Beep! Beep! - Friday 5/29/2009

This roadrunner brought to you courtesy of my Nikon D80. This has been much-cropped.

Maybe because it happens so rarely, I always feel that it's great good fortune to see a roadrunner. It might even be a good omen.




Hydra on the trail again. Good man! See the road runner at about 5 o'clock?



Elusive... He's the V in the grass.



Baby toys where they shouldn't be. I have this thing about lost things.



This lost feather is not as out of place.

Budgies of the Serengeti - Thursday 5/21/2009

Yeah, we get a kick out of our three little guys grazing in the carpet.

That's Nick in the yellow, Gus on the upper right, and Rocky down front with one of his best friends: one of those little lattice balls with a bell inside of it. He plays with them endlessly.

Rocky has a very rich inner life.

Ventura Coast - Saturday 4/4/2009

Just some Gerbera daisies we saw in a gas station we stopped at. Love the colors.


We started out our visit to Ventura with a meal on the pier. Hydra had the mussels. I had a seared ahi sandwich.



Unfortunately, the restaurant's logo is better than its food.


The view from our table was pretty great, though. This is the Ventura Pier.


Hydra gives Flat Brayden his first look at the Pacific Ocean. Later, we helped Flat Brayden pick up a piece of a shell and a small smooth stone for souvenirs.


The water at the end of the pier. Beautiful color, huh!?

There were lots of people fishing. We noticed someone using shrimp as bait, which prompted me to ask Hydra, "What can you fish for that's better than shrimp?"



Looking back at the shore. Honestly, if I could choose any coastal Southern California town to live in, it would be Ventura.


The tracks the water leaves behind.


Yes. This is when my foot got wet. Right before I leapt onto this rock.


These little guys amused us by hopping away while never putting the other foot on the ground. Hee!


Just a cool shop sign in the shopping district of Ventura.



We stopped at a fruit stand on the way back so Flat Brayden could check out the orange groves. He's growing up in a farming community, like I did. Figure he'll be interested to know that California produces something like 75% of all the domestic fruit the U.S. eats.

Beauty Shot - Saturday 2/7/2009

Just the handsomest, smartest parrot on the planet. And he's feeling it today.

Since joining 24 Hour Fitness, I don't work out with DVDs at home very much. But the other night I wanted to get home before the rain, so I fell back on The Firm : Time Crunch. (45 minutes of aerobics and weights.)

As soon as I put the disc in the player, this little guy--who was sitting on top of his cage in the bedroom--starts up with the sound effects, "oof," "umph," "erghhh."

Hey, I don't sound like that!

When he got bored and started exploring the bed and nightstand behind me, I put him in his "house."

As I'm working through my crunches I hear, in a most plaintive voice, "I love you soooo good."

Unlike how I love him. Which is clearly deficient if I am willing to let him sit in his cage at all when I'm home.

I remember having pets that couldn't talk. I always assumed they admired me.

Later That Day - Friday 1/8/2009

Tree at the edge of my neighborhood.

I felt so good, I invited Hydra out for a hike. We hiked by the light of the moon!

Next day, the terrible cold descended. Glad we hiked when we did.

A Perfect Saturday Morning - 11/29/2008

Ah, yes. This is why I drove down to O.C. last night instead of this morning. So I could start a fire, make a pot of tea and read the last chapters of The Thirteenth Tale.

Perfect!

No, wait.

Something's missing!



There now.

Perfection.

Thanksgiving - Thursday 11/27/2008

While we had Thanksgiving dinner, a bird of a different feather watched us from Cuz-M and Cuz-P's back yard.

I wandered around taking photos of the paving stones Cuz-P makes, and the flowers in their yard.


I love the way their white washed fence sets off the roses!


The person who gave them the cutting that these shamrocks grew from says he brought it over from Ireland himself. I didn't realize that it had blossoms.


One of many blooms on this shrub.


Yellow!


After a long day of making us feel at home, Le Roi is bushed. Fuzzy photo because I didn't want to use the flash.


Hydra naps. As it turns out he was at the beginning of a weekend long illness. Let's just say he didn't keep his Thanksgiving dinner very long.

Parrots Rights

No, he's not supposed to get into the kitchen drawers. Yet for some inexplicable reason he has been obsessed with just this act of defiance for a few weeks now.

Must enter drawer. Must remove random lids and toss them to the floor!



Must defend rights of myself and all parrots everywhere to ransack kitchens, via terrifying display of ruffled neck and back feathers.

You may well quiver, humans!

Bwaaa-ha-ha-ha-Halloween!

Our first Trick or Treater is Dodger.

Once again, he dresses as a thief.

He destroys a green Skittle, a yellow one and an orange one before I stop him. Yipes, he only weighs about 9 ounces. I think he just ate 1% of his body weight in fruit flavored sugar.

The first costumed kid arrives at 6:25. It's a little later than usual and I am a little concerned that we might get stuck with 10 pounds of Starbursts, Skittles and assorted fun-sized chocolates. (I'm not kidding!)

She's wearing a homemade bee costume. The pipe cleaner wings are already bent. I adore her. She gets a Snickers.

I admit it, when I have the time--and sometimes I don't because they arrive in rushes of ten or twelve a time--I rate the costumes and give accordingly. Handmade ones get the good stuff. Skittles are mid-range and Starburst packets are the norm. Back when I bought the candy, I got nothing but chocolate. It's cheaper when I let Hydra do the shopping.

The official greeter at Chez Sundry.

There's a great little cowgirl around 7:00. With just the most wonderful smile, dark hair in pigtails descending from her hat, holster angled across her hip, real cowboy boots.

Two packs of M&Ms!

7:15 : A teeny-tiny Sleeping Beauty just barely understandably asks, "Where is your puppy?"

I have to tell her we don't have one.

"Okay!" She turns away, completely satisfied. Her mom takes the candy and thanks me, shaking her head and smiling.

7:20 : I eat a packet of Peanut M&Ms.

Hydra checks the body count. We've jumped from 13 to 52 since the last time he asked.

7:30 : Dodger's sitting calmly on his travel cage in the kitchen, saying "Helloooo--- Hellooo---" He is not sure why we are handing all our candy to these vagabonds. Just because they asked?

We get a lot of tweens and teens in our neighborhood. Maybe it's because Acton's a small town and there's not a lot to do. Most of them make an effort to dress up. No one has seemed happier than the boy in a skirt, tube top and heavy glam make-up.

7:50 : A batch of high school students shows up, not really in costume.

"What are you dressed as?" I ask with a chuckle, "Bums?" (Oh god, when did I get so old?)

"No!" says one.

"We're from the local rehab," says the another with a smirk.

"I'm a cripple," says the girl, holding up her wrist, which is in a cast.

"Very convincing," I say, handing over the Skittles.

"Ohhhh!" says Dodger in the background, "Heh-heh-heh."

8:05 : "Wow, your window is so clear!" a little lady bug says. Cute. A Twix arcs into her pillowcase.

8:57 : Time to turn out the porch light.

Total for the night: 131 critters!

The really scary thing is, I didn't open the second 4 pound bag of Skittles and Starburts, and I barely put a dent in the chocolate!

Red Rock at Night, Camper's Delight - Wednesday 9/17/2008

After work on Wednesday, we tossed what we needed for the night and the next morning, and the birds, and clothes in to the Tahoe and hooked up the trailer and took off.

It's only about an hour and fifteen minutes to Red Rock Canyon, and that gets us 1/3 of the way to our destination for the weekend : Lone Pine, CA in the Owens Valley.

We arrived at the campground just before dark. There's no water or electric, so we didn't even unhook the camper. We had propane, so I heated up some hot dogs.

If you'd told me when I was in high school that I'd be living in California and I'd have a parrot for a pet, I might have asked for my fortune-telling money back.

But if you'd told me that I would lie on my back one evening and watch a million stars ease into view while my darling played guitar to the rocks, I would probably have bought that.

Bird Work - Tuesday 9/2/2008

I'm on my way to work.

These birds have already started their daily tasks. Preen, watch traffic, fly, eat, poop. Repeat.

Sometimes that seems like an apt description of my work day.

Except with a lot more reading.

Dream Big, Little Man - Sunday 8/17/2008

Rocky chats up the metal hen in the living room.

You go, boy.

Succulents - Friday 8/8/2008

Lovely succulents abound in the campground in which we spent the weekend. I love getting there on Thursday nights and having the day to laze around. Kept trying to finish up a novel I'm reading, only to doze off.


Succulent parrot enjoying being outdoors and having people stop by and visit. Why do they all make such strange squawking noises, he wonders.

They think they're talking parrot, dear.

Into town for dinner with friends. We actually do that every night of camping.

I love cooking. You know I love cooking. But I don't so much like cleaning up afterward when camping.

We didn't even go grocery shopping until we got to Fillmore. No time to prep. But that's okay. I've learned not to stress about it or to feel inauthentic because I'm not doing it by someone else's standards.

We're so happy to be in our little home away from home.

Stand Off - Sunday 7/27/2008

Technically, this is Dodger's playset.

But sometimes Nick likes to pretend he's the big cheese.

Yet Another Hike! - Sunday 7/20/2008

Our goal, should we choose to accept it, is to scale Sundry's Mountain. We started off earlier today and it was curiously overcast and cool throughout our entire hour and forty-five minute hike.

If you click on the photo and make it bigger, you may be able to see the moon above the mountain and a little to the right of center.


We can only assume that Hydra is doing his Rocky routine at the top of Sundry's Mountain.

Hey, somebody has to lag behind and document events like this. Not everybody who flew up there got to walk on the moon, you know.

But I did eventually make it to the top of my own mountain.



The diffused light was really wonderful. Made these dried out flower bases just glow.


HydraSquatch offers up the pod of friendship.

I took a cactus pine out of his paw once, and he's been bringing me stuff like this ever since.

(That's a yucca flower pod...pretty neat!)


This shows most of our little development. See all that stuff on the other side of Hydra's Mountain? 99.5% of it wasn't there when we arrived.


The yucca rises from the ashes. This area burned in March 2007.

Long time readers will recall that this was our personal brush with that powerful and famous California icon, the wildfire.


Looking back at Sundry's Mountain from atop Hydra's Mountain.

I know, I know. Another weekend hike...yada yada!

Just to spice it up, here's a not very good video of some finches eating the seeds out of the Indian Blanket flowers in our front yard. This was shot with my Canon point and shoot digital camera, not even a real videocam.

Point Mugu - Saturday 5/3/2008

We drove out to Point Magu to hang out with some Songmakers friends who were camping up there for the weekend. We didn't camp because of various other things we wanted to do on Friday and Sunday, but it was a great day to go up there!

This is the way to the beach, passing under Pacific Coast Highway from the Sycamore Canyon campground.



There weren't as many people with guitars there as we'd expected. I took my bagel with me to the beach and ate it for lunch while sitting on this very large piece of driftwood.




My foot at the beach. As you can see, my original Crocs are holding up nicely.


Hydra joined me and we walked down the beach. Cool kite!



Can you see the Easter Island-like face at the tip of the outcropping of rock?

This area is one of the first my brother Joe brought us to when we moved out here. We came back here pretty often.

There's a place near here where the water undermined Pacific Coast Highway and it was rebuilt a little further inland. It is forever known as The Place Where Sundry Tried to Kill a Seagull.

Not that I actually intended to kill a seagull.

We'd only been out here a few months (from Indiana) and were not yet wise to the ways of the gull. We took a bucket of KFC out to the beach for a picnic. I tossed a chicken drumstick bone toward some gulls, thinking they'd pick it clean and I'd go pick it up.

It was not to be.

One of the gulls grabbed the bone, tilted its head back, and proceed to swallow it whole! We were horrified! I fully expected the bird, who didn't look like it could accommodate a bone of that size, to keel over in front of us.

Instead, it shook it's snowy head, fluffed its wings contentedly and blithely winged its way up the beach.

Yow. Never again. Even if they can handle it, I don't want to see that again!



The bridge from the other side.



Swallows nesting in the roof of the bath house.


Our friend's campsite and the place we hung out and talked and played a little music. It was a good day. We returned home with that feeling you get from being at the beach...tired in a very satisfying way.