End of June in Photos

The end of the school year is so hectic for us in the office as well as in the classrooms.  The teachers have their end-of-year checklist in addition to trying to maintain order when the students have had enough of school already.  This makes for testy times all around.  We have some, what I call "frequent flyers" that wind up in the office after pushing their teacher to their limit of patience.  So we get extra discipline issues, frazzled teachers and to top off our end-of-year checklist of things that have to get done, there are the class parties and picnics, and staff kickball game, and field day which account for parents in and out of the building, all funneling through the office.  

We do usually get little acknowledgements from some of the students, particularly our 5th graders who are leaving the school, like bakery treats, notepads, travel cups and such.  This year one mom brought us this "Survival Kit" just for the office staff.  

Along with a lovely written thank you note, it contained the "recipe" for this bowl of goodies.  Mints to keep our cool, aspirin for headaches, band-aids for paper cuts, circus animal crackers for minding the 3-ring circus, tissues for good-by tears, etc.  

And my indulgence this time of year - Ranier cherries.

I also treated myself to an end-of-year gift - KOH-I-NOOR Magic Colored Pencils.  The leads are mixed and the pencils are triangular.  Now I just have to figure out how to sharpen them.

We had to shut down the bluebird box in the garden because some House Sparrows invaded the territory and were fighting with the blues.  House Sparrows will kill Bluebirds over nesting space.  That is why we chose to shut down that box.  But HWNSNBP had another box in the garage and we had a pole very near to the house that used to have a very elaborate bird feeder that HWNSNBP made on it.  Sadly, the squirrels had decided to chew that feeder up but we never removed the pole so he put the new box on it.  Within a few days there was interest and now there are 4 eggs in there.  

This is Papa Blue keeping an eye on the box while Mama Blue incubates the eggs.  

At the condo some of our neighbors have a hummingbird feeder that is pretty active at dawn and dusk.  I doubt that I'll be getting any morning pictures, but I was able to snap some one evening. I have not truly identified what kind they are so I won't add that here.  They are very fast and the coloring is very similar for a couple of species.  

Sunset in the back.......

later a moonrise over the water (sans tripod).......

And then in the back again from another angle.

And we got to spend some time with the little guy.  Here Papa is showing him the picture he took of what he found inside the nest box they have in their yard.  It appears to be baby birds, but we're not sure what kind.