Musings

This trio and our neighbor duo welcomed us to the cottage. We made it! Great fun taking “the long way” via Seattle. Especially enjoyed being two days ahead of a foot-and-a-half of snowfall at Glacier.

Posted at 9:22 PM | Comments Off on Whew

Today I walked around the old economic heart of A Real City.

The Beating Heart was these falls, the Upper Saint Anthony Falls, now marred? by a lock and dam.

The power the river generated, and this is the Mississippi so it is a mighty generator, ran the Gold Medal Flour mill on the south/west side…

And the Pillsbury mill on the north/east side. This is the underbelly of the mill complex. [Note fisher-person.] Now the mills are no longer milling, and this sacred place of the people who were here before the EuroAmericans arrived is irretrievably altered.

I quite enjoyed walking across the curving Stone Arch Bridge that seems to connect the two mills. It’s a pedestrian bridge now, although it was built for rail cars. The water on the left is the lower end of the Pillsbury millrace (it seemed to me), and the bridge crosses the main channel of the Mississippi.

And all this? Yup. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Posted at 10:28 PM | Comments Off on Layers of history

Steady eastbound motoring brought us from pastured beef with oil drilling, to pasture plus some row-crops (seemed almost exclusively wheat), to less and less pasture and more and more crop-fields.

Somewhere in there, the oil machinery disappeared, and then we got a few wind turbines. A few of these old-style windmills were scattered throughout.

Now, no photo, we’re in almost entirely row-crops, and no cattle/pasture whatsoever. Rain expected overnight, which is good as it is a bit dry; however, accompanying tornadoes are not desirable.

A more precise title might be along the lines of “Central continental longitudinal topographic and land use drift,” but, duh, too unwieldly.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Crossing the plains

Sometime today, yesterday’s Cascades became today’s Rockies. These long lakes are all fake, or perhaps more kindly, they’re reservoirs. With abundant power generation. I’ll take the reflections.

This murder scene welcomed us to tonight’s overnight housing.

When I first arrived, as part of the dying fish tableau, I watched a male mallard preen before departing. And among the plants, several Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, which I know as kinnikinnick (from the Algonquian referring to the plant’s use as a smoking substance).

If I understood the weather prediction correctly, places we’ve been today and will visit tomorrow will have snowfall Wednesday after we are out on the Great Plains.

Posted at 7:37 PM | Comments Off on Clear skies

I think this is Prunus serrulata, with the huge distinctive dangling blossoms.

Found this huge trunk; tree too tall to make a good “portrait” photo.

We spent most of the day with family, sitting and laughing/talking, with this great view. Also: great eats.

Apologies for the delayed post; we had too much fun for too long, so I didn’t have time to get my brain in gear to write a cogent post. I DID think of youall, Gentle Readers, however.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Family day

This is very close to what it looked like standing there. You have to imagine the fresh air, slight breeze, and faint noises coming from the water and moving vegetation. Down two-thirds of the way from the moon to the land, and to the right is Venus (thank you, SkyGuide app), and between the moon and Venus is Mercury, but I couldn’t pick it out, and the camera missed it, too.

I do like the camera’s computational capabilities, but this example is maladroit, and I didn’t take the time away from all the fun social hubbub to finesse it.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Daytime’s goodbye

The high school nephew had an open day today, because: covid. So we had an outing. We took a short ferry ride, a little longer than it took to wait to board, board, and disembark. We were told to stay in our vehicle, because: covid.

Since it was mid-day, our first stop was food. We drove by the possibilities and picked a hometown burger place. With a food truck. This is the drivers control area. Shift on the left, which I do not recall ever seeing for a left driver. Not because: covid.

After wiping our chins and downing the last fry, we drove on to Point No Point Lighthouse. It is the shortest lighthouse I remember ever seeing.

Atop a row of evergreens I suspect were planted to protect the lighthouse from the prevailing winds, we saw eagles land and watch the doin’s below from on high—not so much the tourists as the fishing.

Down on the beach, we spotted an otter moving along, then finding something to eat—clam perhaps? An eagle spotted this, too, and dived the otter; however, the otter seemed to have positioned her/himself to see if this happened, and quickly plunged into the water, saving lunch from the feathered, screaming predator-thief.

Next stop had no David Attenborough drama, instead an eroding escarpment called Foulweather Bluff. Rusty red dot lower right is nephew’s jacket, so you can tell it’s a tall bluff.

Lucky us, the tide was out. We used our identification crutch, the iNaturalist app, and found out these are aggregating anemone. With seaweed and what we thought was a tiny jellyfish.

With plenty of excitement behind us, we headed back to the ferry, and were stopped behind HTBNANA. The plate surround indicated that “it only happens twice.” We remain unsure what that refers to.

Posted at 8:54 PM | Comments Off on Ferry adventure

Mole negro (say: moh-lay nay-grow) is a famous sauce native to Oaxaca, Mexico. We made it (more or less) the way it is made today, so it includes Old World ingredients not available in the prehispanic kitchen, like almonds and chicken. We processed a long list of ingredients this way and that, often with toasting, ending up as three different purees, plus chicken stock (upper left). The immersion blender got a huge workout, as it was the processing workhorse.

The final assembly began with the toasted then reconstituted dried chiles (right foreground), pureed, pureed, then more pureeing, and finally sieved to achieve succulent smoothness, then adding stock and simmering down. To that, we then added the upper right mixture, colored principally by roasted tomatoes, but also including tomatillos and toasted bread crumbs. Plus other lovelies. And more stock and simmering. Next, we added the lower left mixture, three kinds of nuts plus roasted plantain, and toasted spices like anise seed and raisins and sesame seeds and cinnamon bark (not a lot, but still). And stock, followed by simmering, of course. The final add was “Mexican chocolate,” which includes more cinnamon, and is not super sweet—still, it does include sugar. And more stock and further simmering.

At the end, the harsh sharpness that the chiles initially had was gone, and their biting heat was tempered. The twenty-four (or so) ingredients had become one amazing, complex sauce.

So very yummy. Probably won’t make it again from scratch, yet a lovely experience. And the eating—well, incomparable.

Posted at 10:44 PM | Comments Off on Mole negro Sunday

See the horizon? Those white vertical not-egrets? They flank the Columbia River at Biggs Junction, great for parasailing and wind turbines.

Found this little gem hugging the ground, with lovely about 3cm diameter flowers. ID conclusion: Lewisia rediviva. Grateful for assistance from iNaturalist, which indicated it was a Lewisia species.

I wondered what the (free!) app would do with this, as it is just vegetation without blooms. But, I thought, it has distinctive configuration. iNaturalist suggested Lithospermum ruderale, and (after comparison to multiple pictures) I concur!

Posted at 9:29 PM | Comments Off on IDing fun

We crossed no state lines, although we did change time zones.

The high point was partying with old friends, and later new—so so many laughs. Such good company. Such lovely eats. So special-precious.

Title refers to second photo comments, but you already figured that out.

Posted at 1:20 AM | Comments Off on Well-nourished