I think I have stumbled

I had so much fun three months this past summer while I was writing my book, Nature’s Geometry: Succulents, that I decided recently to write another book, tentatively titled SSS: Southwest Succulent Staycation. However, in order to write that book, I have to visit quite a few places in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah to take pictures.

If I’m going to leave home and drive for a long distance, I would prefer to do a lot of things on the same trip. For example, to get to Utah, I have to go through Nevada. I’d rather not make one trip to Utah and then another trip to Nevada.

That started me thinking, which always is dangerous with me.

I decided I would simply catalog all the pictures I do have to make it easier to decide what areas I actually need to go to take pictures. While I’m doing that, I also can send my Nature’s Geometry: Succulents flyer to all the horticulture clubs, plant clubs, gardening clubs, and cactus & succulent clubs in those four states in an effort to get invited to make a presentation to their clubs.

If the Ogden Garden Club invites me, I could turn that into a photographic journey and visit a lot of places in Utah on the way to Ogden.

A presentation to the Tucson Cactus & Succulent Society would allow me to visit Organ Pipe National Monument, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and so many other treat places in Arizona that are on my list.

All of that is well and good, but that would mean I wouldn’t be writing a book until 2021 or 2022. I could be pretty bored between now and then. As I was cataloging some pictures, I got the idea for a shorter book that could be written immediately. Then the mail arrived, bringing three books that I had ordered; two of them pretty much are useless for my purposes. The third, however, confirmed my idea. It’s titled Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

The book is only 32 pages and the text is in a half-inch font. Very little text, mostly pictures. In other words, it’s a children’s book.

A-ha! (not the group).

A children’s book! It would be much easier to write and I could begin immediately after a few more dreams…. Yes, dreams.

Whenever I need to think deeply about something, I go to bed when I’m not tired. Thus, I won’t fall asleep. I’ll simply dream about what I want to do, and additional ideas pop into my mind.

I guess it’s a form of daydreaming since I’m what the medical community calls a polyphasic sleeper. In other words, I never sleep more than three or four hours, and that’s very rare. Usually I take a 30-60 minute nap and then work for 3-4 hours. Repeat throughout the day, every day, 24/7, 365 days (except in leap years, 366 days).

I have had several dreams about this idea so far and I’m almost settled on what I want to do: A children’s book titled (tentatively) Numbers, Letters, Colors & Shapes: Nature helps your child learn.

I’m thinking for ages up to 8. I’ll entertain comments about the age.

Numbers could be the numbers of petals in a flower, number of plants in a landscape, number of tree branches….

Letters could be apple, bear, cat, dog, elephant, fox, goat, horse, igloo….

I could get flora and fauna representing every color on a color wheel….

There are so many shapes in flora and fauna: circles, stars, triangles….

Since it is a children’s book, it should be rather short. Letters would need to be at least 26 pages, so maybe this idea could morph into four children’s books:

1. 1. 1. 1. Nature Teaches
            Numbers
         2. Nature Teaches
            Letters
         3. Nature Teaches
            Colors
         4. Nature Teaches
            Shapes

I might be able to make this into 8 books:

1. 1. 1. 1. Animals Teach
            Numbers
         2. Animals Teach
            Letters
         3. Animals Teach
            Colors
         4. Animals Teach
            Shapes
         5. Plants Teach
            Numbers
         6. Plants Teach
            Letters
         7. Plants Teach
            Colors
         8. Plants Teach
            Shapes

I think I might have stumbled upon a way to use the billions of pictures I have!

The Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden—A Review

The Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden
A Review

I became a fan of zoos after my first visit to the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, in summer 1966. If I had never seen a giraffe, or an elephant, or a rhinoceros, or a hippopotamus…. I never would have taken such an interest in their plight in the world.

A couple of years later, a real live monkey showed up in our yard. My wise old grandmother told me to give it a banana. I though that was only in cartoons. The darn thing ate it. And as with just about any animal, if you feed it, it’s yours.

That monkey stayed in the trees in our back yard for several months. I named it Cheetah.

Then, one day, people showed up to take Cheetah. They were people from the San Antonio Zoo. A monkey was considered an exotic pet, and exotic pets were not allowed in Kingsville, Texas. We had to let them capture Cheetah and take him away.

When San Antonio hosted Hemisfair in 1968, I convinced my wise old grandmother to take me to San Antonio. Sure I wanted to go to Hemisfair, but more importantly to this little boy, I wanted to go to the San Antonio Zoo to see Cheetah.

I don’t know whether or not Cheetah recognized me, but to this day I believe he did. All one has to do is watch YouTube videos about animals recognizing those who rescued them, fed them, and cared for them, even after being separated from them for weeks, months, and, in one case, 11 years. Yeah, our animals that we care for know who we are.

Yesterday, Jim and I went to the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden. I had never been to the Los Angeles Zoo, but since I have been going to the San Diego Zoo and the Safari Park on a regular basis for 26½ years, I already knew that the Los Angeles Zoo didn’t have anything that I had not already seen. Thus, my main interest was in the Botanical Garden aspect of the zoo with the possible intent of including a section in my forthcoming book, SSS: Southwest Succulent Staycation.

The Los Angeles Zoo opened in 1966, so it’s about fifty years younger than the San Diego Zoo. However, at 133 acres, it is 33 acres larger. However, there are only about 1,400 animals residing at the Los Angeles Zoo. After walking the whole zoo yesterday, I would guess that about 70 acres is simply unused land. Jim and I always are tired after a trip to the San Diego Zoo. We didn’t experience that after walking the Los Angeles Zoo.

I was disappointed in the zoo but I might be unreasonably comparing it to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. The L.A. Zoo was quite busy yesterday. However, it needs a serious cleaning, including a parking lot renovation. The asphalt probably is the original asphalt from when the zoo opened in 1966. The whole place was overgrown with weeds. Deciduous trees had dropped all their leaves; unfortunately, all over the exhibits, making a mess of them, making a mess of any horticultural exhibits beneath the trees, making a mess of the various play areas for children.

Notwithstanding all the problems, there were several things that made the visit worthwhile:

1. 1. 1. I now have been to the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden.
      2. The birds show was excellent because it featured birds that you won’t be seeing in your back yard: two African vultures (huge birds!) and a California Condor (another huge bird!)
         
      3. Although many of the botanical gardens were weedy and covered with leaves, I did get enough good pictures for my book.
      4. The giraffe feeding line was very long, and having fed the giraffes at the San Diego Zoo, I can tell you that feeding giraffes is quite an experience. This final picture shows a little girl feeding a giraffe. I believe this little girl will grow up with an appreciation of wildlife—my appreciation of wildlife started by feeding a monkey. Perhaps this little girl will get a college degree in wildlife conservation, maybe even work in a zoo providing this type of experience to the next generation.

All pictures in this post were taken by me
at the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden
on December 29, 2019.

Climate change?

People usually don’t associate rain and snow with San Diego. Quite true with the city of San Diego. The county, however, is another story. There are mountains in east San Diego County that top out at 6,271 feet elevation. That’s high enough to get plenty of rain and snow.

Where I live at 682′ elevation, Mother & Father Nature have provided me with 70.3 inches of rain in 2019, of which 23.3 inches has arrived since November 19.

Rain at this time of the year usually means snow just 20 miles east of me.

In the 26½ years I have been in San Diego, I never fail to go visit the snowy mountains once a year.

This year has been completely different because we had significant snow in the mountains in February, November, and December, so I have been three times.

New Year’s Eve is supposed to bring another huge storm, so I might start off 2020 by heading to the snowy mountains.

Climate change?

I like snow as long as it’s about 20 miles away from me, I can go visit it, and I can come back to a warm home with a warm cat on my lap.

Meanwhile, here are some of my favorite snow pictures from 2019.

Mount Laguna National Recreation Area

Thin ice

Pacific Crest Trail, Mount Laguna

Snow people in the Cuyamaca Mountains

City slickers in the snow at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park

Snowy Lake Cuyamaca

City slickers clogging the roadway in Cuyamaca Mountains

Poor cacti

My poor car

Mommy told him to put on his coat

My poor feet

Are you happy?

Today is the most important day on the cat calendar. Happy Boxing Day!

I believe Little Queen Olivia is the world’s only cat that does not like boxes. In the six months she has lived here, I caught her in a box only once, and then for only a few seconds, just long enough for me to take a picture. She seems to be saying, “See! I am a cat! Are you happy?”

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Nature’s Geometry: Star-tetrahedron

In my never-ending quest for finding geometry in nature, I recently found a star-tetrahedron in the flowers of a Hoya pubicalyx ‘Red Buttons.’ Here are the flowers:

The star-tetrahedron is a three-dimensional figure, represented in two dimensions thusly:

The flowers create a three-dimensional ball, so if I could wrap a three-dimensional star-tetrahedron around the flower ball, I’d be willing to bet that everything would line up almost perfectly.

Since I can’t do that, I have to settle for a two-dimensional picture of the hoya flowers and a two-dimensional representation of a star-tetrahedron. But, with special thanks to Photoshop, everything lines up pretty nicely when I superimpose that star-tetrahedron representation on top of the two-dimensional picture of the flowers:

It’s too late to put this in my book, Nature’s Geometry: Succulents, but it’s not too late to put it in my Powerpoint presentation for the cactus & succulent clubs that I will be talking to next year.

Will always miss Zoey the Cool Cat

On June 23, 2019, at 6:35 p.m., I was holding Zoey the Cool Cat in my arms at the vet’s office. She let out a final little snort as her head nestled into the crook of my arm and she started her journey over the Rainbow Bridge.

Will always miss the Cool Cat. She brought so much joy and laughter into my life with my husband, Jim.

Following are ten of my favorite pictures of her. The first was taken about three hours after we had brought her home from the El Cajon Animal Shelter on September 21, 2007. Her name was Zoey, but I added “the Cool Cat” after taking the picture. I think she had decided to stay in our home.

If you are new to my blog
and would like to know more about
Zoey the Cool Cat,
here are all my blog posts featuring her.
Here are my three posts about her final days,

Music on Monday (12/23/2019)—All the machines say, “We’re okay!”

Excel tells me that I have in my rock & roll music collection 4,260 digital files totaling 1,594 hours, 16 minutes, and 2 seconds. Some of them are individual songs and some are albums.

By listening to my collection for a mere 10 hours each and every day, it only takes me 159 days, 25 minutes, and 36 seconds to listen to everything. Done. Start over. I should disclose that I listen to my collection in chronological order.

File #4,261 will be “Software” by Grace Slick released in 1984.

Grace Slick was the first female rock ‘n’ roll singer whom I liked. I listened to “White Rabbit” and “Someone To Love” by Jefferson Airplane until my wise old grandmother thought that I was in love with a white rabbit. I stayed with Grace through her years with the Jefferson Starship and Starship, only recently discovering that she had four solo albums:

1. 1. 1. 1. Manhole – 1974 – Peaked at #127 on the Billboard album chart
         2. Dreams – 1980 – Peaked at #32
         3. Welcome to the Wrecking Ball! – 1981 – Peaked at #48
         4. Software – 1984 – Did not chart

I listened to all four albums yesterday. Surprisingly, I didn’t really like Manhole, Dreams, or Welcome to the Wrecking Ball!

Software, though, got my attention. Here’s the track listing:

1. 1. 1. 1. “Call It Right Call It Wrong”
         2. “Me and Me”
         3. “All the Machines”
         4. “Fox Face”
         5. “Through the Window”
         6. “It Just Won’t Stop”
         7. “Habits”
         8. “Rearrange My Face”
         9. “Bikini Atoll”

“All the Machines” was released as a single, and it is my favorite song on the album.

I was going to include the lyrics, but Musixmatch, the world’s largest collection of song lyrics, has the wrong lyrics. Since they are the world’s largest collection of song lyrics, everyone else has copied them and cited Musixmatch as their source. I think I have something to do later today….

The reviews of “All the Machines are not good. They had comments such as

1. 1. 1. 1. dated
         2. not your typical Grace Slick
         3. what happened to Grace Slick
         4. synthesizer heavy

I completely agree, but I don’t find any of those to be bad.

Anyway, here it is:

I’m well on my way before I even start!

Ever since I joined my first cactus & succulent club in February 2017, I had been wanting to do a presentation of nature’s geometry using the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…..). It’s an additive sequence, meaning that the next number in the sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers.

The program chairperson for the first club told me in April 2018 that they had just had such a speaker a year ago, that he was very good, and that I would be hard-pressed to follow him. I told him that, since 1973, I had been studying the Fibonacci numbers and how they are expressed in nature, so I wouldn’t be hard-pressed to follow anyone. However, having a speaker just a year ago meant that having another speaker on the same subject the following year probably would not go over well. I got the name of the previous speaker, and it turns out that “a year ago” was defined as “five years ago.” More importantly, though, I since found out that the program chairperson for that club doesn’t schedule anyone who is not already on the cactus & succulent club speaking circuit. That, of course, begs the Catch-22 question, “How do you get on the speaking circuit to begin with?”

Turns out that one has to make contacts in a club which will take a chance on you, and that happened in June 2019 for me with the Palomar Cactus & Succulent Club of Escondido, California.

I recently found out two other ways: (1) write many articles throughout the years and have them published in reputable books and magazines, and (2) to publish a book, which I did in October 2019:

My book is for sale at my Etsy shop, $30 with free shipping to United States locations: etsy.com/shops/russelrayphotos

Many decades ago, being an author of a book was a pretty good indicator of expertise. In today’s world of self-publishing, not necessarily. That’s a problem that I dealt with with my own head when looking at publishers.

I wanted desperately for the Texas A&M University Press to publish my book since Texas A&M University is my alma mater, Class of ’77. However, the cost of having the Press publish it would have been about $44 per book, so I would have wanted to sell it for $50 to make at least a little money. The only books that are 174 pages that sell for that much money are academic books by academic publishers. So that was out.

The other problem was the time frame. It would have taken up to 18 months to publish the dang thing.

So self-publishing it was…. inexpensive and as fast as I wanted it to be. I chose BookBaby because they are a print-on-demand service. I can have one book printed, hundreds of books, or thousands of books. Of course, the more books one has printed, the less expensive the cost per book.

I could choose to have BookBaby completely involved in everything, or nothing. I chose nothing because I have been doing writing, editing, graphic design, book and magazine design and layout, and publishing all my life.

If I used all of their services, the cost would have been right up there with the Texas A&M University Press, and the lead time would have been up there, too. By buying an ISBN number from BookBaby and then using their printing services, I kept the cost low and the lead time short.

I am extremely happy with BookBaby’s printing, paper, and binding.

Having a book published immediately got me on the cactus & succulent club speaking circuit. I’m also exploring many other speaking circuits, including horticulture clubs, gardening clubs, community retirement homes (I had no idea that so many of them have regular programs; two already have expressed an interest), and city and county libraries, many of which have up to five programs each week.

The reception of Nature’s Geometry: Succulents also has me looking at doing another book. My two immediate choices are Nature’s Geometry: Flora and Nature’s Geometry: Fauna. However, my main goal is to stay on the cactus & succulent speaking circuit where I already know my intended audience and their likes.

I have noticed that a great majority of the cactus & succulent speakers give presentations on their travels to foreign countries. The Atacama Desert region of Chile and the Oxaca region of Mexico are two of the most popular. That, though, caused me to think that maybe, just maybe, the southwestern United States has a lot to offer.

There are a lot of cacti & succulents that grow in our region, many of which are found only here. Carnegiea gigantea (the saguaro) comes immediately to mind, but there also is Ferocactus wislizeni, the Southwestern barrel cactus (picture at right), Agave utahensis (which, you might guess, occurs in Utah), Ferocactus cylindraceus, the California barrel cactus, and Yucca brevifolia, the Joshua tree.

Knowing this, I have decided to do a second book, tentatively titled
SSS: Southwest Succulent Staycation. For my purpose with this book, I will define “southwest” as California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.

During 2020, I will be endeavoring to go to all the national parks, national monuments, botanical gardens, zoos (many zoos in the southwest also are botanical gardens), state parks, and cities with a population of at least 50,000. There will be exceptions, I’m sure. I already have a few million photos from excursions in the southwest, so I’m well on my way before I even start!

The nice thing about this second book is that, for people back east, going to the southwestern United States can be very much like going to a foreign country, so I might be able to get on cactus & succulent speaking circuits outside of my home territory of the southwest.

Rockin’ down the highway

I love it when I’m out and about and come across something that is featured in a song that I’ve been singing for several decades.

This morning I went to Albertsons, our local grocery store. Sitting in the middle of the parking lot was a Chevelle SS 396:

That had me singing “SS 396” by Paul Revere & The Raiders from 1966:

The Chevelle SS 396 was in production from 1964 through 1973. I do not know what year model the one I saw was; the best I can determine is that it might be a 1964 or 1965. The highest-rated horsepower SS 396 was the 1970 model with 375 horsepower.

My first car was a 1976 Chevrolet Impala with a 400 cubic inch engine. Theoretically it should have been able to keep up with the Chevelle since it had a bigger engine. However, I think the Impala was a few million pounds heavier. So much for speed. So much for gas mileage, too. I always have tracked gas mileage, and that Impala on a good day gave me just over 7 miles per gallon. Eventually, I bought a cruise control system from Sears and installed it, increasing my mileage to 11 miles per gallon!

My next car was a 1976 Chevy Nova, also with a 400 cubic inch engine. After downsizing to a 1970 Datsum B210 station wagon (don’t ask), I went full on into the muscle car program: Mustang, Camaro, Firebird, Trans Am, Porsche. If you had told me back then that in 40 years I would be driving Toyota Avalon & Camry & Corolla, Honda Civic & Accord, Nissan Altima & Maxima, and—gasp!—a Honda Insight hybrid, I might have gone over to my uncle’s house, borrowed one of his 500 shotguns, and come after you. Sacrilege. Yet here I am:

I like to tell people that I officially am out of the horsepower phase of
my life and into the gas mileage phase. My 2019 Honda Insight is rated
at 55 city/49 highway. At first I thought the numbers were reversed,
but they are not. Out on the freeway, most of the driving is under gas power. In the city, sitting at traffic signals and such, most of the driving
is under electric power.

The best I have done in the five months I have had the car is 51.1 mpg on the highway and 53.8 mpg in the city. The good highway driving on that one tank was the result of stop & go traffic for two round trips of 290 miles between San Diego and the Los Angeles County Arboretum over two consecutive days. I was quite happy

With electric power and 4TB of my music in the car, I don’t even mind stop & go traffic anymore. I just sit back, cruise on electric, and rock on down the highway.