First Wildflower Walk

 

Two weeks ago a couple friends and I went on a hike in nearby Foothill Regional Park, hoping to see some wildflowers. It was a glorious day - sunny but not hot, perfect for a walk.

This park has a good amount of dead and crooked trees, and you know how much I love these.

It didn't take long until we saw the first tiny wildflowers - Mediterranean Stork's Bill. As the name implies, it's not a native.

Foothill has a few ponds and after a short climb we arrived at the first one.

The unique call of the Red-winged Blackbird was easily heard all around the pond, accompanied by the deep bass of a bullfrog.

We took a shady trail around the second pond where again I was happy to see more dead and crooked trees.

The views of the pond were beautiful.

In October and November 2019, Foothill Park badly burned in the Kincade Fire, a wildfire that caused widespread evacuations throughout Sonoma County and was the largest of the 2019 California wildfire season. There are still numerous burnt trees in the park that now offer a wonderful habitat for all kinds of birds. I've seldom seen so many Acorn Woodpeckers in one place. It is amazing how nature comes back after a natural disaster if we don't mingle and clean everything up.

The Western Fence Lizard certainly felt at home here.

Can you find the turtle?

Hairy Vetch was almost everywhere - it's not a native plant either. It is used as a cover crop and I guess at one time it "escaped" and did its own happy thing, spreading all over the county and beyond. Even though it can be quite invasive, I really like it.

Finally we came upon this meadow of Sky Lupines, a California native. These are my favorite lupines.

Pairing them with our California Poppy is simply fabulous. It was still a bit early for the poppies.

We found a lovely bench under a tree where we stopped and had a little snack while listening to the Red-winged Blackbirds and the bullfrog.

A last view before we returned to the car - it won't stay that green for very much longer.

Here is an AI watercolor rendering of my two friends, so perfectly framed by a tree branch. This is for Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Some of you asked about this app. I have a Google Pixel 6a smartphone that I bought because of its excellent camera. When Google introduced its own AI, Gemini, it became available for the photo app as well, and that is what I use.

A Beacon in the Night

 

Barnegat Light, NJ

Lighthouses have always held a magical fascination for me. A lonely, firm post on a rugged shore, they send their lights out to the souls on the dark oceans. Their beacon of bright light can be seen as a sign of hope or just as a light source that shortly brightens the darkness - here it comes, there it goes, and here is comes again.

When I was a child of six and seven years old, my family spent the summer vacation in Denmark, in a small summerhouse amidst the dunes in Jutland. The sandy beaches were incredibly wide and seemed to be endless. One of my fondest memories is walking along the beach with my parents and older brother at twilight and seeing Rubjerg Knude lighthouse further up the coast, sending its white beacon across the North Sea, again and again in its steady rhythm. I felt the comfort of my family and since then I've always associated lighthouses with safety - not only for the ships out on the oceans of the world, but a safe haven for my emotions as well.

Of course there is also the solitude of a lighthouse, its tall lone standing. I have often dreamed about what it would be like to live in a lighthouse. I imagined a big light room with white washed walls. A desk would be in front of a window from which I could see the open sea and just a little bit of shoreline. A vase with yellow and orange flowers would sit on the desk. Here I would sit and write novels all day and live my solitary writer's life. So romantic.

Dreams... my life has turned out very differently. But I live close to one of the most beautiful coastlines that gives many lighthouses a home - places you can visit and learn about lighthouse keepers and horrendous ship accidents. Seeing those lighthouses still give me that feeling of having reached a safe haven - where my dreams continue to live and delight me.

(first written for Vision and Verb almost exactly 15 years ago)

AI Watercolor: Home Sweet Home

 

Exploring the AI feature in my photo app has become a bit addictive, especially the watercolor feature. I spent quite a bit of time playing with it. All my photos in my phone are organized in folders so I can find a specific photo easily. Yesterday I chose photos from the "home sweet home" folder.

The view out of the kitchen window is very accurate.

The "Good vibes" neon sign turns on in the early morning and in the evening. We have a few of such signs in our windows - the Geek found them.

The pantry - just open IKEA shelves in our breakfast nook.

I had to laugh what AI did with one of our book shelves. Do you see the little dragon in the left picture? Well, we don't have a dragon sitting there - there is a piece of the Berlin Wall. Obviously, the dragon is way more fun. Now I wish we had a little guy like that.

Some pictures from the garden. I love how all the colors are so well coordinated in this top image. They are coordinated in the original photo as well, but not quite as well.

These are some shells and rocks I found at the beach. The dry seaweed turned into these colorful scrolls.

My collection of garden lights and terracotta birds.

Another collection - this time empty bottles of different shapes - at sunset.

I love the Moroccan lights on our porch, a present from a former neighbor in our old neighborhood. They were part of her wedding decoration.

I'm sharing with Nicole's Sunday in the Art Room. 

Early Spring Garden

 

So far March has been pretty warm in my corner of the world. The last couple days temperatures were hovering around 90F (32C) which is way too hot for this time of year and for me - I prefer the lower to mid 70s (21-25C). Everything is early in the garden and I almost can't catch up with all the weeding I still have to do.

The Calendulas have reseeded and are simply beautiful. I planted them years ago because they remind me of home - they were early bloomers there as well. They readily reseed and have spread quite a bit over the years. They are a wonderful pop of cheerful color during the gray days of winter. They first started to bloom in January just like the camellia in the top photo.

African Cape Daisies are early bloomers as well. My California Poppies are usually later than some of their cousins in the neighborhood, but now I see more and more of their orange flowers in the garden. There will be more coming. They always make me smile.

A few years ago the Photinia died and we eventually took the trunk out, but left it lying on the ground. But one part had survived and has been growing strongly since last year. In early spring the new leaves have a stunning red color.

Since it was so hot the past couple days, the French Lilac is now past its prime. But it was beautiful while it lasted. During the night the delicious fragrance was wafting through the open window into our bedroom - bliss. The Pipevine Swallowtail enjoyed the blossoms.

Pacific Bleeding Heart - native to California - prefers shady spots. It seems to be very happy here since it has spread considerably since I planted the first one a few years ago. Don't they have the sweetest "faces"?

I was VERY excited when this native lupine showed its first blossom (left photo) because I wasn't at all certain that it would come back again. A couple days later it looked like in the right hand photo.

Today it looks like this:

My phone's photo program has an AI option and just for fun I played with it a little bit. I particularly like the watercolor option. It turned one of the lupine pictures into this:

The Mourning Doves are daily visitors. I wonder whether they will build a nest on our solar box again like they did the past two years.

The Desert Mallow has started to flower as well. I really like the soft salmon color of the flowers.

And the Western Fence Lizards are back, racing up and down the fence and soaking up the sun on the rocks.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I saw the first flower of Lauren's Grape Poppy, today there were two. I had bought them as tiny plants last year and they didn't keep very long, but at least they reseeded. This year the plants are much stronger.

I couldn't help it, I had to turn them into a watercolor photo as well.

I really like this.

Since I had so much fun with this, I took a photo from my "Cattitude" post and let it turn into a watercolor. It looks like there are a ton of flowers in my garden - which wasn't the case at the time when the photo was taken (and I'm not cross-eyed either!).

All these faces - human, animal and plant - are for Nicole's Friday Face Off. Come check it out!

Nett hier

 

Nett hier. Aber waren Sie schon mal in Baden-Württemberg? (Nice here. But have you ever been to Baden-Württemberg?)

This is a slogan from a 1999 marketing campaign by the advertising agency Scholz & Friends for the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Even though I was living at that time in Tübingen which is located in Baden-Württemberg, I was completely unaware of this campaign. I was busy with a toddler and my volunteer work at the crisis hotline.

Years later, the slogan has been printed on stickers - and they seem to appear everywhere. I first saw it in an Instagram post by my daughter. She had seen it in Gent, Belgium, in the summer of 2024. 

When we travelled later that year, we saw it as well.

In Hamburg...

Before I go on, I want to make something clear: I am not at all a fan of pasting stickers everywhere. Actually I find it quite hideous. However, seeing this sticker I couldn't help but feel a bit of local pride. Not of the sticker or the people who thought it necessary to stick it there, but because of the place it represents. Even though I had lived in four German states (Lower-Saxony, North Rine-Westphalia, Hesse, and Baden-Württemberg), slowly moving from the North to the Southwest, it is Baden-Württemberg that I call my home.

In Moab, Utah...

On a stop sign along Highway 12 in Utah (you almost can't see it)...

With all of these I was sort of okay with (well, not really, to be honest). It's not beautiful, but it's a sign of our time to leave our crap everywhere. I don't waste any grievance on that.

But what I came upon in Bryce Canyon was not okay at all.

Obviously someone had unsuccessfully tried to remove it. This is made to stick - and it is disgusting. No local pride was left here, just a very bad calling card.