2010 April 20, from Portland, Oregon

Hello, Everybody,

The new slideshow is even more than usual nearly all birds and
flowers, rather than scenery. The California coast abounds in exotic
looking flowers as well as good birding. My friend Joey Tuttle and I
visited the Australian section of the University of California at Santa
Cruz Arboretum where we had heard there were lots of
hummingbirds. We found an Allen's Hummingbird, new for my 'life
list', a bit of extra excitement, and photographed many unidentified
'strange looking' plants and flowers. 

I just got a 70-200mm f/4 Image Stabilized zoom lens for taking
'grandson pictures', and a reconditioned 40D body which is slightly
upgraded from the 20D I've been using for 5 years, and Joey tried
out the new lens while I carried my usual 300mm 'birding lens'
(working at 420mm). The new lens seems to work extremely well, and
I'm looking forward to putting it to its main purpose soon.

I spent a few weeks birding in the great Central Valley, with six major
sites in the San Luis and Sacramento NWRs. I was especially happy to
get some nice pictures of White-faced Ibis in flight, with their exotic
colorings and prehistoric appearance seeming very dramatic. Also
a large flock of Black-bellied Plover, which I had thought rather
exotic since the single other one I've seen in 6 years was near the
edge of the Arctic Ocean.

While I was camped up a rainy and muddy side-road in the foothills,
30 miles from town, I was hailed by two bedraggled Hispanic
women from Salinas (3 hours away) asking for help - - their very
limited English was enough to tell me that their car was stuck in the
mud farther up the road. When I drove up to their car just at dusk,
with them sitting half in my camper door and half on the tailgate,
expecting to pull them out of the mud, it was too gooey to try it
without risk of damaging their car - - in fact three days later it was still
not dry enough for a wrecker to be able to manage it. I loaded all
my stuff from the front seat into the camper, and spent the next 5
hours chasing around the hills trying to link them up with their two
men-folk who had walked out for help a few hours earlier. In the
process I carelessly drove into a muddy ditch off the paved highway
while trying to turn around, and had to wait steeply tilted, with the
two women crammed into the right seat, nearly 3 hours for a
wrecker to come pull me out (which took 3 minutes). When I finally
dropped them at a motel in town, and got back to my campsite at
0300 in the morning, the mud there had gotten so bad that even
after several tries I could not get the truck up on blocks to level it, so
finally gave up and went to the bottom of the hill where I found a
sloppy looking but nearly level spot that worked. At 0430, with lots of
mud smeared around everything, bed felt good. I was
congratulating myself that throughout all this drama nobody had
gotten hurt and no equipment was damaged. Then I discovered my
camper fridge was not fridging even though the propane flame was
merrily heating the chimney. Looking into the manual for the fridge, I
found "Operating not leveled for more than a hour may
permanently damage the cooling unit." So later this week I'll be
putting a new fridge in, for $640.

The new slideshow is: 10 04 Apr CA.exe

The server address is:     http://www.meetmarsha.com/~john
(note the tilde ~ before the john part)

Boilerplate follows: Each browser is a little different, but generally you
can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then
OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I
have used my up-to-date Zone Alarm and SpybotSearch&Destroy to
be sure the .exe files are malware free, so you can safely ignore
Windows's warning about 'dangerous <.exe> files'. 

Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar will advance to the next
picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture.
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems
stuck.

If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files on a phone line   please let me know,
as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you
would like any of the individual images, perhaps to print, just let me
know. I periodically remove older slideshows to put up new ones; let
me know if you want me to send you a CD of any of the 'back
issues', or of all of them from 2004-2010 along with their
accompanying emails, on CDs. And if you don't want to get any
more emails like this one in the future, just let me know. If you have
friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to add them to my
email list and they can download the slideshows if they have a
Windows computer and broadband internet connection. None of
this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the pictures,
the better.   

Regards, John Armitage
1-970-250-6080
john@qued.com