Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
Harbor seals use multiple techniques to slip past these waves, wave after wave, as they play and feed just offshore in the Pacific. I spent hours watching them and could have spent days, it’s mesmerizing how naturally they move about this environment.
Sam visited the specialist on Monday and got his belly shaved for an ultrasound, which thankfully didn’t show anything alarming. Because he’s not losing weight, she wanted to try Sam on a new food with lots of fiber before getting more aggressive with a biopsy. We’ll transition him off his old food and onto the new over the course of a few days, but so far he seems to like the new food just fine.
An old windswept tree at Seal Rock on the Oregon coast, barely hanging onto the cliffside and to life. Much of the fragile ground has already crumbled away beneath its roots, leaving them exposed, but its remaining roots still help hold the ground in place.
I don’t think this Wookiee we ordered from chewy.com is authentic. Still, I think we’ll keep him, he’s adorable and much less likely to rip your arms off.
Sam sees the specialist tomorrow afternoon and needs to fast before the visit, so we can’t feed him until afterwards. It’s going to be a long morning.
We’ve lived in our house for 15 years, and while our time together is probably coming to a close, it will continue on as a home for someone else as it has since it was built in the 1920’s. There are lots of little hints in a house this old of those who went before, for whom this house was also home. In my office I’ve always had a fondness for this long-ago patched-over light switch or dimmer control, for reasons I can’t fully explain, except that I can see it from my couch and it reminds me daily that everything has its time and place, but nothing lasts forever.
While I was watching a larger harbor seal that was perched nearby, this smaller one climbed up onto higher ground for a little extra rest as the sun rose, before the incoming tide took away even this, its bed of tide pools.
The mottled coloring of this harbor seal at Yaquina Head reminded me of our tortoiseshell cat Trixie, who I would see shortly, as this was the last day of my short trip to the coast.
The past couple of days Ellie has only wanted to go on 45 minute walks, still amazing for her age, but not quite the adventurous 60 to 90 minute walks of previous days. One thing I’ve noticed as she’s aged, in addition to the stiff legs and shortness of breath, is that at an intersection she tries to take the diagonal across instead of crossing each street in turn. She I suppose intrinsically understands the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and at her age wants and needs to minimize effort, but it always makes me think of the famous theorem that bears Pythagoras’ name. It made a big impression on my young self when I first learned of it and I realized the world of mathematics, and our world it describes, is both profound and beautiful.
Despite this I make Ellie take the long way round, crossing each street one at a time instead of taking the diagonal, as we live in the world of the automobile and it is their rules that govern our walks. She doesn’t understand, but then neither do I.
There have been multiple generations of Rosies in Yellowstone, a name given to a line of female bears that has stayed near the Roosevelt area. According to a park ranger on my fall visit in 2006, the previous Rosie didn’t appear to have survived the winter, she had lost a lot of fur before she hibernated. The new Rosie was a fine mother, looking carefully after her two cubs (who were following her just out of frame). She’d been tagged in her ears to help identify her, although its hard to tell in this picture since it matches the bits of brown leaves in her fur. The picture was a bit of a nod to wildlife photographer Nick Nichols, whose work in National Geographic inspired me. The light was low and the bear moving, so I tried to capture the movement with a low shutter speed and panning with the bear instead of trying to go for sharpness and freezing its motion. A technique Nick did well but I did not, but I still enjoyed the moment.
Boolie 