Scarlet Quince Ramblings

We went for a walk at Balcones Canyonlands over the weekend. It sounds like something at Disneyland, but it’s really our closest National Wildlife Refuge. It’s habitat for the endangered black-capped vireo and golden-cheeked warbler, but I usually go for flowers or butterflies or just to get outdoors.

This is at Doeskin Ranch; two other sections are really just birding platforms.

Texas is not a place most people associate with fall color, but it exists — you just have to wait until late November. The colors would have been spectacular had it been a sunny day but we were having a gloomy Novemberish day. On the other hand, this time of year the sun is so low in the sky much of the day that it would have been annoying. This is a good year for color — the Spanish oaks, sumac leaves and berries, persimmons, and poison ivy are bright red — the cedar elms are bright yellow. The dark green of the cedars shows them off beautifully (it’s really Ashe juniper, but people here call it cedar). Other trees have already lost their leaves.

This time of year, it helps to have an appreciation for dried plants. Liatris mucronata or Blazing Star blooms in late September, but the died heads are attractive in their own way.

If you look around, the rosettes of next year’s flowers are getting started. This is Erodium texanum, or Texas stork’s bill. It’s a little geranium that blooms in early spring.

The junipers are covered with berries. I’m not a gin drinker but I do like the smell of juniper berries.

We hiked up the Rimrock Trail to start with. It’s a silly name because although they have managed to make the trail very steep, this is not really much of a canyon. Walking along the plateau at the top, we found a new trail (or new to us), the Indiangrass Trail. I assume this is Indiangrass.

The trail winds and winds down the valley and eventually returns to the top of the ridge. They should call it the Cairn Trail. This borders on the absurd, don’t you think?There are two more cairns in sight up to the right. It’s a very easy trail to follow so I can only assume that someone had a lot of time on their hands. Then, about 2/3 of the way along — no more cairns. It’s as if they thought, “Ok, you should have the picture by now — you’re on your own.”

If you go to Balcones Canyonlands in October, it can be a great place for Monarch butterflies. There’s a lot of frostweed (Verbesina virginica) which isn’t much to look at but the butterflies find it tasty! I’ve seen as many as six Monarchs on a single plant.
But they drift on the wind as they migrate so they don’t always get to Balcones. This picture is from another year; by now the frostweed has dried up.

And I mean that literally!

I just posted a picture a couple of weeks ago, but I finished the second row of letters last night, and by posting again I will know later on when I got to this point. I don’t keep a stitching diary — why? I certainly wouldn’t record what I did every day but it would be good to have a single place to note when I start and finish the pages of a chart. Sometimes I write it on the page itself but I’m not very consistent about that and it isn’t something I can really go back and review.

It has taken about 5 months to get to this point. H was a lot of stitches but I really like it. In fact, I like D, G, and H. Seems to be an unfortunate pattern there. I, coming up, is not a lot of stitches and will go quickly.

You may not have noticed in the picture of letters D-H that there’s a mistake, but it’s there. (It’s a small picture, but if you know where to look you can see it.) It slowly filtered through my brain as I was working on borders. These squares have a variety of borders, so if the horizontal lines don’t line up, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there has been a mistake, but D and E do have the same border, so the lines at the bottom of those letters should line up. And I realized one day that they didn’t. Arrrgh. Yep, I’ve now added counting to my list of un-talents. The E should have 3 unstitched rows inside the top border above the figures, but I left 4. So this makes the bottom border 1 row too low. I picked out the bottom border stitches while I thought about what to do. The E didn’t take that long to stitch so I briefly considered redoing the whole thing, but it was so much work (because of the way I’m stitching) to rip the border stitches out that I quickly decided against that. I also considered just moving the border up, but there should be 2 rows between the figures and the border, and if there was only 1 row, I decided it would look too squeezed. Here’s what I did instead. The left side is the original, the right is my redo.

I picked out about the rowest 3 rows of stitches in the swirly things, then replaced them with 2 rows of stitches that taper off faster. Some of the figures are now on the flat side on the bottom, but I don’t think anyone will notice. This pattern has odd places where things aren’t symmetric where you would expect them to be, and some of the curves are much jaggier than they really need to be. (Sometimes I have smoothed out the curves; sometimes I’ve followed the chart.) I don’t really have a lot of emotional investment in this particular piece, so I’m satisfied with this solution.

We got back from Yosemite about a week and a half ago and I am finally almost caught up. (What? You didn’t notice I was gone? That’s because of the secrets I learned in the Orient which enable me to pass invisibly among men.)

We stayed in the Wawona Hotel which is one of the lodges in the park and did day hikes. The first day we hiked in the west end of the Yosemite Valley, and here is El Capitan:

We were walking along the Merced River when a black bear came out of the woods on the other side and had himself a bath.

So much for my theory that the bears might be hibernating. I had brought a couple of bags of trail snacks and it was very hard to know what to do with them — the park doesn’t want you to leave them in your car or the bears will rip your car apart, and the hotel doesn’t want them in the rooms because they’ll attract mice. Yeah, carry them with you, but you can’t walk all the time (especially me).

This is Cathedral Peak, same day. I didn’t connect it with the Bierstadt painting of Cathedral Rock until later — his view is from way down the valley.

The next day my knee was trashed so we had a mostly driving day. We drove out the Tioga Road which crosses the park east-west and is a winding chain of sheer drops with no guard rails. We stopped at Tenaya Lake, famous from the Ansel Adams photograph.

The jet trails are coming from Reno, I believe.

On to Mono Lake (actually a little east of the park). I had a vague impression that the tufa towers were caused by pollution but that’s not quite the story.

They form natually underwater when the calcium carbonate in the lake water reacts with something in the fresh water entering the lake. They’re visible now because Los Angeles has been siphoning water off from the feeder streams for years. This has been very bad for the lake and everything trying to live in it. A few years ago an agreement was reached that half the drop in water level would be replaced, and the lake is within about 10 feet of the target level, if I recall. The last 10 feet will take much longer because of the larger area to fill. The bird in the water is a western grebe. This does not count as an animal picture.

We stopped at Tuolumne meadow on the way back and walked to Soda Springs (a naturally carbonated spring) just for a place to go. We saw this coyote on the way back.

We visited a couple of sequoia groves. Here’s the upper grove at Mariposa Grove:

The building is a museum which was closed for the winter. And yes, we saw the tree in Bierstadt’s painting, the Grizzly Giant!

They had been burning the grove (lower down; you can’t tell from this picture). For a long time there haven’t been any new sequoias getting started because they need fire, and the Park Service has been on a no-fires mission for years and years. A managed burn clears away the pine litter on the ground so the seeds can germinate, the ash nourishes the young trees, and the fire doesn’t hurt the old trees.

The Mariposa grove was full of tame animals. I refused to take pictures of the mule deer, although I pointed some out to a woman who was taking pictures of every animal she saw. She crept up on the deer very slowly, taking pictures all the way, only to discover that the deer probably would only have moved if she had kicked it (and maybe not then). I do like ground squirrels:

The markings on their fur look like feathers. This guy was completely focused on his digging and only moved when I stepped around him.

I took a lot of pictures of Half Dome from various angles. Here’s Half Dome and Tenaya canyon from Glacier Point:

Glacier Point is at about 7200 feet with a 270-degree view, and there is a 4-mile trail from it down to the valley, which I think is at least a 4000-foot drop. Must be quite a trail.

When we got home, I went through a lot of Bierstadt paintings on a couple of web sites to see what his views were like. He painted at least 100 pictures of Yosemite’s domes, peaks, waterfalls, and canyons, but as far as I can find, not a single picture of Half Dome. That seems very strange. Maybe Half Dome wasn’t really famous until Ansel Adams photographed it.

We also walked down Tenaya canyon one day. It passes Mirror Lake which is the brown spot among the trees at the lower center of the picture. The Park Service has allowed it to silt up (they used to dredge it each year), and while there may be water after the snow melts, in the fall it’s just a sand pit. It’s on a list of “most overrated” destinations in Yosemite. One guy who hadn’t gotten the word asked us where Mirror Lake was, and was very put out when we told him he was looking at it.

We had beautiful weather with chilly nights and daytime highs of about 70, and it was really a relaxing trip, in no small part because there was no TV, no radio, no internet, no email, no cell service (we were apparently the ONLY people in Yosemite not getting cell service, but I think they were the ones losing by it — what sense is there in climbing to a beautiful spot and calling the office?).

Someone asked, so even though these aren’t finished yet, here is D through H.

D, E, and G are finished except for the borders. The letter F itself is finished, there is just topstitching to do. Most of the vacant area to the right of the F will be filled with this stuff. Recall that this is 22-count fabric so the little leaves are REALLY tiny. I had to figure out a good order to do these little figures so that the stitches support each other instead of pulling under the threads in the fabric. Obviously there’s a lot to do on the H, but I feel very happy with my progress. I started this in late June so this is a little over 4 months and it’s a LOT of stitches.

Coming up are some letters that will have some red topstitching over white crosses. I haven’t figured out yet what the closest shade of red is. J has just a little but P is almost solid white with a feather topstitched in red. I’m looking forward to that … not because I like topstitching, anything but, but it will be different.

We picked up the four cats yesterday and stacked their carriers in the laundry room overnight so that they would stay warm and we could keep an eye on them. The good news is that they all came through the surgery fine. The bad news is that one of the females had kittens about 5 or 6 weeks ago. They said she probably wasn’t still nursing but I let her go a bit ahead of schedule. (They say you should monitor females for 24 hours after surgery but if they’re nursing the kittens need them.) I haven’t seen the kittens yet but she will no doubt bring them to the food at some point and then we get to do this again. I hope that if we can catch them while they’re very young they can be socialized and adopted. The Humane Society has a bunch of adult cats for adoption, but kittens always go quickly.

We were also able to get one of the Humane Society’s good traps, and caught one more cat last night, which went to be fixed this morning. We re-set the trap, but only caught a possum.

The Humane Society here, and I imagine most places, has a trap/spay-neuter/release program which they say is the only proven humane way to control feral cat populations. They spay or neuter the cats, give pain medication, worm them, clean their ears, give them a flea treatment, a dose of penicillin, and a rabies shot, all for free. Quite a deal. You can have other things done for a fee. I don’t know if the vets donate their services but I’m sure they at least give them a reduced rate. I checked into having our vet spay or neuter these cats and it would have been several hundred dollars, depending on how many were females. They also “tip” the left ear (remove about 1/4″ from the eartip) — they say this is the universal sign that a feral cat has been spayed or neutered, and it’s mandatory. Then they go back to wherever they came from, and live out their lives but without increasing the population. It feels like a bit of an uphill battle (and it must seem like a mountain to the people at the Humane Society) but I’m sure it makes things better than they would be if nothing were done.

We have quite a few feral cats in our neighborhood. When the people who had been feeding them moved away, and we started feeding them, we found that there were even more than we had thought. There’s a female who had a litter last year and about 6 adolescent cats, mostly her kittens but maybe not all. The big yellow tom who is responsible for all these kittens hasn’t been around in a long time — the coyotes may have gotten him (yes, that’s a thing that happens to outdoor cats here). I think some of these cats just heard that there was a good buffet at our house and probably trek a ways to get here.

The Humane Society has volunteer trappers who will live-trap the cats, take them to be “fixed”, and then release them, but we were never successful in getting in touch with any of the trappers. Finally we decided we had to do it ourselves. The first (lame) plan was to leave just a small opening where they could get into the garage, wait until they were inside, and block the rest of the opening. Then (a miracle occurs here) we catch them and stuff them into carriers. When I talked to the feral cat coordinator at the Humane Society, I learned that they have drop traps they’ll lend. Yep, it’s like a Wiley Coyote trap, a box that props up and when you pull a string it falls down. So we got one and set it up in the garage so the wild cats could get used to it.

Today is one of the spay/neuter clinic days so we didn’t put out food last night and this morning five cats showed up for breakfast. Four went under the trap and one decided to walk around on top. Figuring four was better than none, we sprang the trap and then it was pandemonium. The cats began flinging themselves at the mesh covering the top of the trap which was very exciting and nerve-wracking. We had been warned that this would happen so we were ready to hold the trap down (did you know that pound for pound, cats are stronger than titanium? or maybe it’s only steel. Anyway …) and cover it with a sheet to calm the cats. There is a port on one side of the trap where you can connect a covered crate, then by judiciously uncovering the trap, the cats are encouraged to go into the crate, where it’s hidier. So before long we had four individually crated cats who are being spayed and/or neutered right about now. We have to pick them up tonight and keep them until they have recovered from the anaesthetic and are doing OK post-op. They are supposed to be indoors too, which will be interesting. They’ll have to be in the laundry room and I hope they’re quiet because Lucky will go berserk if he thinks more cats might be coming to live here.

I hope we can get a couple of small traps that we can bait and leave to try to catch the other cats in. We borrowed a have-a-heart trap that is supposedly cat-size, but a cat couldn’t even turn around in this thing, and we have had no success with it in the past. But some of the people dropping cats off this morning had a different kind of trap which was larger and, they say, works better.

These are beautiful cats and I wish we could find homes for them, but we were told that it just doesn’t work. They’re wild and won’t ever be tame. Most of them have gotten a little used to us and go about their business as long as we don’t get too close, but some disappear if they even see you looking at them.

There’s so much other financial bad news lately that inflation has not been getting much attention, but I’m here to tell you it’s alive and well. Since I buy the same items for Scarlet Quince over and over (envelopes, labels, ink, etc.) I have the opportunity to notice prices going up. (In “real” life I tend not to notice until things reach a pain threshhold and then I don’t know for sure what the price used to be, though I’d swear that mushrooms used to cost a whole lot less than $5 a pound.) Since I’m trying my best not to increase Scarlet Quince prices (and I do feel like a lone voice in the wilderness) my shopping process is this: I go to the last place I bought, say, envelopes; notice that the price has gone up; spend a bunch of time looking for someone with the same thing or maybe an equivalent for less; buy the envelopes someplace else and still pay more. I never gave any thought, all the years I worked for companies big enough to have a purchasing department, how much work went into keeping that supply closet stocked. All these price increases mean that reordering something, which should take 5 minutes, usually takes several hours.

Fortunately the internet makes it much easier to comparison-shop, although one of my vendors, a big office-supply chain (I won’t name them but they’re one of the big 3) has an irritating way of having drastically different prices in their store than on their web site. Although their store is only 4 miles from here, I often end up ordering online from them, because their store prices can be 30% higher than their online prices. What sense does that make?? Maybe they figure that anyone who shows up at the store is desperate and will pay whatever they have to. They used to have free shipping on orders over $50 but now they add a fuel surcharge to all orders (they claim it is “some” orders but no matter what I’m getting, there it is). I wouldn’t mind if they changed the minimum for free shipping to $75 but this double-talk of still having free shipping and the fuel surcharge is somehow not a shipping charge drives me crazy. (Not that the shipping was ever free; it was and is built into their prices.) I shouldn’t complain because even WITH the fuel surcharge, my online orders cost less than if I picked them up at the store. But I hate that kind of weaseliness. (This is the same place that was out of my ink one time, suggested I drive to a much farther distant store to get it, and when I asked what good their in-stock ink guarantee was, I was told that it wasn’t a GUARANTEE guarantee, more like “if we’re out, we’ll be really apologetic”.) Weasels!

Last week I thought I had found a good deal on cover stock (for pattern covers). I felt a positive glow all weekend that not ALL prices were going up. Well, yesterday it arrived, and — yep, you guessed it, I ordered the wrong thing. Actually the price of floss labels has held steady since I started offering them, and while the shipping charges have fluctuated, they have been fluctuating down (only a little, but it’s something). So that is one tiny bright spot.

I’ve been working on the next Lady with Unicorn now for, oh, forever.  Weeks.  I’m not sure if this one (it’s Sense of Touch) is in worse shape than the others or if my standards are getting higher.  You can see in this picture that there’s a large area at the bottom that is faded or stained.  There’s an area to the left of the lady which also seems abraded — maybe damage where the tapestry was folded for a long time.

What you can’t see at this size is that there is just a lot of discoloration and spottiness everywhere.  The red was originally a uniform color, I’m sure, and I hope to be able to get it back to something resembling that.  It won’t be absolutely uniform — part of the tapestry look is the color variations — but on the other hand, there shouldn’t be 100 reds.  I didn’t do this for Sense of Hearing or Sense of Taste but have had something of a change in philosophy since then: to the extent possible, I think the cross stitch patterns should reflect the art as it was originally created. Obviously there can be technical problems with doing that, as well as with knowing how it once looked. But, for example, paintings have a tendency to turn yellow and/or darken with time, and fabric fades (especially greens and blues). Yellowed and faded colors can be fixed; dark colors that have turned black can’t. Once the detail disappears, it’s gone (until the original painting is cleaned).

Another thing that is odd about all these tapestries is that they’re darker at the top than the bottom (aside from the faded areas).  This may be due to problems with photographing something this large, although you would think that they would have set up good lights.

The New Yorker had an interesting article a while back about photographing the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters.  They took them down to wash and repair the backing and photographed them while they were soaking (they had made a tub big enough to soak them flat).  They photographed them in sections, thinking that the sections would be easy to tile together, but it turned out that the tapestries were creeping the whole time they were in water.  They ended up hiring a couple of mathematicians who used a supercomputer to put the pictures together.  You can read the article here.

Now that the temperature is sometimes below 90, Lucky has decided that it’s too cold. He has taken to sharing my chair most of the time. He wonders why I’ve gotten up:

He has a funny way of getting into position and he always does it the same way. If I’m sitting all the way back in the chair, he walks around on my desk applying cathair to the monitor with his tail, gazing at me and making soft complaining sounds.  As soon as I make room, he steps onto my lap and then goes around behind me, always facing my left. Then he reaches up and grabs the back of the chair with his claws and folds himself into a U. If he’s not satisfied with the amount of space he has, he pushes at me with his back feet until he gets more room. Usually he has at least 2/3 of the chair and I’m left sitting on the edge getting a numb butt. If I move to get a little blood circulating, he usually manages to acquire a little more real estate. But he really doesn’t want me to leave — if I get up, he follows me talking and talking. He just wants me to sit with him and keep him warm. I personally am not finding it all that cool. I’m looking forward to truly chilly weather, because then he’ll probably want to be on the monitor. (How do cats with flat-panel monitors keep warm in the winter?)

He’s a very affectionate cat, and he likes to be close.  Maybe from his point of view, it’s finally cool enough so that he can be comfortable sitting with me.  We also sit together on the sofa for a while each evening and if I’m late he complains. He sleeps with me when it’s not too hot for him.  If I get too hot and move, he gets up and packs himself against me again.  It’s nice when it’s cold, but we do have this different idea of what constitutes “cold”.