No, I did not mis-spell “sweater” in the title. We’re having a summery spring, with hot, dry Santa Ana conditions interspersed with normal spring weather, and it’s confusing our poor little seedlings.

I’m actually doing a tiny bit of gardening. Though I’m a plant — especially flower — lover, and I’ve hankered for some fresh garden produce for a long time, I’m shamefully lazy at doing anything about it. Any yard we’ve had that looked good in the past was entirely my spouse’s doing, except for a little weeding here and there on my part, and even now with my surge of interest in finally getting a real garden started here, I’m quite a bit lazier than he is. I’m much better at mental or creative, sedentary work than physical labor. But I’ve had my bursts of productive activity too, and I’ve gotten a little spring cleaning done indoors as well. Not enough to suit me just yet. There’s a lot of catching up to do around here. Thus my long absence, which has been partly rest periods due to the early lapses into summer. Hot weather tends to make me just want to lie down in a dark room with an icy drink of something and whine about the heat. When the thermometer rises above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, my brain even seems to go on vacation. Hopefully that helps explain the long absence from blogs — mine and yours.

How’s your spring going so far?

Had any summer yet?

Want some of mine?

That title sounds like a metaphor for something, maybe political. But it’s not.

Earlier I wrote about the Ringed Turtle Dove I spotted one morning under our pine trees. I’ve been keeping a lookout for it, and have since seen it with a second dove, and the two of them courting. I think maybe they’re nesting in the pepper tree in the yard behind and downhill from ours. They like to hang out in our back yard, and I’ve seen them on the ground, on the fence, on the satellite dish, in the palm tree, in the pine tree, and on the old aerial antenna on our roof.

I also wrote earlier about the Red-Shouldered Hawks and Red-Tail Hawks in the neighborhood. I’m not sure which it is that’s been stalking the doves, but at one point yesterday I went out back and saw one of the doves perched on the satellite dish. As it sat there, I saw a hawk swoop out of the sky, diving for something in a yard two houses up the hill. I think it was a Red-Tail. The dove apparently didn’t see, or wasn’t concerned, even as the hawk flew over our yard, without any prey I could see. Disappointed, I suppose. The dove remained sitting there calmly, right out in the open, either unaware or unconcerned about the hawk.

A few minutes later, out front, I saw the hawk still flying around, getting hassled by a crow, but staying close by. When I returned to the house I took another look out back, because I’d just seen the hawk again. The dove was now perched on our back fence. I started to turn away, heard a kind of thump behind me, and turned my head. The hawk was flying away from the spot where the dove had just been. The hawk let out a frustrated cry, though, and then I saw that the dove had escaped into the nearby pepper tree. It sat there under the leaves, looking ruffled and scared. Yeah, me too. I think the noise I’d heard may have been the dove jamming off the chain-link fence into the tree with a split second to spare, but I’m not sure. It must’ve moved faster than I’ve ever seen it move.

A moment later I heard the dove cooing in the tree, but I didn’t see it sunning itself out in the open anymore yesterday, and today when I saw both doves up on our antenna, they seemed a lot more wary. The hawk, or possibly more than one, keeps circling the area, passing over now and then to see what prey is sitting out in the sun not paying attention.

I’m trying not to pay too much attention — though it’s difficult when these dramas unfold right in my back yard. It’s nature, and I love nature, but nature is dangerous at times, its beauty and peace transient at best. Today I’m keeping a respectful distance.

We’d seen it before, many weeks ago. A big bird of prey with black and white bands on its tail. The rest of it was paler than a Red-tailed Hawk, but we only caught glimpses of it flying over, and not a long enough look to identify it. We thought it was stalking the ground squirrel that moved in last summer. Maybe it was, because the ground squirrel hasn’t been around for a few days now.

Day before yesterday, we saw the big bird perch on top of the nearby telephone pole, and we got binoculars out for a really good look. Its breast, the undersides of it wings, and its beak are indeed paler than a Red-tailed Hawk’s. Its breast is almost pinkish or strawberry blond.

It’s a Red-shouldered Hawk, which is apparently found all over the eastern part of the country and along the California coast. I’d never seen one here before, not close enough to identify anyway. Our dominant hawk is the Red-tailed.

I wonder how long it’s been here, because last summer we watched what we think was a clutch of young hawks taking their first flight from a neighbor’s palm tree. Maybe this is one of the parents, back again to nest in the same tree. Or looking for the squirrel, or more squirrels. Poor squirrel, if so.

Our local birds continue to intrigue me with their variety and number. I’ve read, in a Harvard study, that this area is one of the most biologically diverse in the continental US, and that doesn’t surprise me, just basing my opinion on the birds.

I saw lots of owls from the road, when I used to leave for work while it was still dark. I’ve seen plenty of Black Phoebes here the past few weeks. I can’t seem to walk outside without spotting one of them. We have what I think may be Purple Finches, a variation from the House Finches we knew in San Diego, though I’m not certain. Some kind of small woodpecker likes the neighbor’s palm tree. We even have a small flock of feral parrots in the neighborhood, though I haven’t seen or heard them yet this year.

I’ve also seen lots of Mourning Doves, all my life, as I’m sure most people in North America have who pay any attention to wild birds. I’ve heard their mournful song since I was a girl and learned to recognize it. But this morning I heard a dove that sounded different, so I looked out the back window and saw a Ringneck Dove, also known as a Ringed Turtle Dove, under our pine trees. These doves aren’t natives. In fact they’re supposed to have been domestic for the past 3,000 years or so. But I suppose quite a few may have escaped into the wild at one time or another.

I just heard it again, out there, hiding in the pines and cooing, reminding me to post this. I wonder if it’s moved in to nest. If so, I guess it had better watch out for the Red-shouldered Hawk.

It turns out that this Snow on Mt. Palomar, back on December 9, 2007, was nothin’.

But you couldn’t have told me that three days ago, when our high temperature was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was certain spring had sprung with a summery vengeance. I almost tucked away my warm clothes and pulled out my summer shorts.

There was no more snow on Mt. Palomar. It had all melted since around Feb 5th, when the mountain didn’t boast nearly as much snow as in early December. I did get a nice view of the entire mountain with snow on it, from our polling place on the 5th. But I didn’t have my camera with me, so this view was from our yard. As you can see, it wasn’t as much as in December.

FEB 5

And like I said, by three days ago that was gone, melted. History.

But I’m glad I never got around to putting away my sweaters, because yesterday I don’t think the outside temperature ever rose above 50 degrees, and although the forecast had called for a light drizzle overnight, instead we got dark, threatening skies, cold wind, and steady rain for several hours yesterday.

I was sure that once the clouds parted there would be a fresh layer of snow on the mountains. But when they did, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Here’s our view just as the clouds lifted yesterday afternoon.

CLOUDS LIFTING

Below shows our view from our side yard at just around sunset yesterday, when the snow reflected the setting sun.

SUNSET

We can only see the lower, southern peak from our side yard, and that’s possible only in the past few months since we removed some obstacles. Below is a view of the entire mountain, from the vacant lot two houses down the hill, this morning. I’ve circled the portion visible from our yard in the second view below.

ENTIRE MT. PALOMAR VIEWED FROM DOWN THE HILL

ENTIRE MTN WITH SOUTH PEAK VISIBLE FROM OUR YARD CIRCLED

I don’t mind a little warm weather, and I don’t mind a little cold or rain. We can always use more rain around here, and snow is beautiful from a distance, but this snow looks more like Washington, Idaho, or Sierra snow than Southern California snow. Okay, maybe it’s like Big Bear snow. But it’s not normal San Diego County snow. We had roads close near Campo yesterday, which is near the Mexican border! Is it possible the entire region shifted north and we didn’t know it? It’s confusing, and I guess it’s time to dress in layers for a few weeks.

What the news people have to say:

A wintry surprise for area: Snow, sleet, hail, rain turn nice weather upside down

‘Slider’ brings rain around county, snow in moutains.

See what happens around here when it snows? People get stranded, roads close. Just a little snow can set us upside down and sideways. It’s not supposed to snow here.

But it sure looks pretty.

MORE PICS

In a couple of weeks, groundhogs will make their yearly predictions, though I’m not sure a prairie dweller afraid of its own shadow is a very reliable sign of the turning seasons. I’ve begun to wonder if we’ll have an early spring, though. The weather has turned sunny and warm, and we haven’t needed an extra blanket for the past few nights.

Weeds have cropped up all over our yard, making everything green, even if it isn’t the commonly acceptable form of green. When the weeds first sprouted they were beautiful, and in some open, flat parts of the yard, from a distance you would almost think we had a lawn. We don’t, and now that they’re larger, from a distance they just look like a bunch of weeds.

We found something new and interesting under the pine trees. It was a strange vine, not anything I recognized, but vaguely reminiscent of a Cucumber, or maybe some variety of Passionflower. (Click photos for larger views.)

It had grown a lot by the time we noticed it, and was on its way to spreading all over that section of the yard, sending out long, tightly curled tendrils that took hold of whatever was in their reach.

It had already started up one pine tree.

I looked it up on the internet and didn’t find anything conclusive, at least not at first. Nope, not a garden-variety Cucumber, and thank goodness it doesn’t appear to be a Kudzu Vine. It wasn’t a Mandrake, which sort of disappointed me, as a fan of Harry Potter movies, though I don’t particularly want a plant that will scream at me.

Possibilities came and went as I searched for vines with multiple-lobed leaves, even the possibility that it was some kind of wild grape, which it wasn’t. One type of vine that seemed to come close was the Bitter Melon, also known as Balsam Apple or Balsam Pear. That narrowed my search to various forms of gourd or Cucurbitaceae, such as Hodgsonia, or Luffa, or the much more likely Chayote, which is sold in our local markets. But the leaves weren’t right for Chayote. The strongest possibility I’ve come up with so far is some variety of Coyote Melon or Coyote Gourd, which grows wild in our region.

If you know for certain what this vine is, please let me know.

How it got there is the easy part of this mystery, and would be even if I’d never seen a house finch scatter seeds. Our local scrub jay friends are always hiding things in the needles that collect under our pine trees. It’s a favorite place to store their seeds, nuts, magic beans, and whatever else they hoard for later, usually scrub oak acorns, or peanuts people have fed them. Last summer, while we trimmed the pine trees and cleared out a thick mulch of pine needles, one scrub jay kept fussing over our activity, and every now and then he darted in to rescue some of his treasures. In some years we’ve had volunteer sunflowers sprout there and grow to full height.

NOTE: The pictures that follow are from past summers, not this winter. Even here, we don’t ever see sunflowers blooming in January.

Out front, we have an entire patch of some kind of creeping yellow daisy that came up there one year, probably also carried in by birds. We water it now and then, so although it dies back each winter, it returns to open a bright patch of yellow flowers every summer, next to our old pickup.

In any case, the strange vine has been eradicated, so we won’t have any cries of “Feed me, Seymour!” coming from under the pine trees, and it won’t grow so large as to strangle a pine tree. Jack won’t have to climb up the beanstalk and see if there’s a giant living up there. Good thing, too, because no one named Jack lives here, so we’d have to pay Jack to do that. Still, I hope we didn’t kill something we would’ve liked. Sometimes the birds bring us weeds, and sometimes they bring us gifts that we enjoy for years.

Maybe we will have an early spring, maybe not. I’m in no hurry. I certainly don’t look forward to the hottest part of summer. But a long spring would be nice.

We’ve had a few more days of rain, enough to soak the ground, and this storm came before the ground dried out from the last rain, which is good — and unfortunately unusual for us in our past few drought years. So I really shouldn’t complain about the weather, but . . . it’s awfully dark out there.

I balk at turning on lights in the middle of the day, but that’s what I’ve had to do the past two days in order to get any work done. I’m sorting through files, which is a bit scary, especially in the dark. I’ve also hibernated through these dark days to some extent because I’ve been under the weather. We both had the flu over the Solstice and Christmas, and though we’ve recovered, it tried to come back on me a few days ago, sending me once again in search of my vitamin bottles and throat lozenges, and whining about an earache.

It’s a good, wet winter, good for staying indoors and drinking hot beverages, celebrating the fact that we’re actually having winter, even if it is most people’s idea of spring or fall. The more wet winters we have, the less likely we are to have such horrible fire seasons.

Meanwhile, because I’ve decided to keep politics mostly off this blog, whenever I get the urge to wax political I post my views at my other blog, Spirit Blooms. I am putting my political blogging efforts into support of Dennis Kucinich for President.

Don’t worry, I haven’t given up this blog, and I don’t intend to. I’m still somewhat of a mystery to me, and I intend to keep writing, even if not mystery novels. I’m also still opinionated and have lots to say about writing, books, and lots of other stuff you might find interesting. Mystery of a Shrinking Violet will live on until the bitter end of my blogging adventure, whenever that is, sometime in the far future. I’ll be back in a day or two, hopefully with more to write about than the weather — or politics, which I honestly hate but can’t avoid in good conscience these days.

Happy New Year!

Today entered with a beautiful sunrise and left with a gorgeous sunset. What more could we want for the first of the year?

I’ve come to think that the day I enter a new year should be almost like any other day, that making resolutions for the entire year ahead isn’t really sensible. Anything can happen in the course of 12 months, and sometimes our focus changes completely due to forces outside our control. So instead of thinking about resolutions, I spent a lot of time in the past few days reviewing not only this past year, but my entire adult life. The whole-life review has partly to do with a journal project, basically sorting through a mass of accumulated pages from years of personal journal keeping and coming up with a way to edit them down to their essence and organize them, to preserve the memories without all the bulk. In the process I’ve read back through pages that I wrote at 18, 19, and 20 years of age. Wow, what a kid I was — and still am, in some ways. But it made me think a lot about choices and where they lead us, and how we define happiness and success at different times in our lives, especially how our focus shifts, sometimes suddenly, and what we spend our thoughts on. It made me face some of my regrets that I hadn’t considered or thought about in years.

Those regrets include hurting people’s feelings in any way — and I’ve committed some doozies, usually by accident but in hurtful, unthinking ways just the same. I regret changing my college major from English, leaving college without a degree, spending too much time in college distracted by and pining over young men, imagining potential relationships where it should’ve been obvious to me they didn’t exist, joining a church at 19, which distracted me even more from school and may have been what finally drew me away from it altogether — there were boys there (gag me with another repetitive, pining journal page) — and taking religion too seriously for even those few years, mistaking it for a deeper form of spirituality that it was not. Let me say right here, young women put far too much emphasis, or at least we did back then, on finding mates. It’s absurd. Though I eventually did, and have been with him for going on 25 years now, he wasn’t one of those responsible for distracting me in school, so you see all that pining back then was a complete waste. Later in life, I regret not buying a house sooner (though I’m not sure how that would’ve been possible earlier), not taking more vacations when I could afford them, buying even half of the magazines I ever purchased, spending rather than saving most of the excess I finally earned for a few years (and still not spending it on vacations), not buying a new car before I retired, and not giving up on being a novelist sooner. I’m serious about that — seven novels with no sale is too much — enough already!

In spite of those regrets, I’m pretty happy with most of my choices, especially in my spouse, and even in some of the jobs I didn’t like at the time but which were worth the opportunities and the friends they brought me. In fact all my experiences, including many I regret, taught me something of value.

Regrets are a waste too, so I won’t dwell on them, or on dreams or plans for the future. Instead I want to focus on now, on how I’m doing and what I plan in just the next few days or weeks. If there’s anything else I need to focus on more of the time, at this point in my life, it’s the same things I think we should always focus on, all our lives. Most of the people I know spend too much worry on whether we’re good enough, or what we’d change about the past. And some of us spend too much time worrying what others should do, or what should happen that’s out of our control, to make us happy. So I’m reminding myself yet again:

Be happy with myself, as I am

Don’t worry whether others like or approve of me

Treat myself and others kindly and with respect

Don’t let anyone tell me how I should live my life, and don’t tell anyone how to live theirs, as long as they’re not harming anyone

Stand up for myself and for the rights of others

Love life, and live it with passion and an open mind to possible outcomes

Have no regrets — let them go

Follow my bliss and enjoy seeing others follow theirs

Own my life

Don’t worry at all, let tomorrow take care of itself

Learn from everything

All my best regards to you for 2008, and good luck in the coming year.

We got quite a bit of much-needed rain last weekend. This week’s storm didn’t bring as much where I live. I think the storm dumped most of its moisture on Oregon long before its tail end reached us. But yesterday afternoon, clouds moved in from the west again.

I was sure this one meant business. (more…)

We’re fine, our home is fine, and all our nearest neighbors are fine, as is most of downtown. We got home today and found everything just as we left it four days ago. In the meantime we stayed with my sister, her husband, and her two dogs, who kindly took us in along with our dog, and made us feel very secure and cared for. Thank you, all of you who contacted us and expressed your concern.

I’d never been evacuated before. It’s a surreal experience, especially early on when you don’t know whether you’ll have a home to return to. All I can say is that the more information local governments can provide evacuees the better, whether it’s positive or negative news. Information makes people feel less helpless and forgotten and tells them what they need to do, how to begin as soon as possible to get back to normal and to find a thread connecting them to their future. Sitting and waiting without much information doesn’t work for most of us. I learned in the past four days that it definitely doesn’t work for me, and I usually think of myself as a fairly patient person. (more…)

Yesterday felt like a rerun of my birthday four years ago when I spent the day worrying about a fire at nearby Camp Pendleton. That year the wind changed to a Santa Ana, carrying that fire away from us. But a few days later the Cedar Fire started, and burned 280,278 acres, 2,820 buildings (including 2,232 homes), and killed 15 people. About a year and a half before that was the Gavilan Fire, which came within 1/2 mile of my home.

When I was a kid I thought Santa Ana winds were sort of exciting, though even then I didn’t like the heat that came with them, or the dry air that made my hair crackle and my skin feel like paper. But now, after so many fires and worries, I’d rather be out of town when this weather kicks in. The humidity was in the single digits all day yesterday, and it’s every bit as dry today. I slept very little last night, spending most of it listening to the wind tear around the house, creaking the walls and whipping things around outside, and wondering whether all of Ramona (36,000 population) and all of Potrero got evacuated, and how far the fires would spread during the night and all that wind.

This morning I woke to a phone call from my sister, who’d heard on the news that there was a fire in Rainbow, about 5 to 10 miles from me. So today is a fire watch day, hoping the wind will settle down, hoping the air will moisten, and hoping our firefighters aren’t stretched too thin.

I turned 51 yesterday. I think I’m getting too old for this.