Oh what beautiful mornings!

The last two mornings have been absolutely wondrous. On Sunday morning I went into work early (because I left early to attend a wedding shower the day before). Pedaling through the cold, clammy fingers of fog before sunrise, I chastised myself for neglecting to put the ear-warmer insert into my helmet for the ride. Luckily I was just going into CBEC, which is a mere 1.5 miles from my house. When I arrived at our ocean-view farmhouse offices I was greeted by a stunning sunrise. I couldn't see it, really, because it was behind the hill, but looking west from the front porch, I caught beautiful colorations on the wispy clouds above the morning ocean.

This morning I had to ride back for my camera almost as soon as I hit the road because the elk in the morning fog as the sun burned it off the meadow was too pretty a picture. They had moved from their cluster near the road by the time I returned, but I was still able to snap a few haunting shots of their silhouettes in the sunlight. Beautiful.

Last weekend (?) I did a slew of canning operations again. I ended up jarring 1 pint of mixed, chopped garden tomatoes, 2 quarts of mulled apple juice, 2 quarts of apple pie filling (with apples from our tree!) and 1 quart of peach pie filling (with peaches from the CSA boxes).

So why the question mark after weekend? I had a split weekend last week, to arrange the schedule for me to work a solid 7 days in a row (8 for me, actually, since my boss is supposedly going to put me on the schedule for Thursday, although I'm still waiting to see that schedule change made official) along with the other two members of one of the two "media teams". We've been making videos to be released on the park's social media websites over the winter. It's fun, and out of the ordinary, but it's starting to feel like a long week and I've still got a few more days to go.

One of my posts features the rather morbid picture below - a long-dead sea lion on the beach. The point of the post is that if we had condors here, they would've opened up the carcass to other scavengers and it would've been long-gone weeks ago. But since we don't... the sea lion just sits on the beach and nobody touches it. Redwood NSP is hoping to help bring the condor back to the area as part of the NPS Centennial. The project would "start" next year, but the birds probably won't be in the air until 2018 or so. Maybe later. Still, it's an exciting prospect, and I'm excited to make people think. Even if it's with a tastefully disgusting photo and a well-written caption. ;)

Anyhow, I've got two more evenings and three more mornings to get everything ready for my trip to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival to visit Jack and then to Sequoia to stay with him for a few days. I'm SO looking forward to it! But I also have SO much to do! So... I'd better get back to doing it. The washing machine is done - time to switch the laundry...