SkyWatch Friday: "O Hushed October Morning Mild…"

I fear that between last month's premature killing freeze and some very wicked winds, we've been robbed of most of our fall foliage here. 

But we've been enjoying - and taking full advantage of - a long stretch of glorious Indian Summer weather to make up for it, and on a recent lovely evening spent at the local cemetery fulfilling photo requests for Find A Grave, I spied this stately cottonwood. Despite its golden leaves being more muted this year, it's still a standout against the blue sky and its evergreen companions...

Though the local leaves aren't providing much fall color this year, the local skies certainly have been! Here's a sampling of our harlequin sunrise on Wednesday, taken during a five-minute span (from 7:07 - 7:12am):

Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, 

birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings. 

~Terri Guillemets

It was October again... a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings… 

~L.M. Montgomery, "Anne of Green Gables"

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens...
 and you can feel the breath of winter morning and evening.
~Alexander Smith, "An Essay on an Old Subject"

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow,

Make the day seem to us less brief…

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst…

~Robert Frost

Autumn bowed to place a beautiful crown on the Queen of Morning, 

and her velvet robes sway merrily in the chilly breeze. 

~Terri Guillemets

There is a harmony 

In autumn, and a luster in its sky…

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Enjoy more October skies ~ lustrous & mellow, glorious & crisp ~ from around the world...

SkyWatch Friday: A Dickens of a Sunset

The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud 

which piled up in the west…; 

the light was all withdrawn…; the birds were silent; 

and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything. 

~Charles Dickens, "Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit"

and have a wonderful weekend!

Listening to Luiz

When I found this quote recently I agreed with it immediately, and recognized that far too often I listen like "most people." It's something I often remind myself to work on, because I think that deep listening, while seldom easy, is so important...

And then a short time later, along came this wonderful video. I was moved and inspired not only by Luiz's heartfelt and compassionate convictions (of course!), but also by how naturally his mom listens to him with such love and with such an open heart and mind, and what a perfect example she provides of listening with the intent to understand...

I especially found the last part of their conversation very touching. It probably goes without saying that I fell utterly in love with this wise, sensitive, soulful (and undeniably adorable) child. Luiz, may life always treat you, your mother, and the animals with kindness, and may you never, ever lose your beautiful compassion.

"I am committed to cultivating loving speech and deep listening 

in order to bring joy and happiness to others 

and relieve others of their suffering."

~Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing crabby about these apple blossoms!

To say it's been a devastating week for many residents of Tornado Alley, especially in Oklahoma, would be an understatement. To say that our thoughts, support and solace are with the affected people and animals as they grieve and recover is an understatement too. 

After every storm the sun will smile.

~William R. Alger

The sun has come out, and the air is vivid with spring light...

~Byron Caldwell Smith

And to say that here in northern Wyoming the trees have awakened at last would also be an understatement, though a much happier one and for that we are grateful. Seemingly overnight, the lilacs and apple, plum and crabapple trees have burst out in colorful, fragrant blossoms. Walking the dogs down any street in town is heady stuff! Juggling three dogs (and their, uh, used hygiene paraphernalia) by myself is enough of a handful without lugging the Rebel along, but after passing this crabapple tree a block or so from our house last evening I just had to return with my camera. I'm glad I did, since most of last night and this morning we've experienced 40mph winds with gusts in excess of 55mph, so though I haven't yet been able to check, I'm sure a lot of these blossoms now litter the ground...

Can you see the heart in this last one?...

For hurting hearts any and everywhere...

Your heart has been sore wounded too. 

Dear Light, love shall cherish you, till you look again on life with happy eyes.

~Byron Caldwell Smith

SkyWatch Friday: The Bighorns at Sunset

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, 

leading to the most amazing view. 

May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
~Edward Abbey~

Black Tooth Mountain & neighboring Bighorn Range peaks

Enjoy your weekend, and happy Sky Watching!

Ringing out the Old....

I like to tidy up loose ends as an old year wraps up, so here are a few recent photographic and anecdotal stragglers I haven't had time to post but wanted to share before we find ourselves in 2012, distracted with trying to remember to write the new year on our checks. :-)

My Merry Muffin Misadventure

First is the story of my biggest kitchen debacle ever (not that I have many, honest!) As you know from reading my previous post, the holiday season was a struggle this year between having the flu and BW's atrocious work schedule. My friend Robyn and I always get together shortly before Christmas to have lunch and enjoy our gift exchange, and this year we'd decided to order take-out Chinese (our local Chinese bistro makes some slammin' vegan dishes!) and have our get-together on the 23rd here at Dragonfly Cottage, which Robyn hadn't seen since we were still in the throes of moving in. Then I got (and stayed) sick. Then Robyn's husband Jesse broke his wrist and had to have surgery and a metal plate installed. So we decided to postpone our get-together till after Christmas. But as the 23rd progressed, I was feeling better and had cleaned house so Robyn and I decided to see how it was going that afternoon and maybe stick with our original plan, but left it open-ended. When I hadn't heard from her by about 4:30, I decided to bake a batch of Hearty Spiced Cocoa Muffins for BW to enjoy when he got home. But then Robyn called to say she and Jess were picking up the Chinese food and would be here in half an hour, and since I'd already started mixing some of the liquid ingredients, I thought heck, I'll just forge ahead. It's an easy recipe, I've made it many times before, it won't take long, and we'll have the muffins for dessert. Simple! No sweat! Step aside, Martha Stewart!

But alas, I'm a cook who just doesn't function well if I feel rushed or distracted, and suddenly I was both. The muffin recipe calls for a cup of non-dairy milk, and I like to use 1/2 cup of vanilla and 1/2 cup of chocolate soy or almond milk. I'd already measured and added the chocolate milk to some other liquid ingredients, and had just shaken and pulled off the little plastic sealing thingy (under the twist cap) on a brand new half gallon container of the vanilla almond milk, but hadn't poured and measured it yet, when Robyn called. So when we hung up and I resumed my muffin-making, somehow I managed to completely forget that I'd already shaken and opened the container. I'm sure you're ahead of me by now - gave that container a good shake and ended up with almond milk in my face and hair, saturating my apron, sweater sleeves and even the t-shirt beneath, dripping down the front of the cupboards and dishwasher, and in widening puddles on the floor. I was aghast. But what was there to do but rinse out my hair as best I could, change my clothes, wipe up the mess, and proceed... now in a bigger hurry than before.

So I made it through the liquids without further incident and started combining the dry ingredients, which includes 1/2 cup of sucanat. To save time, I poured the sucanat from the container in which we store it into the measuring cup instead of spooning it in. Normally this works fine, but I didn't realize there were two fist-sized lumps of sucanat lurking just beneath the innocently powdery surface, and they hit that nearly full 1/2 cup measuring device like a pair of massive meteors slamming into a lake. Sucanat covered every surface I'd just cleaned (except my hair). Through tears of frustration now, I cleaned up THAT mess, and after pausing to turn on all our little lamps and Christmas lights (no small task), feed the dogs and supervise them while they went out front for their post-dinner constitutionals (the back yard being too muddy), I resumed my muffin project. Because really, what else could possibly go wrong?

I was very careful and precise in measuring the spices, given how it had been going thus far. Didn't want to confuse my baking soda with my baking powder, or my cayenne with my cinnamon! I made it to the end of the recipe in fine shape, but noticed the batter was soupier than I remembered it being from previous times. So I figured I must have just added a bit too much almond milk, and added a couple of teaspoons of flour to compensate. But it made little difference. I also noticed the batter was pale - more khaki than dark, chocolatey brown like it should have been. This I attributed to using chocolate almond rather than chocolate soy milk. Ignoring all the red flags and klaxons, I spooned the pale and soggy batter into my silicone muffin cups, sprinkled some demerara sugar on the tops, and was placing the tray in the oven when it finally hit me. I'd failed to add the six tablespoons of cocoa powder!

I actually stood there for a few precious minutes, trying to calculate how they might taste without it (concluding that since "cocoa" is actually part of this muffin recipe's name, it was probably a key ingredient), how the hell I was supposed to add it now, how much time I could possibly have remaining before Robyn and Jesse showed up with gifts and Chinese food, and whether I would be ahead to just dump everything in the garbage and pretend it never happened. But being even more loath to waste ingredients than I am to have to gag down a baking failure, I scraped the batter out of the muffin cups and back into the mixing bowl, gamely added and thoroughly stirred in the cocoa powder (ignoring that it's supposed to be sifted with the other dry ingredients and then have the pre-mixed liquid ones stirred in "just until mixed"), refilled the muffin cups, and with hope in my heart and perspiration (and a little vanilla almond milk I'd missed) on my brow, popped them back into the oven, all before Robyn and Jesse showed up.

Unfortunately, the Baking Gremlins weren't through toying with me yet. This kitchen has a fancy, high-tech double oven, and its timer is programmed using super-sensitive soft-touch buttons. An errant touch, easily and unwittingly made, converts the timer from minutes and seconds to hours and minutes. I really don't have to tell you at this point, do I, that I'd set the timer for 15 hours rather than 15 minutes without realizing it. Distracted by Robyn and Jesse's arrival and house tour and serving up the Chinese food and pouring wine, it occurred to me at some unknown point later that I'd never heard the timer go off. It was a Christmas miracle that they weren't burnt to a cinder. In fact, they weren't burnt at all, but in addition to being over-stirred (and downright man-handled), they were now quite overbaked. I took them out, expecting them to turn into little brown rocks as they cooled. But we all tried them and they were not only edible, they tasted very good and their texture really wasn't bad! So though I wouldn't recommend following my unorthodox techniques from that evening, I do highly recommend this recipe as not only delicious and (as sweets go) healthy, but also bordering on saintly for its phenomenal capacity to forgive!

The Loot

BW and I didn't exchange gifts or get ourselves anything for Christmas this year, but we enjoyed an abundance of goodies to unwrap and enjoy thanks to the generosity of my friends and several of his customers! Here are a few highlights... You've already seen a photo of the entire string of pretty paper hearts from Barbara in my last post, but here's an artsy closeup I took of one of the bigger hearts...

I don't have a photo of it, but Joanne (aka AdventureJo) gave me this wonderful digital photo frame, and just as soon as my tech-challenged Amish self figures out how to load my favorite photos onto it, I'm going to have some wicked fun with that! :-)

And Rose gave me a tin of Remedy Teas Orange Krush (which I have really been enjoying, and has me convinced I am now a Remedy Teas junkie), and two bars of delightful Hugo Naturals seasonal soaps: the lovely peppermint candy cane and cinnamon spice poinsettia, which are too pretty to use and smell good enough to eat! I love how Rose's thoughtful gifts always introduce me to wonderful products.

From my longtime friends Paul and Marsha (real names: Spud and CG ~ which stands for "Candle Girl," earned when she once propped her stockinged feet up on the coffee table too close to a candle and caught her sock on fire and has never lived it down) came this beautiful (and heavy!) wolf hologram crystal, a wonderful surprise!

I've loved wolves since I was a little girl,

collecting pictures of them for a scrapbook I still cherish.

Since then I've been lucky to know several wolves personally.

In the wild their plight is dire, their future in peril.

Please take a moment to help endangered native wolves

in my state of Wyoming and neighboring Montana!

One of my gifts from Robyn was a set of three large ornaments in the shapes of a gingerbread man, snowman and stocking. But I didn't put them on our Christmas tree because they're for the birds. Literally. :-) Made of a variety of bird seeds and dried fruits, I've hung two of them from our juniper and poplar trees and am saving the third for later this winter...

A seedy guy hanging around in the juniper

The stocking was hung from the poplar with care

in hopes that the chickadees soon would be there!

The Wild Critters

Okay, we didn't see Tigger (but check out Barbara's snow leopards!), but we had some bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun-fun-fun-fun-fun wildlife sightings lately! On Christmas Day, BW and I took the dogs for a walk along one of our favorite sections of the walking path network, very near Dragonfly Cottage, which we call "The Apple Orchard Trail" because it passes by an area with several bountiful apple trees. Regrettably, I didn't take my camera with me that day but here's a photo of a section of that trail that I took in October...

We had it all to ourselves that late Christmas afternoon, except for all the wildlife that showed up to make merry! First was a herd of about two dozen mule deer, running hellbent across a very steep, open section of the opposite hillside. At first we thought something was chasing them, but quickly realized they were just playing! They chased each other in varying groups down the hillside to the creek, then back up to the top, then back and forth across it, bounding like impalas (as muleys are wont to do), and clearly having a jolly time! We all really enjoyed watching them till their play date wound down. We'd no sooner turned and started hiking back home when Josie alerted on something across the creek, which turned out to be a gorgeous male pheasant, strutting his colorful self among the trees and brush. After admiring him for a few minutes, we set out for home again only to be stopped in our tracks by an adorable little otter, frisking along the opposite creek bank! We watched him play until he splashed into the creek and vanished. BW thinks his den was under there somewhere. I've never seen a wild otter before and had no idea there were any in this area! It was an amazing little stretch of abundant frolicking wildlife and one of the best Christmas presents the Universe could have given us! Only thing that would have made it better is if yours truly had brought her *&$# camera! I'll be revisiting the spot where we saw the otter as often as possible, with my camera, in case he does encore performances!

Here's one wildlife photo I did get, earlier today when the first chickadee finally discovered the gingerbread seed ornament!

A Message from the Universe

And finally, and speaking of gifts from the Universe, comes this wonderful way to bid farewell to 2011 and greet 2012. Thursday morning was rainy and windy but by afternoon the rain had stopped. It continued to be windy and chilly, though, so the dogs were contentedly snoozing on their Pooch Porch while I worked on my blog, when I heard our neighbors' dog bark followed by some woofs and boofs (which is something between a bark and a woof) from our girls. I looked out the front windows to see what they might be boofing at, but all I saw was a little girl of perhaps 8 or 9, wandering rather aimlessly with a little black dog in tow across a couple of vacant lots on the other side of the walking path. Most people don't venture from the paved walking path like that so I figured that unconventional behavior is what inspired the boofing, and went back to what I'd been doing. A few minutes later I looked out to see if she was still there, but she and her dog were nearly out of sight down the path to Whitney Commons by then. And that's when I noticed that the door on our old mailbox, no longer in use since the communal neighborhood mailboxes were installed early last month, was hanging open. When I stepped out to go close it, I looked down and saw a piece of green construction paper, rolled up like a scroll and tied with a piece of pink yarn, sitting on our top front step. I closed the mailbox, brought the scroll in and opened it. I don't know if it was the wandering girl who left it, but it's had me smiling ever since. And as we enter the new year, its sweet message is worth passing along to each of you...

:-)

And have a very

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on,

with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

~ Hal Borland

SkyWatch Friday: Summer Sunrises

For this week's SkyWatch Friday, I give you a month of summer sunrises ~ all taken from our house on the side of a Wyoming mountain ~ along with some inspiring quotes and a perfect song accompaniment to enhance your viewing pleasure. :-)

July 19, 2011

I wake up in the morning torn between the desire

to save the world and to enjoy the world.

This makes it hard to plan the day.

~ E.B. White

August 3

I'll tell you how the sun rose,

a ribbon at a time...

~ Emily Dickinson

August 8

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

~ John Muir

August 8

Climb up on some hill at sunrise.

Everybody needs perspective once in a while,

and you'll find it there.

~ Robb Sagendorph

August 12

Each day comes bearing its gifts.

Untie the ribbons.

~ Ann Ruth Schabacker

August 14

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep...

~ Jelaluddin Rumi

And here's an appropriate song for my readers in the southern hemisphere, as your winter gives way to sunny spring...


For more sky photos from both hemispheres, visit...

In memory of Klaus Peter, SkyWatch co-founder and co-host 1960-2011

Vita mutatur, non tollitur

(Life is changed, not taken away)

SkyWatch Friday: Salsify against the Sky

(Click photos for more detailed images)

Western Salsify (Tragopogon dubius) in our pasture

With a yellow budding Salsify flower to its left and fragrant wild Bergamot at its base, this Western Salsify will soon release its large dandelion-type seeds to drift across the summer sky on mountain breezes.

Wildflower seed on the sand and stone

May the four winds blow you safely home...

Wildflower seed on the sand and wind

May the four winds blow you home again.

~Grateful Dead, "Franklin's Tower"

Aren't they beautiful?

The seed has no idea of being some particular plant,

but it has its own form and is in perfect harmony

with the ground, with its surroundings ...

and there is no trouble.

This is what we mean by naturalness.

~ Shrunyu Suzuki, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind"

Click on

for more skies (with and without wafting seeds) :-)

SkyWatch Friday: Riding the Thermals

Soar into the weekend on the thermals of Wyoming's summer skies above the Big Horn Mountains, accompanied, if you wish, by Brian Crain's beautiful song Dream of Flying...



Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Click the photos for larger versions...

Paragliders often ride the thermals above our house (at 5500'),

since there's a popular launch point above us.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass

under trees on a summer's day,

listening to the murmur of the water,

or watching the clouds float across the sky,

is by no means a waste of time.

~J. Lubbock

It looks like he's sitting on the cloud!

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all along,

my soul is being blown by great winds across the sky.

~Ojibway saying

Floating back to earth about 1000' below our house,

with the Goose Creek Valley spread out below.

Be sure to visit

to see more skies around the world!