entirely safe and fun

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Due to a pressing need (chiefly on my part) not to be in Silicon Valley for a couple of days, Punam and I took an overnight trip starting Saturday morning down to the Monterey area, with the idea that we’d see some new sights and in particular that we’d finally get to see the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo.

It has been restored to a strikingly nice condition — enough so that Rome named it a Minor Basilica, and that it received a pastoral visit from the last Pope. Above, I composited a panorama of the courtyard. To the right, the chapel, with its catenary arches, as opposed to the old semicircular arches. Catenary arches are most closely associated with the twentieth-century architect Gaudí, and their use here would have been pretty advanced when the chapel was constructed in its present form in 1793. The calculus required to calculate their correct shapes was less than just about a century old at that point, depending on how you interpret the Calculus Priority Dispute, and far from widely taught. There are some exhibition areas within the Mission’s outer wall, and Punam and I spent a pleasant hour at the exhibition of the art of Jo Mora, the Californian artist-of-many-trades.

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We then proceeded to Asilomar State Beach, which it pains me a little to say is yet another dramatic Central Coast beach. Which is not a complaint or anything! We hiked through the dunes, and played around near the tidal pools. I took a few photos in a stab at a “micro-panorama,” stitching together some high-zoom, short-range images, but the errors that the focus mechanism made in reporting its focal length in the EXIF metadata, irrelevant in most applications, created some severe aberrations in the final product. Still, it was cool to get so many pixels to work with! This pool, full of bright green sea anemones and deep red seaweed, was isolated a good three or four feet above the then-current tideline, meaning it had been cut off from the ocean for around four hours by the time we got to it, and the uppermost of its denizens were just beginning to dry. Sea anemones can curl themselves up into little donut-shaped masses, which keeps their most delicate tissues (such as their tentacles) from dessication. Some of the little monsters, such as the one in the upper-left corner, are partially dry, and have tucked in the tentacles above the water line while leaving their underwater tentacles out to catch food. Also, some of them are curled up defensively, probably in reaction to my moving shadow.

Your narrator’s beard, unruly though it was, had not a stripe on the tree-beards.

On Sunday, we went to Washington Park in Pacific Grove to see the overwintering butterflies. We walked through the wet forest, every branch heavily-laden with a variety of epiphytes. Initially, we weren’t sure what we were looking for. There were a lot of butterflies in the air, but no more than you might see by chance in a still forest. But then, we saw a small crowd assembling around a taped-off area, and we looked up. There were many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of monarch butterflies, tightly clustered on high branches. In the picture below, note carefully that there are no dead leaves, just poorly-resolved orange wings.

The butterflies were busily mating, which involves a male grappling with a female, the pair tumbling to the forest floor, and then (after a little while) the male flying away, carrying the female aloft by their attached, load-bearing genitalia. It is most remarkable. My camera, with its once-massive two-megapixel resolution and its sometimes unpredictable shutter delay, simply couldn’t capture it adequately.

And finally, on our way back up to Oakland for a Superbowl party hosted by one of Punam’s high school friends, we stopped in the city of Monterey for a little while, where we walked out to the beach to watch sea otters and listen to the surf. The otters escaped photography, but Punam and I didn’t, so: one final trick-photo panorama.