We went for an early (6.20am) morning round of golf on Thursday and were greeted by several hot-air balloons already up in the air over the golf-course.
It was a gorgeous day, still cool at that time with 58F, but without so much as a whiff of wind. Just perfect!

               

James managed to sweet-talk the groundskeeper into letting us tee off on the back nine, which meant we had nobody in front of us!
Now that's my kind of golfing, setting your own pace, not having to wait for people looking for balls or taking their sweet time choosing a club and deciding their strategy.
I mean .. hit the darn ball already! It's not like you're a pro and there's money on the line!
Although .. lot's of these guys bet a lot of money on their pathetic shots .. oh well.

Reason for this un-christian early start was the fact that the day was predicted to be another scorcher, like several others this week .. as in 96F on Tuesday!

                                                                        

It's even a little much for our AC, which, when the temps are that high, can only manage to make it about 10-12 degrees cooler inside but that is about it!
It's time we're moving to our new spot, which is covered for the most part by huge maple trees.

Fortunately we received great news this morning ... that move is a go! The county has approved our request of permanently parking an RV on the site!
We're tickled pink of course as we now can finally move forward to installing/extending all necessary hook-ups permanently, like electric/water and sewer, which we'll do before we move the RV to make work easier.




In the meantime, as I mentioned, temps are high which has caused most of the grass that is not being watered to turn brown by now. Wild flowers alongside the roads are pretty resilient though and are still flowering profusely ..

The clover in the field behind us is in full bloom and the owner has placed several bee-hives at the far end of it ..

I don't know why these frames were laying around like this in the picture below. I hope they weren't removed by some 'honey-robbers' but were left out for a purpose ..

We hear coyotes all the time in the evening and night and the prints below are proof we have raccoons around as well.
We've actually seen both during the daytime but they've been too fast for my camera.

This little guy (gall?) joins us every evening at happy hour, when we sit in the lounge chairs under the trees of our future site, overlooking the back meadows:

                                                

It's an Olive sided Flycatcher (I think) and they're very common around here. They're amazing bug-catchers (not just flies) and for that alone very good to have around!
One such evenings this adorable little Red Robin fledgling showed up as well ..

He came, literary, out of the wood-works, and hopped right up to our chairs as if to say 'do you know where my mommy went?'
Sure enough, not a minute later, both parents showed up, rather agitated, and started to guide it towards an area with a lot of overgrown Ivy, in which it quickly disappeared.
I presume it had only just left the nest and didn't quite know very well how to fly and where to go ..

I've also been trying to get some pictures of the quail and their chicks who've been hanging around here for a while, but every time they show up I have nothing but my phone or my reader/tablet at hand, none of which make even remotely decent pictures.
This is all I could manage:

One of these days I'll get them! Although by than the chicks are probably as big as the adults ..

By far the funniest animal-encounter this week was the following:



That's James, thinking he could out-wait and scoop-up the gopher who has been destroying the meadow for months now, and who so far has evaded every attempt to catch him.
I was watching from inside the RV, and just when I was thinking it would be really funny if the little bugger would show up out of  a hole somewhere behind him ... it actually happened!
I grabbed the camera and managed to sneak behind the gopher for this shot:

                       

It's hard to see, I know, but the gopher is that brown little thing there in the very bottom-left of the picture.
Here's a close-up:

                                             

In hindsight a video would have been better since you would see it move, but believe me it was hilarious! Of course the movie 'Caddyshack' came to mind immediately!

And so the summer is slowly moving along ... it's mostly warm, even hot, and dry with occasionally a a few cooler days in between.
They're predicting showers for Monday-morning and actually a stretch of cooler days after that, but I'll only believe it when I see it .. so much can (and does) change in a few days.

                              

For now, we're enjoying the warm evenings by having dinner outside.
A ham-and-leek quiche and a fresh-from-the-garden salad. Perfect summer fare!