A dove took off, being forced from the birdseed by a covey of quail.
When I looked through my old photos from last January’s intro to photography class, I found quite a few of birds in flight. I remember trying and trying to catch them flying and found it was almost impossible. So, it was surprising to see a few that were okay. If you missed my post Wednesday, I posted old photos of Red HERE.
I found this view of a stately predator to be fascinating.
Doves in flight.
Quail sound like jets planes taking off.
Harris’s Hawk landing on a mesquite tree.
A Harris’s Hawk flying from a Century Plant.
A hawk I caught right before he took off our neighbor’s roof.
This is a framed photo of birds in flight that is hanging in our living room. Gary Gruber has a lengthy career as a photographer that includes street photography, public relations, landscapes and more. We worked together back in my PR days and I remember helping him in his booth at a juried art show in La Quinta. Now he has photography in a gallery in Palm Desert. You should spend some time looking through his photography on his website HERE. His work is stunning and will brighten your day! Here’s a photo from his Birds on a wire tab.
I’m sad to say I haven’t had a Red or Mrs. sighting in a few weeks! Where did they go? Maybe they aren’t enjoying the cold weather with lows at night down to 30 degrees and highs in the low 50s during the day? Just like me. I’m not liking it either. This Red photo is from last March.
I took a few photos of squirrels and quail over the weekend. I was looking at them in Adobe Bridge. Then I thought, I wonder what else is on this card? I discovered it was from my intro to photography class I took January through May last year. In that class we weren’t allowed to crop or make changes. The professor’s point was for us to learn composition and our camera’s settings. I spent a few hours opening last year’s photos in Adobe Camera Raw and improving what I had originally captured. I discovered some photos of Red and friends that needed little touching up.
A new photo of a quail and squirrel I took over the weekend.
Here is one I took a year ago of birds in flight at my Bird Buddy feeder.
Old photos of Red and his House Finch friend. Here’s a series of them looking this way and that.
I had fun looking through old photos, cropping and brightening them up. I have a few more to share in upcoming posts.
Hopefully it will warm up and Red and Mrs. will return. Red was a bachelor when I took these photos last January.
Do you have a favorite photo out of these?
What are you working on as a new project for the New Year?
I got another visit from my javelina friends. I was taking out recycling when I smelled something nasty and skunky. Then I looked outside the fence and there they were! Yes, they smell. They also seem to use their sense of smell to figure out where I was and don’t seem to see that well. Their snouts are very active!
Now back to my topic: The New Year is a Gift
With January slowly slipping away, I’m making a conscious effort to make the most of it. Each new year does feel like a gift. There’s a chance to be better, make changes to be healthier and focus on new goals.
How am I doing that? First, by re-reading Julia Cameron’s book “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance.”
From Amazon’s description:
The third book in Julia Cameron’s groundbreaking trilogy on creative self-renewal, now for the first time in paperback. In this inspiring twelve-week program, the third in Julia Cameron’s beloved body of work on the creative process, Cameron offers guidance on weathering the periods in an artist’s life when inspiration has run dry. This book provides wisdom and tools for tackling some of the greatest challenges that artists face.
The second thing I did this weekend was renew my membership to SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writer’s and Illustrators) and downloaded “The Essential Guide to Publishing for Children.”
The guide covers all aspects of the publishing process, including finding an agent, writing a query letter, writing a book proposal, understanding contracts, and more.
I also watched a video of marketing trends in children’s literature which was on SCBWI’s resource page. I have several children’s manuscripts that I’d love to get published. I’m going to give it another try!
One of them is a story about growing up with my mom with her quirky and eccentric ways. I wrote it at least 20 years ago and got an offer from a small publisher. At the time, I was on contract with the Los Angeles Times Kids’ Reading Room to write children’s stories and was published in children’s magazines like Ladybug. I thought the publisher’s contract was too small! Of course, I never got another offer and quickly learned getting published is not that easy.
The other manuscript won first place in a Writer’s Digest competition as well as my local SCBWI chapter. It was also picked up by the most adorable website in the UK called S’mories where young British kids were recorded reading stories. The website was taken down for some unknown reason. Perhaps the parents no longer wanted their children broadcast in public all around the world.
I’m going to start with those two projects and will work on new projects, too.
This is not our usual weather for sunny Arizona. How does 49 degrees feel like 33 degrees? I went outside today to take photos. It does feel cold. I wore my heaviest coat.
I struggled to come up with something to post, which is not like me. I realize it’s because after coming home from our Christmas Hawaiian trip, both my husband and I got sick. I’ve been down for several days. Not much has been happening in my life.
It was hubby’s birthday this week and we cancelled our birthday dinner plans with our friends from Palm Springs who moved one mile from us in Arizona. They called several times to see how we were feeling. Finally, the scoop was that they are taking their kids on a cruise soon and they don’t want to get sick. We decided to postpone the birthday dinner celebration. If we are contagious or aren’t contagious and they get sick in the next few days, what is the upside?
We did take out Chinese at the only decent Chinese restaurant around us and spared strangers from our coughing fits!
Here are some photos I took of our gray day:
The view out my office window. It’s difficult to see through the rain drops.
Our crocodile. It looks like he enjoys the weather.
Looking out the front door.
Our backyard aliens or geckos left by the previous home owners. I know they are geckos, but they look more like aliens to me.
The first year we were here, we had snow! This coyote was playing in the snow and ended up on our wall!
A coyote hanging out on our wall.
It is snowing in Sedona which is less than three hours away, but at a higher elevation.
What is your weather like today? Is it normal for this time of year?
This is the view from our small, local grocery store. It was a bright, sunny day and the mountain just popped out at me. What a beautiful location in Carefree. Although I loved the lush jungle Hawaiian scenery on vacation, I enjoy my desert landscapes, too.
So what was odd?
I got a change of address notification from USPS by email. It was from a stranger who decided to use our address to forward his mail from Virginia. Then I got a confirmation from USPS by snail mail and started getting this stranger’s mail. I took it to my favorite postal worker in Carefree and he filled out several forms to stop the mail forwarding.
I wonder how if you’re moving you enter a wrong address? Or, does this guy plan on moving into our casita? Maybe we will have a tenant?
Kidding aside, according to the postal worker, the guy entered the address online. He must have made a typo. Somedays I get a stack of mail, other days nothing. I’m sure when this person moves, he will figure out what his address is.
A bronze statue of a cowboy and horse in the Carefree Desert Gardens. A bronze sculpture by Arthur Norby titled, Stampede. This is close to our post office.
What else seemed odd?
We have a small chest freezer from Costco in our garage. My husband had this idea that meat prices were going to go up a few years ago. So he wanted to buy the freezer and stock it up with protein from Costco. We have enough steaks, chicken, and pork to probably last a lifetime.
Do I have to admit that my husband was right? Meat prices went up.
The freezer is plugged into a plug that shines bright green. This is handy because the GFI goes out when we have thunder and lightening. We know by looking at the plug if the freezer is working or not.
So to move on with my other odd occurrence, we woke up one morning this week with no green light on the freezer. There was no storm….but the meat was softening up. I managed to throw away a bunch of stuff we no longer eat, like Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sausage Sandwiches (too much sodium and calories) and a few things from Costco that we thought we’d like, but didn’t.
The beef, pork, oxtails and chicken I managed to save. I’m lucky we have the casita fridge. Plus, the former owners of our house left us fridge/freezer in the garage. I’m glad I didn’t get rid of it, because the day the freezer went out, so did the main fridge in our kitchen. It felt like I spent the day shuffling and rescuing food! On the bright side, I cleaned out all the fridges and freezers. I’m starting the year of with a clean slate. What are the odds that two units would go out on the same day, but for different reasons?
We had to get the GFI replaced. We hired an electrician who is married to one of my kids’ swim friends from childhood. They came out with their 10-week baby! What a wonderful visit. We went to their wedding last year and baby shower. The baby is adorable.
We found our own Stampede in a gallery in Carefree. The local artist only made about 10 of the replicas.
I have only seen Red and Mrs. a few times since we got back home from Hawaii for the New Year. I was disappointed with the photos I took. They were blurry, fuzzy and altogether not good. While I was taking photos of my quail, Red showed up and posed for me on the pink flamingo. I kept trying to snap photos, but my camera wasn’t cooperating. There was a large “E” on the screen.
Then I exchanged the camera battery, thinking that might be the issue. It wasn’t. I glanced back at my laptop to see the dongle plugged in with a card reader. The SD card wasn’t in my camera. No wonder the photos of Red weren’t going to happen.
Red flew away. I had to be content with quail photos.
A female quail acting as “look out” in the tree. This is normally a man’s job.
A male doing his job.
Then he flew up into the tree from the rock.
While in Hawaii, I received an email from my photography professor. He said the class is no more. I had registered for Spring semester which was to begin this month and run until May. There were five others in the class along with me. The class is by invitation only, so there’s no signing up if the professor didn’t think you’d be a good fit for the class. He told me before I joined that everyone is dedicated to learning and improving in photography. That everyone is on the same learning curve, just at different points along the way.
I’m sad the class won’t continue. But in the meantime, I’ll continue working on my learning curve, wanting to improve my photography. What’s really sad is that professor said after 26 years of working at the college, he was sent an email coldly telling him he was no longer employed.
I’m starting off the New Year with a very light calendar. No more ladies’ group, newsletter, photography class. Even the neighborhood coffee has ended. With all this free time, I’m going to get back to my focus on writing. I have several projects and manuscripts that need my attention.
What would you do with a cleared calendar?
Is there a project you’d like to start on or continue?
We’re at home from our family Hawaii trip that I shared photos of HERE and HERE. I’m now in my real life wild kingdom and enjoyed a visit by a squadron of javelina.
I counted three or four babies, two moms and a handful of males. I took photos with my Nikon and telephoto lens, but the best photos and videos were from my iphone. I got amazingly close feeling confident our fence would hold. I had thrown a few handfuls of birdseed out for our quail, but the javelina discovered it and soon took over.
I wouldn’t want to get between these two guys!
Babies. I especially like peewee redhead!
Another look at two babies.
Here’s to a happy and healthy 2026 for all of us and our wildlife friends!
What are your plans for the first weekend of 2026?
