My brother Glenn and his old school friend Jim pose to recreate some old photos:
Category: Home
Happy 4th of July!
Just messing around with some watercolor paints and Darlene as my willing canvas:
Belly Dance!
Another Bobcat Visit
I had another bobcat visit/sighting this morning at my home in the hills above Santa Cruz — and once again a deer drove it off:
Another Cute Kitty in the House
Moon-Jupiter Conjunction
A nice conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter tonight — meaning that they appear very close together in the sky. With binoculars, you can see our moon, Jupiter nearby (appearing as a small disc) and several of Jupiter’s moons (several points of light around Jupiter) all at once. Pretty cool.
I tried to capture what I could see through my binoculars using my 400mm lens plus a 2x teleconverter on my DSLR but I wasn’t able to get a sharp image with my lightweight tripod, even with a delayed shutter release. (I have been meaning to get a heavy tripod for this sort of thing.) So this was the best I could do before the sky started to get a little cloudy with moisture — and I never got so far as finding an exposure to catch Jupiter’s moons as well:
More fun than watching a lawn grow?
What’s more fun than watching a lawn grow?
How about watching a lawn removed and replaced:
This is work-in-progress to transform my front landscape from the usual lawn-centric, high-maintenance, manicured look to a more natural grass/meadow landscape — and save my oak trees in the process. It’s been taking a while but the end result will be something of a meadow garden using more native plants, lots of ornamental grasses and requiring much less maintenance and even less water once established.
The local company doing the work is Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping. Here’s their blog.
Here’s some meadow garden examples:
Rough Week for Pan
Pan was pretty content when I woke last Sunday morning (below left) — but I noticed he had a lump under his jaw — and there was a dead bat on the bedroom floor when I came home late Saturday night.
Yeah, a bat. I suppose they caught it on the roof — they have a pet door upstairs so they can access the balcony and roof. At least both he and Hera are current on their rabies shots.
So, the result of taking him to the vet is that they anesthetized him, took care of some overdue teeth cleaning, gave him a rabies update and installed a drain in the abscess that had to remain in place for the week.
That first night was a long one. He was drugged out for the evening but then he started getting restless and wouldn’t tolerate the elizabethan collar — he kept pulling himself out of it. He also seemed to hallucinate things now and again. I didn’t get much sleep that night baby-sitting him.
Sometime early the next morning I finally remembered the cat body harness I had and was able to attach the elizabethan collar to it so he couldn’t remove it any more.
Not a happy or comfortable cat for the rest of the week until the drain and collar could finally be removed. But he’s good and happy again now and healing fine.