Posts Tagged ‘nature’

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Eulogy for Boomer

January 8, 2016

Goodbye old pal, we’ll miss you, big time!

Blogger’s postscript: Just wanted to add some important details that I left out yesterday.

Boomer started out as a southern California dog, roaming the streets of Sun City and eventually becoming the property of my mother-in-law, Eileen. She brought him along when she moved up to live with us in Oregon. Boomer was her pal and companion for years until she died. Then he lived with us after her passing, and he became our pal and companion.

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Boomer wearing his snow jacket.

Circle of Life (from the Lion King soundtrack)

Seeing that big, open-mouthed grin with that wonderful tongue with black spots (were you part chow?) was always a joy.

Your response to my touch when I scratched your back side, moving that leg back and forth. It made me feel good too.

  • Scientists say that dogs (not sure about cats) are beneficial to humans because there is a chemical response that actually lowers the blood pressure and relaxes both the animal and the human when they interact. Pretty cool, eh!

Boomer, I hope you reconnect with your old friend Eileen, and I hope you and Morty (our other dog that died in 2013) meet up and have a great time running around together.

A couple more pictures – the tongue with the spots and his “summer” buzz cut.

Quote: I learned the roots of any relationship (from working with dogs) – honesty, integrity, loyalty. It’s hard to find a human to give you all three. But every dog, that’s all they know. Humans are the only species that follows unstable pack leaders. Animals don’t . . . why would they? (Cesar Millan, dog whisperer, in Men’s Journal)

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It’s a New Year – 2016 (Woohoo!)

January 3, 2016

We made it through another one, eh! Just some thoughts to make you think about the year ahead.

Quote: Be kind to even unkind people; they need it the most. (Quoted from a friend I see at the gym)

Steely Dan – Do It Again (live version)
Picture: it’s just for shock value, yes, it is someone’s hand. (unknown source)

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One of my daily rituals is reading Daily Word (a Unity publication). The reading for January 1 in the January/February 2016 booklet is titled: “Fresh Start: I behold and delight in a fresh start.” The daily readings always have a Bible verse at the bottom of the page. For January 1, the verse was from Exodus 12:2, “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.” In this passage, the Lord is addressing Moses and Aaron in Egypt.

Quoting from the same January 1 reading, “The new year stretches before me like a blank canvas. What kind of life shall I paint this year?”

Anyway, here’s the link if you want to subscribe to the magazine. It’s a good way to start your day.

Daily Word web site

In parting, a few word pictures to describe a calendar, one of the many that nonprofits send to me because I’ve donated money to them, or they want me to donate money to them. The calendar I’m looking at is from the Nature Conservancy. The photos and layout are impressive.

Picture a zebra with those wonderful black and white stripes – is it a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes? The zebra is standing in a field surrounded by pink flowers that are in soft focus. There is a white bird perched on the animal’s back, a cattle egret. This is the photo for April. It was taken in South Africa.

March and September are photos taken in Oregon, my favorite state. Colors in the March photo are predominantly green with the tree foliage and the moss growing on the rocks in and around the waterfall which is bright white. It’s a very peaceful picture. The picture was taken in Silver Falls State Park not far from Portland. September’s photo was taken in central Oregon and shows a cliff mesa in the background with yellow wildflowers in the foreground. The pictures and descriptions in the calendar serve to remind us of how wonderful nature is and that we are a part of nature.

I’ll finish with a few Rufous pictures, not taken by me, but they’re good ones.

Rufous-sided towhee
Next: Not sure yet, but I’m working on some things.

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When a Tree Isn’t a Tree

May 6, 2014

What a great old tree!

When your day has gone well and you sit in your backyard looking up at a big oak tree at dusk, and the light is shining on one small part of the tree, about in the center and just barely visible, what thoughts occur to you, me, or anybody? Come on, free associate, meditate, have some fun with it . . .

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Lucky Gets Lucky

March 26, 2013

Sometimes, it’s just plain luck or timing that saves the moment. That’s the way it was that sultry, summer day in the river bottoms of southeast Texas. It started out peaceful enough, just a bunch of Boy Scouts on a field trip. Many of us, as you might expect from kids growing up in a small, one-horse town where the only source of amusement was a single indoor theater, a drive-in theater, and a couple of drive-ins (more like “drive-arounds”) with carhops no less, were lovers of nature.

At one point, there was also a bowling alley, but that burned to the ground a few years after it was built.

But it was a lucky day, especially for “Lucky”, the squirrel. But I’m getting a little ahead of my story. If you’ve spent any time in the Texas woods, you know about the snakes. Yessir, enough to make any Freudian fool giggle with delight, or a person with snake phobias might just lie in bed on sleepless nights with cold beads of sweat on their brow.

Go figure how a Cottonmouth Water Moccasin weighing several pounds could climb high up in an Oak tree, nary a branch to be found close to the ground, climb into a squirrel’s nest, grab him for lunch, and bail.

WHOOOMPPPHH!!!

That was the sound we heard or something like that. Up until that moment, we were just walking through the woods appreciating nature and horsing around. Many of us knew about the snakes in the river bottoms, although our relationships with the creatures were often punctuated by looking down the barrel of a .22 caliber rifle and pulling the trigger. As I was saying, there wasn’t much to do in Liberty, so you invented your own entertainment, often at the expense of the wildlife.

But let’s get back to Lucky who at the moment is being eaten for lunch. With part of his body already in the snake’s mouth, he was starting to get a bit anxious, given the fact that this was not his idea. Scoutmaster Bill took out his machete and ended the snake’s lunch and life by removing his head. You could almost hear a sigh of relief as we removed the living, breathing squirrel from the snake’s mouth, or more accurately removed the severed head from the squirrel.

Duly named “Lucky” the squirrel lived out his remaining years at the home of the scoutmaster.

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