Victorian, on the move

On this day...

2011-07-02T04:15:00.006-06:00

I was looking back through some old pics and thought it might be fun to do some On This Day posts.

In 2006, I was about to leave the job that had worn me down over 8.5 years. My seventh boss in that time was my undoing. Couldn't hack breaking in yet another boss.

For me, these pics are fairly prosaic but for others? Probably exotic.

--

In 2007, we had been in Colorado for hmm 10 days. We went for a drive up the Poudre Canyon. I was still struggling to drive on the correct side of the road... LOL

It totally blew us away.

I so want to grow one of these - Colorado's state flower, a white and blue-mauve columbine.

More pics here.

--

2008? We stayed home. But we still saw some nifty stuff around this day, like Ainsley House:

(OK, I cheated, that was taken on 3rd July 2008, but then I used 4th of July photos in the 2006.)

--

2009... The trip to Yellowstone.

Ol' Faithful (the second one we saw in the US ;-)

But my faves are still the pics we took at the Grand Tetons on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.

(That is my desktop pic :-)

A few more pics here. I should edit the rest of the good ones cos believe it or not, there are many more where these came from. Only problem is I am not terribly discriminating.

Enjoy!

Topped out

2011-04-24T20:41:00.001-06:00

What a fantastic view

From not quite the Barrington Tops, in the middle(ish) of NSW.

Sydney-itis 1

2011-04-11T00:22:00.001-06:00

Opera house. Excuse the shiny :-)

A drive down the peninsula

2010-04-04T03:10:00.004-06:00

Ah what a long time between posts! Not for want of photos, mind you, more because there are so many photos to put online and yap about. And excuse the overly wide shots for this blog layout...

So a little while ago, we went for a drive

down to Heronswood, a house built in the 1860s about 80km out of Melbourne. Actually, I lie, we drove down to visit the Digger's Club nursery and have lunch at the café there. (Not many cafés have set menus of locally grown food for $50 for two courses though!)

Along the way we saw a drive in with two screens! Drive ins are a rarity these days and one iwth two screens Of course it is near the beach in a touristy sort of area...

Heronswood has a lovely view of Port Phillip, aka "the Bay." The Bay was quite calms that day and the views were amazing - much better than the camera can depict. We could see the City quite clearly (what 60km away?) and even Mt Macedon, which is well beyond the City.

Very pretty!

(Excuse the power pole in the pic :-)

We were hungry and in a hurry to get to the café... but things like this were in the way.

There's lots of gardens at Heronswood but we didn't have time to go and look at them. We just saw the gardens around the café. We were hungry, remember? DH was galloping to the café and MiL was not far behind.

The café prides itself on using locally grown produce, including herbs and bits and bobs from borders like these:

(The bees were going nuts over the allium flowers. Totally nuts!)

My entrée (note that entrées are well entrées in Australia, not main meals). Swanky! My first ever terrine :-)

Mmm, lunch!

After lunch, I admired the kapok trees

and we visited the nursery and bought waaay too many fruit trees. DH has ideas of being self sufficient. I have images of every rainbow lorikeet and flying fox on the eastern seaboard eating our fruit before we get to!

On the way home, we popped into a winery - FiL had very much enjoyed their wine with his lunch!

And finally started the drive home, around the end of the Dandenongs. (The car we were in looked very similar to the silver one in the pic, only not the same cos that would be very odd indeed!)

So good to be Home

2009-10-20T17:30:00.002-06:00

I'm sitting in the dining area of my parents'-in law place. There are young magpies begging for food in a gum tree about 10m away.

(ours have white backs unlike the northern or western version. Pic taken in the Exhibition Gardens in Melbourne.)

Magpie Dad carols a little, making up for the ugliness of his kids' whining.

There's rainbow lorikeets winging past, screaming their apparent joy to the world. They stop and sit in a tree and start squabbling. (Pic taken at Tooronga station.)

A couple of wattlebirds are disputing territory. Some little whitter birds are whittering. There's gum trees (Eucalypts), sheoaks (Casuarina), wattle trees, hibiscuits (hibiscus) and melaleucas outside the window. I ignore the houses and the sound of traffic from the local major roads. They are peripheral.

My goodness, the sounds make me homesick for the place where I am!

Brienzersee

2009-09-24T14:09:00.001-06:00

Two pics, nearly the same, taken from the train near Brienz, of the Brienzersee. Love the difference in colour!

Luzern 22 Sept 2009

2009-09-24T14:04:00.002-06:00

A few pics from Luzern (Lucerne), Switzerland. Too far behind to do a travelogue!

Our feetses were very sore after this walk...

and we climbed lots of stairs too...

Not more stairs!

Austria - Salzburg

2009-09-18T04:14:00.003-06:00

Last post for the nonce! Lots of photos to go but I've had enough for the moment.

I hopped on a train for a couple of hours yesterday and emerged in Salzburg. It was very interesting. I didn't go to Neuschwanstein as it was raining and what is the point of going to a fairy tale castle if you can't see the flaming thing? (actually if it was flaming, it would probably be visible even in the rain.)

(Excuse the wonkiness - I had walked about 25km in the three days before, this including 12km on Wednesday, and I've had enough of walking.)

I didn't do much running around singing about Maria or the hills being alive or even a little night music. I didn't even see the statue of Mozart. But I did see a fair whack of old Salzburg before it started raining.

Since it was being unpleasant and drizzling on and off, I took off back on the train to Munich. I managed to get lost by using the gopher holes that they use to go under streets and get into the underground railway lines. I popped up one road too late and ended up walking back to where I had tea by mistake!

Germany - Munich

2009-09-18T04:01:00.002-06:00

Now that I have found a friendly net cafe that runs linux/Ubuntu boxes, I'm uploading some stuff and writing more blog posts up. I feel much safer using a linux box than a windoze box. I know the net can still have sniffers and things just waiting to steal my password but at least the box itself is unlikely to be infected with anything nasty. And I now have it working with an English keyboard, not a German one. And there's a couple of people with NO accent sitting next to me. We do get around.

So, Munich. Gosh I didn't have a good day the first day we were here. Want to hear the litany of disasters?

I couldn't connect to the internet in our 300 euro a night hotel. They charge a euro per 15 minutes after the first free 15 minutes in their business centre. 300 euros a night and no free wifi! Can't believe it. 60 euro a night places have free wifi. Crikey! This meant no looking up German words for please, thank-you, excuse me, etc etc.

No tea and coffee making facilities in the room either - you have to call room service for that. Now Nathan's work is paying for the room but y'know a 10 euro cup of coffee seems a bit overpriced. I went and bought an electric kettle for 30 euros instead.

A bird pooped on my pants, the lovely new pants that I had put on for the first time that morning.

I only had five hours sleep.

DH forgot to give me any cash. 5 euros does not get you very far when you have to buy some lunch with it.

I had been told that most people speak English, but most of the people I found didn't! Lots of pointing and hand flapping followed.

Oh there were other things but that will do!

I did find yarn in department stores. Nice sock yarn and some souvenirs for people in SJ. I also saw a lot of interesting buildings, which you can see scattered through this post.

I went for a lovely walk in the Englische garden. It was soooo green.

And I found out why some boys were carrying surfboards in the middle of Munich.

(That's surfing on a standing wave at the start of one of the garden's rivers.)

France - Dijon

2009-09-18T03:53:00.002-06:00

Dijon was a very different place to Toulouse. OK it is smaller but its centre ville is quite different in feel. I am sure that Toulouse's buildings are not as old as they appear but Dijon has a lot of classical French stuff. It was also about 10C cooler.

There was still columbage (I am probably spelling that wrong), which is what I'd call Tudor

The main street had the flags of local duchies, etc, flying. Sorta odd given that I thought France got rid of all that a couple of hundred years ago. But the effect was great.

We had 24 hours in Dijon. It was very pleasant, though cooler than we had expected (but Toulouse was warmer than expected too). I think I preferred Toulouse, though I didn't have to deal with anything like getting us from A to B in the living sense, getting food, etc, etc. We just walked or rode or took PT to town. In Dijon we were on our own. It was still verra nice!

France - leaving Toulouse

2009-09-18T03:45:00.002-06:00

(This post has pics this time around!)

After a very busy but happy few days in Toulouse, we headed off to Dijon. We had to get up before dawn (as did our host) and the train was well on its way by the time the sun got out of bed.

The train was very pleasant and we had the carriage almost to ourselves for the first hour or two of the journey. This is first class.

The train also went super fast between Montpellier and Lyon. Gosh that was fab! 300km/h. Just a bit faster than I've ever been except in a plane of course.

Finally, six hours later, we arrived in Dijon. Cheers!

Munching in München

2009-09-16T08:19:00.003-06:00

Well we made it safe and sound to München and gosh I cannot type on a German keyboard.

Our 300 euro a night hotel won't let us connect to the net. We don't even get coffee cups or anything. No pics cos this is not my machine.

Now I am off to find yarn shops. Tomorrow I am off to either that castle, Neuschwanstein?, or to Salzburg. Depends on when I wake up - the tour leaves at 9 whilst I can catch a train to Salzburg anytime.

It has taken me nearly 10 minutes to write this much.

Have fun!

France - cheers from Dijon

2009-09-13T13:17:00.002-06:00

This morning we packed our bags and left Toulouse and our new good friends behind. I was sad to leave Toulouse but excited about seeing a new place!

We chose Dijon on advice of our Toulouse friends. Also we could get a train directly here but it did mean getting up at 6:30am on a Sunday morning after getting to bed after midnight.

My goodness, what a great choice!

I leave you with a few pics. On second thoughts, I won't cos we have low speed free wifi and it is baulking at the large pics. I can't upload them.

Cheers from Dijon!

Oooh la la! Toulouse!

2009-09-11T04:33:00.003-06:00

On the 10th of September, we walked into town. Our plan was to hire Vélos but there were none left in the stands. So we walked.

Walking was good. Just as well. It is only a bit over 2km into the centre of town but we managed to walk more than 10km just wandering around looking at stuff (and today my feet are sore and Nathan's calves are complaining). We planned on getting velos back to here but umm, well it turns out that they don't like overseas credit cards (I can remember this being an issue in Paris not long after velibs were introduced there). But we survived, and at least it was not far to walk home!

We are fascinated by the narrow streets - they are not very wide at all. Cars park on one or the other or both or neither side (depending on the width), the narrow footpaths have green wrought iron barriers on them (presumably more to stop cars parking on the kerb and forcing peds to walk in the middle of the street even more than they do now), motorbikes, cars, bicycles and pedestrians are just all over the place. And the buildings are fascinating.

(I think that is the Canal du Brienne but I am not sure of the spelling or the French grammar but I know where to find it again.)

C'est fab! LOL

Today I hope to go back into town to find two yarn shops - we were only one road off them but one road is plenty far enough away! DH is not very willing to walk, and we need to do things like get stamps for postcards and fix up our I-94s, which the silly people in DFW airport did not take from us - they were running late getting us on the plane (that was fine, we were late too!) but did not do any passport stuff, unlike say LAX which wants your passport and takes the immigration card. We have to send off proof that we have left the US along with the card before we can get back into the States. Sigh. Oh and we need to book the next part of our train trip, which means deciding where we are going. 8-D

Ooh la la! Carcassonne!

2009-09-11T03:41:00.004-06:00

Our host kindly drove us down to Carcassonne to look around the ancient walled town/fortress there. It was tres bon. (I seem to have lost the compose key I set up so I could do accents, etc. Ah, I've wrangled it back again.) C'est trés bon! Like really really bon. Trés fantastique!

(You really should click on all the photos in this post to see the bigger ones)

It was really interesting. I've never seen a walled town before - I've been to England but "only" saw ancient stone circles there, that sort of thing (which I loved seeing so don't get me wrong!). There are Roman parts, medieval parts and then the reconstructed parts. The Romans used small squared stones, the medieval parts are made of large, shaped stones and the reconstructed parts used very nicely squared off stones - they haven't had time to start dissolving in the rain.

I am not sure that I appreciated it as much as I could have. After all, I have absolutely nothing to compare it with. But it was totally fascinating.

We had a lovely afternoon walking around it, seeing it close up, being amazed by the tourist tat inside its walls - I guess that whilst the things sold may have changed, the shops inside have not changed all that much in the last hundred years or so that they have catered to tourist trade rather more than local rather. Cos oh yes, locals live there not just in the new town (ville basse) spread around the flanks of the hill.

Some linky love letter for my city

2009-08-27T19:24:00.003-06:00

In a bit more than a month, we'll be flying to Oz to visit our Home. I hope it still feels like Home when we get there.

There's been a few articles in the Home newspaper that I read that I thought I would share with you.

Catherine Deveny's Things that say 'Melbourne' (even more than a big M)

and a piece on a new endangered species, keeping the bush natural, and we ain't talking trees and shrubs here....

A love-letter to the Yarra River (apparently its proper name is Birrarung.) Oh I look forward to seeing you, beautiful placid river. People might dak on you and call you horrid names but you are beautiful.

Of course I am looking forward to seeing family and friends and cats and the garden etc etc etc but I am also tied to the place itself. It is a part of me.

(Pics around the Melbourne CBD in 2006, when I last worked there. River pics show the Yarra in all her beauty)

Today's odd noise

2009-06-11T12:01:00.003-06:00

Mating squirrels make the MOST bizarre noises!

Like someone clicking their tongue only sorta dully and making a brrrm brmm noise without the b and also a noise like a wheel spinning combined with the noise of a cat starting to chuck.

Or at least that I what I assume is going on, given that there is a black squirrel with its tail up and a normal coloured squirrel chasing it but not in the usual fashion of "get outta my territory!" where they don't get near each other... No I would say the black squirrel is saying "Catch me if you can!"

Much catching up to do. So many pictures, so little time!

To our neighbours

2009-05-04T09:30:00.002-06:00

To our neighbours, who whenever they feel hot at night
(and I mean hot in the temperature sense)
Please, desist from smoking pot.
It really peeves your neighbours
who have to close their windows
and put the fan on
and hope that the disgusting smell
this time of SKUNK!
not perfume
passes
and that they won't awake
with a sore throat
from YOUR need to relax yourself
and share with your neighbours.

RAIN!

2009-05-02T10:35:00.003-06:00

It RAINED yesterday and drizzled today. Rain! In May!

This list shows the average precipitation in inches and (mm) for San Jose, California, over the year:

January 3.2 (81.3)
February 2.8 (71.1)
March 2.6 (66)
April 1.0 (25.4)
May 0.4 (10.2)
June 0.1 (2.5)
July 0.1 (2.5)
August 0.1 (2.5)
September 0.2 (5.1)
October 0.9 (22.9)
November 1.2 (30.5)
December 2.0 (50.8)
Total: 15.1 (383.5)

(Scuse the formatting - can't be bothered writing HTML table code. Plus I think they say 2.5mm on average in June, July and August cos once in 10 years a thunderstorm dumps an inch of rain in one afternoon, then no more rain is seen for ages.)

Of course when I look at the local rainfall data, it says no rain fell at *all* in the last day. That is because it is stupid, IMO. I know rain fell cos I was out in it! There was water running off the pavements. There was water running out the storm drain into the creek. It was not coming from sprinkler systems. It may have only been 2mm of rain but it was enough to make me use my umbrella.

In hairing off looking for local rainfall data (which took over an hour, I might add plus an extra hour for a nice diversion into looking at the seismic faults around here and pics and lovely stuff), I discover that noone particularly cares how much rain falls in San Jose. Weatherunderground has lots of little local weather stations but I get the feeling many of these are quite recent as their data peters out before 2008 or 2007. I eventually found that sfgate has a list of rainfall totals for the current rain year and the last one too. SJ had 80% of its usual rainfall (12" rather than 15"). As far as I can tell, Campbell (where we live) gets less than 10" of rain a year on average, which makes me wonder how on earth they grew fruit trees here - this whole area was an orchard and canned and dried all sorts of fruits.

It just gives me the feeling that people here are just plain not interested in weather. They are used to the weather being unchanging for half the year and barely variable for the rest of it. Where I come from, the weather is a major topic of conversation - it changes. We worry about rainfall, we gripe about it being Too Hot or Too Freezing, or Too Dry or Too Wet (rarely these days - rain is good!), we have a whole network of govt sponsored weather stations, I can look up a website to see how much rainfall fell in my local area in the last day, week or year (and get historical records too)... I guess we are just boring and obsessed at home with our interest in the weather and whether we'll get any rain.

On photographing wildlife

2009-04-21T18:50:00.002-06:00

Now you see it:

Now you don't:

That ground squirrel (well that is what I guess it was) was very fast! It was sitting in front of us happy as larry at the elephant seals past Big Sur and then just VOOM! Ah the perils of photographing wildlife. At least it wasn't a tree squirrel - it probably would've run up someone's leg!

Bunnies and bonnets

2009-04-20T18:34:00.003-06:00

Our local council, Campbell City Council, holds a Bunnies and Bonnets parade every year. We just so happened to be in downtown Campbell and saw a bit of the fun.

There were marching bands (local high school, pic chosen to not show faces!).

Floats.

People on weird recumbent advertising bikes, including this Easter Bunny who had one of the ugliest, scariest faces I've ever seen on something that is meant to be happy and jolly.

Girls dressed in Scottish outfits dancing (have a video but again it is of kids and there seems to be some prohibition against showing kids on blogs without permission of their parents/guardians). Local pollies in porsches. Dancing girls, not doing gaelic jigs. People just wandering along. Old cars.

Americans seem to enjoy parades a lot. We don't have many in Oz. I think they are thought to be dicky and old-fashioned.

Near the end, before the fire trucks, etc, there was a pipe band! I videoed them :-)

Enjoy!

A drive up Mt Hamilton and back again

2009-04-07T13:03:00.003-06:00

Two Sundays ago, we went for a drive up Mt Hamilton.

From down in SJ, Mt Hamilton is marked by some white lumps on top of a rather bald mountain to the east. It doesn't look like much from down here and our last attempt to get to the top of the mountain (about 14 months ago) was stymied by snow!

SJ foothills

Anyway, the drive up the mountain is fun. You first have to cross over the foothills, on a pretty narrow and rather windy road, cross a meadow/valley and then wind wind wind up to the top of the mountain itself. I would not recommend this road for anyone who gets carsick but for the rest of us? Woo hoo! It is soooo windy that you can't actually go that fast up it, especially when much of the road is stuck on the side of a rather steep hill - one side is often cutting/cliff and the other is a biiiig drop. And when the wind blows (it is windy as well as windy!) then it can be exciting indeed!

But we were just as enamoured of the spring wildflowers.

Just over the top of the foothills we found these in a sheltered, northfacing cutting;

Dodecatheon hendersonii - shooting stars. I was so excited to see these. We didn't see any last year but we didn't go to the right places. They are fairly common but to me they are the orchids of the primula world and I love to see them.

Californian Buttercups

There were also nemophila and some other things I cannot recognise due to low light and lots of wind blurring the pics.

I am fascinated by the oaks here - they are all twisty and gnarly :-)

One particular sheltered hillside was a riot of all sorts of things.

Delphiniums and dodecatheons dominate this pic. I didn't realise there were so many delphiniums (larkspurs) and so many lived here!

Cynoglossum grande - the flower looks like a very large forget me not. It's in the same family.

(This pic is best seen in a larger size so click on it to see delphiniums, dodecatheons, blue dicks and others. Yes, there is a plant commonly called blue dicks. Ahem!)

I think this is a blue dick (Dichelostemma capitatum). They were pretty hard to get pics of due to the wind and our unwillingness to step into the verge. We have a complete paranoia of poison ivy/oak and also hate squashing plants.

D'oh! Two deer, two (presumed) female deer!

Out of focus lupines and a nice valley.

After winding winding winding our way up the road, we came in sight of our destination

Now with fricken lasers! Really! They now use laser spotters to help line telescopes up. This telescope is over 100 years old and is still in constant use. It was and still is an amazing piece of machinery. It is so delicately balanced it can be lined up by a single person. You can read more about it here and more about the Lick Observatory complex here. (I am very pleased with this handheld shot - it is quite sharp and is limited only by the ISO of the camera rather than me shaking the shot.)

The Lick dude himself, well a bust of him. The guided "tour" (we didn't go anywhere, just stayed in the observatory itself) described him in glowing terms but I am not that sure he was a fantastically nice guy.

Me, chilling outside the observatory (which was rather cold!).

Nathan chilling even more in the brisk wind - he forgot to bring a jacket.

A bad pic of us at the observatory.

I call these ouchcones, not pinecones.

The long and winding road.

All of these hills and valleys are caused by the Pacific Plate grinding against the North American plate. They are very scenic when they are green.

Nathan called this a mushroom farm - I can see why!

On the way back down we saw other plants,

like these Indian Paintbrushes (Castilleja foliolosa I think)

Lathyrus vestitus?

Checker blooms in the middle of common fiddleneck (I think!)

Lupines and poppies on the foothills roadside.

Nom nom!

2009-04-07T12:51:00.005-06:00

Gosh how I love this new word - nom nom! It is even better than birdy num-nums! (Points to whoever knows where that comes from!)(Yes I am a nerdy geeky dork.)

Anyway, the caterpillars have been looking for nom noms. Alas many of them get squashed on the path. Here's one I saved (no I didn't touch it cos I am one of those people who get itchy spots from just looking at a spiny caterpillar).

And its "face"

And nomming away on a wild mustard/brassica

We thought they might be giant leopard moths or something similar but those are not found in California, certainly not in the Bay area. Also they don't have red stripes when they curl up. They just have dull red spots where the spines ("setae") stick out. They are some sort of woolly bear caterpillar, which means they are a moth caterpillar. I assume that they are a good sized moth cos the larvae get to about 3cm long.

So the plot thickens! Wish I knew an entymologist around here. Guess I should look online at the local universities.

ETA 11 April 2009. I think we have an ID thanks to "National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America" (Arthur E Evans). The caterpillars are Painted Arachnis (Arachnis picta) instars. They are a form of tiger moth. The grubs eat weedy plants, which fits the bill for the mustards we found them on. Yay! Thanks, NWF!

A little downtown

2009-04-01T13:52:00.003-06:00

The other day I trawled around on the buses visiting a couple of op shops (thrift stores). (I much prefer op shops cos the focus is on lucky finds, hence op for opportunity, rather than being thrifty, which has some negative connotations these days.)

Anyway, after I got peeved with Savers cos they had three registers open and a LOT of customers with a trolley (shopping cart) full of stuff and two registers closed just like that, I decided to call DH up and go into town (San Jose) to have arvo tea with him. I had even remembered to take the phone with me! A miracle!

So I caught the 23 bus in to town. Here's a few pics from the little walk from the bus to DH's work.

The Guadalupe River. Downtown. Looks wild!

A male merganser duck swimming frantically upstream. He actually blends in pretty well!

On the road to nowhere - the bike path on the other side of the river (more a creek) just stops. Waaaah! as you fly off the end of the path. I presume there is a barrier on the other side of the bridge.

Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium

In a bed of presumed native plants (except some things are obviously weeds)

A green avenue. It was all nasty brown sticks two weeks ago.

DH's workplace with its signage being coy and its buildings looking wonky due to the wide angle.

No pic of peppermint tea. mmmmm....

Oh my! Caterpillars and butterflies

2009-03-30T10:03:00.003-06:00

What a weekend! Lovely weather - absolutely perfect.

It was a weekend of butterflies madly skipping NW-ward. Thousands of them. I have no idea what the butterflies are - they were here and gone before one could do anything apart from appreciate the speed with which they moved. These butterflies were on A Mission. We think they were Painted Lady type butterflies but who knows? they certainly were not fluttering by in the usual butterfly manner - no barely able to fly for these chaps! These were the ferraris of the flutterby world. Hwnce no photos.

Also we've been seeing heaps of fuzzy black caterpillars on one bit of sidewalk on the way to downtown Campbell. They look totally black and are right by a "wild" patch by the freeway. There's oxalis pes-caprae, redwoods, ashes, thistles, and wild oats and other grasses in the area. We have not seen them feeding on anything there. We would love to know what they are. I might be able to get a pic of one before it is squashed.

Umm, where am I again?

2009-03-19T22:39:00.003-06:00

This 'ere's the wattle,
Emblem uv our land.
You can stick it ina bottle,
You can 'old it in yer 'and.
(Thanks, Pythons!)

Silver wattle and gum trees against a blue blue sky.

I took these pictures at Vasona Lake Park, Los Gatos, California, USA. Ahem.

South Bay Spring

2009-03-19T21:53:00.003-06:00

Nearly a week ago, after getting my first ever flat on any of my bikes (and getting it fixed), I went for my oft-proposed ride up the Los Gatos Creek trail. I had been itching to ride up the creek for weeks and finally the planets were in the right places, etc etc and I could ride!

My goodness it was lovely!

I shall let you judge for yourselves. Click on any of the pics to go to the Flickr sizes page. :-)

(Redbuds - natives)

(the creek from a bridge - all green and growing!)

(A rather small egret in said creek)

(Another small egret further up the creek)

(common fiddleneck - native)

Something lives in this hole, a Californian Ground Squirrel I think but it dashed away before I could get a shot of it. It was being stalked by a presumably feral calico cat.

(Statice - weed)

(Canadians walking on water)

(Percolation ponds looking northish)

(Percolation ponds looking southish/Los Gatos-ish)

(Weedy but very very native - I love Californian poppies!)

(Lupinus succulentus - native)

(Male ?swamp? Baccharis - native)

(Female ?swamp? Baccharis - native)

(Some of the prettiest weeds you'll ever see but boy are they pests. I doubt if there is one native species in that shot.)

(Just below the Vasona Lake weir)

(lake outlet)

I am really enjoying this spring - it is quite exuberant :-)

Spring prettiness

2009-03-18T22:15:00.002-06:00

I am a total sucker for these.

Crab apples?

No matter what they are, their daintiness, whiteness and pinkness pull me in like a moth to a flame.

A circular drive

2009-03-15T21:56:00.003-06:00

Today we went for a nice drive, courtesy of Nathan's boss. We showed a potential new hire and his girlfriend around a bit of Santa Cruz and then up the coast and across through the redwoods in the coastal range. (I am pleased to report that we didn't actually drive through any trees, just past them.)

We had lunch by the marina, where it was grey when we first sat down

and then brightened up by the time we had finished:

The heiferweizen was a little shaken up it seems - someone had problems pouring it without a huge head.

We walked up almost to the mouth of the river (you can see the dredger and its pipeline in the pic above) to admire the Pacific and the lighthouse.

The breakwater/groin that the lighthouse sits on is made up of concrete "shapes" which totally fascinated me. Obviously the local sandstoney type rock is not impervious enough to the pounding of the waves. (see natural bridges below)

We then found Cliff Road after doing a little tour of the boardwalk area (no pics) and drove up to Natural Bridges. Looking south from the carpark, we saw

BLUE!

And looking north?

GREY! (note there is only one bridge left - I guess the same fate befell the second arch to the mainland as befell our London Bridge in Victoria.)

Which direction were we going in? Guess? Guess why there are no pics of the coastline or of the wildflowers (native and weedy) along the coastline? So we drove up to Pescadero, with brief views of a cloudy and veiled Pacific Ocean on our left, no kite surfers, past rudey nudey Bonny Doon Beach.... Interestingly it was a little clearer up in the mountains! So we stopped on Alpine Road for a little walk through the redwoods.

These are only bubby coastal redwoods - nothing like the ones we saw at Muir Woods and not to be confused with the giant sequoias that live say at Yosemite.

Quite a number of plants are in flower at present in the redwoods or are about to be in flower.

Redwood sorrel, or Oxalis oregana, or Oregon sorrel. The flowers were not very open.

Cardamine californica or milkmaids (different to our milkmaids at home!). The one in the pic below has pointy leaves - I presume it is the same plant as it has the same flower structure.

After a long afternoon of looking, gawping, knitting (for me) and blathering (oops, me again), we hopped across to the Sonoma Chicken Coop for dinner with knitty/crochetty friends and home with a magnificent sunset at our backs.

A dog question for you

2009-03-03T11:38:00.003-07:00

I was having a discussion with an older, American, lady the other day. We were talking about cattle dogs. They are quite fashionable here in the States. People think they will be good family dogs. (But they are not - they are bred to run all day, they will herd anything - ducks, chooks, children - and tend to look to one pack leader.)

She considered it cruel to have such a dog on a "running line" - a leash that allowed them to run around the back yard but did not allow them to jump the fence or otherwise escape a yard. Under no circumstances was it acceptable to put the dog on a running line.

She thought it much better that the dog be confined in a cage whilst its owners were out.

Quite obviously I think it is cruel to have a very active dog confined for 8-10 hours a day. As long as the dog has access to water, shelter and entertainment (and there are no mountain lions/etc) I can't see the problem with the running line. Free roaming of the yard is better but if the dog is an escape artiste.... (Some of these dogs love jumping fences and will go in search of something to herd if they are not entertained enough at home.)

You may be able to tell that I don't think that active dogs in apartments are a good idea either. AFAIK most apartment dogs are kept in cages when their pack leaders are out.

What do you think?

The other think I abominate is the docking of dogs' tails. Some dogs in Oz have docked tails (eg corgis, Jack Russells and some other short haired terriers are allowed stumps as are dobermans and other pointer dogs) though the practice is on the way out. Here - all sorts of dogs have docked tails. The other day I saw a cattle dog with a tail docked as short as a corgi's - there was no tail left! It wasn't the first one that I had seen docked so short. How do dogs tell tales if they have no tail? Taking off a dog's tail is like making us mute - the dog cannot talk properly. You can tell a lot about a dog's mood by how it is holding its tail. People carry on about how horrid it is to neuter a male dog - how can he take his greatest pleasure? (or what men think is his greatest pleasure cos they sorta envy the dog's flexibility) - but think nothing of docking the tail to "improve the dog's aesthetics" and to make sure it can't sweep the cups and dustables off the coffee table. It seems to be a very odd double standard.

OK, off my hobbyhorse now. You might get some local pics again soon! I have plenty to share.

PS If you hadn't already worked it out, I am a cat person.

It must be tough

2009-02-25T17:25:00.001-07:00

It must be tough being a smoker in San Jose parks. But it makes me happy!

Winter is here!

2009-02-16T23:15:00.002-07:00

So why are the spring flowers starting?

14 Feb - magnolia, Santa Clara.

It has been raining HEAPs here, which is fantastic. We might even make our expected rainfall for the month. Doesn't mean we are out of drought but it is nice that it keeps raining (except when I am out in it). It got me nice and soggy yesterday at the farmers' market, then after keeping my runners dry for most of the day I didn't see a huge puddle in a carpark (I was watching the crazy cars) and soaked both feet and my pants halfway up my legs. Now I usually don't do half measures in anything but this time I am glad I did!

Anyway, it is lovely to get some rain - about 50mm since Saturday I think. It's hard to tell with my large yoghurt pot rain gauge.

I guess I should've figured there'd be some rain when I saw lovely threatening clouds like these

It was a sunset though, not a sunrise. Not much of a warning for the poor old shepherd!

For train nuffies only

2009-02-03T16:13:00.004-07:00

Here's a couple of wonky-cam videos of the Tehachapi Loop in action.

If I can get a video editing thing going, I'll show you one that Nathan took too. It is too big for blogger. You can read more on Nathan's blog.

:-)

Straight to the pool room

2009-02-02T22:45:00.002-07:00

(If anyone knows where this originated, I'd be happy to credit it.)

You know you're Australian if....

You know the meaning of 'girt'

You believe that stubbies can either be worn or drunk

You think it is normal to have a Prime Minister called Kevin

You waddle when you walk due to the 53 expired petrol discount vouchers stuffed in your wallet or purse (and purse does not mean handbag but the female version of a wallet)

You've made a bong out of your garden hose rather than use it for something illegal such as watering the garden

When you hear that an American 'roots for his team' you wonder how often and with whom

You understand that the phrase 'a group of women wearing black thongs' refers to footwear and may be less alluring than it sounds

You pronounce Melbourne as 'Mel-bin'

You pronounce Penrith as 'Pen-riff'

You believe the 'L' in the word ' Australia ' is optional

You can translate: 'Dazza and Shazza played Acca Dacca on the way to Maccas'

You believe it makes perfect sense for a nation to decorate its highways with large fibreglass bananas, prawns and sheep

You call your best friend 'a total bastard' but someone you really, truly despise is just 'a bit of a bastard'

You think 'Woolloomooloo' is a perfectly reasonable name for a place

You believe is makes sense for a country to have a $1 coin that's twice as big as its $2 coin

You understand that 'Wagga Wagga' can be abbreviated to 'Wagga' but 'Woy Woy' can't be called 'Woy'

You believe that cooked-down axlegrease makes a good breakfast spread

You believe all famous Kiwis are actually Australian, until they stuff up, at which point they again become Kiwis

You know, whatever the tourist books say, that no one says 'cobber'

You know that certain words must, by law, be shouted out during any rendition of the Angels' song 'Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again'

You believe, as an article of faith, that the confectionary known as the Wagon Wheel has become smaller with every passing year

You still don't get why the 'Labor' in 'Australian Labor Party' is not spelt with a 'U

You wear ug* boots outside the house

You believe that the more you shorten someone's name the more you like them

Whatever your linguistic skills, you find yourself able to order takeaway fluently in every Asian language

You understand that 'excuse me' can sound rude, while 'scuse me' is always polite

You know what it's like to swallow a fly, on occasions via your nose

You understand that 'you' has a plural and that it's 'youse'

You know it's not summer until the steering wheel is too hot to handle

You biggest family argument over the summer concerned the rules of beach cricket

You shake your head in horror when companies try to market what they call 'Anzac cookies'

You still think of Kylie as 'that girl off Neighbours'

When returning home from overseas, you expect to be brutally strip-searched by Customs - just in case you're trying to sneak in fruit

You believe the phrase 'smart casual' refers to a pair of black tracky-daks, suitably laundered

You understand that all train timetables are works of fiction

When working at a bar, you understand male customers will feel the need to offer an excuse whenever they order low-alcohol beer

You get choked up with emotion by the first verse of the national anthem and then have trouble remembering the second

You find yourself ignorant of nearly all the facts deemed essential in the government's new test for migrants.

You will immediately forward this list to other Australians, here and overseas, realising that only they will understand!!

My addition - you know you're Australian if you get the title of this blog post!

NY Drive Day 3

2009-02-02T19:09:00.003-07:00

The day dawned grey and cold and miserable - the dense fog Bakersfield greeted us with the night before had settled in for the long haul it seemed. We were glad to leave and headed sorta eastish, towards the desert.

As we started to climb out of Central Valley, the fog began to clear, revealing rolling green velvet hills. There were even some cows grazing in the paddocks! That required a photo - we are not used to this idea of cattle being able to graze on their right and proper food here in the US - we see too many intensive dairy and cattle farms.

The terrain became more rugged as we climbed a bit further, and more scenic.

Some of the mountains had snow on top!

Eventually we were high enough to see patches of snow around us. We passed a small town and headed for the desert. But first,

The vegetation suddenly changes - rainshadow I guess - and we saw our first Joshua Trees. Weird looking things but fairly typical of agaves.

This is the best pic we got in Mojave. I think it sums up our visit there - we came, we saw, we got out of this benighted place as soon as we could. It is on a vast desert plain and I cannot imagine how hot it would be in summer when the winds blow out of the desert towards the coast.

We left the land of the Joshua Tree behind and crossed the pass again.

We stopped in Tehachapi (te-*hatch*-a-pee) for lunch. It has a very good train shop, for reasons that were about to become abundantly evident to me. The hippy eatery at the east end of town fed us some very nice chili - it was even Lynne friendly (though not very hippy when i think about it cos it had meat in it). The sign shown above indicates how important the local train attraction is to the town. It also looks a little sad - the bare land behind it was until recently their railway museum. A fire razed it in 2008 just after it was completed.

We also saw this sign at another eatery - we sniggered quite a bit.

So why had we come here? To see the Tehachapi Loop, a 130-odd year old engineering marvel that lets trains negotiate the grade up the Tehachapi Pass. Trains are important in this household.

As we returned to our car, we heard dingdongs and a train horn! Oooh, we were in luck! This BNSF train was on its way west to the loop!

We dashed back to the car and took off towards the loop.

We were still beating the train to our date at the Tehachapi loop.

The road became a bit windy with patches of snow in the sheltered areas. Were we still beating the train? There was a chap selling souvenirs at a layby on the road. In talking to him we discovered we had to backtrack 100 yards and go along a little track to get the best view. Back we went to get that view!

The train looping around half the loop.

The train then winds around some more bends on its way to Central Valley.

(A picture without trains or trainlines in it for those not interested in trains)

And back we headed into Central Valley

to find a solar power plant designed by Aussie ingenuity (our pic shows little of consequence), and pass a bunch of turkey vultures (I got excited cos I thought they might be condors but condors don't feed in packs) and face RAIN and excitable cars before finding a place to stay in Oakhurst.

Australia day 2009

2009-01-26T18:01:00.003-07:00

Golly, my second Australia Day away from Home.

We won't be thrown a prawn on the barbie, or a lamb chop or a banger or two. We don't have a barbie y'see. Technically they are illegal where we live (well can't be used within 9' of flammable stuff), though about 30% of the flats around us have one on their patio.

Plus I don't think I've got any lamb chops. We do have bangers though, funny American Italian bangers.

There's a few things I miss here in the States. Bangers for starters. Getting a good sausage full of lord knows what bit of the animal is really difficult. Americans don't do sausages. They do these funny little breakfast links, which are often skinless. They do hot dogs, which are about the right size and shape, but they aren't bangers (though the source of "meat" is probably similar). But they do not really get the idea of mixing mince (ground) meat with seasonings and rice meal (for gluten free bangers) and sticking it in a casing (real gut or synthetic, your choice).

Another thing I miss is the good old Aussie meat pie. Again, meat of uncertain, often chewy, origin seasoned (usually overly) with salt and pepper all wrapped in plain pastry. Mmmm, pie-y goodness, and I used to be able to buy them frozen at the supermarket. When we get back to Oz I am going to stuff myself full of pie-y goodness. Yum yum yum. And eat lots of sausages. I might turn into a banger myself!

Why is it that the foods that are bad for us taste so good?

So on this Australia Day, well I still call Australia Home. I might live in the States but this is not my Home. It is home for the time being. It has enough Aussie-ness that I can survive quite well - the place is riddled with blue gums (eucalypts) so it isn't as it I can find the odd eucalyptus leaf to crush and smell. Plus there's a range of other Oz plants too. That is enough to keep me going. Sooner or later I'll get a recharge of Australia(n-ness). One day I expect to live there again. Hope it will wait for me!

Day 2, part 2, the exciting bit!

2009-01-25T15:01:00.004-07:00

After leaving Morro Bay, we headed southwards to San Luis Opisbo. We didn't hang around, just stayed long enough to fuel up and choof off inland.

I think you can get an idea of how dry it is in this part of California by the pics. Ther are not that many trees and those that exist are either reallly tough local oaks or growing in drainage lines.

Then we hit California Valley. Oh my. What a benighted place! This technically isn't California Valley itself, but it is darned close and is a better pic than the others we got.

Imagine land developers thinking, hey who wouldn't want to live here? Soil is alkaline, there's a soda lake down the road, the water supply is from an aquifer that is a bit iffy, there's no trees, it bakes in summer and freezes in winter (overnight), but there's plenty of sun! Let's set up for a town of 50,000 people or so. The road map of California shows a heap of roads to be set up in a grid.

Ahem.

Well some people set up house and still live in the area but really you'd have to enjoy being isolated.

There isn't that much to do in California valley. We drove along Soda Lake Road, to see the soda lake.

It has a top notch recycled plastic boardwalk, for those times when it is wet I guess.

Not much can grow in the alkaline clay soil.

See those wrinkly hills on the other side of the valley? Well those would be the Carrizo Plain part of the San Andreas Fault. Yep, The Big One!

How'd you like to live right next to one of the most notorious faults in the world?

We'd stumbled on one of the best places to see the San Andreas, and it was getting too late to go exploring. We had driven down Soda Lake Road (mostly paved but with a 10 or mile stretch of unpaved road) just randomly and there we were, driving through a national monument and beside the San Andreas.

This is a bit of a punt but I think the fault runs through this valley. There was a really odd dip, like a creek bed that had moved, near the end of the road that made us very suspicious.

This is a really dull pic but from Google maps and digging around online, I am pretty sure that the San Andreas fault runs right next to the road here, through that puddle.

Sunset was pretty - you get too many pics of it :-)

I think you can see something lurking in a couple of those pics. Lurking just down the hill and waiting to swallow us whole.

I hadn't realised how high up we were until we hit the fog bank and kept driving down down down. Gods it must be dull in Central Valley if it is foggy for half of winter. The fog was pretty dense at first but soon I had plenty of visibility to do the speed limit. We stayed in Bakersfield at a cheap but perfectly adequate motel that even had a microwave and bar fridge! Yay for microwaved dinners :-)

Morro Bay, day 2

2009-01-21T22:16:00.003-07:00

DH has fond memories, or at least memories, of visiting Morro Bay back when 'e were a lad. So we drove there - wasn't exactly hard as we followed the coast road.

I think I'll let you form your own ideas about what dominates the seaside town of Morro Bay....

(loved this drippy sandcastle)

From the beach, Morro Rock looks like some great stranded leviathan.

It looks a little more mundane from the harbour.

Someone wanted chippies.

Someone else could smell goodies in the seawater irrigated holding tanks.

Someone else found a goody flopping around on the pier

but its slimy gooeyness was a bit hard to deal with.

Morro Bay was such a mix of different things - the old town area was very laid back but the Embarcadero/harbour area! Oi vey, and this was in winter, admittedly on a lovely sunny holiday. Cars everywhere all looking for a place to park, yet the foreshore is lovely, the beach is lovely, the Rock's carpark is horrid and then there is the power station glowering over all! It is right on the harbour - I guess that means it has plenty of cooling water. Apparently it is old, gas-fired and running at only 5% capacity whilst its replacement is wrangled through bureaucracy. (More info at this wikipedia page.)

I couldn't resist taking pics of this rubbish bin, decorated with turkeys.

When I think beach, I do *not* think turkeys, but obviously someone saw them as important.

Finally, before we turned our heads inland, this tough yellow flower just begged to have a photoshoot. It grow on the foreshore area so it is well adapted to large doses of salt - just look at those fuzzy leaves!

Next, we travel inland and cross one of ze most notorious geological features in ze world!

Beach lumps - New Year's Drive day 2/part 1

2009-01-20T21:21:00.004-07:00

So overnight on NYE we stayed at the Ragged Point Inn. It was pleasant, not cheap mind, but pleasant. We dined at the associated restaurant, again quite pleasant but I had not dressed for the occasion (mind you I was not naked either but sweat pants, aka trakky dax, are not exactly classy). We did not make it to midnight - I had done some hard driving and DH had done some hard sitting.

Can you see the little road halfway up the hill?

(southwards)
The motel has great views on either side of the point, as I discovered when I went for an "early" morning walk at 9am...

(northwards)

(outwards)

These aloes are very popular in the area. I guess it is hard to find things that grow. Also given their prickles, they may resist being removed...

Cypress and the hill inland from the motel complex.

I was lucky to get those pics when I did as only a few minutes later, fog began blowing up from the ocean. It was like it had been set on fire or something. Within a couple of minutes of returning to our motel room, the view out the window went from

to

DH never saw the views in person, only in the pics I took.

So we drove onwards, ever onwards. It was all very Scottish according to DH - the hills were moving away from the road and there were flattish spots and all was draped in mist. We passed a LOT of cyclists over the next 20 miles - they were all going the other way. Good luck chaps - not too much in the way of bike lanes are marked along the coast road!

Occasionally we saw views like this

and this:

The coast seemed less rugged in some ways - a precipitous hill no longer fell straight into the ocean but it was pretty darned rocky. I wouldn't want to be landing a boat on it. I'm guessing that the lighthouses were/are absolutely necessary given the fog that benights this coast.

At one point we drove past a very popular car park. "Seals" pronounced DH. Whatever, I've seen seals before. "Elephant seals." On go the brakes and around we go - of course I checked the traffic before chucking a U-ey.

Yes, indeed elephant seals.

There are some youngsters in that pic and some mums-to-be as well from their shape. I have a video of one calf trying to work out where to get some tucker. Mum's flipper wasn't the go, nor her ?elbow? ?wrist? Here's mum flopping over and trying to prod the kid downwards but golly, I have no idea how these critters have survived if the calf takes five minutes to work out that the top end of mum does not have food but about 2/3 the way down does.

Apparently the chaps are all ready to make more baby elephant seals. I guess it takes all kinds cos I wouldn't want him making love sweet love to me!

And one intrepid ground squirrel with a great beachside home.

One of our aims was to visit this place, even though they can't spell Hurst.

Alas, it was closed on New Year's Day.

So onwards, ever onwards.

Things I have learned

2009-01-20T14:32:00.003-07:00

Today's thing I have learned is that dishwashers suck. Even manual dishwashers (ie me) can suck, but I'm really talking about the ones where you stick your dishes in a machine and hope they come out clean.

One of my great delights upon moving to the US was discovering that most (but not all) rental apartment kitchens come with a dishwasher. I'd never had one before, having lived in older pre-dishwasher houses. How wonderful - dishes go in dirty and come out clean! None of this scrubbing stuff in the sink. Plus you use less water because they are more efficient!

Weeeeelllll, maybe there are such dishwashers out there but I've not yet met one.

We eat rice and potato a lot. And vegetables. Dishwashers do not remove the rice and potato and vegetable grunge off the pots. Some would say "That's clean, it's been through the dishwasher" but I see gunge, old food that harbours evil nasties that are just waiting to inflict some gastrointestinal horror upon me (or DH). For all I know that gunge has gotten together with a gluten/casein morsel from DH's cheese and cracker plate and is now just biding its time, waiting to leap at me when I next use that pot.

I've learned that sticking said gungy pots and lids back in the dishwasher just bakes the gunge on harder.

Solution? Scrub pots and pans, give up on putting them in the dishwasher. Run the water slowly without plugging the sink cos the sink is HUGE and takes forever to fill even 7cm deep (enough to mostly cover a glass).

Dang.

Mashed potato also doesn't come off bowls well, nor does cake mix. Handwash time!

Dang.

Then there's the times when I forget to run the garbage monster that lives in the sink drain before starting a load of dishes and the drain backs up and our "clean" dishes come out covered with lord knows what. They also can't just be rewashed - they have to go into the sink for a soak and a hand wash.

Dang.

But I will admit when the planet are in the right alignment, the dishes have been rinsed and the great drain god has been appeased, the dishes come out pretty clean. Just make sure the cups are turned towards the centre of the machine, not the edge.

Day 1 - A drive to Big Sur

2009-01-19T15:31:00.004-07:00

Over Christmas and New Year, DH had some time off. He brought home a cold for Christmas and passed it on to me, thanks ever so, still suffering the effects 3 weeks later...

Anyway, since he had this time off, we decided to go for a drive down the coast. We had been told the drive along the Big Sur coastline is a great deal of fun, if you don't get carsick. Sounded exactly like my sort of road!

So off we zoomed. Traffic was not as bad as I expected for New Year's Eve. Soon enough we had passed through Monterey and bypassed Carmel-by-Sea.

Soon the coastline started getting lumpy and bumpy and a bit more exciting. So did the road, well at least it began to wiggle more but was no more lumpy bumpy.

We stopped at the first bridge.

Mr Grumpy had not had lunch and things were looking grim. A snack bar and an apple helped but lunch was needed and lunch was not available.

We drove further, over many bridges and around many corners. Whiz, whiz, whiz! The road is mostly cut into the side of a very steep sided hill, though around the part where you go past the Big Sur visitor center, it swings inland for a bit. (And thank heavens for a bakery where DH got some sustenance.)

130,000 acres of Big Sur burned in June/July. Massive wildfire. The hill in the background of this pic is representative of what remains. The countryside looks so rugged there - any rain that falls will wash away whatever topsoil remains. It will be interesting to see how much of it regenerates and how well it regenerates.

Alas we had started our drive rather late and the sun fell low in the sky waaay too early for us.

We stopped for afternoon tea at one place but the cafe had already packed up for the day and the restaurant was pricey. I rather liked this driftwood sculpture of a bird.

We did get rather a number of shots (ahem!)

of the coast around and after sunset.

It is gorgeous.

I drove the next however many miles to Ragged Point in the dark, missing out on many spectacular views. Alas I did not make it to the 55mph speed limit very often - 45mph was more prudent, especially given the amount of roadwork happening along the way, with lanes not marked in any way shape or form. Staying on the road involved taking a punt and pointing the car at the middle of the darkest bits. I may love my corners but I also want to arrive at my destination in one piece.

This road is one of the Great Coast Drives. It certainly compares with the Great Ocean Road back 'ome. I think it was built with a similar goal to the Great Ocean Road - that of job creation. Tourism of course followed but really the road was created to provide jobs. It is an amazing drive and we will have to do it again, when it isn't dark. LOL

Entering Yosemite from Mariposa

2009-01-14T23:16:00.004-07:00

Another video! I hope these are working ok.

This is a short one of the rock entryway when you come in from the "north" via Mariposa. I think it is sometimes called the El Portal entrance. So exciting! Excuse the wonkycam. I don't think I'll ever hand hold something straight.

Pure comedy gold

2009-01-14T19:38:00.003-07:00

One of the more average videos we've taken. LOL

Context - it had rained at Yosemite and refrozen. Some of the paths were so slippery you could not walk up them without crampons or walking off the paths and hoping to find non-slick spots. Going up was bad, coming back down was fraught. It was easier to sit on your butt and slide than try to walk down. I have no dignity left. DH was disparaging of my ability to slide - he took about 5 seconds to do what took me 30 - well that is what you get for having 80-odd pounds over me weightwise!

An Act of Bastardy

2009-01-07T15:28:00.003-07:00

Man I am getting really really REALLY annoyed with the "lady" who thinks our car park is hers.

So when we got our car, there was always a silver Audi parked in the spot I later found should be ours. So I parked in the next space along thinking I had muddled the numbers up.

No.

No I hadn't.

Someone moved in and wanted their spot. Fair enough too. So I got booted out of the spot that wasn't mine. But the witchqueen in the next spot won't give up "her" place. She knows it is not her spot but it is convenient for her to park there. We've stuck notes on her windscreen, I've complained to the office practically every day for the last two weeks. But it is convenient for her to steal someone else's spot. She got away with it for two months and now she wants to keep it.

It isn't hers.

Is this typical behaviour for someone who drives a silver Audi and/or comes from Illinois? Have they "made it" and can trample on anyone as they choose? Or is it a reflection of an egotist?

Of course since very space is allocated to a unit, I have to park in the free parking about 400m from our unit. You have to be early to get one of those spots. Normally not that big an issue but at present, walking 100m tires me out. Normally I would ride my bike but with an ear infection, I can't.

The other thing is we are *paying* for a carport space. We are being denied our right to our car park. I obviously have been in the USA for too long cos I am wondering whether we can threaten legal action against her and this place.

I wish they would just danged tow her car as the note threatens. I guess they are not allowed.

Grrr

Travelling

2009-01-03T22:37:00.003-07:00

Since New Year's eve, we have

driven down the Californian coast to Big Sur
seen elephant seals on the beach, including a particularly dumb baby
failed to see Hearst Castle (it's shut on NY day)
seen Moro Rock (a place DH remembers from a trip 22 years ago)
visited a soda lake
driven across the San Andreas faultline
climbed up out of the seemingly endless central plains to see a 130 year old engineering feat
brushed the edge of the Mojave (I am SO not going there in summer!)
driven more of the endless plains in RAIN!
finally reached Yosemite.

It is snowy in Yosemite and gorgeous. I just wish I had not picked up DH's cold - am pushing too hard and now have blocked ears, half deaf and hurties! Especially since we keep having to climb up 3000' or so the drop back down. Plus a cough that even worries DH - which is an achievement, LOL

Tomorrow night we will be home. Thereafter I can assault you with pics, bad videos and tales of derring-do! (well at least the first two.)

California here we come

2008-12-30T22:41:00.003-07:00

On the 30th of December 2007, we touched down at SJ airport.

A year in California! A year of occasionally singing "Do you know the way to San Jose?" and as we've gotten used to the place, usually being able to find our way back home.

One of the things I've learned better whilst living in America is it is all about expectations. I've learned not to expect the same things as at home. Most of the time. This is a different place, one I am learning to call home. It is not Home - I think that will always be Melbourne - but it is a decent substitute.

You need to manage expectations. You might get promised this:

but in reality it turns out to look like this:

In fact, it might look like dog vomit but jeez it is blasted good dog vomit! Very tasty indeed. :-)

Things aren't always as they appear.

Good things about where we live?

The availability of good fresh (organic) fruits and vegies. California is the vegie foodbowl for America. Here we can buy vegies grown 50 miles away and chat to the growers. All. Year. Round. It is fantastic.

The availability of public transport - we deliberately chose this place for that reason, and the closeness of Wholefoods. Plus we can walk to the library with our red trolley and unload books and dvds and cds and load up with new ones :-)

I definitely appreciate the weather. I just do not cope well with cold. I muffle up well but my skin goes horrid - fingers and face dry out and start peeling and cracking no matter how much moisturiser I use. I much prefer temps above 10C. Visiting cold and snowy areas is fun but I think I'd curl up into a little cracky ball of chapped skin if I had to live in a place that stays cold. But one never knows!

I don't appreciate the cars. Too many cars. Over Christmas they have been everywhere and aggressive too. Just like home - people start getting really aggro cos they feel stressed I guess. But cars are necessary to get us to the spectacular sights around the place.

The food - well Nathan is sick of American food but he doesn't remember he was rather sick of the food back 'ome as well. Even with 50 different cafes and restaurants within walking distance of our modest manor.

(Why they are called chipmunks?)

The people have been lovely, in general, except when some of them get in their cars and turn into morons on wheels. California is a place of immigrants, just like me. Finding a native is difficult quite frankly but I am getting better at picking local accents.

I feel I understand how the land here works better than I did in Colorado. Weather patterns are more explicable to me. I am used to a land that dries out under the fierce summer sun and then grows madly in the damp winter. The plants are different - eg we don't have native oaks at home, unlike the lovely tree in this pasture.

America is seen as a land of opportunity. We are seeing a lot of dreams go bust here at the moment. The people who work two and three jobs just to keep their home ownership dream alive are watching it all go down the gurgler. One of DH's friends moved to the US, thinking it would all be fabulous, a dream come true, but he and his family are now poorer in both time and money than they have ever been. We see infrastructure problems - roads so rough that they jiggle you off the seat in the bus, make you feel like you are driving on square tyres, unrepaired sidewalks.... (I said sidewalk! Not footpath! Argh, turning into a local!) Too much emphasis has been put on things that have torn the heart out of America. Too much money has gone into the pockets of a few, all in the name of the many. Too much money has been sent away from this place rather than fixing things that need to be fixed. Too much emphasis on oil. Not enough focus on America's greatest strength. (That'd be her people.)

This coming year is going to be full of challenges. Thank heavens DH has a job. Thank heavens we have met some really lovely people that we can happily call friends. Thank heavens a new president is stepping up to the plate. (And remember, I'm agnostic! ;-) It will be interesting to see if Yes We Can becomes a national slogan, if people work together to pull themselves and their country out of the mire.

Wishing you and yours a happy, safe and fulfilling New Year.

Hooray for Solstice!

2008-12-21T09:56:00.004-07:00

Yesterday was the winter Solstice. Gosh, today we gain less than a whole second here in San Jose.

Dec 20, 2008 7:18 AM 4:53 PM 9h 35m 21s − 04s 12:05 PM 29.3° 147.163
Dec 21, 2008 7:18 AM 4:54 PM 9h 35m 20s < 1s 12:06 PM 29.3° 147.154

I usually try to get a pic of sunrise and sunset on the shortest day. Ooops, missed sunrise, but here's sunset. It started well:

but didn't redden up much at all, sorta just fizzled:

But it was indeed a sunset - it could've been wet and dull - and we got to see it in town. More on going to town later!

A year ago, we were in Canada on a train! I never posted those pics - shall have to remedy that :-)

Uewesual and noice

2008-12-20T11:24:00.002-07:00

We've had some quite cold, for the Bay area, weather recently. Mebbe not as unusually cold as further south, but cooler than expected. Maximums have been reaching 9C, mins down to freezing. The frosts have knocked around my baby basil but given they haven't done anything for two months, I am not fussed. The cold hasn't knocked the tomatoes on the head yet - I have flowers still and some baby tomatoes are growing slowly. Stupid things. I should just pull them out cos I want the pots for winter veg.

The other day, we saw this on the hills around San Jose

(Do you like how I got the light rail bridge in there for my FiL? :-)

Yep, that'd be snow. By the time I remembered to get out and take pics, it had melted off quite a bit. I am told there was snow on the Cupertino hills, just a sprinkling and it looked really pretty.

There are a lot of Chinese Pistachios (Pistache chinensis) planted in our area. They like them as street trees. Not totally sure why - they have pretty leaves and pretty autumn colours and pretty bobbles

but they make a helluva mess on the ground. Of course it mainly affects the bike riders and pedestrians, and bike riders and pedestrians are third class citizens. The trees are prettier than the local sycamore (plane tree) but plane trees don't drop as much crud, just leaves and the odd branch.

I'll be able to torture you with more pics now that we have our hard disks sorted. We had a heap of pics on an old machine and it is playing up badly, but now the disk is in a current machine and I access more pics from last year and four months of this year. Hooray!

I was all ready to go for a good bike ride on the day I took the snow pics (Wednesday, I think), but the wind was sooooo cold that my ears threatened to fall off. It is hard to ride when your ears are killing you (mental pic of ears reaching around and throttling one). I am knitting a head band but I've got more than one thing to knit so it is taking a while.

Memory? What's that?

2008-12-13T23:23:00.002-07:00

I just had to look up our phone number at home.

We occasionally have to "prove our ID" for stuff back 'ome and well, the phone number got shuffled out of the deck. It has not been important so it dropped off.

The good ole White Pages came through for us. It's not often that I like a Telstra product but really it is the only option for us.

LOL

Amazing discovery

2008-11-21T12:47:00.003-07:00

None of the local dentists recommended by our dental plan seem to work on Fridays!

How bizarre is that - they like having a long weekend? There's training stuff for dentists on Fridays?

Anyway it puts the kybosh on me getting an appointment. I have a very hurties tooth and gosh I could have a good cleaning as well...

Madwoman

2008-11-13T18:44:00.003-07:00

with an icecream cone!

Gluten and dairy free - it has my favourite almond soycream in it. Yum yum yum! I have not had an icecream cone for nearly 10 years. Actually it would be 10 years now - I've been GF since November 1998. eeek! That means I finished my PhD more than 10 years ago. What have I done with it? Ummm...

Madwoman with an enormous ?sycamore? leaf.

Adam and Eve eat your hearts out! Much better than scratchy figleaves (anyone felt the back of a figleaf? I reckon A&E must've invented velcro the first time around cos a lot of figs have what feels like sandpaper and/or hooks on the back). Anyway, this leaf is for plus-size models - it would hide a lot!

Did anyone know that sycamores are the same as plane trees? No wonder I thought there were a lot of London Plane Trees here - they are actually native sycamores.

Fall is here! Hoo-blasted-ray! The birches outside our place are really starting to yellow up and there is a constant pitter pattering of leaves falling. Looks very pretty. Just in time for my cauliflower babies to get some light cos the birches shade them. I bought green (limelight), purple, cheddar (yellow) and romanesco (spiral) broccoli. Here are some in their new homes.

I recycle the water bottles into plant pots and then at the end I can wash them out and dump them into the recycle bin. I still have about 10 to plant out into pots - gotta clean the pots first.

Soon I can show you the liquidambar's progress through autumn. It is colouring up well. Unlike the one back 'ome, which was a horrid pest and never did anything better that weak yellow. We don't have to worry about the one back 'ome anymore - an accident befell it, well it is befelled :-)

Fall pics from upstate New York

2008-10-29T23:31:00.004-06:00

Where I come from, Australia, we don't have a lot of colourful trees in autumn. That cos we have eucalypts (gum trees as we call them) and they are evergreen. Why not be evergreen? It isn't as if most of them have to put up with harsh winters and even the ones that grow where it snows still can grow in winter (they've been found to grow even in the middle of winter in Siberia!).

So going to Rhinebeck for the sheep and wool festival served a double purpose.

In this blog entry, I'm just going to show the pics of the trees, not the trip up along the Hudson. Enjoy the fall colours!

(love the weird branch on that one!)

(my arty shot)

(my not at all arty shot but gosh the leaves were thick on the ground!)

Outside the fibre festival - Americans love doing little Fall and harvest scenes. They love dolling stuff up for the current festival du jour.

Cows! Grazing in a PADDOCK! Not in an intensive farm in a little quadrangle, ankle deep in muck.

Most of the pics from the trip back look like this:

Whoosh! Too close to the car! I loved the colours though and the golden light in the woods - wish I could've stood in them for a while and just absorbed that light.

Though I did get a couple that looked a little less blurry

Sfunny

2008-09-30T18:20:00.003-06:00

Y'know life is a funny thing.

I was looking at a friend's blog and she linked to another blog where the writer has written a book on Colorado's Scenic Byways.

And I thought, as I looked at the cover of that book, how much I regret that we didn't get to see even more of Colorado whilst we were there, and how I actually miss the place almost as much as I miss Home. California is nice, the weather is great, the people are fine, it's great to be near the coast and see the redwoods and whathaveyou, but Fort Collins and the Rockies really took me (and DH) by storm. Yes we didn't have to deal with winter and a very fickle spring but we miss the place. It is sorta saddening to think I will probably not go back - we wanted to go for Estes Park wool festival but the timing was all wrong. It was so very pretty and relaxed, not all stressy and hurried and so chock full of cars that you can't get away from the things....

So here's to you, Fort Collins and the Rockies!

(and goodness me, there are MANY pictures that never made it onto the blog or Flickr1 About two months worth! Let alone the tales that go with them...)

Harbingers

2008-09-30T13:57:00.002-06:00

Look at this for a forecast:

WEDNESDAY
MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE 70S TO LOWER 80S. WEST
WINDS 5 TO 10 MPH.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT
MOSTLY CLEAR IN THE EVENING THEN BECOMING
MOSTLY CLOUDY. SLIGHT CHANCE OF RAIN AFTER MIDNIGHT. LOWS IN THE
50S. WEST WINDS 5 TO 10 MPH. CHANCE OF RAIN 20 PERCENT.

THURSDAY
MOSTLY CLOUDY. SLIGHT CHANCE OF RAIN. HIGHS IN THE
70S. SOUTHWEST WINDS AROUND 5 MPH
BECOMING WEST 10 TO 15 MPH IN
THE AFTERNOON. CHANCE OF RAIN 20 PERCENT.

THURSDAY NIGHT
PARTLY CLOUDY. LOWS IN THE 40S TO UPPER 50S.

FRIDAY AND FRIDAY NIGHT
MOSTLY CLOUDY. CHANCE OF RAIN. HIGHS
IN THE 60S TO UPPER 70S. LOWS IN THE 40S TO UPPER 50S.

SATURDAY
PARTLY CLOUDY. CHANCE OF SHOWERS. HIGHS IN THE 70S.

There's TWO words in there that I have not seen for ages:

a) cloudy, and
b) RAIN! (albeit a slight chance of)

Golly, the season might be changing. It is nearly October after all.

Then on the shop hop, I saw this tree in a car park at Los Altos. It was a little enthusiastic about changing I reckon.

Enjoy your weather and spring or autumn wherever you are!

A walk in the woods

2008-09-07T22:30:00.003-06:00

(Or on the second day, our calves were sore!

On the American Labour Day, this year on the first of September, we went for a walk in the woods with our Aussie mate who was visiting for work. We also met up with an old friend who now lives in SF and his four year old daughter. She's a real sweetie and is going to be a handful when she gets older - pretty and bright! We all were given sticks that had a very special import, though lord knows what it was....

We didn't go to just any old woods, nope, we were off to Muir Woods.

Sequoia sempervirens is the star of the show at Muir Woods.

This is the centennial year of the woods. They've been around for much longer than a hundred years but not as a national monument. These are The Woods to many San Franciscans, but they are lucky to still be around. The April-June edition of Bay Nature outlines how the woods could first have been logged and now be under water - only a freak of topography meant the valley they lie in (Redwood Canyon) was spared from the loggers in the mid to late 1800s and then a dedicated battle by a conservationist by the name of William Kent, who ended up buying the woods for the princely sum of $45,000 in 1905.

Two years later the local water company decided to acquire the land. This was on the 2nd of December 1907. Kent sent a barrage of letters to Washington DC, offering 295 acres to the US government in exchange for turning the land into a national monument, permanently inviolable. By New Year's Eve, the gift was accepted, and President Theodore Roosevelt declared the woods inviolable on 9th January 1908, a day before the water company took possession.

When you think about it, it is truly impressive that such an exchange could take place so quickly. There was no internet in 1907. No faxes either. No planes or automobiles, only trains. The Wild West was barely tamed. SF had been devastated by a major earthquake the year before. The quickest way to correspond was by telegraph. And then there is the government - these days getting a national monument declared would take reams of paperwork and months, if not years, of hand-wringing and bureaucracy...

But what Mr/Congressman Kent left us with was this:

And goshdarnit, we should be grateful and we are.

Muir Woods is not his only legacy. The whole area north of SF is covered in parks that are all thanks to him. He bought land and gave it to the public. The public seems to appreciate his efforts.

We were there on a sunny day. Sunny days in summer are rare in redwood country - they need the sea fogs to survive as not enough rain falls, particularly in summer, in the Bay area to sustain redwoods. They are only found near the coast - if you visit the Bay area, you'll see that the hills and ranges along the coast are clothed in trees whilst the ranges on the inland side of the Bay are clothed in grasses/herbs/forbs and the odd oak. Redwoods simply do not do well when they don't get rain or fog year round. They happily "breathe in" the water droplets in fog. They are ancient trees, gymnosperms dating back many many millions of years.

(Do not adjust your eyes - those shadows really are doubled yet there was only one sun in the sky.)

Noone knows how old these trees are. We can make guesstimates based on their girth and rate of growth, but there is very little genetic variation between the trees of the Muir Woods. When a new seedling manages to get a hold on life (and that ain't easy in a mature forest that is not allowed to burn), it grows and grows for many years. It has little offshoots at its base that eventually take over as the old tree fails. There are lots of "fairy rings" of coastal redwoods. They grow so closely together in their family groupings that it would be hard to sidle in between the trunks of some groves. Individual members of the group may only be a hundred or so years old but the parent tree could be much, much older.

If a tree falls over but manages to survive, a row of trees can grow from its trunk, making lines of redwoods. Here's one we prepared earlier:

We took the road less travelled up above the redwood canyons. We saw groves and dells similar to those that inspired the forest moon "Endor." We saw light and dust and many special things. And we walked up an awfully steep hill and then down the other side of it. It's been a while since we walked up any hills - we live in a flat part of the Bay.

(Up out of the canyon)

We didn't just see redwoods - there are other trees and plants there too up on the hills surrounding the redwood canyons. The lack of fires has reduced the biodiversity some - only recently has US national forest management concluded that little fire is good for the forests - Smokey Bear's policies of no forest fires equals no regeneration of old forests. (I'm not saying people should go round burning forests to the ground but a widespread area of old, even moribund, forest is not good for the forest or any of the critters that rely on it. It is good for water catchments though.)

At the end of the day, we came home with very dirty legs. LOL

Hopefully we will get a chance to visit these woods again (less traffic would be nice too!) and see them in a different mood - autumnal maybe or misty or early spring with leaves just at leaf burst.

Feeling wistful

2008-09-05T15:23:00.003-06:00

I was reading Crazy Aunt Purl today and her comments about Tennessee having real seasons made me sorta wistful. Where I come from, we have winter (should be "cold" (50sF, 13C) and wet/damp but has just been mostly cold and vaguely miserable for the last 10 or so years), spring (should be four seasons in one day, still living up to its reputation), summer (often blasted hot, rarely miserably cold, ie only 20-25C, generally balmy nights, the odd thunderstorm, cool changes every week or 10 days) and autumn (dry start then cool crisp mornings with sunny, warm days).

We've been here in SJ for over 9 months now. We arrived on 30 December. So far we've had the weird winter here - relatively cool days (warm compared to Canada though!), once every two or three weeks it RAINS for three or so days, non-stop. Then it clears up for a week or two with heartbreakingly blue skies. It rained and rained and rained for Stitches West, only stopping in the last afternoon. I am told that is usual. The rain events wound down over March, the last shower was in April, and we had lots of blue skies. LOTS and LOTS of blue skies. I waited impatiently for it to start to warm up. It stayed around 15-20C for AGES, or so it felt.

At the end of May, it suddenly heated up. We had a few days of nearly 100F, which killed off my pea plants (and they had been bearing so well!). Then it cooled off some, thank heavens cos I was afraid I'd have three or four months of 100F temps. We had one lot of showers in late June. The locals freaked out cos it doesn't usually happen. The clouds brought dry thunderstorms to many areas, triggering a heap of wildfires and things got pretty dire for a while. The whole Bay area was smoked out. Can't imagine what it was like for those living in the areas/fighting the fires...

Since then the weather has been up and down. Mostly 80sF (high 200s/low30s C), but for a while in August I wondered if fall had come early cos the temps were around 25C for a few weeks and there were CLOUDS in the sky. Yep, white fluffy things. I'd almost forgotten what they look like.

One thing that often keeps temps bearable here is the sea breeze. The north end of the Bay calls it the Delta. I call it the sea breeze. It kicks in most days, bringing cool air from the Bay. It also means that most evenings are surprisingly cool - even if it is 38C out in the arvo, one must take a cardi or jacket out cos it will probably be quite cool in the evening, especially if the sea breeze keeps blowing.

This week? HOT! 100F or nearly. Gack. So hot that I am not getting stuff done. I've been warned that September and October can be rather warm. The average temps for SJ say 82F and 76F (28 and 25C). I'd like to know what the standard deviation on those figures is. 25C sounds marvellous but not if it is 15 one day and 35 the next... Time will tell!

When mates visit

2008-08-27T20:23:00.003-06:00

Once in a while, we get a real treat. OK, this is the first real treat apart from the rellos coming to visit. We like seeing people from Back 'Ome. Heck we like seeing people we like, no matter where they come from!

One of our mates from Oz is over here for a couple of weeks for work. We'll call him Jono - nice and easy, pretty Australian sorta naming convention too. Rather appropriate too.

He invited us to his friends' place for a games night. Little did we know what was in store for us (apart from a fun night with nice people and Too Much Food).

We brought this bag home with us.

What's in it?

Hmm...Let's poke around in it.

Well there was a flag in it - MiL decided that if Americans can fly their flag everywhere, we should fly our flag too (didn't help that she was here during the outburst of patriotism that is the 4th of July). Excuse the deep shadow on half of it - it is really all (royal) blue except for the white and red bits.

See our flag? The Union Jack (those who want to argue that it is the Union Flag can go watch some more Dr Who and discuss it amongst themselves) in the upper right corner - the past, the Southern Cross on the right and the 7 pointed Star of Federation in the lower left (wikipedia calls it the Commonwealth Star). When I opened up the packaging (which in tiny print advises the flag is made in China, gosh-what-a-surprise and don't any of you lot laugh cos I bet your flags are made in China too), the Americans at the gathering were rather interested and one even said it was a nice flag. I reckon it is probably a bit easier to sew an Oz flag than the Stars and Stripes - all those little stars would be a drag!

And there were LOTS of Oz goodies in there.

(If you hop along to my photostream on Flickr, you should see there are mouseover points on this pic with descriptions.... why yes I do have a bit of time up my sleeve...)

Things to note:

a vegetable peeler (tested by DH, it wasn't really slightly used when we got it). Yes, I have tried about four different ones here and all I wanted was one that:
a) peeled, and
b) left me with most of the thing being peeled after it was peeled.
I've used a lot of dud peelers in the time I've been here and given that they cost $5-10 it isn't as if you want to throw the duds away, unlike when you buy 5 cheapies for $2 and two don't work for a left hander but do work for a right hander, or three don't work at all but two do ok. MiL sent a good one across. I can guarantee it did not cost a buck or less.

Now see that box? Inside the box was a surprise that I am claiming.

One of my friends has taken up needle felting. She made me this little bear (I've argued with myself that he is a mouse but he is a bear cos he doesn't have a tail. OK bears do have tails up not long ones like mice). He is very soft and cute, and he has a nice Oz pin on him that I can put on something I wear or use a lot. I have not given him a name yet, though I am tempted to call him Mouse, not Bear.

Things of note in the goodies? Twisties. The red (cheese) ones - they were my favourite snack food for the first 30 years of my life (until I went gluten- and then dairy-free. Yes there is enough dairy in cheese Twisties to make me sick). Chicken (green) ones are the Spawn of Satan. Cherry Ripes - another staple of many Australians. I despised them too but DH likes them. He likes turkish delight too - the man is weird I tells ya. Tim Tams. Those who have not done a Tim Tam Slam have not lived. A pile of Lynne-safe chocolate. MMMM. It's moments like these you need Minties, a quintessential lolly (but don't chew them if you have bad fillings). A bottle of a nice red (Wyndham Estate bin 555 Shiraz, can't remember the vintage but has a swag of medals from royal shows and suchlike). Breakfast of champions (or at least snack food) - BBQ Shapes. Crumpets (no we did get two packs of crumpets not a part eaten one). Nathan likes a noice bitta croompet. I thump him and he has to put up with me instead. Crumpets go with Vegemite.

Vegemite is our national spread. I despise the stuff - just as well too cos I can't have it these days. It is the sludge left after making yeast. It is salty and full of B vitamins - isn't it nice that they have found a use for industrial waste? Many Australians love the stuff and given that it has been around for 75 years now I guess someone has to like it. I do remember it was delightful when spread on two Salada biscuits (crackers) along with a slab of butter and then squeezed out through the holes (not that I would eat it even then!). WORMS!

So Jono brought us over a lifetime supply of Vegemite for a family of five.

A little Vegemite goes a LOOOOOONG way!

DH noticed something about it:

ahem. It might be a crime to bring open food into the States, I'm not sure, but nothing can live in Vegemite so it should be pretty safe. Apparently someone grabbed the wrong jar out of the fridge. We told Jono at DH's birthday bash and he has the *BEST* reaction for embarrassment I've ever seen. He curls up with his hands over his head wailing "Oh, no!" And we laughed like drains and then told him the even better part:

But Vegemite doesn't go off,it just gets tastier!

Shopping by bike

2008-08-10T22:30:00.003-06:00

Yep, we have a bike theme happening here.

Yesterday DH decided he needed a keyboard and he needed one NOW! He had checked out some keyboards and played around with some and read reviews online, and figured out which one he wanted.

So I hitched up the bike trailer (with some fumbling - DH had had a go but he did it *wrong* and then it wouldn't go *right*) and took off to Guitar Showcase, our local instrument dealer.

Quite a few bucks later and some occy straps (bungee cords) later, I had brought him home a Privia "digital piano" (as it proudly claims to be).

Note the division of labour. I got to pull this:

DH had to lug these terribly heavy cables home. Poor darling!

He looks very happy about not having to haul 25 kilos of stuff (plus trailer weight) home. Gleeful even!

Moving by bike

2008-08-10T22:15:00.003-06:00

I thought I would share some pics from our recent move with you.

I moved lots of stuff by bike trailer.

Fleece and yarn

Boxes (not rubbermaid, sterilite) of all sorts of crud (not that I have any pics of them being moved).

It was a bit easier with the Penske truck - at least I didn't have to do more than press my right foot on the correct pedal rather than pedalling*. Penske actually provided us with service. Goodness me!

(You can see my bookcase-wot-I-made on the right in the truck, and DH had already unloaded about half of it by this stage)

But I had to move a lot of bits over the last few days of our old lease. Like three loads a day.

On the last day for the last load, I brought back the vacuum cleaner and a lamp along with a heap of cleaning stuff and a carpet runner. I was totally over moving stuff then!

There's lots of stuff that can be moved by bike trailer. And some stuff that can't, at least not on mine.

I am currently eyeballing one of these shopping trailers. They look very funky, especially when the front wheel and handle/pushbar are installed. I also wonder about xtracycles. They look very functional but could I fit one on our little patio?

(*anyone else notice how many people now "peddle" their bikes? Are they trying to sell them or what? Or possibly they mean propelling them with the use of pedals...)

Tuesday sky

2008-08-06T22:36:00.004-06:00

Goodness me! Long time no blog here....

Yesterday and today there were some weird phenomena in the sky.

I give you

Campbell Avenue

Looking up outside our front door

Los Gatos Creek without the creek

Albizia with sky wrongness.

!!!! White fluffy things in the sky! Not the usual morning fog, but white fluffy things. How unusual! I can hardly remember their names.

They became solid things yesterday and what a sunset followed! (Must download the pics to bore you with.)

All pics bar the one with the albizia are from within 10 minutes walk from my place.

Heh. I'll leave you with a pic that I ran through the "auto-enhance" filter on the Gimp.

Looks a little scary, eh?

One Year

2008-06-23T20:52:00.003-06:00

A lot has happened in the last year.

But not really that much if I just say "We moved to the USA."

Doesn't seem like much at all, really.

But it is a big deal and we've had a lot to deal with in this last year.

Moving countries. Setting up a new home - not as easy as you might think! Trying to find/make new friends. Going carless (a biggie for me - I *love* driving!). Finding ways to fill days of not-much-to-do with cheap hobbies. Losing one job. Being homeless for a month (whilst still paying a mortgage) and travelling across Canada in winter. Getting another job. Moving from one state to another.

It is a year since we landed in the US. Do we ever stop missing

friends

family

house

garden

?

We've seen so much

And experienced the highs

and lows (or at least sea levels)

of life.

It has been an interesting year....

On cars in the USA

2008-06-02T11:13:00.003-06:00

Where I come from in Australia, about one in four cars is a Ricer.

What's a ricer?

A little Japanese four cylinder car (eg Honda Civic, Mitsubishi Lancer) or occasionally a 4 cylinder Korean car that has been hotted up - y'know noisy exhaust, lowered, spoiler, body skirts and wing on the boot (trunk), sometimes even engine mods. It doesn't make them fast necessarily - I dragged quite a lot of ricers off at the lights in my little bog stock standard 1.3L Starlet, even with 110kg deadweight (DH) in it - but they *look* fast, and that is their aim - style over substance. I don't include Subaru WRXs in this as they come out of the factory looking OTT - to me a ricer is an aftermarket job and individual labour of love (Aussies can now howl me down).

In the USA, after my nephew pointed it out, I realised that I have seen very few ricers. I've been counting how many I've seen in the last what two or three weeks?

Three.

That is if you include small cars with noisy exhausts. Two if you require the full on body work.

Americans like to show off in honking great big trucks. They don't show off in little cars - no, you show your status in a Ford 150 or a Chev Tahoe/whatever with double wheels on the back ("dualies") and a roaring engine that would wake the dead. Big is beautiful in the US. Small means you are po.

Wonder how long it will take for that to change? Last I looked, petrol was costing $4.17 a gallon. Diesel costs more. Small might start meaning you can still drive whilst those big expensive-to-feed things get to sit in the driveways of America (not in the garage - the enormous triple garage is full of crud).

On another matter, what is with all these American cars with flip-flop fuel filler flaps? They have a little finger flip open thing. It is not locked. Anyone could come along and help themselves to that precious petrol. The number of times I've looked for the little lifter button in a hire car and then found I have to GET OUT OF THE CAR! to open the fuel filler door on whatever side of the car it is (yes yes, of course I have to get out to fill the car up but I want service!).... plus it means I inevitably pull up on the wrong side of the bowser...

More Maker Faire

2008-05-13T20:07:00.002-06:00

Just cos the Maker Faire was over a week ago doesn't mean I am not going to post more pics!

People ask me what the Maker Faire was like and well imagine a whole heap of crafting and electronics and making geeks all getting together. There was all sorts of stuff - Tesla generators (gods they were noisy but now I have a better idea of the Tesla trees in Dan Simmon's book "Hyperion"), Wikipedia, softees, yarn/fibre, paintings, textiles, prints, steam punk...

Here are some more pics from the day:

A flowersaw for the powertools races.

Mobile cupcakes. I love the hats the people were wearing.

What the? This thing was scary - it was on treads and had forklift propane tanks.

A steampunk mobile home.

I have a heap of weird bikes to show off too, and more pics once I manage to get the other computer running - it is being naughty and I only have them on it.

Maker Faire - Offally Good

2008-05-06T21:44:00.003-06:00

I wonder if they really are?

This mob must be good -

look how many people were willing to queue in the hot sun! Reminds me of getting in when they were dropping people off from the free shuttles at the gate where only two windows were open! 20 minutes just to pay cash and I reckon about 2 hours of waiting for the credit/debit queue. They didn't say that there were other gates....

A close look at my pea*

2008-05-06T21:30:00.003-06:00

I've been waiting and waiting for this: *The naughty life of peas

First the flower:

Then the baby pealet - you can see the stigma and the anthers still attached to the pealet in one shot:

The peapod grows long and then starts growing outwards (indeed like most of us - we grow up and then grow out). When it is nice and stout, it can be picked! More and more peas grow - yummo!

Hope you enjoyed a close look at my pea(s)!

(Apologies to those who are still getting over winter - we are on a dead run for summer here.)

Celebrating SJ's spring (part 1 of some)

2008-04-24T23:22:00.001-06:00

Spring in San Jose is a looooong, drawn out affair. I've read that spring here really starts with the autumn rains. Sounds much like where I come from, assuming we get the autumn break (aka rains).

We arrived here in the depths of winter, such as they are in the Bay area. The hills around us occasionally were sprinkled with snow but the snow melted pretty quickly. We never had snow, though we did have a few really rainy spells.

In late Feb, the first real hints of spring began to show. The buds swelled on the trees and shrubs and a few early flowers bloomed.

Since then, it has been on for young and old.

I love poppies and there are plenty around here - mostly icelandic and the native Californian poppy.

The plums have come and gone, and some of them turned out to be flowering almonds or similar (different shaped leaves). Ahem. And I think I am a botanist (ok, a biologist).

Some I knew were flowering crab apples.

The wattles also have come and gone - Oz wattles have been naughty here it seems and have gone a bit wild.

The ranuncs (seen here at the front of our apartment buildings, now alas also gone, cruelly pulled out to be replaced by white petunias, magenta petunias and yellow marigolds - who thought up that colour-scheme?)

This magnolia out the front of a local Catholic school was totally amazing in full bloom, but my pic shows it about a week after its prime.

Even the local nursery was a good source of pics - a port wine magnolia

and a grevillea (oz native) - love those snail flowers!

There's plenty more spring pictures where these came from, so don't despair that for the moment, that's yer bloomin' lot!

It's Good Friday people, go HOME!

2008-03-21T19:30:00.003-06:00

It is always interesting seeing how different places work.

At the moment I am sitting in the study with the window open, and a gazillion cars are flogging down the freeway that runs on the other side of a masonry fence about 20m away.

It is late peak hour on Friday arvo.

Only this is Good Friday. In Australia it is a public holiday. It is a sacred day for Christians and for the rest of us, it is a good day to bludge around or try to get to someplace for the last gasp of summer.

In Australia, the traffic would not be as heavy as a normal Friday. Noone works if they can possibly avoid it on Good Friday (and if they do work, they try to make sure that they get at least double time).

Australia is not nominally or constitutionally a Christian nation. If our prime minister said "God Bless Australia" at the end of a speech or what have you, everyone would be very very surprised. We have separation of the church from the state and it is not considered appropriate to ask for god's blessing on the country. (Mebbe cos Aussies consider that we already have that? Even with the drought and all?)

The US does seem to be a Christian nation, no matter what its founding fathers intended: '"The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," states the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. This document was ratified by Congress without much debate or contention and stands today as a reminder of the founding fathers' intentions.' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States, accessed 21 March 2008). The president says "God Bless America" at the end of speeches. It seems very odd then that Good Friday, being a Very Important Day in Christianity, is Just Another Day To Go Shopping.

I admit to going shopping but then again, I'm not a Christian 8-)

A most curious hedge

2008-03-21T19:23:00.003-06:00

Goodness. it is ages since I last posted here!

Anyway, expect some posts on spring! Lots of spring pictures coming your way, but just to make those in the north of the northern hemisphere jealous, have a look at this hedge!

Yep, there are oranges and what I suspect are grapefruit sticking out of that hedge!

All of Silly Valley area used to be orchards apparently and grows citrus very well indeed. There are lots of orange and lemon trees around, but none are as special as this hedge in Campbell!

SF2

2008-02-29T17:55:00.002-07:00

BTW, it most definitely was winter the day I travelled to SF, but it sure didn't feel like it. Hooray for places with mild winters!

This old riverboat appears to have been modified to become a nightclub or something. Bizarre.

I walked and walked and walked. My legs were getting weary as I finally reached pier 39. I liked the crab that greeted me

The pier is a tourist trap but I didn't mind. I was ready for a tourist trap with its various diversions. It had Stuff in it, some of which was almost interesting! The merry-go-round was very nifty

and quite a number of people were admiring the pretty horses (mostly adults, probably like me wondering if the things could bear our weight)

The stars of the show at pier 39 are of course the sea lions. I thought I got a totally brilliant video of two sea lions threatening each other but alas no the camera didn't understand that pressing the shutter button means start recording now. (I got a totally brilliant video of the decking :-) Instead, you get to see a still shot of this seagull enjoying some pre-digested lunch...

By the time I had reached Pier 39, I was sick of walking. I was going to walk all the way back into town to check out yarn shops and there was no way I was walking any closer to this SF icon:

And I certainly was not swimming all the way to there:

(though I could've caught a ferry if I wanted to share it with 500 or so 15 year olds. Ick)

A number of old trams/trolleys/streetcars rumble up and down the (dangnabbit, getting old, I think it is a Spanish word that would translate to esplanade, though it sounds like place of embarkation). Embarcadero. That is it! I spent quite a few frustrating minutes trying to get a shot of a tram rather than the side of a truck or a taxi or some enormous hulking SUV. Eventually my patience was rewarded:

I think this building demonstrates that I was in SF and not some other place

This steep street could be in SF or Wellington in New Zealand - both of them are subject to the same forces that cause sudden uplift of land

But these houses have a very Bay area feel to them

The centre of town was interesting - it was older than I expected but then again I guess the last *rooly* big earthquake was what 1906? 1908? Anyway, there were a lot of pretty looking buildings. I could've wandered around for hours if my feet didn't hurt after walking 5 miles and if I didn't want to find a yarn shop or two. (Imagiknit, which is two miles out of town and art fibers which is right in the heart of town.) I didn't take a ride on one of the cable cars (and I forgot to wait for it to rumble past so I could get a photo - I only saw one in the distance). Next time! I didn't get any good shots there either - the best views are in the middle of the streets and the streets are busy and a little canyon like (as one might expect when surrounded by skyscrapers).

On the way back a heap of Caltrains awaited me, but I chose the one that was express most of the way. Hooray for express trains! Boo hiss for diesels that spew poisonous fumes everywhere! Caltrain is going to be electrified - it is running at capacity now and if they electrify it, they can run more trains as electric trains accelerate faster. Having two tracks all the way would help too - one there, one back Yeah, it's all train stuff to me! But I sure prefer riding the train to a big city than driving a car cos at least I don't have to worry about traffic in the train nor finding a car park without having to pay extortionist rates to release the thing at the end of the day....

SF1

2008-02-29T17:53:00.002-07:00

And that is not science fiction! Nope San Francisco.

Alas, I didn't wear a flower in my hair but I did go to SF. I plotted and planned over a MONTH ago now and chose the first sunny day in over a week for the trip. It said it would be clear in SF, which I think is pretty important if I am to take a brazilian pictures, which I did. Think yourself lucky that you get what I consider are the best ones, and think yourself unlucky that I am not very discriminatory when it comes to chosing the best photos.

Since it was half an hour to the Caltrain on the light rail in whatever direction I took, I hopped on the tram-train to Mountain View.

This is the most amusing thing I saw all day (except maybe the sea lions).

The Caltrain runs *backwards* all the way to SF. There is no turning point for the trains so the driver sits up in the "front" carriage. Clang clang clang (they have clangie things not horns for pulling into and out of stations) and the train "backs" into the station. Most bizarre. The advantage of having the loco at the back? No diesel fumes! (But this means the trip to SJ is most pongy and quite a number of people were coughing, me included.)

So I hopped off the train at San Francisco and started wandering around. I had no idea where Good Stuff was (except for my little scratch map of how to get to yarn shops) so I headed for the waterfront and walked past the ball park and onwards ever onwards.

The bridge that goes to Berkeley, etc.

I love the barrier on the bridge suspension to stop people walking/climbing up it. I can't imagine ever getting to a point where I would need to be stopped from climbing further. I would've fallen off much earlier after the vertigo got me in its clutches. Not only is the suspension support a few metres above the upper bridge deck, it is also at least 14 stories above the ground (there are buildings pretty much underneath the bridge). Ackles.

(For some reason I like the shot with the pigeon in it so you get to see it too. The bird fluttered down in front of me and strutted around importantly and amused me, even if it is a rat of the sky.)

Just what every city needs.

Along with its own little Elder thing

and a

But wait, there's more!

An ENORMOUS spidery thing. Have I scared all you arachniphobes yet?

Maybe you'll find this scarier

It is the hint of the unknown and the frightening that is more scary than the real thing!

Hmm, now that I have scared off half my audience, I had best put the rest in another blog post!

Tanked

2008-02-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

Full again, eh?

There are so many levels to this one.... Leave your favourite version.

I must say that this lovely

caused me some angst in trying to figure out how to get it home. The angst was partly my fault for leaving the cargo net and most of the occy straps (bungee cords) in the bike trailer (cos they are SO USEFUL there! NOT!). Actually it was all my fault - I didn't *have* to buy it. But when I saw it, I had to have it - the Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of my all time favourite books. Yep, I read real complicated and difficult books ;-) The comforter was my Valentine's present to myself, since I know I won't get anything (men, Pao particularly, can you teach Nathan a thing or two?). Plus it was CHEAP! But pretty! It has the very hungry caterpillar on the bottom part and the beautiful butterfly he becomes on the top part. The back is luridly red, yellow and black. Anyway, I figured it out as you can tell. Hopefully it provided a giggle or two for people driving past....

A pretty dinner

2008-02-20T14:47:00.001-07:00

So pretty! Purple cauliflower!

But I have no idea what this carrot thought it was up to...

On baking

2008-02-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

Baking cakes seems to be easier down here in Campbell compared to mile-high Fort Collins. We are roughly 60m above sea level here (190'). That is pretty comparable to home. At least we won't be first to go when sea levels rise, unlike one of the Sun offices we drove past - it is TWO FEET (SIXTY CENTIMETRES) above sea level! Crikey, I won't be putting my finger in the dike they will have to build around that place! Especially considering this area is earthquake prone - San Andreas fault anyone?

Whoops, I was talking baking.

Well what do we have here?

A ugly pudding face? (Remind any Aussies of the Magic Pudding?)

Or maybe it is a yummy yummy gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake!

Mmmmmm, yum!

Maybe I should make another one. That means a LOT more bike riding must be done cos when I make a cake I tend to eat the whole thing in 3 days or less. OK, I don't put icing or frosting on it but that much cake... and can we just say that the amount of gums and cocoa have a *very* interesting effect? ;-)

On moving

2008-02-20T14:41:00.001-07:00

In short, moving is a PITA.

In more wordy terms, moving even our pitiful amount of stuff that we have here in the US is still a PITA. The removalists asked twice if we had a bed base. Umm, nope, we still have a mattress on the floor. (Nathan's feet dangle off the end - he needs a much longer mattress but that equals some expense and if we put this current mattress up on a base, his feet would dangle a long way to find the floor instead of being propped up on a pile of material.) We had 100 items moved (though I think labelling each piece of a desk that was knocked apart is cheating, as is labelling each bucket and rubbish bin). We got most of our stuff here safe and sound, though the cheap bookcase is worse for wear and a couple of plastic items will never be watertight again.

See those boxes?

From just one of those boxes, I unpacked this much paper:

After a while I got bored with neatly folding and squashing each piece/bundle of paper. Instead I threw it on the ground. This enormous pile came out of another box:

It was the crockery crates wot did it. And the ones with food in them - they wrapped up anything that was open and most of the stuff that wasn't. Some of the things that came with us amazed me, but then again they did come out of Nathan's cupboard and he hadn't cleaned it out. I am hoping that all of this will be taken away by the removalists soon for recycling (I put it all in a nice big box and flattened all the other boxes bar three little ones we are keeping :-).

The lounge never looked spacious even without stuff in it but after our small collection of furniture and large amount of junk moved in along the walls, it started looking a little squishy.

The study? Once we ran out of room elsewhere, everything was directed to the study, which is going to struggle if we have visitors as they will not fit in unless we become very tidy people who put everything away all the time.

Ahem.

I was very proud of myself. I managed to unpack and stow away most of Our Stuff in only two days. Two weeks later and I still have not managed to put away the last 5% of Our Stuff. I have sorted out lots of stuff for the recycle bin, some stuff for the charity bin and some that is just plain rubbish. Hooray for me! Double hooray for not having to move a full on household of stuff!

Australia Day 2008

2008-01-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is the first Australia Day I have ever spent out of Australia.

Not that Australia Day is exactly a Big Deal to us Aussies. It is usually a chance for a long weekend or a looooong weekend, depending on what day of the week it falls on. Still, it is a time for me to reflect on what I like about being Australian.

Hmm, well, let me see.

After our last prime minister's efforts, I feel our country has degraded its international goodwill (but to nowhere near the same extent as the current US administration). We are not as tolerant as we used to be (fancy having race riots in Australia! Godsakes!). I could go on, but well what is the point?

To me, being Australian means:

Living and letting live
Being tolerant
Giving others a "fair go" (which is pretty much the opposite of "never give a sucker an even break," a very American attitude)
Being able to kick back and have fun
Dissing anyone who is not Australian, particularly our Kiwi neighbours (cos we do actually like them - just look at how we congregate with them and Canadians when we are overseas)
Being able to ask where the toilet is without people curling up and dying of shame
Having our own lingo (though it is on the move itself)
Laughing at fart, gutter and other crude jokes
Giving a mate, or anyone else for that matter, a hand when they need it or even better before they need it
Forming deep, if unspoken, friendships, or what we call mateship
Not speaking like any other peoples on the planet

and lots more.

Living in the US has given me a fierce faith in my own Australianness, so to speak. This may be the land of freedom and opportunity but y'know it really doesn't always seem that way. I look at the people sleeping on park benches and the people hanging around a local Home Depot hoping to be picked up for some menial job and I wonder. I see people buying cheap and nasty because that is all they can afford. I see ads on the tv offering people cheap health cover. I hear people whinging because they have to pay state sales and other taxes (and why? because without those taxes the roads don't get mended and the hospitals close). I am told I am free but I am invisible to the government here. I am not free to do as I please - I am not allowed to work and if I did work illegally I could get kicked out of the country along with DH. OK, it might take them a while to catch me but the risks are just not worth it. I am not allowed to get a social security number which means I can never get a credit card in my own right, nor open a bank account, nor get a credit rating or buy anything based on that credit rating, we have to pay double security bond on an apartment, etc, etc.

Living in the US has given me an appreciation for what I had Back 'Ome - friends, family, understanding of the culture around me, a feeling of a deep connection with where I lived. During my one month trip to the US and England in 1999 (nearly 10 years ago!!!!) I felt like a rubber band was pulling me back home. This time the rubber band is pulling harder but I am not going. Not yet. There is too much to experience here and DH is less than a month into his new job. Homesickness is pretty much a constant, like a dull toothache but there are distractions here.

I leave you with a favourite Monty Python poem:

"This 'ere's the waddle,
Symbol of our land
You can stick it in a boddle
You can 'old it in yer 'and.
Amen. Crackatube."

(Pictures taken along the Los Gatos bike trail in San Jose. I've chosen these because they could be around any lake or trail in Melbourne.)

Random pictures around SJ

2008-01-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

Peoples are asking for pictures.

So pictures you get!

Driving down one of the highways on our way to Santa Cruz. Redwoods apparently make their own mist - it is easier to pump the water part way up a large tree and transpire it out and then absorb it further up than it is for capillary action to pull the water all the way to the top. Weird, huh?

Looking west from Skyline Road.

Looking over Mountain View/Sunnyvale/almost SJ from Skyline Road.

Spring comes early to these parts it seems, though not today - we had a cool change at about 2:30, just when I was walking to Trader Joe's, Michael's and Target. It was wet and horrid and the supposedly half mile walk felt like about 10. I was Bad Girl :-* and spent more $$ at Target cos I need some new clothes (I spent $$ on jumpers and bras at Kohl's yesterday). I now have a new pair of shoes, two new pairs of pants (one casual, one good for work not that I am allowed to work), a new dress and 3 new tops all for about $70! It helps that only two items were full price and the rest were 80% off... Now all I need is new undies and I am set for the next two or three months.

I have plenty of pics of SF to show off and of Pigeon Point Lighthouse and surrounds. All I need is enough time to blog them - we've been apartment hunting and running around after that stuff, and I think I've had about 8 hours home without DH for the week, which is not enough to blog properly (DH hogs the computer at night. Hooray for getting our stuff next week! I'll have my own computer again!)

Agnosticism

2008-01-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

Whilst tramping around Bonny Doon beach, we had opportunity to think about the creation of the world.

Is this proof that God made ze world? Concrete stuck between two layers of rock?

And a culvert cut through the rock, creating a creek around the edge of the beach?

Oh no!

Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster be *dead*???? I would've tried mouth to mouth if
a) I could figure out what was the mouth
b) it didn't stink pretty badly.

Getting to know you

2008-01-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Ah, I think I am starting to settle in to SJ. I hope.

Going for a drive on the weekend was good. Very, very good. We don't have a car but we hire one once in a while. Visiting the beach was very good for me. I love the beach. Even nudie beaches are good! And no, mrsp, we will continue to have LOTS of white bits. I have lovely fair English skin that turns beet red if I stay out in the sun for long - I am a Sunscreen Queen! nathan tans but is wary of Too Much Sun, mainly cos it hurts. He is not completely convinced that sun causes melanoma, but we are convinced that Not Enough Sun = bad bones as you don't make enough vitamin D. Apparently there is a rise in diagnosis of rickets in kids as they are being made to cover up all day long = no vitamin D. Vitamin D is supplemented in milk but some of us don't drink milk.... yucky stuff!

Anyway, enough blathering. You want pictures!

Today's pictures are still from Bonny Doon beach.

I *love* the rocks there - zebra type rock. Hope you do too cos most of the following pics are of rocks :-)

Lynne and Nathan go to a NUDY beach

2008-01-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Oo err!

We stopped at BONNY DOON! We sang the BONNIE DOON song! Bonny Doon here in the Bay area has a beach! A big pounding, secluded beach! The Pacific isn't exactly pacific here - the waves were really thumping in. I was so excited - I love a good ocean beach and this one reminded me of some of the beaches on the Southern Ocean Back 'Ome.

One thing that was a little unfamiliar -it was a nude beach. My first ever nude beach.

Can anyone tell me why all the nudies on this beach were male? It was mid-afternoon on a winter's day. At least they all sucked their guts in, including the older chap who paraded in front of us.

And can I just say that male genitalia are silly looking things? Quite obviously a sex-driven display because they really are obvious. Except when men are cold, of course. You don't easily see the dongles on other male great apes.

What no pictures of rudie nudies? Like I want anything that could be interpreted as porn on my blog! (Plus I didn't want several streakers running after me trying to break my camera - if nothing else most of them looked quite fit and I would not have been able to outrun them.) Instead, you get a lovely few pictures of the same scene with different waves pounding in.

(That last one is the sort that makes you squeal and flee as you still have runners on and don't want to get them both wet *and* sandy.)

(Oh and if I don't reply to your comment, it is either a) I am too stupid to try using blogger's newly upgraded commenting system (I don't want my own replies sent to me) or b) blogger tells me "no reply" possible as your email account is not hooked up to your blogger account so my email system can't send an email to you.)

Lake Louise

2008-01-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

What a mixed bag Lake Louise was!

This is a most gobsmacking area, both for the quality of the views and also the ahem breadth of cuisines available in the area. At the same time as I struggled to find food to eat in the local mini-market, there is a hotel with fine dining room and pub that has European trained chefs, including pastry chefs, just around the corner. And I don't mean the Fairmont hotel at Lake Louise either! (Hint for coeliacs - BYO food!)

The village is small and has a shopping plaza with a very nice book shop. Not what one expects but it was a good shop. Wish we had bought something there. The national park place was interesting but dull at the same time. (Just like my notes accompanying these pictures!) Since we were whacked by the time we looked at the national park place, we just sat down and watched a kids' doco on how the Rockies formed. We enjoyed it. We watched all bar the credits at the end (and probably would've watched the credits but we got a subtle hint that they were closing - oh! People! You watched all of it????). The host of the doco was a complete whacko but we learned stuff. Like how to tell if rock is shale/mudstone (wet it and rub it). Sandstone feels rough against your teeth (!!!). Limestone dissolves in acid (not many of us carry vinegar around but maybe someone has a little sachet left over from some fish and chips! Not that I found fish and chips there. Gosh I miss fish and chips, not that I could have them Back 'Ome either....). The park ranger said we are about the first people to watch the whole thing. Well why not? It is amusing and educational, even for big Know-It-Alls like us!

Here's some shots taken walking up to the Lake from the village. It is only about 4km. We can eat 4km of walking normally, but this was in quite sub-zero temps (about -15C, I think almost subzero F as well) up a steep hill on ice and snow.

Along the way we met another AUSTRALIAN. How on earth do we do it? We are halfway around the world from home and we meet Aussies. Like doooods, we want to meet other people!

Even worse, he was from the same suburb of Melbourne where I spent the first 25 years of my life (Ringwood). He says it has gone downhill since I was there. He and Nathan had a good chat.

Crikey! The picnic ground is CLOSED? Y'kidding me! Whyeverso?

Aren't these chalets cute in the snow - it is dripping off them just like icing on gingerbread houses!

Nathan demonstrates how cold it was - our breath was forming hoar frost! It was driving me insane cos I could keep my face covered (so it didn't freeze) or I could see (my glasses kept fogging up if I breathed with my face covered). I chose to not see as well as I could. Mostly. After all, the scenery is on a grand scale and not being able to focus on it was not really impairing my ability to see it.

These were the best icicles we saw on the whole trip. Imagine one of them breaking off! Be like a spear through someone's head....

It might have been so cold that the hoar frost was building but the creek was still bounding along with some open water here and there.

Finally we came in sight of the World Famous Lake Louise Fairmont hotel. Have you ever heard of World Famous sites (or burgers/food) that you've never heard of before you came across them at their World Famous site? Well this one I reckon really is World Famous! This is one of the few World Famous sites that I've ever heard of!

Next - Lake Louise itself.

en route to Lake Louise

2008-01-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

Despite a warm round of apparent indifference, I persist in posting more! Your feedback is welcome* - I can only imagine that photos of snow capped mountains don't do it for most people. I guess it is very normal for those in the north, but it sure as hell is different for someone who comes from a place where it NEVER snows. Also Australian mountains are in general pretty pathetic. Our ranges have been ground down over so many gazillions of years that there's only a couple of thousand metres (6,000') left if we are lucky. Mostly we aren't lucky. Plus not a whole lot of them get snow and nothing like the Rockies do.

The highlight of the short trip from Banff to Lake Louise on the Greyhound bus is this:

Castle Mountain.

There are other mountains and pretty views along the way

and a very interesting and pretty parkway to drive along if you have your own car, but this is The Big One.

We arrived at Lake Louise just at sunset.

After dragging our suitcases a few hundred metres through the snow, we found our lodgings for the night - the Lake Louise International Hostel. It's in two parts so if you go there you'll find reception at the back of the larger building on the left. Just follow the deck. Don't stand at the door to the rightwards building, like I did, and wonder why you can't get in. Duh!

At this point I should I found the international hostels in Calgary, Banff and Lake Louise to be clean and good places to stay, particularly if you are on a budget. I recommend them and would stay at them again, even if the Banff hostel is two km out of town. The Banff and Lake Louise hostels are quite new, which means they have nice furnishings and have not gotten shabby around the edges. (Though I would very much like it if the girls who shared the toilets with me, though not at the *exact* same time, had figured out that they were NOT auto-flushing - EWWWW!). I was surprised by the bed at Lake Louise when I flung myself on it - it was a 4" mattress pad. We had private rooms at each of them, though not always private bathrooms. The central Vancouver hostel was very interesting and they've tried hard to make it really funky, but it has challenges associated with old city buildings (including vermin problems) and does not have stoves/cookers/ranges due to fire regs! The Vancouver mob did fix our toilet promptly, as it kept flushing every 10 minutes, and the room was fine - rather cute in a vaguely art deco sort of way. Just don't get a room on the lower floors as there is a dance club under the hostel and boy does the noise travel! I have no idea why the Canadian hostels leave most of those in the USA so far in the dark - mebbe we have not stayed at the right hostels in the US.

Next - Way Too Many Pictures of a Very Snowy Lake Louise!

(*mrspao - this does not mean you need to comment on every post ;-) It is very sweet of you though)

Name change

2008-01-07T11:02:00.001-07:00

Y'know Colorado Dreaming was no longer appropriate for a blog when the writer is no longer in Colorado, and is doing a bit of California Dreaming instead.

Considering this is in essence a travel pics blog, I decided that for the time being an old slogan for my home state of Victoria would be fairly appropriate. So Victorians and some other Aussies will get it and the rest of you? :-)

Banff 2

2008-01-04T16:47:00.000-07:00

We walked a lot around Banff. It was an education, walking in my snowboots (and discovering that they would rub my legs raw if I laced them up to the top! Ouch!). We don't get much snow and ice in Oz, and Banff had had a warm snap and rain and then cold temps, so there was plenty of ice. Shuffling seemed to be the best way to stay upright and minimise likelihood of slipping, and let me tell you there was PLENTY of opportunity for stacking on the ice. Some shops and homes kept their sidewalks clear and others? Welllll..... One of the slipperiest places was the Safeway carpark - lord knows what the local drivers do there but.

Speaking of the Safeway, it always surprises me when I go to a town and can't find gluten free food. After all, we were in a tourist town and gluten free food was pretty scarce. In retrospect, Calgary was a coeliac heaven - we did find a good organic supermarket, right by a light rail station, that stocked a good range of GF foods, including corn thins and a local GF bakery's products (GF/DF pumpkin pie! Oh it was YUMMY! I shall never see its likes again, alas!). An organic bakery had what they called "gluten free" brownies but when I asked, they said "oh, no, we can't guarantee they are gluten free!" So why call them gluten free? Low gluten is truer! We did have a good meal at the Rose and Crown pub - they did what I call pub food. They are one of the many eateries that are upstairs and are accessed by a set of doors and lots of stairs - hole in the wall type doors. The Safeway did not have a good range of GF foods. Indeed it had hardly any that I could find.

Enough crabbing. Banff was pretty, just not coeliac friendly.

(I am also terribly surprised that NOONE was using the bike rack by Bow Falls! Those are the rapids above Bow Falls in the pic below.)

(And NOONE was using the picnic tables. Like DOOOOOODS, it was only -17C, what are you, a pack of wusses? (If I wrote nancies, would anyone spank me?) Just cos your butts would freeze off if you sat on the snowy seats.... The odd crow/raven might steal your food cos they will be hungry too!)

But Banff was not about food. Banff was about cold and walking EVERYWHERE. Y'see they advertised a bus service that went past the youth hostel. The bus ran every 40 minutes. So after our meal the first night, we waited at the bus stop. We made sure that we had the right change, and then we saw the bus turn right one street before it reached the stop we were waiting at. We were confuzzled by this, and cranky cos it was cold and dark and we Had Had Enough. The map said the bus went past our stop.

(I am very cold in this shot - I don't have a nice lined tuque yet)

Turns out that we had the NEW new map. The bus had not been going along the main street as it had been closed due to extremely icy conditions. We had the map/timetable that was correct for the day after we left, not the current timetable. It made for crankiness as the walk was reasonably long and up a steady hill.

We never did manage to catch the bus.

It didn't run past these places:

Why do people like houses that are EXACTLY the same as the house next door? I must just prize individuality more than most (though you can find 20 of our house in our neighbourhood Back 'Ome, but at least the houses around ours are not the same as ours).

But jeez we saw a lot of prettiness.

(Cascade Mountain)

Lots of pretties!

(Mt Rundle)

Even more pretties!

(Mt Rundle)

More pretties than you can poke a stick at! Or maybe a hoodoo at

Pretties all round!

(up the river)

(down the river)

Too many pretties?

NEVER!

Some old railway hotel for you - the famous Banff Springs?

And from afar, on the road to the hoodoo gurus!

(The funny thing is that you think the hotel is up the hillside a fair way but really? It is in the valley!)

It has a great view along part of the Bow Valley - what a fabulous, ground out valley it is too!

How's this for a snow plough?

Looks just like the prow of a ship, for a similar reason, but it really is attached to this:

But alas, all good things must come to an end, so we moved on to LAKE LOUISE!

Rocky Mountain Dreaming

2008-01-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

Calgary is Not Very Far At All from the Canadian Rocky Mountains (though I do own it is a fair whack away from the Colorado Rockies). We waved goodbye to Calgary and settled back for the ride.

The Greyhound seems to take no time at all to get one in (pathetically small point and shoot) camera range, and then the pictures begin! (BTW, for the trip to Banff, I recommend sitting on the right side of the bus if you want to see lots of mountains.)

Woo hoo!

(mountains behind Canmore)

The Canadian Rockies are quite different from the ones we knew in Colorado. These ones are made of limestone and shorter, though I think somewhat more spectacular as a result. All those layers upon layers of rock make fascinating patterns. The snow upon them looks fantastic - it really highlights the layering. The valleys seem to be wider too.

(Highway 1 across Canada)

You will get the feeling I loved the Canadian Rockies. Dunno how!

Be warned, millions of pictures will follow in the next few posts...

Calgary

2007-12-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

(apologies. I am only well over a week behind)

Calgary. what can I say about Calgary?

Hmm. Well it was COLD!

(OK that isn't frost on the trees - it is pretty lights)

COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD!

There was snow everywhere, except on the roads and the better trod/cleared paths. This was a total novelty for me. OK, I have been To The Snow back 'ome but this is SNOW in a CITY! Not snow in some place two or three or five hours drive from home.

My thinsulate gloves were almost useless. Brr! But my thrummed mitten and my cashmere mitten were nice and warm. Thinsulate seems to work better in wind and natural fibres when it is calm. Go figure.

Go figure even more when you find a lush garden paradise in the middle of town. Devonian Gardens is an indoor garden with water features and lots of lush green plants (including a few Oz natives) slap bang in the centre of town. It is very popular with the locals who are starved of greenery in winter, even though it smells like a biology lab - that weird smell of mould mixed with autoclaved materials. Very odd. Just like these blokes having a nap in a nice "sunny" spot in the gardens. I love the way they play stacks on each other. Why settle for sitting on a rock when you can sit on aother turtle?

So Calgary. Calgary is definately a city in a hurry. Not so long ago it was a prairie town and now it is galloping. I am not dead sure the services or infrastructure there are coping terribly well with the influx of people. It was a nice change to see asians, etc, not just white people. I sorta feel that it is having some birthing pains as it grows up.

(Nathan had a nice little sojourn with a bunch of suffragettes. Gosh they don't make ladies like that these days - they are giants, I tellsya, much bigger than Nathan and he is pretty tall! They were giants of their time and now are giants in perpetuity.)

Does every city in Canada have one of these space age towers?

It took two goes but I eventually found M1 yarn. It is a nice yarn shop, quite spacious - I am used to Aussie shops which seem to be crammed with yarn, piles of it all over the place, bags threatening to land on your head. Aussie yarn shops are very into keeping yarn in bags - heavens to betsy someone might touch it before they buy it! I bought a particularly Lynne coloured skein of sock yarn.

I had a most excellent walk along the Bow River. Y'see I could see a pedestrian (but not boring) suspension bridge just down from where the road/pedestrian bridge crossed the river. It was getting near sunset and I was blessedly cold but I wanted to walk across the suspension bridge. So I followed the river path.

And I followed it

And followed it

(See the dot in the photo? Click for bigger. Yep, that's a bird swimming in the river looking for fish I guess. I have no idea how that bird's feet don't drop off - yes they have heat exchangers in their legs to keep the blood warm but really, why don't their feet just drop off with frostbite? Also is that a loon?)

And followed it

(At this point I should've realised that the river split in two and that the 500m would be a ways - it even has a pointer stabbing at it!)

and followed it....

Until I had almost walked to the zoo. Then I crossed a boring bridge and turned back up the island that the Bow River splits around about 300m after the road bridge.

It seems that the suspension bridge wasn't half a km away as it seemed to be. I was feeling a bit brrrr cold by this stage as I had not expected to walk so far. Still it was a good walk and the river was very pretty.

And we had our shiny new visas so life was pretty good!

Anyone for a game of frisbee golf?

Or maybe you would prefer a nice picnic with a backdrop of Calgary?

No need to bring the Esky/chullybun/cooler! If you want a coldie, just stick it in the snow for a while and she's apples 8-)

All good things must come to an end, so we moved on to BANFF!

On the road again

2007-12-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

O Canada!

If only you were full of Canadians, instead of introduced species - everywhere we've gone so far has had large numbers of feral Aussies and Poms.

When we have wireless connection again, prepare to be assaulted with a gazillion pictures of Banff and Lake Louise, not that we have pics of Lake Louise yet.

BTW, we have new visas. Yay! San Jose, here we come! Via Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Waterloo, Toronto, LAX....

It's been real

2007-12-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

Today the packers take away our stuff. We have a home tonight but nowhere to sleep. Our neighbours lent us an air mattress but we won't have bedding, etc.

Tomorrow we leave Colorado for Canada. There we hope to get new visas.

I think I'll long have the impression of unfinished business here. We came almost halfway around the world and expected to be here for two years. I had brought my homebody mind around to it to enjoy the challenge of being far away from Home. We've weathered a few crises, wanting to run Home during each of them. I didn't realise how tough it would be being so far from Home, from support networks, from friends. Then when you start making new friends suddenly you have to move.

Colorado is one of the prettiest places I've seen. The mountains are something special. Any Coloradoans who are not getting out there and seeing the mountains - why the heck are you here? Why not go live in Iowa?

But we must move on. We must go where the job is. I am sure that San Jose will prove very interesting, somewhat more traffic but we don't have a car. It has mountains nearby and the SEA! Oh the sea! Plus SF - DH assures me I will spend many happy hours exploring SF. Plus a multitude of yarn shops - more than I have access to here.

So we'll see you on yet another flip side!

Things I didn't know about America #438

2007-12-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

When dinner comes out on a plate in the USA, you only get one veg. That's one veg plus a potato or rice or some form of carb. I only found out this is standard yesterday.

Back 'Ome, dinner appears with two or three veg as standard, or a mix of all sorts of stuff. My dinners usually come with at least three veg, usually in great steaming mounds, or stir fries with all sorts. I don't believe in stinting on the vegies. Vegies are Good For You!

So my dear Thanksgiving hosts, if you thought I seemed to be waiting for something, I was waiting for the other veg to appear. I didn't realise American meals only have one veg. I am used to having vegies of every colour on my plate. I was too polite to ask. :-)

Day two: travelling to Chicago

2007-12-01T16:19:00.000-07:00

Ah Denver. Denver that could not feed me. Denver that did not even have an obvious supermarket near the central mall. Don't people live in Denver?

We did buy us each a pair of shoes. I had bought new inner soles for Nathan's shoes and he had worn them for four days before the top lining started rubbing off and giving him blisters. Fabulous! We hadn't even started our holiday!

So he got some nice sensible black lace up shoes and I got some weird non-runner walking shoes after trying on nearly every pair of women's (sensible) shoes in the shop.

Nathan developed a gut wobble and looked quite ill whilst we waited for the train. We waited waited waited. We eventually hopped on the train and discovered the joys of travelling on Amtrak.

The seats are larger than economy on the plane (not really that hard) - the chairs in front are so far away I had difficulty putting my feet on the foot rest unless I snuggled down a bit. Even 6'5" hubster was not cramped for room. They are wider too, but the metal bar in between the seat cushioning is a mongrel. I caught myself a few times on it. It is hard to cuss quietly at 1am when you feel like you've busted your leg. They tilt back and have leg rests that lift up (with a little persuasion) so that you feel like you've got a bit more seat and support. They are sleeper seats, not to be confused with the sleeper compartments that have almost real beds in them.

So we rode to Chicago. With respect, can I ask anyone who lives in Kansas or Iowa what on earth do they do for entertainment outside the cities? Nebraska seemed to have a little liveliness in its scenery but most of the Great Plains are exactly that - plain. I know November is not the best time of year for scenery but flat flat flat! Lots of harrowed black paddocks - the soil is amazing. Black or dark brown. Thousands of kilometres of it. Nothing like most Australian soils - here they are rich, fertile, ready for years of hard work. Plus it was grey allllllll day long and drizzled for some of it - I think we saw the sun for about 2 milliseconds. It was clear in Omaha at 5:30am and when I woke up again we were in Iowa and grey! I waited for the sun to rise for two hours and then realised it already had.

We crossed the Mississippi without even realising that it was not just any other river. Disappointing!

Eventually we saw signs of civilisation. Chicago loomed into view.

For some reason I warmed to Chicago even though it tried to kill me with cold. You would think that a singlet, a tshirt, a polo-neck top and a woollen jumper with a rain slicker over the top would be sufficiently warm (plus a scarf muffling me, a woollen hat, a cashmere mitten and a thrummed mitted) but NO! The wind whistled straight through me. I haven't been so cold for ages. Probably not since my sister and I went skiing and we got caught in a blizzard. We walked from Wholefoods (I can eat most of their roast chickens and I did! Hooray!) to Target in the south bank/side area across a bridge that was horridly cold on a night with a strong wind and a bit of drizzle to top it off. I was half frozen solid.

The Target was two storied and had a REALLY funky shopping trolley/cart lifter. We had to go up and down the escalators to check the thing out. It runs between the escalators - the trolley is pulled by a lever type thing whilst remaining horizontal on special runners. We thought it was the coolest thing out! (Except for outside which was realllly cool!)

We stayed at the Holiday Inn. My towel was not oh so fluffy, dangnabbit, and they didn't have any ashtrays to eat soup out of (bonus points to those who can pick the reference and will comment on it!), but they do have shampoo/etc that is scented with peppermint and something a little spicy/masculine but not offensive. Hooray! I took those little sample bottles cos I could use them! That is only the second time ever!

Day One: Denver

2007-12-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

Ah Denver. We had never really done Denver much - we usually travelled through rather than stopping to look.

So we had six hours or so to burn.

So we walked down 16th Avenue, which is a mall. Malls are meant for walking along. They are vehicle-less areas. So WTF is that bus doing? There are free buses that go up and down the mall. Nice idea. They are supposed to not pollute much as they are some sort of hybrid system. There was at least one Starbucks on each block. We could not believe it. Then again Starbucks is apparently about the atmosphere not the coffee. Americans seem to like drip coffee and coffee that has been in a pump thermos for hours. Australians tend to like espresso in its many forms, or at least Melburnians do. There's a fair difference between them. We found a 1950s/rock style cafe to eat lunch at (lunch for Nathan - burgers and me won't get along).

We walked and walked and walked until we got to the other end of the mall. Then we looked at the Capitol Building:

It looks a lot like other capitol buildings though maybe not as white. Plus there was the council?county?parliament? building facing the capitol building. Very grand. I have pics but really they are not that grand. The light was from behind the building and it is not well lit.

I was more entranced by this:

yep. Steam coming out of the ground. Doesn't happen in Australia. Happens all over the USA it seems, especially in the colder areas. I remember seeing steam coming out of the road in NYC in August. I can only imagine there are steam pipes running all over the place.

There were a lot of benches in this area. We walked through at about hmm, 3pm. There were a LOT of people staking out the benches. Most of the people were men and had a lot of bags and were pretty darn shabby looking. All bar about 5 benches out of say 100 were already claimed. I wonder if the local residents see the poverty of these homeless people? I found it rather disturbing cos there was nothing I could do for them. Maybe I found it disturbing because we are about to be homeless. We won't have an address for a month.

So it is sorta ironic that one of the next pics I took was of this wall:

What is a city but its people?

Sunset, Nebraska

2007-11-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

At last we come to the end of the trip pics for Nebraska. Having bored you all witless, any remaining readers can switch off at the sight of sunset over the prairie.

Oddly, no matter how fast I drove (75mph is fast by Oz legal standards), I could not keep up with sunset! It got away from me on the I80. So did the clouds. They were going south at least as fast as I was on the highway (65mph). Those were clouds in a hurry!

Next time I go to Nebraska, I hope to go to Omaha and meet persons who know who they are ;-) Of course if our upcoming train trip goes ahead, we have to pass through Omaha on the way out and on the way back. The train stops in Omaha at 10:30pm on the way west (back) and at Ridiculous Hour (6:14am) on the way east. Ouch!

On top of the world (a trip to Nebraska, part 3)

2007-11-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

Heh, that isn't the sort of title one expects for Nebraska, is it?

The ranger at Scotts Bluff kindly let me go up the top - you can drive right up to the top on a made road through tunnels and all - even though it was pretty much closing time. I guess he figured someone who was from Australia and had driven specifically to go to a woollen mill (his mum knits so when he was posted there she was delighted) ought to see the local sights.

My goodness what a lot of sights. I'll let them speak for themselves.

(Saddle Rock)

As I scuttled around the various short walks on the top of the Bluff oohing and aaahing at the sights I noticed LOTS of bunnies that are almost perfectly coloured to blend into the landscape

and even more trains! Our camera doesn't have a big zoom (heck it is a 4megapixel beast that has now taken 10,000 pics in exactly 11 months) so I don't have pics to share of the trains cos they are like dirty lines with bright dots for lights at the front. It turns out that Scotts Bluff (the town) is on the main east west line so that would be why there were trains about 5 miles (if that) apart on it going in either direction. I was mighty impressed by the number of trains I could see. I would've seen more if I had dropped a quarter or two into the viewing binoculars.

I noticed some sunsetty colours appearing

and thought I had best drive back down the bluff so's I could check out the stuff outside the gates, like the Oregon Trail itself. Alas, not much to see of the trail as it has eroded a LOT - heck you can see how much the sandstone bluff itself has eroded in less than a hundred years - that survey post was level with the rock:

so all the wheel ruts are gone. Still I trotted along a trail that has a lot of history, even if that history is not mine.

Dome rock from the Oregon Trail, and some more :-) These views really made me feel like I was in the Wild West somewhere but this wasn't really wild, not like some of the places we've been. Very cool though.

The sunset light was full on Saddle Rock - how pretty! Like Uluru but not.

And the skies lit up gently over the prairie

(Next, the journey home - sunset over the prairie)

Scotts Bluff (a trip to Nebraska, pt 2)

2007-11-10T08:59:00.001-07:00

Ah where were we?

Driving through the wilds of western Nebraska. As I drove, I mused on the landscape. At this stage it was all looooong rolling hills. Imagine being a pioneering (white) family and having oxen pull your wagon over the vast prairie and then getting the wagon over the occasional little creek. I don't know how gullied the landscape was when it was true prairie but there are a few gullies now. They would've been pretty tricky to navigate.

The land itself looks rather barren at this time of the year. Anywhere that isn't irrigated (which is most places now as it is November and snow is expected anytime) was a soft grey/beige/green stubble. I have no idea what most of the land is used for but it has fences so its used for something - cattle mebbe? - and some is ploughed, and I'm guessing some has winter wheat on it just waiting to be covered by the winter snows. It looks like land that is asleep and waiting for the days to start getting longer and spring to come.

Suddenly the landscape changes. Instead of long rolling hills, you discover scarps and pointy mesa type hills and the landscape becomes somewhat more exciting.

Wildcat Hills open up on the long prairie beyond. The far west of Nebraska seems to pocked with the remnants of a plateau. The plateau is only sandstone, soft sandstone, and is eroding away. Scotts Bluff and Wildcat Hills are an edge of that disappearing plateau.

Finally I reached Scotts Bluff. It was not my actual destination - a woollen mill was, but as it turned out Scotts Bluff was *much* more interesting!

I had plenty of time to ponder the bluff and Mitchell Pass as there were roadworks happening.

How would you like to be this guy, standing out in the occasionally bitter wind holding a STOP or SLOW sign? Nice view, though. (taken from the north, coming back from Brown Sheep Mill)

I only twigged that there was something special about the bluff when I saw a sign like this:

Like DUH!

Ah. That would be *the* Oregon Trail then. The one that all those nutty, hopeful, nothing to lose and land/livelihood to gain people dragged their families across America on. In this age of cars, trains and aeroplanes, I cannot imagine how it must've been to hitch some oxen up to a wagon or two and take *everything* you had on a trip across the prairie and the mountains (cos I have been across those mountains and they are rather large!).

(Eagle Rock and wagon)

See? They even have an old wagon or two, minus the covers at this time of year, at the national monument. Guess they don't want them blowing away.... The wagons were *very* narrow - about a metre or about 4' wide at their widest point and maybe 2.5m/8' long. That amazed me. I don't know how those poor women survived having everything they needed in the way of provisions, clothing and basics in that small space. The wagon in the pic is a larger freight wagon. It still is not bigger than a family sized car say a Camry or something like that. You can read more about the history of Scotts Bluff on this NPS page.

Here's some pics of Mitchell Pass, Eagle Rock and some extras. I rather liked this place despite the bleakness of the badlands and of the season.

Just you wait - Even More Pics next time! Still of Scotts Bluff and views from the top! It is quite speccy.

A trip to Nebraska, part 1

2007-11-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

On the 2nd of November, a most auspicious day, I decided to do a quick trip to Brown Sheep woolen mill outside Scott's Bluff in Nebraska. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone - visit a woolen mill and get to see a little American heritage.

Driving up the I25 to the border of Colorado with Wyoming is well, not terribly interesting. It's only about 40 miles to Cheyenne from Fort Collins but it feels a fair whack longer.

One of the main things I noticed about northern Colorado was:

and

Yep. It seems to specialise in big powerlines. The two shown are just a subset of the many I saw. There are lots and lots and lots of powerlines.

The reason for the lots and lots and lots of powerlines became pretty obvious too. The wind farm was east of the old (coal fired) powerstation - a nice contrast of old vs new tech, ecologically unsound vs sustainable electricity generation. The windfarm is set well away from the I-25. It seemed weird to me because from one angle all the turbines were in a number of rows. In Oz, windfarms are not in lines as they follow the coast or a range of hills and those landmarks tend not to be in nice geometric lines....

The terrain is fairly flat with low hills rolling away from the Rockies. There was one weird lot of lumpy rocks by the side of the road:

and a metal bison on top of a hill:

But that is about it, unless you count the excitement of a car pulled over with not just three but four cop cars behind him and the coppers checking his car out *very* *very* closely.

I'd show you the welcome to Wyoming sign but well let's just say the camera focused on the inside of the windshield and leave it at that.

Soon enough I saw this sign:

and was so excited about taking a pic of it that I nearly missed the turnoff! Hi Minnie!

They appear to grow satellite dishes in Cheyenne, like some weird and enormous form of fungi:

And off we dashed through a wee bit of Wyoming, which I have to admit was a boring bit of Wyoming because it is prairie and a bit bland this late in the year. The opposite diagonal corner of Wyoming is very exciting indeed since it is the home of Yellowstone.

You can see some prairie on the other side of (Pine Bluff?). It seems to go on forever. It looks very flat, but it isn't. It is just mostly flat.

Finally the sign:

Home of Arbor Day? I guess there are so few trees in a place where the prairie dominates that they wanted a few more trees as windbreaks and to beautify the place. After all the prairie seems pretty trashed now.

I've always thought of Nebraska as being flat. Apparently it is wrinkly around the edges (a bit like me I guess) cos I drove over a lot of small hills, like overgrown sand dunes only rocky, and a few larger hills. At least they know how to make good roads there - the ones around Fort Collins all appear to be based on concrete slabs, which all seem to move, so there is a lot of k-thud, k-thud k-thud as you drive around both on the interstate and around town. (Particularly painful on a pushbike.) All of the ones I drove on in Nebraska (all four of them) were good bitumen (asphalt) roads.

I found a little wind farm to take pics of - do you think I like them?

I even took pictures of shrubs and trees on the roadside because I hadn't seen any for quite some time on my drive. I don't need to share them with you as I am sure you have seen trees and shrubs before, but you do get to see these:

Two months ago that field would have been magnificent. But now? Dead sunflowers all bowing their heads. It is sorta sad and dull. Wonder if their seeds have fallen out yet or will hang in there until they are harvested?

Next - Scott's Bluff National Monument and lots more pics.

Is there anything in Calgary?

2007-11-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know? There is a US consulate there. It was home to the Winter Olympics many years ago. I guess I should look it up on Wikipedia and google for any yarn shops.

Hey, it is near Banff! Even Aussies have heard of Banff. Maybe we can do a day trip out there or something, weather permitting... 1.1 million people live there so it ain't small. Looks more interesting than Winnipeg, ahem! (DH was there in August.) It gets a lot of sun, for Canada, and winters are highly variable - chinook winds can make things rather warm or blizzards can bring temps low.

There's a few yarn shops too. Anywhere to get spinning stuff?

With any luck the new visa applications will go through no probs and we can fly across to Toronto and spend time with friends and family too! Hopefully we will get a white Christmas after all! Looks like Nathan's parents won't get to see Fort Collins now cos the visa stuff for us makes it too complicated. This dumb rule of not being able to enter earlier than 10 days before the job starts sucks bigtime!

Still we have an appointment, we get to see two big Canadian cities, we will get time with people we know (new friends are nice but sometimes you want something/someone familiar) and then we get to go to a WARM place! Oo err!

Flat as a pancake

2007-10-29T14:51:00.001-06:00

Ah what is it about this time of year that gets me down? The rapidly shortening days? The coolth that greets me some days (that I suspect is giving me cold-induced asthma?).

I love the cool mornings and warm, sunny afternoons we are getting here at the moment on most days. I love the green grass and coloured leaves, mostly yellow, and the crunchy leaves on the ground - I deliberately ride over them or walk on them (hope there are no doggy offerings hidden though!). But I despise the cold mornings that remain cold dreary days, especially when I have to go out riding to get something we need or something that I have to get done or whatever. I have to muffle myself right up, but if I do I can't get enough air and if I don't, I still can't get enough air as my airways close in response to the "cold." When I say cold, I mean under 10C or something like 50F I guess. Yes I am a wusster. Thank heavens we aren't moving further north cos I think a real winter would kill me. My nose would turn that dainty shade of alcoholic purple when it goes numb, my fingers would go numb, my toes, I'd end up with frostbite and hypothermia! See what happens to people when they grow up in a very mild climate? They turn into wussters!

As for the blues, well what is going on there? Daylight is a certain influence. I am so much a long days person, and a person who appreciates warmth. Stress - my goodness the stress of HP doing the dirty on us, the uncertainty of our futures, the realisation of having to move again, trying to get everything organised AGAIN for another tilt at ANOTHER visa, ANOTHER move.... Apparently all the Canadian consulates are booked out. Sigh.

Having a limited budget is also very vexing. I'm in a consumer's paradise and I can't consume anywhere near as much as I would like! It's my birthday at the end of the week and I know I won't be getting anywhere near as much as Nathan did for his. I used to get spoiled on my birthday and at Christmas. Now that I am Big, and Mum's long gone, that doesn't happen any more. So I spoil Nathan and since birthdays are not important to him, he doesn't spoil me.

Nathan's parents are going to be here for Christmas, which I am looking forward to, and the last couple of days they are here we'll be on the move, almost literally. The removals company will be taking all our stuff just after Christmas. Hey, parents in law, pull up some carpet! Hope you like your mattress reallly firm and no bedding! Sorry we don't have anything to cook with or eat off of - we'll just have to do takeaway for breakfast lunch and dinner! (and poison me!)

I think I am particularly grumpy about the fact we finally started settling in, making connections and now? Bang, gone. We don't really have that many friends here yet anyway but that is another stress cos we really have each other to moan at, with a couple of others like our neighbours occasionally getting a whinge from us.

So I am grumpy, whingy, whiney, moany and generally peeved at present. I am crafting stuff madly - spinning yarn for a November project, knitting socks madly, trying to work out how to make a rug out of felted sweaters, dyeing yarn - and avoiding anything that really needs to be done (like vacuuming the floor, but without a vacuum cleaner it is hard to do the floors. I've been sweeping the carpet instead). Why won't Mr Dyson swoop down and give me a lovely vacuum cleaner that actually is able to pick my long blonde hairs off the floor and not lose suction when it is halfway full (one borrowed vacuum cleaner with a name that is used by Brits for vacuuming had to be totally empty for the accessories to work. How suckful, ahem, is that?).

Heh. Having a good moan is most enjoyable. I feel better already! Hope it lasts. Gods, I'd best get outside - the forecast from Wednesday onwards is grey and dreary. Today it is bright and sunny and over 20C! Oh I'd best get the chairs finished - we've only had these two bar chairs for like two months now and I still haven't sanded them back and put the estapol finish on them...

On giving up the car

2007-10-27T09:19:00.000-06:00

When we moved here, I knew that we would not be getting a car for a while. Cars are expensive and well we have rent to pay here and a mortgage Back 'Ome... and a house to set up, etc, etc. That costs a LOT of money. People here seem to think we are on easy street but we've had to buy all sorts of dumb things. Want some envelopes to send the bill payments in? Oh yeah, we don't have any! Want some scrap paper to write some stuff down on that you are working out? Ooops, none of that either. Wrapping paper for a present? Umm, yeah. It is on the other side of the world. All these dumb small things make a big difference. Then there are the big things, like chairs, beds and other furniture that is really very handy to have. When you add it all up, it costs a bomb. Plus we stil have to pay for the everyday groceries, bills, rent, etc.

So we bought bikes when we got here. Bikes have been our main form of transportation for four months now. Once or twice a month we hire a car and go places. If we only hire a car once a month it is obviously cheaper but we don't get to see so many places. The bikes have been great but we can't go very far on them. A 20 mile ride and we are stuffed.

DH doesn't like cars. They are a means to an end for him, a dirty, filty, CO2 blarting means to an end. But me? My car is part of my identity. To move here I sold my car (To a friend who loves him too). I loved my car. I had had him for nearly 10 years (so I guess it was coming time for us to part). He and I did so many fun things together. We thundered (ok, whined and zipped) across the Nullarbor Plain. We zipped and flogged around twisty mountain roads. We crept over places that only four wheel drives should've been able to go (thank you small overhangs at either end!). He took me (and DH) to so many lovely places. We did 170,000km together (over 100,000 miles). About 130,000km of that was with DH (and DH had rubbed a shiny spot on the dashboard with his knee, so now you know, Gibbering). Every single place you've seen on Yarnivorous blog up to when we came here is a place I saw thanks to my car (even if it was just he got me to the airport so's I could fly elsewhere). I miss my car.

Moving here meant leaving my cats, my friends, my family, my house, my garden and pretty much everything that was familiar to me behind (except obviously DH). It meant leaving my car behind and that cut just as deep as the rest of the dislocations. How many distortions to one's reality can one take at one time?

No wonder we wandered around here in a blur for the first couple of weeks. No wonder I hold the few things we brought from home with deep familiarity.

We will be moving to San Jose after Christmas assuming the visas work out ok. We will be moving to a place where cars are a cult - they are pretty bad around here (just ask the three boys down the road with their Subarus with drainpipe exhausts, the guys who like to go out late at night with their suby on full throttle - so charming them letting the whole neighbourhood know that they have gone out or are coming home, just ask the guys who insist on driving around in these enormous trucks, not that they are carrying anything bar themselves in them). We still won't have a car. There will be less need for a car there as public transport is plentiful and *much* faster than driving on the, ahem, freeways (DH used the Caltrain and the cars on the freeway by it were pretty much at a standstill whilst the Caltrain was full speed ahead). We'll have the bikes too. But sometimes, sometimes I just want to get in the car and drive. I've been doing that for 20 years. Just get in the car and Go Someplace Else. I want to be able to look at My Car and examine any little dings some klutz has put in his panels, and wash him and drive him and get him serviced and have him spirit me away to magical places. We can still hire cars or use the car share programs in SJ and SF but it isn't quite the same, y'know? They are not *my* car, just my borrowed baby for the weekend. I regret that. I want my own baby. And not the sort that squawks and wails and pees and poos and seemingly never endingly wants me to be a milch cow, no I want a baby that rolls on four wheels and flings himself around corners at my bidding.

I want a car.

A To Do List

2007-10-25T18:10:00.000-06:00

Before we leave this state at the end of the year, I want to:

visit Interweave Press
drive through the Rockies (at least twice!)
go cross country skiing
go snow shoeing
visit Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins (you knwo what i mean) in Boulder
visit the gluten free cafe Deby's in Denver
go to Brown Sheep in Nebraska
visit Cheyenne (just cos)
go up the Poudre
visit the Swetsville Zoo

That will do for starters!

Quelle horreur!

2007-10-23T22:52:00.000-06:00

You know how I went to Walmart and BOUGHT stuff the other day? You know I don't like to buy stuff from there because I don't approve of its business plan, putting the Ma and Pa businesses out of business?

Well anyway, not only did I buy stuff because they were the only place with what I wanted, I gave them an unintended present.

Yep, I LEFT MY DEBIT CARD BEHIND!

Quelle horreur!

And you know how I found out about it?

When I went to pay for a LION BRAND pattern!

Quelle embarrassment!

OMG how could I fall so low?

(It appears the card has not been used. I cancelled it at midnight last night when I realised, and I already have a new one that I have to activate tomorrow, and no suspicious activity has been recorded on my account.)

Just to top off my misery, I had a dream that Mum came to visit us here (only we were living in a dance hall, oddly enough). She was already sick but hadn't told anyone and we couldn't afford to get her illness treated. We got my father across to help out cos Mum was pretty crook. Again in that whacky dream way, she was lying in bed in her own bedroom, but it definitely was here in the USA (otherwise we could've afforded to get her treatment cos we have universal healthcare and she had private health cover anyway). We had friends around who wanted to play loud music but that upset her. It was a pretty miserable dream watching Mum die for the second time. (She died over 17 years ago, for those who are new to my blogs.)

So I had a pretty miserable night and morning! Bibbling, blubbering wreck is more like it. But it got better. The sun was shining and it got reasonably warm, so I was able to go riding all over town and look at stuff we need (eg a hair drier, a set of kitchen scales, other stuff that I randomly remember and then forget again....). The possibility of buying stuff is always happy making. Sad isn't it that retail therapy is so effective!

Green potatoes

2007-10-20T20:10:00.001-06:00

What is it with the green potatoes I keep getting in bags here? Actually getting potatoes that have not gone green is REALLY hard, in bags or not.

Potatoes go green when they are stored in light. Green potatoes are NOT good for humans. Potatoes should be stored in the dark, yet the spuds here are often put under a spotlight (not that Wholefoods is guilty of that, no, nosiree!). Is this something that American supermarkets don't realise? Back 'ome, the potatoes are covered over at night, even if the shop is open, to protect them from going green quickly.

I wonder if they store spuds any better in California? And if the broccoli and cauli will be better there cos they grow it there....