It Must Be Spring

Two days' dispiriting drizzle turned, in the middle of the night, to torrential rain, part of an 'atmospheric river' that was supposed to strike the California coast. The  people who have already evacuated the Santa Barbara/Montecito area once due to landslides and flooding have evacuated again. 

We had our own adventures going to Kathy, our personal trainer's studio which is in the country near Windsor. Two of the roads needed to get to her house were closed due to flooding. She directed us around the first closure, but we decided to risk through the other one since she told us she had just done it.  Flood conditions on rural roads in the county are quite common when the creeks overwhelm their banks and run across the road.

It's been two weeks since I've seen Kathy since the flu rendered me useless for Pilates or anything else, and she gave me a little carton of six beautifully arranged eggs, three blue and three brown, from her hens. It was a lovely birthday gift and I came straight home and made an omelet for lunch. The yolks were orange, and the omelet was delicious.

Our own Santa Rosa Creek is in spate right across the road. As far as anybody who lives around here can remember it has never risen above its banks, but we can hear it roaring by as soon as we open our front door,  even though we are a couple of hundred feet above the road. It was still raining quite hard so we confined our morning walk to a sprint down the driveway and across the road to check out the level.*

We ran across today's amorous couple in the middle of the driveway. They are generally very elusive,...we never see them, but have heard them calling with increasing urgency for a mate every night. At first I only saw one frog, but upon closer inspection I realized that this pair were successful for so preoccupied were they this morning that they were completely unphased by my introduction of a camera.They must have thought that they were completely camouflaged by the stones of the driveway....

It was hardly an erotic encounter as both remained entirely motionless while I messed around with my lens inches away from them. Call it anthropomorphism if you must, but I still think there was something fascinating and perhaps even rather sweet about the resulting picture.

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