Winter Assortment

 I'm under pressure to leave town - not because of what I post here, but in order to do some shopping.  No time to make sense of this particular collection.  There really is a connection among these.

Much later - December 10:  I received a comment before I got around to explaining this strange assortment.  Here's the scoop.  As my regular readers know, I have often had a hard time letting go of summer, although I vowed to do so this year.  I excitedly took a ruler out on my back deck to measure our first snow (above photo).  But, on that morning of December 7, I also got a photo sent from a naturalist friend in the Central Valley of a skipper.  He wondered if I knew the species, which I didn't.  But, that prompted me to search my photo archives for Skipper photos for comparison. The one below was taken near my house in late summer.  I never did manage to identify my friend's species, but sent along my best guess.  Meanwhile, I'm back at staring at this one's beautiful, curved proboscis and remember the Skippers and many other species that gathered on the Tansy in my neighborhood in August through October.  Click on this photo for a closer view.

Another friend asked if he could use my photo of a ripe Gooseberry (below) for the cover of the winter issue of the Quincy Natural Foods Co-ops winter newsletter.  It is red and green, which are iconic colors for the holiday season.  However, it's also a photo of a late-summer phenomenon,

so the longing for summer came back for a while.  Since I'm administering my last semester exam today, and anticipating a month without classes, I think I'll get back to the work of enjoying the season I'm in, maybe occasionally mining my archives for old photos, but mostly concentrating on drawing and creative projects that lie ahead.  I'm contemplating offering Adventures in Nature Journaling in a whole new format during the latter half of spring semester, say April and May.  Stay tuned.