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Home again for barely a week, then off again. I still haven’t unpacked my gear bag from the last adventure.

But at least some things are clear now. The biggest change precipitated by my Maine trip is probably acceptance of where I am (which has to do with something else entirely). Not that there aren’t thousands of other places to live—Maine was pretty nice, actually—but I have run clean out of room to be an idiot, and here is where we are. Before the last scraps of family inheritances have gone to pay for dental work or motorcycles, it’s time to throw them at a house.

Meanwhile, there’s a scheduled get-away to the Land of Pork and Goodness (Iowa to you). I love to go to Dubuque. It’s such a unique place in its own right, hanging on the bluffs above the Mississippi. There’s a cliff where a railroad train comes out of a tunnel in Wisconsin and shoots right over the bridge! From any overlook above the river, you might see bald eagles or white pelicans. Our hosts have one of those TVs that covers the whole wall. It’s like a happy movie when I’m there. There’s all this food, even tequila for me. The a/c softly hisses. Everything is clean and orderly. No one lacks for anything. You can drop a pair of underwear on the floor and nothing drags it under the bed. A fortress of Clean & Safe & Nice. The anti-Taos, if you will.

Always good to soak that up before heading back to dirt and danger.

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Another dirty window hummer portrait! This time I caught one twisting around to flee from me. This is the moment just before he let go and zoomed off. We’re getting a lot of these black-chinned hummingbirds just now, and other new birds as well. Just saw an indigo bunting, for example. You don’t soon forget a thing like that.

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The window is dirty. That’s what just a little bit of rain and blowing dust will do. I stand there in the kitchen with my telephoto lens and drive the autofocus mad as the little buggers dive and whiz. This guy has some mighty shoulder action. It pulls me in. You think a hummingbird is tiny but then where does it keep the batteries?

Today I replaced the cabin air filter on our 2007 Vibe. I should have done it 30,000 miles ago, but I knew better, right? The old one was piled high with birdseed husks, leaves, bug wings, dirt, and a wad of dirty string (?). It disintegrated on removal and I thought I caught it all, but when I tested the fan, the dashboard shook and shuddered. (Das ist nicht gut.) This wasn’t hard to figure out. I must have dropped some ugly crap down in the blower vanes, and now the whole assembly was unbalanced! Easy does it, fella. Coat hanger wire. Pliers. Gentle fishing where I can’t reach, and mira!—out comes a piece of dirty string, a leaf, and my salvation.

Goodness, and comfort, and art. Hummingbird dynamo heart.

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Just a few yards down my favorite trail today, I nearly stepped on a great big snake. I saw at once it wasn’t poisonous. Between two and three feet long, a kind of speckled yellow with a pattern on its back. The reptile stopped in front of me, flicked its tongue a couple of times, and proceeded on its way. Even if I’d had the camera out, I might have let the creature be. We were having a private moment, after all, and it wouldn’t have been polite.

After that, I took the camera out of its case and hung it around my neck. A little farther along, a gorgeous horny toad* ran across my path and stopped inside a sagebrush looking up at me. I tried to take a picture, but the auto-focus kept fixing on the bush. When I took the camera away from my face to switch to manual focus, the damn thing vanished! I left the trail to stomp around a little in the dirt and look for motion at the edges of my vision. No luck this time, though.

Most people don’t know that horned toads, at least the little ones, can change their color in an instant. This one was small and showed some green and purple spots. They would have vanished in just a couple seconds with the lizard sitting in the dirt, but I wonder where it was before?

* See comments. West Texas in our brains.

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