I’m on a new plan: whenever prudent, I will be hiking Mars Hill at 5am to see the sunrise over Flagstaff. I did so this morning, and I’m feeling fantastic. I’m also rather proud of my plant ID list:

• Pinus ponderosa – ponderosa pine
• Quercus gambelii – Gambel oak
• Pinus edulis – pinyon pine
• Linaria dalmatica – Dalmation toadflax (invasive little bastard)
• Artemisia carruthii – wormwood sage
• Ceanothus fendleri – Fendler’s ceanothus
• Festuca arizonica – Arizona fescue
• Lotus wrightii – deervetch
• Ipomopsis aggregata – skyrocket
• Penstemon barbatus – gold-beard penstemon
• Cirsium parryi – Parry’s thistle
• Cirsium vulgare – bull thistle
• Gutierrezia sarothrae – broom snakeweed
• Verbascum thapsis – common mullein
• Bouteloua curtipendula – side-oats grama
• Bromus anomalus – nodding brome
• Bromus tectorum – cheatgrass
• Hordeum vulgare – common barley
• Muhlenbergia montana – mountain muhly
• Muhlenbergia wrightii – spike muhly
• Melilotus albus – white sweetclover
• Lupinus argenteus – silver lupine
• Abies concolor – white fir
• Bouteloua gracilis – blue grama
• Thalictrum fendleri – Fendler’s meadowrue
• Poa pratensis – Kentucky bluegrass
• Poa secunda – Sandberg bluegrass
• Juniperus communis – common juniper
• Geranium caespitosum – wild geranium

Woohoo! Didn’t have my field guide with me, either. Unfortunately, as I sat down in the grasses to watch the show, I realized I’d lost my camera. I furrowed my brow and pondered it for a moment. Aha! I’d crawled under a barbed-wire fence. And, indeed, after leaving, I found my crossing point, my camera, and the gate through the barbed wire a mere 30 feet away.

Beautiful morning, beautiful sunrise… I’ve started painting again, and intend to try to paint something from the sketches I drew up there.

Also:

wild geranium

Since I’ve begun to transition my cat to a raw food diet, I’ve been doing a lot of scheming and research on how I can go about this in the best way possible. One of my search queries, prompted by the success I had with thawed (and, uh, the first time- cut) baby feeder mice, was “cat live diet”. One hit caught my eye: “Evolution Diet.” I poked around curiously for a while before reaching the unsettling realization that they were selling vegan cat food and advocating a vegan cat diet.

Two things left me confused and indignant. One was the idea that someone would suggest a diet of autotrophs for a mammal who has evolved as an obligate secondary consumer. The other thing was that someone would suggest a diet of autotrophs for a mammal who has evolved as an obligate secondary consumer, and call it an “Evolution Diet”.

I had to document my utter bewilderment. I think I’ll file the first offense under “Animal Cruelty” and the second under “Crimes Against Science”.

With that out of the way, this former-vegan is free to go find some more evolutionarily-appropriate food for kitty. Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow sells frozen chicks, baby rabbits, mice… and even a ground meat/bone/organ sampler pack– it’d be nice to avoid taking scissors to a carcass again in my efforts to teach my cat that animals are food and grains are not.

For now I’ll order the two dozen mice, and continue to supplement with a dry food I feel is much more entitled to reference evolution its name (plug): grain-free Innova EVO, weighing in at 50% protein. It’s turned my cat from scrawny and sickly to sleek and muscular– can’t wait to see what an even better diet will do.