Nineteen Years Later

Today is our 19th wedding anniversary. According to the internet there is no traditional gift associated with this anniversary. So, I guess that means we get to make it up ourselves, which we do anyway (renegades that we are!). We always celebrate our anniversary with a special bottle of wine, not a particular wine, but one that catches our attention by vintage and vineyard. This year it is a local 2008 Zinfandel from Nevada City Winery. I'm making an Indian dish for dinner, a variation of Chicken Makhanwala, a delicious cream curry. We bought a fantastic garlic naan to go with it. This is going to be a very spicy feast. Nineteen years requires this kind of celebration and attention.
We just got back from a very quick trip to Santa Cruz, the place Roger and I lived for 15 years before our life-changing moves to Port Townsend and then to Grass Valley. It's been two years since we've been there. We didn't remember it being so crowded and crazy with cars and people everywhere. Even the short respites on the beach were spent among throngs of surfers, other walkers, and dogs chasing things into the waves. There was never a moment of silence. Not one. Still, we loved sniffing the flowery fragrant air and seeing jasmine and datura, sweet peas and scabiosa in bloom. A complete delight for our senses.
One of the very coolest things about being back in Santa Cruz for those 48 hours was the fantastic coincidental arrival of the monarchs. It's amazing how much we took these sights for granted, and now it has become a rare feast for our eyes to see them again. Lucky for us, they were everywhere.
Then, we were back home. Beautiful skies. Katydids on the old squash leaf, and a lizard in the sink. Nineteen years and the greatest gifts come for free.

Monarchs and Pelicans

It's surprising to think that for all the years we lived in Santa Cruz, and the number of times we biked and hiked around and past Natural Bridges State Park, we never actually stopped in to take a look around. It's one of the places where Monarch butterflies come to winter. They arrive in mid-October and stay until late January.
It was difficult to capture both the butterflies in the trees and sky simultaneously. There were Monarchs everywhere, and the trees looked like they were covered in orange and black flowers. (These photos really need to be clicked on to get a sense of what it looked like.)
After walking the Monarch butterfly path, we headed out to the beach at Natural Bridges. The pelicans and gulls covered the rocks.
We could walk fairly close to them. Close enough to get a close-up of a Brown Pelican grooming in the Sunday afternoon sun.

No Flippin' Way

Okay, we didn't actually flip a rock on International Rock Flippin' Day. We meant to. In fact we kept saying to each other, we should go flip a rock, we should go flip a rock. But we ended up working in the yard and never did made it out to where the interesting rocks to flip are. It was one of those Sundays that started out cool and cloudy and pretty much stayed that way until we went out to clear the late summer flowers that have already gone to seed. That's when the sun came out and baked us. Roger did have to move a rock on the border of one of our flower beds in an effort to get to the root of an invasive blackberry vine. We don't think that counts, although I did say, you flipped a rock.
There have been interesting sightings in our yard, nonetheless. We did see our very first Monarch butterfly since we moved here in 2004. It was happily nectaring on the buddleia. I had forgotten how large and beautiful Monarchs are. Much bigger than the Pine Whites, Lorquin Admirals and Red Admirals. I'm not sure why we haven't seen them here before this, and can only hope this is just the beginning of such sightings.
We also had this wonderfully marked moth on our screen door. It stayed there most of the day and let me get fairly close for this pic. These Syngrapha alias are reputed to spend their caterpillar stage defoliating Sitka and other spruces in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Other than that, I devoted a lot of my attention over the weekend trying to figure out how Google actually ranks the pages that show up after a search. My sister has a website for her real estate, and even though there doesn't seem to be anyone else with her name (how weird is that?), her website didn't show up after a google search. So, I started thinking about how to remedy that. I made a blog for her and named it Lynn Hook Real Estate. That brought her up after a name search right away, but after a day, she disappeared. That seemed very strange. So, I started googling her name a couple of different ways to see how and when she would show up. Roger did some research and found that the more sites that link to her, the higher in rank she goes. So, I added her to our blog. Then I added her website to her blog. Now, when we google Lynn Hook or Lynn Hook Real Estate she actually shows up ranked one and two on the first page. She would like her page to show when someone searches on Simi Valley Real Estate. That's going to be quite a bit harder to accomplish. A million results come up after that google search, and I checked fifteen pages, and she wasn't there yet. I wondered if I started to google Simi Valley Real Estate Lynn Hook, and kept at like a fanatic, if that would begin to influence search results. I am still working on it. If any of you have any insights or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
The light is changing fast and significantly these days, as we approach the equinox. The angle of the sun in fall is my favorite of all the year. In a celebration of that light, we had one of our first pretty sunsets in ages. A beautiful end to the flippin' weekend.