Tom said it rained really hard for about 5 minutes at 4 AM and asked if it woke me up. Nope. Never heard a thing and I slept with the fan on low, too. I sleep with it on low when I’m sleeping more during the dark hours and on medium when I’m sleeping more when it’s light. This is to help drown out the prairie dog’s squeaks.

I see a lot more roadrunners making runs for prairie dogs lately, but I only saw one get caught once and that was last year, I think.

That same baby black snake came to see us yesterday while we were watering (one of the bougies has started to bloom!). This is the one that jumped up on the steps with Tom. I misunderstood him about that, too. It didn’t jump up on the bottom step from underneath, it jumped from the side up onto the top step as he stepped onto the top step, then it slithered on down the steps. It’s a good thing these kinds of snakes, which I think are king snakes, are harmless because it was right by his foot. When we were watering, we were only a couple of feet away from it. It came towards us, then went into a small bush. I was standing really close to the bush trying to see it when it came out, froze a minute when it realized I was so close, then slithered into a bigger bush. From there it peered out at us. I was so close I could see the fork in its tongue. Then it left the bush and disappeared, probably down a hole.

The regular phone is now disconnected. We’re now strictly cellular. We’ve each got about 180 minutes left on our phones which doesn’t expire till mid-July, so we have no phone expenses to pay till then.