Christmas Wishes!

The picture says it all!

DECEMBER 2007

MAGIC!

Computers can be so frustrating. Just now when I wanted to scan a picture, my computer told me that the scanner wasn’t connected, although it clearly was. It also told me that, if I was using a SCSI connection, I should restart my computer. That often solves problems and seemed to be a good idea, under the circumstances (even though I’m not using a SCSI connection), so I did a restart and, lo and behold, the scanner was connected again as far as my computer was concerned. I could just see that little old elf in my computer racing around at the speed of light, flipping switches here and there, working his magic until everything was in order again. So, do I know what the problem was? Not really! That little old elf never tells me.

The picture I was trying to scan was one a friend of mine, Carol Stohs, sent to Dickie and me a few weeks back. It was one she had done a little magic of her own on. I imagine you can tell what it was. Dickie had said something to the effect that she wished she were taller, so Carol (the one on the left) granted her wish.

I imagine you have some wishes you’d like to see come true this Christmas. May it be so!



STILL BIRD-WATCHING

The weather hasn’t been exactly right for indulging my hobby lately. Cloudy days are not great for my kind of photography, but I did manage to get another shot or two of an acorn woodpecker storing acorns away for harder times. Perhaps you’ve never seen their work. The acorn woodpecker is strictly a western and tropical phenomenon. What they do is clear from the picture below. What you don’t see in the picture is how they do this to the whole upper portion of the power pole. Notice that this guy is just beginning to hammer the acorn in tight, so tight that a squirrel will not be able to get it out. This is food only for another woodpecker.







CLOUDS OF STARLINGS

Migrating birds have been coming through our part of the world lately. Most recently it has been huge flocks of robins that seem to find something to eat in our empty vineyards. There are literally hundreds of them together. About a week ago Dickie and I noticed huge flocks of starlings that, seen from a distance, looked like black clouds expanding and contracting. This is a sight people all across the United States can see, if they watch for it at the right times, since starlings are now found across the length and breadth of our country and Canada. That’s interesting in the light of the fact that there were no starlings in North America until 1890 when about 60 of them were released in New York’s Central Park by a group of people who wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned by William Shakespeare in his plays. The picture below is of one of these clouds of migrating birds. The whole cloud was about five or six times this many.






MR. JACK RABBIT

Occasionally, when Dickie and I take our morning walk near a local vineyard we scare up a jack rabbit or two. This is one of four that we spotted the other day. I think he was sure that, if he didn’t move, we wouldn’t notice him.







BACK TO SHOLLENBERGER

We still make regular visits to Shollenberger Park in Petaluma. It’s a great place to find water fowl. One of the most beautiful birds is the egret. His grace in flight is almost unmatched, in my humble opinion. Here’s one that I captured on our last visit.






As I write this, we’re still a few days away from Christmas so let me take this opportunity to wish you a happy holiday season and a great New Year!

FALL

Just click on "Play" to run the Smilebox below:

Egret

Dickie and I stopped by Shollenberger Park in Petaluma yesterday. It was cloudy and not a great day for photography, but I liked this shot.

OCTOBER

I have to tell you about our recent trip to the mid-West. Dickie and I spent two weeks visiting with our relatives and friends in Illinois and Missouri. We had never taken the California Zephyr (Amtrak train) prior to this trip. It was an interesting ride on the way out through the Sierras and the Rockies, some desert and lots of corn fields before we arrived in Chicago. We stopped in Ottumwa, Iowa, long enough for me to get these shots of the engine and Dickie in our sleeper car.





We saw all kinds of beautiful sights, rugged mountains and swiftly flowing rivers as we approached the Rockies, not to mention a beautiful sunset as we came down into Denver.







The trip by train took 55 hours from Oakland to Chicago, a little longer than the return trip on Southwest Airlines, even though the plane stopped in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Ontario Airport in the LA area before our woman pilot finally set it down in Oakland eight hours later.

Our visit in Chicago enabled us to attend the 70th birthday celebration for my brother, Joel. His wife, Mary, secretly went about planning a huge bash with 65 guests and an oompah band. Other than that the secrecy almost caused a divorce and the party noise resulted in a visit from the local gendarmes, it was a huge success. Here's the shocked and bewildered birthday boy (in the feathered hat) as he arrived home from a round of golf to find a cheering crowd of well-wishers:



Since Joel and Mary were headed for China and a visit with their son, Paul, and his wife, YingYing, shortly after the birthday bash, Dickie and I spent most of our time in the Chicago area with my brother, Ralph, and his wife, Ilse, who live in Arlington Heights. Here's Ralph, who picked us up from the train station, unloading our suitcases from his van:



After some debate, Dickie and I decided to take the bus from Chicago to St. Louis (not the best decision we ever made, but we did survive). Dickie's sister, Mary, and her husband, Richard, picked us up from the Greyhound bus station in St. Louis and we spent the next four days with them in Belleville. Richard was also celebrating a birthday, his 81st, so we got in on another family birthday-gathering at his son, Rick's. Here are Richard and Mary in their own backyard:



We spent the last day of our visit to the mid-West in St. Louis, enjoying the hospitality of our friends, Milton and Carol Stohs, who took us to visit the Missouri Botanical Garden. That's where I took these shots with my little Olympus C750:





We're back in Windsor now, enjoying our morning walks and watching the baseball playoffs. I'm still carrying a camera most of the time. Caught this flicker trying to hide from us the other morning:



Thanks for looking. See you next time.

SEPTEMBER ACTIVITY

Dickie and I made a trip to the ocean a week or so ago, hoping to get some bird pictures. It was a cloudy day, so the bird pictures didn't turn out all that well; but I did get a nice shot of a Yorkshire terrier that was taking his owner for a walk on the beach. He was such a cute little guy that I asked the lady who was walking with him if I could take his picture. She was delighted and the four month-old puppy was very cooperative. His name was "Boomer". Here was the result:



Dickie thought the picture was good enough to send to Bestfoto for the picture of the day, so I did send it and, lo and behold, it won. You can see it in a larger version at this address:

http://www.bestfoto.com/Archives/POTDdisplay.asp?PIC=091107A%2Ejpg

The cloudy day made it difficult for me to get any good bird shots with my largest lens. The pelicans were generally too high in the sky or too far away, but I did catch this hawk along the beach front road. I had to work on it a bit with photoshop to make it acceptable. Here is the result:

Geese

Geese, originally uploaded by zampi.

I actually took this photo last February when Dickie and I were visiting Shollenberger Park in Petaluma. I'm not sure which direction these geese were headed, but they made a fine group.zampi

Off We Go!

We had an air show here in Windsor last weekend. There were all kinds of planes and demonstrations. This plane flew right over the road on which I was standing, so I got a good close-up. You had to be quick on the trigger.

Here's another plane that flew in the show. I think it was the U-2, but I never saw the program and I'm a dunce when it comes to identifying planes, so I'm ready to be corrected.

This guy was also at the show this year. Last year it was a wing walker. This year the hang glider was featured.

Here was another part of the show, a helicopter transporting firefighters to the scene of the fire. There are six of them hanging from the copter. They dropped them and picked them up again, - quickly, too.

Full Moon

Full Moon, originally uploaded by zampi.

OK! I've neglected this blog long enough. Don't know how much I'll be doing in the future, but Flickr has spurred me on. That's where the picture above comes from. If you want to see more of my photos in Flickr, all you have to do is click on "Full Moon" (just below the picture). You'll have to be a member of Flickr, but it's free, so help yourself.

APRIL SHOWERS, DON'T WE WISH!

Whoa! How did all the time go by so fast! We’re already heading toward the end of April. I can hardly believe it. When you get to be my age, you don’t dare blink anymore or you’ll miss a week or two.

Of course, some weeks here lately would have been better off missed. The horrible shootings at Virginia Tech and the recent bombings in Baghdad being prime examples of things we could all wish had never happened. The world is an ugly place at times. Hopefully, one of the good things that can come of this sadness is that, at least, some us will redouble our efforts to do good and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I’m sure you’ll be happy to learn that I finally finished Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, LOL. As I said earlier, it’s a great book and I recommend it. Hamilton was certainly a genius. He had his own personal faults, but he was one of the great people who helped to set this country on a good foundation.

I’ve decided to go back a bit farther in time with my reading now. I’m working through some of Plato’s writings at the moment. I’ve read some of the ancients in earlier times, but it’s fun to get a fresh taste of them at this point in life. Who knows? They may still be able to teach me something before it’s too late.

What other diversions are sprinkled through my life, you ask? Well, my wife gave me an early birthday present – a subscription to Major League Baseball’s games on TV so I can watch my favorite team, the Cardinals, through the rest of the season. I expect to devote a good share of time to watching their ups and downs. Unfortunately, so far I’ve seen them lose more than they’ve won. Ah, but good baseball fans never give up. We didn’t last year and look what it got us – a World Series victory!

Something else that added some spice to my life recently was becoming the victim of a credit card scam. Some conscienceless person managed to charge a couple notebook computers to my card. Unfortunately, for him or her a detective was waiting when they delivered the packages to an Ohio address. I’m not sure that my quick alert to the credit card company and a call to the company that sold the computer was the sole reason for that happening, but I like to think it might be.

Another of Dickie and my evening entertainments is working through the old “Upstairs, Downstairs” series on Netflix dvd’s. We didn’t have TV back in the days when the series was first run, so we’re catching up, so to speak. The worst thing about it is that our hearing is deteriorating and we sometimes find it difficult to understand those English accents.

And, yes, I’m still taking pictures. Here’s a bee I found pollinating some lavender the other day. It’s good to see some bees around. From the reports of their mass elimination, I was afraid they might not show up around here this year:



We still take our daily walks, camera in tow. That’s how I captured this mourning dove on film the other day. He was high enough that he didn’t flinch when I pointed the lens at him:



Lately, when we walk by the horse corral a few blocks away, we’ve been seeing a small covey of quail that appear to be using a blackberry patch as a nesting place. Here are three of them that posed for me. If you don’t know, the males are the ones with the dark brown rings around their necks. Females are the plainer sort, like the one in the middle of the picture below. Both male and female Calfornia quails sport a plume on the top of their heads:



Enough for now!

THE IDES OF MARCH

A little over 2050 years ago today Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of Roman senators who regarded themselves, not as murderers, but as “liberators”. Since then, emphasized by William Shakespeare, this “Ides of March” day has always had something of an ominous feeling for many people. Fortunately, here in Sonoma County, California, today the sun is shining brightly and you wouldn’t know from looking around that there was anything wrong in the world. Would that it were so! I hope your own personal world has a good deal of joy and a minimum of foreboding.

Out to the Ocean

As you may know from earlier sessions with this blog, when Dickie and I want to refresh our spirits we make a trip to Bodega Bay or, lately down to Shollenberger Park in Petaluma to enjoy the scenery and the wildlife. We were out at Bodega Bay again last week when I caught this goshawk hunting for his lunch:

I was actually stalking a large egret at the time. I had spotted the egret doing some hunting of his own on the hillside east of the parking lot, so I walked up to get the shot below when the goshawk flew up and headed straight for me. He had almost passed by me before I managed to get some degree of focus on him. The egret, on the other hand, kept a wary eye on me but allowed me to get fairly close so that focusing wasn’t much of a problem:




Dickie and I always take a backroad out to the bay. It’s so much more fun than driving out the main highway. Occasionally, we are rewarded with the sight of some wild turkeys, a deer or two, or some bird of prey. This time it was a red-tailed hawk sitting on a power pole. I was close enough that, with my 400mm lens, I could come up with this result:




I don’t always find my birds in distant places. The other morning Dickie and I were walking along a road that runs along a vineyard on the edge of our subdivision. That’s where this robin posed for me with the mustard plants in the background. Although the plants are out of focus, they make a nice background for the robin, don’t you think?:




When I’m not out there taking pictures, I’m usually at the computer fooling with those same pictures. Oh, yes, sometimes I read, too. Right now I’m enjoying Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. He’s one of the central figures of the Revolutionary War that I’d never studied too closely. Chernow’s book is exhilarating. It’s a 700 page tome that makes Hamilton come alive. I highly recommend it, and I’ve only read about a third of it.

When Dickie’s not out there with me doing her “sherpa duty”, as she’s wont to call it, she’s usually doing some kind of sewing. Here’s her latest quilt creation, not quite finished, but I think you can see it’s another great piece of work, What you might not notice is that she was standing in back of it holding it up when I took this picture:




Last month Dickie finished putting together the quilt below for our daughter, Gretchen. She decided not to do the quilting herself but took it in to a quilt shop to have it “machine” quilted. I think it turned out very well, don’t you?:



That’s it for now!

FEBRUARY ALREADY !

My, how time flies! Seems like only yesterday we were celebrating New Year’s Day and today is Valentine’s Day already. Well, happy Valentine’s Day! to anybody who happens to read this today yet. Dickie and I celebrated by going to a movie (“The Painted Veil”). It was the story of a mis-matched couple that wound up in China in 1925 in an area that was experiencing a cholera epidemic. Actually, the male lead was a bacteriologist who volunteered for the job and pressured his new wife to come with him. That’s as much as I’ll tell you, since I don’t want to spoil the movie for any of you who might be seeing it in the future. Dickie and I both thought it was great. The movie is based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham.

A Little Poetry

So, what else have we been doing lately to entertain ourselves, you ask? The other evening we went to hear Billy Collins read some of his poetry at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in nearby Santa Rosa. Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York. If you’re familiar with his poetry, you know that he has a great sense of humor that always shows in his writing. It was a fun evening. If you’re not familiar with his work, here’s a sample. It’s entitled,

“Fishing on the Susquehanna in July”

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.


Still Walking

Dickie and I still take our daily walks, I with my trusty camera hanging around my neck. Occasionally, it comes in handy, as when this robin posed for me on a neighborhood fencepost:




I had my camera with me, too, on a recent visit to Shollenberger Park in Petaluma. We only discovered this wonderful park recently, but, now that we’ve seen it, we intend to become regular visitors. The bird-life there is wonderful. Here’s a blackbird I managed to get a shot at a couple weeks ago:




What’s every bit as much fun are the waterbirds. Since visiting this park, we’ve become acquainted with the northern shoveler, a duck with a broad bill that he shovels through the water. Here’s what it looks like:



Another bird we’ve found there recently is the black-necked stilt. I haven’t managed to get too close, but my 400mm lens provided me with this shot:



Still another bird that haunts the swamps there is the red-tailed hawk. I’ve managed to get several shots of him so far. Here’s one of the best:



He posed for me on a fencepost, too, one day. This is how it looked:



Dickie and I also made a trip up the coast recently to visit a resort area called Sea Ranch, just south of the little village of Gualala. Going out we traveled over the mountains form Lake Sonoma westward, but, coming back, we drove down Route #1 along the water. That’s when I saw this fellow sitting on a telephone wire, surveying the brush. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a kestrel:



So, like most of you, I suppose, we’re waiting patiently for spring. It’s definitely on the way around here. We now have jonquils blooming at the entrance to our house. Come see us!

JANUARY DAYS

OUR GRANDCHILDREN

During the holidays, we Schmidt's all got together on Christmas Day at our daughter Gretchen's home where we managed to assemble our eleven grandchildren for the picture below:

Left to right in the back row, that's Kyle Crosson, Jonathan Zweig, Aron Szecsey, Daniel Zweig, Evan Schmidt, Jesse Schmidt, and Matthew Zweig. In the middle are Becky Crosson, Dickie, Carl, and Nik Szecsey. Down in front are Jenny Schmidt and Claire Schmidt.

Kyle graduated from California State University in Santa Cruz in 2004. Jonathan is in his first year there now. Aron is in his third year at the University of Calfornia in Berkeley. Daniel is a high school sophomore at El Molina High in Forestville, CA. Evan is a high school sophomore in Alameda, CA. Jesse is in his first year of college at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA. Matthew is in his third year of college at UC Davis(Sacramento, CA). Becky has done some college work at Santa Rosa Junior College and is now working at Starbucks in Sebastopol, CA. Nik is a Junior at El Molina High. Jenny is a seventh grader at the Middle School in Shamong, NJ, and Claire is in her first year of college at Cornell.


AND OUR CHILDREN

Many years ago, when Dickie and I were considerably more physically fit than we are today, we and our children formed a family pyramid for a photo. Here's what it looked like some twenty years ago:



That's Dickie on top; Mary, Heidi, and Gretchen in the middle; and me, Butch and Peter underneath.


And here's the latest edition, minus Dickie and me:




That's Gretchen at the top, Mary and Heidi in the middle, and Peter and Butch underneath.



POINT REYES

One of our greatest pleasures is heading out to the ocean whenever the spirit moves us, as it did on the past Tuesday. Our customary haunt is Bodega Bay, but this time we decided to travel on down to Point Reyes. We've visited there on other occasions but had never before travelled to the northern tip of the peninsula which is home for a large herd of elk. We came
upon them rather unexpectedly as they were feeding and resting by the side of the road. There were, perhaps, a hundred of them scattered across the hills. I counted more than forty elk cows and two bulls in one location. Here's a part of the herd at rest:




Not all of them were lying down. Here are three elk cows that were curious about my approach:




We hadn't seen a bull elk on the way in, but, as we left, Dickie spotted this guy standing near a little gully:





DRAKES BAY

Sir Francis Drake, on his ship, the Golden Hind, visited Point Reyes in 1579 and claimed the land (Nova Albion) for England. You can see why the bay reminded him of the white cliffs of Dover. Check out this scene:





Before we got to Drakes Bay, I made a wrong turn and wound up at Drakes Bay Oyster Farm. That's where I got the shot below of two egrets. The larger bird is a "great" egret. The smaller one (slightly out of focus) is called a "snowy" egret. We see lots of them both around here:




As we drove along the road, we also came upon what I first thought was a hawk, but, after checking my bird books, I am fairly persuaded that it's a prairie falcon. I would be happy to hear from anyone who can positively confirm or correct that opinion. In any case, he was sitting atop a light pole, so I stopped the car and snapped this picture:




That's about it for now. See you again soon.