Sunflowers at the Warwick Farmer’s Market on Sunday.

My sister left on Saturday. We had a good visit and I think we did everything she was hoping to do. Time went by so quickly that her visit was over before we knew it!

Cirque in the city was wonderful! Such skilled performers. Death-defying acts! Lightning fast set changes! Non-stop entertainment! If you’ve never seen Cirque perform I highly recommend them to anyone. This is the third one I have seen. On Las Vegas trips I’ve seen Mystere and LOVE (the Beatle one). All of them well worth the price of a seat.

On Saturday after dropping my sister at the train station we took the dogs for a walk before it got too hot. Poor things have been inside with no exercise because of the heat. We did a little grocery shopping, then took Mia for a short drive around Greenwood Lake. We ate lunch at the Emerald Point restaurant (which I always refer to as the biker place because all the motorcycle folks hang out here). We sat outside in the shade with a view of the lake and had a cool beer and a sandwich. It was nice.

When we got home we pooled it for a few hours. And then again after dinner. I did about 30 laps or so of the side-stroke and it felt good to get the exercise.

Outside house lights reflecting in the pool.

We are having a marvelous pool year this year with very consistent temperatures in the low 80’s and clear sparkling water. Sheer heaven with all the hot weather and humidity we’ve been having.

The cicadas are slowly starting up. I hope they reach symphonic heights this year as I love to hear them singing away. We have a few fireflies left but I think they are a different species than the ones earlier in the summer. These fly high amongst the tree tops with a different light pattern. The other day there was a bug inside on the sliding glass door. I grabbed it, opened the door and tossed it outside and as it flew off it lit up! It didn’t look like a firefly to me, jut another beetle. And we’ve had some strange beetles around this year.

The bee balm is nearly spent. The hummingbirds enjoy it now (must be the concentration of nectar?) but it’s not as pretty.

I got a surprise when I looked closer at the garden. The bee balm that I got when I traded with Maggie was blooming! Last year it did not come up, but this year even with the lack of rain it’s making a strong showing. I LOVE the color!! Maggie, did mine bloom in your garden??

On Sunday we made a new recipe: Tomatillo Gazpacho. It was perfect on a hot and humid day.
Tomatillos, cucumbers, green pepper, jalapeños, and avocado all blended, then topped with a cucumber/avocado/shrimp/green olive salsa. It was delicious!

Hopefully I am back into the swing of blogging again instead of the hit (and mostly miss) of the past week!

Okay, we are going back to Colorado for a day. This old tree lies at the top of our 70 acres. It’s been down a long, long time. I think it was a ponderosa pine but I can’t be certain. There are other living ponderosas that dot this ridge so it would make sense.

You’ve got to admit that in its repose it has a lovely view. If you’re going to fall over you might as well do it right.

If you back up a bit from where the tree lies you would get this view. I took these shots and stitched them together into a panorama. That’s Bull Mountain in the background. The cabin lies kind of mid-photo where you can just see trees sticking up beyond the hill.

The dry climate has weathered the tree to a state of mummification. Its bark and roots have taken on a kind of patina that only years of being exposed to harsh sun and wind can accomplish.

Its mighty roots that once kept it grounded now reach for the sky instead.

Its gnarly branches reach out in supplication.

It is indeed a grand old tree. Even in death it commands respect.

Lawn shadows.

Last night as I lay in bed my head was spinning with a great idea for a blog post. I was literally writing it in my head. I should have gotten up there and then and written it all down because now I have no idea what the idea was. PooF! Dust to dust. Kind of like my brain. Maybe it will come back to me.

This morning it’s only 58 degrees with a chilly breeze and it feels like fall out there! It’s supposed to heat up mid-week (which I hope it does for the pool’s sake) but for now it’s blessedly cool. Yesterday we had a rainy start to the morning with a little over a quarter of an inch of rain and then a few little squalls in the afternoon. I didn’t even bother to close up the house it was so nice.

Back yard with a peek at the pool.

One day this week I am going to try and go to Skylands and see what’s blooming there with my camera and gear. I recently unearthed a macro lens that I didn’t know I had that must be over ten years old. It still works on my new Canon so I want to give it a whirl and see what I can do with it. (I was looking at a beautiful macro lens this weekend at Unique Photo.)

I am a macro girl at heart. I guess since I started out that way taking photos of flowers with a set of screw-on close-up lenses.

Anyway, I am rambling this morning. Sorry!

Here is our dinner on Sunday night: grilled Calamari salad.

It was fresh, bright and delicious. We fried the tentacle bits after dusting them with cornmeal, flour, a pinch of cayenne pepper and some salt. I had some marinara sauce I had made in the freezer, so we thawed that out and used it as a dip.

I can see many of you out there wrinkling up your noses at the crunchy tentacles, but hey, honestly you should give it a try. They are the best part!

I can’t wait for dinner tonight as we bought a big bag of fresh peas at the farmer’s market this weekend. Peas! A seasonal treat that I thought we had missed out on this year. We’re adding them to a lemon-sauced fettuccine.

Good grief, it’s too early to have food on the brain!

But maybe my brain needs food so it can remember what I was really going to blog about this morning!

Pool water with the sun’s reflection.

Yesterday was perfect. Truly perfection. The temperature was perfect: 81 degrees with low humidity and a gentle breeze.

We had some shopping to do early in the day such as a new umbrella since the one we’ve had for four years broke and refused to go up anymore. The new one is striped for a change.

We also had to buy another solar cover for the pool. We replaced our old worn-out cover last year but the new cover was so heavy and thick we had trouble reeling it up (and I certainly could not do it by myself), plus it did not fit on our current reel and we had to purchase a new one. It just was not working so we decided to ditch it. The new cover is much lighter and fits on our old reel, so we will try and put the other one on Craig’s List or something to try and sell it.

I got a new pair of sunglasses to replace those that were stolen off our table at the get-together at Rio’s in Ft. Collins. I hope that college kid who cleared our table is enjoying my Revo’s! I hate dishonest people.

We also dropped by the huge and great camera store in our area, Unique Photo, because they were having an Expo with lots of different camera reps and all kinds of things going on. I wanted to talk to the rep about my new Canon T4i since I was not happy with the photos it was taking in Auto Intelligent mode. The shots were always over-exposed. (Okay, I admit I set my camera to “auto” quite a bit. Bad me. But sometimes you just don’t want to mess with settings.)

I had the same difficulty with the very first Rebel I had, but my most recent Rebel (the XSi) did not have that problem. It took pretty decent photos in that mode. Now “Program” mode was another story: there the photos were always under exposed! No camera is perfect I guess.

Anyway, I talked to him and he told me to completely ditch Auto Intelligent mode! Hmmm. Makes you wonder why they even have it as a selection, doesn’t it? He suggested I use the Program mode instead since it gives you a couple of different options, such as adjusting the aperture down or up a few stops.

He also told me about a class called “Canon EOS Discovery Day” that he teaches where they go through your camera and all its features (and how to use them). It sounded like something I need, so I signed up for the next one taking place July 20th. I can’t wait!

While we were there I somehow ended up talking to the Canon rep for photo printers, which I have been telling Rick we need for quite a while, and he had a deal that we just could not refuse. Not something we had planned to buy yesterday, but there you go.

Once home the afternoon was spent installing the new solar cover and setting up all the furniture around the pool. We are getting such a late start to pool time this year! I don’t know what we did before we had the cabana.

We swam a bit and the water was delicious!

And speaking of delicious: our meal shown two different ways. (It’s’ a veal chop.)

Back to the pool to sit and enjoy (I took another dip).

I tried out a new setting on my camera Handheld Night Scene which takes 4 consecutive shots and combines them all together (like HDR). These are the cabana lights that we forgot to put up and Rick just brought them out in a pile and plugged them in. There was no other light except for them.

Cool, eh? I have a lot to learn about this new camera!

I see many differences between where I am now and where I’ve been. No, I’m not getting philosophical on you, I mean literally, not figuratively.

Sometimes though I might think a little too deeply. Like how it’s weird that while I am living somewhere else, live goes on without me where I used to live. Two different timelines that converge once in a while. I’m not sure if I can even properly explain it. For any one who has traveled a great deal I think you will know what I am saying. It boggles my mind to think about of all the people you pass while crossing the country, people just like you, are going about their daily lives and you know nothing about it or them.

Okay, on with what I really sat down to write about.

Let’s start with what I am doing right now. Huge computer screen and a mouse. Something I have done without for three weeks. I am used to blogging, getting email and virtually living through my iPad2. Pretty amazing really. All my photos were captured through it too. All 1,565 of them. It took me a bit to get used to such a large screen when I first booted the computer up last night. Even now I almost long to go back and blog from the iPad. It seemed cozier somehow. Easier.

Carrying right along with that thought process is where I am blogging from. At the cabin my blogging place/desk was the counter-high table at the cabin in front of the large windows that looks out onto our newly cleared space. From that viewpoint I saw the remaining beetle kill pines, slash piles from the clearing process, chipmunks and ground squirrels running across a few of the trees that fell over during the winter, using it as their super highway, and in the distance was the outline of Bull Mountain.

Now my view (if I turn around from the computer) consists of green, green and more green in the nature of our hedge in front of the house, the big old oak tree and the expanse of green lawn that peeks through now and then from the other green chaos. My computer desk is piled with various stuff. At the cabin we are so pared down that now all this “stuff” seems excessive. Sorry, no pics; no camera. Just picture it in your mind.

Different bird song.

Silent hummingbirds vs the broad-tailed at the cabin which make a busy whirring noise with their wings.

Trees and limited views as opposed to sage and open vistas.

Two-lane tree-lined winding and twisting roads vs straight, wide roads sans trees. (I have no clue why Colorado has such wide roads and the speed limits are so low.)

67% humidity vs 10%.

Fireflies in the grass. They don’t exist past a line somewhere around the mid-West.

Triple the living space.

A dishwasher instead of the dishwasher being Rick or me or both.

Automatic coffee maker instead of putting my mom’s old Corningware percolator on the burner and remembering to turn the gas down once it barely starts to perk.

Lush ferns vs dried grass and sage. (Again, no pic but you would not believe the fern growth since we were gone!)

King bed vs Queen bed. (Ahhhhhh)

Possibly a new bear vs deer and moose. (Yes, according to neighbor Kim we have a bear again. I thought as much since my hummingbird feeder was taken down with a few claw marks on the deck railing before we left.) Please bear don’t come around until I have a camera again!

A grocery store within 10 minutes instead of 45 minutes.

I’m sure there are more, but for now that’s all that I can think of.

It is more of an adjustment after three weeks than you would think!