Bloomin' Garrya

For the third time since I planted it back in 2001, my garrya is blooming. The last time it bloomed was in 2007. Why the long pauses between flowering? Does it take so much
energy to flower that the plant can only muster up the guts to do so every few years? Or is there an environmental trigger, like early rain? We got 5 inches of rain in October, the last time we got such a large amount of early rainfall would have been back in 2005. Very mysterious.

Update 2012

Full bloom Feb5 2012.  Lots more flowers than in 2010. Full bloom delayed due to our drought? Also bloomed beautifully in 2011, Full bloom was Jan 26, 2011.

Desperation leads to action

Ted has a committee meeting here tonight, and that was enough to finally cause us to spring into action on the deplorable condition of our kitchen. This took most of the day and our solution may be funky in the extreme, but it does provide quite a bit of camouflage which at this point is badly needed.
Before:







After:

Old double nickel

For my birthday I wanted to take a trip up the valley to the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge. I'd been reading in the paper (well back in mid December) about the huge number of geese and ducks that had come down to the refuge. So after breakfast and cooking of my birthday pumpkin pie, we headed up 505. It was raining, and I was feeling discouraged about the weather, but the forecast had only been for 20% chance of rain, and sure enough when we got up to Williams the rain had stopped.
We had lunch at Gargenzella's, which was okay. Ted and Frances each got a gelato (of course) and then we headed to the refuge.
What a nice afternoon we had. First we walked around on the hiking trail. In some ways it isn't much of a trail, but we did see birds on that trail that we didn't see on the auto tour, namely the American Pipet and the Cinnamon Teal. We also saw two deer as we walked the trail. Such an interesting pattern on their ears.
After completing our walk we climbed in the car and headed out on the auto tour road. There was a steady trickle of cars heading out on the tour, but we managed to be spread out enough that we didn't interfere with each other.
On the tour road we saw lots of ducks: mallards, coots, widgeons, ring-necked, ruddy, pintails, shovelers, and green winged teals. (I think thats all of them). We also saw greater and lesser snow geese, and white fronted geese (so named for their white faces). There were also numerous hawks, and a few egrets, commorants, and herons.
The funniest thing we saw was an American Bittern. Frances spotted this bird, it had apparently been thinking about crossing the road before we came along, and it was quite out in the open and away from its camouflage. Nonetheless it did its freezing routine, and sure enough, it had more patience than we did. After shooting lots of pictures, we headed on down the road towards home and birthday dinner. My pie celebrated my 55th birthday.

My New Years Resolution-keep up this blog!

I wanted very much to take our annual New Years Day hike up Cold Canyon, but the weather was gray and showery, so we deferred. As it turned out, that was a good decision, since John, Anthea, Lang, and Cammie came to our house on Jan 2. They arrived about 1:45 p.m. Frances was in Davis so we had some coordination issues, but we all managed to rendezvous at the trailhead at 2:30pm.

The weather was unexpectedly warm. Because we started so late, by the time we reached the top of the ridge, we had it to ourselves. We reached the top about 4 pm and stopped to admire the scenery and have a water and snack break. The second half of the hike was longer than I remembered. We continued along the ridge for quite some distance with more up and down, before the trail finally turned downward for good. By the time we reached the turnoff for the dam overlook it was quite dim, so we continued hustling down the trail. The others were far ahead of Ted and myself. The kids go at zoom speed hiking downhill, and the parents wanted to keep up with them. But only Frances was able to keep up with the boys. We finally reached the end of the trail at about 5:20 and it was pretty dark by this time. Great hike but my knees are still sore!