Treasure ! ! ! !

I just spent a couple hours looking for buried treasure. Actually it's my grandfather's pocket knife that is missing. And that happened way back when I had my horse in the early 80s. I'd seen Joe Ryan's photo in the paper telling about his adventures using his metal detector and thought he might be able to help me. The photo above shows the wonderous finds we made. Okay, they aren't worth anything but it was amazing to see how sensitive those machines are in finding the smallest piece of metal. No luck finding the knife unfortunately.

Fun new rug

This is something I got for the fun of it. There's a company that makes personalized merchandise and I picked this rug. It's called a Tweet Heart rug and it has the names of most of the dogs, cats and a horse who have lived with me over the past 45 years starting with my first dog, GYPSY and including the two dogs and two cats now here. Their names are on each of the little bird houses.

Now I need to buy another one to include those names I missed.

Yum ! ! ! !

Tonight is the annual Christmas party at the Stone Soup Studio in Cody. Linda Raynolds and Elijah Cobb put this on to celebrate the season and it's a wonderful time. Everyone brings a dish to share which means there is a huge variety from soup to nuts. Actually I don't think I've ever seen soup but that's about the only thing not offered. My contribution is two apple pies as shown above. I know, it's cake icing but it's the only thing I could think of to make it festive. What's a little more sugar in your diet, right!

California dreaming.....

Wow! OMG! Awesome! Brilliant! Amazing! These are some of the words to describe the 10 day vacation I just returned from. I went to visit my friend, Jenny Papka, at the Native Bird Connections in Orinda. She has received five birds from me in the past seven years so I was able to see them too.

This is FIONN, a leucistic Red-tailed Hawk I received with a broken wing. She's now one of Jenny's most distinctive school birds.

We did a lot of driving, sat for awhile in traffic which is normal for that area (near San Francisco) but not for me. We visited the Oakland Zoo thanks to a friend of Jenny's. Kristin works at the zoo and got permission for us to go in the back and make a dream of mine come true. I got to meet an elephant. His name is OSH, he's a 14 year old African bull elephant and looking very large to me. John and Jessica, elephant handlers assured me he would grow another two feet.

(above) me touching OSH's foot. (below) feeding him banana pieces, he was very gentle.

OSH standing behind John, myself and Kristin. Note his size....

We also visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the California Academy of Science and had a lot of fun on an amazing zip line. I've included just a few of the photos from those trips and may post more in the future. Don't want to bore you with "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" photos.

l-r: Jenny, Matt, Susan and Sue. Sue Honeywell and her son Matt were just two of the group doing the zip line. Everyone was a lot of fun to be with. The other photos show how long one of the lines was and one of two suspension bridges we also had to walk across.

Standing in the Pacific Ocean, in Yosemite (before we were told to leave) with El Capitan and Half Dome behind us and in front of one of the Giant Sequoias. Talk about tall.

Olympic fever

I thought I'd include this photo from the eagle release shown below. My maternal grand-parents are from near Toronto and thanks to a friend over there, Morley Davidson, I have some of the paraphenalia that the Canadian Olympic athletes wear. The hat I have on is from the winter games a few years ago. The mittens are from this year and are very sought after. I also have three of the 2010 pins plus another hat from before. All in all I have enjoyed showing off my heritage and wish both the U.S. and Canada the best in all their individual sports.