Back when I was trying to decide which peach varieties to plant, my friend Constance voiced her strong opinion that Babcocks were the best-and-only to strive for. She’d grown up with one in her yard and she’d never found better.

In my childhood, we’d picked Lorings on a farm, gleaning a few weeks after the pickers had gone through–and, just a few times, Babcocks as well. So it was an easy sell.

It was hard though for me to tell starting out which spot in the yard got how much sun, having never had to pay attention before, and it turns out my Babcock didn’t get the best one. But it tries. It’s fed a few birds and critters over the years but I don’t think it’s ever gotten to the point of gaining this much color to its fruit.

But it looks like this is the year we’ll finally get to taste a homegrown Babcock. Thank you grape Koolaid.

Meantime, the two peregrine eyases were banded Friday: a boy and a girl. The video artist in the group made a compilation of the various recordings involved.

And: the slider is fixed. Now the challenge is to make sure it doesn’t bounce against the left hand side because it runs so slick and so fast after years of having to put so much oomph into it to get it to move at all. Moral of the story: fix it when it’s a $400 job, not when it’s become a $1000 one.

Also, something I didn’t know and thought I’d throw out there is that a house settling after construction can skew the glass and damage the track on a slider if not attended to early on.

They told me that and I told them, Yeah, when we added on, the contractor put in one of those upper windows–and it cracked before the remodeling job was even done.

They looked at me like, Wow!

The guy replaced it.

They said, As he should.

They left and then another guy came to give an estimate on the shed and the wood replacement. Another for that will come Friday. So will the tree guy, because they have to have the branches away from the roof. Woodwork, replacing a plate glass window that cracked in a small quake, painting (we were told when it did that that to replace the window you’d have to repaint the whole house, so, well, now we have to do that anyway), then the termites, the roof, the skylight with dry rot and hey, the flooring, the driveway and the kitchen counters so they don’t fall in when we put in a stove that doesn’t have mismeasured cabinets hanging directly over the burners, right? Maybe those last three can wait?

The wood/shed guy looked at the one spot I knew about out on that side and pushed just below there at the solid-looking wall just to see.

It’s not supposed to bend inward.

Oh fun.