Category Archives: Photos

Sometimes I Wake Up To This

Close up of Quigley

Literally!

Of course I don’t usually have a camera in bed with me, so I had to stage this the other day. It was payback, since I had to wake him out of his nap to get him to put his head on his bed while I took his picture.  😀

Have a great weekend!   We’re supposed to get STORMS!

Spring in Arizona

Specifically Southern Arizona. 

A couple of weeks ago, (about a week after my surgery, in fact),  I met my editor at a local garden restaurant for lunch. After we finished eating and talking we took our cameras and went around the hummingbird garden taking pictures. The hummingbird garden is one planted with native wildflowers that attract hummingbirds. At the time of our visit, the flowers were all in bloom. I had a blast, and thought I’d share some of the pictures I took.

This next one  is a nesting morning dove. She just sat there not far off the path and let people walk by. Most didn’t notice her, but even when we started taking pictures, she just watched

And now for my favorite of all the shots I got, and the most appropriate for the “hummingbird garden”:

Fun Morning at the Zoo

This morning I took my first “Artist’s Date” in a long time. I didn’t really plan to do it… kind of fell into it. Our local zoo, which is not far from our house, recently received a herd of 5 African Elephants from the San Diego Zoo’s Safari Park. There’s one large male, Mabu, two females, Samba and Lungile and the sons of Samba — Punga and Sundzu. The zoo has transformed what was once a picnic area and soccer field into a large elephant habitat with a mud wallow, termite hills, swimming pool and wading stream. We’ve been watching the construction now for a couple of years as our daily walking path goes right by it. Finally, now, it’s finished.

The grand opening is to be tomorrow, but starting last Sunday, they have been holding a members-only preview. This morning I had a doctor’s appointment near the zoo, so decided that afterward I would go to Starbucks (also on the way to and from home) for a mocha and a scone and then head over to the zoo with my new camera.

It was awesome. The lion was out, and in the perfect position and lighting (see above). And the new Expedition Tanzania enclosure is wonderful and all the elephants were out.

Here’s Samba and Sundzu, the latter having breakfast.

Here’s Punga, Sundzu’s older brother. See his little tusks growing in? He seemed to like to throw hay on his back…

And finally Mabu, the giant male, who likes to eat branches and sticks and has already pushed over one of the trees and then broke it apart. That’s one of the “perks” of having an area with elephants in it if you’re some other kind of animal. They clear out paths and make the forests less congested…

Altogether I took 95 picture, just haven’t had time to go through and pick out the ones to keep and do the necessary editing and resizing. But what a fun morning, it’s been!

Estate Taxes and a Photo

I’ve been working on gathering my mother’s medical expenses so I can have her taxes done and over the weekend realized that while I’d talked with people at her former employer — the City of Tucson — and they knew she had died, and that I was the Personal Representative, and that I had given them my address as her mailing address… that was the retirement department. Not the Tax Forms department. And last week the forwarding order at the Post Office expired (I realized that today) so if they don’t have the correct address (the Social Security Administration didn’t) it won’t get forwarded.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to call the City. Oh, joy. Oh, wonders. Oh happy day.

I already found a number for “Employee Records” in the phone book and that seeming like the appropriate place to call, I dialed it, just to see when they opened. I think it’s a fax line…

I also tried the number of the above mentioned retirement department person. I got a message saying she was no longer with the city.

So that leaves me with “Administration.”  I’m putting it all in the Lord’s hands. Father, do You really want me to spend all day talking to mindless bureaucrats, right hands and left hands that don’t know each other exists?  I shudder to recall when I tried to make headway with the insurance company last summer, passed back and forth between the same two people, who just kept saying, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.

But this is borrowing trouble. And didn’t I just say I’m giving it over to Him?

So I’ll leave off with it, and put up a picture of Quigley taken during our recent trip to Los Angeles. I especially like the way the leash is all in motion. Well Quigley’s pretty cool-looking, too…

Enter His Gates With Thanksgiving

Shout joyfully to the LORD, all the earth.
Serve the LORD with gladness;
Come before Him with joyful singing.
Know that the LORD Himself is God;
It is He who has made us and not we ourselves.
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.
Enter His gates with thanksgiving,
And His courts with praise.
Give thanks to Him; bless His name.
For the Lord is good;
His lovingkindness is everlasting,
And His faithfulness to all generations.
~Psalm 100

Happy Thanksgiving!

(I’ll be back next week with Part 3 of my Journal Entry series)

Flipping Priorities

Lately the Lord has been giving me lots of messages from various sources about the importance of focusing, of having priorities and following them, of knowing where your heart is by looking at where you spend your money and/or time. They’ve all been urging me to get more serious about the book and making me think about priorities.

I thought I’d already gone through all that, and had set up my morning routine to take care of things that had to be done every day or week as my first priority. The routine is always done and there’s no dithering about that. You just get up and do it.

And I have been. The first portions of it have become automatic. The second half, not so much. Plus I would often get distracted or sidetracked with some other project before I finished the second half. Was my morning routine too long? Maybe.

Worse, by the time I got around to writing — say between 10:45 and 11:45 — I was tired from all the other stuff I’d been doing all morning.

So I decided to change it up. For the last couple of days I’ve done only part of the morning routine and then went straight into the office to work on Sky for a bit, until I was hungry for breakfast. At which time I would do the second half of the routine (which includes hanging out clothes and doing tricks with Quigley)

So far that has been working really well, not just because I don’t end up out of gas before I get to the writing, but because once I’ve started working on the book, I tend to want to get back to it, and am thinking about it and not new housework projects I can work on. The other way, the new projects bombarded me.

Monday I alternated home chores and writing all day long. Today (Tuesday) I wasn’t quite as good on that, because after all the progress I had yesterday, today was more of a stalled out day. I spent a good amount of time being distracted, still, and being blank. But toward the end of the day I began to find a way to at least collect and organize my thoughts (which are mostly questions and possible answers) in such a way that I’m hoping tomorrow will see a few more pages added to the total.

One of Orson Scott Card’s recommendations is to always has why.  Why are the bombers in the basement? Why did she ask Lago to bring the ambassador up to the office to see the video? Why would she ask him to make the bombers go away?

The problem with that, is that I open up a world of questions I often don’t have answers to. Hence the distractions and protracted periods of staring out windows.

Wait. Maybe I should rephrase that.  “The problem with that is that I open up a world of questions I don’t have answers to …yet.  🙂

And tomorrow is another day. As it stands, in two days I’ve moved from the end of chapter 1 to almost the end of chapter 2.

First Visit with Lily

Well, we left last Friday for San Diego and our first visit with our new granddaughter. We spent Friday evening, all day Saturday and a brief bit of Sunday morning with the new parents and Lily. She is very cute. And sooo helpless. I’d forgotten how helpless we are as newborns. Although, at a bit over a month old, Lily’s not quite a newborn any more.

I think the parallel with a baby Christian is more apt than I ever did before. Lily can’t yet hold up her head, her arms thrash about, she can’t walk, can’t sit up, can’t roll over. Can’t really understand language. All she can do is eat, make messes, look about and be cute for a few moments, then cry and fuss and sleep and start the cycle all over again. The main thing she does, though is eat. And grow. And learn.  She’d have a hard time driving a car, or doing surgery! In fact, it would be impossible. So it is with the Christian life. Too often, as new Christians  I think we expect to be able to do things early on that only come with time and spiritual maturity.  Yet, when we look at a baby, we see there is literally no way she could do what she will be able to do when she is grown.

Well, I have been wiped out for two days now, and have done little more than put away trip stuff and basic morning routine. I expected that on Monday. I didn’t expect that today. I’m hoping tomorrow I’ll be a bit more energetic — enough to actually get back to work on Sky. Tonight I had already given up on the idea of getting a post up, but suddenly I had a window of time and an unexpected burst of energy.  So here are a couple more pictures.

Lily and the Sleep Sheep

Proud Grandparents

Kachinas and Chapter Breaks

“The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.  ~Pro 16:9

I’ve been thinking lately about my unrealistic expectations as to what I should “accomplish” in a day. Some days are just… ornery. A day when things skew out of control and you don’t even know why. Where you spill the coffee, track in mud, end up doing things you had no inkling you were going to do.

Like today, where I read some entries in a book called The Multi-Cultural Southwest that my son left here when he moved out . The entry that had most interested me was one written by the Hopi mentor of my old college boyfriend. It was called “Hopi Indian Ceremonies.” And in light of my recent Bible lessons on how the kingdom of darkness deceives, it was fascinating.

It had to do with how attitudes toward a culture or belief are developed in a child and was illustrated by the author’s own remembrances.

The Hopi religion involves kachinas, which are… well, even having read the article I’m not exactly sure what they think they are. Spirit beings that the men dress up and dance in ceremonies as, and somehow become the Spirit they are representing during the time of their dancing… That’s about the best I can do. Maybe it will be better if I quote the source.

Indoctrination begins in childhood where

“In Hopi practice the kachina is represented as a real being. From the time children are able to understand and to verbalize, until they are eight or ten years old, they are taught that the kachina is real. There are a variety of ways in which the Hopis attempt to demonstrate this realism to the child. The kachina is all goodness and kindness. The kachina also gives gifts to children in all of its appearances.  Thus it is rather difficult for me to agree with the descriptions of the kachina that often appear in literature. The kachina is frequently described as being grotesque, but the Hopi child does not perceive the kachina as grotesque.”

Here are a couple of pictures of my mother’s kachinas. You can decide if you think they are grotesque or not…

I think they look pretty scary, but I’m not Hopi.

As the child grows up, his fantasies all involve the kachina. He goes about emulating the kachina, enacting his feelings about it, and singing and dancing like one.  The author says,

“At an early age, [the children] begin to feel the sense of projection into spiritual reality. When the child is initiated and becomes eligible to participate as a kachina[in the adult ceremonies], it is not difficult to fantasize now as a participant in the real kachina ceremony, and that is the essence of the kachina ceremony. The fantasizing continues then, in spite of the initiation which seems to have the effect of revealing to the child that this is just a plaything, that now we are grown up and we don’t believe.

“The idea of make-believe continues with the Hopi man and woman as they mature, and …must continue throughout life. For the kachina ceremonies require that a person project oneself into the spirit world, into the world of fantasy, or the world of make-believe. Unless one can do this, spiritual experience cannot be achieved.”

He goes on to say that the mask in the kachina ceremony helps with this projection, since the man who dances behind it loses his identity and “actually becomes what he is representing.”  In fact, “the spiritual fulfillment of a man depends on how he is able to project himself into the spiritual world as he performs.”

I’ve read this several times and I’m still not sure what this means, since my concept of spiritual world and the writer’s concept seem to be two different things. The author’s subsequent development of what he’s saying above didn’t help much, either, explaining that while performing the man isn’t doing it for anyone “but himself, trying to express to himself his own conceptions about the spiritual ideals he sees in the kachina.” What those ideals are beyond “good and kind” isn’t elaborated upon.

But I can’t help wondering why concepts of goodness and kindness need to be represented by dressing up in scary masks with teeth, or black faces biting snakes.  I know there is a great deal more to the kachinas than what was presented here — there are so many different varieties — but the author seemed more intent on talking about how he couldn’t explain or give concrete answers as to what’s going on in all this —  it was just part of the Hopi way, elements of culture that didn’t fit with the “dominant culture” — than he was in explaining.

 Then again, maybe it’s not the Hopi way to explain things or to need them explain.  The attitude expressed in this article seemed to be more that they just “are” without any need of explaining or understanding why or even of trying to change any of it.

So, I read all that. Why? Well, for one I wanted to make more room on my bookshelf and so if I would just read that one article I could get the book out of my house. It turned out to be more interesting than I expected. But I’m not sure how, or quite why. I’ll have to ruminate on this.

In any case,  that’s part of what I did today. I also avoided writing for most of the day… again… but when I finally made myself go into the office, I reminded myself that it’s hard and complicated when I have sooo many decisions to make as I do right now, and that maybe I just need to make some and quit worrying about whether they’re right or wrong.  So I looked over what I’ve done, and decided that I’m going to stop ch 1 on p 17 and move the remaining pages 18 through 23 into ch 2. With additions and alterations.

But that will be tomorrow’s work.