Life on the High Plains

The best thing about spring is the mornings when you can hear the birds tweeting and chirping and preparing for their day. This year is especially exciting because we finally have a nesting pair of falcons on the raptor roost we put up in 2019.  They work hard at building their nest and then we have 60 mph winds that blow it all away, but fortunately they keep coming back to try again.  Tomorrow we're under a winter storm warning here in Southern Colorado. We don't want to disturb them so these shots are taken at quite a distance away.  Our skies are also filled with smoke because of the fires to our south in New Mexico.  We need rain in the southwest! We've had these beauties show up for the last couple summers. Who says hummingbird feeders are only for hummingbirds? Lots of robins in the yard too. I don't know much about birds so I can't tell you what they are.  We think the yellow ones are some type of oriole. It's always great when the hummingbirds find our ...

 I'm going to wrap up the European vacation posts with my two favorite stops in Budapest--the Dohany Street Synagogue and St. Stephen's Basilica. First a little story that filled my heart with love.  We were on our way to the Dohany Street Synagogue when we jaywalked across this street.  The little old lady in the red jacket was stuck on the center median.  Irv say he'd catch up with us and when I turned around he was helping her safely across the street.  Be still my heart. So I had watched a documentary a few years ago (can't remember what it was called) that was about the Budapest ghetto, this Synagogue, and the history of the holocaust in Hungary.  The synagogue was built between 1854 and 1859 so it's not even all that old (by European standards anyway).   You might be thinking it looks like architecture from Northern Africa or medieval Spain and that it resembles a mosque.  The architect chose to  design it based on buildings that r...

When morning arrived in Budapest we loaded onto a bus for a panoramic tour of of the city. Let me just say that I hate bus tours that just drive through the city, but I realize that Budapest is a big city and it's impossible to do a walking tour of all the beautiful sites.   We saw many beautiful buildings and statues and the tour guide did his best to tell us what they were.  He was an older Hungarian man who has been doing these tours for years and he was full of misogynistic jokes aimed at women which quite frankly turned me off and I pretty much stopped listening to him.  When are older men going to get the hint that it's not okay to do this things? I did take note of things around the city that I wanted to go back to visit when we had free time in the afternoon. We were able to get off the bus and have a couple hours to ourselves when we arrived at the Buda Palace.  Straight ahead was the Matthias Church. It has a very beautiful tile roof.  That's a br...