What a thriller this was.  I was suprised by a birthday cake for my 66th birthday.  It was such fun and I felt loved and blessed by all my new friends from our thriller gig at the Loft.  Connie, who made the cake out of white batter and coconut frosting, also added candles, although I am certain it was not 66 candles.  I did make a wish.  And I did blow them all out.  That means I will get my wish.  If I can remember what I wished for...joke! We have put together a video and it will be on UTube very soon...perhaps under the heading...ThrillTheWorld..maybe Yosemite after.  We were all celebrating in a secret location...on the meadow.  We all contributed something to the party.  Mine was my favorite bags of chips and a cake.  I brought a cake because I did not know they were going to suprise me with the above...Connie is a fabulous cook by the way.  It was a 10 star cake.

Our friend and fellow dancer Greg Bruner took this photo.  I did not know anyone had brought a camera.  I got one of this on my camera, but it is still locked away in a memory chip.  Thanks Greg I really appreciate this sentiment.  I was wearing my pink thermals printed with tiny cute cartoon reindeer.  I do not think anyone could see the reindeer.  They look like music notes, but they are really reindeer feet.  Right now I wish I was younger and prettier.

The only present I got for my birthday was a handknit scarf that I knitted for myself because I fell in love with the soft pastel colored yarn.  My grand daughter made me a second cake with no candles and chocolate batter decorated with white frosting.

Now I have to make a bucket list, since the years are beginning to pile up on me.  Still no prospects for a husband though...OMG I do not even have a boyfriend.  But I do have a great job and it is working at DNC in YNP and they do something that no one has ever done for me...they pay us to work on our birthdays, even if we do not work!  And if we work on our birthdays we are given time and a half in pay.  Fancy that! A company birthday present...that is the coolest.

During Christmas of 2009 we all celebrated in some way.  This was a gathering of NPS and DNC employees to express their Christams sentiments and enjoy a potluck together.  This was sponsored in part by the local Yosemite Chapel and the nativity performance was staged at the local Yosemite School.  The school is nestled near the government housing area and is showered upon continually by the steady roar of the famous Yosemite Falls.  Many people were there and some drove up the curvy 140 road from El Portal to celebrate.

We sang Christmas songs and ate delicious food and visited among the gathered crowd.  Eventually at the end of the evening Santa Claus appeared and we watched the children tell Santa their Christmas wishes.

The Yosemite School is for grades K - 12.  If I were a child I would love to attend school their.  I can't think of a more beautiful setting than this where I could learn and grow.  This school will probably produce the next set of Park Rangers and Foresters and Ecological Environmentalist.  Housing in one of the classrooms is a completed project, one that I always wished I had the time to do:  a mobile of a thousand origami cranes floating in the air.  These cranes arranged in a group of a thousand according to Japanese legend, are a living symbol of eternal peace.

They also have a community project in the works.  It is a story of Yosemite and this large circular mosaic tablet will be placed on the front entrance wall of the Yosemite School.  Eventually.

If I were a teacher i can not think of a more wonderful place to teacher.  All the children are bright and enthusiastic because of the positive environment and the encouragment of all the teachers.  This school will produce exceptional people who have been educated in an exceptional location...Yosemite National Park.  How great thou art....

El Cap

One solid plutonic rock soaring thousands of feet above the Yosemite Valley floor that has been dated by geologists to be approximately 82 million years old, El Capitan is a world reknowned challenge to Class 5  Rock Climbers and photograpers with an eye for the perfect picture.   Just to pass by in an automobile is an experience as one can feel the mightly presence of the rock as it rises far and above, often lifting its stretching top into the tumble of fluffy clouds.  The altitude alone is breathtaking,

The road to Yosemite Valley literally takes you into the bowels of the earth, so to speak, since the surrounding environment is grandorite walls that loft skybound into the cooler upper atmosphere, while you remain on the Valley floor, as small and tiny as a  colorful butterfly in spring, or  a grasshopper hidden by meadow grasses.  One felled tree was laden with 135 rings, while others still standing might be even older as these ancient soldiers stand and sway,  guardians of all that goes on within the Walls and Cliffs of Yosemite.

While you are enthralled watching and viewing cliffs as you may have never seen them before, and trees whose heights may astound you, please be ever mindful of the unguarded dangers that may catch you unaware due to your detachment from your normal earthly reality.  What might that be you ask?  Say for instance you stop your car and get out, forgetting that the road in is a one way road, and perhaps you just stop without pulling over because you do not see any approaching cars.  Well, cars are not supposed to drive over 25 miles per hour in the Valley, however Yosemite boasts 3.5 to 4.1 million visitors and guests per year.  If the road is open and the weather is pleasant, someone will be on the road.  You can count on it!  Pull over and shut off your car engine.  Look both ways and all around and then be mindful of picture taking.  Many people loose themselves in the beauty of the scenery and they forget to be careful.

Everyone wants the perfect picture and we all have to be in the right spot, according to our own perceptions to get it.  This often means we do not look where we are going at eye level and oops, we step into a gully or soft meadow patch or trip over a rock, loosing our foresight in our photo conquest.  Our camera, digital or expensive telephoto goes flying and we can land boot side up with mud on our lense.

Some dauntless visitors stand smack, road to their middle and stop traffic or naught...making the ultimate picture their very last vision.  Believe me, those cliffs and walls will be their finger click or naught, so watch out where you are walking and then stop when you are safe and still and then click away my friends.

Please realize you are in a National Park and it is a wildlife habitat and a forest.  The latter is important because while the trees tower from 5 stories to perhaps 30 or 40 stories high on an average...when limbs and branches break they come a crashing down and the wood in one seeminly small branch is quite heavey.  Falling from a distance far above your 5 or 6 foot human body,  the branch can accumulate a speed and an impact that is deadly.  My suggestion is to pay acute attention to the sounds around you.  Many visitors wear headphones or play music off their ipods...not a good idea in Yosemite.  Listening to the music of the forest is for certain a better way to survival and ensuring your safety.  Those strong branches, that are often falling, make great music and the sound they play is the sound of them warning you to pay attention and hop out of the way.

Yosemite is a geologists paradise.  While rocks can be an absorbing study of geometry, and an artists delight of shifting colors, from grays to whites to blacks to golds, all depending of the moment of light and tones of the shadows, the rocks themselves are never stable and are always moving.  Well, maybe not right at the moment you are there, but they will and you do not know when, and that is why you have to pay attention and be alert.  Again rocks send out warnings and if you are  listening to the rocks or the walls or the cliffs, you can hear them speaking to you.  Rocks make music just like your ipod does, and if you are listening to their voices, it could save your life, however, outside music only provides background noise, drowning out the low growl of shifting granite walls, or the heavey clunking music of descending granite cascades tumbling and grinding rock over rock in a thunder of vertical descent.  Listen to the sounds of the forests.

The trees, the rocks, the waterfalls....are the music of the forests, and these also are punctuated by the bird calls from ravens, bluejays, and other creatures that hide themselves from public veiw.  Know that they are there.  And if you listen you can hear the music of the forest...the music of Yosemite.

When I first arrived at the Ahwahnee Hotel in August of 2009 I was excited to be part of a National Historic Building.  To me it was a museum and not really a Hotel.  Most guests that visit and have visited over the last 82 years feel the Ahwahnee is more of a home than a hotel and even less of a museum.  However this is where time looses its importance in Yosemite.  Our park and our hotel have adopted, like the walls surrounding us, a sense of timelessness.  I have not been here very long, certainly "just a puff of wind across the way" and already I feel like I have been here since the begining of time.  The Ahwahnee was built with endurance in mind and so it is a standing monument and living hotel, as well a viable artifact set among the tall trees of the forest.

Artifacts were what I was looking for, such as old bones among the rocky ledges of the walls of the mighty granite cliffs around me.  I was suprised to find my first artifact in the dry creek bed running near the Ahwahnee heated pool.  One was good but two more revealed themselves to me and like someone who did not know any better I thought they should be handed over to the NPS office.  No, no they told me.  If I found any artifact in the future I was to leave it exactly where it lay, even if it was in the creek bed and would soon be swirled over by the chilly eddies of snow melt, or rainfall.

We are not to touch anything.  We are not to pick it up.  We are to let it lay.  Kinda like being buried in place.  Since I learned my lesson about this I started taking photos.  Nothing much has turned up and this is the only piece that I have found.  Now what is it exactly is not necessarily clear.  It still lays in the bar garden of the Ahwahnee unless of course the mule deer stomped it under the sod during one of their foraging excursions, or a hungry squirrel spirited it away mistaking it for one of their pine cone nuts.

Considering all the ground that gets walked on by guests and visitors, we are certain to find or see something interesting.  Like the day I saw a Blue Squirrel.  I might have been sky gazing way too long, however the ranger I told about the Blue Squirrel claimed he had never heard of one.  I have looked for that same squirrel for the last 8 months now without any success.  Perhaps he just disappeared and ran off with this artifact so  he could put more support in his squirrel hole....either way I am hoping to find my Blue Squirrel again one day.

The garden I daily find myself in is surrounded by the wonders of nature. My view is supported by towering cliffs or granite walls, and trees nearly as tall or so it seems. The trees stand straight as arrows, sometimes or when the noon breezes blow they gently sway and make the sounds of the seas, well air through needles and cedar boughs anyway.

today I found myself catching the second growth of the crocus as it springs forth its green leaves amidst all the long gone dry leaves of 2009. From a few inches my crocus has new growth that well spring of cellular movement upwards is now about 7 inches high and unfurling large lovely leaves that are hoovering over a slender bud that is just beginning to poke its way skyward. It is peeping upwards towards the underbelly of the larger parent leaves that are gracefully protecting its tender innocence...just as I see infant children toddling beneath the tall leg stalks of their parents as they walk about the Ahwahnee gardens, absorbing the same view of my world as I am.

Today was a day for raking and sweeping and picking up of the debris that continually gathers upon the lawns and other garden surfaces. As I drove my gator around the main lawn, I saw that some small children had kicked my piles of carefully raked leaves and then went running off playing rather destructively I might add with our garden sprinkler heads. One little person was banging them up and down...tiring of this game the child then ran off to play jump rope with our pathway rope fences, as though in fancy play put them in a hurdle race, whereby gaining one rope and then, hop, hop across the path. Youth does not always miss and the falling down did not happen. So I went on my way off down the flagstone pathway, catching up my piles as I roared away. The wedding lawn produced some nice sticks and I tossed them aboard also. With my gator loaded I roared out to the pile of sticks that has evolved into a larger pile of trees and stumps.

There was a point out in the garden when I stopped by the creek to clean it out. It was a mess. One young lad stood on the other side and he was watching me. He hollers at me from across the way, "Is that a beaver dam?" Well I hollered back to the lad: "No, we do not have beavers in Yosemite!" I was merely cleaning it so the water would flow nice and steady. That is what we do up here, keep the water flowing.