Gopher

Golden Gate Park in San Francisco has lots of gophers. We can usually see their holes here and there, but it's rare that we actually see one hanging around outside of its hole. Tomokee didn't attack it -- he stared at it in a frozen state just like he does while staring at cats. We think he gets confused by life forms that he's unfamiliar with.

Here's a close up of the little guy. I think he (or she) is cute.

Ocean beach

San Francisco's Ocean Beach was amazingly pretty last Sunday. The skies were blue and the weather was very warm. Tomokee greatly enjoyed his stroll on the sand.

Adoptiversary

This weekend was Tomokee's adoptiversary. Tomokee, we've put up with you for five years now!

Tick removal, the twist method

Recently, we found a couple of ticks on Tomokee, probably the result of a hike in Windy Hill Open Space Preserve. The first tick was a little stubborn but did come out after some tenacious pulling. I decided it was time to search da web for other solutions after struggling a lot more and not having good success removing the second tick. The two pointers that were the most useful were this link and this link.

This first link talks about rubbing the tick in a circular fashion, and the second link mentions twisting the tick as one of the suggested methods. I tried rubbing the tick in a circular fashion for a couple of minutes, but didn't have any success. I waited a bit, then just held the tick's body and gave it a half-turn twist, let go, held it again, gave it another twist, and just repeated this for a minute or so. I was amazed when the tick just let go. Apparently, by doing this, the tick eventually gets tired of trying to hang on and gives up. Patience is the key because it can take a couple of minutes or more, but doing it did not bother Tomokee at all.

I wish we could have video-taped it, especially the part when I kept yelling "eeek! -- it's going to jump onto me!" after the tick landed on floor.

Sleeping posture

Tomokee has some strange sleeping postures, but this one takes the cake.

Golden Gate Park

We were walking through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park recently in early spring and came upon this tree with a mass of birds all parked on the branches on one side. I don't think Tomokee noticed.

Christmas must be finally over

It's never too late to get rid of that Christmas tree. We spotted this on a S.F. street corner recently.