Room to Snuggle

Heretofore the only real place to sit in my office has been the Throne of Kings, the recliner we bought when we moved here a decade ago to replace my beloved window seat from the previous house. It’s a Scandinavian style recliner, incredibly comfortable, yet small and lightweight and easy to move about, perfect for my small office. But it has a fatal flaw — there’s no room for a sixty-five pound lap dog.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to re-arrange my office to be able to both have something large enough for Ellie to curl up beside me, yet where I could still recline so that Scout and/or Sam and occasionally Emma could curl up on me as well. A visit to Ikea this weekend appears to have solved the problem. This Kivik loveseat is big enough for Ellie & me, while the footstool on the left is big enough that I can recline on it and the cats can sleep on me as before.

So how come it is Scout curled up on it in this picture (and Sam & Emma are sleeping there now), and not Ellie? Well, she somehow hurt her rear leg and is limping a bit, so she’s confined to bed rest in the basement for now. Not that she’s at all happy about it.

Soon, Ellie, soon.

WWDC Postscript

I loved watching Steve give Apple’s keynotes, even if I wasn’t interested in the products Apple was introducing, as it was infectious to see the enthusiasm he had for the company he founded and the direction they were taking the industry. So hats off to Tim & the team from Cupertino, for while no one on stage today could replace Steve, their love for what they were doing was obvious and I enjoyed the show from start to finish.

What I hoped to glean from the day was what my future computing setup might look like. I’m about to start on the second half of renovating my office and wanted to know what sort of desk arrangement I should plan for. I had been thinking that a MacBook Air / iMac setup might be better for my photography work, but after today I’m not so sure that an iPad / MacBook Pro solution isn’t a better bet.

The biggest surprise from the week came not from Apple but from Emma. She normally likes sleeping on the floor so I’ve kept a bed there for her, but lately she’ll only use the beds of Sam and Scout up on my desk. So I need to make sure my new setup has room for the cat tree, my TV, three cat beds up high, a couch with room enough for Ellie & me, and a desk for my computer.

A tall order for my little office, but I’m not complaining, I love snuggling with the little ones.

Rest Lake

The picture above of a coyote hunting in the marsh is deliberately like this bittern picture, both taken at Rest Lake. The lake is the largest on Ridgefield’s auto tour and has water in it year round, but the marshy areas that ring the lake are my favorite places to watch. To survive in these areas is to avoid being eaten not just by coyotes and bitterns but herons and hawks and harriers and eagles and otters and mink and weasels and raccoons and snakes and bullfrogs and …

The Softest Alarm Clock

Many mornings I wake to these paws poking softly into my cheeks. It’s so adorable I can’t be angry. Plus it’s Scout, The Cat Who Can Do No Wrong. She’s tried a variety of techniques over the years but sticks with the ones that wake me in the best mood. Another technique I love are her gentle little headbutts. She crossed the line when she started flipping my lower lip, thankfully that phase didn’t last too long.

(Almost) Missed You

As you know by now, one of my favorite things to do at Ridgefield is to photograph bitterns. After having such great success last winter and spring, this year I’ve seen them mostly in glimpses and rarely had a chance to photograph them. I was tickled to have the chance to photograph this one in January, showing how well it’s coloring matches that of the dried grasses in which it loves to hunt.

I took the picture below last winter with my iPhone, just wanted a quick shot of my favorite place to look for bitterns, I took it with the phone since the view is similar to what I see with my eyes as I drive along. It’s a bit hard to see but there’s a bittern almost dead center in the picture, on the opposite side of the channel a few feet up from the water line.

Suffice it to say they’re hard to see but I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Once I get to my favorite bittern areas, I wait until there’s no traffic behind me and then let the car creep along as slow as possible as I scan the grasses for these elusive birds. I normally take our Subaru to the refuge but this spring I’ve been taking our Civic, mostly to see if I could tolerate driving a stick shift at the refuge.

The biggest problem I encountered is exactly this scenario. At these speeds, the car is right at the stall speed and it requires a lot of pedal work to keep the car front stalling out. It’s doable, but annoying, and probably not so great for the clutch. So my preference for the next car will be an automatic, although if the stick is a particularly good one, the irritation at Ridgefield might be balanced out by fun on the commute.

And honestly, I’m done talking about cars, starting now!

By the by, the body of water on the other side of the the berm is Rest Lake, and those white dots are tundra swans that winter at the refuge in the hundreds. The bittern above was also at Rest Lake, but at a different spot than this one.

A Good Year

I knew it was going to be a good year for coyotes.

During a two week stretch in mid-to-late January, I saw a coyote pair frequently and took some of my best coyote pictures ever. But not long after I jammed up my ankle and took a two month sabbatical from Ridgefield. Even after the ankle healed, I’ve only been back to Ridgefield three times this spring with not a coyote picture to show for it. While it’s been an extremely wet spring here in the Northwest, many of the weekends have been sunny. The refuge gates are locked until well after sunrise and before sunset at this time of year, so the best light on sunny days is lost. And sunny days bring out the crowds, so I prefer to stay home and get in some extra hedgehogging.

I did see a young coyote on my visit a week ago. It was so close that getting a picture was going to be difficult from my angle without risking spooking it, so I just pulled over and watched as it hunted beside the road. But I saw a Subaru coming up quickly down the road, a car I recognized since we have one just like it. I knew they had seen the young coyote, and I also knew what was going to happen next. The coyote watched them approach and as they got on the brakes on the gravel road, the coyote bolted at the sound.

In the real world they weren’t going fast at all, just Ridgefield fast, and even a tolerant coyote won’t tolerate that.

This adult is one of the pair that I watched with such success in January, it’s coat drenched on a wonderfully wet winter’s day. And I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about cars anymore, but this is why I’ve been on the hunt for a quiet car. When I’ve worked to earn an animal’s trust, the sound of the gas engine firing up feels like a betrayal of that trust.

Disturbance

This young bald eagle was perched on a tree overlooking Canvasback Lake, watching the waterfowl below, when it suddenly took to the skies. Normally I would have liked more empty sky in the upper left corner of the picture but the eagle bolted with no warning, disturbed by the sharp retort of a shotgun blast, so I had no time to properly compose the shot. The birds aren’t normally so perturbed by the blasts, but I do prefer the off-days during duck hunting season, not because I have a problem with hunting per se but because I prefer the quiet.

WWDC

We’re all waiting on pins and needles here to see what Apple announces on Monday at their Worldwide Developer’s Conference. We’re so anxious we can barely sleep! Well maybe not all of us. And in fact this picture of Lady Em was taken last summer as she tried to beat the heat by catnapping on the glass table on our porch as she and I enjoyed a nice day in Portland.

Not As Easy As It Looks

I’ve hoped to photograph pied-billed grebe chicks each spring, as their fantastic faces look nothing like the birds they will become, but this is the first year I’ve had the chance. The two parents had a handful of chicks and were busy feeding them, catching a variety of underwater creatures and feeding them to the hungry chicks. It seemed to me the adults were killing their prey before handing it off to the youngsters, but even so the chicks often dropped their food into the water as they learned to move items about in their bills. The adult was always nearby if necessary to retrieve the food, but in this case the chick was able to pluck it from the water on its own.

The List

I suppose I should mention that, after all the car talk, I’ve decided to wait until at least the fall before replacing either our Civic or our Outback, and maybe not even then. But I did want to have a list of potential candidates in mind in case something bad happened to either car and we had to replace them on short notice.

Replacing the Subaru isn’t so challenging as there are only a handful of cars I would consider, with another Outback at the top of the list. Choosing a replacement for the Civic isn’t so easy since there are so many potential candidates. So I created a mental list of all the cars that have interested me, divided up into four tiers with my favorites at the top, cars that I think I could buy almost sight unseen and be happy with, moving down to cars I like but don’t think I would buy.

The list has been fluid, with my head shoving cars down the list and my heart shoving them back up, but it has started to coalesce. When the time comes, a few test drives should sort things out for good, but here’s where we are for now:

The Favorites

Chevrolet Sonic
Subaru Impreza

The Challengers

Honda Fit Sport
Lexus CT 200h
Mazda 3
Toyota Prius c

The Longshots

Chevrolet Volt
Ford Focus
Honda CR-Z
Toyota Prius Plug-in
Volkswagen Golf TDI
Volvo C30

The Probably Nots

Ferrari 458 Italia
Hyundai Veloster
Scion iQ

There are a few vehicles coming out this fall that should shake up the list. The Subaru Crosstrek (shown at the top of the post) is the most intriguing, as it is the only car that could replace either the Civic or the Outback. Both the Subaru and Hyundai have been on sale for a while in Europe, while I think the Fords have been on sale there in regular form but not as hybrids.

The Up-and-Comers

Ford C-MAX Energi
Ford C-MAX Hybrid
Hyundai Elantra GT
Subaru XV Crosstrek

If the Crosstrek were available today, it’d probably be in our driveway, but we’ll see how the competition stacks up in the fall. And I promise that’s enough car talk for a while.