Thursday morning's walk

As the sunlight rises over the mountains east of us, it ignites the white guanoed rocks in the waters below. Thursday morning, and I knew I had lots of work ahead of me, but a walk in the garden, with no eye for what tending things might need, seemed just the way to start the day.

My kitty and my camera came with me...

tiny pink roses on the path...

Leaning over the wall I see a gull, perhaps pondering where to dine for breakfast?

I know all the flowers have been given names...several of them usually and in various languages...I have even known this flower's name at some point in time and it grows under our apple trees in Sebastopol...but this morning it is a "perfect stranger," delighting me with its quiet beauty along a path by the wall above the sea.

When this century plant blooms it is likely to block the passage...

pale lavender native asters

a clique of aoeniums ... dinner plate sized succulents

morning light on the water

sunny side up

the trunk of the left most tree was soaking in a pure shot of sunlight

Phoebe, my faithful escort cat...time to get to work!

Here a blog, there a blog Links & Navigation

Some of you know that I have two blogs. Bread on the Water is the blog that links up with my name first and I love to share photos and creativity and odd events. On Write Purpose I share some journal entries, a little fiction, politics some times. I really hope you visit my other blog and read the post about an orphanage run like a family home in Rwanda. I am friends with the folks who began it and they are soon moving there. I will miss them, but if you go here and read the story about them and the children they adopt, you'll see why I am happy for them to go.

It took me a while on blogspot to learn that if you follow a link to a specific story, that is all you can access unless you then hit on the banner of the blog and it will then reload with the latest story on top. If you check out a blogger's complete profile you can also navigate between their blogs if they have more than one. Most bloggers are more organized than I am...they have their recipes on one blog and their trips to foreign lands on another, but here I am enjoying being here and there in the blogosphere and as I said when I first set out to share, I'm never quite sure what it's going to be. Thanks for visiting. Leave a comment if you will, it's always great to find out who has stopped by.

Dancing Fuschias from my New Camera

Oh, I do like my new camera.

There are many things to learn about it...first of all it takes such big pictures that I have to use a different program to download them. I can adjust the pixels though...maybe tomorrow I will read about that. I do intend to become much more versed with all its capacities. My last camera was capable of more than I ever learned. When a child I used our family camera and took a class where we walked all over Mount Tamalpias and Muir Woods snapping pictures and learning about light and apertures. It was quite expensive to get film developed and I ruined many a frame of film. Now there is so much done for me, you'd think I'd unravel its mysteries, right? But as one of my brothers who telephones me frequently recently said, with the numbers he calls programmed into his phone, he has no idea what my telephone number is... All right, no excuses...I will learn more about my Canon Power Shot SD990IS. Page 89 says that "M" stands for manual.

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Sunday Sun and Whales in the Cove

I didn't grab my camera when Mark called out that there was a whale breaching close in. I could see it myself from the window where I was sitting at my computer. I grabbed the binoculars and ran barefoot down the rock stairs, across the wooden footbridge, along the decomposed granite path and up onto the landing outside the greenhouse to get closer. Mark actually took this picture with my new camera that I still need to get a larger memory card for and read up on the how to use it beyond the automatic settings.

Real photographers must live to take pictures...sometimes life is just too fun to stop and take photographs. That's how I felt yesterday morning. For one thing, it seemed like the first early morning sun we've had for a month and then to see whale after whale spout and breach all I could do was jump up and down and make happy noises. They were going south of course...it is now August. Most of the breaches were out in the open water where one would expect to see a line of leviathan traffic, but one leaping beauty came in for a closer visit. And that is just how I felt, visited in the bright and sunny morning. Mark thought I was a funny picture myself, not formally ready for the day, shall we say, but I was drawn out into morning by creatures of the deep navigating their way in the ocean blue.

Just think of this as a picture of the water if you like...but they're out there!

click on this to make it bigger...there's a big back to see

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A trip to the Succulent Nursery

The woman working in the nursery was friendly. I asked her if I could mispronounce a little Latin for her. She was used to butchered Latin she said. But she didn't think they had any Lampanthrus Oscularia Deltoid.

As directed by the man who been associated with this succulent gardens for years, the man who identified the plant for me, we had driven all the way to Castroville out on Elkhorn Slough Road.

It was hard to believe, given all the succulents we were surrounded by,

that the one

we had come seeking was not to be had. The worker started talking up other alternatives and even suggested we might like to drive yet further north to Santa Cruz where another grower might have Lampanthrus.

Such a patchwork of succulents surrounded us, we certainly weren't going to leave without first enjoying the place. While we wandered amongst the grand variety, the worker decided she should check the computer just to be sure. Her further investigation revealed the plant was now known simply as Oscularia Deltoid. They had flats of four inch pots of just what we were looking for, of course we will have to wait until next year for more blooms. We did also find several other succulents we couldn't resist.

Here's what we brought home.

If you click on the photo you can see the tiny white flowers of the Sedum dasyphyllum major more clearly. The larger pink stalk is Sempervivum arachnoideum or Big Cobwebs plant.

We admired many plants we had either never seen or at least never noticed before. We also found out the names for several plants that we already grow but had not yet identified. It was a nice jaunt for a foggy Saturday. As we traveled back south, the sun was out in Seaside and the beach was sparkling, but further south we reentered the fog and it remained a somber colored afternoon on the cliffs where we live. We worked in the vegetable garden until dinner time. The sun sank without a flare. Throw in a little reading, a little music, and a few loads of laundry and there you have it, a very Saturday kind of day. By definition succulent means : full of juice, full of vitality, fresh. I think we can say it was a succulent Saturday.

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