musings

ice ice, baby

2012-02-14T20:02:00.001-05:00

I rambled in a new set of woods today. The first part involved visiting the local shrine to the powers that be.

an army of icicles.

daggers threatening hordes of innocent bubblies.

innocent bubblies, huddled in terror.

From here, the trail ascended a series of switchbacks – actually, an overlapping series of switchbacks. One was For the Whole Family – an old logging road. The other darted stealthily alongside it. I rambled back and forth between the two, going wherever the fun was.

Such as occasional moss-covered outcroppings, dripping in icicles.

I had the Nikon with me. Today, that meant Fun with Focus:

Ze Icicles.

Ze Rock Wall Behind Ze Icicles. Actually, I got to play with post-processing as well on these two, to get them to match, as one started out all blue. I typically think of that as cheating, but sometimes it really does help get the picture to look more like what I actually saw, when I saw it. Anyhoo. Back to the adventure.

some icicles clung to the rocks, forming flying buttresses.

you know me, can’t resist a closeup.

a lot of these shots ended up looking like x-rays.

see the moss?

whoa.

and now, for the surface texture at the top of the waterfalls causing all these icicles:

whew.

the trail turned to a river of ice

more like a congealed lava flow.

sentinels watched.

I didn’t think they’d catch me, given their feet had frozen into a puddle.

my eventual reward?

a dancing goddess, practicing her tango moves.

on the use of shells in an emergency

2012-02-13T09:36:00.001-05:00

The 80mm macro lens. Mmmmmm mmmm good.

Yesterday: No Photographs, which Pains my Soul. (Hence, this morning’s indulgence in the 80mm lens before I go about my bidness.) I did, however, go for a splendid run in 20 degree sunshine.

Today: Reiki Reiki Reiki, Gym, Gym, Gym.

Can’t complain.

stream ice, the perseverance of beech, and ibuprofen

2012-02-11T20:18:00.001-05:00

Returning to the scene of the crime, this time with the Nikon. Few things are as tempting as a stream loaded with ice: it forms around any obstruction in the water: twigs, the texture of a rock, you name it.

Filigreed layers form; the water rushes on heedlessly.

The resulting shapes are beyond anything I can invent.

I finally pried myself loose from the stream and headed up into the meadows.

The clouds rolled in gradually from the west. We’re heading into a cold snap. Bring it: it’s time.

Beech stump sprouts: “Oh yeah? Sez who?”

One last pass at the stream.

A fine day.

Oh, and Day Two of the Big Important Conditioning Project! That’s right, my hiking buddy who shall remain nameless but whose initials are MCD, is up for the adventure: we’re planning a Presidential Traverse. Psych! I walked a couple of miles today on the above meanderings, and that was after I went to the gym for an hour (cardio on the stationary bike, weights). Tomorrow’s run is only like, five miles or something. My feet ache, ache, ache. Am I due for new orthotics, or am I due to not use them any more? Probably the former, as well as some sort of foot-strengthening exercises. Any minute now I’ll spring Best Beloved from his computer and make him give me a foot rub.

Yep, just another day in paradise.

I’ve been here all along, I swear.

2012-02-10T20:07:00.001-05:00

I just discovered that my Facebook status updates haven’t been showing up in many of my friends’ newsfeeds – thank you, Facebook – which means that lately, as far as Facebook is concerned, I’ve been standing in the corner, talking to myself. Don’t mind me, I’ll be the one in the corner, gesticulating to a house plant. Yes, Facebook friends, I’ve been here. Click on “older post” at the bottom and I promise, you’ll see I’m alive and well. Up to my usual.

I took myself for the inaugural hike of the season. Well, what it looked like was just a 1.6 mile walk to a nearby stream. But really, it was the inaugural hike, Day One of The Training and Conditioning Program. I took my old buddy, the Lumix, with me. Awwww! The Lumix! The Lumix is the most freaking awesome little camera.

First, the setting. The light was sorta weak so I punched it up a little afterwards. See the blobs of ice in the stream, center of the picture?

Let’s sneak up on them. I know, I know, it’s blurry. Blurry, but cute. Must show the cuteness.

I played with shutter speed.

Note to self: this is 1/60. The next series are all from the same exact spot, just zoomed in. Not bad for a point-and-shoot – I’ll have to bring the Nikon next.

Well, that was fun. This stream isn’t marked on the google borg. It’s off the radar: a secret stream, known only to the few who know enough to brave the “no trespassing sign” that guards the meadow it burbles through. In truth, the owners groom a nordic ski trail here throughout the meadows, that the whole neighborhood uses. But “whole neighborhood” around here is not a lot of people. I could see, by the tracks in the snow, that one other person had been out since the snow melted too much of the ski tracks for them to be of much use, but other than that mysterious soul mate, I’ve been the only human out here for a while. A little touch of wilderness, hiding right here in plain sight. Yep, that’s me.

I love living here.

On my way home, I decided to inspect the largest of the beaver-chewed stumps in the pond.

They’re all resting in their lodge. A trapper was supposed to come and (gulp) take a few (not all!) but I don’t think he ever came…

The sheet of ice forming on the tributary that was forming yesterday? It melted some today…

Oh, I said this was an inaugural hike. (Still here?) Last night I decided to plan a hike for some time in July. I’m going to do the Presidential Traverse in the Whites. I’ve done it a couple of times, but not lately. I totally need to get in shape for it. This is what’s different about being My Current Age (6, on the inside, if you must know, but somewhat older on “the real” calendar).

I have to train for this. I’m not worried about my cardiovascular ability – bring it on. It’s more the bottoms of my feet – all the little muscles that are getting weaker because I’ve been wearing OTC orthotics (because of a near-miss encounter with plantar fasciitis last summer). My achilles tendons tend to be a little grumpy. I need to literally build muscle in my legs, AND stretch more. All while training for a half marathon in mid-May. My most recent run, this past weekend, was supposed to be 8.5 miles but I pushed it (not on purpose) to 9, and I felt it, both during, and the next day. The extra half-mile wasn’t the problem – slight dehydration was. I have to get back in the above-6-miles routine: bring Cliff Blok Shots, bring water with electrolytes, even though it’s in the 30’s and I’m not aware of thirst.

So anyway. That’s my plan. And since I just announced it here, that means I actually have to do it. Damn readers.

learning to see again; also, moon rainbows

2012-02-08T20:17:00.001-05:00

Just another day in paradise. There’s not a lot of color to behold, but there’s plenty to see.

Today’s adventure in the woods comes to you courtesy of the new Nikon. How to compose shots is an entirely new game with this camera. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Oooh, look! A blonde!

The beech leaves are getting pretty pale – a far cry from their recent coppery sheen. Soon, they’ll be thinking about falling off and making way for spring’s crop.

Fun with focusing.

OK, enough playing with aperture settings. Move on.

This choke cherry has had several years in which many buds open only to immediately start next year’s bud.

But this past year it finally got into the swing of things.

And then I got distracted by ice puddles in the grass.

Two points if you spot the birch seeds. One point for every ash seed.

Man, I’m loving the patterns!

Here’s an old friend:

Thimbleweed – tall anemone. Its brains long ago exploded and all we’re left with is fuzzy fluff.

Witch hazel apparently has NOTHING to report. Aren’t they supposed to be blooming this time of year? Or something? I forget. They do something weird, off-cycle from everyone else. I believe last milestone was in October, and I missed it then, too. Hm.

The brook’s freezing up. This is downstream.

And upstream.

Down by the mail box, next to the baffle in the culvert that aims to limit the beavers’ concupiscence. Points for a long word! Actually, that’s not quite the right word, but we’ll let it stand for now.

Cattail, of course.

Remember this? Sensitive fern’s spore stalk.

AND NOW!!! THIS is a moonspot, much like a sun spot. It’s a section of moon rainbow. The full moon is off-camera, to the left.

focusing; the Super Bowl; I am too a stud.

2012-02-04T17:58:00.001-05:00

A year and a half ago, in August, Kevin gave me the Panasonic Lumix – a fit-in-your-pocket point-and-shoot – and I fell in love with photographing the natural world. The following spring, as I started watching the wildflowers wake up, my thirst to get to know dave (our 10-acre property in southern Vermont) only got stronger.

This time of year is a bitch, because while there is certainly plenty to see and document, it’s harder for me to get it done. The biggest obstacle is the temperature: the Lumix doesn’t like the cold, and neither do my fingers. (I’m a gal who runs cold: I have, literally, begun going into hypethermia while my sister and sister-in-law have each been as happy as chili peppers in the sunshine.)

But ahhh…today was in the mid-30’s, with sun. That’s good enough. I played with the new Nikon, my first SLR. I am learning-by-doing here: I vaguely remember something about f-stops from my brief relationship in college with a guy who was taking a photography class at the time. But really, I don’t know squat about it. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO setting – I have a tenuous grasp on what each is, but not a lot of experience monkeying around and aiming for specific effects. Plus, the Nikon does a bunch of stuff I really don’t know about. Meter balancing, anyone? Exposure bias? Uhhhhhh….

At any rate, one day at a time. Today was mostly about enjoying the sun, visiting some friends I hadn’t visited in a few months out in the field, and enjoying the process itself. I’m sparing you a lot of shots that are all similar to each other, with only one variable at a time changing (point of focus, f-stop, shutter speed…)

Today’s particular bliss? The moment of “yes! this!” when I get just the part I want, into focus. (No can do with the Lumix.)

Dried up ferns in the field…

…versus the thawed-refrozen snow itself.

Happy sigh.

Check out how a spruce cone arranges its scales – like the flower mandalas I used to draw as a kid.

I can’t quite tell if the resulting quality is quite as good as the sheer exhilaration I feel when I’m taking them. This one sort of gets at it.

In other news, I grilled Kevin all about football this morning. We’re going to a Super Bowl party tomorrow; the instructions are to root for the Patriots. Apparently, if Kevin (who grew up rooting for the Giants, but who subsequently became a Pats fan at BU) has been informed that if he repents, he will be accepted. I trained my brain a long time ago to literally not hear sports broadcasts. Well, let me clarify: I hear that there is sound coming from the speakers, but my brain does not process it as language I understand. My default policy is to root for the Steelers, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good here.

So I was grilling him on the current and recent status of the Patriots and the Giants: I don’t want to completely dissociate tomorrow. The overall impression I got was that the Giants, if they win, will have been able to do so because a) this one Pats tight end is maybe not going to be quite as fast and forceful as he usually is, because he’s got a sprained ankle (I can relate) and b) they specialize in knocking their opponents just a little off their game. Kevin has a gift for sports – his whole family basically grew up playing street hockey, baseball, soccer, you name it and they’re all really…amazing in a way I would not have been able to appreciate when I was growing up, but which I certainly do now.

In other words, he made it all sound pretty interesting. I’m looking forward to the game, tomorrow.

But, like Linus, I need my security blanket. I’m not allowed to bring a book to a party any more than my siblings and I were when we were little and getting dragged off to parties with my parents’ friends.

But I can bring a camera.

And, just because I don’t “get” team sports, that doesn’t mean I don’t get the joys of being an athlete: I’ve got an 8.5 mile run in the morning.

I’ll take what I can get

2012-02-03T22:17:00.001-05:00

Our food coop has a great little plant section where you can buy all manner of impossibly lovely things, from cut flowers to cacti. Today, while I was running around doing my member hours, I stumbled across two huge potted plants – I believe lavender – that were just starting to come into bloom. Kevin and I had a hot date scheduled for later – we were planning on meeting in town to catch a movie – so I called him up, quick like a bunny: “SWEETIE. BRING THE CAMERA.”

Ta dah! My first ever indoor plant shot! How…random! And…how blurry. Regardless, this compares nicely to a whole planting of lavender I made out with back in California a few weeks ago:

From the first day I played with my new SLR.

That was a fun day – we were exploring Soka University, in Aliso Viejo. Did I ever post these shots? I don’t think so. It’s a beautiful campus:

Even Gandhi thinks so.

There was sun today, ladies and gents. Which naturally leads me to look forward to my next long run – 8.5 miles this weekend. Let’s check the weather forecast, shall we?

WTF? The folks at weather dot com must be racking their brains thinking up ways to make their website more useful. And this, apparently, is what they’ve come up with. There are times when “value-added” gets into “over-kill”.

I’ll shut up now. Good night.

If we’re going to live in Vermont, could we at least get some snow?

2012-02-02T20:12:00.001-05:00

Deep fluffy snow under bright blue skies? Four feet of silky soft powder, which is nature’s way of saying “come, play!” Oh, to be able to explore the woods, listening to the silence of a winter wonderland – perhaps the mutterings of the chickadees as accompaniment.

Today was gray, the sky flat and dull.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh.

The Nikon – focal length 55 mm, whatever that means.

The Lumix – focal length 4 mm. I think that speaks to the zoom zoom.

I stayed home from work today, as I’ve been exposed to two people with wretched colds and this morning it felt like both of them had taken up residence in my torso. Buh-leeeeeggggghhhhhh. Some coughing and sneezing ensued, but I think I may have nipped it in the bud. Just in case, I procured some 70% and 85% organic dark chocolate, cause, uh, the anti-oxidants are um, yeah, good at warding off colds. Or something.

C’mon, mother nature, pony up some sweetness, pretty please?

To conclude, some T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”

“In the spring, the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang. In the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed. In the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory. And in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.”

dana hijacked me again

2012-02-01T21:49:00.001-05:00

Remember my brother, the animal control officer? He’s hijacked this blog a coupla times before, once when he issued a Notice of Violation to a red tail hawk and another time that involved a lot of body fluids, a crackhead, and a bar of soap. Well, it’s time for another visit from Our Hero. Without further ado…

*****

I was minding my own business driving around when my phone rang, and I recognized the number, it was 5-0. And I was just about to take a long walk on the beach, too. Fuck.

So anyways, they said I had to meet them under the bridge between the beach and the town, and impound a dog so they can take his owner to jail. So I show up, and I see a cruiser parked under the bridge with its lights on and a pile of stuff on the sidewalk. I get out of my truck and I don¹t recognize the cops, (it turns out they are switching shifts or some other shit and they don¹t normally work that area.)

They are busy fooling with radios and clip boards and whatever they do, so I walk over to the pile of paper and plastic bags and stuff and there is a frigging ginormous pitbull leashed to the crash bar up front. My boy!

Me: Hey, Thor!

Thor: (was sleeping on the curb, slowly gets up, shakes his sleep off, sticks out his tongue and wags his tail.)

Cops: How did you know his name?

Me: Is that Phil in your car?

Cops: (A little incredulously) Yeah! He was passed out on the sidewalk, we don¹t know who the fuck he is.

Me: Can I talk to him for a quick sec?

Cops: Sure! (They open the door.)

Me: Hey, Phil, it¹s me, Dana, Animal Control again! I¹m taking Thor with me, he¹ll be fine, just come up and get him when you get out!

Phil: igjpjg fopgjp gj pgjfs

Me: I¹ll give my card to these guys to put in your shit so when you get out you have my number, okay?!

Phil: flih dsfihr5 lhfs

Cops: Holy fuck, how do you know this guy?

Me: My third, my partners have a couple each though. What¹s his charge?

Cops: He¹s got warrants for public intoxication, illegal camping, shoplifting, defrauding an innkeeper, resisting arrest, trespassing, simple assault, possession of less than an ounce, possession of paraphernalia, possession of stolen property, and harboring an unlicensed dog.

Me: The dog¹s current.

Cops: (Pause.) He¹ll be out tomorrow.

Phil: fsh5ja pif 9jfl

I let Thor ride shotgun, he¹s the balls. I think it runs in the family though, I was feeding him treats while we were driving around but he was more interested in licking the bottle of hand sanitizer in the center console.

and…she’s back.

2012-01-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

Well, this is a first. This post comes to you from my shiny new iPad. To back up a minute, after ten days on Kauai, we flew to Honolulu for a couple of days. I had visited the Big Island and Oahu for a week apiece in '99, but Kevin had never been to Hawaii at all, and he wanted to see the Pearl Harbor Memorial. So off we went.

One of the stranger and sweeter aspects of this particular visit was noticing how many visitors were Japanese. I just wanted to hug everyone. It’s a place that inspires reverence – not necessarily the same flavor of reverence as the innards of a flower inspire in me, but reverence none the less.

We stayed in a three-star hotel in Waikiki. If you have never been to Waikiki before, it is a major, major shopping emporium. In fact, from what I can tell, the whole city is a shopping emporium. (But what do I know? We live in Vermont.)

Best part of the hotel? The electronic toilet. It was great! It had buttons for washing AND drying your tender bits. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how it worked. I couldn't even figure out how to get it to stop beeping a happy little chirrup every time I either sat down, or got up. Quite disconcerting. I mean, I so get how someone got the idea for a hands-free bidet (think of the uninterrupted reading possibilities!), but what purpose could that little beeping serve? Baffling.

We also had an epic adventure finding the Niishodo candy factory, on an errand for a friend who used to live in Honolulu. Oh, the fun I had being excited taking pictures in the sales room while all around me, folks in the know laughed at me.

The things you can do with rice flour: unbelievable. Also, just a tip, world travelers: a box of these spongy little delights does not fare as well in checked luggage as you might hope.

Anyway. Where was I. Shopping emporium. There was an Apple store. One thing led to another. Did you know that Apple Store employees walk around with iPhones on lanyards around their necks, and they can process your purchase, down to swiping your credit card, using said iPhone? Not a cash register to be seen. Waaagggghhhh. Please bear in mind: we do not have smart phones – we’re a little behind the curve here. So, when the dude in the store showed us how you could use an iPad as a GPS/navigation device, and explained how you could get a simian card (simian? perhaps he said SIM) that would enable you to access the interwebs from other countries…I’m glad the device is drool-resistant, let’s just put it that way. No regrets thus far.

Then what? We took the red-eye to San Francisco. I puked upon arrival. Note to self. Red-eyes are a little beyond me at this point. We breakfasted with a dear friend, who kindly let us nap, as neither of us had gotten much rest on the flight.

And then we headed down the peninsula towards LA. Check out our wheels:

Turns out that’s what you get when you get a one-way rental car. A sweet, sweet, minivan.

Here’s Big Sur. Turns out there is a place along here somewhere that served for the natives of this region, what that spot on the western side of Kauai served as for the folks there: the jumping off point for spirits to enter the next world. This makes eminently good sense to me.

We did the whole 17-mile drive around Carmel. Full of slurpy goodness.

And, further south, we stumbled across a simply magical place I'd been to before with family – Nepenthe, a restaurant right off PCH.

Around here is when we learned that there had been a landslide, and the rest of the Pacific Coast Highway was closed. We backtracked and cut inland, arriving that evening at the house of...my aunt Jen! Yay!

Put me up as a houseguest and this is your reward. That’s Morro Rock in the background, over my left shoulder. I believe it’s the plug of a dormant volcano. What I don’t know is if it’s where it always used to be, or if was blown sky-high and that’s where it landed.

The day after that, more driving south, and more time with family. Double yay!

Being a tree-hugger apparently runs in the family. That’s my cousin and his three “…AND A HALF!” year old daughter.

And the day after this? We flew home. I spent a couple of days unpacking, dealing with the piled-up mail, and adjusting myself to the cold…gray…bland…Vermont…winter. Hopefully we’ll get some serious snow at some point, and I can re-adjust to the whole New England thing again.

Oh right – like getting up early to go to work. Good night, world!

kauai: is there such a thing as too much of a good thing?

2012-01-22T04:14:00.001-05:00

Greetings, world! Much catching up to do. We have left Kauai – we are now in the surreal shopping mecca that is Waikiki, Honolulu. We have a red-eye to San Francisco tomorrow night.

Trying to write a coherent post about our time on Kauai would be difficult. Two words apply: sensory overload. On one of our last days, we were hanging out on a lava outcrop at the beach, watching the waves thunder in, and my inner Park Ranger kicked in, so we warned a bunch of people off the rocks who did not realize the danger they would be in. We got to talking with a woman from Chicago about her time on Kauai, and she said she felt wasted – she couldn’t keep track of everything she had done, or what she did, when. We felt the same way.

We spent our last couple of days on Kauai hanging out on the North Shore, in and around Kilauea and Hanalei. We hung out at possibly the loveliest beach either of us had ever been to: Ke’e Beach, the end of the road, where the trail along the Na Pali coast starts.

As usual, we were warned about not swimming. Actually, that’s just the stash of signs the life guards use as conditions warrant. In our case, we were lucky: the seas were calm…

…meaning the coral reefs were doing their job, protects a swimming area from breaking waves. Kevin activated his inner hippopotamus, and bobbed up and down contentedly in the water, while I played with the Nikon and lusted over the trees fringing the beach. (At this point, Kevin would like to point out that he has killed fewer people than your average hippo.)

That’s the life guard station. Yeah, those roots….mmmm….

Trunk of the tripod tree. (My name for it. In a minute you’ll see why.)

Beetle calligraphy.

I also stalked a rooster on the make through people’s abandoned towels and beach paraphernalia. Kauai is positively infested with wild chickens – liberated from their coops by a hurricane some years ago, they’ve never looked back. Kevin and I got into a running joke over it, exclaiming every time we encountered one in, say, a grocery store’s parking lot, “Oh hey! Look! A rooster! Wow!” Kevin is convinced there are really only two or three of them, who just move around a lot.

View of the Na Pali coast from about a half mile up the trail. The Kalalau Valley is some 10.5 miles in from here – that’s the one we hiked up to the headwall from the interior of the island at Waimea Canyon, several days ago. Feels like ages ago.

Kevin commandeered the Lumix, meaning that there now exist photographs of yours truly using the Nikon.

In our waning hours on Kauai, we also revisited Secret Beach. It’s flanked on one side by the Kilauea lighthouse, and on the other by Ben Stiller’s house. Ben: I’d love to housesit. Really. It would be no trouble.

We dared walk right along the water’s edge, and actually had a startling moment when a wave came out of nowhere and soaked me up to my knees. They reallllly aren’t kidding when they tell you to watch it in these waters. More experienced souls were out surfing and I amused myself filming them, but I can’t post any of those videos here because I am so astonished by their skill that many, many bad words came out of my mouth.

Oh, here’s one of those tripod trees I mentioned earlier.

As for plant life? Completely ludicrous.

Today, we visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial, and tomorrow we’re heading up to Oahu’s north shore. And then, the aforementioned red eye to SFO.

wreaking havoc on the botanical garden

2012-01-17T04:04:00.001-05:00

I’m getting used to the Nikon.

I started today – at the botanical garden, as promised – with the 85mm lens (the macro), but conditions were too windy. I couldn’t get anything in focus for long enough, even on auto. It would have even challenged the Lumix. So I swapped out for the 18-55mm lens and tried to content myself with bigger picture stuff.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Nearby was the blossom of the rare Twizzlestick. Or something. I am not even attempting to learn anybody’s name – let’s see if I can just not pass out from the variety.

This would be considered in scandalous taste back where I come from. So much lushness, you can afford to make holes in your leaves? *!*

Ah! Familiar territory. Fern spores. Some were round, as above.

While others looked like donuts. We thought the non-donut ones looked like those apocryphal LSD tabs we were warned about in grade school – those cute little candy dots! – but as we are both children of sunshine and utterly innocent, we weren’t sure.

Said spores. (This is one of the few 85mm shots. Notice how relatively little of the overall scene is in focus? This is the blessing, and the curse, of the 85mm.)

A gratuitous shout-out to the color. This is un-retouched. Yes, it’s not in focus. Grrr.

Speaking of gratuitous, and speaking of gorgeous, this is the rainbow Eucalyptus. Does it come in wallpaper? Can I live in this house? This may be its actual name – I was chatting with another photographer about it. Deepest layer down = the light green.

Plumeria! Just coming into blossom.

Wind-fallen.

Plumeria tree. Never would have guessed. I guess I’ve seen them in Lamu (off the coast of Kenya) in blossom…with full leaves. When this party gets rolling it’s probably quite something.

And for the day’s mind-blowing, staghorn fern. “Not a true fern, I think” according to a park volunteer.

Little. (These baby, and others its size, were tucked inconspicuously just off the trail – turns out they’d established themselves all by themselves. Go, team, go!)

Bigger. (Same as above – self-started.)

They get to crazy sizes. Those leaves cup falling whatnot and use it as soil. Can you imagine the fun of getting to know one of these day in, day out? The one above and the next one were established by the gardeners: set up, and tied to the tree with either plastic or twine. They’re epiphytes – they don’t harm the tree. I have no idea if they are native or introduced. Hm.

So there you have it: Kauai. Crazy.

Tomorrow: a kayaking trip up the Wailua River.

this place is kicking my butt

2012-01-16T02:34:00.001-05:00

Honestly, I thought – after a solid two years of sabbatical in which I did, no kidding, nothing I didn’t want to do all day every day, with only the wee distraction of a part-time job for the the past few months – that I had the whole kick-back-and-relax thing down cold.

Fool.

What do I know of chilling out? I am a mere amateur.

How long do you think Kev and I watched the surf pounding the shore yesterday? Psshhh, I dunno. An hour, according to the time stamp on the photos. We were sitting on a lava promontory on Secret Beach – North Shore – that was not receiving the brunt of the waves, due to whatever variables: the nature of the rocks and coast just a few dozen yards offshore, perhaps? Next to us, similar promontories were getting hammered.

Ka-BOOM!

The rule of thumb is, don’t turn your back on the ocean, and don’t hang out on wet rocks. Waves have a rhythm worth paying attention to, and if the rocks are wet, that means they’re contemplating sneaking up on you, grabbing you by the ankles, and hauling you off to sea. No, really. Our buddy and host actually warned a family off the shelf pictured above – they were from out of town, and didn’t know the dangers.

This guy was playing his guitar on the beach to his lady friend, and I could not help, as I walked by him, singing “I gave my love a cherry…without a stone”. I am a bad girl.

In other news – here’s a shot from the other day’s foray up Waimea Canyon – look, it’s Mars! Mars has water!

As for today, we went to a different beach just a stone’s throw from where we’re staying – each beach its own marvel, completely different from the last one.

This one featured a magic c'mon-on-in zone – a zone of dunes shaded by some type of ancient-looking…conifer?

The needles are segmented. What’s even crazier is I’ve seen this species of tree pruned every bit as aggressively as plane trees in France, shaped into boxy-looking hedges. Wacky.

Anyway. I digress. Kevin lolled around in a swimming lagoon for a while…

…while I lusted over stupendous chunks of rock and coral.

Here we have a grove of upside-down trees (can’t remember the name just yet), complete with giant rope swing.

And massive loads of whatever seed pods these are.

Happiness prevails. Tomorrow I’m entitled to extra doses of goofing off, since I started this morning with a 7.5 mile run. I plan on wreaking major havoc at a nearby botanical garden.

more kauai goodness

2012-01-14T15:13:00.001-05:00

I’ve never been to a beach before where it’s not a good idea to so much as step foot in the water.

We’re on the north shore of Kauai, which at this time of year, is the time of heavy seas. The waves above are just wee little things, but they’re still bigger than anything I’ve ever seen on the east coast. That’s Hanalei Bay, above – home of superstar surfer Laird Hamilton. He gets more done before breakfast than I’m apt to accomplish in any given lifetime.

Hanalei Bay is also home to Puff, the Magic Dragon.

No, really. That’s Puff’s head, above. As for the rest of Puff’s body, off to the left – I’ve never seen a landscape shaped like this, either.

Insane. This spot, to the west of Hanalei Bay, marks the northern end of the famous Na Pali coast, accessible by foot or water only. The other day, we hiked a little ways to get a feel for it.

We watched whales spouting just beyond the breaking waves. This time of year, humpback whales use the waters north of Kauai as breeding/nursery grounds.

Yesterday, we went around to the southern part of the island to visit Waimea Canyon.

Absurd.

Ridiculous.

At the head of the canyon, we found a hiking trail we hadn’t noticed in the guidebook, so we had no idea where it headed.

We enjoyed the trail itself – kind of otherworldly.

I took pictures of other tourists with their cameras, and one of them reciprocated:

Gradually we realized what this trail was doing: skirting the headwall of the Kalalau Canyon on the northeast side of the island, the southern-most end of the Na Pali coast. That bluff over my left shoulder is the northern wall of the canyon.

A quarter mile or so later, we arrived the head of the canyon.

The southern wall.

On our way back, we took a peek into Waimea Canyon from a different lookout.

See the incredible drop off to the right? OK, see the goat?

From here, we headed to the Polihale Beach.

One of those bluffs is the spot where spirits launch themselves into the next world. It is said that those who are not greeted on the other side stay right here, attaching themselves to rocks. Tis a bad idea to take a rock home as a souvenir. Fair enough.

We headed back to the town of Waimea to watch the sunset from a bluff.

I got my requisite plant shot.

That’s Niihau, The Forbidden Island. Privately owned.

I could get used to this.

kauai, day one

2012-01-12T00:39:00.001-05:00

Hallelujah! I got Kevin’s laptop set up with LiveWriter. Without further ado, I give you…

Martian nubbies!

What planet do we live on?

Oh? And this is just the shrubbery.

Baby gets her first SLR

2012-01-09T14:18:00.001-05:00

Faithful readers, I have not abandoned you. I have(temporarily) abandoned Vermont, however. Best Beloved and I are in lovely southernCalifornia, visiting my brother and his wife. Tomorrow we are Hawaii-bound. Yep. Hawaii. As we used to say growingup…and, I confess, still do, when the occasion merits:

“Nanny nanny boo boo!”

So last week was devoted to getting ready for this trip,which entailed a) cleaning the house, b) finalizing a grant application atwork, and c) visiting my dad’s house forprobably the last time ever. It’s undercontract and scheduled to close in a few days. Hey – it’s only been on the market four years.

In other words: I was crazy-busy.

We arrived in LA on Friday late morning, having woken up at– brace yourselves – 1:49 am to make our 5:45 am flight. There comes a timewhen you wonder if it’s even worth going to bed first. Would you be able tofall asleep, knowing how early that alarm is? Yeah, me either. By the time we got to LA we were both soexhausted that we pretty much wasted our first afternoon here trying to nap.

On Saturday morning, my awesome sister-in-law Lynn and afriend of hers headed out for a 20 mile run, and I joined them for the lastbit, as I had a seven miler scheduled. This was on a bike path by the BEACH.BEACH. BEACH.

On Saturday afternoon, Kevin and I realized that the greatthing about this crazy southern California culture of seven-lane highways is afeature not commonly available to us in rural Vermont: shopping.

One thing led to another, and I am now the proud owner of aNikon D3100, an entry-level SLR. Translation into English? “Real” camera. I also got an 85mm lens to go with it, whichcost almost as much as the camera itself.

Shall we see some results?

Stamens make me happy, there’s no doubt about it.

Oh yeah, baby. This is a mallow in Lynn and Dana’s backyard.

Rosemary. Let’s focus on the tip of a leaf.

OK, now let’s focus on the stamen just behind it. I don't have this level of control with the point-and-shoot Lumix. They need to make an optional accessory when they sell you your first macro lens: a drool bib.

This is a leaf on a century plant – a viciously huge aloe onsteroids with deadly thorns. Ain’t it cool that the edge of the leaf ismirrored by a watermark? Lynn tells me this is from the leaf unfolding. You can bet if I lived here I'd document the s*** out of this while it was happening.

The tip of a century plant's leaf.

OK, enough fun in the garden. Let's go to the beach.

In the tidal pools, there were these shell-encrusted donuts.

I gradually realized they were related somehow to these lovely little buggers.

Anemones!

Colony of mussel shells on a rock, exposed for the moment by the tide…

I had no idea barnacles looked like this up close and personal.

Self portrait.

a misty wet day in the northern woods

2011-12-31T16:53:00.001-05:00

It’s the last day of 2011. It’s been a great year. In celebration, I headed up into the woods. But first…

…partially frozen puddles in the driveway!

microbubbles. that’s the reflection of the garage, incidentally.

bigger bubbles. or, small planets with complex atmospheres living in our driveway puddles.

ice monster eyeballs.

What does the worm think about water freezing up?

OK, enough of that – up we go.

One of those fairy convocations I mentioned the other day.

two points if you know what this is*.

These logs could occupy me for days.

*it’s an ash seedling that’s dive bombed into moss.

Yet another example of mischievous lichen. The one in the back KNOWS it can easily distract my point-and-shoot, making it focus back there instead of on the front-and-center stalk. Lichen is even worse-behaved as a child than I was.

I’m still pretty much a goofball.

I have all kindsa resolutions for 2012:

- Balance out all the running and cardio at the gym (I’ve been whaling on the stationary bike on my non-running days) with stretching, and lolling about in the sauna at the gym. Continue this no-sugar kick I’ve been on, because it feels great.

- Run a coupla half marathons. First one’s in May.

- Put my friends’ phone numbers in a more prominent place so that I will actually call them. (I have relatively few phone numbers committed to memory these days. Not sure how that happened. Some folks moved or switched up cell providers and I never bothered to memorize the new numbers.)

- Keep hanging out in the woods. Get to know the various spots to hike around here. I’ve actually done quite a lot of hiking in Vermont, just not in a while and/or right around here.

- Keep doing Reiki. Keep wailing away in chorus, sitting in the front row next to our contractor Jonathan (he’s even more prone to misbehaving than I am), and barely avoiding getting yelled at by our choir director.

- Continue this lovely game of enjoying life, first and foremost, and letting the rest it take care of itself.

That’s the plan, anyway. How about you?

panoramania in just twenty minutes

2011-12-27T19:06:00.001-05:00

Howdy, world! First up, in an unusual twist, I went for a quickie hike the other day up Black Mountain, which has a fantastic bang for buck ratio. A twenty minute hike from one of the trailheads gets you panoramic views in three directions:

To the east, world-famous Mt. Monadnock. You can see where the next generation of camera would come in handy for a shot like this – my trusty point-and-shoot, which has developed its neural network in concert with mine, wants to focus on the nearby foliage.

To the south, Mt. Wantastiquet looming over the Connecticut River valley and Brattleboro, with – if you squint – the nuclear power plant in the distance. (Just to the right of where that power cut chops up the flank of Monadnock.) I know it doesn’t look like it’s looming from here, but trust me, if you are in downtown Bratt looking east, that sucker looms.

To the southwest, the West River sneaking up on the Connecticut River.

And to the west, using super-duper zoom, we have Mt. Haystack. My dad’s buried within sight of Haystack. Hi Dad!

Aw crap.

I just realized that today marks the four year anniversary of his death. Wow. Just…wow. I think of him every day. Particularly lately, as I’ve been working out at the same gym he used to go to.

Where was I. Black Mountain’s cool because it features a bunch of different kinds of ecosystems, including species somewhat unusual for these here parts.

To wit, red pine. (Two needles per bunch.)

And the trails leading up to the summit are flanked by mountain laurel, which ought to make for a pretty fantastic spring. Note to self: go back in the spring.

merry christmas

2011-12-24T21:16:00.001-05:00

Sweet dreams!

on showing up. (also, drunk chorus girl mushrooms.)

2011-12-23T14:22:00.001-05:00

IT SNOWED!!!

please to note the green angel hovering in the space above the garage door. why wouldn’t angels take the form of optic glare and whatnot inside a camera? may as well show up somewhere, right?

ahhhh, the fog is burning off. nice.

thank god for goldenrod.

mmmmmm, MMMMM! oh hey: two more angels, one white, one amber. (yes, that was my brain you just heard, realizing that in the 3D, that orb of amber light must be between the leaves and the lens.)

gentian. you’ve seen gentian here before. I know this isn’t pretty, but hey: it’s a friend, and the process of turning all this stuff back into Basic Matrix Substance has to happen somehow, right? here it is.

the snow was melting this whole time – it was sunny, but sounded like it was raining.
I went back inside briefly.

some people know what it’s all about.

and back out we go. wish I knew what this guy is. grrrr.

same species. just not as tall.

could you be any more beautiful?
and now for a closer look at the flower stalks when there are more layers of them:

after this, I tried a series of head-on shots into the individual flowers. there was not enough light – I gave up, and went with a side portrait:

what do you think? pretty, no?

onwards to the intricacies of leaf decay.

happy moss, just after the winter solstice. so much green poking up.

jaunty little buggers.

moss, moss, everywhere.

I believe this is a fallen bird’s nest.
still with me? and now for an obsessive series about a shelf mushroom.

speaking of jaunty.

awww, a heart! these are all the same type of mushroom, I’m pretty sure, growing on a downed branch, that can’t make up their mind between standing up straight, as shown above…

…or sprawling flat like a lichen. This one’s doing both. “Bartender! Another beer!”

this one looks like it’s waking up from a nap.

others happily dangle upside down. there was a whole chorus line of this sort:

(I don’t know about you, but I keep hearing “New York, New York”.)

others engaged in competitive napping.

this makes me so happy.

While playing with these mushrooms, I came across a convocation of moss reproductive spores.

like so.
these guys are super-elusive to photograph close-up.

this is the best I could do. I’m not sure why: they’re tiny, to be sure, but a lot of stuff I photograph is tiny. I think part of it is the camera tends to be in love with all the texture that’s available in a perspective like this, and it wants to focus somewhere else.

like so: enticingly sparkly water on a rock.
but honestly, I think it’s the little beings themselves. they are willfully elusive. every time I see them I feel like I’ve stumbled across a convocation of forest fairies. (and as above, why wouldn’t fairies take the form of moss fruiting bodies? gotta show up somewhere, right?)
this is why I like spending time outside like this: the woods are a place where a lot of other beings are busy leading their lives, completely out of the awareness of most humans. Yes, you can travel to remote wilderness to experience nature’s majesty. or, you can also go out in your back yard.
it makes me start jonesing for more serious macro lens capability.

Happy Solstice!

2011-12-20T21:00:00.001-05:00

Charlie and I went for a walk this morning.

He led the way.

He posed while I played with the “burst” setting on my camera, getting multiple shots off in quick succession. He quickly realized it was too cold for a cat, even a solar-warmed black cat. He retreated to the deck, while I checked out the usual things I check out.

Orange leaves on the Umm…Barberry? bush.

Scads of buds on the pieris bush. 2012 is going to be a banner year for this one.

Plenty of goldenrod seeds? wait. Aster? Help. Plenty remain, whatever they are. I think goldenrod, but I must confess – a ton of asters and golden rod went to seed during a two week span in October when we were out of town, so I am not 100% confident here.
Remember the deformed magnolia buds? They’re still around.

It looks like some of the bulges burst open and seeds started to come out, but perhaps the wet weather this fall caused them to rot in place.

A whole tree full of ‘em.
I know I said I’d tell you alllll about my weekend, but that feels like a long, long time ago. Time has been moving slowly for me lately, the way it did when I was a kid. I think it’s because ever since the full moon on the 10th, I’ve been extremely tuned in to where we are in the year – exactly when and where the moon will rise over the ridge each night, flooding our bedroom like god’s own flashlight in my eyes. The exact placement of Orion in the night sky over our garage. And so on. The winter solstice this year is Thursday morning, 12:31 am, GMT. For us East Coast people, that’s 7:31 pm tomorrow, Wednesday. YIPPEEE!!! Bring it!
So the weekend. We went out and visited my dad’s house for maybe the second-to-last-time (it is under contract, for a song, I might add, and we’ll be closing soon on it. Cross your fingers.) We went to a holiday party and had a good time visiting friends old and new. Sunday, my week’s long run was only four miles, and then I went to a winter solstice ritual I’ve been going to for years now. More visiting with friends old and new. Leaving the house several times like that on a weekend is unusual for me. It’s fun, but it takes a lot out of me.
Apparently I’ve transitioned from being an extrovert to being an introvert. I’m not sure that’s “possible” but my experience certainly suggests it’s the case.
Or, as Charlie put it this morning,

Are we done yet? Can we go back inside?

this will be our little secret

2011-12-18T21:09:00.001-05:00

Check out what water does when it thinks no one is looking:

It gets all geometric. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.

Fabulous weekend, folks, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to hear about it.

on the sweetness of life

2011-12-15T21:24:00.001-05:00

The day did not start out terribly promising. I got up before dawn, which sounds more impressive than it really is, given how late the sun gets out of bed at this time of year, and made my way down the dark stairs toward the treadmill. I had my usual black cat escort. At the bottom of the stairs, I paused, sensing, with my keen intuition, that not all was well. I peered in the half light shed by the tiny green LED in the smoke detector above my head. Was that a dark splotch on the pale hardwood floor?

Why yes, it was. Cat puke! Hooray! And look over there: is that a turd? I believe it is! Yippee!

So much for my run. I spent the time cleaning, instead. A friend consoled me via Facebook with a comment in a language I am not familiar with. Latin? Spanish? She’s fluent in a bunch of languages, so I figured I’d use Google Translate. Here’s what she said to me: Cago, cagare, cagavi, cagatum.

Here’s what Google Translate said:

That about sums it up in any language.

And then I went to work. Which wasn’t one of my better days. Nothing terribly momentous occurred; it just wasn’t one of my better days. By the time I got home, I was mopey. What’s better for mopey than a run? Not much! I hit the treadmill hard, and found that my recent days of cross-training on the stationary bike at the gym have been paying off – I was a good .3 mph faster than I’ve been lately. Grrrr. Take that, world.

Last year, starting about a week before Thanksgiving, I got into the holiday spirit in the classic way: by making pie. But that led to the long slide into “Maybe I’ll Make Another Pie”, followed by “Wouldn’t Chocolate Chip Cookies Go Down Well Right Around Now?” and wrapping up with “It’s (insert day of week here), That Means Hot Chocolate”.

All that is right around the corner from “Didn’t I Used to Have a Waist?”

So lately, in addition to more diligent cross-training, I’ve been avoiding not only sugar, but even non-caloric sweetener (we use stevia). I’ve heard that if you really want to kick the sugar habit, it helps to avoid even the zero calorie alternatives – it helps you reprogram your taste buds so you don’t crave the sweet stuff. I’m here to tell you, folks, it works. I have not been craving sweets, and I’m finding some foods unpalatable – like fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt. I’ve been eating just the yogurt and leaving the fruit where it is.

Of course, there is a downside to not self-medicating with sweets. It’s called “feeling your feelings”. (Insert look of shocked horror here.)

We’re a week away from the Solstice – you know that, right? Apparently my system is very much aware of it, because I have been in hibernation mode. I didn’t volunteer at the hospital on Monday – I had a heinous foul splitting headache I couldn’t shake. (No worries: it was caused by our pillows finally giving up the ghost, a situation since remedied.) I didn’t go to chorus this week either (very unlike me.) I haven’t Bonded with Nature and the Camera for almost a week.

Fortunately for me, Kevin has very kindly contracted a temporary case of intermittent hiccups. Fortunate, because tonight I finally wrestled him onto the Reiki table – the beautiful purple massage table he gave me for Christmas last year – and sent him to sleep within about two or three minutes. For a good hour, he dozed, hiccup-free, while Reiki poured through us. Classical Christmas tunes played on Pandora.com, I periodically sipped chai (unsweetened!), and let myself relax and absorb the mellowness of the Reiki, and of the holiday season.

The darkness is upon us, but it’s a sweet darkness. I love my husband. I love our home. I love where we live, and the people I play with, whether at the hospital, chorus, or at my part-time job. This is a good life.

Now that’s the kind of sweet I can enjoy.

in which black panthers give a skunk a run for its money

2011-12-13T20:24:00.001-05:00

Charlie and Maggie were not amused to hear of the visitation from Skunk, and how I realized that’s my (current) spirit animal. This was my send-off this morning:

What, black panther isn’t cool enough for you?

Yeah, we’re looking at you, ‘skunk’ girl. Pppphhhhtt.

It wasn’t all that long ago that this front room, which started its life as a front porch (hence the T-111 siding that makes up that half-wall on the right) was our bedroom. It is now a prime morning catnap spot.

No nature for you today. Oh, how I have missed my time outdoors. On weekdays, I’m usually up before the sun rises. I either run (indoors, on the treadmill), or I contemplate my navel, scrawling three pages of whatever floats to the surface of my brain before it’s fully woken up. (Someday my biographers will revel in the treasure trove of my drivel.) Eventually I go to work. I’m usually home well before it’s dark (yay, part-time!), but because of how we’re situated in this little valley, all nuzzled into the western slope, there can be quite a lot of light in the sky… but none hitting the ground anywhere accessible.

What about the weekend? Well, the weekend was awesome. Busy and relaxing all at the same time.

We decorated the tree on Saturday. About half the ornaments are placeholder schlock from the hardware store, and the rest is sacred: stuff that’s been kicking around my family my whole life, or gifts from friends. Of course, by virtue of being On the Tree, even the placeholders gradually soak up Holiday Spirit Essence and become sacred in their turn.

We also attended the opening of the new local general store. It burned down a few years ago and then, just as it was getting rebuilt, it burned down AGAIN. (Can you say, arson ?) It’s finally reopened, and it’s a beaut – timber frame construction. There was much speechifying, which I’ve developed an allergy to, so I wandered away during that part.

What I love about this place is that they carry the gamut: all the way from kale chips at $7/bag or

..this stuff, also for $7, so you can bet I didn’t get any, plus, they run with imitation food product, like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Something for everyone.

Sunday: ran six miles. That’s the longest I’ve run since September. The tendonitis is healing up, hooray! I’ve also been working out at the gym more – doing cardio on my off-running days.

And look, Santa Claus in the form of my Fabulous Sister-in-Law Lynn brought me an early present! It’s a bling rack, to hang my medals! Lynn has run so many races she needs another one or two of these things. I’ve only got three half marathon medals, but now that I have a place to put them, well, obviously I’ll have to keep running them.

We’re having a cookie giveaway at work tomorrow – Christmas cookies. I’ve never made Christmas cookies in my life, and I’m not about to start now.

Unless peanut butter chocolate meringue cookies count.

in honor of last night’s full moon

2011-12-10T16:20:00.001-05:00

I went for a walk on a break from work yesterday.

The next building up from where I work, as reflected in a stormwater detention pond. It’s a LEEDS-certified facility that looks suspiciously like a retrofitted barn. And they do cool high-tech stuff in it.

Oh hey, apparently another neighbor at work sponsors a chicken coop. Hello, girls!

And now for some fun. Here’s the dried-up seed pods of a dwarf day lily planted around said pond.

The flesh of the pod walls has decayed, leaving behind the structural ribs.

Ribs: a good idea for an even wider variety of creatures than I would have expected. Good design is good design, apparently.

Yep, I had fun with these!

Other discoveries included iced-over mud puddles.

…followed by frost crystals on rocks lining a drainage ditch.

Not bad for a quick break from work.

I hope you all enjoyed the full moon last night. I sure did! Did I tell you that I’ve made my peace with winter coming? Yeah. It was a few weeks ago now. I’m ready. I’m in the groove. I plan on exploring the woods up behind our house on snowshoes – I only did that two or three times all last winter. And there’s XC skiing in some meadows not far from here. I’ve got my half marathon training and two sets of new running shoes (when you find what works, and it’s on sale…get two pairs. One’s for the treadmill on crappy days, one’s for outside.) Now it’s time to wait for the snow!

And in the spirit of celebrating winter, we’ve just picked up our Christmas tree. We picked it out weeks ago and they cut it yesterday.

Would this beautiful 7.5 foot balsam fir be happier minding its own business on the farm where it was planted? Maybe! But it brings a ton of joy, and it’s every bit as much a sacrifice as the wood that went into the construction of this house, or the firewood that is even now warming us. Thank you, trees…this one will be getting a ton of grins in the coming weeks. This evening’s plan? Festoon it with stuff, and then head out for a Christmas choral concert that a friend is singing in.

Life is good.

I may have found my totem animal

2011-12-06T20:42:00.001-05:00

I haven’t posted since Saturday? How did that happen? Um. Well, on Sunday, we (sob) took my brother-in-law and his sweetie to the train station (they’d been visiting us over the weekend).

I stole this picture from my brother-in-law. Dunno who phone lady is. That’s Kersti next to me, pretending she doesn’t know me. Kersti’s Swedish, which those endearing Swedes insist on pronouncing “Sheshti”.

We had a great weekend. I believe it was very restful for them, which is the goal of hospitality, the way I see it.

My legs, encased in Kersti’s fabulous boots. If everyone had boots like this, there’d be world peace.

After they left, I went for a five mile run because folks, that next half-marathon is sooner than you think.

Monday dawned. That’s Reiki day over at the chemo unit in Keene. Loads o’ fun. (Would you let the goofball in the picture above put her hands on you? No? Why not?) I went to the gym. Tuesday dawned. Crap, gotta go to work. Did that. Went for a run. Came home. Cooked things. Ate. Which leads us to now: a day where the sun dipped behind the ridge at like, 4:30pm. Ugh. This job business certainly interferes with my work of visiting the neighboring plant life.

That’s OK, though. Last night, I sat out on the front steps, looking up at the moon and watching a storm front gradually move in. It was warm, in the 50’s. And lo and behold, after I’d been there about ten minutes, we got a visitor: a skunk wandered up the hill next to the driveway. Checked out the compost pile. Sniffed at the bottom of the garage door. Went back and forth several times, just checking it out. This is the same spot the wood turtle got fixated on back in May. Apparently, we have some major mojo magic happening in the space between the garage and the house.

July, 2006 – our wedding: Dancing the Ring of Fire in the space between the house and the garage. That might have contributed to the mojo.

Meanwhile, back to the skunk: I was captivated by its combination of utter cuteness and nonchalance, and stilled into respectful silence at the realization that I had no idea whether it was aware of me, and whether its normal routine included checking out the front steps where I was sitting. Gulp. Skunk eventually wandered back down the driveway, its white stripes rippling as it bobbled along.

Naturally, when I got inside, I looked up skunk in a book I use to decipher the universe’s clues. Some excerpts:

Skunk medicine! Go ahead and laugh. ..The “I-dare-you” attitude of this four-legged creature commands you, as the observer, to respect its space by mere reputation alone…. Learn to assert, without ego, what you are. Respect follows. Your self-respectful attitude will repel those who are not of like mind, and yet will attract those who choose the same pathway. As the odor of Skunk attracts others of its kind, it repels those who will not respect its space.

Yep, skunk. Thanks, universe!

Damn, those were some fine boots.

photos of angels, birch seeds, hemlock cones

2011-12-03T23:37:00.001-05:00

It was a gorgeous day, in both a thoroughly enjoyable yet disorientingly disturbing way.
We begin with Miss Lady, in a rare moment of sitting still enough for a portrait.

The light blobs: I’m sure there is a scientific reason for the phenomenon that occurs when I shoot into the sun, but can we all agree that they’re Maggie’s angels?

The obsession with yellow birch seeds continues. Here we see that the trident-shaped thingies are attached to the heart-shaped seeds. But what I love about this is the two aren’t joined together the way I thought they were. I thought the heart shapes would sit directly on top of the tridents. Apparently not. All I can see is that this is a section of a catkin that’s falling apart. I need to find a catkin that hasn’t completely blown up. Probably too late for this year.
Have I mentioned that the beaver pond’s main dam is gone? They’ve built another, closer to the road. Here’s the currently-drained part.

Not shown: the feral bathtub that lives at the edge of the pond, plotting revenge against whoever dumped it into the burn pile.
As promised, hemlock cones.

(Blurry, sorry.)

And upside-down, for the view. These are tiny. (Relative to your Typical Pine Cone.) Easily less than an inch long.

Forsythia blooming on December 3rd. See what I mean about the gorgeous weather? It’s confusing everyone. Now is the time to shut down and get some rest for the year – not pump out flowers. Go to sleep, sweet forsythia! It’s bedtime!
Speaking of bedtime, ‘tis mine. Good night!

the meaning of life, and whatnot

2011-12-02T16:32:00.001-05:00

so what’s it all about, charlie?

Charlie came to visit me on today’s foray into the woods.

The sky was largely overcast and the lighting conditions were crappy. Or so I thought until I resumed my next lesson in my self-directed Life Curriculum: Learn Your Camera 101. Normally I rely on the Auto-Intelligent settings, even when I’m in Program Mode. (I use Program Mode because it has the macro zoom functionality I use so much for my Flowers’ Naughty Bits Series.) But lately, I’ve been tinkering around more, because Kevin has offered to get me the Next Camera - an SLR of some variety. And I have felt I really should know what capabilities I already have with the Lumix before investing in a new toy. (Don’t worry: I’ll get an SLR. I want the SUPER DOOPER macro lens.)

So anyways. I decided to fiddle with the settings, and here’s the result.

The camera defaulted to ISO-100 and the flash. This is not at all what my eyeballs were seeing.

Looks what happens when I open that baby up to ISO-1600 and disable the flash.

Oh yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about. A little washed out, a little grainy, but definitely an improvement.

Deep musings occurred.

And I realized, duh: I love this. I.Love.Doing.This. See? How hard was that to say? I – love – just – being – in – nature – and – seeing – what’s – there – to – be – seen. l love being amazed. And I love provoking that in others. Today, I taught a coworker how to use PowerPoint. She was thrilled. Not “holy shit, a bald eagle!” thrilled, but you know – “oh, cool!” thrilled. It was a fun moment, but being outside? Waaaaayyyy better.

Playing with the camera is an added bueno. It’s learning another entity’s brain. What will it look like at ISO-800? Or ISO-200? Oh! It’s blurry down there. This explains countless fails, the outtakes of this blog that you seldom see (except for when I do a whole post about them.)

So that was my afternoon. I’ll have lots more tomorrow, I suspect – I haven’t even finished looking at today’s haul.

One more for the road:

fourth time around

2011-12-01T18:03:00.001-05:00

Hello world. Yes, it has been days, I know. Question: what do you get when you cross a blackberry and a cigarette?

One of these things. I vaguely remember learning what this is a few years ago. But I forget. For some reason the name “horsetail” comes to mind. This is a couple of feet tall. They grow in segments, with prominent joints every so often:

For the most part, these are single stalks with just the one terminal flower cluster, but there was this enterprising soul:

I have just visited The Google, and I have learned all sorts of fascinating things about horsetail (Equisetum arvens). Yep, that’s what this is. In the summer, each of those joints has a gazillion threadlike leaves sticking out of it. And? Apparently it synthesizes nicotine, under polluted conditions. So my twisted mind isn’t that far off-base after all, is it.
We also have a bunch of awesomely huge shelf mushrooms to show off today:

That big one on the top is fannnnntastic. Check this out:

Damn.
Say, don’t you find yourself wondering how to tell the difference between this year’s crop of sensitive fern spore stalks and last year’s? I know I do.

New at left, old at right. Oh hey, you can see the shelf mushrooms in the background.

New: still bunched up tight.

Old: each little…bud? it’s not technically a bud, but it sure looks like a bud – has opened up already.
And now for the color commentary.

Rosebud. You thought it was a sled. Think again.

Rosehips.

Willows have a different color strategy.

Since I’m on a primary color kick, here’s some sky, with bonus moon.
Last but not least, I’ve gone and registered for my fourth half marathon! Woot woot!

Yes, California is a long way from Vermont, but I’ll be running this with my Fabulous Sister-in-Law, who got me through my first half marathon a year and a half ago. Last year, for this same weekend, I did the the Pittsburgh, which was great and all, but this one will be even better because there is a wine festival immediately afterward.

learning is messy, distinguishing hemlocks from spruces, and tree turds

2011-11-27T20:28:00.001-05:00

I took 161 pictures this afternoon, most of which are lousy, but that’s OK. I’ve been playing with the Lumix lately, daring to move beyond the confines of either the Intelligent Auto or the default automatic settings in the mode that allows me to use the macro zoom. Today’s experiments were with the white balance, the ISO setting, and whether or not the flash engages. I didn’t think to mess with the shutter speed. There’s always next time for that.

On a day like today – flat light, overcast, only occasional sun filtered through high clouds – it’s hard to get a decent shot of anything, particularly if the background is snow. I have a zillion underexposed and overexposed shots. But I had fun messing around with the settings, and also observing what the camera would do when I let it decide all of these variables.
Along the way, I refreshed my memory on the difference between hemlocks, balsam firs, and white spruces. I shouldn’t be a tease: I haven’t found a balsam fir. But hemlock and white spruce? Yes, ma’am, we have those.

First up, hemlock. We’re up in the woods.

An adorable baby hemlock. Scraggly, but optimistic.

Flat needles, green on top…

…with racing stripes on the bottom. Also?

Those little stalks at the base of each needle mean that when you find a twig that has no needles…

…it’s bumpy. And this is an example of a crap photo.

Another excellent thing about hemlocks is their fantastically cute cones, but I didn’t see any today, so just put that on your wish list and the Universe will provide.

Incidentally, if this were balsam fir, you’d have the same flat needles with racing stripes on the bottom. But the leaves would come straight out from the twig with no leaf stalk (which is called “sessile”), and that means a twig with no needles would be smooth. Plus, balsam firs smell awesome.

White spruce, on the other hand. Spruce needles are not flat – they’ve got maybe four or so sides. If you’re not sure you can see it for yourself, try rolling a needle between your fingers. If you can roll it, it’s a spruce.

White spruce needles look blue-ish green, which I realize doesn’t seem to be the case in this picture, but trust me.

It’s a good year for the white spruce. Lots of cones. Naturally, from a distance, these look like tree turds.

A good day is one where you come home looking like this.

they don’t look barren to me

2011-11-26T10:17:00.001-05:00

The New Jersey pine barrens are no such thing. There’s all sorts of great stuff going on in there.

First, a general view. The trees are mostly pitch pine (Pinus rigida) and black-jack oak (Quercus marilandica).

The pines are well adapted to fire: the cones only open after a fire.

Plus they have this neat trick of being able to launch branches any old place, just straight out the side of the tree.

Incipient amber.

Apparently, the oaks are starting to succeed the pitch pine because of wildfire suppression.

OH! We found several of these. This is an oak, leaf, obviously, and it’s got this puffy sphere attached to it, about 2.5” in diameter.

Here’s one that had broken open. I’m assuming it’s a marble gall, the baby-house of a type of parasitic wasp.

That’s the exit hole. Wikipedia informs me that oak galls contain tannic acids, and that “traces of iron-gall ink have been found on the Dead Sea scrolls”. Wow.
One more tree, and then we’re going to ground level.

Holly. Festive holly. This stuff grows in trees at least 20 or so feet tall.

Lichen, right on the sandy ground.

I wasn’t kidding when I said the ground was sandy.

Ahhhhhh…..

A type of lichen in the Cladonia family, usually called “cup lichen”. I like Kevin’s name better, though: “golf tee lichen”.
This next one completely stumps me. It looks like a cross between a mushroom and an herbaceous plant. WTF?!

As I took picture after picture of this stuff, a family with a brown lab walked by. You can see him in the photo below.

See his golden eye? Just about now is when he barreled into me to say hello.

Not bad for an hour or two.

one of my patented recipes.

2011-11-22T23:06:00.001-05:00

I habe a code. I’m one of those people who at the slightest sign of a cold, I make it go away through sheer force of will. “Nope, sorry, not going to happen,” I say. But I missed the bus on this one – Kevin’s been out of commission with what turns out to be bronchitis, and over the weekend, as I decompressed from a couple of intense weeks, I let down my guard and the little %^&*@# virus got past the gate.

Normally, I’d stay home from work and not inflict myself on the general populace, but a girl’s got to earn a paycheck somehow, particularly after six days of jury duty, so I headed in. Since I work at a yogurt factory – not in production, I do officey stuff – there is an emphasis on hygiene and hand sanitizer everywhere. I think I was coated in hand sanitizer by the time I got home. Mmmmm….hand sanitizer. I hate that stuff, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.

Why am I telling you this. Apparently because I don’t have anything else to say. No new photos. No home renovation projects – at this time last year, we were renovating the downstairs bathroom. (In desperation, I was going to do a “one year ago today” post. I made my first ever apple pie with a crust from scratch on this day last year, woo hoo.)

Sheesh, it’s bedtime already.

Happy thanksgiving, loved ones. Oh, inspiration strikes! here we go, I’ll share my favorite Thanksgiving dish recipe! A true classic, in that we only ever ate this on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and nobody else I’ve ever met has ever heard of this. I might have changed the name of the dish. Sorry, Mom!

A Holiday Favorite: Eyeballs in Cheese Sauce

Step 1. if you are my grandmother who originated this recipe, don’t read this. Oh right: you aren’t likely to read this. See, Grandma apparently peeled the tiny onions by hand. Screw that!

Step 2: Go get yourself a bag of Bird’s Eye pearl onions. Cook them following the instructions on the bag, which generally involves boiling them in some water for like, I dunno, ten minutes or so. The goal here is to have them all thawed out and not clumped together in an unattractive lumpy pile of ugliness. You’re looking forward to this, aren’t you?

Step 3: Make a white sauce with about 3 T butter, 3 T flour, and a cup or so of hot milk. You’ve never made a white sauce before? Oh, this is easy. You melt the butter. You get the milk hot (nuke it, whatever, just get it hot). Sprinkle the flour in the butter and whisk it for a bit. Let it cook. Don’t let it get brown – that’s something else entirely.

Add the milk slowly, whisking every so often, until it starts to thicken.

Step 4: Now add a bunch of grated cheddar cheese. Say…a cup and a half. Let it get all nice and melted and well incorporated. Add the secret ingredients: a bit of dry mustard powder, and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. (Ingredients I have no other use for than this dish.) If you’re feeling super fancy, put in a dash of white pepper.

Step 5: Combine said sauce with drained, cooked onions in a baking dish. Sprinkle the obligatory paprika over the top. Bake it for, um, say a half hour to 45 minutes at 350. I don’t think you need to cover it.

That’s it! Enjoy!

P.S. For other tried and true recipes, you might want to check out my recipe for butternut/squash soup – also known as “how to dirty every pot and surface in your kitchen”. Or my recipe for chocolate brain damage sauce, which generates a lot of blog traffic, I think because people think I’m actually going to tell them how to prepare heroin. Honestly, people.

sartorial splendor, bug calligraphy, belles at the ball

2011-11-20T16:20:00.001-05:00

Striped maple twigs: I want to design a whole clothing line this elegant.

As the branches age, they develop the characteristic stripey look.

A mature striped maple.

In other news, I discovered a cache of calligraphic runes, inscribed on downed branches by either fairies, or insects.

This moss-covered stump or rock – probably stump, but the sponginess was pretty deep – is playing host to three ash seedlings that have buried themselves, business-end first.

It’s not unreasonable to expect those seedlings will have enough for at least a start on life – this mushroom looks pretty content.

Ditto the baby fern.

And this little guy. Either hemlock or balsam fir – I forgot to check which.

Belles at the ball. Milkweed seeds.

Each one a beauty.

on the restorative properties of chocolate, vs a macro lens

2011-11-19T14:27:00.001-05:00

I’ve got the bends: I’m decompressing from the week of jury duty, and the main symptom, as of right now, is irrational anger. It’s not the content of the trial itself, as heinous as that was (more on that in a minute). It’s the effects of several-days running of being trapped in windowless rooms, with no opportunity to ramble and explore. As I joked with my fellow jurors at the time, as we cooled our heels in our deliberation room while the attorneys and judge squabbled, for the n^th time, about how to proceed through the quagmire of evidentiary rules, sometimes you just have to go into airport mode. You’re not in control of things, so sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy a good book. This sufficed for me to get through the week as it was happening, but the pent-up frustration built up under the surface. Hence, today’s crankiness.
I just got inside from about a half hour in the woods. I would have stayed longer, but the camera battery died.

Whew. OK, much better, already.

This is an ash seedling that’s dive-bombed into a moss-covered stump.

The turkey-footed casing of a yellow birch seed. The seed itself is to the left.

I’m pretty sure this is club moss – Lycopodium – and these are the reproductive bits. Those specialized leaves contain spores.

A decaying maple leaf. Reminds me of coming in for a landing at Any Airport, USA that’s surrounded by subdivisions and tract housing.

Moss’s fruiting whatsis.

A snuggling convocation of same.

This kind of moss looks like baby ferns. Two points if you spot the yellow birch seeds.

Gasp. A striped maple. This is where my camera battery gave up – I need to go back so I can show you the incredible colors of the twigs on this guy.
So do you want to hear about jury duty? Brace yourself: it took chocolate chip cookies, as well as a double shot of brownie sundae, to clean my soul when it was all over. The soul is best cleaned with exposure to nature, but chocolate’s restorative powers are not to be underestimated.
The defendant was charged with three counts of sexually abusing his daughter, starting when she was in elementary school, and continuing until she was about to enter high school. We heard three days of testimony, followed by a morning of closing arguments and instructions from the judge. Finally it was ours to deliberate on. A particular detail in the evidence came up on the second day that sealed the deal for me, but I listened carefully, with an open mind, for the rest of the trial.
When it came time for our first straw poll, there were four or five of us who felt no hesitation in saying we felt the defendant was guilty. The remaining seven or eight were unsure, and wanted to replay some of the testimony. We trouped back into the courtroom and listened to the audio recording of certain parts of the trial. When we gathered again, I found myself explaining what I made of this testimony. I hesitate to describe it in too much detail here, but essentially, I argued that the worst possible case scenario was that the witness in question (not the complainant) was a flat-out liar. I showed how it didn’t matter, given other testimony from other people we had established were credible. We could toss this witness right out the window, and it wouldn’t make a difference. We took another straw poll, and only two people were now unsure.
I wondered if I should have followed my ninth-grade ambition to be a lawyer – an ambition that lasted maybe a week.
Another hour or so passed while we mulled things over. Our foreman had us vote officially, and there we were: unanimity. Guilty on all three counts.
It was only the next day, when I read about it in the local paper, which, unsurprisingly, had major, simple facts of the case wrong, that I learned that the defendant could be sentenced to up to life plus 25 years. They don’t tell you that ahead of time.
The whole experience was, on the one hand, a logistical and financial hassle (the pay is well under minimum wage). But on the other hand, it was a privilege to get to do this. I mean, what’s the alternative? Just one judge? No thanks. Vigilante justice? Perhaps more viscerally satisfying, but I’ll take “presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” any day.
In Vermont, you have to serve either three draws, or three trials, whichever comes first. This trial was actually my second: the first was the week before, and the defendant settled the morning of the trial. My next draw is in late February, with associated trials all during March. Until then, I’ll enjoy not having to ask an armed deputy permission to go outside.

Doing my duty

2011-11-15T21:13:00.001-05:00

Greetings, devoted readers. I’m on jury duty this week, and this has been somewhat of a pre-occupation. There is a chance we’ll hear the closing arguments tomorrow and head into deliberation as early as tomorrow night; whether or not that happens, I won’t be able to post anything for another day or two.

So I’ll leave you with the slim pickings afforded me during a 10 minute break yesterday morning just outside the courthouse. I was under guard, in a manner of speaking, and was not allowed to wander far.

Yellow iris, about to bloom, mid-November. Yes, this is Vermont.

Cedar. I used to know which kind was which. I’ll have to study that and get back to you.

flowers in November, seed dissection, wrecked mushrooms: a good day

2011-11-12T17:50:00.001-05:00

Attentive readers may have noticed that I’ve been a bit glum about the onset of fall this year – certain that the fun was over, there’s nothing to see here, move along, move along, see you next spring. Fortunately, the woods behind our house have been whispering to me over the past couple of weeks. “Pssssst. Lady. Up here. Mushrooms. Mosses. Things you haven’t seen lately. Pssssst.”

(Am I the only one out there who perceives life this way?) (Oh, right: doesn’t matter. You’re in charge of your perceptions; I’m in charge of mine.)

Anyhoo, I wandered around today, some in the normal spots, and some up in the woods, attentive to those little whispers. Here’s the haul:

Pachysandra, invading the woods from its homebase around the magnolia tree. We last saw pachysandra on May 6th, when the flowers were forming and dare I say it, swelling.

Asters continue to delight with their fuzzballs.

The pieris bush. This is the one whose flowers look like spider-infested barnacles. And there is a bug, of some kind, right in the middle of the picture. Thank you, O Macro Lens, without thee this bush would just be a blob on the edge of the lawn.

Would somebody please tell the vinca that it’s friggin’ November already?

Screw you, says the vinca. I can do this all week. I’m not proud…or tired.

Spider sez, mind your own business. See that little thingy in the lower right? Stay tuned. Those things are EVERYWHERE.

I came across a lobelia, of the Indian Tobacco flavor (Lobelia inflata), on my way up into the woods.

Lovely inflated calyx, to use the verbiage in my flower guide.

No wait, really? You didn’t get the memo, either, huh? Wow. I’ll keep an eye on this, because I’m not sure if it’s just opening up, or just closing down. When open, the lobelia flowers I’ve seen around here look more like this.

Remember the mushrooms growing in a stump up the hill? Well, someone went to town on them. I am not sure if mushrooms spontaneously fall apart, or if critters are involved, but at any rate, check this out:

Carnage, either way.

I spent a fair amount of time sussing out the mystery of a tiny turkey-foot shaped object that I have noticed in the bazillions over recent weeks. They’re everywhere – on the deck, on leaves, on our shower mat…

Here’s one.

I have suspected the birch trees, just on general principle. But I’m not sure if it’s yellow, gray, or white birch. (We have all three. Plus there’s black birch generally around here, but not in my usual wanderings.)

Look, another one.

I finally figured out that that’s probably the conveyance part, and the actual seed is this thing:

(A double-duty photo. Please to admire the fantastic shroomage.)

I also discovered that if you take an innocent birch catkin…

…and rip it to shreds, you’ll see that my theory is more-or-less right.

Here we have the two bits still stuck together.

As exciting as this is (and isn’t it?) the best part was when I came across a stump I visited earlier in the summer. It’s completely covered in moss and canada mayflower. I realized that even though the mayflower has long since produced its flowers and berries, it’s still around, and once I knew what to look for, I saw the evidence everywhere.

Translucent white leaves are all that remain.

On the way back down to the house, I found the first gentian I ever saw – here’s what it looked like back on August 9th – it didn’t have flowers yet.

And here’s what that baby looks like now:

I’m not dead yet!

The running report: Achilles tendonitis notwithstanding, a girl’s got to run, and the next half marathon is coming up in a few months. Which reminds me, I should probably register for it before it’s too late. I knocked out what passes for a long run these days – 5.3 miles – and right around now, the cats are starting to pester me for dinner. So, sports fans, I’ll see you tomorrow.

even five minutes is better than nothing

2011-11-10T18:56:00.001-05:00

Jonesing for my outside time, I hauled myself out the door this morning before breakfast. Self, you have five minutes. Go.

The closed gentian, once so deliciously purple, is truly rocking the Miss Havisham look.

Bonus round: this one comes with a slug. I wonder what the blobs of green goo are. Hm.

I am embarrassed to report I don’t know what this is.

I’m pretty sure this is a mullein, though. A blurry mullein. I think it was crisper in real life.

Common evening primrose. Fairies probably make pants out of these.
Need some color? The euonymous bush is happy to provide.

Five minutes. It hit the spot. I remembered who I am, why I am on the planet, etc. And then I went to work. And when I came home from work, I was in need of another reminder of who I am, and why I am on the planet. So I did the next best thing: I went for a run.
In the rain.
I thought I hated running in the rain, but I may have discovered the secret to tolerating it: wear a baseball hat. Anything with a visor. Aha! Without the rain in my eyes, it became a pleasant journey through the landscape on a day I would otherwise have remained couch-bound. The sound of drizzle on the beaver pond was particularly delightful.
Endorphins: your friend.
What do you do when you’re in need of remembering who-you-really-are?

in which I am yelled at by chipmunks

2011-11-09T17:12:00.001-05:00

Early morning, sun just starting to pop up over the ridge. It feels like days since I’ve had proper outside time.

Sumac glistens.

Sumac meets Captain Hook.

VICTORY! A milkweed pod opens up. Evidently the process happens when the pod opens up along a seam.

Ready to make a break for it.

They look hand-carved.

Cache of orange shrooms.
And now, a lesson in threes

Maiden (July 1)

Mother (September 21)

Crone (November 9)
Later on, I was scolded by no fewer than three chipmunks.

The fourth didn’t bother to yell at me. It just kept munching.

More mosses going to town with those naughty bits.

Lilac pods, their work done.

Curly dock: sheer fabulousness.

duty calls

2011-11-06T21:28:00.001-05:00

Lordy lordy, what a weekend. After my ten-hour day on Friday, I spent another ten hours – some last night, and the rest today – working on that spreadsheet from hell. Why, oh why? Because The Report is Due, and I have jury duty tomorrow. You didn’t think I had it in me, did you? After slacking off for two entire years? To be honest, I’m not sure I had it in me, even though I already did it. I’m whupped.

Scenes from the day:

A bright, frosty morning.

Fortunately, they let you goof off and read while you sit there waiting to be assigned to a jury.

Sweet dreams, loved ones!

earth to sarah, earth to sarah, where are you?

2011-11-05T18:05:00.001-04:00

Greetings, from an ever-so-much-older-and-wiser, post-birthday new and improved me. I had a lovely birthday, thank you. It involved some of this:

…which is a not very good shot of a freakin’ awesome flourless chocolate cake. Which I’ve almost nearly eaten by now. I know: I’m slowin’ down as I get older. Was a time I woulda eaten this jobbie in one go. Among my haul of birthday gifts? Three jars of Nutella. I married a keeper.

On Thursday, we refinanced on our house. Deeply exciting, I know. Actually, who am I kidding? It IS awesome, as we got a killer rate. Signing all the paperwork was somewhat tedious, and – imagine if you will – I wound up goofing off and taking pictures of the view from our attorney’s windows.

Yesterday, I slaved over a hot computer in a windowless room for ten straight hours, and by the time I emerged I didn’t even know what planet I live on. We met up with some friends for drinks and then Sweetpea and I went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. By the time this morning rolled around, I still hadn’t re-oriented to Life in a Body, so after breakfast I dragged myself out of the house and up in the woods.

Ahhhh…much better.

Melting snow, leaf litter, a spruce or maybe hemlock twig.

Moss on a log, with possibly beech seeds and definitely pine needles. So, identifying mosses apparently takes a hand lens, which I own, but didn’t think to bring with me. All I can tell you is that those stalks are the reproductive bits, and aren’t we lucky to be looking at them, because they’re only out and about under just-so conditions.

You often see lichen hanging out with mosses. Or do you?

Lichen, or dinosaurs?

Lichen, or snake monster?

Beech leaves, pine needles.

Some kinda mushroom.

Life insists on going about its business, even while everything appears to be shutting down and/or decaying.

Oh for heavens’ sake, get your mind out of the gutter. They’re mushrooms.

Moss, this time on a rock.

Ah, moss, glorious moss. I should get to know you better.

Thank you, Universe.

on the eve of 44

2011-11-01T20:30:00.001-04:00

The day of the dead, All Souls’ Day, is tomorrow. And tomorrow, I turn a whopping 44. When I was four years old, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. (It was exceeded only by turning five. Five! Five fingers! Five toes! Five!) When I was four, I was too little and/or dumb to realize that one day I’d turn forty-four – two fours! The best!

So here I am, on the eve of being The Best Possible Age! Of All Time! And I thought I’d improvise a little rumination on what I’ve learned over the past year.

1. Life is more fun when you tune in to who-you-really-are, instead of who-you-think-you-are-supposed-to-be.

And might I add, I am not the only one in my world singing that song these days. As my friend Leslie wrote in a beautiful essay recently, be who you are are. Be who you are. Be who you are.

This has its risks. Imagine doing this: go up to a complete stranger and offer to put your hands on their body to help them relax and connect with a source of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical healing energy. Good Lord. You’re kidding, right? Wouldn’t it be more fun to ummm…floss? And yet, doing Reiki is one of those experiences where I feel like yeah, this is why I incarnated on this planet. It puts me in a zone where it’s all about love. And jeez, that’s all that really matters, at the end of the day, right?

2. No, really, I do better when I spend some time outside every day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. My formative moments as a teenager occurred while backpacking, and I majored in environmental history because I got turned on to the field by a guy whose basic premise was, “let’s start by looking at the land”. I was a Park Ranger for two summers in and after college. I blew off taking my whole first year after college seriously because I planned on hiking the northern half of the Appalachian Trail the following summer.

Well, somewhere along the way I think I kinda lost sight of all that. Too many desk jobs, too much of the 9-to-5. The importance of knowing where you live became an intellectual abstraction, instead of a lived experience. A few years ago, I was somewhat heavily involved in efforts to develop an eco-literate citizenry. These days, just writing that sentence hurt. The thought of even participating in, let alone organizing, such an effort now has about as much appeal as eating cat litter. Instead, let’s try this on for size: Go. Outside. Now.

3. Cameras aren’t an impediment to being in the moment. Sometimes, they help me get in the moment.

I never expected this one. (Thanks, sweetie!) Many gasps, and much cackling with glee, have been involved.

4. I want to be running when I’m 85 years old.

And why not? My grandmother on my mother’s side walked three miles daily on this very beach well into her 70’s. And once, I went for a run with my grandfather when he was 86 years old. His brain was riddled with Alzheimer’s but dammit, he was running.

I’ve had to keep this – the long-term goal – in mind over the past couple of months, because after my two half-marathons this year and a stupid project to do speed training on hills for the second one (oh, during a heat wave, too, by the way) I’m STILL dealing with problems – at this point, achilles tendonitis in the wake of a near-miss with plantar fasciitis. At this point, I don’t anticipate a run of even five miles for another several weeks. Ah, whatever. It’s all good. And how do I know that?

Because of the witch-hazel. It’s just flowering now, in the fall. See? You can flower any time, says the 44-year old runner.

Four bits o’ wisdom from this early, middle, and late bloomer. Time for sneaking into the birthday cake, perhaps? I’ll leave you with where things stand around here today:

I’ll have snow for my birthday, I think

2011-10-30T17:35:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was spent in anticipation of this:

Or, more accurately, in expectation of the all-too-predictable power outages that accompany ten inches of snowfall.

What do you do when you think you might lose power? Mop the basement floor, anyone? Yes, that’s where I start all my big projects. I’m sure there’s something profound in there. I also did a ton of laundry, made beef stew, made sure every last fork, knife, and spoon was clean, filled the bathtub with water, and – at the last minute, as it turns out – made two batches of cookies. One, for my newly-gluten-free sweetpea, and one, for me, that was coincidentally also gluten-free. (Which is what happens when you swap out peanut flour for regular flour. You end up with peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and who wouldn’t want that?)

The power went out around 8:30 pm, five minutes into our Scheduled Evening Entertainment. Fortunately, Kevin had long ago procured three solar-powered lanterns, which sit on windowsills all day, soaking up juice. So we snuggled in with Plan B (our respective Kindles) and were asleep before ten.

The power was still out this morning when the cats’ full-body slams against the bedroom door finally induced me to get up. I was too lazy to go outside until the breeze had already blown the snow off twigs and branches.

Kevin was not nearly so lazy.

He’s more productive than I am, I guess. In my defense, we only have one shovel. (We had two, but one broke – how long should a shovel last? Is ten years good?)

The power was out in the early afternoon and we decided to head out into the big world to see if we could access the Interwebs from where he works. Oh, and we got another shovel. No more excuses, I guess!

Vermont: snow, and photosynthesis, and fall colors, in the same day

snow, sun, fire, kisses.

2011-10-28T21:17:00.001-04:00

It started snowing yesterday in the late afternoon. You’d think after literally decades of living in New England, I’d be prepared for this, but I never am. Since I felt like crap yesterday afternoon and had only the energy to sit with a cat on my lap, this was peaceful and lovely. But I did pout.

So pretty, but when you’re not in the right mindset, there’s no way to avoid being late to work. Oh look, my car’s in the shade…with three inches of heavy snow frozen in place. Where is the ice scraper? In the other car. Oh look, the door to the other car is frozen shut. OK…where is the other ice scraper? (scrape, scrape, scrape.) Damn, this takes a long time. I’m going to be late for work. Why am I working, again? Oh right: for the money. OK. (scrape, scrape, scrape.)

While I slaved over a hot computer at work, the sun came out and made it all go bye bye.

Can you tell that the shared driveway is now as smooth as a baby’s bottom? We got re-graded just in time.

Sweet dreams, white baneberry plant! All your spooky white berries, each dotted with a single pupil of black, have gone into other dimensions.

Mmmmm…cattail seeds…Speaking of cattail-friendly environments, it’s time for an update on the local beaver activity. You may remember that That Bitch Irene stole our pond, by causing the main dam which forms it, to breach.

Our pond, circa ten days ago.

I can just imagine the beavers’ initial dismay. But, being beavers, and thus prone to busyness, they got right on it, building a dam along a small stream that feeds the pond closer to the road. That stream, which really, isn’t a stream so much as a trickle, is now epically pond-like itself.

Here we are out on the road, looking in the direction of the original dam. Our house is off the right, out of the picture. Normally, there’s no standing water here. None. Yes, those are alders and willows, which like living near water. But really, this scene is out of control. Go, beavers! Actually, it’s a problem, as I’ve mentioned before, because if that other tributary backs up far enough, it’ll wreck the field we all drive through to get to our respective homes.

A quick tangent to absorb a treasure trove of bittersweet nightshade berries.

Vermont: snow and photosynthesis, in the same day.

Hm. What could this be for?

Answer: a ginormous bonfire, in honor of the neighborhood high school’s last football game, scheduled to be held tomorrow…in the snow. The team, their supporters, and various and sundry friends and neighbors crowded around. As you might expect, staring into a bonfire is kind of addicting.

No bonfire is complete without a tractor to push the edges in periodically. The fun part is when the tractor stalls and you wonder if it will restart in time to not catch on fire. (Unlikely, but makes for a good story.)

It caved in, bit by bit.

Spirits appeared.

Bonfires are good for making out.

on the importance of oxygen

2011-10-26T22:02:00.001-04:00

It’s late and I’m tired – it’s been a long day. An OK day, but halfway through it, at work, I realized I had a headache. Which is not normal for me. Gradually it dawned on me that the HVAC system was screwed up – the room I work in, and the break room, both fed by the same thermostat, were oxygen-free environments by mid-afternoon. I took myself out for a walk in the cold misty drizzle to inhale. I visited some thistle and black-eyed susan and regretted not having my camera.

Then I went to the gym to lift weights. Grrrr. Then tonight I had chorus. I still have a mild headache. Which I can tell by the number of grammatical errors I’ve been making. Oxygen: it’s your friend. I’m currently undergoing Charlie Lap Therapy as I type – surefire way to get carpal tunnel syndrome. You try typing with a 12.5 pound cat draped over your forearms. See? I’m rambling. Medic!

Some leftovers from the other day:

European buckthorn. An invasive I typically ignore. Weird little naked fuzzy buds.

One Maggie. She is so sleek and glossy – much better than when she weighed 19 pounds and couldn’t lick her own butt. Yes, you can tell my brain’s not working – I just typed something about my cat’s butt. Moving right along:

A failed milkweed pod. Dunno what happened. It should be a supernova of silky fluff. We’ve had beaucoup rain; it probably just got overwhelmed and said f^&* it.

Bittersweet nightshade. Apparently its purple leaves and fantastic flowers outweigh the fact it’s an invasive, because this is a species I’ve been tracking all along. I’d never noticed this particular one before, though, even though it’s climbed up to head height.

False Solomon’s Seal. I had to really look to find this, as the whole plant has given up the ghost and the berries are almost covered up with leaves. This is the very same plant that I watched the sawfly larva going to town on.

I believe I have hot date scheduled now with best beloved. Buh-bye!

Even the plants are better organized than I am

2011-10-25T19:51:00.001-04:00

Take the lilac: it’s made and released seeds…

“Laaaaaah!”

…and they’ve already made their buds for next year.

Rhododendron: same story. As for me? I haven’t even put away my summer T-shirts yet.
I get complimented occasionally by my slavishly devoted blog fans for how Observant I am, How Great that I Notice All the Beauty in the Ordinary World Around Me. Explain to me then how I managed to miss this entire huge shrub, right next to the Maybe Arrowwood Maybe Hydrangea shrub.

Huhhhh...? Anybody have any suggestions? It’s a shrub with opposite leaves. That’s all I got.

Deformed magnolia buds are turning red. Did you see the one where I dissected these in the hopes that they were insect galls? Turns out they were growing seeds. Ooops. Sorry.
And now for the wildflower report.

Starflower. The evergreen leaves are vinca – which, incidentally, are still throwing off purple flowers.

Miterwort.
Yeah, I know, not as beautiful as you were hoping for, huh? It’s fall, people! Here’s what miterwort looks like when it’s flowering. And here are its positively cute-alicious seeds.
OK, one last bit of news. The other day’s fall dandelion is actually Cat’s Ear (Hypochoeris radicata). Thanks, Arianna, for figuring that out for me!

Mmmm, sweet. Relish this color, cause it’s all gonna fade soon…
The tie-breaking indicator? Fuzzy leaves.

Charlie greets his namesake flower.

laughter through tears

2011-10-23T18:06:00.001-04:00

My sweetie pie comes from a largish family – I believe he has something like thirty-and-a-few first cousins – and they’re all loud and crazy enough to have kept in touch over a couple of generations, such that at family reunions, second cousins show up as well. They’re a lot of fun. In my family, when we vacation together, we typically like to ignore each other amiably while we each read, or go for walks on the beach, coming together at meals. We have fun too – just in a more subdued way. In his family, everybody’s in the same room, generally all talking at the same time.
Sadly, the most spirited and ebullient of Kevin’s cousins passed away unexpectedly last week. Paul was only a handful of months older than Kevin, so it gives one pause. Over the weekend, we went down to Lawn Guyland for the wake and funeral: alas, the fourth such occasion in the past five years. We have the routine down. On Friday, the last of the visiting hours at the funeral home were held. It was pretty festive on the whole, with moments here and there throughout the evening of tears and hugs. Afterwards, some of us gathered at a diner for a very late dinner, yakking, carrying on, stealing food from one another’s plates, and generally behaving just shy of badly enough to avoid getting tossed to the curb by our friendly, but clearly world-weary, waitress.
On Saturday, we gathered again at the funeral home. The presiding attendant asked friends and neighbors to prepare to pay respect to Paul one last time. Then he asked aunts, uncles, and cousins to do the same. About half the room stood up. Giggling ensued. Eventually we made our way over to the church for Mass. Paul’s brother Bob gave a fantastic eulogy. As Kevin put it, when he placed the can of Budweiser on the lectern, he had us in the palm of his hand.
After the graveside services, we toasted Paul with more Budweiser, and then repaired to a restaurant where we stuffed ourselves silly. Once we got to the part where the kids were running laps around the room, it was time to go. The consensus is that Paul’s up in Heaven, firing up the grill, putting the beer on ice, and generally doing what he does best: creating a great party for friends and family, with a lot of food. And a lot of beer.
And then Kevin and I came home.
I finally.finally.finally. got outside with the camera after a lull of rainy weather last week, plus the weekend travel. Charlie was glad to see me, and hopped up on my lap as I attempted to capture the process by which beech leaves go brown.

Self-portrait with cat.

Beech. A rainbow of green all the way to brown on a single sapling.

Goldenrod.

Yellow foxtail: seeds formed and released.

Miss Lady, aka Maggie, poses for her portrait.

Wild rose. My buddies. Still hanging on to their desiccated stamens.

Drying fern fronds. Notice the dots?

They’re the spores.

Whoa…trippy.
Out in the field, a few brave souls are ignoring the memos.

“October, schmoctober”, says the violet.

Black-eyed Susan: “I got it going on.”

One last goldenrod puts on a show.

While the rest pump out seeds.
Meanwhile, in other news, last week a utility truck clipped the end of the bridge.

Ooops.
Someone came around to fix it on Friday, when we were heading out of town.

Much better.

Now we are just haggling over the price.

2011-10-18T17:52:00.001-04:00

Scrounging for floral color here.

Pale smartweed: it tiny.

Fall dandelion: arrives late to the party, but brings awesomeness. [Editor's note: I lied. It's Cat's Ear. Still awesome, though.]

Common evening primrose.

Ditto, having gone to seed.
Speaking of going to seed, remember the gentian that I was worried about earlier? No? Here, I’ll remind you. Here’s the time-lapse sequence:

August 20: delicious	August 31: sheer voluptuousness
September 16: going over the hill	September 24: yuck

I was worried about these because they seemed to be moldering away without having had a chance to open up. Turns out this is most likely Gentiana clausa – aka, “closed gentian”. How they manage to do their business is anyone’s guess. Presumably small intrepid insects are involved. At any rate, here’s what it looks like as of today:

Those flowers are PACKED with seeds; to wit:

Flowers that rely on windborne dispersal are going great gang-busters, which kinda makes sense, since a lot of birds have packed up and left for the season. Now, that’s the sort of reckless statement that deserves actual study to back it up. I’ll put it on the list for next year, I suppose. At any rate, here are a few of my favorites from today:

Tall anemone (thimbleweed). My head is exploding!

Rats, I’m not sure what this is.

Milkweed: proof that starting to lose your mind can be beautiful.
And now, for more milkweed pørn*.

*Yes, I just spent five minutes figuring out how to make a slashed zero, rather than spell it out, since that word generates a lot of blog traffic: users the world over end up here, looking for --- oh, nasty stuff. Imagine their surprise when they find me, instead. I could keep using That Word to up my ranking in Nature Blog Network, but that would make me a whore**.
**Ooops.

hello, pippin

2011-10-14T20:19:00.001-04:00

We got back from Hilton Head yesterday afternoon. For a few reasons I won’t go into, it was not the soul-cleansing experience that trips to HH typically are for me. Many fine things did occur, don’t get me wrong: I had a stare-down with a bald eagle... I let my sister-in-law drag me out on a couple of runs, and a yoga class, that I probably wouldn’t have managed on my own... Late night conversations in the hot tub: always great... Convincing my mom to come out to the deck late one night to watch the full moon make the waves dance…

But completely spiritually renewed, cleansed, re-focused, and inspired? Nope. Not a bit. In fact, I came home extra, super-duper cranky.

Typically after I’ve gone out of town for a little while, I tend to not want to leave the house (if at all possible) for a few days, so that I can let myself re-root. But today was Reiki-at-the-hospital day, and I made myself get up and out the door before I could rationalize why I shouldn’t go. On the drive over, through the irritating and completely uncalled-for rain, I reminded myself that that great thing about Reiki is, it works, whether or not you are Spiritually At One With The Universe. Reiki is about allowing. About saying “yes”, and then letting go.

Why I wasn’t able to surrender to that mindset while my bad attitude was developing like a storm cloud all week on Hilton Head? Um, I’m not sure. And I think the super-duper aspect of my crankiness was about that very issue: me, beating myself up, for being a moron.

Anyways, I got to the hospital this morning, and learned that there would be no patients arriving until…two hours later. A change of schedule, blah blah blah. Fortunately, this meant that I could give Reiki to the nurses, who were otherwise occupied with administrivia. They were psyched.

And then I stole this teddy bear out of the basket created for the children of chemotherapy patients.

That’s right, I took a teddy bear away from a child.

Can you blame me? It was hermetically sealed in a plastic bag – suffocating! – and it had been there for months, hoping to be rescued. Plus, it was wearing a ridiculous felt collar meant to look like daffodil petals. The indignity! Not until I sprung it loose did I see that it had a tattoo on its foot – of flowers. I figured this was a love affair that’s meant to be.

The afternoon patients started rolling in, and I gave a treatment to a woman who came in completely tight, anxious, in pain, and distracted. By the time we were through, she was literally asleep, drooling.

On my way home, the bear told me its name was Pippin. Maggie and Charlie have made his acquaintance, as has Kevin. But most importantly, I need to introduce Pippin to his cousin, Smidge.

Smidge is well traveled. He’s been to Hilton Head loads of times, of course, but more impressively, he went on a cross-country road trip with his mom (my sister) and me a few years ago.

Smidge at the Corn Palace in South Dakota.

Smidge in the Badlands.

Did I mention it’s raining? Sigh. At least I have a teddy bear to console me.

so long, farewell, heading home

2011-10-12T21:21:00.001-04:00

What I did on my ~~summer~~ fall vacation:

Books read: 4

Studliness
Miles biked: 50
Miles run: 20
Miles walked: 10
Visits to the gym to lift weights: 3
Yoga classes: 1
Kayaking trips: 1

Seen and admired:
Bald eagles: 1
Alligators: yesterday’s all-time high of 6, just in the two lagoons closest to our house. Numerous others on other days.
Blue herons: one million
Egrets: half a million
Wood storks: 15
Starfish rescued: 5
Turtles: a dozen
First cousin, once removed, aged 11 months, 3 weeks: one
Full moon: one. (We just have the one moon here, on this planet. It’s a fine moon. I’m headed outside to say hello to it one more time, in fact.)

Ingested:
Hush puppies: a dozen or so.
Pints of ice cream: probably five or six. Low-fat, but still. That’s a lot of ice cream. I think there’s still some more in the freezer, actually. Hm.

Headed home tomorrow morning. G’nite, world.

on the virtues of getting lost

2011-10-11T21:12:00.001-04:00

I am told our family first started vacationing on Hilton Head in 1969. One of the greatest things about coming here year in, year out, is the reliable promise of getting lost. It’s not that big an island, and we only stick to one end of it. You’d think after 40 years, we would have figured it out. But where’s the fun in that? I particularly remember the time we didn’t make it onto the island until after sunset, and we spent an extra twenty minutes looping hopelessly around various traffic circles in the dark (there are no streetlights), trying to find the house that um, we’ve been staying in since we were like, ten years old.

Even better than the roads, there are something like 17 miles of bike paths winding through a magical combination of loblolly pines, sweetgum, live oaks dripping with spanish moss, and saw palmetto. Getting lost on the bike paths is the signature experience of a day well spent.

The problem is, though, that I’ve spent quite a chunk of time on Hilton Head in the past couple of years. My Sainted Mother has started spending the month of March down here, and generously invited me (her lone east coast child) down two times. And then there’s the every-other-October time that we all (sibs and associated spousal units) come down here as well. Plus, a year and a half ago, Sainted Mother experienced a health crisis while she was down here which necessitated her hospitalization. Since I was in the middle of my extended goofing off period, it was no problem for me to come down and help her out. I was here all told for several weeks.

The net result of which is that sadly, the road-and-bike-path configurations got welded into my brain. Gone are the days when I have to struggle to remember how the three traffic circles all connect to each other. How to get to the Forest Preserve? Check. Even the ace-in-the-hole – the pre-Civil War ruins constructed of oyster shell cement that each year, lured various aunts, uncles, and cousins to a Bermuda Triangle of hopeless confusion – sigh. I can find my way there blindfolded at this point.

Sucks to grow old.

But today, I am happy to report, I got the teensiest bit of lost, TWICE!! The first time was with Kevin on a bike ride. We took a side trail of a side trail and then, hallelujah, the trail petered out on a road that doesn’t have a bike path next to it, and hooray, I didn’t know where I was! And I took a wrong turn! And was mistaken about where we were! And we had to backtrack! It was AWESOME!

And then I went and got take-out tonight, because everyone else around here wanted to eat sea larvae for dinner (by which I mean shrimp – the only thing worse than sea larvae is giant sea cockroaches (lobster)), and I took a shortcut home, and wound up – YESSS!!!! – on a dead-end street I didn’t recognize. It was awesome.

run, bike, ice cream, lather, rinse, repeat

2011-10-09T22:03:00.001-04:00

Still here on Hilton Head. The weather has started to turn here – it rained on and off all day. Rain be damned: some of us had big plans for the day. We’re in Day 7 of the Effects of Ice Cream Prevention Program. This is the program in which we counteract the effects of massive inhalation of ice cream. It could be worse: the traditional Family Vacation Treat of Choice around here is chocolate-frosted chocolate pop-tarts. So ice cream is an improvement…right?

At any rate, today, the program called for running to the tippy end of the island and back (actually, only 4 miles of that was running; the rest was walking).

Quick diversion: this is butterfly pea; it’s a vine that grows in the dunes. Ain’t it pretty?

Oh, and speaking of sweet pea, Lovebean and I biked 13.5 miles this afternoon (since, let’s face it: a four mile run and a three mile walk are a drop in the bucket, when weighed against the volumes of ice cream being ingested). His bike broke down – the chain fell off twice – so we adjusted our itinerary to swap it out for another at the bike rental place. No worries. It rained – hard – three separate times over the course of our ride.

We saw a bunch of wood storks at one point. I didn’t bring my camera with me because I knew it was going to rain. So here’s what they look like, courtesy of The Internets.

It’s hell not having a proper field guide for this area with me.

Time for more ice cream.

crab-and-jellyfish, dolphins, alligator: a typical day

2011-10-06T19:05:00.001-04:00

On today’s agenda: an hour and a half ass-kicking yoga class:

Vinyasa Flow: Our signature class! A dynamic blend of strength, sweat and spirituality that will detoxify, heal and electrify. This sequence will strengthen and tone the muscles of your body and mind, and is sure to take you to your edge.

Duly detoxed, healed, electrified, strengthened, toned, and drop-kicked off the edge, I followed this up with a strenuous two hours of deck chair asana, which is not for the faint of heart. I put my all into it. By mid-afternoon, I was ready for the next adventure: a kayak tour of yet another chunk of heretofore unexplored estuaries.

The sibs, with just the baseball cap of our guide in between.

Reason #1 to get an SLR camera to supplement the point-and-shoot: a blurry great egret. I should note, s/he was not blurry in real life. S/he was quite in focus, actually, croaking indignantly at us as we gingerly made our way through the high tide waters and spartina. We also annoyed a great blue heron.

Speaking of Spartina, here it is having just flowered.Woo hoo!

FAIL: this was supposed to be an awesome close-up of an immense blue dragonfly eating a monarch butterfly. Not only did I miss the shot, but my presence disturbed things enough so that wham, the dragonfly took off, and the butterfly corpse exploded, with pieces landing in the bottom of my kayak.

Like so.

Cool. Sad, but cool. Dragonfly’s gotta eat.
And now for the fun part. Here’s a wee tiny jellyfish.
These don’t sting. And, bonus, this little one is perfectly alive and happy, scooped up by our guide, Jesse. She explained that certain species of crabs have a little loveshack arrangement going on with these jellyfish. (Yeah, my terminology here.) They both eat the same kinda stuff. So sometimes crabs hang out up under the lid (yeah…my terminology again…) of the jellyfish, to eat with their host…

She rummaged around the hapless beastie to show us.

See the crab??? There were two of ‘em in there.
Then we made our way towards a huge pod of dolphins proceeding through their late afternoon lunch. We parked ourselves where they’d go right by us, and they did: going under us, and then surfacing – at one point, three at a time, doing a partial breech. Heaven.

Reason #2 for plotting the purchase of the next camera: I want a super-duper telephoto lens with stop-action capability.

We visited about a dozen pelicans. They glided by serenely.
A fine day. Tomorrow will be even better, because Best Beloved’s joining us. Hooray! Oh: one last piece of news. The alligator’s back on the other side of the lagoon now.

Whew.

But the local heron took its place right in front of our driveway.