Cat Etiquette

CatEtiquette

What is the proper etiquette when your cat has made itself comfortable on your chest and you would like to get up and do something? Are you supposed to wait five minutes before moving? Pick it up and find an equally comfortable place for it? After living so many decades, why don’t I know all these rules?

Fortunately the cat moved while I was still deciding what the polite thing to do was. I had branches to chip. Lots of branches. Freshly chipped branches make soft, beautiful forest paths. Even dogs like walking on them.

ChippedPath

A Fresh Feast

Wintersky

The winter skies are stormy. Look up and clouds swirl about like drunken sailors. Lie on the ground for an hour and watch as grand opera unfolds above the trees. Giants battling. Swords clashing. You can feel their breath on your ears. The epic tales of Homer performed by dancing clouds on a stage that spans the heavens. La Scala has nothing on this. No pesky crowds to deal with either. Every seat a private box. Over there are the Sirens, singing from the rocky shores, luring sailors to their doom. Here comes Orpheus and the Argonauts, doomed to die like countless other hapless sailors … or are they? You see them, don’t you?

ShiitakeA

Enough with the winter sky. Too much drama for me. Instead, I’m lured by whispering mushroom, shiitake 椎茸 to be exact. Just bumps on a lump of sawdust a week ago, today some are too big to resist plucking. We’ll have a feast tonight. It boggles the mind how fungi turn sawdust into delicacy. Beat this freshness Wholefoods.

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ShiitakeC

Bumps on a Log No More

BumpsOnALogA

A week ago I started a shiitake mushroom growing kit by soaking it in water overnight. A few days later bumps appeared on the surface of the block, a pressed block of hardwood sawdust. Seven days on, the bumps have transformed into baby mushrooms over an inch across. A few more days, maybe a week and it looks like we’ll be eating fresh shiitake mushrooms.

It’s always fun watching my food grow. Seeing all the stages it goes through enhances the flavor. I can bite into the food, close my eyes, and appreciate all the work the food went through so I could eat it.

BumpsOnALogB

What an Old Rooster Does

BillyA

Billy, who will be seven in May, enjoys taking dust baths with the hens. It beats competing with the younger roosters. A problem with young roosters is they all think they are Donald Trump. Which is why many end up in the oven.

After whiling away time with the hens, Billy is off for a quiet walk in the woods. Across the bridge he goes, strutting and flapping his wings. Being an old rooster isn’t bad. It’s better than being a young rooster in the oven.

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BillyOnBridgeA

If Dogs Were on the Internet

DogsA

There are hundreds of millions of pet dogs around the world. Many of them spend a good time of the day alone as their people leave them to make a living, go shopping, and do what people do. What are all these dogs doing when they are alone? One thing we know they are not doing is whiling away their time on the internet. And how do we know this? Because the number on websites are not Buttbook, Instapoo, and Snappee.

If hundreds of millions of dogs around the world were online, our emails would be inundated with emails about dog butts, the best parks to pee in, and fire hydrants you just have to put on your bucket list.

DogsB

Really, all dogs want to be is outdoors. I doubt dogs would fall for spending hours rubbing their noses against a monitor, clicking their way through endless web pages of dog smells. Not when there is an infinite variety of things to smell and lick outdoors.

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Mystery Hen

BrownEggLayer

A day when a mystery is solved is a good day. This nest used to be where Margaret slept with her chicks at night. That ended several months ago, when Margaret and her chicks decided they were big enough to sleep on the roost with the other chickens. The nest went unused until recently, when one of the hens began laying big brown eggs in the nest. Today, the mystery as to which hen it is, is solved. It is Maggie. Now I can make Maggie omeletes.

Is It Spring Already?

SpringlightA

The blue in today’s sky was Spring Blue, not Winter Blue. There’s a subtle difference. Winter Blue makes you zip your coat up tight. Spring Blue beckons you to hang your coat on a branch. Spring Blue reaches deep into the woods. It makes the flying hare smile and look up at the sky.

SpringlightB

Even the daffodils are standing tall. There are a few flower buds just about to stick their heads above the leaves. Today is definitely more spring than winter.

SpringlightC

Above It All

MtBaker1

On a clear winter day like today, it’s easy to see what is above it all, and why this is such a special place. Biking off the hill this afternoon, I ran into a fog bank. It felt like summer in San Francisco. The fog cleared in the valley, and there was Mt. Baker above it all.

Above it all were bald eagles too, one after the other. I counted over twenty clinging to the branches in the trees along the roads. Clear, calm days like today are dangerous days to be something a bald eagle wants to eat. Fortunately, they are not after me. Though, if you think about it, twenty bald eagles, working together could.

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MtBaker3Eagle

Speckled Sunshine – Speckled Egg

SpeckledEgg

One of the hens lays a speckled egg. It’s among the most beautiful of eggs I find. Which hen lays this wonder? I’m not sure. I like to think that whoever it is, she lays it on days when the sunshine is speckled. It doesn’t work that way.

HensEatingSunflowerSeeds

Tracks Left Behind

TrailsNowGone

Nothing moves without leaving behind a track, some evidence it was here. I heard an interesting article on NPR that as we move, we leave behind a cloud of microbes as unique to us as our fingerprints. Yesterday, I left a track bicycling to the post office and the feed store, the one on the right, and one when I came home on the left. With the snow gone today, those tracks are gone, but there could be microbes that dropped from the cloud of microbes that drift around me.

AnnasEgg

Anna left behind this beautiful egg today. I’m pretty sure it’s hers. It was the only egg on the nest she was last sitting in. It’s a gorgeous tract.

WinterHerbs

More tracts are these winter sage, rosemary, thyme, and oregano. Chopped up, I used them in our lunch. They are now in my belly, leaving traces behind as they flow through me. Bits of them my body will absorb. Eventually bits will ooze through my pores and become invisible microbes floating in the cloud around me. A week from now, my dog may sniff the tracts I leave behind and wonder why it smells like oregano. Things never go away, they just flow on and on and on.

WinterHerbsMinced