Author Archives: Pamela

Condor Cam

Warning: this story doesn’t have a great ending.

One of my great joys during the lockdown was watching the Condor Nest Cam from the Ventana Wildlife Society. (If you click on the link now it’s highlights.)

I started watching when the egg was close to hatching. And then kept checking in to get a glimpse when Iniko was a damp little noodle.

I’ve been keeping up with Iniko as it got bigger and started losing its fluff.

The Dolan fire in California destroyed the condor sanctuary. Yes, everything is terrible.

If you really want to bum yourself out you can find the last clips before the camera cables melted here. You can even hear the fire coming. It’s tragic.

As of right now they are missing 13 condors including 4 chicks which includes Iniko. They are actively searching for the missing condor. They identified one yesterday. They say historically many chicks have survived fires so there is room for optimism.

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Good Morning Mama Raccoon

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Wildlife Cam Success!

I moved the camera a little bit and changed the timer. I’m pretty sure this in an opossum. I got more cat pictures and a squirrel.

And lots of raccoon pictures. Those guys were active out there for awhile. This the best shot.

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Old Married People

This is from 2002 when Erin ran with the torch. Photo Credit: Aunt Aileen.

Today we are married 24 years. I’d post a more recent photo but I can’t find a good one right now.

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Cerberus

Did something try to eat one of my apples? I gasped when I found it on the ground like this. It’s a little green and I had to chop it into tiny pieces to eat it because of the braces, but it was pretty and tasted good. Red McIntosh.

I’ve been meaning to write about the bro house across the street. We called it the bro house because when they first moved in it seemed like a bunch of guys lived there in rotation. We were never sure what was going on over there. In all the years they lived there no one ever even made eye contact.

At some point everything changed and the bros were gone and it was a lady and a baby with the main guy.

My story is about their dogs. They had Boxers.

One day the main bro was driving down the street in his SUV with all these dogs sticking their heads out the window, happily barking. So then I referred to the dogs as the Cerberus.

There were four dogs and they barked a lot. You could always tell when UPS or FedEx drove up because of the chorus of dogs. (Not complaining, I thought it was cute.)

One day I was out in the front yard and the woman was yelling at one of the dogs and it had a very not-dog name like Rosemary so what I was hearing was: Rosemary! Bad! Bad Rosemary! Stop it! Rosemary! Bad!

But all the dogs were barking so I’m not sure why Rosemary was called out.

All of this is in the past tense because a week or so ago there was a moving truck and since then all the cars and the Cerberus are gone.

After my post last week I decided I would buy a wildlife cam. I was like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) waking up every few hours wondering about all the wildlife I was capturing on my new camera. The minute I woke up I put on pants and ran outside to get the camera card.

This was the single picture on the card. Impressed?

I’m pretty sure that’s a cat.

I treated the lenses with some stuff that will hopefully not mist up. Stay tuned. I’m going to get Bigfoot or something good soon.

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News From Native California

Bev Ortiz wrote a lovely piece about my writing for News From Native California. You can buy the magazine here.

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We Get It: You Can Grow Tall

This tomato plant out front keeps getting taller and taller.

“Knock that off and start making tomatoes,” I told it. (politely)

It’s going to get serious just about the time the season ends.

Remember The Case of the Missing Bandana? I saw a bandana in the backyard and figured some pet had lost it. By the time I went out to grab it – it was gone.

Look what turned up — the angry raccoon must be back. It’s now the case of the shredded bandana. We need a wildlife cam outside so watch what these guys get up to.

No great news to report. I’m in an unfortunate nap cycle.

I had kind-of a tough week and took Thursday off. I had a glorious nap on Thursday afternoon and then was up in the middle of the night necessitating a glorious nap on Friday afternoon and so on. Last night we were both up at the same time. I read for about an hour and then made little pointed comments until Bob finally turned off his light too. He was asleep about 3 minutes later.

I settled in for a quickie nap this afternoon but a spider scuttled across the bed so I got up. Maybe tonight I’ll do better.

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Take Care of Just One Thing

There’s this clip from Malcom in the Middle where Hank arrives home to find a light bulb that’s out — so he goes to get a new bulb and the shelf is broken. So he goes to get a tool to fix the shelf and there’s something wrong with the drawer and every step where he tries to fix the problem there’s a new problem.

There’s a version of this that happens when the office is really busy. It also happened recently with the yard.

We had a string of hot days and I need to get my watering routine started.

When we got our fruit trees I learned about watering them with a bucket and I adapted that to other garden areas that didn’t seem happy with my “sprinkle water around for 15 minutes every fews days” method of watering.

I helpfully made arrows to point to the holes and somehow one of the arrows is not pointing at one of the holes. Too lazy to fix.

First, the sprinkler attachment had become fused to the hose so when I wanted to change to the sweeper I was stuck. We needed a new hose and new sprinkler.

Then when I went to get my bucket, it had cracked and as I inspected it a piece broke out. We needed another bucket.

I found an old bucket to take over slow water duty but I needed to drill the holes.

The drill was completely dead and needed to be recharged.

While charging, I ended up dropping everything to go to the hardware store. I bought an expensive hose but damn, it’s light and doesn’t get twisted up so I might replace all our hoses.

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Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #6

First tomato. Sherman and Mr. Peabody for scale. A week from now and I will have plenty more plus lemon cucumbers.

This week I tried to map out a conflict before I started rather than just thinking of a character and typing. It is a pretty half-assed entry but I made my stated goal of writing 6 brand new stories pulled out of nothing.

This week’s story is about a bored elder Aunt Beety who escapes quarantine to meet her sister and catch-up on gossip only to be thwarted by a tribal road block. She tells a fib to get around it with unexpected results.

Snippet:

“Well, I’m sick,” Beety said, touching her forehead. A flimsy folding table sat next to the nurse. She grabbed a little gadget and held it to Beety’s forehead.

Beety jerked back. “I do not consent.”

“You don’t have a temperature. Do you have symptoms?”

“Of course I do. Why would I be driving around by myself?”

Beety put her hand on the side of her face and grimaced then slid her hand down her neck and to her chest and forced a gargly cough.

“Yeah, that’s bad,” the nurse said. She picked up a walkie-talkie from the table. “We’ve got an elder gonna need an examination.”

Five (5!) pounds of roasted hatch chiles arrived on my doorstep Wednesday.

This is the final week of the write-a-thon but you may donate anytime. From the final report we had 535 writers with total donations of $19,839. OOF! So close to $20K

You can still sponsor me here.

You can sponsor one of our workshop leaders here: Neile.
Or tireless workshop supporter Kate.
My classmate: Maggie.
My classmate: Tracy.

If you want to check out the participants yourself: CW Write-a-thon Writers.

Here’s the address if you’d prefer to mail a donation:

Clarion West
P.O. Box 31264
Seattle, WA 98103-1264

Thanks again for your support.

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Bad!

Well, this is upsetting.

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