Bay Island Nature

What a day for wallowing: great weather, a good book, and only the dog for company!  I resisted (almost) all impulses and reminders of the many tasks I could accomplish today and focused only on relaxing and enjoying a quiet day in my backyard.  The raspberries are abundant in my little patch and have somehow doubled their size from the early summer harvest.  We're finally having the summer I've been longing for with warm sun.  The bittersweet of it is that evenings are cool, reminding me fall's just around the corner.  I've been feeling lately that life slips along more quickly than I'd like.  Songs end when I'd like them to go on longer.  My sweet little boys are suddenly young men.  Though I try not to linger in melancholy, I find it sneaking up on me more often, a song or memory sliding out of the past.  A little reminder that life is finite.  That got me thinking about this amazing earth.  What are the longest-lived things, longest-existing elements?  Googl

Celebrated another year of orbiting the sun, as a naturalist friend of mine likes to write on birthday cards, by going on a long weekend campout in the Sierras.  Though our favorite campgrounds were already closed after Labor Day, we still found a place to pitch our tent.  It was a little too close to the highway and a train regularly awoke us at night, but the chickadees and nuthatches abounded during the day.  The scenery was beautiful and we had a wonderful time.  The teens even seemed to relish our evening campfires and table game of Yahtzee.  Tanner rolled an improbable two Yahtzees in a row!  We tried for sunning and swimming at Lake Tahoe the afternoon that turned into a huge thunderstorm complete with hail and lightening.  It followed us back to camp where we holed up with books until it passed.  The forces of nature are not to be toyed with!  Back home now, with just the lingering dust on our clothes and the drying of our gear to complete.  I can look back on a celebration tha