Mossy Creek

The Creek, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

An extremely mossy and green part of a creek in Las Trampas. It is so wonderful up in the canyons of that park...today, there were California poppies, shooting stars, filaree, woodland stars, and California saxifrage blooming. The waterfalls were also flowing nicely, and they will be gushing tomorrow as a storm is coming in.
Spring starts this month...how's it coming along in the rest of the country?

A Tropical "Paradise"

Here is my tropical fountain at night surrounded with plumerias, cycads, pygmy date palms, and an Abyssinian banana.

And Now For Some Bat Talk

We learned about bats today.
I'm volunteering to drive on all the field trips now since I'm one of those stay at home ladies now. Although I'm not really a lady according to Lulu. Ladies wear high heeled shoes and lipstick and do their hair up and wear dresses. I'm just a woman she tells me. I just do stuff. Women do stuff and ladies get dressed up.
Today we went to the Oakland Museum to the Bat exhibit.
I felt a little sleepy the whole time. They keep it too dark in there.
Except in the bat cave. Yeah, we went through the bat cave. And we met a bat lady, who has live bats that live at her house. She brought some live bats she'd rescued for us to look at. And they were kind of cute.

On the way back to school, the five kids in my car argued about what a "goth" is. Apparently only teenagers are "goth". And they're mean looking. And you're not supposed to look at them too long or you turn to stone. It was all news to me.
Next week I start swimming. It's been a while since I swam. I swam competitively growing up. But now, well, you know. The most I've swum in the last year is during a few hot summer days during the 10 minute adult swim, while stopping every 2 laps to make sure my kids aren't running wild around the pool.

So recently there was a tri-relay team missing a swimmer, so I volunteered to do the swim leg. Now I need to start building some endurance up for the race in May. I'm thinking it'll be good for the lungs and it'll get rid of my tricep flabbers and it'll be good for the start of the summer bikini season.
Yes, those are my reasons.
The only problem is that I'm blind as a bat without glasses. So when I swim I can't see the walls very well and my flip turns are out of wack. Good thing they have those big black lines in the pool. At least I can go straight.
But really my favorite part is getting in the nice warm steamy water on cold rainy days and just swimming and swimming. I swam for a few days during the last rain storm when I didn't want to ride in the rain, and it felt great. Like a nice long stretch.

El otro lado

All is well and we are in Creel Mexico! This last week since crossing the border really could not have been much better. Regular afternoon monsoons have helped to keep us cool and rinse the salt crust from our clothes. We've slogged through mud, been chased by dogs,and found ourselves awesomly lost in a maze of high Seirra Madre dirtroads. We have also made some enthusiastic new friends both two and four legged and had to repeatedly mash our goofy gringo grins back into our faces.
Were now preparing our attack on the Copper Canyon and wanting to go multiple directions at once. I'll let you know how it goes.

ML8 ML8

Can you guess what kind of car I was once tempted to buy, just so I could get a license plate that read ML8 ML8?

Information Overload

I'm reading this wonderfully informative book called Margin by Richard A. Swenson, M.D. He not only tells us how busy our century is, he tells us why and how to fix it. It's been a real eye-opener for me.
Here's a section from the chapter called The Pain of Overload: Ninety-nine percent of American homes have television, with the average set turned on fifty-five hours a week. Televised news is 24/7. We buy more books per capita than ever before and can choose from 63,000 new titles every year. How does one read a three-and-one-half-inch thick Sunday paper?
A single edition of the New York Times contains more information than a seventeenth-century Britisher would encounter in a lifetime. If I read two health articles every day, next year I would be eight centuries behind in my reading. We are buried by data on a daily basis.
Astonishing, isn't it? Instead of feeling frustrated, I actually feel freer, because there's no way anyone could read every new book that's printed each year. I've actually felt panicky before because I wanted to and knew I couldn't.
So I'm just going to read at my own pace, enjoy what I'm reading or put it down, relax, and enjoy life. The part about how much a seventeenth-century Britisher read in a lifetime kind of puts it in perspective, doesn't it? There will definitely be more quotes from this book.