I’ve been in a horribly bad mood, mainly due to family troubles of the kind that make me feel helpless and small — the news of the death of my oldest brother, and my dad’s loss of independence due to a stroke. I’ve also had some just silly bad luck at home, little things like stubbing a toe so hard a few days ago that I worried it was broken (it’s still sore), straining my back lifting a bag of cat litter yesterday, frustration over the economic crunch that everyone is feeling, when I really could use a newer more reliable car. Why is it that bad news and events seem to come in these overwhelming groupings that feel as if they’ll never end — or, if that isn’t what’s happening, why is it that my mind seems to make even the small problems feel big, once it starts on a downward spiral?

Today I knew I needed to crawl out of this hole I found myself in. I’ve been avoiding the news, because that usually just makes me feel worse, and worse was definitely not what I needed. I know some people think that’s an unrealistic attitude, but I find the news unrealistic, in its focus on everything bad and very little good except nonsensical news about the personal lives of celebrities — people who would likely just as soon be left alone when it comes to personal matters.

I decided to search for some positive news on the Internet, and I found this story on a blog called Great Pet Net that I thought I should share in case anyone else could use a lift: Jasmine the Mother Theresa Greyhound. Dogs tend to have a healing way about them, all around, in my opinion. But this one is exceptional. She certainly had a distant healing effect on me.

It’s a beautiful spring day here. Flowers are blooming, in spite of the gopher that keeps eating them. (Our gopher loves California poppies and nasturtiums. What does yours like?) The The Hooded Orioles arrived early from Mexico, and one almost flew right into me yesterday, maybe because I was wearing green and blended with the plants. Later I watched three Red-tailed Hawks circle the sky above our house. Clouds sail across the sky today in a stiff, delicious ocean breeze. My cat Tara is always up for a game of chase or a tumble with toys. Someone I care about is playing Bach on the piano in the next room.

Yesterday I spotted a long, sinuous cloud in the western sky that looked like a Japanese dragon. I didn’t get a picture, but if you’re familiar with the animated film, Spirited Away, it looked a lot like Haku in his natural form as a river spirit.

Now that I’ve set my mind back in its more customary direction, at least for the moment, good things are beginning to happen inside me again, too.

Every now and then I find it necessary to keep a gratitude journal, to find at least three things each day that I’m grateful for to write about. I think I’ll take up that practice again for a while.

It doesn’t seem possible that we can already be one month and six days into 2009. I’ve been posting so infrequently that the blog barely has a pulse. But it is alive I assure you. It’s just been sleeping, dreaming if you will.

It’s raining and stormy today and I’m grateful for that. I think this is only our fourth big rain of the season so far. My cat Tara had a bath a few days ago on a warm, sunny, dry day that got to 80 degrees and seems to have become typical weather this winter. At least it’s been easy on the heating bill. Not so easy on the water bill or my sinuses.

I’ve been away from blogs except to post my ramblings about Tarot at Spirit Blooms. I’ve worked off-line at my other computer on artwork, read or posted on a couple of favorite Internet forums (more than I should), and searched out alternatives on- and off-line to spending money that I don’t have on books that I dearly want. I started out reading about Carl Gustav Jung; now I’m reading the writings of Jung himself, beginning with his autobiography written late in life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Still deep in my J. R. R. Tolkien adventure, I recently finished reading The Annotated Hobbit, and now I’m savoring The Lord of the Rings. I’m a little shocked by how much watching the movies in the interim has botched my memory of the original story. Still they’re excellent movies. One should appreciate each on its own merits, the novel and the movies as separate creative entities. To do the written story complete justice there would’ve had to be nine or more movies instead of three. Not that I would complain, but not everyone is the Tolkien fiend that I am. Up ahead I plan to continue with The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin. Perhaps others, who knows? I’m taking my time, reading mostly late in the evening before sleep, if I’m not too tired by then.

Eric Mayer mentioned, in his comment on my earlier post about rereading favorites, that he almost never rereads books. I’ve been the same way most of my adult life. I reread a lot when I was a teen and young adult, but at some point I realized there was plenty in print to read the first time around, and life was short. I felt that I’d miss out on too many other things if I spent my time rereading favorites.

I’ve changed my attitude about that again only recently. This has to do partly with some of the newer fiction that I’ve been dissatisfied with, partly with my budget, and partly with the tiny library here in town where the tastes of the librarians don’t seem to mesh with my own — or I’m just quirky in my reading tastes. I’m sure they have some Tolkien and maybe some Jung, but I’ve come to prefer to take my time and not feel constrained by a return date anyway. I tried writing reviews here for a while, and I found that if the book was a library book I had to return it too quickly, and if I tried to write a review after that, I kept wanting to refer to the book. If I like it, I want it to stay around for a while. I also tried our library’s on-line interconnection with an ebook download system, but that didn’t work for me. Old computer or aging human brain inside user? Either way it didn’t work and I didn’t want to waste time fussing with it. I wanted to read the book. You know, just open a cover and start reading. If something is going to slow me down I want it to be the savor of words.

That brings me to the fourth reason I’ve gotten back into rereading. Mostly it has to do with wanting to read slowly. I’ve given up on reading everything out there. I’ve finally accepted that’s impossible. I’ve decided to hone down my reading list and read what I love — slowly, and as many times as I want.

When I reread an old favorite I don’t have to be in such a hurry to get to the end. I already know how it ends. There is something to the first bloom of a new story, that first time through when it’s a path of discovery, recognition, and suspense. But this time I can pause and enjoy the language along the way, let the suspense build again slowly. My old favorites have language worth pausing for. The more commercial books today tend to be heavy on suspense and bizarre plots and twists, while they seem too often short on the kind of writing I savor. Many feel to me as if they’re written in too much of a hurry, or as if the writer didn’t even like the story he was writing. The secret to great writing, I think, is for the writer to so love the story that he’s reluctant to leave it. Chances are the reader won’t want to leave it either.

But then I’m not a hurrier, never have been. I think it’s too easy to get into an “I’ll miss something if I slow down” mindset in our day and age, though it’s a valid concern to some degree. In the work world, one must hurry enough to show up when needed, and if one slows down one is in danger of not getting important work done, of missing opportunities, or of not being able to do one’s job anymore because one hasn’t kept up with hyperactive technology. There are sometimes valid reasons to hurry. I don’t want the emergency room team to dawdle, or firefighters to take their time arriving at a fire. For readers who want to keep up, there’s such a huge amount being published, in spite of aspiring writers’ concerns that no one is publishing what they write, that it’s easy to think one has no time to reread or to read slowly the first time. There are also such a great number of people who want to be writers that it doesn’t appear we’ll ever have a shortage of reading material, even very good reading material leaving out the bad. It’s a crowded world full of people with something to say, many of them excellent writers.

Still I think we miss out on too much by trying to do or read everything. I’m not well-read, mainly because I’m a slow reader. Maybe that’s why I appreciate books that take a long time to produce. I can sense the love and time that was put into them. I can linger, relish, and wonder why. I can spend a relatively equal time enjoying them, and feel gratitude that the authors took the time to do it right.

Tolkien took something like 13 years to write The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949. He took longer, when one considers all the thought prior to beginning it that he put into creating the world of Middle-Earth, from the time he was a boy, and the time between 1949 and 1954 that he worked with his publisher to get everything just right. That time shows. And it’s not as if by taking that long he missed out on sales, which seem these days so unforgiving of anyone lagging behind. The only time any of his books went out of print was during Word War II and the after-war years, when paper was rationed in England. Oh, and there was the problem of some proofs being destroyed in a bombing or a fire (I don’t remember which) that caused further delay in getting one edition of The Hobbit back into print. Of course one important factor in his print longevity was in being Tolkien. There have been many imitators and, as Eric seemed to hint in his comment, most imitations have not held up very well. Time is, I think, one reason.

I’m certain that the biggest problems with many books is that they’re devised and written in too much of a hurry, and because they aren’t true to the writer’s own creative promptings. I can see some publisher urging a writer to create something like Tolkien wrote, but to do it right now. Imitation done in a hurry can rarely hold up to the proper process of creation. Sometimes, but not usually. Imitation as a whole is an iffy and questionable practice. Readers may say they want another story like The Lord of the Rings, but they’re not saying they want an imitation. They want more Tolkien, and that’s simply the best possible compliment to the original creator, not to any would-be imitator. Perhaps we sometimes, as readers, make the mistake of confusing the two ideas ourselves and go looking for another Tolkien when we should be looking for something else that’s new and fresh, and over which someone labored long and lovingly.

It’s been said that most of a writer’s work doesn’t take place at the typewriter or keyboard, or even necessarily with paper in hand. It happens inside the mind of the writer. I personally think every writer’s workspace needs a comfy couch, or a bed, and a window with a view of a natural setting or garden, as well as an immense library. I also think it’s safe to say that most great fiction writers have lived what they write. By that I don’t mean they’ve experienced it in physical reality. I mean they have a fertile and active imagination, an ability to visualize the experiences they haven’t actually lived. A relentless imagination at that. We use our imaginations to read, but the writer uses his imagination far more, over and over again, actively reliving the scenes he writes in his mind, working them out until they feel right, until he’s ready to translate them into written language. They get to know their own unconscious realms and facets of their own characters, as well as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, even more than we do ordinarily when we dream at night.

Now I know that some writers create at the keyboard on the fly. I’ve done that too. But the stories I’ve written that I felt best about were usually those that I had in mind for a long time before I dared to put any words down. They were an integrated collection of many things that occurred to me, including some fantasies, day dreams, things I wondered about, and even whole scenes, characters, or settings that occupied my mind well before I realized they’d formed anything close to a story worth sharing or writing down. Some were ideas I couldn’t put away because they begged to be told.

Fast writing may be part of the problem. I once rewrote a novel (Snow Angels) in the course of a few weeks, retyped the whole thing from scratch, from my head. But that story had been in my mind for a long time, in various forms, and even on paper in a few forms, before I did that. I’ve never taken part in NaNoWriMo, but I think it is possible for it to produce something of value, provided there’s something already percolating in the writer’s mind before they begin, perhaps for years before they begin typing it out. I’ve done fast writing exercises, and I know they have their value. But I wonder if the trend in fast writing is the reason so many new books I read leave me flat these days.

There is fast writing that’s great, and there have been many great prolific writers. But if we make the mistake of thinking their greatness lay in their proliferation, we do them a disservice. The secret to great writing also doesn’t lie in taking forever to produce something. I’m sure there are plenty of slowly written pieces of rubbish passing for fiction. But prolific writers are the exceptions to the slow writing rule, I think, and like Mozart’s music, great fast writing is great for other reasons than its speed of production or lack of revision. Of course everyone should write at their own speed, but fast writing of a single draft usually requires slow thinking up front, and long, slow revisions afterward. If one doesn’t take the time to do it right, to follow through, to consider it worth some effort, then even that smaller portion of fast writing time is wasted, not to mention the time anyone else takes to read the result. If it’s not worth spending lots of time writing, then maybe it’s not worth reading either.

In spite of how long Tolkien’s work has remained in print, it’s still possible that work of this kind is best done for oneself, with any idea or intent of publishing as a mere afterthought. One should, after all, consider oneself worth writing well and respectfully for. From what I understand of Tolkien, he only shared what he created with a few colleagues, friends, and his children, until the friend of a friend mentioned the possibility of publishing The Hobbit. Maybe that’s why it’s so good. He took time to shape and polish it to be what he wanted for himself and those he loved. Only after that did he shape and polish it for publication. Surely that provided him a great deal of satisfaction in what he wrote, regardless of whether strangers in his own land or across the pond liked it later on. He was also a real-life expert regarding myths of a world similar to the one he created and regarding the language he used to create it. But was he an expert who happened to come up with a story he was best suited to write, or was he a writer in the making, even as a child, who lived in his head creating a world first and who worked all his life to become expert at just what he needed to recreate that world on paper? Either way, he took his loving time about it, and that’s a good thing for all of us. After all, what’s the rush?

I’m rereading a favorite book in a new form, and watching some old TV shows I’d forgotten were so good, so it’s been a week of favorites for me and I thought I’d share.

I’m also a little desperate for something to blog about, and I must be growing jaded, because my favorites are old, and sadly far too few.

Favorite Books:

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’m currently reading The Annotated Hobbit, an edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. I’m loving it, though I think most of the annotations will be something to enjoy on my second reading of this edition. It’s been so long since I read the story, that I find myself just sticking to the story and not reading footnotes (marginal notes in this case). But I did read the introduction, and immersed myself in some fascinating biographical and publishing history. Now and then my gaze veers into the margins and my curiosity is piqued.

I decided to read this story again because I’ve read that Peter Jackson is finally involved in a film adaptation of it, which I’ve looked forward to ever since the LOTR trilogy that he produced and directed. This time I want to view the film adaptation fresh from the written story, rather than from the perspective of more than a decade of fogging over of my memory as I did with the trilogy. Which means I’m reading it now and likely will read it at least once more before the film is released.

I’m also rereading this, and plan to reread LOTR, because the film trilogy has become a mini-obsession of mine and yet every time I watch the movies I keep thinking how much I want to read the books again.

Tolkien is easily my most favorite author, ever. I’d be hard pressed to name a second favorite who comes anywhere close. Maybe it was his relationship to language, as a philologist. He also had a deep, abiding love of the fairy story and ancient poems and songs. (Many of his dwarves’ names are borrowed from the Elder Edda.) I like that he was unapologetic about his errors. He didn’t try to hide them and, if it made sense he fixed them in later editions. If fixing them didn’t make sense, he lived with them without shame or excuse. He was still a teen when he began to create his own language, that of the elves that he used in his stories, incorporated so elegantly into the film version of LOTR a few years ago. Tolkien wrote circles around anyone else, and almost singlehandedly invented the modern fantasy genre. He seems to have recalled something both childlike and ancient, and filled it with something else profoundly basic to humanity, all of which make him seem himself to have been a wizard — of storytelling. Stories are his version of Gandalf’s fireworks, and even of Gandalf’s defeat of the Balrog and death. Tolkien is pretty much at the top of the mountain and well beyond compare, in my opinion. All the rest, even my other favorite authors, are still down there in base camp, wondering about the weather up there on high. Keeping in mind that when climbing the highest mountains in the world, just getting to base camp is something, nothing to sneeze at. Most of my favorite books that even come close to Tolkien’s, though, are older, the authors also long dead.

This makes me wonder if we’re ripe for a literary renaissance. And when I say literary, I mean a STORY renaissance. Preparatory to that, if Tolkien’s work isn’t now required reading in school, I think it should be. I would love to see a new generation fall in love with language and with story.

Favorite TV series:

Star Trek The Next Generation. There’s no comparison, and even viewing old dilapidated recordings of it compares favorably, in fact stunningly so, to most of what I see on TV today.

I was saddened to hear of the death last month of Majel Barrett, and I felt as if her death marked the end of an era (started by her husband, Gene Roddenberry) in science fiction and in television.

While watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, I can’t believe how often I have to reach for tissues because a story line touched me deeply, or I’m still amused by the always tasteful humor some 20 years later, or I’m struck dumb by a profound insight or bit of ageless wisdom. At the same time it’s immensely entertaining, and frequently filled with suspense. There’s nothing like it.

I have a second favorite TV series — actually two sister ones: Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Still, Star Trek the Next Generation is another top of the mountain favorite that is difficult to compare to anything. Who knows, Tolkien himself might even have loved it.

I like The Closer, mainly because the female lead is a character, someone I can relate to. She’s over thirty and still attractive, but it’s not in-your-face plasticized starlet attractiveness. Kyra Sedgwick is beautiful in a way that goes beyond starlet appeal, and you get the impression this is a woman who’s actually honest-to-god aging and struggling to maintain, rather than magically stopping time until the powers that be disappear her from TV as soon as she shows signs of (horrors!) appearing to be over forty. She holds her own in a man’s world without needing to act like a tough chick. She’s spunky and vulnerable, and she doesn’t have to show us the inside of the body as the bullet passes through it for cheap thrills, or make us help examine the vomit under a microscope or eat bugs (honestly, some TV cannot be viewed while enjoying dinner), or be right there for the bloodiest new surgical procedure of the century, spurting arteries and all. I need some mystique left in my mysteries, some characters I can relate to, and not to feel as if I have to learn how not to be squeamish along with the interns in my medical shows. I also wonder why there are so interminably many “realistic” detective and medical shows. Isn’t there anything else to write about, guys? Is the sitcom dead? I guess so.

I like Ghost Whisperer, though I’ve discovered it only recently, so we’ll see how that works out.

I liked Dead Zone, until they killed off Walt the sheriff. I thought he provided an important obstacle between Johnny and his former love, Sarah. Conflict in the form of strong romantic and other obstacles is critical to good series fiction, even a paranormal series that has a new problem to solve each episode. Without the core conflicts and tension to fall back on, a series falls flat because no one seems to be trying very hard, day to day. They’re just biding time until the next psychic flash, murder, ghost, mystery disease, or demon appears. A good series has several backup sources of tension. In Star Trek TNG, nearly every character has a known source of personal conflict that’s always simmering just under the surface, and the series as a whole is full of those tensions sometimes rising, and frequently interacting with others’ conflicts. Killing Walt off, in The Dead Zone, was like letting Marshall Dillon marry Miss Kitty, or letting The Fugitive catch the one-armed man. You just don’t do that, until the very last episode ever. The End.

All that said, I would be hard pressed to come up with new series or episodes from season to season and week to week as the best TV writers do.

Maybe we need a television renaissance as well as a literary one.

Barring that, we may need to let all the Marshall Dillons marry all the Miss Kittys in a big Sun Myung Moon style wedding — and then give TV one big funeral service and be done with it. Most of the shows are so lame, and the commercial breaks are so long these days, that I frequently leave the room to finish the dishes, make a snack, or check my email, and then lose interest and forget to return to see how the show ends. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, and television, as a whole, seems to be trying awfully hard to prove it.

Do you have any new/old favorites to share? What entertains you these days?

It was much smaller in scale, in terms of lives lost, but the F/A-18 crash in University City yesterday brought to my mind another crash, while I watched the news on TV yesterday, horrified — the crash in North Park in 1978, when a Cessna collided mid-air with PSA Flight 182. Both happened in residential neighborhoods, and there were many witnesses, including this amazing account by a mail carrier, to both planes going down right over homes. No one who lived in San Diego at the time could forget that other crash 30 years ago, and the one yesterday touched many people deeply as well.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of the four who died yesterday, a mother, grandmother, and two baby girls, as well as to those who’ve lost homes or sustained other damage, to the neighbors and students at nearby schools traumatized by the incident, to the pilot, and to all the rescue/emergency workers who responded. It could’ve been much worse, but that doesn’t change or lessen the impact of this tragedy on so many lives.

Yet another weather blog. That seems to be all I have to write about recently, for which I apologize.

There’s an old saying about rain in California, that it doesn’t rain but it pours. Last night and this morning are a perfect example of that, here in my vicinity, and a day or two earlier with the evacuations of burned areas north of here for fear of mudslides.

After Election Day — the results of which pleased me extremely on the presidential front — we settled into another hot, dry spell with high temperatures in the 90s for too many days to count. I’m trying to put them out of my mind now, but I think this was the first year I ever used the air conditioner here as late as the third week of November. October is supposed to begin our rainy season.

Now the rain. No, now the RAIN. Last night it was so loud it woke me three different times, and once scared the cat so she wailed something about whether the sky might be falling and needed to be reassured. I gave her a hug. (I needed a little reassurance myself.) It wasn’t windy. The noise was just rain. Lots of it.

This morning it’s still raining, but it’s a less frenzied kind of rain. There seems to be less rush to dump all the moisture in the sky on us at once. My estimate is that we might have gotten two inches last night. But I don’t have a rain gauge, so I’ll have to verify that. It sounded like two inches!

And yes, I meant what I said in that last post. Now Tara is nearly 8 months old (Saturday the 29th), and this is her second rain. It’s her first really big rain, since that Election Day rain turned out to be merely a wimpy drizzle after all. And now our fire season is officially over — until the next long dry spell, which hopefully won’t begin until July. The reservoirs are low, so we could use quite a lot of rain this year in Southern California, as well as a nice thick snow pack in the Sierras. Besides, our amazing, intrepid firefighters need a vacation.

In spite of this being a much bigger rain than I hoped for, I’m grateful. The sun is peeking out between clouds now, and I’m wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Wherever you are and whoever you’re with, have a wonderful day!

It’s dry here, desert dry, with humidity in the teens. When it’s hot and dry like this, black widow spiders come out to catch droplets of water from the hose, as the sprinkles shift strands of their webs in the rock wall in the lower back yard.

The other night, a few miles away, people were evacuated because of a brush fire threatening homes, an untimely reminder of last October and our four-day evacuation. I slept lightly, when I slept at all that night, worried we’d get a reverse 911 call, should the Santa Ana winds shift. Now that fire is well contained, and the sky is blue. Yesterday some high, wispy clouds stretched thin feathers across it, so high up we didn’t feel any moisture from them. At least they were pretty to look at.

The cat keeps getting charged up with static electricity when she plays. Then she touches me, gets a shock, and thinks I’m being unreasonable. But she’s a forgiving soul. As soon as the air conditioner chills her, she decides some lap time might be in order. Tara’s coat, which has fluffed out again after a few months in which we thought she’d grow up to be a shorter haired cat, now suffers from static cling, crackling close to her body as I stroke it. Her glorious, bushy tail picks up everything. It’s better than a feather duster.

Last night she cozied up to Barack Obama during the debate. I had the little desktop TV on, and she sat right in front of him, blocking my view, gently patting his face now and then. She completely ignored John McCain. I think Tara has cast her vote.

I’m still inner focused and in reading mode, sometimes online, sometimes in books. As soon as I post this, I’m off to read some more. Someone let me know when autumn starts for real around here. In my experience that’s around Halloween, so maybe my “autumn’s here” notice will be a knock on the door by little goblins.

I would be envious of people like Marion who are expecting snow soon, if I didn’t realize how many months of it she’s in for, away up there in Canada. Extreme weather for months and months — or just weather that’s too extreme, period — isn’t fun, at either end of the spectrum. I wish us all longer, gentler autumns and longer, gentler springs.

Kitten pictures follow. (Click on thumbnails to view larger images.)

The first two are from 3 months ago, when Tara was 3-1/2 months old and Indi was still with us — um, training her? Apparently they didn’t find anything good in the trash that time. In the second one, that was my clothing Miss Bigfoot was digging her claws into with the look on her face that said, “Gotcha!” She’s usually gentle with her claws when playing now, though she has yet to completely understand about not biting. Maybe when she’s finished teething in another month and a half. She’s gradually getting gentler altogether when we play, because she knows if she gets too rough, playtime ends, and she would prefer that it never, ever end.

The next two are from yesterday, at 6-1/2 months. I caught Tara in a quiet moment lounging on an office chair that she’s not really supposed to be on, but I’m just happy if she doesn’t claw it. The first shows a glimpse of her fluffy tail.

She’s starting to settle down, except for her desire to climb every mountain, which involves knocking things off high shelves. I have most of my breakables put away safely now, so if she doesn’t kill herself dragging a heavy, blunt object onto her own head, we’re all safe.

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.

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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.

A lot of people have been stressing over holiday preparations. I decided a few years ago that I would no longer fall into that trap. This is the first year I’ve managed to do it without much residual guilt, so this year is sort of a strange witnessing experience for me, where instead of being caught up in my own holiday madness, I have the opportunity to be aware how everyone else runs around doing what they think must be done or . . . or what? The holiday will fall on our heads like a big rock? Santa will fall out of the sky? Rudolph’s red nose will explode? The days will keep getting shorter instead of lengthening again, until they disappear? The Solstice is past now, so we can rest assured that didn’t happen. Whew!

In truth, each person tends to accomplish the things that are most important to that person. I know that sometimes in the past I wasn’t even conscious of what was really important to me. I was more conscious of what I thought was expected of me, or what everyone else seemed to consider important. I wanted everything for the people I loved, forgetting that what everyone really wants is . . . love. I felt guilty about what I didn’t do, or sometimes even resentful about what someone else didn’t do to help. But the important things got done just the same. Why can’t we be content with that and spend the rest of the time enjoying each other’s presence, or our memories of those who can’t be with us? (more…)