And the beat goes on…

So, life has its surreal moments.    I was not equipped with my camera when I took Ruby for her walk the other afternoon following the mini ice storm.  It was too darn cold; by the time I saw anything worth photographing, the batteries in the camera would have been so cold that it would have refused to function.

Consequently, the amazing beauty I saw as the sun was slanting down that afternoon will have to remain in my mind.   It was a mini ice storm, just enough freezing rain to glaze everything, to make little drops on all the branches that looked like tiny christmas ornaments adorning every tree and shrub.   After the freezing rain, there was supposed to be sleet but it didn’t hit our area.   In the meadows, the grasses were glazed with a thin coating of ice, enough to give them sheen but such a light dose that they did not fall down flat to the ground under the weight.

Off in the corner of the field I was walking around was a stand of sorgastrum, its tall heads were bending in gentle arcs, all glazed with ice.   As I walked past, the sun angle reached the magical spot and every arch of grass turned into a rainbow of color right before my eyes as the ice refracted the light to me.

Wow.

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I really have the best husband in the world.   He tolerates without grumbling the fact that my quilting exercises have pretty much taken over half the dining room:

 

What you are seeing here are the beginnings of fabrication of the baby quilt.   I got my numbers cut out last night, now I have to applique them to the color blocks.   In the first picture, you are seeing our dining room table.  Uppermost in the stack of squares you see is “A is for ant.”   I have all the letters except V and X, and they are coming.

Meanwhile, I am not committed to some of my letters.   “J is for jungle” is pretty good, but there might be something better.   So I Googled “J is for” this morning, and found lots of examples:   Jet, jam, jelly, jellyfish, journey, jump, joy, etc.   The last three might be concepts a bit difficult to portray.   But the surreal one was far down the image set on Google:  ”J is for junkie” accompanying a bedraggled soul actually shooting up.   Disturbing.

The quilt has been quite the topic of conversation around here.   My niece went with me to the fabric stores and observed that when I get surrounded by lots of fabric and imagery I get what she calls “fabric brain” and what I would call “fabric induced attention deficit disorder”.   She really was a lot of help to me in finding some of the very cute fabrics that are going to be featured in my alphabet.   My older sister is contributing too, so it is really a family effort.

Jim is actually quite a good resource in this endeavor, giving me some very good ideas.   So last night, as we were settling down in bed on our way to sleep I was talking about the quilt a little bit (not doing that thing with my mouth… but the Other Thing: talking…)  Anyway, we got a tad silly and he suggested that Y could be for Yttrium.  When I pointed out that it might be hard to find an image that screamed “Yttrium” to the poor parents who are going to be playing the Naming Game with their baby, he then said “Well, you could just put on the whole periodic table of elements.”   I declined to do that, and then he went on and said that later on in the child’s life I could do a needlework project of the periodic table.

Do you think he was being sarcastic?    I don’t.

Anyway, I pointed out that it might be more to the point for the CHILD to do the needlework project as that would give it the opportunity to really learn her (his?) periodic chart.

But the upshot of the whole discussion was that we realized that the list of Atomic Symbols of the elements could be used somehow in that quilt, a subtle thing.    And it is going to be used, too.   When I quilt the first border, which is going to be a plain fabric, I intend to do the list of elements in order of atomic number.   It is exactly the right size to give each element about an inch and a half of space for its symbol.   I think this is very cool.

And this is the sort of pillow talk we engage in.   Then I did that thing with my mouth and stopped talking.

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As I work on this quilt, I realize that there are plenty of images that could be multiples.   Like the image of the horses.   That could also be P is for pony or C is for colt or F is for foal.

While we were discussing J today, Jim came up with J is for jonquil.   Now this is just a dandy idea, but I can see the poor people looking at my quilt and wondering why J is for daffodil.   You could put the same image under N is for Narcissus and create the same confusion.

I’m really trying not to be TOO subtle here.   Maybe later.

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This year on Jim’s birthday one of our friends presented him with the butternut squash to end all butternut squashes.   Today he cut it open and it is roasting as we speak.   I believe it is going to be featured prominently in our dinner tonight.

 

For your information, that is a french chef’s knife with an 8 inch blade.   We are saving some seeds to see what comes up next year.

And so, life goes on its merry way.    Hope your surreal things are beautiful and tasty too.

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Mini ice storm

I’m so glad that the mini ice storm we had yesterday was just that, very mini.   It is so odd to go outside and hear the trees rattling in the breeze.  It all sounds so different, but NOTHING like the last time when we felt like we were listening to the war as the trees cracked and broke and smashed to the ground.

Instead, the string of LED lights we have on the back porch provided us with something stunning to look out in the early morning.

It’s really hard to photograph such bright lights in the dawn’s early light.   But you can see how the little icicles that formed on the string pick up the glow of light from the light they are hanging off.   So very very cool.   I think that this is the effect that the “icicle lights” would like to give and don’t.

By the way, I hasten to explain that these are not Christmas decorations in this application.   Many years ago we discovered that if we strung mini lights up around the back porch they were even more effective than a bug light as a porch light.   Each individual light is small enough that it doesn’t attract swarms of bugs.   They are all away from the door.   So when you go out at night, you get plenty of illumination and you don’t have 900,000 moths and mosquitoes following you in.

I have had a most amusing morning indeed.   My email contained numerous items that made me laugh heartily.   Laughter is always good.   Jim is watching the 49ers game, which he does not know how turns out (although I do)(Tee hee).   I am completing a couple of potholders I created a couple of days ago and then I will address myself to the little quilted piece I made yesterday in my quilting class.  It needs to be backed, quilted and bound.  Later on we will go visit some of our good friends and Jim will learn to smoke cheese and we and the group of people we are spending the afternoon with will have a very good time.

May all your ice storms be small and beautiful, and may your day be amusing and pleasant.

 

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Is it really 2013? Already?

I know that I may be pushing things a little bit, but the number of the year has me a little amazed, and it is NOT because we survived the Mayan New Year.   You see, dear readers, when June arrives this year, I will be 60 years old.   Almost twice as old as the woman in this picture, who happens to be my mother.   She is posing in front of the mountain which was a talisman for my father all his life, largely because it was the first mountain of the Rocky Mountain National Park that he climbed.   Mt. Meeker.   Where I will be in mid-July on pilgrimage with my brother to cast his ashes to the winds high atop this peak and allow him to become one with the place that was always his favorite in the world.

 

He certainly had experience enough to know that this was actually his favorite place.  Somewhere there is a map board that he created many years ago that had flags of countries he visited and worked in during his life stuck into the appropriate places.   It was impressive, actually.   Last time I counted there were well over 50 flags.

But I digress.   Here is another historic photo, taken the same year as the one of my mother above, by the same loving photographer.

 

This is me, of course, engaged in delicate exploration of the beach at La Jolla Shores.  Even then, at the tender age of six, I preferred to have my hands in the dirt rather than putting a utensil between me and the medium.

A lot has happened over the last few weeks.   My “Pet Contractor” finally went under our house to see what he could see.   What he saw was so alarming that he moved our job from “sometime soon” to “I’ll have guys there tomorrow,  I’m having lumber delivered to your place this afternoon.”   Yes, dear friends, the rot situation that had not been addressed because we couldn’t find someone who wanted to crawl around under our house to do the work and also because we had to deal with the downstairs neighbors before we really wanted someone doing that had progressed to a potential disaster.   One of the four beams that support the house was actually broken in two places.    Any engineer can tell you that the loss of 25% of the total weight support of a structure is bad news.

The good news is the other beams held, they have been sistered and the house has been shored back up and we are good to go.   So now we only have to replenish the savings account, which took a Huge Hit (see, a crew of six construction workers only costs around $800 per day and clear 2x10s 14 feet long carry an impressive price tag).  Fortunately, since my contractor is my “Pet Contractor” he was willing to accept payment in three portions so we never actually had to take money out of our IRAs, which is a good thing.    And it is gratifying to be able to walk through the dining room and not feel the floor sink beneath my feet.

The whole construction escapade was ruled a virtual hell on Earth by poor Impy, who has barely adjusted to the new turn his life has taken since my father died and we adopted Impy.   There were disembodied voices yelling from below, saws, hammers, creaks and groans as the house straightened back up, thumps, people walking across is lawn (horrors!).   There was nowhere to go where he could not hear, no place safe enough to hide.   I found him crouched on the bed, eyes as big as the full moon, ready to disappear into thin air if only it was possible.   Fortunately (for my bank account, too), his travails only lasted two days, and a kitty heart attack was narrowly averted.

Mallory, on the other hand, remained supremely unconcerned about the whole thing, at least until the construction worker came into the house with his level to make sure that the floors were being jacked up to even status and not beyond.   Then she felt it was important to supervise his activities.  I was not able to get the camera going fast enough to catch Mallory with her head down between him and his level, watching the  little bubble and exuding the attitude “Are you sure you are doing this right?”  The expression on his face was classic.

Well, I’m looking forward to the next year, when we will start replacing carpets with something more amenable to being clean.   I’m sure that the lack of traction will change the way Impy and Mallory play.   While I am looking forward to the new flooring, I am NOT looking foward to moving all the furniture which includes huge bookcases full of books and an entire stereo set up including every sort of component from phonograph up to and including the BluRay player.    I’m not sure how many cords there are behind that particular piece of furniture, but I do know it hasn’t been moved since we moved in here in 1996, so I imagine there is an impressive collection of dust to go along with the cords.

I really need to get busy and take down the Christmas tree.  It would be horrible to have just fixed all the underpinnings of the house at great expense only to burn it down accidentally.

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Solstice greetings

Here, a few days late, are my solstice greetings to you all.

As I expected, the world did not end on December 22, despite the fact that the gal at the bank told me that she always tries to be ready for the end times.   I try to be ready for breakfast.

Anyway, a few of our friends stopped by last night to help with the festivities.   It made getting up for the 3:15 work call a little difficult, but we managed.

Liz gave me a drama of dragons, rather nifty napkin rings, actually.   Since we use cloth napkins here, they will come in handy.  They seem to enjoy gathering about the bowl of seasonal cheer I arranged.

Another friend, Karen, visited her sister right before the holidays.  There was an artsy craftsy project arranged, and Karen brought the results home and put them in the gift exchange.   I was the lucky recipient.   I have needed a light source for my bedisde night stand.

Jocelyn added to the tree ornament collection.   This time, a very cute felt owl.

Mallory is not dead, just sleeping.  She has a habit of looking dead when asleep.

Impy usually does not look dead.  Au contraire…

This very debonair chap has settled in quite nicely.   He no longer really thinks about his previous life as an indoor/outdoor cat, but has found that it is very unstressful to live inside.   From a hermitage cat, very shy, he has evolved into one of my official reception team, and has discovered that social gatherings are quite nice.   You get lots of attention and people scratch under your chin just so.  It is all very gratifying.  Especially when everyone agrees that you are quite the handsomest cat they have seen recently.

We received a gift in the mail before the busy season, fuyu persimmons from my sister-in-law’s tree.

In addition to smoothies and eating them like apples, they make a very tasty contribution to fruit salad.  The other fruits in this selection came out of my freezer where I stashed them earlier this year.

So, if I don’t catch you around before the actual day, have a very merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

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We sailed on San Francisco Bay

While we were in Redding, we visited the Coleman National Fish Hatchery, which was built during the same time period as Shasta Dam in order to alleviate the problem that the salmon were scheduled to have with their run after the dam was completed.   It was interesting, and quite exciting because the salmon were actually running at the time.   This is a shot of a group of them that have managed to ascend the fish ladder and are on their way to the holding pools where there were over 100,000 salmon waiting to spawn.

We also visited beautiful Burney Falls.   There was plenty to see, and a very nice 1.2 mile walk to stretch our legs.

We hit the road after that stop and headed back to Shasta Dam for the dam tour depicted in the first post about our vacation.   Along the way our driver was actually induced to stop for a photo op.   We got a very nice view of Shasta.

There was a professional ground squirrel at the photo stop, who obligingly posed for me.

Now, there was one thing I forgot to mention at Shasta Dam.   There is a huge pile of riprap along side the dam, and many of these rocks are loose.   It is a dangerous place to play, and yet it is most enticing.   Rather than try to fence people out, the authorities put up a few signs along the top edge of the pile.   Most effective, and quite a bit less than the ugly cyclone fence that the signs replace.

So, after suitably disporting ourselves at Redding, we traveled back to the Bay Area, where we ate wonderful food and got taken sailing on the San Francisco Bay.

Our skipper:

Our other skipper:

Jim got to steer too:

Notice that both bridges are in the background of this shot:  The Bay Bridge on the left, the Golden Gate on the right.   We went under the Bay Bridge on our way around Treasure Island.

It was a truly gorgeous day on the Bay.   It was the first day of the World Series, and there were two blimps trundling about upstairs getting file footage for the TV show later in the day.   We got to watch the Blue Angels form up and do preparatory loops for their flyover after the national anthem.   There were several small airplanes towing banners around, making slow headway against the winds aloft.  A couple of porpoises swam by, checking us out.

On a bell buoy there was a harbor seal napping.   He woke up and scratched his chin.   Unfortunately, the pictures I took of him are all horribly out of focus.   You may not believe this, but I think my camera gets sea sick.

We got to see the winner of the 1976 America’s cup fly by us on the water.

Just a lovely day all around.

The following day we went out to Point Reyes National Seashore, and visited McClure’s Beach.  That was a spectacular day too.

Now, I know I have mentioned this previously, but I’ll say again.  This guy died this spring, May 6:

My father never went anywhere without a camera in his hand, until the digital age stymied him.   He never could get used to the simplicity of digital, probably because the computer skills needed to bring those shots to fruition eluded him.    Anyway, there is a collection of slides and prints that is beyond belief.  I could show you a picture, but it doesn’t translate, because all it is is dusty boxes full of boxes.   My best guestimate is that  there are something over 13,000 slides occupying my dining room floor right now, and so far I have managed to look at about 150 of them.

It’s a real trip down memory lane.   In the following shots, I am the little blonde that is the middle sized one.

In the camper Daddy built for the trip from California to Maine and back.   Took most of the summer of 1959:

At Death Valley in 1960:

In camp on the Gorge Lakes (Rocky Mountain National Park) expedition.  We hiked and backpacked and camped for five days, ascending Chief’s Head, Mt. Ida and several other peaks in the neighborhood.   This was 1962, after we moved to Colorado.

So, now you will understand if my posts come infrequently for a while.   I really have a heck of a lot of viewing and scanning to do.

 

 

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