Follow the bouncing ball!

Isn't this beautiful?

This is a plum tree, I think, old and laying halfway down on the ground. It's at the top of the hill on our neighborhood walk, by the barn where the ladies were. No new ladies, yet, this year. I wonder if they'll be getting in a new herd.

There are skunk cabbage in bloom along the ditches and into the trees there, too. I like this one, with our shadows above.


Sadly, other stuff is also appearing in the ditches here. :(


Still, sunshine and blue sky, a beer and a back porch to drink it on are worth smiling about!


This one is just funny, I think! Meepy contemplating the leftovers in the last of the early evening light.

Fergit it, buddy! LOL!

FatBoy Row. I was trying to get a picture of him looking picturesque in this fan of light, but he insisted on rolling up like a fat pill bug to lick his hiney! What are ya gonna do?


Wabi on the other hand makes a good model, since she doesn't move around all that much!

I wanted to catch that gleam of light on the inside corner of her eye, focused there through her cornea. Geeky or cool?

Then we had another homemade pasta night. We had a bunch of mushrooms that needed eating, so, after demonstrating once and for all that the cuisinart wouldn't chop them, I proceeded to mince up the mushrooms, onions, tofu, etc for the filling.

Okay, I'm totally having a brain freeze. What are the little stuffed pillows of pasta?? Gah! Not tortellini, the other ones. Anyway, those. I was making those. :P H is the photojournalist for this adventure, by the way.

Mushroom filling in the pan...


Ever make pasta? It's really easy. Dry ingredients in a pile, make a well, pour in the wets (in this case, silken tofu and olive oil, something else...)


Start stirring the flour into the wets, incorporating it into a wet paste...


Begin to knead it when you can...

Knead for about 10 minutes, then let it rest for an hour. Letting your photojournalist rest at this point may result in losing your photojournalist. ;)
Actually, when it came to rolling, filling, cutting, boiling, then sautéing the "little pillows", it was all hands on deck, so we're missing that part of the process. Well, I got a picture of the sauteing, anyway.


The finished product!

Doesn't that look wholesomely brown?? LOL! Seriously, it was good. Not as good as it might be if we hadn't started the whole process at about 8pm and could still think straight when it came to seasoning and saucing, but still tasty!

Saturday was a mild partly sunny day. We spent a lot of it outside, mowing, cleaning up the dog yard, rototilling the garden.

Just enjoying the mild spring air!


Cindy (the woman with the kennel) had called to tell me about an event in Blaine. Wings on the Water (or something very like that). I got there around 2, just in time for a presentation on raptors. That was so cool! They had four birds from their rehabilitation facility (lifers that can't return to the wild due to injuries or having been too thoroughly imprinted on humans), and they had lots of bits of information that were fascinating. Like, did you know that some owls have asymmetrically placed ears? One is higher than the other, so they can triangulate height as well as horizontal direction of their environment and prey. Peregrine falcons can see the equivalent of 60 frames per second, as opposed to 20-something that we can see. That means they can pull details out of fleeting objects, like flying birds or insects, that would just be a blur to us. That allows them to hit and grab strategically, so they have a better chance of hanging on to their prey.
Sorry the pics are so crappy. My camera isn't so great in low light or at a distance, but it's better than nothing!
This guy is a Swainson's hawk. He's 33 years old!!


This is a peregrine. He's old, too, but I can't remember how old.


This guy is a male adult bald eagle.

It's kind of hard to tell what's going on here, but that grey dome in the front is someone's head. The guy holding the eagle is hidden by the bird's wings. He was in this position a lot, sort of wrapping his wings around the guy. It was sort of sweet, and you could see they were buddies. It put their two faces RIGHT together, but the guy didn't seem worried. He was whispering to him, and making kissy faces right at him.
This gives a little better idea of his size.

He's not as big as I thought he'd be. I didn't know this either: male raptors are usually smaller than female raptors of the same species. This guy is a lifer because he can't fly. He was badly injured before he was fledged when his nest tree fell over on him and a nestmate.

They had a great horned owl, too, but I didn't get a good picture of him during the presentation. I got this one afterwards, when people were allowed to come about 8 feet away to look and talk to the presenters.

They said this owl is really lazy! Well, I mean, is that fair? Owls are supposed to be asleep most of the day! C'mon!

I wandered around talking to other folks at information booths, and avoiding folks at vending booths (I feel bad when I don't have ANY money to spend, and they're obviously so hungry for business!)
There were some kids activity tables set up. One group had brought a container full of owl castings (not poop; these are wads of fur and bones that the owl coughs up out of its crop, so it doesn't have to go all the way through the digestive tract), wrapped up like treats in foil. You could take one, pull it apart, and sort out all the little bones of voles, mice, whatever, and match them to a skeleton chart. Cool!

That's a stuffed owl, by the way.
That little girl there on the right said, "It stinks!" The adults all immediately chorused, "Well, don't smell it!" LOL!

We went for a walk over at Hovander after that. Got my feet soaked early on because Wabi decided she didn't want to walk after all, so I took her back to the car. When I got back to where I'd left H and the other three dogs, he'd kept walking, and was wwwaaaaaaayyy off around a soggy meadow. I could cut across, or go the other way and meet him at some point on his way back. I decided to cut across. Squelch! Splash!! Agh! I jumped splashingly back to the road, assessed the amount of wetness, decided that one can only get so wet after all, and I had already achieved that state, so *shrug*, off I went across again. The second attempt proved completely un-wet *sigh* so I caught up and off we squelched.
After my close encounter with the eagle at the bird event, this weathervane caught my eye.


These turkeys gave quite a show! They WHUMP-thrummmmmmed their wings at us, strutting with venomous read wattles shuddering. We were suitably impressed!


The geese were hoping for a handout, and disappointed in my camera!


Sunday was garden day. H had prepared several rows in our newly enlarged garden. Inspired by the promise of a fee-free farmers market in Blaine in June, we over-planted. We'll see what happens! We've decided that our whole enterprise here, whatever it produces (wine grapes, produce, whatever) will be named in "honor" of Meepy, and shall be called "Bad Cat [whatever]". LOL!
Before planting:


After planting:


We still need to put up fencing, and string for our peas to climb, and we have several more rows to plant. We hope we learned a lot last year about spacing the rows (wide enough for the rototiller to do the worst of the weeding), and what to plant. We'll see how it goes! Less squash this year, I think! ;)

That's it for now. I think I need to clean my camera lens or something.

Oh yeah! I forgot to add that we got comp tickets to another dance performance at the Firehouse on Sunday! It was a collaboration between a dance company and a writers' group. I couldn't take any pictures, of course, but here's a link to give you a taste. Jess, isn't that the thing you saw, with Sue, last year or the year before?