Life and all in Redding California
Spotted these beauties on Benton Drive in Redding. Lovely prickly pears in bloom. Click any to enlarge.
Cactus doesn’t grow much further north than Redding in California, much like palm trees. Prickly pear is very drought tolerant plant, well suitable to southern exposure in Really Redding. Nopalitos, my friends!
These Petunias love Redding weather evidently. All you see here is from only 3 plants!
This blog was mentioned in a recent Marc Beauchamp column in the Record Searchlight writing about drought landscaping. These need water, but really not much under mulch. And they reward you with this riot of color.
Captured these images from a meadow off Mt Eddy, about an hour’s drive north of Redding. Very pretty.
From Wikipedia, “Dodecatheon is a genus of herbaceous flowering plants in the family Primulaceae. The species have basal clumps of leaves and nodding flowers that are produced at the top of tall stems rising from where the leaves join the crown. The genus is largely confined to North America and part of northeastern Siberia. Common names include shooting star, American cowslip, mosquito bills, mad violets, and sailor caps.”
Mad Violets. They’re Really Redding.
February is early Spring in Shasta County. We have lots and lots of emerging bulbs.
These showy tulips look wonderful all bunched together. Ironically, Tulip Mania was responsible for an economic bubble and collapse, similar to the housing cycle we are experiencing now. From Wikipedia: “At the peak of tulip mania in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.” It seems our economic history is filled with bubbles and collapses.
It’s hard to capture an image that accurately displays their deep scarlet loveliness.
Such is the transitory nature of beauty.
This musical fragment is tentatively titled Clemency. I grant you clemency herewith, and hope that you offer me the same, because I may need it someday. As may we all. Let’s keep this word handy in our lexicon. Mercy can sometimes be in short supply.
This musical sketch by Craig and me goes on for a little more than 13 minutes, in longwinded contrast to yesterday’s synth-pop piece. It’s not exactly ambient, but not melodic either. It floats somewhere in-between, and remains thus unfinished. Some of it “works” (in musical terms) for me, and some less so. It requires a bit more listening to see what we can learn and perhaps adjust. Or perhaps put it back in it’s box, out of sight and out of mind. If this sketch doesn’t “work” for you, I beseech your clemency. And offer mine. It is what it is. We were just looking for a spark of some sort.
You and I have been on a bit of a musical journey this week. I like the little Ovi music player widget very much. As I wrote on my music page, all work and no play makes us dull. So the old saying goes. Work and life are inextricably tied together when you do real estate for a living, and you can’t really separate your work from the rest of your life most of the time. That’s OK. But late at night, when at the controls of a musical instrument, I sometimes feel as though I’m not at work. As mentioned when I started posting music sketches earlier this week, your mileage may vary.
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Cosmos sulphureus (Yellow Cosmos) appropriately near Sulphur Creek -photo by Skip
