Every Day is Exactly the Same

So...not exactly the same, but most of our winter has been like this: fog, rain, wind, cold. This is a seven day project, one photo taken each day, for seven days in a row, from the same location, showing seven days of our wet, winter weather.

Day One: Not everything is brown & dead here, even in winter, we have a fair amount of green, like these ferns in my yard
Day Two: Foggy & Cold, front yard
Day Three: Foggy & Cold, back yard
Day Four: Budding Branches, Cherry Tree, Signs of Spring?
Day Five: Rain on my window
Day Six: A Bit of Sky among the clouds (this was in the morning, before the clouds unleashed their daily downpour
Day Seven: Bulbs starting to come up, Day Lilies, More Signs of Spring? Maybe I'm just being hopeful...We often have our coldest weather in February (hopefully not in the teens, like last month) & sometimes snow...

Hope you enjoyed these seven days in Tacoma, Washington & that there are signs of Spring in the air for you! SAM

(For any of you wondeing about the Storytelling Saturday, I will be making this a monthly feature & attempting to add a space for you to share any interesting storytelling objects you've stumble accross)

*All photos & text the property of Shelley McElhiney, all rights reserved, please contact for any desired usage.

That Was Then, This is Now...

That was then...Arizona desert, blinding sun, cacti, roadrunners, javelinas, quail, dust devils, tumbleweeds, hot sun visible heat, sometimes, a lot of the time. Torrential downpours, flash floods, brief but significant rains, thunder & lightening, rattlesnakes & frogs, brown & green, grey & forest, mountains & valleys, arroyos & rivers, beauty both amazing & fierce, a land of contrasts, filled with cities & vast spaces, difficulties & excess...

This is now...Washington state, vast forests, some old, some new, felled by industry & preserved for (hopefully) all time, lakes & deserts, industry & farms, mountains & fields, cities brought together by vast systems of trains, boats, cars. More rain than anywhere else in the country, orchards filled with apples & pears, pine trees on one side & desert plains on the other, the ocean nearby, connected to the world by huge ships...
In between...adventure, travel, love, sadness, the normal stuff of life. SAM

Happy Earth Day :)

Happy Earth Day!

Early Morning Frost Tacoma,WA

Hope you had a beautiful day...

* Photo by Shelley Mcelhiney, all rights reserved

Brrr...

It's turned very cold (for us, anyway). Not much snow, but very cold:

How about you? Are you experiencing the ice & cold of winter? What's it like where you are?

*All photos & content property of Shelley McElhiney.

Bumblebees, Spring, Tea & other stuff....

Newest Sam's Stuff shop listing http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23789439
So, today I saw the first bumblebee of the season. An adorable, big, fat, fuzzy bumblebee. A sure sign that spring is on it's way. No, even though he was fuzzy & cute, I didn't try to view him up close. He was still a bee, after all. I also saw wasps (not fuzzy or cute), giant spiders (fuzzy, not cute) & adorable little birds, all today. The flowers are blooming & it was a lovely warm, sunny day. A perfect day for a nice cup of iced tea.
Which reminds me... I want to get more of the Gypsy Tea brand Lemon Jasmine tea, delicious (as are many of their flavors). They did not have any at Fred Meyer, where I've gotten it in the past, so I may need to get a refill on-line, at their website. If you've never tried their tea & you like tea, I highly recommend it. I haven't had any flavors that I haven't liked yet! The Coconut Chai is the best chai I've ever tasted & the tins are refillable on-line.
All this talk of tea brings me to... the "tea parties," hosted by Fox News, etc. that have been all over the media this past week. I'm not even sure where to begin with this. It seems to me that this is a comparison of apples & oranges gone horribly wrong, not to mention a terrible waste of money, time & commodity, all rolled into one. The colonists where protesting taxation without representation, the taking of their money, not to put back into the colonial infrastructure, not even really to help the "mother country," but to line the pockets of the already wealthy. Our current government (& not governments of the past, who all had different goals & methods of achieving those goals) is taking money & assets to reinvested in our countries infrastructure, going beyond the whole unsuccessful "trickle down economics" theory of recent administrations to stimulate growth through the creation of jobs & the prevention of property loss. One of the problems they have run into is the lack of real cooperation from some who take this stimulus money & reinvest it into their own little "trickle down" (again, this has not worked in the past, why is it going to work now?)theories, lining their own pockets & companies with money that the average person will never see. The effect is more of choking growth than stimulating it. It's an old model that didn't work in the first place. If it had, we wouldn't be where we are today. So, to get back to the colonists & tea parties, the comparison is way off. We do not have the same situation. The money is meant to create jobs & stave off the concurrent rise of homelessness that the loss of jobs has created. The sooner corporations get with the program & drop old & ineffective models, the better off we'll all be & the sooner we'll truly recover from this crisis. That's my opinion, at any rate, what's yours? How do you think we can best "recover?"