Saturday, 21 November 2009
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
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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.
Friday, 6 November 2009
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!
Sunday, 1 November 2009
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.
Monday, 26 October 2009
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.
Saturday, 17 October 2009
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.
Monday, 28 September 2009
1) …is soda.
2) …is pop.
3) …is soda pop.
Conclusion: Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas any more!
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
So, the big photo is from Monday, when I was downtown and basking in civic duty. There’s quite some historic controversy, apparently, about the statue of the female on top of the capitol dome.
The statue stands between 15 and 20 feet high, depending on how she is measured, weighs about 1,800 pounds, and is made of copper.
The little picture to the right is the 3-D version of Georgia’s capitol as rendered in Google Earth. I haven’t yet explored the collection in the gallery “Historic Places 3D Tour,” but it may be included. Oddly, there is no “National Registry of Historic Places,” the way it’s noted by Google. Instead it’s the National RegistER of Historic Places.
Or perhaps I’m nit-picking.
Sidenote: Finding a Notary Public (in today’s modern, digital world)—not so easy, especially if your bank is closed.
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
There’s no north 40 here, but we take a tour of the modest estate nevertheless. Actually, we tour the agriculturally productive plants. Fresh corn silk (doesn’t sound right to call it “maize silk” although that’s what it is), all curly and soft, seems like an improbable plant part….
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Don’t ask me how to pronounce it, but back in Old English days that’s the word that referred to the color orange, and it meant yellow-red.
Then came the fruit from distant lands to the east, and with it the name that was then, for obvious reasons, also applied to the color.
This specimen’s known as a naked orange around here, since it’s lost its zest….