks away from huge lemons and navel oranges. Our second winter here, and I still find it 'exotic'...