Of thee I sing, sweet land...

Sitting at lunch today in one of those travel centers on a freeway, I couldn’t avoid seeing and hearing a thirty-minute segment of Fox News.  Margaret told me I should lower my voice when I was telling her how much I hoped that the choice of Fox over other news options was no choice indicating preference but a simple mistake... that someone punched a number on the remote thinking another newscast would appear and then went back to the kitchen without noticing Fox was broadcasting a familiar senator’s face as it contorted around the words describing what he insists is the very worst economic time in American history because, he said in several ways that America is burdened presently with the worst president in its history. I had a strong urge to stand and yell at the TV or at least search for the remote and turn it off. Of course, I didn’t.  I just went back to eating my lunch thinking as I did that the person back there in the kitchen who made the wonderful meatloaf couldn’t possible be someone who would agree with the senator and his Fox News anchor woman... and then it occurred to me how great it is to live in a country where people can disagree so completely on what makes a great president and agree on what is a very good meatloaf.  

After lunch Margaret and I went back to driving through the center of the United States, the heartland of America... talking about how wonderful it is.

More America the Beautiful... from farms in central Utah to snows above Denver.

from Beaver, Utah:  America The Beautiful...

The balloons were flying above Del Mar and Sorrento Valley this evening... beautiful Old World ticklers... capping a wonderful evening in very good company.

...The French Chef himself tossing the salad Elaine made.

Still playing around with the new Sony attachable lens camera, I checked to see what it could do in all kinds of environments.  Margaret and I went to a lecture this morning at the San Diego Museum of Art, and that put me close enough to the House of Botany to check out the lilies that Jean E. told me I would find there.  In mid-afternoon I went out to Sunset Cliffs to see what the camera would do with waves exploding onto rocks; and, of course, I had to find birds.  Pelicans flew too high, but a sea gull sunning itself on a rock cooperated.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Trying out Sony’s innovation in the world of small cameras today, I looked for images mostly in keeping with this week’s bird theme.  The Camera is a marvel of technology.  It doesn’t have a viewfinder or an LCD viewing screen.  It must be paired with a smart phone, and it does even better what the cameras in smart phones are already doing… much better.  It’s Sony’s DSC-QX100, and I’ve paired it with my iPhone. The industry calls it an attachable lens-style camera. With 20.2 megapixels and Zeiss optics, it may take the place of the big heavy cameras I usually take on long trips. I’ve posted here six of the dozen photos I shot with it today.  I’ve got to focus on getting my mind around this new notion of what a camera is and what it takes to make a photographic image, so I think I’ll take only this QX100 on a month-long driving trip that Margaret and I are beginning this weekend. If I leave everything else behind, I will learn what the QX100 will do.

By the way, if anybody seeing these pictures knows the name of the brown bird eating wild oats, let me know what it is. I couldn’t find it in my San Diego bird book.

With the camera on a tripod in front of the hummingbird nest on our back porch, I operated the focus and shutter controls from inside the living room, having set it up while the mama bird was out getting food for the chicks so she didn't even know I was there.

This week is for the birds… beautiful, happy, doing-what-they’re-supposed-to-do birds .  Every now and then I check on one of my favorite bark scars… this one happens to be on a flowering tree in a Starbucks patio.  I have no idea how the scar got into the bark of the tree.   I hope it was an accident of nature and not done by some brainless, open-carry person with a knife who’d rather be carrying an assault rifle.   I first saw the scar and took a picture a couple of years ago.  It has been for me a kind of long-term thematic apperception test.  The image seems more bird-like than anything else.  Birds are for me mostly friendly creatures, but I’ve not had much experience with raptors… avian, mammalian, or reptilian… so it’s probably why I like them.  A friend of mine who has coffee with me in this patio says the image is threatening… but comically threatening.  Go figure.  Maybe I should set up shop in the patio beside this tree and do consultations.  On second thought, that sounds too much like that four-letter-word work; so I think I’ll stick with retirement.

Birds and flowers… that’s more my style.  The little hummingbird mother nesting in our back yard on the geranium tendril not ten feet from where I sit and read the paper is a gift of nature.  She is a model of diligence and patience.  The day began a bit cooler than usual, so she spent more time keeping her chicks warm than chasing around the garden gathering food for them. My hummingbird feeder hangs a few feet from her nest, so she can pop up there for a quick snack and be back on the nest before her babies have time to get cold. She’s a good Mother.  I’m guessing hummingbird males have nothing to do with the care and feeding of chicks, and I’ve never seen a second bird hanging around when it’s time to teach them to fly.

Everybody is a story.  Today I began to consider the possibility that every creature, every life form, is a story.  Midmorning I wandered for an hour down by the San Diego River. The river bottom runs through a busy valley from Mission Gorge out to the Pacific Ocean.  When someone asks me where I live in San Diego, the answer is Mission Valley.  Margaret and I live on a hill above the valley in a secure, lovely apartment with all the comforts a person could want.  Mission Valley is also a place where scores of homeless people live.  The first picture today is of such  spot.  If you look closely you’ll see a person on the other side of the rushes and shrubs.

  

A great variety of creatures who are not human live in Mission Valley.  I had the privilege today of watching a family of Goldfinches do some family business together.  As I was shooting the first picture, a goldfinch flitted back and forth across my field of vision several times before I finally figured out that it was concerned about my being in the little clearing that ended with the wall of rushes beside the river… then I saw movement in the grass in front of me.  Four adolescent goldfinches had left their nest, probably pushed from it by one or both the parent birds, and they were being watched carefully by an adult male and an adult female goldfinch.  I was interrupting a flying lesson.  As quickly as I could do it, I took these pictures and left the little family so they could get on with the business of staying alive.