Author: boolie

Scout Ascendant

Our cat Scout relaxes on top of the kitchen cabinets

I had forgotten how much in her early years Scout loved to be up high until I was looking through old pictures. Here in 2004 she’s on the kitchen cabinets, in other pictures she’s on top of bookcases or even on top of doors.

Red Rocks

An American pika sits in red rocks in the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park

I came across this pika in red rocks somewhere in the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park during my trip in 2008. I say somewhere because for whatever reason I didn’t edit the original picture back then, so it never got added to my now defunct photo site and thus I never wrote about it. While the complete old site will never return, even in the blog there are 915 posts still offline, waiting for pictures to be re-edited and uploaded to Flickr. I’m keenly aware how dependent I am on Flickr for hosting my images and how even the rebuilt blog will go away if something happens to them. Over the years I’ve tried to think of a better solution where I’d be less dependent on the whims of other companies, on things outside my control, but I haven’t thought of one. Flickr doesn’t replicate my old site but it is better in many ways and provides a lot of functionality I can’t easily provide here.

If Two is Company and Three is a Crowd, What is Four?

Four purple coneflower blossoms grow close together

Four purple coneflower blossoms grow close together in our garden. I’ve propagated several patches around our yard as this is my favorite flower, but this old patch from when we first moved in continues to be the most vigorous. I don’t deadhead them late in the fall so the birds can eat the seeds during the winter, as the juncos are doing now.

Drop Box

A large orange trash container sits on a snow-covered Siskiyou Street in the Irvington neighborhood of Portland, Oregon

I finally found the Dropbox everyone’s talking about, it’s supposed to be good for sharing files on your computer but if I leave it there aren’t I just sharing my entire computer? I didn’t see anything else worth sharing in there, I don’t mean to be unkind but frankly it all just looked like trash.

Cone on the Cob

A Douglas' squirrel eats a cone in a forest in Leadbetter Point State Park on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington

A Douglas’ squirrel chews through the outer part of the cone to get to the seed underneath, like we would eat corn on the cob except that we are interested in the corn not the cob. A lovely little squirrel, and native too. Taken at Leadbetter Point State Park on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington.