Boolie

And Who Might You Be?

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I came across this crane in Yellowstone National Park in 2004. I was only aware of two species of crane in my country, the sandhill crane and the whooping crane. It looked like a sandhill apart from the brown coloring on its body, so I wondered if it might be a juvenile. Later research showed this to be a subspecies of sandhill, the lesser sandhill crane.

We’re moving to Arizona soon (we’re in Arizona at the moment, we found a house yesterday we’d like to rent), so I’m going to have a lot to learn as I explore my desert home. No matter how long I live here I’ll still come across identification puzzles, I still do even after being in Oregon for 21 years, a combination of my lack of skills and nature not always being so easily pinned down.

Shelter Me, My Brother, and Protect Me From All Harm

Trixie has been a bit on edge lately as she knows something is up from all the sorting we’ve been doing the past couple of weeks. She’s always adored our eldest cat Sam and seeks him out to snuggle with him, but never as much as now. Seeing them like this reminds me of how much comfort Sam took from Scout when he was younger.

The Ball Game

Someone from the moving company came the other day to do a walk-through of our house. Ellie was eager to greet him, as is her wont, but then she got her orange ball and starting tossing it at me. She followed us around, trying unsuccessfully to get me to play, the entire time he was there. When we were finished, the moment he was out the door I turned to Ellie to play with the ball but she wouldn’t even put it in her mouth much less play with it.

You make me laugh, my pup, my heart and my joy.

How To Make Sure They Don’t Leave You Behind

Don’t worry little Squeaks, we are going to great lengths to make sure you and your siblings join us in Arizona. My wife and I fly out on Thursday so we can meet with a realtor on Friday and Saturday to look for a rental house. We know it is going to be difficult to find a place that will take 3 cats and a dog, but we’ll do our best. If we find a place then we’ll move down before I start my new job, regardless of when our stuff can follow us down. I meet with the moving company later today so I might have a better feel then for when they can pack our things and get them started on their journey.

Little, But Less So

Two black bear cubs follow their mother (she’s just out of frame to the right) up a hill in Yellowstone National Park in October 2006. She was very protective of these two, when another adult bear came wandering by she sent them scurrying up a tree without waiting to see if the other bear meant trouble (it didn’t). The cubs were still quite small compared to an adult but were much heavier than they would have been in the spring, a necessity for the winter that arrives early in Yellowstone.

The Boo Box Condo Is Not Just For Boos

Wherever Your Path Leads, May You Find Peace

Guarding Boo

Tired

When my team got laid off at the start of November, one nice thing the company did was set us up with another company that gives advice to people in our position in starting the job search and updating resumes and online profiles. They gave a lot of good advice which genuinely helped on the job search, but one piece of advice I deliberately didn’t take, even though I think it is a good idea, is to treat the job search like a job and take the weekends off to recuperate. I didn’t do it because I was looking at different industries and different cities and had a lot of research to do. I don’t regret it, pursuing even the long shots as long as they interested me is how I got the job I accepted. But there’s also no question it left me mentally worn out.

And physically worn out as well, the past four months I’ve a hard time getting back to sleep once I wake up in the morning. In the early days it was because the reality of what happened would hit me after being blissfully unaware of it while sleeping, then it was because I started thinking about everything that needed to be done that day while I was searching for a job, and now I think about everything that needs to be done as we prepare for our move. For all that, once I accepted the job my mood became much more upbeat as I’m excited about both the new job and the new place where we’ll be living. This afternoon I even felt a strange sense of euphoria about it, despite so much being unsettled and how much needs to be done before I start. I suppose it’s a mix of being over-tired and legitimately excited about the new adventure we’re about to undertake.

The pup, though, she’s still sleeping like a champ. I prefer when she sleeps in one of her beds as, if she starts running in her sleep, it keeps her leg kicks from getting too violent. In her younger years they were adorable little leg kicks but these days, either from old age or side effects of medicines, she can get into a full-on gallup. Perhaps it led to her injuring herself a couple of weeks ago, but we’ll never know.

Elephant Skin

There is so much I will miss about the Pacific coast, but there are three places I’ll miss most of all: Rialto Beach in Olympic National Park in Washington, Enderts Beach in Redwood National and State Parks in California, and Cobble Beach in Yaquina Beach Outstanding Natural Area in Oregon. All three are scenic and all three have good tide pools. But the reason I’ll miss Yaquina Head so much is not just that it also has a beautiful lighthouse, but it has harbor seals. Up close. I could watch them for hours, and I have.

It also has elephants, of a sort.

While watching the harbor seals swim near the southern end of Cobble Beach, I turned around and saw an elephant in the cliff wall right behind me, or at least an elephant’s skin. The rock formations of the vertical cliff face are fascinating, to the point that I stopped photographing the seals for a while and started photographing the rocks.