Too Quiet

(Why I play such sad and haunting music when I am alone and hubby is on the other side of the world is something only a well-experienced psychotherapist could explain.  I skate dangerously close to the precipice as an aging soul.)  

The photo below is a perfect example of the breathtaking beauty and strength of old trees in the West.  The air is dry and the sun is hot and wood just seems to grin and wrinkle and age in such a lovely old way.  It becomes a parchment skin that is neither fragile nor brittle.  Instead it is a thick skinned dinosaur that reminds you of its magnificence just a few decades ago.  It lies about  paths and trails daring you to stop and study true aging, to stop and see what you can learn from the patience of a dignified life.  While sometimes a cold gray color, it is not cold, but welcoming and just begging for your touch, which, of course, you must do gently before moving on down the path to a destination with a view.

Big Sky Country

Wide open spaces.  You can see for miles and miles and sometimes even to the ends of the earth.  Big sky country.  Enough piney air to breathe and enough land to get away from it all.  The wild west always lives up to your expectations.  Above is a little hike we took outside Denver, Colorado, on the second day we arrived.  We did not see much wildlife, but with such open land, the animals know how to hide when hunting season is near.  (It is getting harder to take a photo without a house in it!)

One Blog Room is Clean

I find that this blog seems to have no malware warnings when I try to open the pages where my other blog did...for a while.  I had to break the link to Kenju's blog, Imagine, and for some reason it helped.  Maybe when my head clears of code and malware I will write a true post.

Sighing

How can she be so lovely and peaceful?  How can she end the day with such grace and quiet charm?  Just last week she was angry, spewing tears everywhere and thrashing about like a 4-year-old.  I am tiptoeing about hoping she is done with her temper tantrums for this year!

Tough Love

While taking my granddaughter around the zoo the other day, I had fun watching all the wild birds.  Wild birds in large numbers hang out at the zoos since the food is so abundant...seeds and fruit leftover from cages, dropped french fries from the kids, and garbage cans full of interesting foods.  The birds are not intimidated by humans, I am guessing we are just more zoo residents to them.  I wasn't able to take the dozens of interesting behavioral photos that I would have liked to take, since my granddaughter required much of my attention.  But I did get the interaction below from a baby bird (no longer a baby!) begging for food and a mama bird telling him to fly off alright already!!  The zoo if full of food all along the sidewalks, so this fledgling was being super lazy.