A DIFFERENT WALK ~ THE LAST JEDI ~ DEHYDRATING DIVAS ~ FOR THE BIRDS ~ FIRST THE FIRE, THEN THE FLOOD ~ PARTING SHOT

A DIFFERENT WALK

Linda and I live near a very nice park, Emil Kissel Park, which we walk to almost every day. It is just a few blocks up to the park, then we walk around the paved pathway, and then back home. All told, the entire walk is about a mile. But we do like to change it up every now and then just to keep things interesting. So we decided to drive to Randall Park on January 4th and take our walk there. I had been anxious to get out with my camera and get some pictures of something other than sparrows and finches. Randall Park is not very far from us but it would be quite a walk for us to get there, so we always drive over and then walk the pathway around the park. This park is bigger than the one near our home, and it has a pond. We all know what a pond means...ducks and other assorted water fowl! Here is what greeted us upon our arrival at the park.

The ducks are quite friendly, mainly because they think we are going to feed them something. When they found out we had nothing to offer, they proceeded to ignore us. There are usually a few geese of various species in among the ducks. The temperature was in the low 30's that morning, so it was quite cold. The pond was frozen over in most places, so the ducks were gathered on one side.

A couple of the ducks actually posed for me.

Say "cheese"

There is a song I like by Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and singer who died almost a year ago. The song is called "Anthem," and the chorus goes like this:

"Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in." 

I don't know how this crack got in the pond at Randall Park, but I think that particular quotation fits this picture perfectly.

Letting in the light

The days have been pretty dreary around here since before Christmas. We've had a couple of days where the sun has come out for a while, but not enough to my liking. It was dark the day we walked at Randall Park, but the sun did try its best to poke through the clouds. It almost did at one point.

Just a glimmer

The thing about walking in Yakima in the winter is that you really have to bundle up, so it takes some commitment on your part to even consider a walk. I usually wear my snow pants over my jogging pants, a long-sleeved undershirt, a t-shirt, a fleece jacket, a parka-jacket, a scarf and knit hat, socks and boots. By the time I get all this on, I feel like I can barely move!

All suited up!

THE LAST JEDI

Linda and I usually go to the movies only about once or twice each year. There has to be something really good playing for us to decide to leave our comfy home and brave the cold (inside the theater). I don't care if it's summer or winter, movie theaters are always cold. And then, too, there's the sound level. I swear they have upped the volume in recent years so that it is almost unbearable. But, since the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, was playing, we couldn't say "no." Our usual tactic is to go to a matinee that gets out right around suppertime, and then we go to Chipotle Mexican Grill for a burrito to split for supper (with chips and corn salsa, of course!). We did just that last week and we are so glad that we went because this was one of the best Star Wars movies yet. And that is saying a lot. If you like Star Wars (and who doesn't?), I urge you to go see it...if for nothing else than to see the performance by Carrie Fisher. It was a fitting last movie for our Princess.

A movie & dinner

DEHYDRATING DIVAS

I belong to many "groups" on Facebook, most of them cooking related. As you know, my latest craze is dehydrating, so I joined the Dehydrating Divas & Dudes group. There is one lady in the group who drives a custom-built long-haul truck with her husband. She calls herself the Truck-Driving Dehydrating Diva, or TDDD for short. This gal has her dehydrator going in the truck while she's driving! It is so much fun to see what's she is dehydrating and where they are traveling. She's very innovative with her dehydrating. She has even inspired me to try dehydrating a few things other than the usual zucchini or apple chips. This past week I dehydrated salsa (from a jar) to make salsa chips, and also chickpeas to make a crunchy chickpea snack. I am happy to report that both endeavors were successful and I now have some healthy snacks.

Salsa on top, chickpeas on bottom

The finished product...the salsa chips were HOT!

FOR THE BIRDS

We did some re-arranging of the furniture in our living room this past week so I could move an ottoman over to the front window to watch the birds. It's almost like having a bird blind because I can sit in there and watch them and they don't see me if I don't make any sudden movements. This is also a great place to take pictures of them at the feeders. Although it is a real challenge to get good bird pictures when it's so dark outside (those little buggers won't stay still), I have managed to get a few decent shots, such as this one showing these birds all queued up for their turn at the feeder.

Playing the waiting game

FIRST THE FIRE, THEN THE FLOOD

Once again this past week we have been on pins and needles about the situation down in Carpinteria, California, where Linda's dad lives. You may have heard on the news that there was a devastating flood in the fire-ravaged hills that were burned by the Thomas Fire just last month. Fortunately I can report that dad's house has been spared again, although they did have to evacuate as a precaution. There was some flooding in areas around dad's house, but not nearly as drastic as in the neighboring city of Montecito. The rains were much heavier there, just 14 miles down the road from dad's. Houses were washed off the foundations and huge boulders came down from the hills. Interstate highway 101 was closed down from Carpinteria through Montecito and Santa Barbara because in some places, the water and mud were completely covering up the road. If you didn't know better, you would think that it was a lake instead of a highway. Below is a picture of the computer screen that Linda took this morning as she was watching the coverage by KEYT Newschannel 3 in Santa Barbara. Our hearts go out to everyone affected by this flood.

News from California

PARTING SHOT

In addition to everything else that has happened the past week, we are still working on the puzzle...when we can get to it.

Thanks for stopping by, check back in next week for more news!

WELCOMING IN ANOTHER YEAR ~~ THE SNOW SITUATION ~~ FOR THE BIRDS ~~ CLEARING THE AIR ~~ PARTING SHOT

WELCOMING IN ANOTHER YEAR

I hope everyone had a Happy New Year's Day. We played it pretty low-key at our house, as usual, working on our current jigsaw puzzle and playing with my new camera. I am still a very long way from proficient with this camera, but I am making progress. I feel like I need to go back to school to learn how to use it. This is what happens when you have spent the last 10 years using a camera that was very much automatic. When you get a camera that enables you to have some control using manual functions, you have to learn all over again exactly how everything is inter-connected. Suffice it to say that I am still learning. And we are still working on the puzzle.

The puzzle on the day after Christmas

The puzzle as it is now

THE SNOW SITUATION

We did get a little bit of snow that made it possible for us to have a White Christmas, but since then we have only had a rain/ice mix on a couple of days. This is a far cry from what we had last year at this time.

Our spruce tree last year at this time

Our spruce tree now

As a result of the rain/ice mix, our driveway, which is in deep shade all day, is a solid sheet of ice. This makes for precarious walks out to the road, which is completely clear. We gingerly take each step, trying to find a spot that still has somewhat crunchy snow instead of slippery ice. If it ever warms up enough to melt the ice a bit, Linda and I have vowed to get out there and shovel it away. But until then we have to take it easy.

Our icy driveway

FOR THE BIRDS

All this melted snow has made the scenery around here pretty boring. The ground is a mixture of mud and snow/melted ice. Plus we have had a couple of weeks where the sun has only peeked out once or twice, and then not for long. All of this makes it hard for me to get some good pictures. We have been keeping our bird feeder full of seeds, but the dark, dreary days do not lend themselves to getting good pictures. However, I have managed to get a few good shots that I can share with you.

Male House Finch

Eurasian Collared Dove in tree behind our house

Close-up of male House Sparrow

I saw this little guy below hopping around underneath the feeder in the remnants of snow. I try to identify birds correctly, but with sparrows it is quite a challenge. However, I believe this one is a Song Sparrow.

Song Sparrow

When I ventured outside earlier today to take a picture of the driveway, I was surprised to hear the birds in the barberry bush beside the driveway chirping their little heads off. They love to get in this huge bush and survey the bird feeders. The bush is so big and dense that they are assured to be protected from predators, like hawks...or Summer Girl. Be sure to have your sound on for this.

CLEARING THE AIR

One of the neatest presents I got this year for Christmas came from my sister. It's an essential oil diffuser. This one has a light with really pretty colors that you either leave solid or set to change colors every few seconds. She also sent us a box with a nice assortment of essential oils. Just 2-4 drops are all you need to put in. So far we have used the Lemongrass scent, which is very soothing. You can determine how strong the scent is by the number of drops you put into the diffuser. If you are interested, you can check it out on Amazon by clicking here. If you watch the video below very closely, you can see the mist coming out of the top.

PARTING SHOT

Summer Girl enjoyed her holidays and now has gotten back into the groove of just being a cat. Her new favorite thing is to join us in the office while we are working on the jigsaw puzzle. We have to keep an eye on her, though, because she likes to walk on top of the puzzle. If there are any pieces missing, we will know where they went!

"Are you accusing me of something?"

That's all for now, see you next week for more news from the Yakkie City!

POST CHRISTMAS ~~ PUZZLES ~~ SNOW! ~~ CHALLENGE ~~ PARTING SHOT

POST CHRISTMAS

I trust everyone had a wonderful Christmas! I know we did at our house. As I had hoped, Santa was very good to me this year and brought me a new camcorder/camera. It is a very nice one with all the latest technology. Now my job is learning how to use it! I have been "studying" daily, trying to learn at least one new thing each day. I have never seen a camera that has so many bells and whistles. But I am slowly learning so please bear with me and I promise my pictures will get better. One of the first pictures I took with my new camera was this one below.

The best little present that was under the tree! 

Summer Girl really enjoyed her first Christmas as being the resident mostly-indoor cat. Last year she was only allowed in the den, but now she has the run of the house (except the bedrooms because we don't want her hiding under the beds.) Her favorite spot was under the tree, so she could alternately nap and look at birds. Santa even brought her a present, although she is scared of it! It was a pair of plastic balls with bells inside, so when you roll them on the floor they make a noise. Oh well, she has decided to donate her balls to the Yakima Humane Society (that sounded a bit odd, didn't it?).

PUZZLES

We spent a lot of our time before Christmas putting together a jigsaw puzzle. We have done this off and on throughout the years. We find it is a good activity to do especially during the winter months because there is always a lot of "hanging around the house" time due to snow and cold temperatures. When we lived back in North Carolina, Linda and I put together several puzzles, one of which was shaped like a butterfly. It was beautiful. We glued it together and hung it up in the mobile home we used to have at Holden Beach. How I wish we still had that puzzle (un-glued, of course) so we could put it together again. We still have several puzzles in the closet that we have put together once or twice already, like the one below. It is titled "The Tower of Babel" and is the one we finished two days before Christmas.

1000 pieces

Have no fear, Santa was aware of our plight of not having any new puzzles to put together and he brought Linda no less than FIVE new jigsaw puzzles. She is really the one who put together the majority of the above puzzle. I usually wander in after it's about 75% together and put in some pieces. One of the best things about jigsaw puzzles is you can get up and leave them and come back later and pick up where you left off. And you don't have to boot anything up to do them, either. No wonder Linda likes them so much! This below is the puzzle we are working on now. I will post a picture of it when it is finished.

"Readers Paradise" also 1000 pieces

SNOW!

As usual for Yakima, we had a White Christmas. We got a bit of snow on December 22rd and 23rd,  and some more on Christmas Day, so we were glad for that. I must admit we have become spoiled for having a White Christmas as there have been only a few years when we haven't gotten snow. I took a walk down to Kissel Park in the snow one day and it was so beautiful. Of course, along with all that snow comes cold temperatures. This was the temperature on Christmas Day when I got up.

Yikes...brrr!

At least the snow does offer photographic opportunities. However, I am still in the process of learning how to set my new camera to take good pictures of snow. My first snow picture is this one below. It was very dark that day and the picture was taken in deep shade, but I wanted to see how it would look. I think it came out pretty good considering the conditions.

Someone's been walking on our driveway!

Judging from the size of those footprints, I am guessing they were made by a California Quail. We do have them here year-round. They like to get beneath the feeders and scratch around in the dirt (or snow) for bits of seed. We also have a multitude of sparrows that like to forage around underneath the feeder as well. I saw this little guy below hopping around on Christmas Day. I looked at him closer and noticed that he didn't have a tail! I got a picture of him although it was pretty dark. But I figured a dark picture is better than no picture at all.

Tail-less Sparrow

CHALLENGE

For the month of December, Linda and I have been participating in a fitness challenge sponsored by our local newspaper, the Yakima Herald-Republic. Each day in the month participants have pledged to complete at least one 10-minute activity. You can do more than 10 minutes if you want, but that is minimum for the challenge. For most of our activities, Linda and I have been walking down to the park. A few days we haven't wanted to get outside in the cold and have opted to follow an exercise video on YouTube. Points are accessed to each participant for how many minutes you exercise and whether or not you post about your activity on social media. At the end of the challenge, each participant who completes it will get a "swag bag" full of goodies. It has been a lot of fun and I hope we have established a habit that we can continue after the challenge is over. This was our social media post picture for Christmas Day.

Bundled up!

PARTING SHOT

Birds are not the only animals walking on the snow on our driveway. Can you guess which animal made these cute little tracks?

Tracks in the snow

I just realized that next week's blog will be the first one for 2018! Here is what Summer Girl thinks about that...

"In your face, 2017!"

See you next week!

TRIP TO DAD'S -- PART FIVE ~~ PARTING SHOT

TRIP TO DAD'S -- PART FIVE

Today's blog post will wrap up our trip down to Carpinteria, California, to visit Linda's dad. Our trip lasted three weeks (four days were spent driving) and we had a great time. I have always enjoyed going to visit dad because he is such an interesting person. He is always interested in how things work and why they work the way they do. He's always got something going when we are down there. I believe having all these interests in life has contributed to his longevity. It just goes to show you that the more you exercise your mind, the better off you will be.

My most favorite thing to do while down at dad's has always been to watch birds. He has the perfect set-up for bird watching...a nice deck on the back of his house with lots of trees and bushes surrounding it. He has a wonderful large bird feeding station suspended from the deck, and a nice cement bird bath nearby. There are a multitude of different bird species around his area, and I have added quite a few birds to my life list by observing them there. This trip I was able to add two more. One was the Tennessee Red Quail that I mentioned in last week's blog, and the other was Hutton's Vireo. We saw this bird several times at the feeder, but he was always moving so fast that I couldn't get a good picture of him to help in my identification. However, one day as I was sitting on the deck he landed in a nearby bush and I happened to get a shot of him. He was very similar to a little bird we used to see back in North Carolina, the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet. I used to call this little kinglet "my baby" because he was so cute and was always visiting the feeder in our back yard. They are both very small birds, similarly colored, but this one on dad's deck did not have the red crown on top of his head.

Could this be my baby?

I figured he was some other kind of bird, but since there are a lot of small greenish-gray birds it was hard to tell exactly which one he was. But I took note of the white eye ring and the white bands on his wings, plus the fact that he was not constantly on the move, and this pointed me to the possibility that he was as a Hutton's Vireo. I saw him visit the feeder almost every day. One day I was inside looking out the window at the feeder and all of a sudden the birds spooked and flew all at once in different directions. Unfortunately, one bird hit the window. I went outside to see if it was alright and it was the little vireo. He was still breathing and I didn't see any blood, so I moved him off of the concrete onto the grass. He fluttered his wings but acted like he was a bit shaken up, so I left him alone but kept checking back to make sure he was okay.

Hutton's Vireo

After an hour or so I went outside to check on him and he was gone. He had been moving about a lot before that so I concluded that he had flown away. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Another bird that I had seen before at dad's showed up towards the end of our visit. He also was very similar to a bird we had back in North Carolina, but his coloring was different. I got this silhouette picture below of him. Can you guess what he is?

You probably noticed the very distinctive curved bill. That feature immediately reminded me of the Brown Thrasher that we had in our yard in NC. But this guy was a dull grayish-brown and turned out to be a California Thrasher. He posed for me to get his picture.

California Thrasher

Here are some more bird pictures that I took while we were at dad's.

A couple of sparrows enjoying a bath

Anna's Hummingbird

A Cooper's Hawk who visited the feeder (not for the seed, though)

Red-Tailed Hawk in a nearby tree

Anna's Hummingbird

Northern Mockingbird on top of a cactus

My first sighting of the Tennessee Red Quail

Alas, the day came when we had to head back home to Yakima. Linda's sister and brother-in-law returned from their vacation well-rested and ready to resume their duties as dad's caregivers. We all watched the beginning of the last game of the World Series, then Linda and I said our goodbye's and left for our motel. We wanted to turn in early so we could get an early start the next morning. Unfortunately, the people in the next room were also watching the game, and none too quietly. After a while they quieted down, but it was a rough night for both of us. However, we did get an early start the next morning. Check out the clock on the wall.

At the Starbucks in Carpinteria @ 5am

Fuel for the drive

The first day's drive back home was uneventful except for a couple of traffic delays. It was definitely more interesting than the drive down had been because we went back on Highway 101 instead of Interstate 5. We had learned our lesson.

The hills along Highway 101

Much better scenery than I-5

Lettuce fields

The garlic capital of the world!

San Luis Reservoir

Victory!  We made it halfway home!

The second day's drive turned out to be very eventful at one point. Just outside of La Pine, Oregon (which marks our halfway point on that day), we encountered this below.

Needless to say, we were shocked to see snow falling when just days before we had been in over 100 degree heat. But we must remember that this two-day drive takes us all the way from southern California into the southeastern part of Washington, so the climate change is significant.

Pictures taken at a rest stop outside La Pine

We started to panic because we didn't want to be driving in snow for half a day and wind up having to go over passes without any snow tires or chains (which we don't even own). Fortunately, the snow eventually stopped and we continued on in clear weather. When we arrived in Yakima it was rather chilly outside but not snowing. However, the next morning was a different story.

The view out our front window

So, we arrived home to temperatures pretty much the same as when we left, with a little bit of snow as an added bonus. Another trip down to see dad was in the history books!

PARTING SHOT

Summer Girl was definitely glad to see us but did sulk a little bit. I would like to take a moment to thank our good friend, Linda H., for taking such excellent care of her while we were gone. She loves her Aunt Linda! Here is where she was for almost every second the day after we got home:

Summer Girl on my lap

Linda and I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! I hope you get to spend it doing what you love with people you love.


Thomas Fire Update:  I am happy to report that despite having to evacuate from the house three times during the Thomas Fire, everyone is fine. It was pretty scary for them but due to the diligent efforts of the firefighters and some pretty timely and efficient back-burning, dad's property was undamaged from the fire. It came very close but the firefighters were able to stop it from destroying any houses on the hills around dad's house. We are all very grateful for their hard work and sacrifice during this most trying time.