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!