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Okay, maybe I have the muscles wrong. But look at this guy! I don’t think that’s baby fat. If this thing were six feet tall, you’d wouldn’t want to meet up angry at the bar. We used to have these fly into the kitchen when we lived in San Cristobal (no screens on the windows). They’re surprisingly easy to catch once they’re inside, and when you’ve got one in your hand, it’s like there’s nothing there.

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Just imagine if this were in focus. I would be a god! I decided to keep it anyway because of the arc of the wings. To hell with me, hummingbirds are gods. Or popcorn, if the cat jumps high enough. A real god would understand. I like this one for the colors and the energy spraying off the little bastard.

I don’t know what other people do. I just sit in a patio chair a few feet from the feeder with my Pentax and my telephoto lens and hope it works. Mostly auto-focus, sometimes manual. Auto-focus on a hummingbird is goofy, but sometimes you get cool effects like everything all fuzzy except a foot. I could take pictures of hummingbirds all day. It’s like playing the slots, except you win more.

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There were plenty of hummingbirds this evening, mostly rufous females and immature males. I was lucky enough to get some nifty action shots like this one. A couple of these are rather different, and I’ll post more directly.

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Yesterday was a wonder. Real mountain weather. For most of the morning and afternoon, the air had an electrifying coolness under bright sun with just enough humidity to pull you in and not enough to make you leave. We drove into town on a water run to fill the 5-gallon jug at Cid’s. I found some Colorado peaches there the size of softballs and bought three for $5.38. Hell, when I was a kid, you could buy enough to have a peach fight with that.

On the way past Ranchos Plaza the sky was full of puffy white clouds, the temperature 71 °F. Utter perfection. Three out of four vehicles went by with their windows closed (presumably on AC), and they weren’t all from Texas, either. That used to be the qualifier, but the disease has spread. I don’t get it. Perfect air from God and hardly any takers.

Later on the clouds built up. The strange and mighty Southwestern storms wandered over the land at walking speed and dropped real rain. Way back East in Maryland, thunderstorms fueled by boiling humidity would roar in ahead of cold fronts and knock down trees. You could pretty much count on some kind of disaster. Here the things just kind of coalesce like planets out of primordial weather goo and reach enormous size, often without doing any damage or even raining very much except for when they do, and that’s when people die in floods that wash away their cars.

Out here where the skull lives on the dry south end of town, we had maybe 15 minutes of heavy rain around 4 o’clock. That’s a lot, in my experience. Wow, I have experience—you know what that means. Meanwhile my wife has taken to yelling about the humidity. I can’t tell yet if this is just surprise or if the humidity makes her tired. (If it’s the latter, then she’s gone native, too.) What happens when it rains like this in New Mexico is that everybody’s roof leaks. It’s quite a common theme. That’s because it usually almost never does rain and all those roofs sit baking in the sun. Stuff dries out, gets brittle, cracks, and goes unnoticed for years until all of sudden, you either need to do something right away or mop it up and never mind—the traditional approach in a land where mud houses slowly disappear.

There’s a place by the canales over the bathroom where the roof covering cracks and I caulk it every year once it starts to leak again. So far this monsoon season I haven’t bothered, but that means I have to lay a towel down in the windowsill every time it rains. Another lesson from New Mexico, where the less you need, the better, as you probably can’t afford it anyway.

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