mistressofmuses

Quick picture of Berry Mad, lurking in the corner of her plant pot.

On Tuesday, we had a few errands to run, but spent most of the day at Hudson Gardens.

It was a little early, though it's been so warm it didn't feel like it should be, ha. They hadn't yet planted their annuals or put out any of the water plants, but there was still plenty to see, and it was a very nice day to walk around.


Crabapple blossoms against the sky.

Sixteen more pictures:

Lily of the valley.


A bushtit. They are so remarkably tiny, and the name remains so unfortunate!


Potentilla.


Honeybee on an allium.


Wild roses.


An iris.


Speedwell.


More irises.


Lilacs, which smelled wonderful.


These roses were such an intense red that my phone camera didn't want to believe it existed, ha.


Only a few of the flowers had this kind of yellow variegation, but it was neat.

We stopped and had a fancy coffee and split a pastry (banana bread) from the coffee shop down along the bike trail. Always nice.


The bee hives are more accessible again! Still behind their usual fence, of course, but last year they were trying to reestablish some of the grass and groundcover, so a lot of the grounds were off limits, including the view of the hives.

We'd been hoping for frogs, but alas. Mom and Taylor heard a lot of frogsong up in the mountains a few days before (on a Mother's Day hike), but nothing at the gardens, alas.

However...


There were so many tadpoles! Future frogs!

We took another break at the far end of the gardens, and split a can of boba tea. It was delicious, but had a couple silly things on the can:


Shack well! Precipitation may occur!

We spent a long time just sitting in the "cascades" area, listening to the water and talking. It was a lovely afternoon.


Across the 'mountain stream', a family of geese scrambling up the banks. They were so cute! And hungry. We watched the little goslings just going to town on some of the plants over there, haha.


I liked that there was grass and some small plants growing out of the top of one of the logs. I also rather liked the reflection of the trees.

After the gardens, we also stopped by Barnes and Noble. I had a couple of gift cards from Christmas and my birthday, and I was wanting to get Overgrowth, the new Mira Grant book.


Obviously, I found a few more books than that, as always.

Five Ways to Forgiveness was one of the Ursula K Le Guin books that wasn't included in that humble bundle of her work, so it'd been on my list. The other four books were on a "buy one, get one 50% off" horror table. I picked out A House With Good Bones, because I've heard good things about it, and Blood On Her Tongue because it sounds interesting and I was tempted by the cool cover design. (The bloody effect on the pages!) Alex picked out The Last House on Needless Street and The Reformatory, because those sounded the best to him. We'll add them to our shared TBR list, ha.

Yesterday, after stopping by the vet to get Cy's sample foods, we went on a walk along the greenbelt. (Not with Cy - these sorts of longer walks are too much for him, anymore.) It was a nice day, fairly warm but not terribly hot. I did get my first sunburn of the year, and I think even poor Bella got a little burned on her nose. (Not badly! Some aloe and we're all good today.)

The usual spot we park at was going through repaving, so we started our walk at a different point, and went the opposite direction that we usually do, so we saw a slightly different stretch. We still looped back to see a few favorite points along the part we'd been originally planning on.


Nice dramatic tree, with the smaller flowering trees in front. (These are the ones that remind me of the plums in our yard as a kid, but I think they're actually sand cherry.)


The creek and a lone female merganser. She had a pretty great mohawk.

( Fifteen more pictures: flowers, birds, etc. )

Today wasn't as warm as it has been (we set a record just a few days ago, hitting 86°. While I enjoy the warm, it is a little concerning to be that close to 90 in April.) It was nice enough to want to be outside though, so we headed over to Pelican Pond. There have been pelicans there a few times this year already, but none today.

(Glad we took advantage of the nice day; Friday - Sunday we might be getting snow. Sobcry.)

It does make me feel a little better to get to go outside and do things, even if the boost is a bit temporary, so that's another reason to be glad.

Bella made it all the way around, though she was pretty tired for the last third of it or so. We'll get her endurance built back up yet!

When we first got there, before we'd even gotten out of the car, we saw a cloud of seagulls take off, all milling around in the air above the lake. They were reacting to an eagle! The eagle was hunting, making some really dramatic swooping dives toward the water, but I don't think it caught anything. After a couple minutes, it flew off into the trees. (I of course couldn't get any good pictures from the parking lot, haha.)


The apple trees were blooming and they smell absolutely wonderful.

Four more pictures of flowers:

Hint of pink!


Pink! I think these are crabapples.


More pink!


Golden banner.

A chickadee! I love them.


A spotted towhee!

Five more pictures of various birds:

Another little chickadee.


Once we'd made it to the far side of the lake, the eagle came back! It was circling fairly high, so still no great pictures, but at least you can see that it was there, haha.

We saw the eagle a third time, too. It always seemed to decide to land on the opposite side of wherever we were at the time, haha.

While I am still very excited when I get to see eagles, it's also exciting that it no longer feels like an Event. When I was a kid, it was a rarity to see them at all: there was one place they nested every year, but other than that one place, it was something that might happen every few years if you were lucky.


A "bachelor flock" of ducks.


Nice green head and bright orange feet. (Also a goose nesting in the background.)


A flicker! This one had a brief fight on the ground with another flicker and won the chance to eat some ants, but then flew up to the tree a minute or so later.

I did also find about half of a mostly-skeletal cormorant. It's kind of cool, but not everyone wants to see dead critters, so it gets its own section:

One picture of a dead bird. Mostly skeletal.

On the sort of beachy area... the skull and neck of a cormorant. I think it's sort of cool to see the shape of the beak so clearly, with the little hook that I imagine makes catching fish underwater a little easier. (There was also a wing and the keelbone nearby, but I didn't take pictures of those.)

While there are plenty of potential predators, I do wonder if this might have been the result of a successful eagle's hunt. (It could also be coyote or fox, but it seems less likely they'd succeed in catching a bird that spends so much time in the water or on islands/up high trees.)

On Saturday, everyone returned from their respective "trips." I have lots to catch up on.

Alex went to a model show in Kansas last week, so I brought the dogs and stayed with my mom and sibling for a few days, Wednesday through Saturday, since I didn't have access to a vehicle at home, plus didn't want the dogs to be alone for 9+ hours while I worked.

Berry Mad got to stay home alone, though we of course made sure she had a full pond and she got the last of the most recent batch of crickets.


She's so cute! Standing up all tall.

I was very worried about the extended time with the dogs in the house with Jaspurr, the new cat. Not so much because I expected anything to go badly, but just knowing that if something did go wrong, it could go extremely wrong.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened! Really... nothing much at all happened.

Jaspurr did stay upstairs basically the whole time, but he also didn't seem distressed about it. He did not hide or get anxious. He just didn't want to be around the dogs, though it seemed like he sort of enjoyed watching them. That was a relief, because that was basically my ideal scenario: cat with his own safe zone to stay in without needing to be confined, with no evident stress for anyone.


This was basically the whole three days: Bella in motion, Cy oblivious, Jaspurr judging from the railing of the upper floor.

Bella noticed the cat a few times, but was more jealous that mom would go upstairs with treats for him and to play with him than upset/interested in reaching him. Cy also noticed him a few times, and he had a meltdown about it every time, because he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs (as we had the bottom of the stairs blocked off.) Cy loves cats, ever since he got to "help raise" some orphaned kittens our friends were bottle feeding. Cy has some of the strongest paternal instincts I've ever seen in any animal, and he loved those kittens.

Cy did realize that sometimes he could specifically see Jaspurr in the hallway mirror, which reflects more of that upper floor than is visible from the living room, so he would just stand there and stare at the mirror and cry about it.

More pictures of the dogs:

Saintly Sister Belladonna, true martyr.

The dogs and I slept downstairs in the basement, so that we could shut the door on the dogs and give Jaspurr his house back overnight.


Cy was pretty happy about the basement sleeping arrangements, since the couch was wide enough for him to sleep on it with me.


Bella was a little less enthusiastic about the basement, because you can hear everything else going on in the house so loudly. I'm not sure if she knew it was people walking around upstairs, or if she thought the ceiling was haunted, haha. She'd walk around trying to figure out the source of the sounds.


Bella in the living room with the rainbow banana.


Dogs on couch.

Some pictures Taylor sent me while I was at work:


Couch dogs.


The saddest beast the world has ever seen.


Cy, helpfully assisting with opening the bathroom door.


Cy watching the oven dog TV.

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Alex's drive out to Kansas on Thursday was fine, but unpleasantly windy.

The hotel he stayed in was quite nice for a relatively inexpensive hotel. Dated, but clean and everything worked. (Which was better than we can say for the one we stayed at in South Dakota, damn.)

The Breyer Midwest model show was on Friday.

Alex did pretty well!


18 placings out of 50 models is pretty good. 6 NAN cards and one sectional champion! (Sectional champion also came with a prize model, "Sorry Not Sorry," which was a special run from BreyerFest last year. However, Alex already had this model, so he sold it to his table-mate, since she wanted one.)

BreyerWest/now BreyerMidwest has, for the last several years, had an event-exclusive model. These are only available to people who attend the event themselves: you cannot have someone else pick it up for you. This year was a glossy version of the portrait model Marc of Charm!


He's so shiny!

This is one of my favorites of Breyer's recent sculpts (sculpted by Jennifer Scott, an artist who lives fairly local to me, and who by utter coincidence is a mutual acquaintance of a DW friend of mine!) The regular Marc of Charm model is part of the general Breyer line, and we have wanted to see him in gloss ever since he was released. (Breyer sometimes does special gloss runs of other regular run models, but while others of his release year were, Marc of Charm was never never included in those events. We were SO EXCITED that he was the event model this year.)

The drive back from Kansas to Colorado on Saturday was also apparently very windy and unpleasant, but uneventful. Alex is super wiped out and unfortunately hurting pretty badly, but it was a good not-quite-weekend.

-

It was nice to have a couple days that I got to hang out with Taylor and my mom, and while I started off being very stressed and anxious about the dogs and the cat, it all went just fine.

Monday was our last day in Arizona. Our flight was late in the afternoon again, so we still had some time to kill.

Taylor needed to work a half day, so got up super early. They worked in our hotel room for the first chunk of the morning.

Alex asked me to go to Starbucks and look for one of their Arizona mugs if I had a chance to. The nearest Starbucks was a mile or so away, so my mom agreed to go on a walk with me to go get some coffee and a souvenir mug, lol. They didn't have any Arizona mugs, but they did have a Phoenix one, so that's what Alex got, haha.


Little cactus beds in the hotel's courtyard. Not as exciting as all the cacti at the gardens, but I was still excited to see saguaros everywhere.

On the walk back to the hotel, my mom and I saw a cactus wren building a nest in a cholla!


We watched him for quite a while, flying off and coming back with more materials for the nest.

Two more of the wren:

A little after we got back it was checkout time. The resort was fully booked for Monday night, so didn't have any late checkout options. They did have storage for luggage, though. Taylor set up to finish their workday in one of the sort-of lounge sort-of restaurant areas. Mom and I hung out outside and just read or killed time on our phones. I think I fell asleep for a little while, ha.


There were flocks of grackles in the courtyard. They had lots to say and really hoped we had snacks for them to poach. (We did not.)


One of the bigger saguaros in the courtyard. (This one is just slightly visible in the first pic in this post - the second garden bed toward the top, but it's almost entirely obscured by the tree.) I do love how many of them have woodpecker nesting holes. We did see a few gila woodpeckers, I just never got a good pic!


And the little saguaros that are in danger of tipping over... this is how we keep them standing, I guess.

The flight back was fine. There was a lot of turbulence again, but we arrived fine. Taylor and I were across the aisle from each other, so we could at least make faces at each other about the screaming child. :|


Welcome back to DIA. I love you, luggage gargoyle.

It was miserably cold back in Denver. It was well worth the cost to park at one of the offsite indoor garages, since at least we didn't have to chip ice off the car. The drive back to my mom's sucked for a bit on the slick roads, but we made it. I picked up the rest of my stuff, and then she took me back home.

Didn't get home until pretty late, but it was nice to be back. <3

After Butterfly Wonderland, we did sit outside for maybe twenty minutes or half an hour, hoping Taylor would start to feel better. Luckily they did! So after that, we headed toward the OdySea Aquarium.


There were a ton of rays, which I really loved.


Seahorses!!


I was extremely charmed by the variety of clownfish! I don't think I've ever seen this many kinds before.

( Twenty three more below the cut: )

The big plan for Saturday was a group hike with most of the party.

Originally we had signed up to go with, but my mom had us bail. Her foot is still barely healed from the melanoma surgery back in December, and she was very worried that a serious hike would be painful and potentially damaging. So instead, we decided to do our own thing!

We got tickets to two local attractions: Butterfly Wonderland and The OdySea Aquarium. Both are located along a sort of walkable mall/city center/tourism center called The Arizona Boardwalk.

I took a bunch of pictures at both the butterfly house and the aquarium, so those will get their own posts. This one is just for the other stuff we saw on the boardwalk.

We were able to take a shuttle from the hotel over, which was nice.

Right at the entrance is a really cool carousel, with all kinds of interesting animals!


We were most excited initially to see an okapi! I love okapis, and they're definitely not a common animal to see represented anywhere. I was then very charmed by the little poison dart frog right next to it. <3 When the carousel was in motion, the frog looked like it was hopping.

3 more pictures from the carousel:

A lovely hummingbird. The butterfly on its saddle is the logo for Butterfly Wonderland.


My absolute favorite was this sort of classic dragon.


Another angle on the dragon (the tail!), plus the nice rainbow seahorse.

I'm sad I did not apparently get a picture of the manatee, which had a lily pad saddle, and was super cute.

There was also a bunch of art, some of which just seemed to be public art, some of which was advertising things you could do on the boardwalk.


I liked this delightfully unsettling statue. :)

5 more pictures:

A flying saucer. (There was an alien encounter/UFO museum, but having been to the UFO museum in Roswell, NM, I fear all other UFO tourist traps will pale in comparison.)


I WANT TO BELIEVE


Not art, just an advertisement. We did not go eat at the Pangaea Dinosaur Grill, but I loved the dinosaurs that were in only some of the product photos. Both the model dino in the top photo, and the weird photoshopped glowing raptor, ha.


A T-rex made of old tires.


And a scrap-metal Predator. :)

Mostly I just feel really behind. The whole *gestures* everything with the election makes it hard to want to do or say much of anything, but I'm trying to get back to doing... something. Catching up here. Writing something.

My break from work was sort of a nothing span of time. We did almost nothing in terms of "going out to do things" and I did almost nothing in terms of "productive personal projects that would have been worthwhile uses of the time."

I spent a couple nights hanging out with Taylor, Sunday (Oct 27th) through Tuesday (Oct 29th). That was fun.

Unfortunately, that Sunday night, Cy started really having a hard time walking. Just about as bad as the first time we'd taken him to the emergency vet. I wasn't home, but Alex was extremely worried. He did start to slowly improve after that, though! Alex was concerned that maybe he'd had a stroke, because his balance was so bad, and he only wanted to turn to the left. I'm more inclined to think it was still just pain, and that moving right was more painful. He wasn't *incapable* of turning the other direction; just reluctant to. He's been continuing to get better, and was back to wanting to run and play by the end of the week, but it was a bad couple of days.

That same Sunday night into Monday, the first katydid, Greenbean, died. :( I knew that late-October - mid-November was about the longest I could expect to have them, but it was still sad to have him go. It's about a month longer than he likely would have lived in the wild, and he overcame that terrible probable-poisoning, and seemed to have a happy month with us, judging by his enthusiastic clicking and eating of green beans.

I miss the clicking. :(

That Tuesday (the 29th), we did our one "go out and do things," which was going to a haunted house. It was fun, though I feel like Alex always goes through them faster than I want to! But there were a lot of cool sets and fun costume pieces. There were two houses: one was nautical-themed and one was more traditional haunted house. Both were neat, but the second one felt a bit more engaging, like it was just better established, maybe. It was a good time, and I'm glad we went.

Halloween itself was kind of a bummer, just in terms of how little we did, but it wasn't *bad.*

Friday (Nov 1st) we did a big grocery trip, but Alex started feeling sick partway through, so I wound up doing most of it solo.

Saturday (Nov 2nd) was a model show. We'd spent much of the week leading up to it doing prep for that, as this one was focused on collectibility (so emphasis on things like age/rarity/condition) rather than the shows we usually go to, where the focus is more on realism. The show... did not go terribly well for us, haha. Not a lot of winners, though the show itself was good. Two of the few winning horses we had were my two from the last couple years of "NaMoPaiMo" - my wisteria stained-glass styled horse (who got second in her class) and my art-deco peacock horse (who got first in his!) I was quite happy about that.
My mom kindly watched the dogs, even though it meant barricading part of her house off so that the cat wouldn't have to see the dogs at all.

Sadly also on Saturday, the second katydid, Moodring, passed away. We suspected it was coming, as she was suddenly eating far less, and then on Friday night she didn't want to move when I got into her cage to swap out her food. :(

RIP, my katydids. I'm glad we had you for a little while, and I hope it was a decent life of green beans and no predators. I miss the clicking.

We are left with somewhere around 30 or more katydid eggs, as Moodring just kept laying them. I don't know how many of them are viable (if any), as the two weren't housed together for very long. There are a few obvious "duds" - ones that are small and dark, obviously different than the bigger, smoother tan ones... but whether they're *actually* fertilized or not, I don't know. We'll keep an eye on them and figure out what to do if we DO wind up with a bunch of katydid nymphs.

Time change has not been terribly kind to me. I am definitely feeling the impact from having it get dark so early.

The election happened on Tuesday and was a bit of a dismal, miserable shock. I still don't have anything better or more meaningful to say about it. I am still afraid of what will be coming.

The return to work was mostly fine, except that now it's dark by the time I leave, which is tough. One of my work friends (our lead instructor) had to go on surprise leave to take care of his father.

We had a major winter storm come through starting on Thursday. It snarled local roads a lot less significantly than expected (Friday night and Saturday morning were supposed to be basically impossible to navigate, but thankfully we did not actually have any trouble.) The storm total by the airport came in at 20", so it was a pretty significant storm! I was super concerned about the potential for broken branches; with the unseasonably warm weather we've had, lots of trees are still leafed out, and I was afraid the snow would break many of them. Also surprisingly less of a problem than I'd expected!

We had a weird power outage on Friday night. Our bathroom light, bedroom light/fan, microwave, and dishwasher stayed on. Everything else, from outlets to stove to other lights, all went out. We messed with the breakers for a good five or ten minutes before we realized that the lights in the apartment hallways were on their emergency power, so it wasn't just us. The parking lot lights were also out. The street lamps were on, but the traffic signals were out. I've never had something like that happen - as far as I knew, all our power to the building came from the same source, and in the past a power outage has knocked everything out, not left a handful of lights and appliances somehow working.

I haven't wanted to write anything much since the election news, though that'll be its own post, probably.

About the only good thing has been reading. I finished Acceptance and have started Absolution.

This "weekend" I decided to get my covid and flu vax out of the way, while we're still allowed to. The pharmacist who did them for me was great - whichever he did first I almost didn't feel at all, and the second only stung a bit. They haven't knocked me down quite as badly as all the previous covid shots have, but I've still felt under the weather yesterday and today. I'm hopeful I feel a bit better tomorrow when I'm back at work, but shouldn't be so sick I can't tough it out.

Unless of course, I'm just also getting sick. I've felt crappy for much of the week, with intermittent sore throat, but mostly just tiredness. That's worse today, but I'm hoping its just my usual side-effects. I've been falling asleep by 8:00 on some nights, but am still exhausted when I get up the next day. Is it getting sick, or just the depression? I can't quite tell.

Last week, we finally had a clear day where we could go take a look and try to spot the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet.

It was dimmer that night than it had been on previous nights, but the previous few nights had been too cloudy. My eyesight isn't good enough to have really quite seen it with the naked eye - I could see that there was *something* there, but couldn't see the comet itself very clearly - but Alex's phone picked it up fairly well.


This was my favorite of the shots he got.

Definitely neat to see. :) I don't recall ever getting to see a comet that was this visible (I was born a couple years too late for Halley's comet's last visit, and the others I remember hearing about typically required a telescope.)

Last week Alex and I went back to Hudson Gardens, a free botanical garden. We went back in the spring, but at the time it was a little too early for a lot of the stuff we wanted to see. This time we were too late! But it was nice to go anyway.

The gardens are doing a seasonal event, "The Magic of the Jack-o-Lanterns" or something to that effect. It's a paid, ticketed event at night, but you can walk through the setup during the day as part of the regular free admission.

The Halloween setup is pretty cool - tons of carved (foam) pumpkins. (But pretty good realistic fake pumpkins!) Unfortunately, it does block a couple areas of the garden off even more than they already were. (This year they've roped some sections off for reseeding and to reestablish areas that have been eroded. I can't be mad about that, but it's sad not to be able to get to all the usual things. The event stuff ropes some of the things like the beehives off entirely, so you can't approach them at all.)

We were too late for some of the stuff I'd hoped to see, like the water lilies (which we were too early for in the spring), but the roses were having a fantastic second bloom! The single frost we had last month seems to have done away with the Japanese beetles that were devouring them earlier in the year, so they were doing great now!


Always love bees on flowers.


I also really liked this rose. The picture only sort of does justice to just how enormous it was!

( Ten more below the cut: )

And there were the pumpkins! Like I mentioned above, they are foam pumpkins rather than real ones. They're good fakes, and it makes sense. If you want the displays to last the whole month, real ones certainly wouldn't!

Lots of the displays were things like pop culture figures that I didn't really care about too much, but some of them were really neat.


Edgar Allan Poe was certainly an appropriate choice, imo.

( Eleven more below the cut: )