Tonight I introduced my friend Robin to my friend Andi. We went over to Andi's ranch and shot some images right before sunset. What a gorgeous place and a gorgeous sky.

The horses seemed a little antsy tonight, and lemme tell you, when a horse the size of Roy starts running toward you, you move out of the way ... fast!



Every time I go to Andi's house, I am just so happy to see all the happy animals.

This time I even got to meet her 24-year-old cat!

I'm hoping to have a play date set up for July, so she can bring her dogs over to play with Dante and Brit.

All her animals are rescued, it seems (ok, maybe just "most" of them), including a white goat who was found up in the mountains up at 9,000 feet, all by itself! How it got up there? No flippin' clue!






But like so many other animals that are lost and needing a safe haven, he lives out the rest of his life fat, happy, and loved.

What an extremely happy place!

Despite best efforts of "the world" to ruin my mood today, my lunch hour has kept me pretty happy through the afternoon. :)

I spent my time visiting a couple of my favorite local places and got some awesome snapshots. You should be able to click on these and enlarge them if you so desire.




And now, some of our wildflowers. Y'know, I grew up in northern Michigan, where springtime wildflowers were things like black-eyed susans, queen anne's lace, bachelor buttons and indian paintbrushes. These wildflowers in the high desert are hearty! They look rough, don't they? Like they would kick some queen anne's lace butt! haha.



I hope a little bit of the beauty of my world today found its way into yours.

Monday and Tuesday of this week it was just under 100º in the valley.

Wednesday there was a storm, complete with thunder, lightning and rain (pounding rain .. rare here!)

Today on my way to work it was snowing. Not enough to accumulate down here (but it is, up in the mtns)

Welcome to the high desert. :)

My mood lately seems as volatile and shifting as our weather. Last night I was in SUCH a crabby mood. More crabby than I can remember in recent days. I'll spare you as to my epiphany of where the mood came from, but just to give you an idea, I had to actually force myself to go sit in the living room at one point so I didn't chuck a rolling pin through a window. It was just one of those kinds of nights.

But any time I'm in a mood like that, there's always Jeremy and the dogs there ... they pull me right out of it! Last night we prepared a lot of food for tonight's dinner, so that instead of being in the kitchen preparing, we could be sitting out with our guests, enjoying their company. When we cook, we dirty a LOT of dishes. Because much of our stuff anymore is made from scratch, there are myriad food processors, bowls, spoons, and lots of other dishes and containers and knives and such that just get completely wrecked. We're messy, and the mess spreads far and wide.

I was exhausted last night by the time we got done, and told Jeremy I'd get up early this morning to do the dishes. He had left work a little early yesterday, come home and taken a nap, because he'd been up late the night prior, working, up and out the door by 4 a.m., again, because of work, and he had to work again last night (a lot of the stuff has to be done during non-business hours). So when I went to bed at around 10, he stayed up to continue working. I vaguely remember hearing him come to bed at around 2 a.m. And then his alarm went off at about 5:45 and it was time for him to be up and off to work yet again. Ha. And _I_ am the one who's crabby, can you imagine?! If I had to keep that schedule, someone would die.

This morning when he kissed me goodbye he said, "Sleep in a little extra this morning. The dishes are all done." He stayed up last night and did them after he was done working. Unreal. Seriously. I'm just amazed by how lucky I am.

So, we're all ready for our guests tonight. The menu? Mediterranean. Hummus with pita chips, wine, greek salad, Moroccan chicken with couscous, spanakopita, more wine, and chocolate cake with very thin sugar cookies in the shapes of sea creatures from the Mediterranean. haha. I had to change my dessert at the last minute because of the STUPID recipe I was using. It was in a book of very fancy-shmancy recipes written by professional chefs. They had measurements like 9 oz sugar, 3 oz flour. Well, I assumed they were talking volume, so I put 1 1/8 cup sugar and 3/8 cups of flour. Obviously they were talking weight, not volume (who the hell writes recipes like that?!) and after sitting in the fridge overnight, as they directed, I had a separated, runny mess. And uh, yeah. That didn't help with the bad mood. :)

But anyway ... looking forward to tonight and I'm sure tomorrow's blog will be filled with lots of pics of a good time had by all!

Ok, so, you know that point in a horror movie where the camera pans WAY out, you know someone's about to die, and all of a sudden all you see is a huge swarm of birds fly up in the air at one time?

That's what Jeremy saw tonight, a few minutes after I'd disappeared over a hill, which caused him to come make sure I was still alive.

(I was.)

Tonight I got a chance to see something up close and personal that I'd never ever seen before. Sandy, forgive me for posting these photos before the scenery of Monitor Pass, but I was just so amazed by it! And I know, of course, it has to be BIRDS, right? Ha.

So, we ended up, right before sunset, at the reservoir.

Gorgeous. First I pissed off a couple geese by walking up to the water, and then I walked out onto the walkway for that little building and I pissed off hundreds and hundreds of Cliff Swallows! Boy, was it noisy!

But incredible!

Let me show you their nests.

Yep .. made of mud, built under the wooden building.  See all the white specs with a kind of orangy-brown beneath? Those are the birds! Poking their heads out and watching me.

When Jeremy came up to find me (to make sure I'd not fallen in the water), he thankfully had his 100-400 mm lens with him, so we did a quick swap so I could get some more close-up shots of these incredible birds.



Damn, they were cute!
















Oh, but there were fish, too. Here, let me show you. These things were HUGE!

I have no clue what kind they are, and I know this photo does them no justice, but they were easily a foot long or longer, each.




Oh, and there were lots of flowers there, too.


The sun set pretty quickly, and the birds let us know it was about time we got the hell out of there. :)

Ok, next post will be the scenery shots from the Pass. I was tickled pink to have experienced these Cliff Swallows, though, and I want to go back with a tripod and get much better shots!

I'm not sure if the downed power lines are due to the earthquakes that keep happening, or the ridiculous wind we've had so far this season, but they've now caused a massive wildfire in the Washoe Valley area. The winds are a steady 40 mph today with gusts up to 70 ... I don't imagine there's any way they're going to be able to stop this one for a while. Eight fire agencies are fighting it right now, but they won't be able to bring in aircraft, I don't think, with this kind of wind. All they can do is try to get people out of its way. Sad. Looks like another bad wildfire year for us.

Jeremy heard about the fire and left work early to try to get through before the highway closed. I just called him and he said he was, from what he could tell, the last car to make it through. Hwy 395 is now closed between Reno and Carson City, and traffic is being diverted through Geiger Grade and Virginia City (basically turning a 25-minute commute into an hour and 25 min).

Seeing all this stuff happen sure makes me thankful for what I've got. There'll be extra hugs to Jeremy and the dogs tonight, I'll tell you that.

(picture above taken from KOLO 8's web site)

Just a quickie blog because we have to be in Truckee by 10 and I'm sure we'll be stopping to take photos along the way.

For those who've heard/read about the earthquakes in Reno, we're fine. Though, Jeremy did feel the 4.1 that happened yesterday (he works in Reno) and apparently last night there was a 4.8, too.

The map to the left shows the earthquake activity around Reno in the last week, so yeah, something's definitely shakin' there. If you want more info on recent earthquakes, go to the USGS' site! You can also go there to get more info on the individual earthquakes seen in this pic by clicking on the different sized squares around the Reno area.

And for those of you traveling to or CONTEMPLATING travel to Reno, don't let this panic you. On the USGS site, just take a look at all the earthquakes in California in the last WEEK! Seriously ...  it's not a huge deal at this point. :)

(but to those inquiring about us .. thank you! Appreciate the thoughts ... everything's good!)

Of course, the best for last. The BEST reason to visit northern NV/CA?

US, of course!!
(and of course by "us" I mean ALL of us .. including the dogs)

So ... have we convinced ya? :)

Ok, so, this is a continuation of "Why Northern Nevada/California?" - I'm trying to convince you in the only manner I know best: photographically. :)

WEATHER
We have our share of interesting weather here, including fires and what they call here the Sierra Wave (other places just call it the lee wave), which creates, as an old friend of mine used to call it, a "river of clouds" in the sky. I love the weather patterns here.


JUST SOME SCENERY
Most of it's been covered in the last blog and above in this one .. but here are just a few more.

And in the final blog to this series, I'll give you the best reason to visit northern NV/CA!

Recently, a Multiply get-together was suggested by Sandy. A debate over where it should be held ensued, and as someone suggested Reno, a question was brought up: Why Reno? Well, I thought I'd expand upon that a little and make it "Why northern NV/CA?"

These are my stomping grounds, and by golly I'll try my best to answer that question.

I know some of your are really tired of snow after this winter, so I'll keep my snowy scenery pics 'til as close to the end as I can make it. :)

This area has a ton of diversity. Desert, mountains, lakes, waterfalls, ghost towns, wildlife, and extreme temperatures.

Within 2 hours' drive from Carson City (the capitol .. located about 20 min south of Reno), I could have you exploring ghost town ruins (even crawling around in them, if you so desired), witnessing Mono Lake (made famous probably mostly by Ansel Adams), swimming in Lake Tahoe, hiking the "California Alps" or Kit Carson Pass up to 10,000 feet or a little above, in Sacramento, in the Black Rock Desert (where burning man is held every year), exploring hidden waterfalls, driving through Sunrise Pass, where you're almost guaranteed to see wild horses, watching cheetahs run, out on "The Loneliest Hwy In America" where you would likely not see another car for hours – well, you get the idea. This area is an outdoors-person's dream. Probably not the best place for "city slickers" or people looking for a lot of culture (unless you really consider "Cowboy Poetry" cultural).

Let's break it out into categories (I'll do my best).

WATER
It's not quite the desert .. it's the high desert. So yep, we have water!



ANIMALS/WILDLIFE:


Ok .. I'm getting nervous this is too long and I'm going to lose it, so I'm ending this post here. Next one will include NV/CA weather and scenery. :)

This morning our phone rang at about 4 a.m. A server emergency had Jeremy out of bed, making phone calls, typing frantically, and me, trying to go back to sleep amidst it all and thinking "In our NEW house ..." (that seems to be our mantra these days) "... he can do this out in the living room and it's a big enough house that I won't HEAR it!" :) Of course once I opened my eyes, it was all over because the DOGS knew I was awake. The tandem "thump thump thump" of tails on the bed always makes me smile, and then I'm a goner, cuz I'm a sucker for a snuggly dog in the morning.

Soooo, I was awake. Jeremy fixed what needed fixing and then just decided rather than go back to sleep for less than an hour (at which point his alarm would have gone off), he'd go to work. When he left at 5:30, I got up and jumped in the shower, too. I'd seen some clouds in the starry sky and thought eh, good morning to try to shoot the sunrise.

Now, mind you, it's been up in the mid-60s (F) every day for about the past week and a half. Spring is supposed to be HERE! But the forecast for today called for snow, so I thought I'd play it safe and throw on some layers. Thank goodness I did! It was coooold out there. The car said 28º, but there was a really cool breeze (rare for here in the morning), so I was glad I still had all my "real cold weather" gear in the car from the trip to Yellowstone a few weeks ago. On went the earmuffs, glove liners and mittens.

My hair was still wet from the shower (I hate to use a blow dryer on it so almost always let it dry naturally), so I got a little more chilled than usual (my hair's pretty thick - it usually keeps me pretty warm). But I figured it's ok. Just a short while of suffering and then I'll be in a nice warm office with nice hot coffee.

So, I took my photos (as you can see) and headed to work.

Where I walked in the door and immediately learned the furnace was out.

And it was 48º in here.

I went out and got all my Yellowstone gear and made coffee.

And now at 9:50, while typing this, the heater JUST kicked on! I guess the heavy winds we had yesterday, with the storm blowing in, knocked the cover off the furnace thingy so that it was off-kilter, and it won't run if it's not on there perfectly. Wheee .. heat! I figure my fingers oughta be thawed out by about, oh, 2:30 or so.


I decided to add a little P.S. to this blog, too. Recently there was a discussion on someone's blog (Sandy, was it yours?) regarding DSLR sensors and dust. I know some people weren't aware of how to tell if their sensor was dirty (and if you don't change lenses very often, yours probably isn't), but it just so happens that mine, at the moment, IS. So, here's a good example. The tighter your aperture (large F-stop number), the more dust will show up. So this morning I was shooting landscapes and using a tripod so I set mine to F/22, which has a very large dof (which is why the dust will show). Here's the result (of course once it's online it appears much lighter. If you'd like to see the original file, I'm going to attach it here, so you can download it and look in a photo editor):

So, if you're ever shooting with a tight aperture and you see lots of soft dark spots all over the place, you've got dust!

Burn, baby, burn!

In northwestern Nevada, about two and a half hours from our home, is the Black Rock Desert, which has a surface that covers about 1,000 square miles. You can drive out on the playa any time but spring (it can get soft and quicksand-ish then), and it is used for all kinds of things from land speed records for jet-powered cars to extreme rocket launches and, probably most widely known, the Burning Man festival.

According to organizers of the festival it is "an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance and takes its name from the ritual of burning a large wooden sculpture of a man on the sixth day." (photo from Wikipedia) What it is, from what I know from locals and photos, is a 6-day celebration with a lot of music, art, nudity, drugs ... kind of "the '60s and '70s condensed into a week." There's likely someone who's reading this that's been there or knows someone else that has, and can set me straight if I'm misrepresenting the event. All I know is I am waaay too square to ever actually go. Oh, and way too cheap. It was free to attend for about the first 10 years of the event (1986-1994) and this year tickets run $210-295 a piece. In 2007 there were over 47,000 participants .. do THAT math. :) The year 2000 saw the first police activity at the festival, mostly due to drugs. In the years following, there were multiple arrests, injuries and deaths for various reasons.

If you want to know more about it, Wikipedia actually has fairly good information. Click here: Burning Man on Wikipedia.

For more information on Picture Perfect, click on that name, and you'll get to see links to some other awesome examples from "Around The World."

(yes, Heather and Jammy, quite different than your iDeer .. ha)

Today at lunch I ran out to Genoa to try to get some pictures for this week's PP. After a not-overly-successful shoot, I turned around and saw movement.

Genoa is a very beautiful little town that is located right at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As you can see in the background, that's the mountain, rising right up behind this rancher's barn.

But do you see them? Do you see what I saw moving? Let me give you a better look at what it was I saw and what they were after ...

Aren't they just magnificent?

Well, at least I thought so. :) I'm sure the rancher would have had a few different words for them, had he been around.

Jammy, is this making you sad?

Ok, well, as if seeing all these does and yearlings and such wasn't enough, I walked around to the other side to see how many more blacktails there were stopping in for a free lunch and saw this guy.

Of course, he wasn't quite as pleased to see me.

I made my retreat when it appeared he was going to come over the fence at me (remembering hearing how many people are actually killed by deer each year).

I didn't wanna tangle with the horns .. but what an incredible moment this was.

Even if I didn't get a good PP shot, this was so totally worth driving out there at lunch. :)

I don't make new year's resolutions. I don't have a problem with people who do - I mean, whatever works for you, y'know? But it's just not for me. I won't ever change just because it's a new year. I have to have a bigger wake-up call, and then I just start the wheels in motion for the change I want to effect.

However, due to other circumstances, so far this year I've had lots of reason to take a look at my judgmental nature. Jeremy, ever the loving diplomat, says, "Yeah, you're pretty 'black and white', but you're usually pretty fair, as well." *smile* Well, he's biased and I want to be a better person.

I think maybe today I got a little bigger wake-up call. Nothing major .. just a little tap on the shoulder, reminding me not to jump to too many conclusions.

We went out for breakfast and then decided to drive up to Topaz Lake just to look at the scenery. It was the only part of the sky that had any blue.

In weather and with road conditions like this, you find that drivers run the gamut from those that are overly-cautious to those that drive like maniacs with no clue what it's like to try to stop on ice. For the last 2 days while we were driving around, I've been commenting on the people who felt the need to pass me in dangerous conditions, etc. We've watched people fishtail and spin, seen people in ditches. More than once I've commented on the "idiots" out there driving what I considered to be too fast for the conditions.

Well, meet one of the idiots.

About 2-3 miles out of town, we were driving along with no problems. There was some slushy stuff and you couldn't see the asphalt, but the roads didn't seem bad, really. There wasn't a curve in the road, no need to brake - nothing. We were just driving. All of a sudden, a little fishtailing and next thing I know we were heading into a spin, and also into the opposing lane of traffic. Luckily I know better than to hit the brakes, and I also to try to steer into the spin, if possible.


I was able to keep us out of a spin, but unable to keep us on the road. Thank goodness there was no oncoming traffic. We went across the road and into the ditch. As you can see by the pic on the right, we stopped just short of the fenceline. And yes, that bent-over roadside reflector was courtesy of our front bumper. We were lucky in a lot of ways. When I stopped shaking enough to feel like I could try to get out, with the help of Jeremy and 4WD low, we did indeed make it out. We backed right back out the way we'd come, got back on the road and pulled off on the next available road so that I could let my heart calm down a little and work on that shaking hands thing. We scrapped the idea of driving to Topaz (I'd have been a nervous wreck) and turned back around to head home (stopping briefly, of course, so I could take a couple pics).

We made our way home, slowly. :)

When we got here I took a quick closeup pic of the icicles before they completely disappeared, and now I think I'm going to do something safe like bake cookies or something. I think I should at least be able to do that without judging anyone else but me and my cookie-baking skills.

On Friday night, because the clouds were just too dramatic for me to pass up, we raced to Fort Churchill after work. I would have liked to've gotten there at least 1/2 hour sooner, so that we had time to shoot in a little more waning light, and to set up for the best angles, etc., but eh, you take what you can get sometimes, y'know? I'll be submitting this and another similar image to NV Mag for possible inclusion in their January issue, too. They're doing a feature on the old Pony Express route and the ruins found along it. Now, I don't think this officially counts, because the PE didn't exactly stop at Fort Churchill, but at Buckland Station, which is a little bit separate from the Fort (but which is built of materials from the Fort), but I'm going to give it a shot, anyway. :)

Either way. If they don't want it, I'll put it up for sale.

Yep, it's true. It's snow! Can't see much of it because the mountains are also covered in fog this morning, but I shot this out my back passenger window while in the Starbuck's drive-through. Still can't see the mountains right now, so I don't know how MUCH snow, but you can definitely see it on the mountainside below the fog line. I hope, hope, hope we have a great winter this year. Last year's snowshoeing really kinda sucked .. it'd be nice to have a good snow year to take the dogs out exploring. :)

You may very well have heard about Steve Fossett by now. He's the millionaire whose plane is lost presumably somewhere in Nevada or California, but really who knows where? The search is still on, but sadly I'd imagine now it's a search for closure, rather than a search in the hopes of still finding him alive. It's been almost 2 weeks, and as much of a survivalist as he is, if he was able to be mobile, I would imagine he'd have figured out a way to have gotten himself found by now. I feel so sorry for his family.

What you may not have heard, if you don't live in this area, is that the Reno Air Races are being held this week and weekend .. and since they started on Tuesday, there have been fatal crashes EVERY day but Wednesday! Three people are confirmed dead so far, and we are waiting to hear about the final results of today's crash. I have never heard of this many fatalities in the air races here .. it is so very sad!

Sept. 11, 2007: Steve Dari, a former Navy fighter pilot, of Lemon Grove, Calif., biplane crashed on takeoff when his engine stalled during practice.

Sept. 13, 2007: Brad Morehouse of Aston, Wyo., dies in crash of L-39 jet during race.

Sept. 14, 2007: Gary Hubler of Caldwell, Idaho, dies in crash involving Jason Somes of Simi Valley, Calif. (whose condition is still unknown).

I feel so sorry for their families .. what a horrible thing. With the heavy mood of Fossett's tragic disappearance (there are search planes constantly flying around here the last 2 weeks), this has just been a horrible month for planes in this area. Between 1972 and 2002 there were 14 deaths at these air races. So that's roughly one death every other year. Now this year there are three! Scary.

Interestingly, with the search for Fossett, tons of other airplane crashes have been discovered in NV! That's what the graphic above is showing, and if you're interested in finding out more about the crashes, you can go to http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?NoCache=1&Dato=20070913&Kategori=SPECIAL04&Lopenr=70913016&Ref=AR&Show=0
(sorry, you'll have to copy/paste) and click on the little plane icons .. it tells you when the crash occurred and some details about it.

Interesting stuff, but scary. I guarantee you _I_ am not getting in a little plane around here any time soon!

After something like 88 consecutive days with no rain, we finally got some! Not enough to make actual puddles or anything (it's so dry here that the earth soaks it up as fast as it can fall, usually), but real, honest-to-goodness rain. There were many people who were speculating that we'd see snow before we saw rain, so this is a really nice break from our hot, hot summer. Supposed to be back up in the 90º temps this weekend and next week, but for right now, it's in the 70s and I'm lovin' it!

(oh, and yes, this was taken on my drive to work this morning.. luckily there were no police in view as I drove down the road with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a camera up to my face! Ha)