California here we come

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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.