Open Thread – Creek’s Open!
Another sign of spring – the creek is open!
December 20, 2024
Thursday, August 3, 2023
The Quitter Returns! -Monday, March 21, 2022
Putting the goober in gubernatorial -Friday, January 28, 2022
Another sign of spring – the creek is open!
I saw a male Western Tanager at my feeder today – the Tanagers are so pretty that they look like they’ve been painted and set loose. It has been a really challenging (meaning incredibly sh*tty) and seeing a beautiful bird seemed like a harbinger of better times ahead, or so I can hope.
How could you tell it was a Western Tanager? Was it wearing cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat,ala John Wayne?
No, it was because he was whistling “Don’t fence me in” as he sat atop the sunflower bin. Actually, a male W.T. is on the cover of my “Field Guide to Western Birds”, and if Roger Tory Peterson says it’s a Western Tanager, I believe him.
I just watched a flock of geese winging South with a disgusted look on the faces. One actually flipped me “the Bird”. I have no say in the weather. Furnace is running and it is almost turned to the bottom of the dial. Drizzled all night long looks like. Barn Swallows are too cold to fly. I see a raccoon has been using my raised onion bed for his personal toilet. Looks like he surveyed the the bed to get the exact geographical center to dump on my onions. Oh well,better days are coming. Tomorrow is Monday. Yippee!!
Ah, yes. Spring is on the way.
Over 25 tomatoes growing on my 4 foot plants, Sweet and chili peppers the size of my little finger nail on the pepper plants, pea blossoms, fresh radishes, and little buds on the zucchini. Onions getting bigger by the moment.
Yep, spring is on its way.
Planning on going skiing this next weekend. I miss the snow. Seriously.
🙂
ggggrrrr!!! 🙂 I’ve just got blossoms on my tomato plants !! but I DO have some articoke heads growing ! and no deer in the yard yet!
Oh you had to mention the other thing I miss so much, affordable artichokes. We pay $3 for medium size, frost burnt artichokes here.
we stopped off at the veggie stand at Moss Landing on the way back…. small ones were 5 for a dollar,big ‘uns were 2 for a buck, big flats of Strawberries fresh outta the fields , and cherries are out now $3 for 2 lbs.basket…. 🙂
Ahh, the music of running water.
Lovely photo. Health and peace to all.
Peace and health to you as well. 🙂
…warm today- rain due tomorrow, so have been finishing up my spring garden chores… including repairing the sprinkler and drip system ! ( like I need it for this upcoming week! ) We have red tailed hawks here, and saw something new.. coming back from Monterey with wife, a hawk flew over us with a snake in its talons !! rabbits, mice, rats…yup, seen those a lot… but a snake ?!.. still writhing .. was just glad he didn’t drop it on top of the car !
Oh I miss living in Santa Cruz. Now I’m in the Mojave Desert which has its own beauty, but it just isn’t the same. I saw an owl splat in my arena yesterday to take a dirt bath and rest in the sun. Different fauna and flora and a beautiful view of the mountains here, but my heart will always be in Northern California.
Cold and raining again where I am. Field corn is above ground and probably wishes it could have waited another week. We had back to back days of 94 and 95 degrees and now its in the forties with strong North winds. Lilacs are blooming. Too chilly to go sniff the lavender scents. Friends from town picked asparagus which was really growing strong. I get barbecued ribs in exchange,just warm them up and chow down. Got two or three Canadian geese in one pasture trying to nest and have had a blue heron here of and on this Spring. I like the stark look of the picture. Someone knows what they are doing with a camera.Send some warm sunshine.
Husband just brought all the big tropical plants home from the school where he winters them over for us. Just in time for those forty-degree temps. I just bought a slew of annuals during that heat spell. Was too hot and humid to plant all of them so I waited until this weekend when it was supposed to be “a bit cooler.” Just came in from watering them and nearly freezing my fingers off as the water dripped off the hose and the wind whipped the spray back onto my hands. At least next week is supposed to host seasonal (and reasonable) temps. Want to get my sunflower seeds planted so the birds will have fun in the fall. Maybe if we all ask really nicely, Spring will back an extended comeback. 🙂
The (lack of) compassion of some politicians is simply overwhelming. Ron Paul supports abolishing FEMA because “it’s a moral hazard to say that government is always going to take care of us when we do dumb things. ”
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/13/ron-paul-abolish-fema/
I’m not sure what ‘dumb things’ the residents of Alabama did a couple of weeks ago to make the tornadoes flatten entire towns and kill hundreds of people. Or what the people of the Gulf Coast did to entice Hurricane Katrina to wipe out entire cities. Or what millions of people along the Mississippi River are doing to make the water wash away their towns. Or what the people of his home state of Texas did to encourage wildfires to decimate over a million acres of land.
Seems to me that natural disasters don’t check on people’s IQs before they kill them or destroy their communities.
Here’s some of those dumb people that didn’t plan ahead for the gulf oil invasion. Why should I help them, just because I’ll expect help if there’s earthquake or fire damage where I live! Is there any place on earth that’s virtually safe from natural disaster? Where’s the safest place to live as far as nature is concerned?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0514/Life-along-the-Mississippi-Waiting-and-watching-as-the-river-rises
I’m glad to know someone else thinks Ron Paul lacks compassion. I’ve been hearing him spout his cruel Ayn Rand nonsense (me, me, and me) all week on various shows. He doesn’t seem to realize that the woman he named his son after eventually had to rely upon the very government programs he is trashing. Does he not see the irony in that?
The man (and his son Rand) simply lacks empathy for anyone. He seems to think everyone has access to the same advantages and breaks as he and his family has had. He brags about how he worked his way through college. I hate to break his darling bubble, but time has moved on but wages and salaries for most working people have not. Kids cannot find enough hours in a week to pay for their tuition, room and board unless they are lucky enough to have earned scholarships or grants. Even state schools are becoming prohibitively expensive for the working class kids.
He never seems to remember that many people who tried to “take care of themselves” by investing their savings or relying upon their 401ks, for example, have lost all of a substantial part of the money they were saving to help their kids or to retire upon. He seems to not understand how the free enterprise system really works when it comes to insurance companies; how millions get thrown off the system because they get the wrong illness or have an accident that costs the company too much money or because they can no longer afford the premiums or co-pays or have lost their jobs because those corporations and the free market he so dearly loves have shipped jobs overseas.
Ron Paul has lost touch with reality. He has no understanding of how hard it is for most people just to pay the rent/mortgage, utility bills, gas-up a vehicle, buy groceries, get basic medical care, et cetera. He doesn’t seem to know any moderate to low income folks or even middle class families trying to make ends meet. No, he just blathers on about how we should all be more self-sufficient, how we don’t need assistance, how government shouldn’t protect the country, build and repair the infrastructure of our highways, bridges, tunnels and rail system – nah, we can all get out there and take care of that stuff ourselves. What an idealistic fool.
Those “dumb things” he dismisses are what constitute the inevitable crises of our lives, both personal and national. He is the Dumb Thing we need to avoid. (end of rant)
P.S. I could go on ranting about his son, Rand and the truly Dumb Things he spouted this week about his fear of being enslaved if just anyone (or everyone) had a right to medical care. Good grief!
I am firmly convinced that Republicans don’t “do” irony. It would short-circuit their belief system and then they would be left with naught but empty threats and broken promises.
I’d say his timing is spectacularly bad. Between just the tornadoes and current flooding, I think many of his potential voters are hoping FEMA is on the job.
And will probably wish that it’s even better than it is. 🙂
The famous Rochester Lilac Festival starts today. 🙂
http://www.lilacfestival.com/
Unfortunately, rain is predicted for the next several days. 🙁
As for some happy lilac news, the bush just outside my kitchen window is about to bloom and appears to have lots of buds. It’s a late blooming variety, but did a really odd thing last year. It went through its usual bloom period and finished in late May. Then it started blooming AGAIN in August and kept putting out a few small, not-quite-fully-formed little clumps of flowers until early November when the first hard frost hit. It’s never done that before (it’s not a re-blooming variety) and I was worried that it wouldn’t bloom this spring after it ‘shot its load’ last fall. Thankfully, the unexpected second flowering last year doesn’t seem to have dampened its enthusiasm for producing blooms this spring. Nature sure is full of surprises!
Willow Palin Busted for Speeding … In an ESCALADE
http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/14/willow-palin-speeding-ticket-sarah-palin-todd-bristol-alaska-governor-president-campaign-running-tea-party/
Apparently, there is yet another book to be published about Mrs. Palin in the near future.
Karma is a b*tch. 🙂
AND… the emails get released at the end of this month….geeeee.. she won’t have to do ANYTHING to be in the news cycle again, will she !!??
Our lake is finally liquid today! First day of waking up to reflected trees in nearly 9 months! AAaaaahhh! And a loon — also reflected.
Hope!
I live on a lake too…sat out on the deck yesterday in the early evening for a couple of hours and watched the loons, ducks and beautiful ‘green’ trees surrounding it once again. Yea!!! Nothing more calming and peaceful.
Saw the heron in the pond on the way home from work yesterday for the first time this spring. The goldfinches and house finches arrived back in my yard the other day, and several white crowned sparrows have been scratching up a feast under my birdfeeder. The hostas in the front of the house are growing like crazy and my peonies have grown almost three feet in the past week and a half and are starting to bud.
Yup, spring is finally here!
(Hope – I’m going to assume the ‘loon’ in the lake you’re talking about is the feathered variety and not the screechy one you occasionally see reflected in Lake Lucille!)
Sarah Palin was so successful as a governor (The Bitter Quitter), she graduated early, she real is a “Dan Quayle” in heels. She clearly loves “dishing it out” but real can’t take it because she loves playing the victim card, poor thing. She fail as a VP candidate (her lie that her daughter was engaged was such a farce), her stand-up comic fiasco on the Jay Leno Show, please, her TV show canceled after declining rating, I guess running for Prez is the only thing she can look forward to, but since she is a coward she will only throw small minded rocks, poor thing.
That’s funny….graduated early 🙂