Butterflies

The Owl Butterfly fends off potential predators by pretending it is a big-eyed bird. The other side of the wings are blue as the sky, to avoid detection from those who fly higher.

Taking photos of stationary butterflies, as they feed from flowers at the butterfly farm, is one thing. Catching them in flight is a skill I need to work on. I have dozens of "where a butterfly once was" shots on my camera roll.

"Some kind of swallow-tail" would be the scientific term for these two beauties.

This one looks like something a jeweler would create.

Blogger won't let me center the photos, but you get the idea.

Looking Up!

One of the truisms of horse riding is that you should look to where you want to be. If you look down at the ground then that is your destiny but, if you lift your eyes over the obstacle to your distant goals, then you will achieve them.

Our (My) original plan was to leave work behind us at noon on Friday and head south for our weekend of eagle-spotting. We were both thwarted and supported by the request from Artist Jane Rosen for an appointment to choose stones from our inventory to use in displaying her works.

We have worked with Jane Rosen before. She is a seriously creative artist and sculptor grown from New York Bohemian roots and transplanted to a coast side ranch where her love of nature has led her to produce a series of carved stone and now blown glass falcons, hawks and eagles. The energy and excitement of finding and appreciating the best colors, textures and shapes in our stones, as well as being welcome business, gave us pleasure and made the time fly by.

Knowing that we had a three hour drive to our destination, the last forty miles on very rural, unlit windy roads and we would be unable to get there before dark, I conceded that Hubby could have one more night in his own bed but that the alarm would ring at 5am, no excuses accepted. We had a smooth early morning trajectory and were welcomed by the staff and out on the lake by 10 am; supplied with loaner binoculars much stronger than my own and a map of the lake studded with silver stars , showing where most eagle sightings were to be expected.

For most of the morning, we were the only boat stirring the waters. The weather was perfect; mostly sunny and warm enough to laze around semi-snoozing between arduous bouts holding binoculars to our eyes. The eagles are first spotted as a dark outline, perched in the topmost branches of the abundant oak trees as they survey the open grassland for rodents and snakes. They are there to breed and reproduce before continuing their migratory path. I was satisfied just to have seen one and know from the locals that there were two dozen at last count. I didn't exert myself too much and counted 5 eagles myself. As the thermals rose a little towards the middle of the day two eagles took flight and circled before dropping out of sight beyond the crest of the hill.

Eagles are not the only wildlife of course. I bundled up and took my coffee outside to watch the sunrise Sunday morning with a mama deer and her two fawns. Mama came to eat bread from my hands and then all three grazed nearby for a while.
A storm had been predicted for later in the day and, when it was time to leave, we headed towards the coast to face the weather head on. The dormant vineyards between Paso Robles and Cambria were dissolved in white fog before we got too far and then we were hit by the pounding rain.
Up the coast road past San Simeon it was too wild to stop. The elephant seals were not only on the beaches but out into the ice plants, heads up  roaring to the sweeping rain. They are so huge that they were visible from the car as we drove by.
Hubby likes to drive, especially in challenging conditions. There were a few boulders down in the road and we saw multiple emergency vehicles involved in hauling some poor soul back up the cliff just before we stopped for lunch in Gorda. It was too foggy for a helicopter rescue, that's for sure.

As we neared Carmel the skies cleared and we pulled into Point Lobos to stretch our legs and look for sea otters. If you were a sea otter looking for a beautiful place to raise a family, you would be hard pressed to find a more perfect spot than Point Lobos' China cove. The water is always turquoise, even on a stormy, January day.

I hope the sea otter by the rocks, near the center of this picture will be visible. He's on his back, floating and noshing on something. Then he would dive to catch something else and resume his concentration on his tummy-top buffet, completely impervious to the roiling swells.
So, my weekend was condensed into a shorter span than planned but we fit way more in than we could have imagined by just going with what felt right at that moment. Finding our way back from "My" to "Our" for a while, clearing our heads and facing into whatever storms lie ahead.

Pontiac Ice Capsule

Leaving my house this morning, under blue skies, with bright horizontal sunbeams doing little to raise the temperatures, I slid into my frost encrusted car and cocooned myself from the world around me. I have an ice scraper but today I chose a pacifistic approach; preferring to experience a moment of beauty and reflection; respite from the daily grind. I started the motor, turned off the radio and listened to my own thoughts, inside a magical, diamond encrusted palace. The windshield was a landscape of luminous white feathers, slowly growing translucent and sliding away into clear chill liquid as the heater gently returned me to the reality of life. Off to work. Sigh!

Silk Trees

Silk Tree or Silky Acacia/Mimosa (Albizia Julibrissin.

We are lucky to have a couple of silk trees shading the front of our house. They are currently in full leaf and flower, attracting bees and humming birds and cloaking us with a cool green protection from the afternoon sun. The horizontal, parasol-like spread of the canopy and the puff-ball delicate flowers are a luxurious surprise every year, from a starkly naked tree that fills in it's greenness much later than other neighborhood trees. One day the first green fingers of the leaves appear and shortly thereafter you can't see our house at all.

The trees are messy, dropping ghostly, colorless spirit- versions of the pristine and delicate flowers. They clump together and accumulate like an old-man's-beard, shorn and accumulating in wind-drifts by the steps and trapped in lumpy contrast on the bright, geometric spikiness of the dahlia heads below. They blow over the house to the back garden, which would surely become a forest of silk trees if I let it.

Soon we will have long seed-pods dangling down, much like those on a wisteria vine. As they ripen, then dry they will twist as they pop, the empty husks will rattle in the wind, then they too will fall, crunchy underfoot. A few weeks from now anywhere that receives water from my sprinklers will have sprung volunteer life in the form of small, want-to-be-trees, that grow visibly taller every day. Luckily they are easily extracted but will account for a weekend or two of my time to eliminate the invasion.
I don't mind the messiness, it represents an abundance of beauty and weighs lightly on the scale of pros and cons.
It's time to head home. Once I am done fighting freeway traffic I will enter my house and appreciate the aquatic-green light filtering in the windows, as cool as a trout gazing up from the river's depths. The muted luminosity is full of shadows and movement as the long-fingered leaf fronds lift and wave and mime in conversation with the wind.

Picture added 7/23/09
This is what I know as a Mimosa Tree. In early spring they are all over Provence and we have them in California too.

Iris-Hint to Grand Couturiers

Dear Grand Couturiers, 

I have yet to see a red-carpet ensemble as beautiful as this.