Boolie

Subtle Sunrise

One of my favorite moments is when the rising sun first sweeps its light across the desert. I’ve played around with different ways of photographing it on days off when I manage to get up before sunrise, which is rare these days. I love simple scenes and when we moved here made a mental note to photograph this one next to the trailhead, only to realize the other day I had never done it. I thought I’d prefer the scene when it was more strongly lit but my favorite three images were over a 40 second span when the rising sun just fell upon the boulder and tree and left the foreground in shadow. At the moment this is my favorite of those three.

Desert Leaves

In the desert we have butterflies that resemble leaves more than our leaves do. All of the desert plants have adapted to minimize water loss to deal with the scarcity of rainfall, though I know one transplanted desert feline who will be happy to see the backside of the monsoon storms.

Fruiting

Taken last year on July 4th with the light fading as the sun slipped below the mountains, a white-winged dove enjoys saguaro fruit before calling it a night. I had planned to focus on saguaro flower and fruit photography this year but life had other plans. I wasn’t able to do much hiking this spring or early summer, and while the saguaro in our front yard blooms it only does so up high and regardless didn’t produce much fruit this year.

Dinner Invitations

This American kestrel invited me over for dinner but I had to make my apologies lest I spoil my appetite. The white streaks running down the saguaro are not damage but rather show she’s been painting a favored perch. I suspect the rodents of the desert will be like the Townsend’s voles of the Pacific Northwest, animals I see but only manage to photograph when something else is eating them.

Relaxing

Bear relaxes by the pool after a late summer swim. Ellie had her classic spread eagle pose but Bear’s signature sit is to tuck a paw underneath. The other night I went out on the back porch to watch an approaching monsoon, Bear indicated he wanted to join me but I was a little hesitant as I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the storm. However I also didn’t want to have to put up with the most serious side-eye from the other side of the sliding glass door so I brought him out and had him sit beside me. We watched in silence as lighting constantly lit the mountains until he rolled over and asked for a belly rub. Not much later he fell asleep in the occasional darkness, when the storm finally passed I woke him and we went inside and I had my answer as to how the pup feels about thunder and lightning.

Trixie of course was buried under several layers of blankets in our bed.

The Melting Ice Reveals a Dragon

I’m sure this will end well.

Old Glory

The Classroom

Though most of the same plants are blooming now, this picture is from early April as I haven’t taken many pictures of Bear in the pool since then. It’s not that he hasn’t been in the pool as the pup loves to swim, rather that as soon as the water got warm enough for my delicate sensibilities, I started swimming with him. And that’s when I discovered he seemed uneasy with me in the pool.

As long as I stayed by his side he was OK, if often giving me some side eye, but if I swam out on my own he’d immediately come after me and start tugging on the sleeve of my shirt or gently tugging on my wrist. I got a lesson in just how much it freaked him out when I wanted to get a little exercise so I looped his leash around a deck chair so I could get swim some laps. He dragged the chair across the porch and to the pool’s edge until I got out and assured him I was alright. My wife took him inside but he just stood at the window and barked until she took him out of sight.

So in addition to using our pool time on the weekends to work on his understanding of the Come and Stay commands, and then Drop It and Leave It, I added some exercises to convince him I was a good swimmer and he could just relax and play. By mid-summer he was doing much better, but then there were a few weeks with no swimming when I got sick and then my wife got sick and then a monsoon washed a lot of dirt into the pool.

When the swimming resumed I was fearful of a relapse but the opposite happened, he was now completely at ease with me being in the pool and since then we’ve spent long sessions just goofing around, with me hoping the exercise will tire him out but discovering which one of us has the most energy. Our pool time has become as treasured to me as my long walks with Ellie were, time to forget the stress of the world for a while and revel in the joy of the two of us.

Blackout Shades

One nice thing while I was quarantined in July is the bedroom has blackout shades on its windows, so I could keep the room dark to make it easier to try and sleep off the illness. It’s hard to get them to come down the last little bit to the window sill but sometimes I leave some extra room regardless, to allow curious cats to sneak in behind them for backyard birdwatching. Trixie was one of my convalescence companions, though at times it was hard to tell if my fever had returned or I was just feeling flush from the heat of Little Furnace sleeping on my legs.

It’s the first time I’ve appreciated the bedroom being so big, normally it’s just wasted space for us but it was nice while it was my home inside our home for a couple of weeks. It gave me plenty of room to play with Bear when he was allowed in, it was nice to have time to bond with the pup, normally hard to do except on the weekends.

Quarantine Companion

One night in July I woke to my teeth chattering so badly I had to clench my jaw to get them to stop, not exactly normal for the middle of the Arizona summer. The thermometer confirmed a low grade fever and the rapid test confirmed Covid, which I later discovered was quietly sweeping through the plant. I quarantined in the bedroom, at first we kept the pets out but after talking with the vet we allowed them in when I was feeling better. Boo even slept on my chest at one point, something he hasn’t done since he was a kitten, he usually prefers curling up beside me.

In the early days Boo and Trixie occasionally complained outside the door about not being let in, with paws swiping under the door to try to catch my attention, but if Sam was still with us we would have had to let them in and just brought in litter boxes and food. He would have curled up on my chest and been annoyed if I coughed too much, but not so much as to actually get up. I would have been serenaded to sleep by the purrs of a cat who was happy so long as we were together.