Some Flutterbyes

Heading up for three days of dog-sitting. Son is somewhere in Australia, Daughter-in-law is working and baby grand will be in day-care. The dog needs an hour's walk and usually gets it when his son gets home, but we have volunteered for the next three days. While I love seeing family, there will be periods of exhaustion followed by boredom. So I am sending you some pictures of peace (all except for the demise of the caterpillar) from my yard as the rain moves in.

Please Do Not Poke the Bear

Mother Nature is like a sleeping bear. She hums and purrs and sometimes rolls over and kicks that old bee hive, but for the most part, she is clever and lets us do our thing.  She puts up with us and our greed and anger, both of which change the surface of this planet.  Between the wars and our incessant air, ground, and ocean pollution, she is probably very tired.

But I am sure she is also angry these days and our time is doomed.  My brother and a few of my high school friends live between those three fires in Colorado this week.  The smoke is filling the skies and the photos on Facebook are terrifying.  When I grew up there we did have a scare or two from floods that swept down the canyon from the mountains, but fires were not common.

My brother is using the air conditioning in his newly built "mansion" and they rarely use that in the dry west!  The smoke is not a problem but they have been cautioned about the dangers from particulate in the air.

Last night we got three emergency warnings on our TV about a pending storm with strong winds, medium hail, thunder, and lightning.  It never manifested itself as badly as the civil warnings cautioned, thank goodness.  But I did carefully go down to our dock and took the pictures below.  Mother Nature is both frightening and beautiful.

Pause, Take a Deep Breath...

The common saying that you are busier in retirement than when working is true. I figured out why. When working, you have scheduled downtime. When retired, it is all downtime and you fill it with projects, hobbies, social calendar stuff, volunteer things, and family meet-ups until you crash into bed at the early end of a long day.  

This morning the temperature was 69 F which is the coolest early morning we have had in some time!  I was smart enough to pause in my coffee-making and avoid the news to go outside and breathe!  We have had so much hot and humid weather that I have spent just small spurts of time outside.

I stood on the deck and looked out across "our" river and up through the tall tulip and oak trees.  The air was not cool or warm but like a friendly room.  The doves across the river were cooing peacefully; the sound of the crows was distant enough that they provided a tiny bit of percussion that aided the cicadas in keeping up their sizzle; the trees sighed softly.  The photo below shows how green we are staying despite the drier-than-usual weather.  As a balance,  it is supposed to rain all this coming week!

We are fortunate to have a cuckoo somewhere in the woods that makes a hollow call that carries from the front of the house to where I stand as quiet as a small deer.

On this Sunday morning, neighbors were still asleep or doing crossword puzzles with their coffee because no machines were cutting into the quiet.

This is the time for pollinators who help keep the world in balance.  They are everywhere showing off.

They must know how short their lives are and that there is no retirement in the future for them!  Their rhythmic history helps mankind accept moving forward and making our history.  I am hoping your summer is not hot and steamy but quiet and lovely.  (If you are in winter, I somewhat envy you.)

The Flickering Short Life of Genius

I had some down time today and some brilliant perspectives that I thought I could share about new views as I age, when I realized I could not connect to the Internet on this laptop. I had to wait until my oldest grandson came home from his job and he did the exact same data entry I had been doing on my laptop, but it worked for him and now I have access to the net! Of course, my brilliant ideas have have evaporated into the "netsphere" and I cannot remember what I was ruminating upon! 

I am now up in the city grand-sitting teenagers, which in actuality means housesitting while they come and go with jobs, activities, daters, and friend meet-ups. I have tried to see if they want to work in some "fun stuff" but when you are already having fun, you do not add more "fun" to the load. They are beautiful people, polite and conscientious, but our lifestyles are vastly different. My husband is awaiting knee surgery so we are avoiding bicycling, hiking, etc.  

We did return a few weeks ago from a vacation with the whole family where we did bike several miles each day and that seems to have aggravated the knee even more!   I am now making my husband behave.

The family dog and I ponder how quiet this old house is with hubby napping and the teenagers out and about.  The dog barks at the rare postman or next door dog.  The plumbing creaks and the extra quiet dishwasher sighs.  It is too hot outside except for a quick walk of the tiny dog.  We are near a hospital and I can hear the ambulance which cuts the siren the minute it leaves the highway and heads into the suburbs.  Hubby feels guilty at this wasted time but I do not care how little time I have left because I have no control over the length.

My children are off for a long weekend in Los Vegas for a 50th birthday party for a friend.  This would have been out of our league when we were 50.  Hubby's parents were too old to take care of our young people and my mother hated taking care of her grandchildren and lived many states away.  Hate is too harsh a word, but she make it clear it was burden to cook and clean for them when I sent them out one time for a week while Hubby and I were in Egypt.  He was working and I was having fun exploring the city of Port Said.

Despite Hubby's dementia we have been doing quite a bit of travel to see relatives or vacation with the children and I am blest for that, but tired and ready to get back to a routine, ready to find time to breathe, meditate and contemplate...and perhaps blog again.  Sorry this was posted to the wrong blog ...!

Happy Invasion

There was a busyness outside my windows in the early morning.   I saw shadows darting.

The sky was filled with fat-breasted red robins. They were chattering with the sound of small clinking chains as they flew from tall tree to tall tree making dark and speedy silhouettes against the winter's gray sky.  Too many to count but in the dozens, arriving with noisy fanfare.  They sounded like teenagers on spring break.  The skies, the trees, all was theirs.  It was as if they had been released from boarding school.

They flew to my holly trees that were covered in winter-ripe berries.  I was excited to maybe get a good photo or three.  I had been waiting for the arrival of the Cedar Waxwings, more exotic and rare, but the happy (delirious?) red-breasted robins would have to do.

They moved from the back yard with its shorter hollies to the front yard with the one tall 20-foot tree covered in many berries.  I decided to sneak out the door to the porch steps for clearer photos rather than those above taken from the windows.  I moved with the stealth of a stalking house cat, but in ten seconds they got very quiet.  The silence was surprising, and then within the vacuum of no sound, I heard the soft air movement from many wings flying away all in the same instant to the trees on the other side of the ravine, three seconds and they were far away.

I had startled them so I went back to my backyard windows to watch the feeder activity.  I saw this in our winter trees. HIs steely eyes on the feeders.  Maybe it wasn't me after all.

Sometimes You Get What You Want (for a moment)

We had been under a mild drought for almost two years when suddenly this fall the skies opened up and we were all caught up in less than a month.

We also have not had any real snow for maybe 6 or 7 years.  We finally got snow earlier this week.  It was about 3/4 of an inch, but we were thrilled.  And to the north of us, kids got to go sledding and build snowmen.  The temperatures were in the low 30s and high 20s Fahrenheit, and I in my elder years could not appreciate that!  I feel it deep in my bones and do not rush outside to take photos like I used to.  (Sadly for me.)  These bird photos are taken through the windows of my house over the last week or so.  The poor Bald Eagle was resting on the osprey nest during a lengthy rain.

Things are winding down as naturally they should both with my stamina and with winter cold.   The rest of the week we will be back to the 50s and 60s...climate change be damned.  But with more rain as well.  

Mine! Mine! Mine!

If you have had young ones in your life a decade ago, the title above will be recognized from a familiar animated movie. I saw outside my window above the dining room table a dozen or so white flags swooping and diving and gliding. They were our local seagulls.

It is not unusual to see two or three flying about 20 feet or more over the river looking for food, but these numbers were noticeable, and the activity was aggressive.

I picked up the binoculars that we left nearby and realized that along with more than a dozen gulls in the gray sky above, there were just a few fewer cormorants floating just below the surface of the water with their long necks and deep blue eyes.  One or two would dive below the surface and one or two would emerge wet and wiggly.

The cormorants were stirring up the fish to the surface as they went after those that dove below.  The gulls then had a nice feast from those that cormorants missed in eating.  Our river is more shallow than the main part and the little fish can easily be pinned against the bottom.

Two days later after our "big" snowfall of one inch about 100(!) cormorants flew into our part of the river, stayed less than an hour and were followed by gulls.  Alas, I did not get that photo!