Water, water, everywhere

Ha! Just saw a bird dive under the rafters: it's pouring.  (Others are singing in the grapevines.) Half-an-inch since it started this morning.  Maybe I'm not going to the market.

Watching it rain

A sudden onset of excruciating knee pain cut my morning walk short.  I stopped to verify (for myself) a giant sequoia, making my way around the tree, looking for cones, and decided that would be as good a time to turn around as any.  Halfway home, it began to rain.  It's warm out (63 F by 9 am, 90% humidity) and I was wearing a jacket (mostly to protect my camera in the event of rain) and the rain felt pleasant, but to spare the camera, I did go home.  Raining for real now, have to go back out in it: I want to go to the market.

Last week, bright blue sky, looking up I saw a wavering line of silvery beads catch the sunlight, rolling across the sky like mercury:  Snow geese, heading north.

Heard there might be some wind this weekend, so attempted to take pictures of the autumn leaves (on Thursday) before they fell, the air being gray and dark, they all turned out bluish and washed out.

Today at the lake: mallards; coots; a pied-billed grebe; a few cormorants gliding like planes in formation, coming in for a landing; a lone heron standing on the steps to the lake, half-heartedly fishing; and the swimming platform claimed as winter territory by the gulls: their own private island.  On the ground, at the drip lines of the conifers, lots of amanitas.  Don't recall seeing them here before.

Pictures in no particular order, though the mountain, hickory, and crow are all from the hazy day.  Raining hard enough now that visibility has dropped (the nearby hill is barely an outline) and I can hear it through the closed window.  I can also hear rumbling, but don't know if it's thunder or construction or bass coming through the wall.

The Mountain, October 8/L Herlevi 2015

Amanita muscaria, October 10/L Herlevi, 2015

Red Hickory, October 8/L Herlevi 2015

Roses, September 29/L Herlevi 2015

Crow, October 8/L Herlevi, 2015

Tree and birds

The songbirds jump out of the brush as if to say, "What about us?"  Juncos, chickadees, spotted towhee, robins, a nuthatch (or possibly creeper), a large flock of unmarked cedar waxwings (no red, no yellow, immature?) darting across the road from tree to tree, some type of small sparrow that prefers to run along the ground rather than fly away, and a flock of red-winged blackbirds flew overhead; voices like water.  On the lake: a western grebe, mallards, gadwalls, a couple of n. shovelers (non-breeding), and a lone heron lording it over the pond. Water levels very low.

Here are a couple of pictures of the stump for how far down the lightning cracked the tree, and for the fur-like nature of the cut bark. (Sequoiadendron giganteum, for the record.)

What was left, September 27/L Herlevi 2015

Redwood Bark, September 27/L Herlevi 2015