Rare Photos

Many years ago, like at least 30, I used to ride a lot. Most of my horse riding buddies were women. I didn't discriminate, it's just that not many men were interested in trail riding in those days. Occasionally one of the women would bring her husband along. Here are two husbands on horses.

Charlene's husband, Bob

Harriet's husband, Wayne

Bob was an electrical engineer in those days. Wayne had a government job. Now they're both retired. I'm not sure why Bob was riding the day I took his picture. Wayne was on a horse because we were on a trail ride to Souverain winery.

Those were incredibly fun days, there are superb trails all over California and we rode a lot of them. Horses are a lot of work, though. These days I'm sure you'd find us all riding to the winery in a car. I'd be the designated driver.

Predators

Before I write anything else today, I'd like to report that I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure out Blogger's new doodahs. One problem is they removed the words "new post" and replaced them with the icon of a pencil. I hate little pictures of things, they never mean what I think they do. And changes just for the sake of changing things don't please me, either. I suppose that's how people justify their jobs. "Hey, I got nuthin' to do here at Blogger, all those writers are just doin' their thing, guess I better change something so I'll be the only person who knows how things work." Pox on you, programmer!
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When I lived in this same house as a kid, there were no predators in the neighborhood. We could hear an occasional coyote in the distance, but you knew Godfrey Saner would be hunting them with his Airedales. I never saw a raccoon or an opossum here. I don't know if people ate them, or just killed them because they could. All hawks were called "chicken hawks" and were promptly dispatched, whether or not the shooter had chickens or anything else a hawk might bother.

People don't just blast away at wildlife anymore, and I think that's a good thing. But it sure makes living in a rural area difficult. The Cooper's hawk did not migrate out of here when spring came. The juvenile redtail has taken up residence in the cottonwood near the house.

So here we are, out in the country, where I should be able to let my chickens free range and my pigeons fly, but I can't do either of those things.

The pigeons are confined to their pen and have split it into territories; each pair "owns" a shelf or a perch. They are fine with this as long as nothing changes the status quo. Like last weekend, when I needed to put the gray baby and the white dragon baby, who are now grown, in with the others. There wasn't a square inch of territory that some other pigeon hadn't claimed, and none would share with the youngsters. So I installed a new perch, way up high, and put the babies on it. That stopped all the squabbling.

It would be so much easier to be able to let the pigeons out for a fly-around a couple of times a day. It would also be more fun, I love to watch the pigeons fly.

One of the hawks injured a wild tubby dove last week. It didn't have a broken wing, but had obviously been pummeled and wasn't flying well. Jim at the corn stand found it in the parking lot and brought it over. I put it in an out-of-the way corner pen to recuperate. It was just calming down and seemed to be settling in when I went out one morning and found this mess.

A stinking damned raccoon had grabbed the dove through the wire and pulled it out, piece by piece, with its slimy little fingers. This is my reality: I don't give a hang about the supposed threat of human terrorists, I think Homeland Security should be hunting raccoons.

Last week when John mowed the horse pasture, the redtail was right behind him, picking up dead gophers. The hawks around here do that, they'll follow a tractor in a minute. This time, though, the buzzards were out in the pasture, too. I've never seen them do that before. They're pretty awkward on the ground, lurching around like big drunks. I'd feed them every day if they'd just harass the hawks out of this territory. The Swainson's hawks can stay, I don't think they could catch a pigeon, they seem to specialize in gophers and ground squirrels and other pesky things.

To balance the negative news the Old German Owl and his wife have two babies. This is the Owl. You can't see the babies under him, they're very tiny.

And this is his wife (she was mother of the white dragon, too).

Both parents have very short beaks, so I'm keeping an eye on the babies to be sure they're getting enough to eat. So far, so good. I'm still putting plastic eggs under all the nesting birds in the big pigeon pen. A couple of the older pairs kick them out of the nest and lay their own, but I've been throwing the real eggs away the first day they're laid (no babies in them yet) to keep a stable population in the pen. Maybe if there's no easy food source, the predators will move on. The birdy predators, anyway. There's no cure for raccoons except a bullet. Or in our case, many bullets.

Time With the Family

My mother had lots of brothers and sisters. She was the oldest. I was the oldest grandchild.

My father had 2 brothers. He was in the middle. I was the oldest grandchild on that side of the family, too.

I can remember all my cousins when they were little kids because I was old enough when they were born. Most of my relatives still lived in either Sacramento or Amador counties. A couple have drifted farther north. When I was young, kids didn't play soccer and adult lives didn't seem so busy. Families spent a lot of time together.

These days it often takes a special occasion (most often, and sadly, a funeral) to get families together. Cousins these days often don't get to see much of each other when they're growing up.

Bob's dad, John, grew up in a family where he got to see his cousins frequently. Now they're mostly all retired, but they enjoy getting together and talking about their old times. They do this once a year, a great tradition I think. This year's Cousin Reunion was in the foothills near Placerville at cousin Vic's house. It was a totally beautiful day. We sat outside most of the time.

The guys cooked chicken and tri-tip in a barrel and sipped some Jim Beam right out of the bottle.

L to r: Mike, John, Vic, Robbie
and Princess the dog

Beam from the bottle

The next generation of "cousins" got to visit a bit.

Aaron, Nicole, Lura, Bob

And we took some pictures.

Uncle Mike took this picture and didn't get in it, so here's a picture of him.

Uncle Mike

Bob, who loves to cook and party, is ready to host some family get-togethers this summer. Hope to see you there cousins!

Lush Season

I'm talking about how plants have reacted to our recent weather in Sloughhouse, not about human alcoholics.

We had a very dry winter, then some good rains about a month ago. A few days after the rain, the tulips suddenly sprouted, some of them with flowers ready to bloom when they were only a few inches out of the ground. Zap! They were just there. Bob wrote a poem once about how tulips are like little roosters, crowing in the garden to tell the rest of the plants to wake up.

That's what happened. I've just been enjoying the garden for a couple of weeks. There have been lovely lilacs, clouds of white dogwood flowers from the three trees and from the Banksia that grows halfway up the redwood, camellias to die for, huge columbine plants, and lots of smaller daisies and pansies. Last Saturday it was still damp from the rains, but the temperature was almost 90°. We aren't accustomed to that kind of humidity here, many of us thought we would die. But the plants loved it.

This year for the first time my peonies are gorgeous, not just a mound of green with one flower each.

We have another couple of days of rain, then hopefully some dry weather so the grass hay and oat hay can cure properly this year. Out on the hills the native grasses are just starting to dry in spots, as the later wildflowers bloom. The green won't last much longer.

But today, right now, surrounded by my lovely flowers, I feel that my new coffee cup says it all.

Please, No

I was scrolling through Hulu looking for something to watch when this popped up. 

I love animal stories, and certainly do not require that every story have a Disney ending. But there's no way I'll watch something that's pretty much guaranteed to depress me for a month.

When Bob was young and we still had a TV, it was often tuned to the PBS station. We especially liked to watch their animal programs until we were totally turned off by a narrator I called Captain Depresso. The story was always the same. The Captain would drone on about the topic animal, getting us interested in its welfare, then whack! Something would kill the animal. Captain Depresso would conclude by saying something like, "...and that's how it is in the wild."

I know how things are in the wild, pretty much. I live in a rural area and we have an abundance of predators that love to eat my chickens and pigeons, and occasionally a pet cat. When I watch a show about wild animals, I like learning about the animals. I understand their lives are not easy, but don't hit me over the head with that.

The last PBS animal program I watched was at least 18 years ago. Captain Depresso was talking about arctic birds. We watched the birds pair up and lay their eggs on a cliff above a beach. We watched the birds sitting on their nests for weeks, and the babies hatch. The Captain told us what the parents fed them and how hard it was to fly back and forth for miles between the hunting area and the nests.

The babies were finally big enough to fledge and the Captain's voice almost took a cheerful tone. Then the camera showed the babies splatting on the beach below the cliff and being gobbled by foxes. "Unfortunately," the narrator droned, "very few of the fledglings survived."

I didn't watch War Horse, either. Some people said it was a good story. I'll just take their word for it.

Did the "No Call" List Expire?

For the past week, every afternoon between 2 and 5, I've been called by different charities asking for donations. You would think, since I'm paying a lot for my landline phone, I'd appreciate getting a call on it once in a while. Not so. Calls from people I know are great, calls from people who want money are not.

What happened to the "no call" list?

I've also received calls this week from people in foreign countries selling Viagra. I must admit, that makes me really, really angry. I have a semi-polite answer to charity calls - "I make contributions to charities of my choice; I do NOT contribute on the phone, bye!"

The Viagra callers get a significantly different version that contains several bad words and usually ends with, "If you ever call here again, I'll hire someone to hunt you down and blow off your ...." In other words, the caller (and they are always male) will have no use for Viagra himself.

Is this how our society is going to operate in the future? We won't have enough real jobs, so those of us who have anything (even a pittance) are going to be pecked to death by those who don't?

I hope there are no phones in Blogland. Well, except I want to take my iPhone so I can play Bejeweled. And so I can text a couple of friends.

I suppose the next thing the peckers will start doing is texting me on my iPhone. The first one who does that, and interrupts my game of Bejeweled, is doomed.

Blogland

A few months ago a fellow blogger, Sir Yorkshire Pudding, informed some of us that he had procured an island for us. This is a map of it. My place is on the right, see the nice big yard I have for chickens?

We were all supposed to leave for Blogland last week. Sir Pudding is the only one who made it, the rest of us have had problems with our everyday lives. In my case I have chicks in the brooders and I'm still waiting for my passport. Also, a couple of YP's blogs about the island were reminiscent of Jim Jones, substituting kool-aid with beer. That gave me a "wait and see" attitude.

If you don't know what's going on, you can find the link to Yorkshire Pudding in the column on the right and catch up.

I really would like to be on an island with all these people. If you've read their blogs, you know that they are a delightful assortment of literate, sassy, fun folks. It beats assisted living.