Is this the cutest thing ever?

The Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara caused these two to take shelter together. The fawn is 3 days old and the bobcat about 3 weeks. The fawn came from somewhere in the fire and the babcat from Carpenteria. They immediately bonded and snuggled together under a desk in the S.B. County dispatch office for several hours.

Kitten alert!

Here's little miss Pesto...and what a hellion she is! So far she's getting along pretty well with the other cats though she is turning out to be even more alpha than Cleo. Cleo is actually a little afraid of her. Bindi has accepted her presence but doesn't want her to get too close and Hannah has no idea what's going on. Pesto stalks Daisy, naturally. Poor Daisy....she gets no respect.

I have a new Facebook account if you're interested in tracking the ever more fascinating aspects of my life. Heh.

Garden update

So here are some garden update pics....the first if of my perennial herb and strawberry patch. It's fun to be able to walk down the path, lean over and pick a strawberry, flick off the slug or snail attached to it, maybe walk it inside and wash it before eating it. Maybe most certainly do that.....

This is how we're looking mid-summer. This overflowing box in the front was supposed to be all lemon cucumber. I do have those but I also have acorn squash popping up in there and I KNOW I didn't put in squash seed. In the front yard, where I did put in acorn squash seed, I'm getting squash but it's not acorn.
This was the drab and dreary countenance of my garden just a few short months ago. Yeah for summer!

The voodoo lilly blooms!

This lovely plant is a voodoo lilly. It's blooms are these giant purple numbers with a more than vaguely phallic member dead center. The day they bloom they STINK like the dickins....they totally reek of something dead. This "dead" thing attracts flies who then, I presume, light on the stamen, get pollen on their little fly feet and fly away to plant more voodoo lilies elsewhere. Lovely plants, really smelly.

The other photograph is, of course, our resident sex kitten, Cleo. Her outstretched paws are inviting you to give her a big kissy. I always oblige and she always purrs.

The garden is looking good!

It's not even June yet but the garden is looking good. The front yard just went kind of crazy this year....everything seems to have jumped up several feet in size. The radishes are some of our first crop from the vegetable garden. I'll post pictures again mid-summer so you can see how my garden grows!

Pug crawl

I'm actually repeating a picture! Bad form for a photography blog....but we went to the local "Pug Crawl" today and I forgot to take a camera. Here's a link to last year's event if you want to see a few pics. Just dealing with Daisy takes enough of my attention.

Anyway, the Crawl was held at a local brewery (good thing since at least this pug loves beer!). I've never seen so many pugs in one place in my life! Of course it had to be a hot day for this....dragging a dog to this event would be a circumstance any good pug owner would have known to avoid. Pugs don't do well in heat since their breathing passages are so constricted. Daisy is one I can't walk if it's anything over about 70 degrees. 

Anyway, I must say, this is a really good breed of dog. All of them were either concentrating on getting a breath or getting the attention of their people. It was amazing seeing that many dogs in one place that were basically ignoring each other. I would have been shocked if a fight had broken out....it would have been so out of character. Anyway, we didn't stay long but that's what happened in Daisy's day. Not that she remembers (or cares).

Laurelhurst Art Walk

So it's art show season around here again. I've scaled back considerably this year....my sales were not good last year and with the economy so bad this year I didn't do anything new. But when the world starts improving again, I'll get back into it. I'm more interested in doing travel photography, maybe hanging shows in local cafe's or photography galleries. We'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, Charles had a table of guitars set up this year and I hosted the painter, Mandy Main, a good friend of ours...the jewelry maker, Cheryl Cook and Elizabeth Bachman who makes decorative travel-themed boxes. Mandy sold a painting and a few small reproductions, I sold one print and Cheryl Cook sold a few pair of earrings (mostly to me!) so the economy continues to take a toll on local artists. *Sigh*

It's art show season

Heeeeeere's Charles! Doesn't he look coy? He participated in the Marylhurst Musical Instrument Show last weekend and showed a few of his guitars. The guitars in themselves are a work of art but it's the pickguards (that I make) that really draw people in. So it's my job to catch the eye and Charles job to get the prospective buyer to sit down and play.

I really like this leopard print design....if you see it up close it even looks like fur. Crazy!

Next weekend Charles and I and three other artists are participating in the Laurelhurst Art Walk here at the house. We usually get in quite a crowd. I'll post pics from that show later.

The end is nigh....

Well, not really nigh but I'm definitely on the downslide. Most of the time these days I feel tired, fat, unattractive and depressed. (Isn't this a cheery note?) In some ways this time in life (meaning "the change" will soon be upon me) feels almost like the 7 stages of grief...denial, pain, anger, depression, the upward turn, reconstruction and ultimately, acceptance. In my case, I've already experienced the denial, the pain (or fear), I've been totally pissed off and now I'm at the depression stage. All this and the big event isn't even here yet. I'm really hoping that once menopause is here and over I'll get a new lease on life. As it stands now, I'm glad I have a dog so I can go kick her once in awhile (kidding, of course!)

But as it stands now, I feel like I go through most days in a fog. I'm forgetting even the most simple words, can't hold a thought for even a few moments. It's like my brain is swimming in a toxic chemical soup. It's really quite disconcerting....I've always been so sharp and focussed.

If anyone has any suggestions for helping me get through this, I'd be happy to hear them.

Portland in spring

This is why we love Portland. After the months of snow and rain and MUD...hope springs eternal in the form of a flowering weeping cherry. As you can see, all the other trees in the area are still leafless but the cherry tree is having none of that. This tree is just around the corner from us and is one of our "heritage" trees (meaning the owner of the house can't cut it down and install astroturf). It was planted probably close to 100 years ago and is still going strong. Spring, summer and fall in Portland are wonderful. Now if only winter wouldn't last so long....

Portland in winter

This picture sort of epitomizes Portland in winter. Gray, muddy, dead, blah. But! It's the newly built planter boxes that give hope of spring! I'll take this picture again in July and you'll see why Portland is so great....green, lush, sunny and beautiful.

Our oak trees are starting to lose their leaves today, another sign of spring. Unlike every other tree in the world that loses their leaves in the fall (when the city comes around to vacuum up the fallen leaves) our trees shed theirs in the spring....where we are responsible for the cleanup. 

Half a dozen daffodils came up out front this year.....who knows what happened to all the rest. I must have planted 100 of them last year....believe me, my back remembers doing it. I'm the only person in Portland that doesn't have a yard full of daffodils right now. The tulips look like they are going to put on a stellar show this year though.

I'm itching to get over to Portland Nursery and see what's new but it's still a little early. Maybe just a short trip to go look at the roses....what could it hurt?.....

What I learned from CNBC today

I learned that no one in the financial industry has incentive to do good work unless they are rewarded at year end with giant bonuses. Not giant bonuses for doing exemplary work mind you, bonuses given just for showing up.

Which, of course, makes me understand what a sucker I was for years and years working in the blood bank.....turning out compatible blood that would not kill the recipient....for an hourly wage and never with a bonus. I never knew that I should have been receiving a bonus just to DO THE RIGHT %$&^@#!! THING!!!! Without it, what incentive did I have not to kill people????

Gawd, Wall Street makes me sick....

And for the cat sympathizers out there....

The cat I mentioned in the post below is on the left, Pippy. Her sister, Angel, turned out to be a pretty good nurse. They didn't hang together much when Pip was well but when she got sick, Angel stayed pretty close. I hear that Angel is thrilled to be an only, INDOOR, cat now. I still miss Pip however....:-(

I'm getting bloggy lazy

(Daisy, being cute, 2009)

OK, so I'm getting a little slow at posting. As we head out of winter it seems there is more to do.

So I was preoccupied the past few weeks with helping my neighbor take care of her ailing cat. Pippy, the cat, had cancer and was unable to keep food down for long so she lived in Charles' shop briefly as barf doesn't hurt anything out there. I imagine Charles will be finding a little pile of hurl here and there for awhile.

When it appeared Pippy's quality of life had hit its low point, I went with my neighbor, Ann, to the vet to have her put down. It was as hard as if she were my own. Pippy was always one to help me when I was working in the garden and she would often greet me at my car on a particularly sunny day. She would face off with any dog in the neighborhood that dared to pee in her yard. She was one tough cookie and I will miss her.

Now that the stock market is on a bit of an upswing I'm trying to take advantage of the irrational exuberance long enough to make a few bucks. So far, so good but it makes me tense. You never know when these idiot traders will turn and decide to bid everything down again. I was listening to some guy on the radio today saying he thinks the markets might have turned up for good now that Wall Street has got it through their collective tiny heads that a Democrat is going to be running the show for awhile and bidding the market down does nothing but lose everyone money. How much did that particular round of sulking cost our 401k's?

We had three young guys (with strong backs) over today to do a few things outside. I'll take some "before" pics of what we did but we've set ups a series of planter boxes to grow vegetable in. We figure if the next Great Depression really hits at least we can grow some of our own food. If not, we'll be able to donate a lot of fresh vegetables to local food pantries. Matter of fact, we'd probably donate in either scenario since we're not, like, TOTALLY heartless, you know. The "after" pictures I'll take midsummer will hopefully be lush.....aside from the planter boxes, I think I'll put in strawberries in the front yard. The sun is really the best there and the plants are pretty.

Also, Charles got in a load of the walnut he'll be working the next couple of years so the 4 boys moved 6 TONS of walnut this afternoon from the back of a flatbed truck to various points in the backyard and garage. Yikes! Of course, all of this happened during a surprisingly rare rain storm. We've had a fairly dry winter here so far. After moving all that wood, Charles has decided to sub out the manufacture of the 12' x 4' tables. I can't say I blame him.

OK, that's briefly what is new here. Hard to believe that this time last year I was recovering from an appendectomy. How time flies....

I'll post up muddy garden pics soon....

If men were like some species of ants....

....they'd have a lot more to worry about...!

"Some ant species do not have queen ants in the strict sense. Instead, worker ants (which are all female) that have mated with a male ant become the dominant reproductive individuals. These are the gamergates, or "married workers" and their sex life can be brutal. In one species the gamergates venture outside of the nest to attract a male, engage him in copulation, then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded."

This sort of throws a wrench in the whole "intelligent design" theory....it's hard to justify a merciful God if he's the one that designed this particular system. Yikes!

Hawaii revisited

Here is the hand-colored version of the photo below. Pretty cool I think.....

I'm really liking these pictures....

Most of the time the camera doesn't seem to record what the eye sees but this one comes pretty dang close. I took two shots, one metered on the rocks in the waterfall, one metered on the fern overhead. This is the one metered on the waterfall. I'm lucky the fern didn't wash out. With some selective coloring it should look 3-dimensional.

These orchids, too, came out better than I'd hoped. Selective coloring of the flowers and a few leaves should make this one pop as well.

We're back from Hawai'i

It was really not a bad time to go to Hawai'i...it snowed (again) the night before we left so heading off to 80 degree days and 70 degree nights wasn't bad at all.

This was the first time I'd seen the big island, it was the second for Charles. This was a place that required a car...there didn't seem to be any form of viable public transportation so we seemed to spend a lot of time in the car. Just getting to the grocery store was a 5 mile drive.

We stayed at a B&B called Lucky Farm, a coffee plantation on the Kona Coast. It was small and fairly rustic but Johnsie, the innkeeper, is a good cook and her breakfasts (and homegrown coffee) were excellent. Breakfast was always served with a lot of fruit, avocados the size of cannon balls, papaya, passion fruit and something really unusual called jabotacaba. The fruit grows directly on the bark of the tree as you can see in the picture to the left. It has a sweet center and sort of a gingery outer skin and a small seed.

Kona has a fairly large population of wild roosters and a gargantuan population of mosquitos. So between the roosters keeping Charles awake and the bugs draining me of half my blood it wasn't all paradise....but again, 80 degree days and 70 degree nights....it's hard to really complain. I spent most of my time when we were at the B&B tring to domesticate a feral kitten. Cali was the mangiest little cat but the big eyes and wombat ears were quite endearing. By the time I left, she was eating out of my hand and allowing me to (briefly) pick her up.

Kona has to be the churchiest place on the face of the earth. It seems every other establishment along the road is a church. Some of the are a bit more prosperous than the one above . One church we passed by frequently had a sign out front that read: TIME TO PRAY....NOW. I think if they were praying about the economy on Kona they had a lot of praying to do. It's not looking good there.

We couldn't go to Hawai'i without visiting the volcanoes. We first drove up to the rim of the Kiluea caldera and got a lungful of sulpher then headed down to the coast to see the lava hit the water. The plume of steam on the horizon is the lava hitting the water. It's kinda far away.

Unfortunately seeing the lava hit the sea would have been quite a hike over miles of lava fields, and as the sign indicates, the road was closed. (As Charles pointed out, this has to be the most photographed sign on the island).

We went a little way but it was pretty hot and we were unprepared so we didn't go far. Pretty day though.

Keeping with the trend of covering every mile of paved road on the island in our car, we headed out another day over to Hilo to stop in at a botanical garden.

Again, another beautiful day and I got some interesting pictures. I think the one of the orchids will be a future hand-colored shot.

The light filtering through the fern in this waterfall shot was just lovely.

Our last day there we went to a state park, the "place of refuge". This is the place people went to if they had been bad, they were forgiven by the king of the gods or whoever, then they could go out and be bad again. Kind of like confession in the Catholic Church or being "born again" (and again, and again.) I jest...anyway, it was a peaceful spot as a place of refuge should be.

These dudes are ki'i....guardians of the place of refuge.

Other than a few excursions such as this we mostly just read books, went to movies and ate. We did have a little excitement with our first rental car. After leaving a window cracked during a rain storm, the door locks on the car started to freak out. It was like the car was possessed or something...door locks flying up and down, clicking noises coming out of the front control panel. Leave it to GM to design a car door that can't withstand a few drops of water. Yeesh. At least we got an upgrade on our second car.

So that's what we did on our only vacation this year. I just thought I should share.

Relief

It has been incredibly emotional today, watching the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I must admit however that even though the swearing-in reduced me to tears I felt the most relief when Marine 1 lifted off, thus taking the worst president in history, George W. Bush, out of our nation's capital where he could no longer do our country anymore damage. Our very long national nightmare is finally over.

Useful toys!

Believe it or not, there is a toy company that makes something called the Playmobil Security Check Point. It's,  um, interesting that this toy exists in the first place but the most entertaining thing about it is the customer reviews on Amazon. Hysterical!

Our hedonist

It's a sunny day in Portland and one of our resident hedonists will not miss out. Cleo knows a good thing when she sees it....a bed in the sun....aaahhhh....

BTW, one of the first things I learned in photography school is that you, as a photographer, are responsible for every square millimeter of your photograph. With that thought in mind, I find the shadow in the lower right corner distracting. I generally try and frame my shots so that the eye is not drawn to a distracting shadow or some object that does not add to the overall composition. I was, however, trying to quickly shoot a moving object (there was considerable pleasurable rolling around, flopping and purring) and so the luminosity of her eyes help overcome any other shortcomings. I could Photoshop out the corner wedge but I don't wanna. It's a snap of the cat. Again, isn't she pretty?

So much for that.....

Well, so much for the picture every day resolution. It's been so gray and lifeless here in Portland it's hard to get motivated to even take a snap of the cat. I kind of feel like these two at the right --->

Have no fear though, all is not lost. The camera is still my nearly constant companion even if I don't use it. Meanwhile the sun is out today so I may find something good while I walk in the park.

Bonjour Françoise!

(La photo est "Romance, Champs Elysees, Paris" 1997)

Merci pour ton encouragement, Françoise! Je fais des photos chaque jour cette semaine. La pluie et la neige est très difficile mais je fais un photo à la chatte...j'ai terminé ma resolution. Voilà!

Comment ça va? J'èspere tu vas bien!

Je tu embrasse....!

(Translation for the non-French readers: Thanks for your encouragement, Françoise! I've taken some photos each day this week. La rain and the snow are very difficult but I take a photo of the cat....I have completed my resolution! 

How's it going? I hope you are doing well.

Hugs, etc....)

It's a dark and stormy day

It's a windy, rainy winter day and I'm NOT heading out with my camera today. I warned you not every shot would be a masterpiece but this shot I took this morning of Bindi is still quite fine. Note the negative space surrounding the cat and the chiaroscuro effect in the shadowing behind her.....oh for gawd's sake, never mind. It's a snap of the cat. Isn't she pretty?

Stock Tip

(Hand colored photo of a woman in Cusano, Italy, 1997)

Here's a stock tip for possibly some quick turn around cash (and I know many of you will have no idea what I'm talking about here). If there is continued irrational exuberance in the market early in the week, buy a few near-the-money calls in SPY, be ready to sell just after the inauguration.

After that, wait for the market to drift back down to previous lows in the spring....when you're feeling absolutely the most pessimistic and miserable as you think you possibly can, buy stock in companies that interest you for the next great bull run.

The world is going to get a lot worse before it's going to get better but there are ways to make money in the short run.

Remember, always take my stock tips for what they are worth....and that is not much. Do your own due diligence.

Meanwhile, take more pictures! And plan for better days.

Happy New Year!

(Photo of birch trees taken in June 2004, Wyoming)

And so the picture-a-day project begins. I started taking pictures a couple of days ago because it just seemed too cliche to start on the 1st. I walked up to Hawthorne Blvd. with my camera in hand and just snapped whatever struck my fancy. I not only see the world differently when I do this, I see the world. Portland is a quirky town (the city motto is "Keep Portland Weird") especially here on the South East side. Portland has two distinct personalities. West of the Willamette River has downtown and the SW hills covered with expensive homes owned by doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs. East of the river (where we are) are 100+ year old houses where the artists, musicians and other creative types live. In the SE, we are much more likely to see the creativity in the houses themselves...wild paint jobs, lawn art, crazy gardens. Needless to say, Charles and I are SE people, through and through.

Charles New Year's resolution is to go out and put in some time in his shop every day. We should both have great things to show for our efforts this year!