Escape from Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens is once again in the pink. The azaleas are out and driving up the driveway is once again like going through pink clouds. Hattie spent a few days at the vet having what we call her "lady's surgery" (spaying) and we missed her dreadfully. She's back now, healing well, doing great. Keeping her quiet and relatively still has turned out to be the biggest challenge. Here she is kinda showing off her stitches.

She actually picks flowers (this was a spent camelia blossom) and tosses them around and gnaws on them. Messy girl.

Even though we still have the winter songbird feeders up, yesterday I put a couple of the hummingbird feeders out for the first time, reasoning that all the blossoming going on would be attracting them This morning we had our first customer, a male ruby-throat.

We think we finally have our latest Grey Gardens crisis in hand: one of the septic tanks is failing. I have learned more on this topic than I ever cared to, far more. It's about as interesting as it sounds. Anyway now we have a plan in place that won't cost the moon, quite.

Have been writing a ton for work so am motivated only to post photos here. Grey Gardens LA is so photogenic this time of year, and since I finally have a decent digital camera--more than decent, I love the thing, it's a Canon SD850IS Elph that is going to be great for travel since it's so compact--I've been shooting a lot of photos the last couple of days to unwind. It's spring break. I'm pretty glad NOT to be traveling: I have 4 or 5 trips lined up in the next 6 months so staying at home feels like the pause before the storm. I'm behind on everything: taxes, housework, yardwork, correspondence, car maintenance, etc etc. I should be doing all that, but instead today I spent a good few hours outside with the camera doing image therapy among the azaleas.

In the interests of giving the dogs more equal time, today was Scout's turn. He had a bath and a good brushing for his photo shoot. It's very windy today. Gary brushed Scout on the porch and great poufs of golden fur went flying out all over the yard. I like to think of the birds using it in their nests--it's so soft and fluffy. Then he sat out and enjoyed the wind in his hair.

and of course I made him pose in front of azaleas

oh heck, one more of GGLA

This is out back with the cypress tree on the right. I love the way cypresses seem to stretch on their toes out of the ground.