Look Who Came for a Visit!

Ah! Had no intention of leaving the house today; too much to do. Mind, not important stuff, but stuff I feel like doing, such as get digital photos off the hard drive and onto disks, copy out the handwritten Hawaii Journal from my December trip and catch up on my fan fic writing and revamping.

I woke to a phone call that I was too dazed to answer, but shortly afterwards, I slocked to the computer to find out that a Snowy Owl answered my prayers and flew down to meet me! Well how could I refuse to visit with a genuine acquaintance of Harry Potter, eh? Rain or not, I went out and found and photographed the beautiful, snowy white bird. My very own Hedwig.


The pics I took are not that great because the bird was so far off, but still I got my 'been there, saw that' photo. I also got a decent shot of a Yellow-billed Magpie. What with the West Nile Virus my very own namesakes have become a scarce.

I'm hoping to get one or two more looks at the Snowy, assuming the bird decides to hang around for a while. I think it will. After all, it has friends in town.

Western Meadowlark

Good News, Bad News and My Inner Child

Rats! The bad news is Don isn't coming to bird this weekend. We'll chase cranes come February on the dead presidents weekend. The good news is Don isn't coming this weekend so I can continue moving stuff out of my future bedroom.

I hadn't mentioned it before but when Barbara was here last weekend she took all my Happy Meal toys that I'd collected in the manner of a mad-woman over a decade or so. I never, ever looked at the toys or used the toys, or even remembered exactly which toys I had. I think they were part of one of my 'manias' during which I sink into a genre, let it absorb me and then later walk away from it. Whatever the reason I had the toys, I don't have them now and my 'inner child' was a good little cherub and did not pout or fuss or even seem to notice that her toys are gone.

Barb's kindergarteners will enjoy the stuff. Hurrah! Bigarse empty space in my garage now. Will continue dumping stuff in preparation for retirement and moving. Don't want to find myself moving stuff I don't need or want.

At lunch yesterday I told Mommy Nancy that Barb took all of my toys. Nancy could scarsely believe her ears. She said, 'You got rid of your Legos?'

'What, are you flippin' crazy or something? Hell no!'

Get rid of my Legos? I don't think so. Let's not get silly.

Cryptic

Have thought about What the Bleep Do We Know? for days. It fits in to the stuff that scared the crap out of me in the early 1990s. I had an open mind then and “stuff” would happen that was so far afield that I would panic. Eventually I crawled into a back room of my brain, slammed the door shut and assumed the fetal position.

What the Bleep opened the damned door again and at the off, “stuff” began to happen again. As before it starts with little things. In this case, I spent Sunday thinking how I am not “only” lucky in my friendships, but I am lucky in all things. I opened my email Monday to discover I won a pair of tickets to a comedy show this Friday. See? BIG changes are not the rule, only small changes to start, things that are easily 'explained' away by the annoying scientist in my brain; loads of small changes, which perhaps because I had no explanation for the phenomenon before, used to upset me.

Inez, my Crescent City friend, keeps telling me to try and learn to accept it all and just now I’m assuming I can accept ‘it’. Will continue to feed my brain pleasantries on a daily basis.

Yippy Skippy! Had a chat and slide show from Terry. He has the same camera I do, a Canon 20-D and he romps around the same park I used to haunt with Chiquilla.

Terry takes great shots of the coyote, deer and birdlife on the American River. He’s full of useful hints. Right now I can only bow to his expertise because my photography remains hit and miss.

Terry’s latest show had some excellent shots of egrets, the prettiest of which was of a Great Egret in flight over the river – flowing & elegant. There was a nice pic of a coyote that looked so much like a tame dog it made me laugh. The animals in Terry’s Park are used to seeing humans, particularly Terry, roaming in their domain. There is a buck Mule Deer with a notch in its ear that allows Terry to approach quite close. It’s the same buck he photographed crossing the river a month or two ago.

I hope the weather holds up this weekend so I can get some birding in.