After all of our rain Sunday night, from dusk until the wee hours, it was cold Monday morning, in the bay area. The news programs spoke of snow at the higher elevations.

When I walked the dogs, I saw no pelicans along the shoreline. Perhaps they are hunkered down, riding out the storm. But it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t see them again this winter. I’m surprised they lasted this long.

I’ll miss them, if they’ve left. I’ve enjoyed watching the pelicans fish during our morning walks.

As I mentioned earlier, we did not get the large squadrons of pelicans late this summer we’ve seen in recent years.  Two years ago I’d usually see multiple squadrons of dozens and dozens of birds flying out from the breakers where they spent the night, not far off the USS Hornet museum.  I easily saw hundreds in a morning.

 This August and September, I hardly saw any at all. Most mornings, none. But in October I began seeing a few large birds. By November, I regularly saw half a dozen to a dozen. Pelicans aren’t small to begin with, but it seemed to me that these were mature, older birds — gorgeous wingspans as they fished the shallow waters just off Alameda Point around dawn. I love watching how they soar, then circle tightly over a promising spot, how the heads dip and the wings pull in slightly when they consider a dive, suddenly the  heads plunge straight down and the wings tuck, then either ker-plunk! or they pull out at the last instant.

When they are successful they pause, expelling the water from the pouch of their bill, heads up as they re-position the fish, then the neck stretches as they swallow. Maybe they wait a minute (after all wouldn’t you, after a meal?) before slowly taking off. When they aren’t successful, they usually take off  right away, and begin trolling from the sky again.

At 5 a.m. one recent morning I helped a friend by dropping him off at the Amtrak station in Oakland, as he left his car close to our house. After that, I was out with the dogs earlier than usual, well before sunrise. I could hear splashes in the water. As I walked along the shore I could see the large birds hit the water and bob back up, and I realized — the pelicans can fish in the dark. Damned if I know how. I’m guessing not by taste, touch or smell. I didn’t hear any fish surfacing, but maybe I’m not attune.

But as I approached the shore in the darkness, glossy black water shimmering with the distant lights across the bay, I could see them in silhouette in the water, after the plunge. I’d love to know how they sense fish in the dark — and I’ll be curious to see if there are left here along the bay, after our cold snap.

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On another shoreline-related front:  the abandoned-then-sunk sailboat is gone. About a week ago another dogwalker and I noticed that someone had taken a piece of the floating dock and attempted to wedge it under the boat, presumably to raise it. The dock is removable, and most years a city worker comes out and removes it before the storms come in. I say most years, because I vividly remember a time a couple years ago when they hadn’t removed it before the first big storm. The dock is built in sections, linked together, and those sections were bucking up and down like a bronco in the violent, wind-whipped waves. The waves weren’t tall, as ocean waves are, but they were fast and choppy, and the sections of dock were ripping apart. The next time I visited, they were gone.

This year, someone came out and removed them—I don’t know if it was a city worker who tried to use one of them to float the boat or not, hopefully waiting for low tide, before carting it all off.

Anyway, the sunk sailboat is now gone, too.  And I haven’t seen the wild-haired homeless man and his tan-striped pit bull either; I used to see them every so often, bicycling around the neighborhood, him in a yellow rainslicker,but he seems to have moved on. I hope to some place warm.

Science has measured and discussed the positive and negative effects of ions for years. I’ve heard that the ocean shore carries a different ionic charge, which can be energizing for many critters, and as proof  I give you our Edie girl:

On the morning of our third day at Tomales Bay, we headed out to exercise the dogs. It was still a little cool as we drove out to one of Point Reyes’  beaches. When we got there, we had the beach to ourselves; I’m always impressed with how high the waves are. It seems to me as if the water is higher out where the waves form than it is along the waterline itself.

Edie was just nuts from the get-go. There’s something about the beach that fires that little girl up beyond belief.

She ran loop-de-loops, tongue lolling out, and took off for the hinterlands then came charging back

Ernie tried to give chase upon occasion, but since his injuries when Edie rolled him a few years ago, he’s no longer a sprinter.

Boy chases girl — sounds familiar, huh?

If girl escaped boy this often, we wouldn’t have a population crisis.

We ran and chased her some, but the difference was Edie had channeled the Energizer bunny. She just kept going and going.

When she ran down into the water, Mrs. O said, “she’s not getting back into the truck.” 

And she was quite a (happy) mess.

At times she outran the camera lens.

And still she kept going.

I took 35 pictures down on that beach, and this is just a sample of them. I’ve put them in chronological order, except that the first Berserker image up there was actually one of the very last I shot; here’s the larger image of Edie girl toward the end of our walk (and her run).

As we left, we put her in the back of the truck, to keep the wet sand out of the backseat. Softie that I am, however, I opened the back window so she could see us. Oops! She shouldered the window open and tried to squeeze into the cab, bringing a lot of wet sand with her.  I forced her back into the bed of the truck, half-closed the window, and on our ride back I think she came to like being back there, as she got better sniffs.

As far as the ionic effect, the web sites say positive ions cause the ill winds, scirrocos, mistrals, the Santa Anas and bitter winds. But down at the beach it’s negative ions that have such a positive effect. After seeing how happy our Edie is when she hits the beach, you don’t have to convince me.

It was good to get out of the city and away to west Marin. Those familiar with the bay area know of Marin as a wealthy county north of San Francisco,  across the Golden Gate Bridge.  That’s eastern Marin–drive west a ways, past Muir Woods, a park of redwoods, and it opens up to dairy farms and windswept beaches. It feels so different from east Marin (and the rest of the bay area), you could be hundreds of miles away.

It was nice to go up to the house on Tomales Bay. You can see the bay in the background here:

After being in the city, with all its noise and ambient light, it’s amazing how dark it is at night here, and how quiet. I took a few pictures looking out the sliding glass doors of the living room, toward the bay.

The place has a lush, overgrown feel to it.

We spend a lot of time reading, and it’s nice, when you lift your eyes from the page and look out, to see the blue bay and the hills beyond.

Aside from a weekend getaway, there was a reason for the trip. And I stowed the firewood from our fallen backyard branches under the deck.

But that only took a few minutes. Most of the weekend was reading, eating, and taking walks, delicious naps in the middle of the day, in the sunny bedroom upstairs.

Plus, we took the dogs to the beach, where Edie went berserker–but I’ll save that for next time.

The dogs and I were out recently, a pleasantly foggy dawn, enjoying the new day.  When we got out to the misty campground, looking over to the boat ramp, the sky looked like this:

I like the sunlight off the fence. Overall, feeling kind of mysterious, no? Where those low trees are, at right, I also found something for my friend up in the North Bay, La Puenta (as my real estate agent who lived in Point Richmond called it).  Lazy Buddhist had a spidery post and in honor of her arachnophilia (arachno-ambivalence?) I took these pictures at the park district’s kiosk, where I counted seven webs:

There’s nothing quite like  foggy morning to bring out the predatory details of an arachno-trap:

The funny thing is, in these pictures I don’t see a spider anywhere. Maybe it was too cool a morning?

I have to admit, in a gruseome sort of way, I like the overlapping web thing. I mean, come on little fly, you think you can get through one? We’ve got another right behind. And what happens when a fly is snared? Does the other spider come out and salivate?

Farther down the path I found a gaggle of geese on the sidewalk. I think they were aware of Edie before she saw them.

You see the heads go up, the pace quicken, and they begin honking a quiet warning to each other, then Edie realizes they are there, runs forward, and the plump young family takes off.

Wings beating the air, the stillness broken by honking grown more earnest.

How cold is it, to plonk your butt down in that water?

Oh c’mon, they’re used to it. Boooosh!!

Okay, everybody here? Come on, now, let’s all gaggle together.

Not sure what about this tickled me so much, but there was something in the sequence I liked, I guess in how they all gathered together once in the water.  Behind them, that lump on the end of the dock is a snoozing harbor seal, delaying its plunge into the water to begin the new day.

Mrs. Ombud and I were watching a movie (Little Fish, I think) when the phone rang. We don’t always pick up during a movie, figuring they’ll leave a message if it’s important, but when I heard my next door neighbor’s voice I hit pause and got the phone. He was talking about some large branch that fell in our yard, across the fence into his.

We talked for a bit, and then Mrs. O and I went out into the yard. This was after quite the big wind storm we had here, with gusty bursts of rain, on Tuesday October 13.  It was still very dark and wet out in the yard, so it was hard to see the damage. But the next morning the view from our back deck looked like this:

The limbs fell from the back of the yard toward our homes, straddling the fence line and falling on his sheds (notice dent). Our neighbor has a chainsaw, so we made plans to get out there the next day and chop up the branches. I clambered up into the old kid’s house a prior owner built in the back corner of our lot, and took a picture from our yard into our neighbor’s.

I also stood up by our house and took a picture of the tree. The point where the larger branch snapped off is obscured, but on its way down it took out another limb, and that’s what you can see here:

As you can see, it’s quite a way up there.

So my neighbor and I got together and cranked up the chainsaw, heaving branches away from the fence into the middle of our yard, until we had quite a pile, and I stacked all of the logs he sectioned off, wondering in the back of my head, who do we know who needs firewood?

Poplar probably isn’t the best, as it’s so light it’ll burn quickly. We’ll find out; I stacked it under the kid’s tree house. My wife’s cousin has a house up in Inverness with a fireplace,  a cozy retreat, so we’ll toss the wood into the back of our truck and drive it up to Inverness some weekend in the near future.

Another view from the kid’s house, sjhowing how much foliage came down. (Every week now, we fill the green waste bin–and I mean fill it. I’ve been trimming branches and packing it down to give the city as much compostable leafy matter each week as we possibly can.

Finally, the pears. The blessed pears I’ve been waiting to ripen since, oh, July. we’ve been harvesting like crazy here. most of them stay pretty green, but they do ripen sort of. And I have a coworker who likes some hard, unripened fruit (pears among them). He has a whole bin in our downstairs fridge now, full or pears. (“Put them in the fridge!” he tells me. “Don’t let them ripen any further!”)

We’ve had a very nice pear cobbler, and a pear pie, and we gave a lot of the pears to our neighbor with the chainsaw. A day or so after the big blow, when I took these pictures, I was trying to show the fallen trunk through the leaves, and you can’t see much, but you can see that in mid-October we still have fruit onthe tree.

And on this note, I’m going back upstairs to see if I can take a nap before getting up and going to work.

Two years ago I used to see large squadrons of pelicans flying along the south shore of Alameda (and thus south along the eastern shore of SF Bay) most morning I went out there. The pelicans congregate starting in late July through September, and I often saw waves of dozens and dozens of them, easily totaling 50 or more, and sometimes over one hundred.

This summer, I’ve hardly seen any.

Occasionally, I see a lone bird or two, fishing in the shallow harbor between the wall of riprap separating the old naval air station’s shoreline and the bay. Once this summer, getting on the boat for my commute home, I saw a squadron playing follow the leader by SF’s ferry building. They all soar together, until the leader begins flapping his/her wings and then all the followers flap, too, until the leader soars again, and the rest successively follow suit.  (I love watching this.) Must be a fishing technique, so they can follow the cue and plummet for tasty morsels.

Two years ago I still used my old Minolta film camera and wasted my money having them put pictures on disk for me–the resolution was terrible, but I took some pictures of the pelicans that summer. This will give you  an idea of the what I routinely saw, despite the awful quality of the photos.

At dawn one morning I found this flock in the harbor. Boaters launch nearby, which may startle them, so I got them as they took off.  I often saw flocks this size and many more, as successive squadrons flew by.

I read an article in the newspaper recently that said marine mammals which feed on krill, such as blue whales, are doing well off the coast of California, but species which feed on fish are not, indicating that the fish population may have dropped. Perhaps that’s why I’m seeing so few pelicans; I don’t know.

That same morning I found a harbor seal close to shore. In the background you can see the short dock where a half dozen or so often haul out for the night. Again, apologies for the lousy resolution, but here this fellow is, watching me–and doubtless watching the dogs, too.

(There’s something about seals’ heads and expressions that reminds me of the dogs.  Both species can watch with an expectant air.)

I’ve walked out there a few times with the new digital Canon we got last winter, but, of course, the pelicans aren’t here this summer. I’m hoping its just a normal, cyclical rise and fall in numbers, and we’ll get the squadrons back in the future. I walk the dogs just after dawn, southerly along the shore as the pups romp along, wherever their noses lead them, and the squadrons come up from behind me, soaring noiselessly past. It’s like religion without the shouting to have such big beautiful birds glide by with their tiny smiles, paying us no mind, and doubtless looking for the little fishes.

First, the pears. I’m rather amazed at how reluctant these pears are to ripen. This picture was taken in early September, and you can see how green they remain:

We’ve had tomatoes go from flower to green fruit to ripe red and the table with little noticeable change in these freaking pears.

So far, it seems to be more a squirrel lunch program than anything that’s going to grace our table. On a brighter note, the tall bushy plants under our ash tree (head high), which I always want to call lilies of the Nile and my wife reminds me are Natal lilies, are blooming.

I really should have placed something next to these blossoms so you could see how big they are. Finally, I’m still trying to get a good shot of our Molly-girl.

But she’s a reluctant subject–note the hooded look. Here she is on her favorite bed, off in a darkened part of our garage:

And here she is on the new shelf by a window Mrs. O put up for her, so she can enjoy the afternoon sun.

She comes up the stairs on her own more often now, to visit us. She will walk right past the dogs, and has stopped hissing every time they are close–but the fur still rises, at times.

She’s been to the vet now, to address some of the lingering pre-adoption issues. Ferrinstance, when Mrs. O clipped her nails one of them had grown full circle back toward her paw–so the vet cut that one. They’re also puzzled by the scab on her shoulder; the vet suspected it might be a burn wound. Molly got her shots, and they took some of her blood for testing. Mrs. O said she spent most of her time with her head tucked into Mom-cat’s armpit as they pulled, poked, and prodded her. Poor thing. She came home and went staright to bed–the sensible thing to do.

I had the side door to our garage open this morning, so the dogs can get in and out, and after breakfast Molly-cat went for a little walk. I kind of monitor her when she does this, and followed her out to the walkway toward our front gate. She was curious about the gate, and I felt that odd protective pang, both wanting her to be able to go explore yet ready to pull her back inside, where it is safe.

Suddenly a large bird flew down the open fenceline, from the backyard toward the large incense cedar (see old photo, below) covering our front steps. Molly crouched, and the size of the shadow registered for me as the bird flew into the tree, fanning its tail feathers to brake and alight on a branch. I recognized the tailfeather pattern: sharp-shinned hawk. Not big enough to attack a cat, but they like to hunt small birds by swooping along either side of our house and surprising prey.

I went through the house to the front porch, hoping to see it up in the tree, but it was gone.

A few minutes later I went back down to the garage, and Molly had curled up again in her favorite spot, in the dark, not far from a window, on some old fabric. Much as I am glad to see her exploring our yard, I was glad she was back inside.

I hope her bloodwork comes out okay.

The wife and I went to a party yesterday. It was supposed to be a pool party in someone’s backyard, sort of a goodbye to summer thing, but we had a surprise thunderstorm here in the Bay Area Saturday morning, so it was overcast, although surprisingly warm for northern California rain.

I kind of enjoy listening to thunder at night, but our Edie girl isn’t too fond of it. First she fled our upstairs bedroom down to the living room. During one of the later thunder peals I heard her heading down the kitchen stairs to our garage (her cavelike sanctuary).

Anyway, the light rains stopped late in the morning, and it was never that cold, more warm and muggy, so I still put on a tropical shirt and shorts. As overcast tends to be cool here, Mrs. O put on long pants and a sweater over a tank top. Our different summerwear amused me—I joked that we could have been going to two separate parties. It seemed funnier to me than to anyone else—no one seemed to get it. Must be just one of those cultural differences.

I grew up in Minnesota, where you’re always mindful of weather when you dress. Not just t-shirts and shorts in summer or heavy coats and warm boots in winter, but rain gear in the blustery wet springtime or light jackets, as appropriate, in the cool, dry autumn.

When I first visited southern California I hit the beach (dressed appropriately) and saw someone wearing a down vest on the boardwalk on a summer day. This cracked me up. I think it would crack up most people I knew back in the land of lakes. I still see people in down parkas in the middle of summer in the Bay Area, and I usually think something along the lines of if you did that in the Upper Midwest, people would question your sanity.

Coincidentally, one of the people I moved to California with couldn’t wait to become as Californian as possible. He even spoke with the lax vowels, got tan, etc. Interestingly, we met in a German class and got to be friends with a Californian. She was very happy adapting to the Midwest–so it isn’t an absolute difference.

There is an inherent pragmatism to dressing for the weather. It’s a connection to nature, to something bigger than people—I miss that, sometimes. Big Weather reminds us how small we are in the larger scheme of things. I like California a lot, it’s an amazing place, but it also seems so much more people-centered, which has its advantages at times, there is a creative critical mass to the San Francisco area, but it can have disadvantages, too.

It was a fun party. Relaxed, good conversation, a lot of laughter. As I mentioned, no one else seemed to notice the variances in clothing outside on the patio at the party; the host and I were the only ones in short sleeves and shorts, others wore sweaters, and my weak attempt at humor passed quickly, virtually unnoticed. In California, people dress more as a fashion statement than an exercise in pragmatism. Vive la difference!

However, one of the guests walked out onto the patio in his stocking feet. Silently I channeled my father, all these decades later; I could imagine him hollering, “either put on shoes or take off your socks!”

I’ll probably always notice that.

Do you remember Creedence Clearwater Revival? Have you heard “Looking Out My Backdoor“?  I’ve been reminded of the song recently, while out on our back porch.

Looking east across our neighbor’s backyard, we have a view of one of the oldest homes in Alameda, which I’m told dates back to the Civil War era. The owner does a wonderful job keeping his yard in bloom, and this time of year the bougainvillea are blossoming, as well as some form of gum tree (I believe from Australia) which blooms orangey-red:

Here’s a very tiny birdly bonus. If you look very closely, you can see a black phoebe at bottom center of the picture. I’ve cropped and blown up the image so far the detail is shot, but in the middle of the next pic you can see the outline of the little black bird on my neighbor’s garden scarecrow:

It’s been a very dry year in California, and we’ve used gray water to try and keep our garden and yard alive. As a result our garden has been great hunting grounds for a family or two of black phoebes, which love all the little insects, most of which we humans deem ”beneficial.”

We do what we can to encourage these, including having a butterfly bush, which has gotten quite overgrown this year:

And sometimes those conical blossoms do bring in the flutterbys:

Fanning his wings while sipping nectar.

Not all of our buggy visitors prefer the daytime. Working in the yard we found this little fellow underneath some acanthus leaves:

But these guys aren’t the black phoebe family’s favorite food. I watch them flitting around the backyard, dive-bombing bugs and flying back to their post — they prefer posts and medium high spots in the yard where they can pick and choose their meals. Once, all the little ones were lined up on the fence between our yards and I went to grab my camera, but quick as they are, by the time I got back they were gone — oh, well. Hopefully I’ll get another chance.

A few years ago, a friend and coworker of mine told us of a nice place to go for a walk up near Sonora, called Table mountain.  Table mountain is a mesa, and just below the ridgeline there is a nice trail, through a pasture.

We went there a year ago, which I joked about here.

Last time we didn’t try to go up to the top of the mesa, but this time I prevailed upon the missus and talked her into trying to go up the hill. She pointed out that the map we’d printed out called the hike “challenging.”  Which turned out to be true. The ridge is barely visible below the light, in the background here:

And yeah, it was a fairly warm morning, and the dogs had already been bounding about joyously, as you can see from Ernie’s dangling tongue. At first it was an upward slant through the woods. Stooping below low trees and stepping over fallen logs and dry creekbed, before heading up again. And then it got steeper. Then we got to the switchbacks. The trail zigzagged up the rocks, so that it was like climbing a very rocky, irregular series of stairs. Eventually on your hands and knees, but the missus dropped out just before that. A few “flights” or rocky switchback below the top (which was hard to see through the boulders, brush, and trees) she opted to sit down on a nice shady flat rock and leave the view to us. Which view was nice:

The trail we’d been on is just beyind the barely visible telephone lines, below. And those are not bushes beyond my shadow, those are treetops. As I’m not crazy about steepness, going down was in some ways harder for me than going up, in part as our Edie girl was a bit unclear on the switchback concept and I had visions of her romping off the trail and tumbling over the cliff.  But first, more of the view facing (I think) north, across Los Melones Reservoir:

Here’s the view to the northeast:

Those little tiny distant white specks along the shoreline at right are pleasure boats in a harbor. I wished Mrs. O had been there to enjoy the view, too. The pups took a peek, but I think it was lost on them.

They were more interested in drinking the water I’d brought with me (smart dogs!).

It was hot, and we were out in the sun, so I got them down off the mesa and headed back down the trail. We found Mom-dog just a few switchbacks below us.  She was most interested in the blossoms we found:

Back down on the trail, I took another shot looking up at the ridge; unfortunately, the autofocus keyed on the thin branches nearby.

All in all, it was a lovely way to spend the morning. Even with the welcoming committee for any stragglers who lost their way on the trail: