First day of the year nice enough to sit in the sun and read—in the back yard!

Meanwhile, this guy (technically a grotesque, or a chimera) keeps the squirrels away….

The narcissi are shooting up….

• Saw this on the register, when checking out with assorted vegetables, enough I hope will get us through the weekend: loose radishes.

Personally, I didn’t know they were socialized AT ALL!

• Heard this on Science Friday this afternoon (female voice, not sure who): journalism is event-driven and science is a process.

That distinction is worth pondering. Conflating events and process is a major logical error. And this conflation is all around us, even from people who should know better.

Apologies if you thought I was going to connect radishes and event/process….

My favorite late-night show that I almost always watch time-shifted, courtesy of Hulu….

I don’t know enough about economics to know if I agree/disagree with Krugman almost all of the time, but I do have a new interjection courtesy of him: gah!

Here’s a sample sentence: Leno’s return to the NBC 11:30 slot—gah!

If I said this is a late post because I was chopping ingredients for salsa and the like, I’d only be partly wrong. I’ll admit to a bit of laziness, too!

Our special Friday dinner had a Oaxaca theme, which required a quick run to Buford Highway for epazote—there’s no other way to get the black beans and quesadillas to taste “right.” We also like fresh tortillas de maíz like these, with no fat or factory ingredients….

Ya gotta love the imagery here. The brand is Milagro, which already has major positive overtones. Combine that with the traditional tortilla-making scene, including the brazier, and, geeze, not only will you feel compelled to buy these tortillas, you’ll be weak in the knees as you do!

Epazote, the word, should not be confused with “epizootic,” a favored term of RHB. The former is a plant of the Chenopodium group, and the latter is a disease outbreak.

Special afternoon, down near Pine Mountain, at an oyster roast with most excellent company…thanks much, D&K, for the invite!

Clouds tried to drop some precip, but we sent good vibes skyward and we were spared.

Our hosts made the party pot-luck, and I took this simple pickled carrot* dish, which several people found tasty.

* Spanish lesson: carrots are zanahorias, pronounced something like sah-nah-or-ee-ahz

Just happened to be in a bookstore this morning, picking up Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey (okay, for Book Club).

Report: there was a modest pile of That Book (which itself seems to contain a Modest Pile), and no one paying it any attention, let along hugging a copy while waiting in the cashier line!

…this in contrast to the frenzy reported from bookstores in the conservative hinterlands, like Grand Rapids.

Today we lived stress-free, or at least I did.

In the morning (almost) cool, we walked up a dry wash and back. There is nothing comparable in the part of the Midwest I have spent time in. Dry washes always look to me like they’re awaiting the next rainstorm, and are in a pause mode…. We even got in a little hammock time under the cottonwoods down by Little Bear Creek.

I finished the (yawn) novel I mentioned yesterday (yawn), and began Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008, translation by Reg Keeland from Swedish of Män som hatar kvinnor). This one is well worth the time (much better than the Yawn), and I’m only 138 pages into it!

Time change. CHECK.

Costumes stowed (mostly). CHECK.

Leftover candy consumed (partly). CHECK.

Yeah, November has arrived.

And, tada!, we’ve will have made the third corner of The Box come early tomorrow morning.

We laid low today, recharging batteries (the real kind and the personal kind, too!), doing laundry, resupplying, and making travel plans afresh (thank you, Google Maps).

We’ll be sad to leave, although we are looking forward to the next couple of states we’ll be visiting.

I was going to try to get the Guru to make a wee graphic for today that on the left had the letters “CAL” with one of those red circles with the slanty cross-bar, and on the right the letters “NO CAL,” but then I saw the redwoods and, pffft!, I changed my mind!

We did in fact cross Oregon today, as well as not a few miles of Washington, and, whew, we’re in the Governator’s fair state!

Great sunset over a marina-forest of masts and fishing-boat superstructures. Let’s hope the rain will be inland, or “behind” us, tomorrow.

Only on rare opportunities do most of us need to spell the word “geyser.” Apparently our word comes from the name of an Icelandic geyser—Geysir—which is in the Haukadalur Valley in southern Iceland. Still, I have to think to get the spelling right, although I saw it on signs many times today!

While we were in the old caldera where Yellowstone’s geyser activity is found—apparently the greatest concentration of geysers in the world!—we saw lots of volcanic features (not cones, although the caldera is considered an active volcano), and, of course, the famous Old Faithful. Here’s what really surprised me about the old caldera: the continental divide loops into it, so that the floor of the caldera has two drainages, one to the east and one to the west. I found this counter-intuitive.

FYI: That’s the caldera rim framing the skyline to the left of the geyser.