Camera-less Road Trip @ Thanks For Your Comments

The trip down the mountain was gorgeous with verdant hills, dotted with cows, that would have reminded me of Yorkshire if I had ever been there. I have not, but I saw Calendar Girls and read many mysteries by Peter Robinson, so I have an idea of the landscape. Orange flowers still in bud covered the fields and the oak trees were coming alive. Sadly, many of them and many fir trees have died in the drought. 

Looking through my archives, I can't find any pictures of a trip down the mountain in spring. So, instead, I'm posting some I took last year from the west side of our town, where there are oaks and green fields. These were taken later in spring. 

As we drove down the highway, low flying buzzards came sailing down right in front of the jeep. This happened twice and so fast, I wouldn't have been able to capture them with my camera, so I didn't miss out. Instead, I had the opportunity to see, with my own eyes, these large birds close up. And it was quite something to see their faces, the red, that you don't really see as they fly above.

After we finally were done with the Jeep/Chrysler dealer, we were starving and I was throwing a few mini-diabetic hunger fits. So we went to Chili's close by Costco and made a meal of it. We rarely eat out, so we splurged. Hubby had steak and I had salmon, both really good. Then I decided I just had to have some dessert and my hubby wasn't going to be left out: I had cheese cake and my husband (I wish I had assigned my Mr. Anonymous a fitting name, like Buttons: My Hero, and feral woman's: Mr. Forestman, when I started my blog; I really don't like this husband stuff), anyway, he had a huge, warm, chocolate chip cookie, with hot chocolate sauce, topped off with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Dreamy stuff! We ate of each other's goodies and I don't remember when I last ate that much. I could barely move, and kept adding more and more insulin, feeling immensely grateful for my insulin pump. I survived, except for high sugars coming on this morning. Oh, well, sometimes you just have to be bad!

This time at Costco, my husband, full of good food didn't dawdle, he just walked around the store and only picked up what we actually needed. There must be something to this idea of grocery shopping while on a full stomach. 

Finally, thank you so much for your comments on my tired tree. I was especially happy to hear from feral woman, who knows about these things. She said this: That looks to me like a healthy juniper that sprawling - they spread out like that when the going gets tough in order to survive - "dropping" unnecessary branches and promoting the strongest branches in order to catch sunlight for photosynthesis... kinda like us ;)

Thanks for letting me know this, I will now understand my junipers better. I believe that every living thing in the desert must have some tricks to pull out in hard times, in order to survive. The last time we had good precipitation here was three or four years ago and I remember how green the junipers were in the spring that followed.