Did You Know This?

We went for a walk for the first time two weeks. Can you say cabin fever? Roger tweaked his back last weekend after shoveling a week's worth of snow from the driveway. Sunday was the first time he felt well enough to go out for a walk, and it coincided with one of those blue-sky days that simply takes your breath away. There is nothing like the blue of Sierra skies. Deep and endless.

On the Cascade ditch trail (it's a 4 mile round-trip), we got to see our first American Dipper. Unfortunately, most of the trail is in the dark woods and I couldn't take a shot without shaking the camera, while the shutter was still open for letting in whatever available light there was. I did get a very blurry and unusable shot of North America's only aquatic songbird. It surprised us that it was dipping into the human-made irrigation ditch, but it was. Interestingly, when we first started down the trail on Sunday, I wondered if American Dippers ever came to irrigation ditches. I love an answer right away, don't you?
We took the trail down to this turn-around, the big irrigation pipe that connects one ditch to another. Usually we walk the little steel walkway that runs along the side of the pipe, just to add a little bit more to the journey, but on Sunday in the interest of Roger's back, we stopped here to turn around. But before we could head back, we heard this rap rap rapping. We couldn't figure out what the sound was until we saw the crow (or RAVEN?) standing on the pipe. We stood and watched a while, enjoying the new sound. Have you ever heard this before? We hadn't, and we thought it was very cool.

Outrageous Self-Indulgence

I've been feeling quiet and downright sorry for myself. Boohoo, I want my pretty brown skin back. I know what the future holds for me, a few years of crazy discoloration, like the opposite of vitiligo. Damn. Nothing makes me feel worse though, than people analyzing my diet, my behavior, my stress levels to see what I've been doing to make this happen to me AGAIN. It's the wine, the wheat, the caffeine, the spicy food. It's my attitude, my sadness, my my my. I've been reading Susan Sontag's Illness as a Metaphor, just to see why some illnesses get tagged as personal failures. All I know is that I haven't changed. I've always been this high-strung, quiet, reclusive woman with a bad sad attitude. Every now and then my immune system kicks into overdrive and kicks my sorry butt for months at a time. Sometimes there are no known identifiable causes, but I'm leaning towards an opportunistic virus.
Are you bored with this story line? I know I am, but I can't seem to take my eyes off myself. Me me me. What's really awful about this is there's nothing to say. Boring.

Roger and I weeded the front yard on Monday. A thin reed of non-native sawgrass, absurdly planted by our predecessors, whipped across my face and left a nice sharp bloody line from my nose to the tip of my chin. Damn. I ran over to Roger and said, "Do you think they call sawgrass sawgrass because it can really cut you? Look at this." We actually had a pretty good laugh about it. Compared to everything else, being whipped by sawgrass is nothing.
I went into the house to clean up a bit and devour some gluten-free rice crackers dipped into delicious dairy-free hummus. I sat at the table looking out the window, camera at hand, thinking about everything-- our atheism, their god, selling our house, moving to Oregon, growing old, making decisions about where we should live based on where it would be best to die-- when a crow decided it should take a look inside the Tree Swallow nest box in case there was a morsel there it would like to devour: A baby tree swallow, or an egg waiting to be one, no bad attitude, bad diet, or bad behaviors.

This is everything. No lie.