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Rainy Weekend

Rain continued for the fifth day in a row. Not much fell today, and there were actually patches of blue sky this afternoon. Yesterday’s nearly quarter inch brought the June total up to over 0.8 inches, more than doubling the total for the entire month of May.

The rain after all the sunny weather has left me feeling a little less compelled to get out and take pictures, which in turn has left me with less to say for daily blog posts. There were a few things that I did want to note, however.

Salmonberries have started to ripen. Connor mentioned friends picking some earlier in the week, and I saw my first ones with color today (both at the beginning of Verstovia Trail and at Crescent Harbor).

I’ve been a little surprised at just how much water the moss on the berm seems to take up. I’ve checked a couple of different times during this wetter spell of weather, and where the moss was thicker (but still not that thick), the under layers were still quite dry.

A male Rufous Hummingbird seems to have decided to try and take possession of the two feeders Connor has been maintaining around the house. Over the past couple of days when I’ve been out in the yard I’ve heard his distinctive humming sound, and at least once I saw him appear to chase off another bird.

This morning I went up to the first viewpoint on Mt. Verstovia with a friend. I was in the lead and try to go a sustainable pace. We made it up in a little less than 30 minutes. About the same amount of time it took me with Connor and Rowan recently. That time we moved faster (while moving) but had more (and longer) pauses to catch our breath. In the more distant past I’ve found it relatively easy to get to this point in under 20 minutes at a comfortable walk, so I’ve got some conditioning work to do if I want to get back to that point.

After the trip up Verstovia, I played some ultimate at Moller Park. Early on in the game, steam started rising off the turf. The overcast hadn’t yet parted, though the lower clouds that had shrouded the slopes of all the mountains had broken up, with wisps moving through the trees up the mountainside. It lent a different sort of atmosphere to the game.

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