my kind of hummer

We're not talking those oversized suv type things here.  This is a real hummer, the kind nature makes:

And yes, it is a real photo, of a real bird, which I took last week in the real Mission San Juan de Capistrano, with my old as the hills Canon point and shoot.  For anyone who might not know, that is a bird of paradise he is eating from, which is a really awesome kind of flower that I don't think can survive our weather here on the east coast.  I wish it could, though, and if our climate change continues to make NJ feel more and more like California, I might just try planting some in my yard and see what happens.

We do have hummers here, in the right season, which is certainly not February.  Usually people put out fancy hummer feeders, which one fills with sugar water, colored red, since bright colors seem to attract the little guys.

I'm also attracted to bright colors, so I understand how they feel about that.   

rainbows 'r us

One morning this week I arrived at the train station to find people actually smiling.  Never having seen such a phenomenon, I asked around as to the cause, and found this hanging overhead:

Granted, they are not the best photos I've ever taken, and the color seems a bit less intense than the real thing, but then, it's a phone, not a camera, and I was trying to catch it before it faded, and the train was about to pull in and block my view entirely....well.  The long and the short of it is, this was all one rainbow, a full horizon to horizon arch in much more glorious color than you can see in the photos.  I think this is the only place I've ever seen a full arch, really - you see a lot of partial rainbows, like this one from a November day in LA that went from Pasadena on up, but stopped somewhere in the sky:

Sometimes we get full arches over the ocean, and once there was a circular rainbow, also over the ocean, for which I of course did not have a camera handy.  Pretty amazing, someone bigger than any of us is playing with paintbrushes up there.