Monday, April 14, 2008

Urban Wild Life





I checked on Alex this morning and found him in the back yard with a wild turkey the size of Big Bird. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune we share the metro area with a couple thousand of them, but this was our (and Alex's) first encounter. Please notice the fierce cat in the bottom photo, all puffed out yet somehow backed as far away from the bird as he can get.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

The older I get, the better I was.

In an effort to reanimate myself after a long, gray winter (not that it's over yet) I've been watching whitewater video and uploading some of our Grand Canyon snippets from 2003 and 2004 to YouTube.

209 Mile Rapid with Ann in 2003 (with one prominent profanity):



Lava Falls solo in 2004:



Granite with Ann in 2003:

Monday, April 7, 2008

feeding the iguanas


Overnight our youngest cat Emmie knocked a few blooms off the pinkish-purple azalia Robbie and Jeff gave us. Ann put what she could in a tiny vase and gathered the rest to throw into the yard. She stood in front of me with a fist full of purple and said "I'm going to give these to the iguanas. They love the purple ones."

I didn't remember the name of the tree whose blooms the iguanas preferred (wygelia?), but I assumed I had told Ann the story of the iguanas that wouldn't go back to eating lettuce when winter came. At least once. And, unlike me, she had remembered it well enough to make the comparison. And that became today's post.

Then Ann read it and said "I wasn't feeding iguanas in Ohio! I was feeding iguanas in Costa Rica!" Evidently she was remembering more recent (and more distant) iguanas who liked purple blossoms.

The moral being that profundity and reality may intersect but don't necessarily.