Five on the First

For the first day of January, 2016....a new year begins!  What will it hold!?  Join us at Willy Nilly Friday Five (Tanya's super meme) and Five on Friday (Amy's great one!) for a FIVE THINGS new beginning!

1.  I am in general a positive person I think.  I am also a realist and can sometimes have a very negative view.  But I try not to let any negativity run my life.  I think 2016 is going to be a good year in MANY ways, with lots to be happy about.  But I also know there will be some sadness and tragic events.  Let us all remember to be there for one another in any way we can....

Our wonderful daughter with her Dad Christmas morning

2.  Google is announcing that it will soon start blocking access to our Google blogs by anyone who does not have a Google blog.  We are supposed to tell those affected that they should open a Google account so they will continue to have access.  This is so disturbing...I believe in freedom of choice; in not being "controlled."  I wonder how many of my blogger friends I will lose because of this.  I wonder if we have any recourse to say we disagree with this action!  I may not continue through the end of 2016, as sad as that would make me!
Christmas moments with my family....

3.  I have been a blogger since 2008...EIGHT years!  Wow!  It has given me such great joy!  I have so many wonderful blogger friends!  It is a way I can be creative, and enjoy others' creativity, and be touched by their lives and their worlds.  Giving them a shoulder to lean on, and leaning on their shoulders sometimes.  And finding joy in this life is sometimes a little hard.  It's always true that keeping it light is important!

Octopus-face! :-)

Goofy face! :-)

4.  So....we keep a positive light on things and truly hope for the best!  May there be many wonderful new birds, new breath-taking landscapes, new flowers, new critters, new shared experiences, new thoughts and events for us all this year!

5.  I wish you all a blessed, wonderful new year!  May 2016 be one of our best yet!  We may have to fight for some of it, but if we do, may we be successful!  All my best!  Marie.

Directing Traffic

One day when I was headed out of my neighborhood I noticed this Harris Hawk perched on top of a Ham radio tower across the street.  By the time I turned the camera on and got the lens protector off and aimed, he was fluttering his wings.  But by the time the shutter compressed (there is a delay with my camera) he had placed one wing back against his side, and the other was still outstretched.  Interesting, I thought...I never knew that they put one wing away and then the other.  I would have assumed they replaced them both to their sides simultaneously.  So in spite of my disappointment at not catching him with both wings outstretched, I learned something.  And, it also made for an amusing photo...the Harris Hawk appeared to be telling me to turn right!  :-)  Joining in with Stewart's Wild Bird Wednesday, and later with Anni's Bird d'Pot!

Christmas Day

Though this is for Christmas, and I hope everyone will be spending the day with their families, as I will, I am doing a Willy Nilly Friday Five that we can all enjoy on Saturday instead once the wrapping paper deluge has settled!  Hope you all have a very blessed and special Christmas Day!  And for those who do not celebrate Christmas, here's a post to enjoy on Friday! :-)

1.  Grandson's birthday was this week....we have two December birthdays and two January ones in our immediate family and that just adds to the specialness of the season!  I can remember our daughter and son-in-law bringing our grandson home from the hospital on Christmas eve.  In his little carrier he was the most wonderful Christmas present of all for us! :-)  Oh how much he has grown!

A very special gift from his great-grandmother back in Virginia

This mug has some significance with someone he follows on the internet

His Mom made a carrot cake...his favorite

 2.  The doorbell rang two mornings ago and I was sure it was just a salesman or perhaps the mailman but when I opened the door, it was our neighbor from next door, Frank and his sweet little girl, L. who is 5.  We have been neighbors for four and a half years, and always friendly, plus my husband and Frank have visited together on occasion.  We have seen their older children grow from kids to driving their own cars. :-)  The little one is brought to our door at Halloween in costume for treats, and she always yells hello to us when we come and go, if she is outdoors playing.  I have bought "still in the box" Star Wars figures, etc. from them when they've had yard sales, and our grandson has been thrilled with these when given to him.  Once when the boys (our grandson and great nephew) were weeding our front yard and walked over into Frank's yard to get rid of the weeds that had spread there, Frank came out with a "toy" for each of them and they were thrilled. 

Well, our visitors were bearing a basket of goodies!  "Merry Christmas!" they chimed in as I opened the door!  We invited them in for a visit.  I was amazed at the homemade banana bread, the cheese and crackers and candies in the basket.  And little L. was so cute in a little elf shirt, and her eyes were round as saucers, telling us about the package she got from the North Pole with a magic elf inside and how Santa knew where she lives and her name and even where she goes to pre-school!  Her joy filled our hearts with delight, because our daughter is a grown woman, and our grandson just turned 14, and well, that kind of Christmas wonderment is a thing of the past for us!  I told her Dad she was giving us a special gift!  What a delight this was!  The joy of Christmas, of giving to your neighbors, of receiving from neighbors, of hearing the delight in the voice of a child.  All this is priceless.  It was a visit I will always remember!

face blocked out to protect her ID

3.  We received a very special Christmas present almost a week ago of the tropical kind!  I bought a Bird of Paradise three years ago and much to my chagrin it has grown very slowly and had never bloomed.  Then about a month ago I noticed a spike with some color and realized a flower was going to happen!  I had brought the plant inside to protect it from the cold.  It took all month for the bud  to open (they seem to be the sloths of the flower world!)  but it finally did and boy is it beautiful!  Most people have Christmas Cactus....I have a Christmas Bird of Paradise!

Almost completely open....

In full bloom at last several days later!

This is the plant inside the house! :-)

4.  We didn't have a tree the last two years because we go over to the kids' house and enjoy their tree, plus it's very hard to find space for a tree in our living room.  But I had missed it and decided to get a smaller tree and make it a table top so I could enjoy our ornaments and I am so happy we did!  Oh, it has to be a real tree!  Maybe someday I will opt for an artificial one, but it's hard for me to "go there"....I'm just such an old-fashioned girl! 

5.  I also ordered The Nativity Story dvd....we have watched it every year through Netflix and I figured it was time to buy our own copy.  It's the best story of Jesus's birth I have ever seen!  That is the reason for this wonderful day....the coming of the Saviour of the World!  We celebrate Emmanuel....God with us!

Sunset Silhouettes

For Through My Lens with Mersad I would like to share a few photos taken at day's end.  The first three were taken with my phone two and a half weeks ago, as we traveled off the main road to see the entrance to a place where my husband took a shooting course many years ago.  The others were taken with the camera at sunset from my front yard during our unusually stormy Fall.  That is my front yard saguaro cactus in the silhouette.

Male Pyrrhuloxia

I have seen a number of these birds in the past four and a half years, and also some cardinals, which are a close relative and a bird I was MUCH more familiar with, but I had never noticed one in the back yard.  Unfortunately I had to take the shots through my very dirty bedroom window, so they are not crisp and clear.  Joining Anni's Bird d'Pot and on then Stewart's Wild Bird Wednesday.

Wikipedia states:

The pyrrhuloxia is a year-round resident of desert scrub and mesquite thickets, in the U.S. states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and woodland edges in Mexico. It occupies the southwestern half of Texas, approximately the southern third of New Mexico, and southeastern region of Arizona. Its range flows further south inhabiting areas from the west to east coast of Mexico north of the Sierra Madre del Sur, Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and Isthmus of Tehuantepec, whilst excluding the Sierra Madre Occidental. An individual of the species has reportedly been seen as far away from its dominant range as Costa Mesa, California in Orange County.^[6]
This cardinal is relatively nonmigratory, though it may occasionally stray slightly north of its usual range. The pyrrhuloxia prefers habitat along stream beds. In areas where the range of the pyrrhuloxia and northern cardinal overlap, hybridization may occur between them. There seem to be no conflicts between the species as none have yet been reported

A Little More Festive Now...and Snow!

Joining Willy Nilly Friday Five, Five on Friday and a new one for me, My Town Shootout, with the theme of "snowfall."  The snow is even falling in the first shot, though its hard to tell. :-)

1.  Last Friday it was getting a little cooler...had been 82 about a week before!  But now a little cooler, and I looked out and saw hundreds of fluffy white things falling out of the sky.  Not snow!  I knew it couldn't be!  It was just too warm. So I went outside and captured one of the floating fuzz-balls....and that's exactly what it was, a little white filament seed-head.  But it was also a foreshadowing....that night we had another freeze and we awoke to rainy cold, and could see a dusting of snow on the mountains which lasted again over Saturday night.  Just a dusting...but so awesome to see. Snow!!!

And in keeping it the snow theme, here is a shot I took while in N. AZ a week & 1/2 ago of the San Francisco peaks...always capped in beautiful snow!

2.  I finally created a hanging basket for the door...that Christmasy feeling started welling in my breast! :-)  So I also created a centerpiece for my table...the placemats were a gift from my Secret Sister at church, and the tablecloth belonged to my great-grandmother.

3. I also brought out the nativity set and asked our grandson to set it up for us.  This was the set from my childhood, but unfortunately when Mom gave it to us, some of the pieces were missing.  I still need an angel and a shepherd or two, but I bought the donkey and the sheep (and the barn manger) on etsy and they match wonderfully.  Grandson set it up without the sheep which I was awaiting by mail, and they came two days later.  Here's how it now looks!

4.  Our daughter had a birthday this past week and we had a little get-together with presents and cake.  We have two December birthdays and two January birthdays in our immediate family...makes it a little hectic.  But it's always good.  I can't believe our wonderful daughter isn't still the child we celebrated so many birthdays with for those years she was growing up.  Now even our grandson is growing up fast!

5. I just finished the most incredible biography of Benjamin Franklin!  It is not a book I will be sharing on the book club blog, because it is just too long.  But, it was wonderful!  Written by Carl Van Doren, it is the ultimate biographical masterpiece!  In fact, Van Doren won the Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1938.  It's long...I read several other books at the same time, because it was just too hard to carry around (789 pages!) and sometimes too I just needed a break for something lighter.  So it took a while to read.  But, it was well worth it...just amazing!  What a delightful, fascinating, intelligent man Franklin was...I've come to know him in ways I never knew him before, and it was a wonderful journey!  Van Doren is an amazing writer!

The Quilters

For Linda Kay's Wit and Wisdom  (awesome writing meme on Senior Adventures!) I would like to share a special legacy....

My mother is a quilter.  My grandmother was a quilter, and every aunt and great-aunt and my two great-grandmothers and on back through my lineage.  It was fore-ordained that I would quilt.  The days of the quilting joys of my grandmother and great-grandmothers were born of necessity.  The quilts were used to warm their families against the winter cold, and were worn out after years of faithful use.  Not many of them survived.  They were made of scraps of clothing and of feed and flour sacks.  Nothing was wasted.  The batting was often hand-carded cotton.  Women's work was truly never done in those early days, and they went to bed to sleep under their hand made quilts, bone tired from the long days.  When the quilting was to be done, a group of women would gather around a frame suspended from the ceiling, to do hand quilting and visit.  My mother sat under that suspended frame as  a child and watched the needles go in and out, snaking across in long lines of loving handwork....it was the perfect fort.

Mom took me to the quilt shop to buy my first fabric for my quilt.  It was the early 80s and life had progressed to templates, and purchased fabric to be cut up into shapes, and sewing machines to put it all back together.  The rotary cutter was new also and soon became the norm.  Prices started soaring for expensive cotton fabrics needed to make heirlooms that would last for generations.  But, as I began to learn the techniques involved in piecing and creating quilt blocks, I also wished to pay homage to my roots...and make an old-fashioned quilt, hand-quilted.  My Mom often hand-quilted her quilts back then too, and she tried to teach me, but I just couldn't get the hang of that rocking back and forth motion that was needed.  So, as you can see from the photo above, I did my first hand quilting by going IN and OUT!  Not the most effective method, but I was comfortable with it.

What I love about the photo, is that the feed sack fabric the quilt is created from was some of my grandmother's fabric.  She was no longer quilting, and she gave me these pieces.  The frame was my Mom's....and she soon after gave it to me as she had moved on to using a hoop.  I love the feed sack quilt, which unfortunately I have never finished hand quilting (perhaps this is the year!) and I love the quilting frame.  Both are treasures!  I do my quilting on the machine now, because hand quilting by my archaic method was just too darn slow!  But I at least know how to properly hand quilt now.  I have made a few quilts, and several wall hangings or other small projects since that day in the 80s when the photo was taken, and I know I will quilt until my hands will no longer hold the needle that I can't see how to thread!  When that day comes,  I hope I will be happy with all I have accomplished.  I know it has given me great joy over these years.  After all, how could it not?  Me being a quilter was truly fore-ordained.

Tucson Fall Flowering Bushes

As I write this, most of these bushes are nipped with frost and on their way out.  We have a dusting of snow on the mountains, and the cold rain is falling outdoors.  I wrapped my plants night before last and they are still wrapped.  The Tropical Bird of Paradise, which is trying so hard to bloom, is now indoors!  But these photos are representative of how the bushes around my neighborhood looked about two weeks ago when it was an unseasonable 82 degrees!  Joining in with Monica's NF's Trees and Bushes, and Mersad's Through My Lens.

The orange bells in my nextdoor neighbor's yard always attracts the hummingbirds.

A view of the orange bells with the Santa Catalina mountains in the background.

This Cascalote tree is right cross the street from me...it flowers in the fall and winter only which I found so unusual when I first noticed it. It is a native of Mexico.

A close-up of the Cascalote flowers.

My bougainvillea bush in full bloom right up to the frost.