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Category Archives: doing it wrong
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

This was the scene in the backyard around 7am.
I keep typo-ing smoke as smoake. Smoake is a good name for a monster or villain in a story that I am too scatterbrained to write at the moment.

The animal cam has been quiet. I had moved the camera closer to the house to try a different angle. I’m not sure if the animal activity changed with the strange weather or the camera set up wasn’t working.

I moved the camera back out towards the back fence and caught Rocket last night. That poor guy is looking scraggly.

Heckle and Jeckle played around the bucket at 3:30 and Pogo wandered by around 1:30 but the camera fogged up. I’m going to treat the lenses with Rain-X again and see if that helps.
It’s a Wild Wild Life

This is my super-pro set up for my wildlife cam. I can easily move this table around and I have been trying it in different spots around the yard.

I re-activated my Instagram account and have been posting wildlife photos. I don’t know how long I’m going to last. [Rant about social media omitted.]
I’ll try to update the cast of backyard wildlife regulars here later this weekend.

These two are Heckle and Jeckle. I surmise that they are young ones, offspring of Mama?

The bucket has water in it. Sometimes they don’t touch it. Last night there was some pooltime action.
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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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.
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.
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.
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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