Our Trip to Salem, Oregon

We just spent almost 12 days on our trip to Oregon recently to sell our Mixed Metal Jewels at the Salem Art Fair & Festival and enjoy spending time on the beautiful Oregon coast after the fair. We are happy to report that the fair was very successful and enjoyable for us.

We are happy to have entered the semi-retired phase of our jewelry making career. One can drive from our home in Ft. Bragg, CA to Salem, Oregon in 9 or 10 hours but we took three days and made stops along the way. One of the most interesting stops was at a facility called the Cascades Raptor Center in the southern part of Eugene, Oregon where injured or abandoned birds of prey of a variety of species are taken care of. The top priority is to try to get the bird to a state where it can be released back into the wild with a hope of survival. They have a hospital facility where the focus is on healing and privacy for the birds and visitors are not allowed.
Many birds that they take in though, for a variety of reasons, physical and psychological, would have a very small chance of surviving in the wild. These are in aviaries and can be viewed by visitors to the center. At any given time there are 55 to 65 raptors that can be seen, owls, hawks, eagles, vultures, falcons, kites, ospreys and others. It was a special experience to be able to see these magnificent creatures up close and to be able to take pictures. There are staff and volunteers who act as handlers for some of the birds and bring them outside to exercise and to allow people to see them close up and tell visitors about their lives and stories. I really enjoyed seeing an osprey up close, they fly above our house sometimes here on the California coast and I sometimes see them flying in from the ocean with a fish in their claws on the way to their nests in river canyons. I learned a lot about them that I didn't know, that they actually dive into the water to catch fish for example and that they have some of the sharpest claws in the world of birds. I also learned that eagles often follow them and take the fish that they have caught. Eagles can't dive in the water, they can only catch fish on the surface (or steal them from the successful osprey).

The website for the center is CASCADE RAPTOR CENTER
It is well worth a visit. Easy to find and a small admission charge. Parking may sometimes be a little of a problem but not an insurmountable one.

Trip to Anza Borrego State Park

 In mid March we took a break from the rain here on the Mendocino Coast and traveled down south to Anza Borrego state park south of the Palm Springs area. We've been there before when we used to do a March Art Fair in La Quinta near Palm Springs and we always enjoyed our time there. On our trip south it rained, often intensely, and a lot all the way until we reached the Santa Barbara area. Being in that area brought back memories as we lived in the Ventura/Ojai area for a number of years 40 years ago.

The first day in Anza Borrego was a little bit of a shock since it was 30 degrees warmer there than at home. We hiked up canyons and across hills each day of our stay and enjoyed the cactus and wild flowers in great profusion. We had recently purchased a new set of binoculars that in addition to letting us see big horn sheep up on the mountain tops were able to focus close so that we could stand up and look at flowers and insects with them and it was like looking at them with a very high powered magnifying glass. We could actually see

them better than we could see them if we got on our knees and got our eyes close to them. It was exciting. We ran into a great swarm of caterpillars in one area, thousands of them, eating plants and flowers with great gusto. Every few years this seems to happen, sometimes locals said there are so many on the highways that the roads become slippery and dangerous after many have been run over and the surface becomes slimy. Although we didn't see them, we heard tales of a specie of hawk that feed on the caterpillars in great numbers.

To the  right are some of the fascinating welded steel sculptures scattered in the desert around the town of Borrego Springs created by Ricardo Breceda. The amount of work that have gone into some of them is amazing. I always love rust.
To see more of his work go to his WEBSITE
A couple of times in the last year we have found really sweet places to stay on our travels through AirBnB. Just outside Borrego Springs we stayed in this great little house with everything we needed to be comfortable, jack rabbits and humming birds in the yard and less than the cost of any of the local motels.

Fall is a busy time of year for us

 The first weekend in November we sell our jewels at the Sacramento Arts Festival in the Convention Center in midtown. It's one of our best shows and this year our sales were amazingly good and we had a good time, even though we were on our feet many hours a day talking to hundreds of people. Many of the people we talked to have been customers buying our jewelry for 20 and 30 years plus. It's an interesting linear relationship extending over time. We see them for 20 minutes or half an hour at a show but after many years we build bonds with them and they are friends. This is an enjoyable aspect of the selling our work. Although it's a lot of work doing the show it was actually pleasant and relaxing for us. On our way home we were gifted with a couple of beautiful natural phenomenon.
The first was this great rainbow near Cloverdale. It was difficult to capture it's intensity with my camera but I think it was the most intensely colorful one I've seen in my almost 73 years on the planet. It was a complete arc and sometimes a double arc and was really a treat to see.

 It rained off and on all the way home from Sacramento and when we got to the coast just south of Mendocino we were greeted with this sunset, a row of dark clouds across the horizon and wonderful colors breaking through above. We see a lot of spectacular sunsets on the coast, this one was up there with the best.

A couple of days after we returned and were at the start of our almost daily walk into downtown Ft. Bragg, we spotted this little guy in front of a neighbors house. He was really focused on whatever he was chewing on and stayed in place even though I got quite close to him. There is a lot of wildlife in our neighborhood, some of which wanders up from Pudding Creek on the northern end of Ft. Bragg. Deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes and so forth.

Our days at Point Reyes National Seashore

We recently spent a few days enjoying exploring Point Reyes National Seashore. We had a very pleasant and relaxing time. We spent our nights in a little cabin called the Hideaway just north of the little town of Point Reyes Station. The first day we visited the Point Reyes lighthouse and Drake's beach. The lighthouse was interesting at the bottom of 308 steps. 308 steps back to the top too. Great views, an excellent vantage point from which to watch the whale migrations. We walked for a mile north on Drake's beach and saw an unusual sight, an otter dragging a dead seagull across the sand. First time for that. On the internet looking up the diet of otters, one writer called them opportunivores, sometimes eating things that were offered up by chance. The otter rapidly drug the gull into a culvert and disappeared into the brush at the side of a little creek and I wasn't fast enough to get a picture. Day two, after spending some time exploring the town of Point Reyes Station (great market with lots of organic produce and an A plus deli that we ate from 3 times while we were there, thrift store, nice little book store, and several excellent galleries and gifts shops) we headed north to the Abbott's Lagoon trail out to the ocean.
Not a long hike, maybe 3 miles round trip, with a surprising amount of wildlife. A coyote walking across a field, a covey of quail searching for food beside the trail and walking within two feet of us as we quietly stood there watching, a great blue heron harvesting food in a shallow part of one of the lagoons, great number of gulls, pelicans, Canadian geese and many other seabirds I didn't recognize. Sitting at the beach, we saw a whale out in the ocean raise it's body up out of the water and saw a half a dozen spouting a number of times. On our way back we found a dead young pelican (sadness) and took a few of it's feathers to add to our feather altar. Day three led us to Limantour beach, a wide and very long stretch of sand. We walked south on it for quite a while and found a pool of fresh water, the end of a seasonal stream, where dozens of several species of gulls hung out and washed in the pool. The 3 gulls at the top left of the collage are Heermann's gulls of which there were many. Deer were also eating from the plant life that grew along the bottom of the cliffs where water trickled out to help them grow, The buck deer in the collage was in the yard where we were staying, harvesting apples that were starting to fall out of a tree while we were there. The residents of the area have left an easement on which deer can come and go from the forest. We're looking forward to returning to Point Reyes at another time to do more exploring including the Tule elk reserve. We did see a few elk at a distance north of the road to Drakes' beach. A very fun trip.

Playing With Photoshop

For years I've been playing with photoshop and manipulating digital images I've taken with my various cameras. This is a sky at sunset in Chico just before Christmas a few years ago, a frame that I created in photoshop and a cucumber beetle that landed on my hand as I was sitting outside eating my lunch.

Once in Santa Rosa, we were walking through Coddingtown Mall and I became fascinated with some manikins that were in a shop window and took a multitude of pictures of them to use in various ways.

They were fun to play with.

The woman was a small doll in a store window along Main Street in Mendocino, about 6 inches high. The professor with the magnifying glass was one of my grandkids toys.

The lizard image was taken at The Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert near Palm Springs in southern California. The fly and the rose were both residents of Caspar. The background is a sheet of copper that I textured by roller printing in my jewelry studio. Follow this link to see more about roller printing. ROLLER PRINTING

A mandala constructed from one of the multitude of flowers images I have collected.

The Presbyterian church in Mendocino taken through greenery from near the ocean and played with in photoshop to make it more like a drawing.

The flower to the right had just fallen off it's parent plant on a deck at our house in Caspar.
Shortly before I had taken the cricket picture with my new digital Nikon that I had bought to take images of our jewelry. I hadn't even learned how to turn the flash off and it flashed, which was lucky since the reflections on the crickets surface created an interesting aspect to the image. Normally it's hard to get close to crickets but this one had only one rear leg so couldn't move very fast. After a series of portraits, I put it outside and wished it well.

Created mostly in photoshop with a few underlying texture layers from camera images.

Here I am behind the swinging door. I got out eventually and went on with my life.

Little bird

 I was working in our studio Monday afternoon and Carlie stuck her head in the door and said, "Jima,
come quick". I followed her through the kitchen to the small room by the back deck and there by the window was this small bird looking a little stunned. It had accidentally flow in through the door which we had open to take advantage of the warm outside air and couldn't figure out how to get out. She said it had banged against the window several times trying to escape. I stood for a minute trying to decide whether just to close the door to the kitchen while leaving the outside door open, hoping it would find it's own way out or try to catch it and take it outside.

 

I finally just reached out and took it gently in my hand and while talking softly to it took it outside and set it on the deck railing. I rubbed its back softly and continued to talk to it asking that it wait for a minute while I went to get my camera to take some nice pictures of it.  It was still there when I returned, confused and slightly stunned I assume and I took quite a few shots of it from all angles. The colors and subtle textures of it's feathers were fascinating to me. I really liked the odd and asymmetrical white spot on the end of one tail feather.

After I finished taking pictures it started moving moving a little and
making short little flights of a foot or so and then in a flash it was off into one of the trees 15 or 20 feet away. There are flocks of these little guys around, very fast, moving through the trees that are full of berries in the yard. I haven't been able to find a picture of this one on the internet yet so don't know the species.

Sunday morning early as we were getting ready for the book sale at the breakfast at the Caspar Community Center, we were treated to this really incredibly dramatic sunrise, what a treat.

My Ft. Bragg Insect Neighbors

 Even when I was very young I had a fascination with creatures and insects were part of the fascinating ones. I got into the rhythm when I lived in Caspar, just south of Ft. Bragg for 17 years, out on the edge of the pygmy forest, of taking pictures of my neighboring creatures, many of whom were insects. There were several species of dragonflies that I saw from time to time in my yard there and captured images of. I never saw one of these red ones there though I had seen one at a small pond at a friends house in Ft. Bragg a few years ago. I see these at my Ft. Bragg house every couple of days. I know there at least two because I've seen two at once.

Dragonflies are often difficult to capture images of because they are kind of shy and fly away when you try to get close. That happened with these guys at first but an odd thing happened after a few days of trying to get close. I was able to get very close, having the camera within a few inches and once actually touching ones body gently. It flew away then but in a few seconds came back to the same spot where I was still waiting. I have no idea what this is about. I hum to them and wish them well but don't have a clue as to why they now seem more unafraid.

I like looking at the details of their wing structures, the engineering is kind of interesting to me.  They are just about the best and fastest insect flyers and do amazing maneuvers in the air. I think one reason they are attracted to my yard is the abundance of other insects since they are predator creatures.

 I've seen a couple of other species of dragonflies in the yard, a small blue and black one and a larger one only seen from a distance that seemed to be black and white with maybe a touch of blue or green, kind of iridescent. Hope to be able to get pictures of them sometime this summer.

I've seen guys like this one to the right in Caspar and Mendocino, not a bee, some kind of a fly like creature but bee sized, I often see them as well as honey bees and native bumble bees on adjacent flowers of some of the plants in my yard.

This honey bee was on my back deck on a basil plant and I think maybe it was at the end of it's life span, sitting still or moving really slowly. But maybe it was just taking a little time out from it's busy schedule, they work really hard. I'm happy that I'm seeing more honey bees this year than I have for the last several.

Borage plants have self seeded all around our new yard and I'm happy about that as the bees really like their flowers, I've see as many as 15 or 20 bees at once on a sunny afternoon, mostly small black native bees but some honey bees.

You can tell this one has been working a lot because of the pollen on it's  legs.

This one also was being very still, resting or possibly at the end of it's lifespan. These guys usually move really fast and only spend a few seconds at each flower they visit so it's often difficult to get pictures. I sometimes put my camera in burst mode and just push the shutter in and let it take picture after picture fast, hoping I'll get useable images. Sometimes I'm lucky. I'll keep trying to get images of my neighbors and post some more in the future.