It's Wednesday in Collegeville and the living is easy

It's Wednesday in Collegeville and the living is easy after two grueling days of work - four hours on Monday and almost seven hours on Tuesday. Mrs. Sully has gone off to work with barely a comment on the fact that Mr. Sully's vacation from full time employment has begun to stretch a bit long and the balance in the checkbook has shrunk to a level perilously close to short. And all morning the pair of phoebes have been treating me to the gimlet eye between rounds of industrious labor as they catch bugs to feed their second clutch of young for the year. Work, work, work, all life is work, their frantic activity proclaims. Look at that lazy bum down there they seem to say to one another when they chance to perch for a moment at the same time. The silent pressure of their disapproval is nearly unbearable. Oh the humanity.

Thankfully the hummingbird is sitting complacently on his favorite perch merely watching over his domain for fifteen and twenty minutes at a time between short fights down to his feeders for a sip or two of nectar. And this while his mates are busily brooding eggs and feeding young in the trees around, if he has any mates for I haven't seen any females at the feeders. It's true that his lazy vigil has a deadly serious purpose. He remains, as he has since early May, ever ready to spring into action and defend his little share of the world's nectar from other male hummers, to the death or to his everlasting shame if luck or deficient will or lack of skill with his sharp beak should so ordain. He's a bad influence, that humminbird. I fill the feeders for him, and he provides a bad example for me.

Meanwhile, not to brag or anything, I picked my first tomato yesterday. The earliest tomato I've ever had. And many more are in the offing.