The solar panels generated 7.6 kilowatt hours of electricity today. Not bad, considering the fact that it was partly cloudy today.
A really beautiful bird flew across the road right in front of my car today on Route 66. I’m not sure what it was, but it was little bitty and had the brightest blue feathers you’ve ever seen. I also saw a couple of scissortails sitting on wires next to the road. They were pretty.
Somewhere around Oakhurst, I looked up at the clouds, which were gorgeous — all big and golden-pink and Maxfield Parrish-y against the bright blue sky — and noticed a much bigger, darker cloud off to the southeast, with a faint rainbow splashed across it. I didn’t try to get a picture, because the rainbow was so faint the camera really wouldn’t have picked up much of it, but it was really pretty.
The hens produced three eggs for us today. I think this puts their total at 12, if anybody is keeping score. I harvested a handful of okra, several tomatoes, a cucumber, and several cayenne peppers this evening. Assuming most of them are usable, I should have enough tomatoes to put up a batch of salsa this weekend.
In honor of that occasion (and because our recent adventures with six-legged invaders forced me to come to terms with the quantity of disorganized junk cluttering up every closet, cabinet, and flat surface in my house), I cleaned out the living-room closet so I can install some shelves in there tomorrow and turn it into a fabulous little pantry to store all my canning equipment, dehydrator, honeycomb cutter, and various other once-a-year tools that need to be accessible but don’t necessarily have to live in the kitchen.
In four and a half hours this evening, I managed to declutter and reorganize two closets, take measurements for two sets of shelves I’m building tomorrow, fill three garbage bags (including a big contractor bag) with trash, fill a grocery bag with recyclables, sort and reorganize my garden seeds, sort and reorganize the strange assortment of random objects lurking under the sink, completely reorganize my kitchen cabinets and drawers, and clean the drawer in the bottom of the stove.
I’ve got another big list of stuff to do when I get up. We’ll see how much of it I get through.
Hope your evening was productive.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 
I bet the little blue bird was an indigo bunting. They have brilliant iridescent electric blue feathers. They could give a regular blue bird an inferiority complex.
http://www.birdsofoklahoma.net/Indigobunting.htm
My first thought was that it was either an indigo bunting or maybe a lazuli (the coloring was more like a lazuli) … but lazuli buntings don’t get this far east, so I think it must have been indigo.
I’ve gotta figure out what they eat and how you coax them into hanging around your yard, because they’re adorable.