An Agave Update

 It's been more than a month since I photographed Roger with the Agave flower. This is what the Agave looked like when we first saw it at the very end of May.

Then by mid-June it looked like this.

So out on our walk on Saturday I photographed Roger with the Agave once more.

We think it has gotten as tall as it's going to get, and the buds are starting to flower. Now we're waiting to see what happens next. 

We never did get to see what happened to this blooming Agave we saw in Captitola years ago. So, we'll finally see. You know we'll keep you posted.

Pretty Clouds At Last!

Just that simple pretty sky moment. Blues skies and cumulus clouds (or not, I can't remember cloud names anymore, so I picked this one. LOL.)

I see funny things in the second photo. An "X" or a frowning face. How about you? See anything? 

Not much else going on. I did put up a post on Facebook completely unrelated to these sky photos that said: 

I hope you'll click on the above pic. It sparked a lot of comments. I was surprised that many people did not have morning prayer in public school the way I did back in the 1950s and early 1960s. Now I'm wondering if any of my blogging friends recited and read prayers in public school. 

In the face of everything going on these days, a beautiful sky day is the best balance and hope for sanity. 

Connectivity

  

We drove into town on a bleak day so Roger could pick up his one and only prescription. I waited in the car in the parking lot contemplating the planet we live on. This tower of connectivity and all those microwave transmitter and receiver things made me think of how disconnected all this connectivity has in some ways made us. Yes we can blog and text and Facebook and watch all kinds of things on TV, but are we really any more connected? And in some ways are we are so much less connected to the intimate world around us? Does this tower look other-worldly to you? It really does to me. 

If I could to put into the words the world I would like to live in, we would be living in the ashram of our dreams. We would have not left the world of tribe and fire so long ago. There would not be house after house, apartment building after apartment buildings of strangers living side by side, unknown and nameless, communicating with beings in other houses and apartments in other places. The occasional nod and smile, our temporary acknowledgement of existence among strangers. We were not always like this. We are accommodating a transition of human reality in such a short time in terms of the age of our species. Are we on the right path? What do you think? How does the future look to you?

A Nest-building Bee?

We were out in the front yard when we noticed this bee flying around holding a flower petal. It landed on the Nasturtium leaf, and I clicked a photo of it. 

We've seen many bees over the years in our lifetime, but never one flying holding on to a flower petal. So, of course I had to try and figure out what that was all about. 

Well, some bees build nests with all kinds of plant materials. There's even a bee in Turkey that builds its nest exclusively with flower petals. So perhaps this one was busy building a nest. We'll never know, but it really was pretty beautiful to see it flying with that lovely petal. 

An ER Visit and A Big Furry Dog

  

Summer skies here at noon

Roger spent several hours in ER on Thursday. The staff ran an EKG because of his existing heart condition, and a CT scan of his brain because of the dizziness brought on by previously diagnosed brain white matter. Then he waited and waited and waited for a doctor to discuss the results with him. I couldn't be with him in the ER so I dropped him off there, came home and waited to hear when he had the tests and results so I could pick him up. After an hour or so, I called him and found that he was still waiting to talk with a doctor. I called him every twenty minutes (we only have once cell phone, so I couldn't text him). I'm sure I drove the other two patients crazy who were also waiting and waiting and waiting to see the ER doc. So, after four hours he decided he'd had enough and told the nurse that he was going to leave. One other patient also left at the same time. The nurse said, "Yes, it's fucking bedlam here." Well, that was that. 

He did get the results of the lab and imaging tests later that day by logging into his account there. Nothing had significantly changed since his last tests a year ago. Mmmm. We're not sure what happened and probably never will. He was never contacted by the staff at the hospital to discuss the results. Health care here is not the very best and that trip to ER confirmed how difficult it can be. It is a little bit worrisome as we get older, but it is what it is.

It does make me wonder what health care is like where you live. Do you feel safe, that it is reliable, and that you are always in good hands? We often think the health care here is so crappy because we live in an area far from the major cities. It's not on very many dream lists of places to go after medical school. So we have to pretty much accept what we have. 

Other than that I did see a beautiful big dog wandering down our street alone one evening around 8:00 pm. I ran outside to see if it was lost and if I could maybe call its people. I called to it. It ran over so fast and was so happy to see me. He came into the front yard, and I gave him a big bowl of water. He lapped it up so fast. That made me happy. Then I tried to see if he had an ID tag. He did, but we couldn't read it. So, we decided to walk him over to a neighbor who helps with stray cats and dogs. On our way down the street, the dog got a bit ahead of us. It walked fast. We watched it. Then a pickup truck turned onto our street. It stopped and the doggie jumped right in. There were two other dogs already in there. We're pretty sure the doggie had found its human. He looked happy. That's our big furry doggy story.

Potato Berries

 

 

 

potato flowers

 

potato berries
 

Potato berries. Who knew? well I didn’t. they are kind of hidden low on the plants. The internet assures us that they are not detrimental to the plants, but are poisonous. The stalks and leaves and flowers are also poisonous. What an interesting plant. also, the seeds contained in the berries may produce plants which grow tubers which are just like the parent or perhaps wild different, or somewhere in between.

Quiet Times

We don't get to walk very much these days. We typically do what we call the "neighborhood loop." It's one mile, and that one mile is filled with little houses and yards. Every now and then we do what we call the "big loop" which is two miles, but more often it's that one mile. So, not much in the way of bigger views to share here anymore. In addition to that there hasn't been any atmospheric optics for months and months. Now that seems so unfair to me. Okay, we can't go out for nice long walks very much anymore, but the sunlight and ice crystals of atmospheric optics have let me down as well. I'm trying not to take it personally, but I do occasionally shake my fist at the sky, which is either foggy or plain old blue, and shout "C'mon give me something beautiful!" 

We do go out to check on the garden, pull weeds, feed the hummingbirds, and watch the few Swallowtails that are lightly flying around. This year's broccoli was not very good at all. As you can see from the photo, the broccoli stems were thin, and the heads were thin and wispy as well. Not much to them at all. They all went to flower like this. I searched online to see why broccoli might grow this way and found the answer: Not enough sun. Aha! Even the broccoli has been bummed out by this foggy place we call home. 

Roger is comfortable and fine with his aging body. He's going to start his 80th trip around the sun next month. Years ago we used to say that 80 was definitely old age. We've changed that. We've moved the bar. Now it's 90 years old. He's got a whole decade before he gets there. We'll be laughing and eating skimpy broccoli the whole time!

Dahlias Brightened Our Day

 We were out for our morning walk on another gray morning when this caught our eyes.

These dahlias are as bright as the sun we've been missing. They made us so happy, I just had to take photos of their beauty and share them here. 

That's life these days here on planet earth. 

Gray Sky Blues

This has been one very bleak summer so far. Roger mentioned it in his post on Wednesday. It's still bleak and we may even get some rain. We would welcome that for the garden and the forests, but we sure wouldn't mind having some sunlit days here. 

We had to drive into town on Sunday to run some errands. I thought I'd give you a view of life here. 

Photos taken at 55 mph on our way home. 

We try to make the best of it. We go for walks. We work in the garden. The high temps have been in the low 60s. Hey summer, where ya been? We're still waiting for you to actually show up.  

Happy 4th of July, friends. We hope it is quiet where you live and that your neighbors don't set off lots of crazy fireworks into the night. Perhaps one good thing of these bleak gray rainy skies is that it may deter some of the madness of this holiday. 

PS One last thing, as if the bleakness of the weather wasn't enough-- how about the direction this country is headed. The Supreme Court has given us a wake up call by undoing 50 years of good decisions. We are not sure how this will all turn out, but it doesn't look promising in any way. There is a moveon.org petition asking Congress to remove Justice Clarence Thomas. I don't know if a petition like that would work, but if there was a way to change things, I would love to see it happen. We're headed in a bleak direction, as bleak as these skies, and really bleaker than I ever thought possible. We're worried.