Friendly Phoebe

I live in the East Bay hills. The weather here, and out to the bay itself, is pretty moderate. Few houses have air conditioning because it’s just not needed 362 days of the year. Neither my old nor new house have A/C. There are some warm days, but unless it’s a rare heat wave, the instant the sun goes down, it’s quite cold. Because it gets so cold at night, the houses stay cool all day even when it is warm out. It’s almost always comfortable here. Basically the weather is perfect almost all the time. But drive just a few miles east, on the other side of the hills, and it gets SCORCHING in the summer. Lafayette is a cute little town, and close to one of the wildlife hospitals I volunteer at (I live very close to the other one), but it gets really hot in the summer and those of us that live in the hills are spoiled and tend to get whiny when it’s too hot. Back near the end of June the Bay Area was going through a heat wave, and it was one of the very few days I regret not having A/C, even in the hills. So I decided to drive to Lafayette, where it was a good 20 degrees warmer! Why??

The owl guru had tipped me off to a potentially exciting something in Lafayette. She thought about meeting me there but then decided it was way too hot in Lafayette to leave chilly Berkeley. So I was alone. And it was hot. And the exciting something was nowhere to be found. I reported to the owl guru there wasn’t much going on except a very friendly phoebe who was practically begging me to take his photo, so she had probably made the right decision to stay home. But the phoebe sure was friendly! I tried to tell myself that was worth the drive and the intense heat, although I see phoebes all the time and they are always friendly.

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