Miscellaneous good stuff.

One of the last mornings when we were on our cruise of the southern Caribbean, Ruth and I were having breakfast in the port of St. Kitts.
Looking out the large windows on the side of the ship I could see where a rainbow was ending in the water about fifteen or twenty feet from the ship. I've always heard about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but the only pots I saw were on the men who'd been enjoying a week of all the food they could eat. I didn't even think it was possible to see the end of the rainbow. Scientifically, you see a rainbow at an 180 degree angle from an area where rain is falling, if the sun is shing where you are. I didn't see any rain around us... certainly I would have noticed if it was fifteen feet off the starboard side. When I think of rainbows, I think of them not just as a weather phenomenon, but as a covenant. God put a rainbow in the sky as a sign of his promise to man. I'm not so sure this was one, though.

Back in the early 60's I spent a summer as the navigator on a floating ice station in the Arctic Ocean. We were closer to Russia than the United States. I couldn't steer the iceberg. I just plotted its location. It was a very strange summer. Among other other things, there were occasional fog bows. It didn't rain in the Arctic but if the weather conditions were right, we'd see fog bows. Fog bows are just gray. No need for a full box of freshly sharpened crayons to draw a fog bow. We also saw false suns directly above and below the sun and on each side, horizontal to the sun. I'd never seen that before.

Yesterday on our river walk, Ruth and I saw several otters apparently cavorting in the river. Actually, they were catching fish. Cavorting came later on a full stomach. The Cottonwood trees are in bloom now and the soft fluffy seed cases were floating across the walkway, gathering in snowy, lightly shifting piles along the edge of the sidewalk. In some places, they collected in tree branches and we saw a pair of Cedar Waxwings gather the seeds for a soft, fluffy nest. I've only seen Cedar Waxwings aa couple of times so it was a real treat. And then, munching away on the lawn a few feet away from the walkway was a young, rather slim groundhog. He'd look around every few chews just to make sure the coast was clear. There are Red Tail Hawks that cruise the skies in the area, and he would have made a nice feast for one of them.

And rather unexpectedly, I'm getting more requests for book signings, concerts and odds and ends of stuff, like performing at the Trolley Day. Some are folk concerts, some are gospel concerts, some are as part of a church service and some are just for plain old entertainment. It's nice to be asked.

The cupboard is bare. I'd better do some baking, soon.