When Kelle Brought Food

When my sister Kelle drove out here a little over two weeks ago to stay for a few days before she and I left to drive to Iowa for our mom's funeral, she brought some amazing food. Let's start with this donut. It was the size of a plate and honestly and truly, perhaps the best donut I've ever eaten. It's from Rose Donuts in San Clemente and I highly recommend!

She also brought fresh fish. Her son Jack, who's a fishing boat captain and lifeguard, caught some bluefin tuna off the coast of Dana Point the day before Kelle drove out. Not being a fish expert in any sense of the word, I wouldn't know that it's practically unheard of to catch bluefin off Dana Point, but apparently it is. Anyway, he caught five of them and she brought these six steaks with her. This is my only tuna picture, which is a shame as it was so gorgeous. Brad pan-seared it and it cut like butter. It was utterly delicious. We had a feast, and on the second night I just let it come to room temperature and we ate it that way, and it was almost as good as the first night.

The weather was hot but not too hot and we spent a lot of time outside.

And in the pool.

We also went down to Patagonia, Arizona to visit a hummingbird sanctuary. 

The hummingbird sanctuary was called the Paton Center for Hummingbirds, and it's run by the Tucson Audubon Society. We saw not only hummingbirds, but also other species of birds. Patagonia wasn't too far from here (about an hour south) but it felt far removed. The sanctuary was beautiful and interesting and teeming with hummingbirds, and it made me appreciate our own hummingbirds at home. We have a lot of feeders around the house and we get a lot of birds and we practically have our own little hummingbird sanctuary right here. And, we have something exciting happening right now too .....

We have a hummingbird nesting on our back patio! We watched the nest being built for a couple of weeks. And before the nest was built, for another couple of weeks we watched the bird scout out locations for the nest. We'd see a hummingbird that kept flying around our ceiling fans (there are six of them) on the back patio and landing on the pull chains. We would laugh and wonder why a bird would do that. It couldn't have been for the thrill of swinging on a chain. Turns out, it was apparently scouting out a location for where to build the nest. Slowly but surely, it gathered the nesting material and started building on this one pull chain, then connected the nest with the other pull chain on the same fan. It built what looks like a hummingbird hammock. I read that they build the nest to be elastic, so that once the eggs hatch it should stretch to accommodate everybody. The eggs take about two weeks to hatch and the birds take about a month to fledge. We can't wait for the baby hummingbirds!