It's a Stretch

Unless I can convince the lady from Simoni's Clock Shoppe to make a house call, my grandmother's clock will be saying 1:32 for the rest of its (or my) life. It worked fine when we brought it home and settled it into its place (again), but within hours it was running 40 minutes fast. My efforts to try to adjust it caused it to give up altogether. I have now officially followed suit.

The roses are thriving in the garden, especially the ones by the arbor that we planted in pots. The twilight roses, which are a deep red, seem to be attractive to a butterfly that is almost the same color.

I sat with my camera pointed through the window at the bird feeders this afternoon until the battery died. A little grey tit with a big round eye is especially appealing , but also quite skittish so it may take more patience than I possess to get his picture. The number of goldfinches has dropped, perhaps because of a disease that seems to be affecting them in our area.
A bright orange oriole was apparently passing through. We saw him regularly for a couple of weeks, but he seems to have moved on.

The antics around the suet holder are especially entertaining. A huge shiny black crow manages to flap his wings wildly for long enough to hover and snag some suet laced with bugs. In the end though, my favorite was this handsome grosbeak who sat on top of the feeder, gently rocking in the afternoon breeze as he ingested a huge beakful of suet, then upended himself, stretching his body down to the receding cake of suet for another helping.

Creepers, house finches and jays wait in the trees for their turn, while the resident grey squirrel, the one with the elegant bushy tail and prehensile toes, the quail and the thrushes collect leftovers from the ground.