Today is my wonderful wife’s birthday. We celebrated with friends Saturday at TSO’s annual Sacramento concert from a suite at Arco Arena, then spent yesterday with son Rick, Kim and grandsons Chris and Jacob. The Sandhill Cranes are migrating, so we all drove down to Lodi to witness their “gathering”, a spectacle of several thousand birds descending for the evening on a small patch of wilderness preserve. Afterward, we shared a birthday dinner at BJ’s, vowed to photograph the cranes’ sunrise liftoff next weekend, and finally called it a great day.

Happy birthday, Sweetheart.

It must be time for the annual email recirculation of “Instructions for Life” in one version or another. They’re almost always an abridgment lifted from Life’s Little Instruction Book by Jackson Brown and H. Jackson Brown, Jr. and incorrectly attributed to the Dalai Lama among others, but a few are unique.

For example, today’s email brought this little graphic gem from James that begs to be shared. I still recommend you read the book, but adopting this advise is a good start toward living a good life:

A follow-up photo album of 44 images taken during our getaway to Stinson Beach with friends Michael & Sisko and Candy & Rob. All were taken with the Nikon D2Xs and Canon Digital Elph pocket cameras. Although Dawn was a little under the weather, this was one of the most relaxing getaways we’ve enjoyed. Heartfelt thanks to Sisko and Michael for making it possible.    (See also Part 2 and Part 1).

Today’s post is a photo album of more images taken during our getaway to Stinson Beach (see Friday’s post). I haven’t processed all the images Dawn and I made - I’ll post another album this week.

Thanks to all of you that commented about Friday’s images. I hope you enjoy these as well.

“Forgive me, gentle readers… it’s been seven days since my last post…”

It’s true. We drove to Stinson Beach last Thursday with four dear friends for a long weekend and some much needed “R&R”, and it’s taken me most of this week to catch up with myself and get back in the swing of things. Obviously, the decompression worked!

For those of you unfamiliar with Stinson Beach, it’s a little beach community in Marin County, California, with about 750 residents. A popular day trip for people from the San Francisco Bay Area and for tourists visiting northern California, it’s near such attractions as Muir Woods National Monument, Muir Beach, and Mount Tamalpais. It has a long beach with occasional opportunities for surfing, although the water is cold and fog is common throughout the year.

In 2002, a surfer was attacked by a 12-15 foot great white shark while surfing off Stinson Beach. The young man survived, but received more than 100 stitches to close his wounds. The attack was the second in Stinson Beach since 1998 and the 13th in Marin County since 1952. The surf off Stinson Beach is within an area known as the Red Triangle, where there have been an unusually high number of shark attacks. Needless to say, we stayed out of the water!

Our friends had the use of a beautiful beach house and invited us to share the weekend with them. What a rare treat! I won’t go into detail about what its owners refer to as their “beach house” — a luxury home by most people’s standards — but we enjoyed a panoramic view of the ocean and fell off to sleep every night listening to the surf just 16 steps from our back door!

Needless to say, Dawn and I took a lot of photos of the beach and the little towns of Stinson Beach and nearby Bolinas. We even visited the Point Reyes Lighthouse. It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend with good friends, no cell phones and no itinerary. I’ll try to get more images posted once I’ve had time to process and assemble them into an album. Meanwhile. I hope you enjoy these. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

It was the Columbus Day weekend, so Dawn and I joined friends Michael & Sisko and Doug & Candy and headed off to Las Vegas to celebrate Sisko’s birthday. It was a “big one” so Michael had arranged for her to drive an Indy-style race car on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a long-time fantasy. We were all invited to be part of the event and I brought along my camera to photograph it all.

Needless to say, Dawn and I took lots of photos, too many for one album, so I’ve divided some of my favorites into two groups. The first album, linked to this post, contains images taken in the hotel (Paris) and along the strip; at the Wynn where we enjoyed 6th row center seats for Spamalot, a hilarious musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail; and at dinner after the race as guests of friend Doug Roberts at Lowery’s Prime Rib. The next post will link to images taken at Las Vegas Motor Speedway before, during and after Sisko’s 143 mph streak around the track!

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The Betrothed

A Poem by Rudyard Kipling

- Breach of Promise Case, Circa 1885 -

Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,
 For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.

We quarrelled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot,
 And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space;
 In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie’s face.

Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass,
 But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.

There’s peace in a Larranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay;
 But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away—

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown—
 But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town!

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I found this WSJ article interesting. It highlights what some call a growing trend where buyers acquire multi-million dollar yachts for the purpose of reselling them for a profit, often a huge one if reports are to be believed. Here’s what WSJ’s Robert Frank had to say about it:

Rich Buyers Sell Unfinished Boats, Reaping Millions in Profits

Terry Taylor, a Florida car dealer, has purchased five yachts since 2001. But don’t expect to see him anchoring off the coast of Cannes this week. Mr. Taylor is boatless, having sold all of his yachts to other buyers for huge profits.

“I wouldn’t feel too bad for Terry,” jokes Felix Sabates, a partner in Trinity Yachts of Gulfport, Miss., which built Mr. Taylor’s boats. “He’s probably made more money off those boats than we did.”

Mr. Taylor is part of a new breed of wealthy boat buyers: yacht flippers, who sell their costly purchases often without taking them on a single cruise. … more

I dabbled in the practice a few years ago and, while I made a little money, it wasn’t enough to make me want to press my luck. I’ve always been somewhat of a risk taker, but these days some things are just too rich for my blood.

It sounds cliché, but it’s the absolute truth. Dawn and I share a special relationship that can honestly be described as blissful. True soul mates, we were destined to find one another.

We’ve been together fifteen years, six as husband and wife, and today marks our sixth wedding anniversary. As we do each year, we’ll be reliving every moment of our wedding - reading the ribbons upon which each guest penned their best wishes for us, looking through our wedding albums and watching the video, reciting again the vows we wrote for our ceremony and our lives together, remembering every precious detail of our fairy-tale wedding and reception in Kauai, the fun activities with our wonderful friends and guests and, of course, our magical honeymoon.

And I can still say, without a moment’s hesitation, that I married my very best friend.

Share some of our memories here and here.

You don’t have to look far to see signs of spring. From the budding of  trees and the warming of temperatures to the animals coming out of their winter hideaways, there seems to be a promise of new birth and color in the springtime air. In our area, signs of the change in season have been popping up for weeks. El Niño has left us shy of normal rainfall, but we’ve certainly enjoyed the early spring-like weather.

The first day of spring is usually March 20 but sometimes, like this year, it falls on the 21st to correspond with the vernal equinox when the sun rests directly above the equator on its apparent trip northward. As the earth revolves around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere tilts more toward the sun as winter turns to spring. Conversely, the Southern Hemisphere tilts more away from the sun ushering in the beginning of autumn for people in that hemisphere.

The word “equinox” is derived from Latin and means “equal nights.” Around March 20 (or 21st as the case may be), sunrise and sunset are about twelve hours apart everywhere on Earth. Because of that, some folks mistakenly believe that day and night on that date are of equal length. In reality, though, the day is a little longer and here’s why. Sunrise occurs when the top of the sun rather than its center is on the horizon. But the sun actually appears to be above the horizon when it is in fact still below it. That’s because the earth’s atmosphere refracts, or “bends,” light coming from the sun, so we “see” the sun a couple of minutes before it actually rises over the horizon. And if you add the daylight that persists after sunset, you’ll find the day on the equinox is several minutes longer than the night.

Spring is a time of transition, not only for plants and animals, but for the weather, too. It can mean weather extremes from very cold and snowy days to humid and stormy days. Some of the country’s biggest snowfalls have occurred in March and the period from March to May brings severe thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes to much of the south. In the Sacramento area, Spring is my favorite season. It means hiking and other outdoor activities, longer days and warmer nights, and myriad opportunities for landscape and wildlife photography.

And let’s lay to rest the myth about your being able to balance a raw egg on end on the first day of spring when, supposedly, the pull of gravity is more equal because the sun is more directly overhead. There’s simply no scientific support for this.

The balancing egg legend apparently got its start in 1945 when a reporter for Life Magazine wrote a story about a Chinese ritual in which people stood eggs on end on the first day of spring. But the Chinese recognized the first day of spring in early February, or about six weeks before the spring equinox! Hmmmm…

Later, in 1983, a hundred New Yorkers got together on March 20 to balance eggs and an article about the event appeared in the New Yorker magazine. A year later, five thousand New Yorkers repeated the tradition on the first day of spring, and the egg legend grew. The truth is that if you can get a raw egg to balance upright on the spring equinox, you can get it to balance any other day of the year. The pull of gravity or the position of the sun in the sky has nothing to do with it.

But balancing egg or no balancing egg, by all means embrace spring! Get outside, listen to the birds and smell the flowers. Take long walks. Explore. Immerse yourself in the newness of the season!