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Mountain Lion in the Yard

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Just four days ago, I set up a new dual camera in a better location for spying on wildlife in the back yard.  (The old camera died a few months ago.)  Usually it’s deer, turkeys, coyotes and the occasional fox or bobcat, but this morning a mountain lion ambled through the yard.  That’s a first!  We know they’re around in the Santa Cruz mountains but I’ve never spotted one before.

The video quality isn’t great in the dim pre-dawn light, but it’s both super-cool and a little freaky to see it in our yard:

Mama Bear Visits

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My brother didn’t fully secure the bear-proof trash bin cabinet while staying at the Tahoe house recently and a mama bear and her cubs managed to get into it. That wasn’t caught on video since their truck was blocking the camera, but you can see mama try the door to the truck before moving on. She was back again a couple of days later to see if anything more was to be found.  Secure your trash!

Another Season of Gaming

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This is a gallery of photos from another season of gaming – July 2024 through March 2025 – including a playthrough of the Gilligan’s Island scenario of the co-op game of Robinson Crusoe (“oh, those poor people…”):

Some of the other games we played were Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, Cascadero, Thunder Road: Vendetta, Hegemony, The Search for Lost Species, Dominant Species, Daybreak, Dune Imperium: Uprising, The Night Cage, Coffee Traders, Barrage, Versailles 1919, Glass Road, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Pampero, Legacies, Deckchairs on the Titanic, Boon Lake, The Game of 49, Boon Lake, On the Underground: London / Berlin, Andromeda’s Edge, Primordial Soup, Small World, Revive, Bunny Kingdom, 7 Wonders, Duck & Cover, Decrypto, Last Light, Age of Rail: South Africa, Lords of Vegas, Tungaru, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Treasure Island, MagnetX, Heat, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Gentes, Cloud Age, Arcs, and Hollywood 1947.

Click through for the full gallery:

Bear in the Garage

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A bear wandered into the open garage while I was outside working on some wiring on the front porch.  I would not have known he was there except that a woman stopped her car in front of the house a minute or so later to take pictures.

He found a little paper bag of trash that I was collecting while I was working – it had a food wrapper in it along with some wiring scrap.  I had to shoo him off twice before he finally gave up and left for good.