We’d just finished an incredible lunch when 10 paces down the street I noticed this sign attached to the building immediately next door. A multiplex? What’s that…a rat condo? The droppings literally covering the sidewalk answered that question.

Believe it or not…I’d eat there again in a heartbeat…it was that good.

My favorite woodpecker, the Northern Flicker, makes regular visits to the suet feeder on the deck. I only wish I could catch a shot of him with his wings spread. They are a brilliant orange which you see hints of in his tail feathers.

Those of you who read Mark’s blog know we recently spotted an owl we hadn’t seen before and couldn’t identify. I was unable to get a picture as it flew off just seconds after I ran for the camera. We talked about what we saw, looked through all our birding books and checked the internet and are pretty certain it’s a Barred Owl. We’ve been watching the trees every night hoping to catch another glimpse of this bird so we can get a positive ID but it’s been very elusive.

Barred Owl - not my picture but I wish it were!

Last night I was manning the barbecue when I heard a loud ‘POP’ and looked up just in time to see the owl fly off into the forest with a screamimg squirrel in his grasp. Unfortunately, it all happened so quickly I still couldn’t get a positive ID but I now know his appearance last week wasn’t a random event. And…it looks like we’re on the same dining schedule.

So, I’ll be watching the trees at dinner hoping to get a better look at just who’s taking our squirrels. I also have a feeling this same bird is responsible for the lack of flying squirrels this year. We were seeing three or four a night earlier in the spring but now we have none.

The weather Saturday was really sucky and cool so I didn’t get the opportunity to work in the yard as I’d hoped. I really needed the distraction but that wasn’t going to happen so I started catching up on my blogroll and was inspired by a remark Homer made about making cupcakes to calm himself down. One great thing about cooking…it fulfills your needs…and since I needed a pick me up I decided to cook to cheer myself up.

Mark and I had stopped by New Season’s Market earlier in the day to participate in their weekly tasting which happened to be ice cream. Of course we had to bring some home and, well, since you can’t eat vanilla ice cream without chocolate cake (okay…berries would work but we didn’t have berries in the house) I decided to make a cake. After all…we had all the ingredients at hand and I don’t mean a box of cake mix either. Nope! I pulled out our ancient copy of The Joy of Cooking and found a ‘real’ recipe for Devil’s Food Cake. The recipe mentioned that during the war they would use cassava flour as a cake flour substitute.  Being that we’re at war I searched the kitchen and pantry for cassava flour but alas had to settle for cake flour.  Times have changed.

Next I needed to make a nice icing and I knew I wanted it to be chocolatey and gooey but not too rich so instead of a nice cream cheese frosting, I made a beautiful, shiny, butter icing. I know, butter is as full of fat as cream cheese but it only requires 3 tablespoons of butter as opposed to 3 ounces of cream cheese. Lees fat…more flavor! The main ingredients were chocolate, sugar and hot water, how simple is that?

And the finished product….

…no, it’s not gorgeous but it was made to eat and with a nice big scoop of vanilla ice cream it tasted like happiness!

A month ago my cousin was diagnosed with a very rare condition, transverse myelitis, and within an hour was paralyzed from the breastbone down. This happened so sudden and unexpectedly that we were all still reeling from it when my sister passed away a little over a week later. Needless to say, I’ve been a bit of a basket case.

I spent a week in California dealing with my sister’s belongings since my father, who turns 79 in August, is devastated. My sister moved in with my father about 8 years ago and although dad is completely independent, with the exception of driving, she had become a caretaker of sorts. That job now falls to me and since dad hates the weather in Oregon, I’ll have to handle his affairs from here. Fortunately, dad is adored in his community so he’ll be well looked after but I’ll need to monitor his business affairs and become a more constant presence in his life. After losing my mother at 52, another wife at 48, and now my sister at 53 he’s pretty beaten down, but he’s a survivor and I’m sure he’ll pull through.

There was a bright side to my trip though and that was the opportunity to stop in and see my cousin Bruce before returning home. I can’t imagine how difficult it is for him lying in a hospital bed all day with few distractions from his plight, but he’s in very good spirits and his therapy is coming along nicely. He’s been able to move his left foot, and lift his knee slightly and a few days before I arrived he started moving the toes on his right foot. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a complete recovery and looking forward to seeing him again when I head down to move Pops.

That pretty much sums up my lack of presence on this ol’ blog lately and also why I haven’t been around to read and comment on yours. I’m slowly working my way back into the swing though and hope to get back up to speed soon.

Many, many thanks to all of you who read Mark’s blog and sent kind thoughts and words my way. I felt the energy and it really made a difference.

I’ve been in CA for the past week and a half dealing with a couple family crises. I’m going to need a little time and distance before posting about it but figured I should post a phun photo before I lose my last three readers. So…without further ado I give you this wonderful door art I discovered in Brooklyn while attending the Blogger Gathering last month.

Arriving home from NYC to typical Pacific Northwest spring weather plunged me into a deep episode of S.A.D. It happens every year but not always with this intensity. In fact, never before has it affected me to the point that I considered calling my doctor for chemical intervention. The mere thought of chemical intervention made me realize that I had to work through it, quit thinking about my depression and start talking about my depression. That of course led me to realize that it’s not drugs I need but light. A normal spring here is usually broken up every few days with some bright sunshine; this year we’re lucky to get a half-day of sun once a week. So, I’ll be calling the doctor tomorrow to talk about a light box, or…maybe I’ll try the tanning salon…some color would do me good! ; )

I thought another approach to getting out of this funk would be to blog but I just couldn’t decide what to write about when, as Spo would say, the Fates dropped by for a visit.

The first Fate arrived Sunday morning when I read an email from Doug at Gossamer Tapestry informing me that he’d given me an award, the result of a meme he was tagged with, and fortunately for me the first ray of light toward recovery. Doug included me on his list of 5 blogs that ‘make him think or make his day’. I’m sure it was more ‘make his day’ than ‘make him think’ but I’ll take it…I’m easy that way.

Doug holds a special place in my blogger heart being a champion of nature and the inspiration of my few attempts at making cheese (a hard cheese is in my near future). Doug, an entomologist who spends much of his spare time restoring natural habitat and sharing his love of butterflies, insects, and plants with us laymen, could have easily sent me reeling into a science career had he been my biology professor. Go check out his site…I’m sure you’ll agree! And…”thanks” Doug…I’m looking forward to the day I finally get to meet you.

The second Fate arrived in the form of another meme. I, like most bloggers, don’t think ‘the meme’s the thing’ but I was tagged by the handsome Gavin at Why Oh Why and having just recently met him, I wasn’t about to turn him down. Besides…it’s an easy meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing…
5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged me

Rule #4 being so cryptic, I decided to trace the meme back to the original and found this (PAGE 123), which doesn’t ask for anything more than the next three sentences. So, moving forward I offer this…

Reading this at work the nearest book was the ‘Big Guy’s massive textbook “Experimental and Clinical Neurotoxicology”.

Page 123, sentences 6-8 read…

“Surviving rats have selective lesions of small interneurons in the lumbosacral spinal cord with sparing of anterior horn cells; in contrast, reactive astrocytes are detected in the hippocampal CA4 region and stratum moleculare/lacunare. The Spinal cored changes clearly indicate that the pattern of this vulnerability induced by this glutamate analog differs from damage induced by kainate, although biochemical studies show that ACRO-A binds to two kainite-binding sites in the rat brain. The Neurotoxic action of acromelic acid on spinal neurons is attenuated by concomitant administration of 6-cyano-7-nitroquimnoxaline-2,3-dione, an antogonist at N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (3,6). “

Since this partial description of the Neurotoxic properties of Acromelic Acid is a bit over my head, I decided to try again once I returned home.

At home…from “Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds” written by local (Seattle) Ornithologist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, I offer this…

“This is no swaying treetop idyll, but an extreme nearness to the earth. A tree returning to the soil, housing on its way a spiral of migrating swifts, a saucer of oval eggs. Some older guides proclaim swift nesting areas to be open, meadowish, watery places.”

I know Gavin expected Mark to pull out the birding reference but most of the books in the family room are birding guides or gardening books and I responded first. Hah! And…I’m going to forego the tagging since most folks I know have already done this meme.

The third Fate dropped in early this morning with terrible news but she was a bit too late. I was already well on my way to recovery and her news only strengthened my resolve to get out from under this dark cloud.

Huge thanks to Doug and Gavin for the pick-me-up!

Arrived home at 1:30 am PDT after waking at 8:30 am EDT…a very, very long day…when six hours of that time was spent flying and another two hours sitting in Seattle between flights. Although most of the folks who attended GB5 NYC have already posted about the weekend I have a few pics and comments to add to the mix.

Hopefully, I’ll get through my pictures tonight and will have time to write something after work tomorrow since the only thing I can thing about now is sleep and snuggling with Mark…and the dog.

We made it in to town about 7:00 Thursday night and spent the evening settling into the loft we’re renting for the next week. Here’s the view from the 28th floor balcony.

Of course we had to grab a slice of pizza before heading out on the town for a few hours. We ended up at Don’t Tell Mama’s, a fun little piano bar, and had a great time chatting up the locals. We were still on Left Coast time so we decided to head out about midnight or we’d have been there until 4:00 and hated ourselves this morning when we were to meet up with the boys we missed last fall in Boston.

Although Mark loves the subway system here, he still doesn’t quite have it figured out….

…actually, he really does love the subway and we always have a good time checking out the various stations. We also get to check out more than our fair share of stations since we usually miss our stop and end up traveling to parts unknown. Last night it was Brooklyn where we realized our mistake and jumped off the train to find there were no trains heading back to Manhattan. We were forced to wait for another train, take it to the next Brooklyn station and then double back to Downtown. Not fun when you’ve had a few drinks and there are no bathrooms in site, but we made it home without any accidents.

Today we had our first mini-event meeting Tony, Tater, RG, Stache and Father Tony for lunch. The food was wonderful and the company even better! With all those handsome men around, I felt like the luckiest gurl in town. Of course I was too dumbfounded to pull out my camera so I only have this one shot…

…but you get the idea.

It was a nice way to kick off the weekend and should make tonight’s ‘meet and greet’ a bit easier. So it’s off to find a little dinner and then up to meet the rest of the gang. I’ll be sure to document this event a little better.

It’s been a busy couple of days since the house guests left, putting the house back in order, cleaning up the loose ends at work, and ironing out the details for our trip to NYC.

We leave Thursday morning and I’m beginning to feel a bit anxious. This trip was originally planned as a small gathering of those bloggers that had, or tried, to make it to the Boston gathering last fall. Now, it’s been rolled into the annual NYC gathering which historically has been a fairly large group. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely looking forward to meeting these folks, but I’m a little uneasy in large groups of people I don’t, or barely, know.

It takes me a little time to feel comfortable in these situations, kind of like accompanying a spouse to a work gathering, so I live by the rule: “take your own party”. Mark will be with me and he’s one of the most social people I’ve ever met yet even he’s admitted to a little anxiety but, he’s my party, so I’m sure we’ll have a good time. Better yet, Tony and Tate will be there and we’ll be meeting them for lunch before the main event and that will add to “our party”. So, for now, I’m busying myself with the usual travel preparations and trying not to think beyond our lunch with the gurrrls. I feel I know them well enough that we’ll fall into comfortable camaraderie in no time.

And…if I don’t feel comfortable after the meet and greet that night…I won’t have any trouble finding something to do for the next four days. After all…it’s hard to be bored in NYC.