The last hummingbird blog...

I watched them turn from little black jelly bean sized aliens to fuzzy little things to baby hummingbirds.
It was a fantastic journey watching these two little darlings grow up and a very protective mama take care of them.
Unfortunately the last few weeks got a little rough because the storms we had knocked down the shade which was good and bad. The shade protected them from some of the harsher weather we had but it also kind of trapped them into that area, so mama had to fly through an opening to teach them to fly. During this time she drove my cats batshit and I when I was trying to nap because she would be flying in the window and my cats would be trying to launch through. I tried hanging a blanket and closing the blinds but to no avail.
Despite the lack of sleep and mini battles I did love watching them grow up and the process of a hummingbird egg to bird journey!
Below are the last shots I tried to catch of them as they grew into little birds! Although they have flown the nest and I have cut it down the little family still seems to be hanging around. We saw them flying around the backyard just yesterday!

You will see they go from eyes closed, to open eyes to fuzzy, to little birds. The last shot I took was them both sitting on the edge of the nest waiting to fly! (Start bottom up)

I am here...

The last couple of weeks have gone by in a blur and I have completely neglected my blogs, my exercise, and my sanity, my everything.
I knew it was going to happen, I just didn’t know to this extreme.
In a nutshell, I was part of a show that unfortunately was very unorganized from the get go. It took much more of my time and stress and gas money than I had anticipated and I had probably one of the most brutal tech weeks of my life. I wasn’t getting home until 1am most nights, and still having to work my regular day job. The show opened and I tried to get my life back on track and I've still been stumbling around trying to get it there.
I also got nailed with a stomach flu followed 2 days later by the cold/flu, knocking me on my ass for about a week.
Then our computer was down for a bit over a week and I found I can’t do a whole helluva lot on my iPhone.
Also my Papa has declined again. We had a paramedic run on him and my gramma when he fell on her one night, the following night he almost fell again but this time he wasn’t all the way to the ground so I thought I could handle getting him up and to the couch. This turned into 2 huge fights with my mother, one with my gramma and me spending 25 minutes of lifting and holding my Papa who is not a light 97 year old. He couldn’t help at all so he was complete dead weight. After a stressful, sweaty, strenuous effort my MacGyver skills using a table with my foot helped us to success. But this did lead to the ultimate 2nd fight with my mom that they need 24 hour care because Thursday night CANNOT be repeated. This was the night of my bowling play offs which I had already missed 3 weeks in a row due to a friend's need, sickness and tech and I couldn’t miss again. I torqued the left side of my body and my already jacked up wrist in the Papa rescue. I only bowled one game but by the end I was hurting.
Of course the next night was my show followed by Warrior Dash and closing my show yesterday.
Whew!!!!
So as you can see, the last few weeks have been a little much and my body has been slammed pretty badly. BUT I'm back and today, aside from the soreness, I'm excited to get back on track again.
SO!
Some updates on some things and thoughts:
- Bowling. I was very sad to have missed 3 weeks in a row of my bowling party league nights. I absolutely love my team and I always have a great time those Thursday nights. The league doesn’t seem to be too organized and somewhat screwed us on our win last season but my team makes up for it. We lost the 1st round of playoffs last Thursday night but we played hella good! I'm so proud of my team and all of their improvements. They get better every time! A couple of them have even bought their own shoes and balls! I plan on at least getting a pair of my own bowling shoes now that I'm back to normal. Our next season should start up end of April and I'm pretty sure my entire team is on board for another go.
- Theatre. I'm a little scared by the fact that theatre seems to have taken a backseat in my life. I'm still exploring this, but it terrifies me. Theatre has always been my everything. My entire life has revolved around it. My passion has not died for it, but other things have become more important. My health, my activity in my life, and my quest to meet someone real. I'm not sure how to handle this quite yet. At the moment I am only going to sign onto projects that I'm extremely passionate about, that are organized and I feel confident will put out a good finished product. I also am very picky on who I will and will not work with now. I need to explore this more, but I have a feeling some things are going to be shifting.
- Warrior Dash. There will be a separate blog for this.
- My blogging. I have gotten WAY behind in my Writers Book of Days. I was going to shine it and just skip the last few insane weeks, but I think I'm going to try to do a couple a day, maybe 3 to try to catch back up. I have found some of the writing assignments give me no inspiration whatsoever so there may be blogs of random words that come to mind, but I feel this is ok. I also am loving my haikus sometimes :). My hummingbird family has flown the coop so I will be posting the final blog of pics here soon. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten!
That's probably it for now. I will be blogging a bit more and catching back up on lots of things now that I'm feeling better, not insanely busy, and have an up and running home computer. But I do have to throw in some naps and recovery time as well so this blog is it for today!

2 babies and feeding time...

So we have two little guys!
Mamma watches me closely when I'm trying to photograph - the screen is really giving me issues.
Tweaks has pretty much given up.
It's been so much fun watching them get bigger and bigger!! I'm so excited to have caught feeding time here!

Update and Traces...

I realized I haven’t updated you all in a while.
Not much has changed since last update, still taking the boxing boot camp Mon/Wed and Zumba on Saturdays. I bowl with the party league on Thursdays. Therapy every other Tuesday. Grandparents on Sundays.
I've fallen into a bit of a routine.
Rehearsals are starting to make their way into the mix of things.
I had a nice chat with my director today on the direction to take my character and I'm excited about it which before I wasn’t.
I seem to be running into quite a few challenges as of late. I am aware the work I'm putting into changing things is starting to really get frustrating. I have some pretty gnarly digestive problems as of late. I have always had issues in this department but it's gotten a lot worse the last few months. I'm meeting a specialist next week but I can’t help but get annoyed since I'm actually eating better than I used to and taking much better care of myself. I've also added a few new injuries to my already existing ones which is even the more frustrating. It's one of those battles that I'm the type of person to plow through things but now they've gotten worse. I HATE when something is keeping me from performing 100%. Did I mention I'm one of those really bitchy sick people? :)
My Papa is really not doing well and this is something I don’t know how I'm going to handle. He's mind is going and in my opinion is the worst thing that can happen to a person. It's absolutely killing me to watch someone I love more than anything in the world go through this.
So yeah. Been a rough month I guess. Er February was, it's March now isnt it!?

Onto a better note.
I saw Traces today. My lovely boss gave me her subscription tickets when she read the description "Urban Energy" and knew it wasn’t her cup of tea but something I would love. She was right. I brought along my friend who’s a brilliant choreographer herself and off to OCPAC we went. Did I mention the seats were Orch row G, almost center.
The group is 6 men and 1 woman (With RIDICULOUSLY amazing bodies I might add). Most from Canada, one Asian and 2 from the US. The show is described as cirque de soliel like.
It began very performance artsy with dance and movement. I'm actually not to into that sort of thing but certainly appreciate the beauty and grace of it.
The cutest tall guy and the gal did a beautiful dance number and he was throwing her around as if she was light as a feather. I've never seen a dance the way they did it. The strength, my god.
My highlight of the show was when they all climbed and flipped all over these 2 poles. I'm realizing right now that I cannot even begin to describe in words how fucking amazing this was. The strength these people had. They were doing things on those poles that didn’t seem humanly possible and beautifully! (I'm not going to lie - I wanted to have sex with all of them right then - throw in the girl too. My god). It was phenomenal.
The Asian kat did a fantastic bit with those yo-yo looking things. Oh and then added 3 more.
They leapt through hoops, they played the piano, they were funny, and they did tricks with a basketball, with skateboards, dance and more. This troupe was seriously brilliant. My friend felt renewed after seeing it which made me happy.
It was a brilliant, brilliant show.
I wish I could describe it better but you had to see it. If any of you readers are interested just google Traces or 7 fingers. Take a look for yourself!

And to add to the good, because I know this blog started out a bit down. I’ve started a “Happy Journal”. Yup – I want to write down every time I feel really good or I laugh really hard. My memory sucks and I want to remember the good stuff.
My birthday few days was nice. I treated myself to a massage, dad took me shopping, co-workers brought me wine and flowers and a handful of my lovelies showed up at Bistro 400 to celebrate me.
I’m working on changing. I know this is hard. I am up for the challenge. I just need to learn patience I suppose. Probably my biggest weakness 

Baby is here...

So it looks like we have one little baby hummingbird!
Unfortunatly I'm having a really hard time with camera getting to focus through the screen. The images below are a little blurry but you can see baby!!!

Hummingbird...

So - we have had our 1st hummingbird nest last year that the little gal decided to build ontop of the light cords in mom's patio.
I had a ball trying to photograph her without disturbing her.
The past couple of days I have noticed a hummingbird buzzing around my window and driving Tweaks mad.
Yesterday I snapped a few shots thinking I was so lucky to catch this bird flying around my window. But why does it keep coming back?
This morning I was woken up by the usual hummingbird buzzing noise and rolled over to my camera to try to catch it again.
I was half asleep while waiting and laid back down when Tweaks hopped again doing her adorable hunting chirp, but she was looking down.
Ooooo, maybe it landed again and I can try to catch a shot.
I slowly leaned closer to the window and looked down.
Holy Shit there's a nest.
She has built a little nest right outside my window.
I dragged my mom out of bed to show her and alert her so her gardening will now have to pause in this area.
Now I know I'm lucky!
I get to witness 1st hand (hopefully!) the process I watched at a distance last year.
I'm hoping my camera will get through the screen, which it seems to do if I futz with it enough.
And I don’t want to disturb mama, so I'll be quite careful.
But I'll be posting them here on my blog for you faithful readers to see!!
Enjoy!

Riding my bike...

I have always loved to ride my bike.
Ever since I was little.
The minute the training wheels were off - look out world. I was on a tear.
My brother and I got BMX bikes at one point and used to make ramps and tricks and got pretty good at it. To this today I'm surprised that neither one of us killed ourselves or at least broke something major on our little bodies.
As I got older I always tried to get out and ride my bike when I could.
I moved to Costa Mesa - didn’t ride too much when I was married due to the fact that I had a rather large husband who wasn’t much of a bike rider.
After the divorce I moved to the other side of the freeway and started riding my bike again. I rode to the beach. I rode to the grocery store. I rode to get sushi. I rode as much as I could. I loved the fact that I was so close to the beach that I could ride there and back.
I moved back home to Orange and was a little bummed out that there weren’t many places that were really bike friendly. Traffic doesn’t seem to care you’re on your bike and it's safer to ride on the sidewalk which isn’t all that great either.
Orange is working on becoming more bike friendly though, and one of the huge improvements that has happened recently is they opened the Santa Ana bike trail.
See what used to be across the street from my mother's house was an Orange Grove and behind that the "Gravel Pit", this was of course an actual quarry that made gravel and cement. In between that was the Santa Ana Riverbed.
As a kid we used to hike and cause all kinds of trouble back there. We'd sneak into the quarry or hike down to the reservoir and hop the fence for late night illegal swims. Then they tore it all down and build condos. I was heartbroken when I watched my memories bulldozed away. Well over the years, as things do, they change and grow. The quarry has since been replaced with Grivalda Park. It's a great little park and has a huge sports complex now. This is where I take my boxing burn and zumba classes. The best part of all - they opened the bridge that now means I can walk there!!!! They have also opened up the Santa Ana Bike Trail. It will hopefully eventually hook up to the beach trail that one way goes to the beach and the other direction to Corona somewhere. There's a slight hold up in the Floral Park area of Santa Ana. But right now it goes all the way through from moms house to Hart Park and under to where it stops under the 5 freeway.
Today I went the other direction since the just opened up the trail that goes under Collins and around the reservoir. It goes all the way around and up to Cannon street. Somewhere up there you apparently can take a detour and hop on to something that goes up to Santiago Canyon area but I haven’t got that far yet. Today I just made it to where the path actually stops. Which was a pretty decent ride.
Now - as you read this you probably think I'm one of those fancy bike riders with the fancy bikes and colorful outfits and helmets.
No.
I have a Pink Panther beach cruiser. It has lights for night time riding and a metal black basket. It's super cute and I love so much! I do actually believe that I have the cutest bike in the whole wide world.
The downfall?
It's a beach cruiser.
When I ride bikes with friends, most of them have those fancy bikes. So when we hit hills I have to holler at them to wait up as I'm standing on my bike pedals and huffing it up the hill at a much slower pace.
I do love my beach cruiser and I will ride it as much as I can, but I'm actually starting to wonder if I should look into one of those fancy bikes with the speeds or whatever magical think they do that makes for more smooth distance riding. I'm pretty sure you will never see me in a race or anything, but I really do love to bike around and adventure. Find things. Find new places. See where trails go. I also wonder if I would be one of those people that would really dig mountain biking. Again - beach cruiser wouldn’t quite work.
I'm not sure what to do about this. My finances are super limited and I can’t imagine ever being able to afford one of those fancy bikes, and a helmet, and a colorful bike outfit and then knowing what the hell to do with the thing once I had it. (What's a gear?)
But for now, this little outdoor nature lover is cruising around town on her adorable Pink Panther Beach Cruiser. And today was really lovely.
I couldn’t seem to find anyone to accompany me on my curiosity ride to see where the other end of the path went, so I grabbed my camera and rode solo.
It was a little chilly but not too bad.
People were so friendly, saying hello, smiling or waving.
I tend to get lost in my thoughts when I ride alone.
I stopped a few times on my way back to snap a few shots playing with a few settings I hopefully actually learned in my photo class.
I felt good.
I'm really proud of myself for following through with things so much better. Doing things I really do love even if there's no one to do it with.
I live in SoCal. I can’t take for granted the fact that we can pretty much do outdoorsy stuff all year around.
Cheers to beautiful weather and the health to enjoy it.
Below are a few shots I snapped today.
It was a good day.