Dog fight overhead and Hummingbird Heaven

Our house operates on a cistern (massive concrete water container in basement), as such our water is collected from rainfall which runs down the roof (house, woodshed, cabin and carport) into the gutters and is funnelled into the cistern to provide the house with water for daily life. 

On Wednesday I cleaned out the gutters on the wood shed and yesterday the gutters on the carport of the cabin next door, both were quite blocked with crud which would obviously have to absorb the water before allowing it to trickle through into the gutters and a decent amount of our precious water would then simply evaporate before getting to the gutter. The main house and the cabin roofs themselves are just too high for me to contend with, if we owned the home I'd bother but as its not ours I'm just not going there.

Not the worst one, but the only gutter I got a picture of.

Basking in the shade... typical men.

Wood shed is filling in.

View of our place from the cabin.

When we moved in the peaches looked like this.

Now they look like this.

Some interesting ships sail by here so I think I'll create a photo collection of them.

(Looks Titanic-ish)

Yesterday we had Eagles and Buzzards fighting over our heads. The buzzards had a significant amount of feathers missing from their backsides - the eagles were clearly winning. One older and one younger eagle (perhaps it was training day). You can see the missing plumage (lower bird) in this picture if you look closely.

They flew around very close - we'd never seen an eagle in flight within 20 feet before. Beautiful.

Second unusual ship. Reminded us of an old Japanese ship (name escapes me).

I am going to show before and after pics when I get a better shot with sunlight... supposed to rain all week but I'll watch for a moment. Meanwhile, the wood pile is stored.

All the wood is put away and there is still room for our garden tools.

The grape vine was overgrowing the upper deck in the front of the house, the landlord said we could cut it out but we felt so guilty about it that we are trying to keep them alive... Absolutely no clue if this is doable but we had to try. I know from an app that this is an invasive species so we are hoping that they will take if we keep them saturated for a few days. They are clearly not doing well right now but they appear to still be salvageable. We will see. 

Special treat. 

There are dozens of Hummingbirds around here and they love the feeders the neighbour has on the cottage. They will drink my feeder but not to the extend they do his, I'll ask him today what his secret ingredient is.