Verna’s Mom, Jane, presented me with this beautiful Caribbean print as a belated birthday gift. It’s a Tommy Bahamas silk shirt with a Club Paradiso pattern. We both love this colorful Art Deco theme.

Photo credit: Verna. Click image for big.

When we go to the local home improvement warehouse store, we always enjoy visiting the garden shop. We both like looking at the landscaping plants, trees, flowers and succulents.

The hothouse is where you can find some of the more exotic tropical plants and flowers. There are orchids, ferns and a variety of other tropical items.

This hothouse is also where you can find garden pottery, specialty plant fertilizer, seeds and garden accessories. The other day, we were in the hothouse and I took a pair of images to merge into this anaglyph. Click on the image to see full-size. You will need a pair of 3D glasses to see the stereo image, so if you don’t have your free pair yet, you can see the 2D version here.

I got to sit on the front porch today and watch the Mama and Daddy Hoomins work on the trees out front. The Daddy went up a big stair thing like I use to get in the truck. When he got up there, he took out a buzzer thing and made pieces of the tree fall down. I wasn’t scared though. The Mama took the things that fell and put them in the black thing that always smells funny.

Yesterday, the Daddy Hoomin let me out in the back to chase a squirrel away from where the birds eat. It was fun. That’s a picture of me that you can make big if you click on it.

I’m tired now and think I will take a nap.

Walking through the garden shop at Lowe’s today, I noticed this lantana cluster with a single, lonely yellow blossom among the many red blossoms.

I went into the back yard yesterday morning and saw a hawk perched on my garden utility cart. I quietly rushed back into the house to get my camera and quietly returned to get some photos. The young bird stayed long enough for me to get several images. The composite image above is made from the best of the perched and in flight images.

According to my copy of “Birds of the Los Angeles Region,” this is probably a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk. This species is a year-round resident in the area and is known to ambush smaller birds as they feed. Cooper’s Hawks are often seen hunting around bird feeders - our feeders are to the left of the perched image, just out of the frame.

This flower on a Pitayo de Mayo (”Strawberry Pear” or “Dragon Fruit” of May) cactus at the botanic garden was one of the many cactus and succulent flowers we saw last Sunday. Click on image to enlarge.

I have not taken the time to go to the ancestry site that my sister sent me a while ago. I got interested a while back about the origins of our family and found out some interesting things, but not in great depth. One of these days, perhaps after retirement, I plan to look into our family ancestry.

Several years ago, I borrowed this 19th century photo of a trio of my Mom’s mother’s siblings and scanned it into a file. As a child, I knew two out of three of the people in this picture, my great uncles Frank and Bert. Great Aunt Kathryn, for whom my mother is named (I presume) was my Grandmother Myra’s older sister who had passed before I was born.

I can remember that as senior citizens, Uncle Frank (left) still had that bushy haircut (white, of course) and Uncle Bert had the same serious expression. Both uncles seemed to enjoy Mom bringing us to visit.