entirely safe and fun

A couple of weeks back, Punam, her mother, Dante and I went to the wedding of our friends Anne and Steve in Santa Fe, NM. The pictures are up on Flickr, tagged “santafe”.

It was Dante’s first plane trip, and his first encounter with the TSA! He had his own boarding verification document that they checked at security.

The happy couple, at the rehearsal lunch. Interestingly, no party in the wedding actually came from Santa Fe — Anne and Steve had met there, but in the intervening time have moved to Phoenix, AZ. But there’s a lot to like about Santa Fe; it’s a beautiful, historic city with really great weather. How important a consideration this is became clear to me during my own wedding in rainy, dark Pittsburgh, when it was pointed out to me repeatedly by the photographers how lucky we were to get a few hours of sun.

We were happy to meet up with Debra and her husband Dave, and spend the night before the wedding hanging around in town. Even if Santa Fe had nothing else going for it, it has a really excellent food scene, as long as you like the meats.

Martha and Chris got to meet the boy for the first time. The suit is so cute! No one could believe that we had found a tie in Dante’s diminutive size.

Punam, Anne, and Debra at the reception. We had a really excellent time!

Dante only looks partied out here… he got his second wind eventually. It was in his diaper.

The DJ played some Guns ‘n Roses. Debra made like Slash for the win.

And somehow, we managed to fit in visits to the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos (with lots of bizarre nuclear-arsenal propaganda) and Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque!

At Petroglyph with Punam’s mom.

After it was all over, we hosed down the boy and put him in his helpfully labelled “BABY” bathrobe, which (as previously mentioned) is sometimes helpful in differentiating baby from bathwater.

And then we all slept like babies, especially the baby.

Abby and I went on a hike at Rancho San Antonio this weekend. RSA is a county park west of Cupertino, in the mountains that make Silicon Valley an actual valley, thick with wildlife and offering beautiful hikes. In the rainy season, seasonal torrents pour down the mountains and every square inch turns green; now, in the height of the dry season, the mountain lions stalk their mule deer prey in meadows gone brown and dusty.

Click any picture for a larger version. There’s a more comprehensive Flickr stream available.

Rancho San Antonio is lousy with California Quail, Callipepla californica. They’re not especially scared of people here, and can be observed at length. Their close cousinship to chickens (Sibley-Ahlquist puts them both in the Phasianidae family) couldn’t be clearer as you watch them scratch and peck, and dustbathe.

A baby Coast Range Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis bocourti). He was perhaps two inches long, and would have evaded detection via camouflage, had the glint of his scales in the sun not given him away. Cute little guy, no?

An adult fence lizard. This photo took some patient stalking to set up, on both of the lizard’s part and mine.

I’ve tentatively identified this attractive fellow as Skilton’s Skink, Eumeces (or Plestiodon) skiltonianus skiltonianus.

Abby and I hiked up Rancho San Antonio’s Wildcat Loop Trail to the top of the ridge, where we were greeted with an expansive view of Silicon Valley…

Silicon Valley. A few big landmarks are easy to pick out – the hangars at Moffet toward the left, the skyline of San José pretty far to the right. When I see it from up here on Saturday afternoon, it seems a lot less overwhelming than it did at (say) 10AM on Friday.

Abby and I also saw wild turkeys, Meleagris gallopavo; this was the first time I had ever seen them in California. I imagined that, since the species is native to Mexico and widely distributed in the Eastern US, that it was probably also native to California, but as it turns out this is a point of contention, as this article discusses.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GOOSE?

Seriously, not dead.

First, I’ve got up a Flickr set of our trip to Kauai (for more photos, see the larger set). The photos there will be acquiring notes over the next few days, too. Everything in the Bestof set has a narrative comment already. Thanks to Michael and Daniela at Marjorie’s Kauai Inn for their attentive hospitality! I’ll be pulling together a more comprehensive blog post on this adventure, probably using Flickr’s syndication features, soon.

Second, beer. It turned out excellent and I’ll be repeating the recipe soon, probably next week, but with a couple of small changes to address the things I would have preferred to turn out differently. The hops will become Nugget and I’ll chop the amount down a bit, compensating with a bit more bitter orange peel. At bottling, I’ll rack off the sediment more aggressively, and I’ll be using a little more corn sugar, as well, to increase carbonation.

Finally, two neat websites I’ve started reading lately:

• Boot Legacy Law Blog, a strikingly well-written legal blog on matters related to IP, property, and jurisdiction issues. Way cooler than it sounds, in no small part because of the parts about treasure hunting, and because it’s so well researched and chock full of linky goodness.
• Epidemix, a public health blog… reassuring to me because I was worried that I was the only person actually reading the CDCP’s (pardon the pun, but…) vital Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It’s news you can use to avoid catching a reportable illness.

Check ‘em out on the blogroll (over there on the right, unless you’re in a feed reader or some commie mutant thing like that).

Bigtree is biiiiiiiiiig!

This past weekend, Punam and I, along with my old friend Noah, travelled up to Humboldt County (far northern California) to spend a little time with some really big trees. The old-growth Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest is like something out of a science-fiction novel, silent, dark and wet, with trees as straight as carved columns towering over 300 feet in the air, and nary a branch below a hundred feet. One tree that large would be remarkable, but the forests of that region boast of a thick myriad of them, trees forty feet in girth, just forty feet apart, for mile upon mile along the Eel River and its tributaries — a gobsmacking accumulation of Ur-old giants.

We drove up on Friday night, and then spent Saturday driving the Avenue of the Giants, stopping at some of the touristy destinations along the way and taking a short hike at the Founders’ Grove. By preference, we went to Fortuna for tuna, as well as to eat at the fantastic Eel River Brewing Company. Overnight, we stayed in the Redcrest Resort, which I can heartily recommend to other travelers, and then on Sunday we had a light picnic, and a pleasant hike in the Rockefeller Forest. My previous trip into the Rockefeller was in high summer, and I can say without reservation that the wet season is a better time to go — it was practically empty, and there were no equestrians on the dual-use trail (and thus no boot-fouling equestrian by-products).

We topped this all off with a world-class dinner at the Underwood in Graton, near Santa Rosa. Our friends Sebastian (a local and a foodie) and Rebecca led us there, and I had what, on reflection, was one of the best matches of desire and fulfillment I’ve ever had at a restaurant. They had a find selection of oysters on the half-shell, two dozen items on the menu that I regret not ordering, a moderately sized but remarkably concentrated wine list, and local spirits on the dessert menu, including a Davis Family calvados-style apple brandy with a perfect match of fire, fruit, and oak that far surpassed any European offering I’ve yet encountered.

Below, I’ve picked out a few highlights from the pictures I took on the trip. More are available in my Flickr set here. Seriously, you need to check these out, especially the vertical panorama of an exceptionally mighty redwood.

Click for a larger version

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.

Click for a larger version

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.

For now, he rests — but soon the stars will again be right, and the groundhog will arise from his long slumber!

Groundhog Day! That quaintest of traditions! Thousands gathered in the tiny town of Punxsutawney, PA (site may be slashdotted), for dawn rodent-watching and early-morning Straub-drinking, pounding longnecks as they greet their own long shadows in the chill pink light! No holiday is more Homeric than this, when the elements themselves gather in sympathy for a great groundhog and order themselves at his disposal.

That such a holiday is most famously observed in Pennsyltuckey — that frequently lovely but perpetually benighted region east of Pittsburgh and west of Philadephia — has long confused me, since no one there actually likes groundhogs; locals’ animus against burrowing rodents increases in proportion to their economic dependence on hooved livestock. A neighbor of mine in Lancaster once offered the pithy observation that “A spade is a tool for digging holes. A small-bore rifle is a tool for removing groundhogs.”

The rainy season has finally gotten started in earnest here in California. Punam and I took a jaunt down the coast to Santa Cruz yesterday and were surprised at the fact that there were just a few people in the Burrell School tasting room, and no one at all on the wharf, in any of the restaurants. A small party of local teens rolled up to pick up some clam chowder, and that was it. We ate crabs in the cold rain, with no human presence other than two guys behind the counter, and Madden and Michaels on a tiny TV in the crab stand. M&M were describing the Doom That Came Upon Philadelphia. My fantasy team has Philadelphia as a defense, and I had carelessly left the victorious Colt’s Joseph Addai on my virtual bench as he had his best game to date, so the Doom was not pleasant company. But Punam is cute, the crab guys were nice enough, and the crab was fresh and tasty.

Despite the fact that it’s crab season, we had those tasty decapods entirely to ourselves because our neighbors couldn’t risk getting wet. Now, I will concede that rainy California is not as nice as sunny California. But an inch of rain and 60°F is hardly like the Yukon blizzard of “The Fatal Glass of Beer” (”It ain’t a fit night out, for man or beast! [blast of snow to face]“). Only one conclusion is available to this investigator: Californians are highly soluble.

I leave the investigation of their paradoxical, constant immersion in pools, hot tubs, and the Pacific to my collaborators.

I’ve reported before on my installation of the Akismet comment-spam-fighting plugin, and it continues to amaze with its accuracy and precision. As far as I know, just one spam comment has gotten through since I installed it, and it has yet to flag a legit comment as spam.

But I still review the spam comments from time to time, not out of any lack of confidence in Akismet, but because occasionally, there’s a gem. Among the ph@rm.acy ads, pointers to nu.de höt téèns, and so on, I’ve gotten a spate of chair spam in the last week. Things like (spammer information removed)…

1. Name: adirondack chair wooden | URI: http://www.ANOTHERSPAMHAUS.info/ adirondack-chair-SPAM.html | IP: 212.56.202.147 | Date: 21 July, 2006 adirondack chair wooden…Thanks for clearing this up ….

Chair spam! I am imagining this spammer at 212.56.02.147, apparently in Amsterdam. It’s not just the money for him – he’s got a passion. After a lifetime of just sitting in one, now he’s got a line on a container full of Adirondack chairs, and if just one blog reader clicks on his link to buy “d3ck furnitre”, he makes back the buck he spent mass-posting comments, and introduces one more person to his true love. He’s sitting, even as he runs his spambot, in that Adirondack, using his notebook computer, no doubt on his balcony overlooking the Amstel (but in his heart of hearts, he prefers to think of it as East Lake George). He’s sipping an iced tea, and he and his chair alike are pining for Upstate New York; he’s always wanted to visit the natural habitat of his favorite seating, little knowing that it’s nearly extinct there. But in the wild, romantic Adirondacks of his imagination, the Mohicans still spend afternoons sitting in heavy wooden chairs, hunting the abundant elk in the cool parts of the day, feasting on the trout that thickly school in the lakes, and assembling in backwoods lodges by night to listen to Borscht Belt comedians who are passing through. Perhaps sometimes they Dirtily Dance, but when their feet tire, they always return to the comfort of their chairs.

Oh, 212.56.02.147, the Upstate of your dreams is not, and never has been. But I can’t bring myself to tell you the truth in the face of so beautiful a lie. Sleep well, my spammer friend.

Rob Cockerham, of cockeyed.com, admonishes you to “Always bring your camera.” With the increasing quality of phone cameras, this gets easier and easier. Having my camera, plus my usual atavistic gift of hunty sneakery, enabled me to get within about ten feet of a black-throated hummingbird in the garden section at Orchard Supply, and document it by snapping this reasonable-quality photo.

Another step was one too many, and my subject took off, denying me the pleasure of roast hummingbird or whatever she might have imagined I’d do with her tasty, tasty flesh. It is a little-known (or at least little-considered) fact that hummingbirds are made almost entirely of meat… and filled with sugar!

Last weekend, our friend Taz mooted to Punam and I that we should go camping in Big Sur. Since our move had been delayed a week, we had the weekend free, and it’s always a pleasure to hang out with Taz. Besides, there’s no place you can go on the Big Sur coast of which you couldn’t say “well, gee, that’s as beautiful a place as I’ve ever been!” I apologize in advance for possible repetitive gushing in this post.

So Saturday morning we took off down 101, crossed the Hunter Liggett Army Reservation on Nacimiento-Ferguson Road, continued along that intensely windy and steep road to the coast, and then briefly went up highway 1 to the USFS’s Kirk Creek campground, where we claimed the high ground with site 26. Kirk Creek is slightly improved – there are toilets but not showers, and there are established firepits. It is certainly the very best campsite I’ve ever been in of any kind, mostly due to the view, as shown below. We set up Taz’s tent and decided to hike down to the beach while the sun was still high in the sky. We also realized that my phone was the only camera we had, so apologies in advance for picture quality issues (actually, the camera on my Sony-Ericsson w600i is good as phonecams go). It was a short hike, but we got our first taste of the place right off the bat. The trail was lined with flowers taller than most hikers: Continue reading ‘Up the redwood canyon’ »