Villa St.

This building, yet another casualty of population growth, was at some point subdivided into studio apartments. The window on the right was the one I peered out from while living there with Shoggoth the cat and an assortment of reptiles. The reptile cages took up most of the space in the living area.

The apartment consisted of two similarly sized rooms, one being the living/sleeping area and the other being the kitchen. There was a bathroom abutting the kitchen, but I can't picture it in my head now.

Shoggoth was an illegal tenant, and I used to sneak him outside when the property manager wasn't around, just so he could touch a tree or smell the grass. The property manager breathed through a hole in his throat and spoke with the aid of technology, making him sound like Darth Vader.

My friend Josh, who was a co-worker at Tower Books, briefly lived in the apartment across the hallway, but soon vacated it because part of his room was under the stairs. I lived there long enough to have several upstairs neighbors, all of them annoying in their own ways. One neighbor made noises that sounded like he had a typewriter on the floor, with which he frantically composed letters during the nocturnal hours. The worst upstairs neighbors were a pair of roommates who fought (I once distinctly heard, "Ow! You didn't have to cut me!". Plus, they had a car with an uncommonly sensitive alarm. It went off every time a truck went down the street.

One day, while I was standing out near the curb (putting something into my trunk, I think), a large sedan whipped around the corner and a hand holding a baseball bat shot out the passenger side window just long enough for the bat to swing into the rearview mirror of the alarm car. The mirror was a home run, bouncing away down the street. The guy upstairs popped his head out of the window and asked what happened, and I had to refrain from laughing while I told him. It seems I wasn't the only one who hated that alarm.

Once, I decided to defrost my freezer at a late hour. It was well and truly iced over, and I attacked it with a hammer and screwdriver. The next day, the property manager told me that there had been complaints, and asked if I'd heard anything. I innocently shook my head and said, "no, because I wasn't home." He immediately concluded that my upstairs neighbors must be the culprits, since they were habitually loud to begin with. This was admittedly a passive-aggressive way of getting back at them, but it worked.

I wouldn't live in a studio apartment again until after my divorce, and my experience living in a small space with a bunch of reptiles inspired me to find a different solution the second time around.

Up the Creek

Today, I'm taking a detour from writing about places I used to live so I can reminisce about the creek near my parents' home in Cupertino. I still have to go and take a current photo of that house. I haven't seen it in a few years, and it has changed ownership again since my dad sold it.

Near the house, behind Wilson park, is a creek. I can't remember exactly what the creek is officially called because we always just called it "the creek". Like many children who grew up in the seventies, we often played outside until the streetlights came on. The creek served as a porthole to adventure. We caught toads, found interesting trash, and generally had a fine old time. I remember once seeing a Tiger salamander in the creek, which is still the only time I've ever seen one in the wild. Strangely enough, we didn't catch it and bring it home, as I did with so many other creatures we found. I remember once catching so many toads that I had to take off my socks to carry them in. At my current job as a naturalist, I discourage kids from exhibiting this kind of behavior because it's a sure way to depopulate the wild. I can understand the impulse though. I loved the creatures I found and had no conception of the potential harm that catching them and keeping them could cause. This early fascination with wildlife eventually led to the job I have now.

I remember my best friend Steve accidentally dropping a nail-studded board on my head. Blinded by blood, I did my best to take revenge, but my mom (I think it was my mom) stopped me.

I remember our excursions upstream toward the beckoning hills, through tunnels and around half submerged shopping carts, up embankments and over boulders, ever onward. I think we only made it all the way to the hills once or twice. We were still pretty young. I remember stopping at the railroad tracks to lay down coins on the rails. Once, we even put a good sized log on the rails, which the train made short work of, turning it to kindling in an explosion of wood.

Once, I almost drowned when I jumped into a rain swollen creek and nearly got swept into a long tunnel with water filling nearly the entire space. Lesson learned.

Another time, during the dry season, we decided to walk through one of the long tunnels but didn't have flashlights. One of us had a lighter though, so we fashioned crude torches by wrapping some old clothes we found around two or three stout branches. It actually worked.

Mariposa St.

After our Clark St. living arrangement became deranged, Jeff and I ended up moving to nearby Mariposa St., along with Jennie and Jennie's friend Paul. The house on Mariposa St. was built in 1903, making it the oldest house in Mountain View, or so we were told (although the picture above was taken last weekend). This meant that it has survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. Jeff's friend, whose name I've forgotten, was the property manager, in return for which he either got free rent or a deal on rent in one of the apartments out back (which originally housed the "help", back when the house was the only one in the area). This friend also filled us in on the fact that a previous tenant (or perhaps the original one, as details are now hazy) blew her brains out inside one of the upstairs walk-in closets (the one in the room that Jennie and I ended up living in). The woman reportedly left a note downstairs warning her kids not to go upstairs, but they did, of course. Several people who stayed the night in the house said that it had creepy vibes, and that they had weird dreams. I never noticed anything like that myself, but then again I never do.

Jeff took over the master bedroom, and Paul lived downstairs. During our time there, a succession of other housemates came and went, many of them Tower employees (Josh and Tigger, at least). Paul ended up losing his job (he was the biggest procrastinator I've ever met) and stopped paying rent. Jennie dumped all of his stuff out front. The last time I saw Paul, he was on well on his way to becoming a woman, and now answers to "Pam".

I remember a girl getting assaulted in our front yard. We called 911, but by the time we got out into the yard, the perpetrator had vanished. The girl didn't really speak English, but fortunately one of the responding police officers spoke Spanish.

Here's what our room looked like. The pictures behind me were painted for an art class at SJSU.

A bookshelf and posters:

Inside the suicide closet:

I remember one of the neighbors calling the cops on Jeff because he was using one of the trees in the yard for crossbow target practice. She might have called because of all of the people coming and going as well. Once, Jeff invited a bunch of deadheads over, and when Jennie and I got home late one night, we stepped on several of them, perhaps harder than was warranted. The whole downstairs smelled of patchouli.

We had a couple of cats, Lolapaloozakersplat (Lola for short), and Shoggoth. We also adopted a poor crippled cat (one leg stood out at right angles to its body), but we had to return it when it started terrorizing Lola.

At some point, after Jennie and Jeff butted heads one time too many, Jeff moved out and my friend Wayne moved in, as did Stefany. Jeff's friend Danette also lived there for awhile. Jennie ended up getting into it with Wayne and Stefany as well, which by that time I'd realized was her pattern. They ended up moving out too. Since Jennie was planning on going to UC Berkeley, that left me as the only person remaining, which meant that I ended up having to clean out all of the crap left behind in the root cellar, which was a kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage space. I seem to remember moving back in with my mom for a month or two until I'd sorted out a new place to live.

This was a great house, except for the fact that it was horribly hard to heat. I was almost as if there was no insulation. It might also been because the rooms were so large. The street was (and still is) a real mixture of nice homes and seedy apartment complexes. It was close to downtown, and not too far from Tower either. I think the rent for the entire house was around $1275.00, although my share of it was sometimes as low as $150.00 (Jennie and I split a $300.00 room).

Clark Street

This is the house I briefly lived in at the end of the eighties/beginning of the nineties. The impetus for moving out of my parents' house was the end of my first real relationship. I'm most likely to make big life changes when I'm feeling upset about things, and being dumped is pretty high on the list of things that upset me. It ends up being a time of reflection and forward progress. I wish I did this kind of thing when I was happy, but the motivation just isn't there. If things are working, why change them? Or so I tell myself.

I moved in with my friend Jeff and a woman named Dela. Dela lived in the garage, which she had converted into a bedroom. She had a dog named Dave who liked eating my socks and escaping. The neighbors who continually brought him back weren't so fond of this second habit. I wasn't so fond of the first one. Dela also had a cute Canadian friend named Val who, while visiting, helped me feel better about being newly single, although that didn't last very long since she was, after all, a resident of a different country and jumping right into any kind of relationship wasn't what I needed to be doing at that moment in time. There was a third bedroom inside too, but I can't remember who lived in it. Dela built a skateboard ramp in the backyard, or had one built. I can't remember where exactly she got it. She didn't skate, but liked skater boys, or so I remember.

Before I moved out, I had started a new relationship with Jennie, who worked at Tower Records. I soon got a job next door at Tower Books, which was a good thing because my other job, delivering the Wall Street Journal at night, barely paid enough to cover my rent, let alone buy groceries or pay bills. Speaking of paying bills, there was another house down the street populated by Tower employees that everyone referred to as "The Cave" because nobody ever payed the electricity bill.

It was during this time that Jennie almost died in a car accident after she got hit on the freeway by a Coca Cola truck (the first paramedics on the scene actually thought she was dead). Her car was a rattletrap with its hood held down by a bungee cord, and I seem to remember it was the steering wheel suddenly no longer working that caused her to spin into the path of the truck. She spent some time in the hospital, and emerged from the other end of the experience with a case of post-traumatic stress which gradually led to her reevaluating her whole life. She went on to become a lawyer, going to UC Berkeley and then Harvard. Again, bad experiences often result in good changes. I'm still friends with her (at least via Facebook). The last time I saw her was when she came to my wedding.

This living arrangement fell apart when Dela and Jeff had a falling out. I can't remember exactly what caused it, but it ended up being Dela against the rest of us (including Jennie, who didn't technically live there, but loved a good fight). We ended up all moving out, leaving Dela there by herself.

Gilman

One more music-related memory, and then I'll move on to something else, at least for awhile. Music was and continues to be necessary part of my life. We all have ways of emotionally navigating the fearsome maze of modern culture, and music is the foremost among mine. Getting the hell out of the city and into the woods is another. This is how I draw some sort of spiritual sustenance into a psyche bleached by contact with the hostile non-environment of concrete, greed, and the general rat-in-a-cage strangeness of city and suburban life.

Of course, being infected with modern culture, lately I've taken my music consumption levels too far, so this year one of my goals is to stick to a budget. So far, I've succeeded, but it is only February. My willpower will be tested.

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent much of the late eighties at Gilman St., aka the Gilman Street Project, in Berkeley. It was basically a youth club where like-minded individuals would regularly gather and experience wave after wave of punk and hardcore bands. Most of the bands that played regularly enough to almost be considered "house bands" were of the humorous variety. Once, the singer from an out of town band, Slapshot, complained that the crowd was like "Romper Room". He didn't get it. Punk is often viewed as being somewhat macho and edgy, so we tipped that perception on its head and acted like a bunch of sugar-addled little kids. Most of the time, anyway.

Here's a photo of the crowd at an Isocracy show, probably from 1987. Isocracy's schtick was to raid dumpsters before their performances, and then rain trash down on the heads of the audience. This was huge fun. We also sometimes had leap-frog pits, rode bigwheels, and in general subverted the public perception of what punk was supposed to be about. For us, it was about rebellion, fun, and served to help develop a social consciousness that I still retain today.

I'm the one with the backwards hat. I think veteran punk photographer Murray Bowles took this. I could be wrong though. Like the photo in the last post, I grabbed this photo from Facebook. This one was posted by my friend Devon, who was my friend back in the eighties, and is still my friend today.

Musical Eighties

Starting in 1983, I started going to a lot of metal shows in small venues, and about a year later, discovered punk. Currently, I thoroughly document my musical obsessions, but back then, I was just soaking it all in and throwing myself around in a never ending series of pits (I've always hated the word "mosh", used to describe this singular form of dancing - why is it that I'm always reluctant to use new words?). Some of my friends from that time regularly cough up detritus from the past on Facebook, which leads me to believe that they were a lot more organized that I was, or at least a lot more obsessed with the past.

I was going to write about something entirely different today, but my old friend Wayne, who was pretty much my constant companion in those days, pointed out my presence in the following photo, posted on Facebook by local guru Ron Quintana (editor of the infamous Metal Mania 'zine, among other things).

That's me in the upper left, wearing a D.I.Y. Exodus shirt and facing away from the camera. I think I silkscreened that in a high school art class, although I might have done it at home. I made a few shirts this way, and this was far from the best. I think the Celtic Frost and Acid shirts I made were much better. The Celtic Frost shirt is now part of a quilt I had made a year or two ago.

I'm not even sure what show this was. Our usual haunts were The Stone, Ruthie's Inn, The Farm, New Method, On Broadway, Mabuhay Gardens, and a few others. In the latter half of the eighties, Gilman St. eclipsed the other venues. I could write endlessly about those days, but I'll save that for another time and my other blog.

Let it suffice to say that these were my people during my formative years. In a lot of ways, they still are.

Your Freudian Slip Is Showing

And then there was the time at an elementary school assembly when the third grade teacher, Miss Campbell, mispronounced the name of the fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schmidt.

Yes, like that.

Middle School Present and Past

Eva's ex-middle school is up at camp this week, with predictable results. For multiple reasons, middle school students always present more behavior problems than elementary school kids, and for some reason, the kids from Eva's old school are more prone to misbehavior than most. To add another layer of difficulty, we didn't have enough cabin leaders to cover the cabins, so three cabins were leaderless overnight.

One boy was reported to be sitting up in bed after bedtime, and not responding to requests to lie down. A boy nearby accused him of trying to scare people. His teacher and I pulled him out of the room and questioned him about it. He said that he felt "weird" and that he thought he might be possessed.

Okay then...

In the end, we decided that he was just feeling anxious about being away from home (he told us he feels that way every time he goes camping), and took him back to bed. That's when he discovered that he didn't have a sleeping bag or pillow. A boy nearby had an extra pillow, and another boy had an extra postage stamp-sized blanket. The teachers this week brought their own supply of extra blankets, so we added a bigger, warmer blanket to the bunk.

In the morning, the boy's sleeping bag turned up in the hands of one of my co-workers. I'm not sure where she found it. Maybe it was in the lost and found. Some kids just seem checked out of reality.

The other overnight issues were more pedestrian, and mostly involved people not shutting up and allowing their classmates to sleep.

This morning, since Scooby, who usually tells stories, is sick, I told the kids a story before breakfast. It was raining, and our usual rainy day spot is slated for demolition and inaccessible, so I told it inside the dining hall amidst the clattering of plates and silverware and tables were set up. It wasn't quite as distracting as I thought it was going to be.

Since we're on the subject of middle school, I guess I'll share a memory of when I was in middle school. The one that pops first into my mind is the time that our universally disliked vice principal, Mr. Boothe, had to put out a locker fire with fire extinguisher. I have no idea who started the fire, but it was grand entertainment watching our unhappy vice principal grimly applying the foam to the flaming textbooks and papers.

My train of thought has arrived at another memory involving Mr. Boothe. A friend and I were called into the office to talk to a couple of policemen who were investigating a nearby residential burglary. We were suspects because we had a paper route in the area (I can't remember now if it was my route or my friend's), and their line of questioning was pretty brainless. It consisted, in part, of showing us items of jewelry and asking if we'd seen them before, as if we'd actually say "yes" if we had. Of course, neither of us were guilty, so we honestly said that we hadn't. Mr. Boothe, jaded drone that he was, acted as if we'd already been tried and convicted, often admonishing us with statements like, "you had better tell the truth now!"

There seems to be a theme to my memories so far. I tended to get into minor trouble a lot, although for some reason school authorities often seemed to think I was a major criminal.

That said, I'm glad that I don't have to supervise a middle school like mine. By my adult standards, we were pretty out of control. At the time, we didn't think twice about how we behaved, and we got away with a lot. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol on campus, not to mention fighting. Perhaps some of those stories will appear here another time.

I have half a mind to drive by my old school, just to see what it looks like today. I'm not sure what the site is used for now.

Memory Month

The sky is blue, and I'm being attacked by a kitten as I try to type. Lately, I've been playing with a free app called Dreamscope, which turns phone photos into "works of art" by running them through various filters. Here's an alternate Brian.

I'm glad I'm not actually being attacked by a kitten who looks like this. That would be horrifying.

AS I mentioned in the previous post, each day this month I'm going to wind back the clock and share a memory. For the most part, it will be whatever memory pops into my head on the given day. Today, I'm remembering the first time I got sent to the principal's office at school. I was in the first grade. I remember waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and getting impatient that the guy in front of me, a redheaded boy named Doug, was taking too long to finish drinking. My solution to this problem was to bite him. We both got dragged to the principal's office. Doug was crying, and I seem to remember being somewhat unrepentant. The principal yelled at both of us for some reason, or that's how I remember anyway. He even mentioned rabies, as if rabies was commonly spread from human to human through bites. This made Doug cry harder.

Looking back on this now, I have to wonder what in the hell the principal was thinking. When a kid is crying because he has just been bitten by some asshole classmate at the drinking fountain, it's not a good idea to scare that kid into thinking that he might also now have rabies. That said, I don't think I broke the skin, so even if I had been foaming at the mouth, Doug would have been safe. I don't remember anything else about the principal, but based on this one memory, it's pretty obvious to me that he wasn't a very good one.

I just looked Doug up online. It seems he lives in Melbourne now. I wonder if he remembers this incident.

Photo Excursion

We spent a windy Sunday driving and walking around Mountain View, taking pictures of places we used to live. Jeanine was born in Mountain View, and I lived in two houses and two apartments there (not at the same time - that would be weird). I got the idea to photograph all of my old addresses after deciding that my writing challenge for February would be to share a random memory each day. I figured that having photographs to go along with some of the posts would be fun. Plus, I was curious to see if any of my previous dwellings looked any different. Of course, now that I've taken these pictures with the intention of writing about them, the memories I'll be sharing are no longer quite random. Also, they're most likely to be of interest to nobody but myself, but I'm writing this for me, not you, so too bad.

We wandered through the downtown area too, stopping in a book store and eating at the crepe place across the street. Downtown Mountain View has a bit of an edge over downtown Campbell (which is our nearest downtown area of any note) because it has two book stores instead of one.

The photo above was taken on the way back. The sky to the north was quite striking this evening.

Skate Party

Months after her last game of the season, Willow finally had her end-of-season soccer party, which included skating at Downtown Ice and receiving a couple of trophies (one for the season, and one for the tournament).

Now, she says her feet hurt, so she's sitting on the couch and watching bad TV while scrolling around on her iPod.

Incomplete Explanation

Sometimes, I get to work and discover abandoned notes written by kids who got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing. Usually, the notes are apologies, but this one seems to be a mere explanation. Perhaps he was leading up to an apology, but never got a chance to get to that point. I have no idea why this was left unfinished.

Just another of life's little mysteries.

Divine Sunrise

I take too many photos of sunrises and sunsets, but in my defense, each one is different. I've always been drawn toward landscapes and skyscapes, and the evidence is in the photos I choose to share here. Very few of the photos I've posted this month (or last month) have people in them.

Last night, while I was reading Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden" (the book that I pulled a bunch of pressed flowers and leaves from awhile back), I discovered that I'd missed one interesting thing:

It makes me wonder about the past owner(s) of this book. The spaces between the pages have proven to be a cornucopia of strangeness. Taking my cue from Jeanine's quick tracking down of the last quote I'd found wedged in the book, I did a quick online search for this one and discovered this site of quotes by an interesting historical personage known as Father Divine. The Wikipedia entry for Father Divine reveals that cult leader Jim Jones once claimed to be Divine's reincarnation, despite the fact that Jones was 34 years old when Divine died.

Music For Cats

As I was walking around camp last night, I was listening to Cat Power. Turning around suddenly, I discovered that our resident feral cat was following me. The only conclusion possible here is that he wanted to let me know he approved of my musical choice.

Or, he may have wanted me to feed him. Cats tend to think with their stomachs.

Other than that, the night was uneventful. A raccoon was hanging out near the walk-in freezers, and later,a mouse darted across the hub. The kids slept. In the morning, a string of planets was visible, laid out across the sky like some sort of cosmic beaded necklace.

Our new gate has been installed, but the finishing touch of an electronic entry system still remains undone. The old gate is still in place as well.

Corvid Points

Looking to the west this morning, I saw this:

This was my view to the east:

The kids this week are the low-maintenance type, so my night was easy. I walked a couple of miles around camp, and got a little farther in Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden". Life is good.

Back On the Night Shift

This is the campfire currently burning down to ash and memories out in the middle of camp. The campers are in bed, the night is cold, and the moon commands the sky.

I wish I could have gotten a photo of the moonrise earlier. It was huge and orange, but partially veiled by dark clouds, making it look eaten away, like a hastily abandoned peach. The photo wouldn't have been as good as the real thing anyway.

Simply Walking

Today's photo was taken during a walk through the neighborhood. These days, Jeanine can't stray too far from home because she needs to stay close by to help her mom, which means that if we want to go on a walk together, it has to be pretty local. No hiking in the hills for us for the time being, at least not together.

Short Hike

I went on a quick hike at Almaden Quicksilver park this afternoon. Everything was moist and green. By the end of the hike, I was kind of moist too, since it had started raining. The air smelled of freshly-minted oxygen, and the light rain just made things better.

The robins were out in force, and I saw a couple of deer grazing near my chosen entrance. There were a couple of possible Mountain Lion tracks in the mud too, although I'm not 100% sure. I thought I detected a claw mark in front of one of the toe pads, which would indicate canine rather than feline. Other than that one possible claw mark, it looked like Mountain Lion to me.

My Camera Rises From the Dead, Sort Of...

Right after I uploaded the last post, I discovered that Jeanine's camera was having lens issues, which inspired me to once again fiddle with my dead camera, whereupon I found that it had come back to life. The image screen was kind of foggy looking, and I wasn't quite sure if the problem lay in the screen or the lens. Not having a better option, I took it to the show. The pictures came out crappy, so the lens still has some moisture inside it somewhere. At least the camera works though. I'll have to see what I can do about the lens.

The show was excellent. Venom, Inc. are two thirds of the band Venom, plus Tony Dolan (aka Demolition Man) from the band Atomkraft. Venom was my favorite band when I was in the 8th or 9th grade. I became a fan of Atomkraft around then too. I'll do a more detailed write-up on my music blog.

The Approaching Twilight

I took this picture at home, so it doesn't count toward this month's daily challenge of taking a photo somewhere besides home. Hopefully I'll have another photo later, after we return from seeing Venom, Inc. It might be after midnight though. I'll be borrowing Jeanine's little point and shoot camera for the job, since my smaller camera didn't survive its plunge into the creek a week ago. I guess that immersing moist electronics in a bag of rice doesn't always work. It's a shame.

The quote above was found between the pages of the same Algernon Blackwood book that contained the pressed flowers & leaves I posted about last month. I just missed it the first time. I went back for another look because I'm reading it next, and I didn't want to end up fumbling through it for errant, dessicated flora in the middle of the night. Now, I have a small bag full of the former in-between contents of the book, and the book itself is ready to be read.

I find this quote strangely prescient, since it deftly describes the danger of the kind of selfish, small-picture thinking that permeates our society at every level. I'm not saying I agree with nationalism, because I definitely don't, but the idea that our failure to see the big picture will be our undoing is one that I wish more people would understand. My big picture extends to the whole world though, not just one country, whether it be ours or another.

Soon after I posted this picture on Facebook, Jeanine saw it, googled it, and discovered its source: the December 14th, 1922 edition of the New York Times. I can't access the whole article without being a subscriber though, so the context is still unknown to me. See the link here.

Predestination

The unfortunate thing about train tracks is that the traveler has limited options. The destinations are predetermined, and deviating from the set path is always disastrous.

Sunset On the American Dream

I often wonder if our current social climate has reached its nadir, or if we have farther to fall. If we haven't reached our nadir, that means there is someone even more vapid than Sarah Palin waiting in the wings. That's a scary thought. It also means there is someone more narcissistic and crude than Donald Trump our there somewhere. Don't even get me started on the people who take either of them seriously, or on Palin's trainwreck of a family. Shudder. The thought of either of them holding power of any kind makes me want to retch.

To help alleviate the suffering of being exposed to their idiocy, here's a nice picture of a sunset.

Wet Wash

It's a relief to finally have a properly rainy January. While up at camp checking on the nature lab animals today, I was happy to see that a number of dry washes are currently far from dry. Take the one below, for example.

Same Creek, Different Day

I'm off work this week due to our main site being closed. I could have worked our other site, but chose not to. Jeanine and I walked a different stretch of the Los Gatos Creek Trail today, starting at the same place but heading northeast instead of southwest.

We saw some fish carts:

A grumpy Cooper's Hawk:

And trees full of robins, not to mention some crows chasing away another hawk. It alighted at the top of a distant tree and stayed there, like some sort of Christmas tree topper.

On the way back, we stopped at Jamba Juice, and as we descended the steps back to the creek trail, politely declined an offer to smoke weed with a couple of elderly homeless people.

Oh yeah, and we bumped into a teacher who recognized me from camp. That kind of thing happens a lot.

Winter Walk

We wandered along the Los Gatos Creek trail this afternoon, under gray skies and past feral cats who were chowing down on the food that some well-meaning but misdirected soul had placed trailside within spitting distance of the sign warning people against this particular activity.

One of the cats looked like Dexter.

The Cats

Willow and I decided to go to downtown Los Gatos today (okay, I decided and Willow reluctantly agreed) to do some aimless wandering. After finally finding parking, we meandered down to the Forbes Mill Museum (Los Gatos used to be called Forbestown, way back when), where we found that, despite the posted hours which claimed otherwise, it was closed.

Then, we ventured down a short stretch of the creek trail (really just passing under the road we'd just been on), so
Willow could complain that her shoes were getting muddy. She's practicing for when she becomes a teenager in shortly over a month.

Our next stop was the pizza place where her brothers work. Neither of them were there, but the cashier recognized me from camp because she'd volunteered there six years ago. She wrote "Crow" (my camp name) on the order slip. We wolfed down some pizza and headed up the street to Powell's Sweet Shop, only to find it closed for remodeling. Damn.

Our next stop was a coffee shop. The cashier recognized me from camp because she'd volunteered there four years ago. She wrote "Crow" on the order slip. Willow decided that she didn't want anything, not even the yummy looking vegan chocolate cupcakes. I think she is an alien.

Uncharted Territory

After the campers had gone home and the Friday meeting was filed in the dustbin of history, I went on a brief adventure with Otter, Jellyfish, and Kestrel. Otter had this idea that if we followed the remnants of an old logging road westward, we'd meet up with Todd Creek downstream from where we always take the campers. We quickly discovered that the logging road (if that's what it was) eventually eroded away to nothing, so we slid downhill through spongy logs and sodden duff to find the creek. It was beautiful, and other than the occasional piece of human generated detritus, pristine.

I ended up dropping one of my cameras in the water. Right now, it's in a bag of rice to draw out the moisture. Hopefully, it will survive the brief submersion it suffered due to my lack of diligence.

Back at camp, a work crew was installing a new gate across our front entrance. In life, the only constant is change.

Fungi Fun

I took the kids on a six and a half mile hike today. At least that's what my Fitbit tells me. The expected newts were not out on the trails. Maybe it was too cold for them. Toward the middle of the hike, the temperature seemed to drop (maybe because we'd stopped hiking uphill for awhile), and toward the end, it started raining. By the time I left work, it was pelting the ground pretty hard.

There is a lot of Witch's Butter out at the moment. It's edible, but everybody I know who has tried it says it's completely tasteless. It's quite pretty though. Poking around on Wikipedia, I notice that Witch's Butter is sometimes confused with a fungus called Golden Ear. That's the thing about fungi. There is often confusion, so picking and eating them can (and sometimes does) lead to death. I don't know if Golden Ear is edible or not. The fungi in the picture below might actually be Golden Ear. Golden Ear parasitises a pathogenic plant fungus called Stereum hirsutum. I'm not sure if the other fungus in the picture is S. hirsutum or not. More research is needed. I really don't know a whole lot about fungi.

Todd Creek

It has been a few months since I last hiked up Todd Creek, and as expected, it now boasts enough water to actually resemble a creek. The recent storms are to be thanked.

Between the afternoon hike and the night hike, I stopped by a coffee shop on the way to get Willow. As I approached the door, an older gentleman sitting at one of the outside tables was looking at me like I'd just made his day. As I got closer, he said, "Do you know who you look like? You look just like Michael Bolton! Do you have the Youtube? Look him up!"

I'm doing that right now, and I look absolutely nothing like him. I think this is the video the man mentioned. Whatever. Still, it seemed to make him happy.

Where Ladybugs Gather

The ladybugs are clustering together for warmth in a couple of locations near camp. This is the meadow contingent. When I showed her the picture, Jeanine asked if I'd ever put my hands in them to feel the warmth at the center of the cluster. I've never tried that. When I'm with kids, I try to model respect by keeping the hassling of wildlife to a minimum, but I might have to try sticking my hand in anyway.

Either way, finding large clusters of wintering insects is always a treat.

Coyote

I took better photos today than the one below, but it's not every day that I see a coyote marching up the middle of the road. It's a smallish, rather starved looking specimen, and it was in the road investigating some roadkill. When I drove up, it languidly walked up the road ahead of me before finally disappearing into the Redwoods to my left.

I rarely get good photos of coyotes or bobcats, usually because they don't stick around long enough for me to aim my camera. In this case, I just clicked off some quick shots while inching along in my car, which isn't the wisest way to take pictures and unsurprisingly doesn't result in the best photos.

Diurnal

It appears that I'm working a daytime shift this week. The powers that be have decreed that all work-related e-mails be sent to our official work e-mail addresses, but for some reason, my password doesn't work, so I'm not privy to any information sent to that inbox. It's a good think that I went to the Primitive Skills workshop yesterday, during which my coworker, Kestrel, informed me that I was working as a field instructor this week. I'd better see about getting my password reset. Of course, I'm operating on the assumption that e-mail was sent to that account. For all I know, I was supposed to get the information by osmosis.

Sometime yesterday, the door to the chicken coop blew closed, so when I went out to shut it for the night, I found that it was already shut and the chickens weren't inside. After a little sleuthing, I discovered them all crammed into the old coop, which is big enough to fit 2 or 3 chickens, not 6. It was like a chicken clown car when they came out, although I had to reach in and grab about half of them because chickens aren't good at navigating after dark.

Today's photo is another view of the local "creek", taken from a different overpass. The buildings on the left are part of a new local housing development. The developers are really cramming them in these days. There is space for shops on the ground floor at the front, but I'm sure that the undoubtedly high rent will prevent anything interesting from appearing there.

At least last week's rain left a few puddles.

Primitive Skills

Today, I went to a Primitive Skills Workshop held at the Bowhunters Unlimited archery range in Cupertino. One of our regular summer volunteers, Falcon, was on hand to teach arrow and bow making, and the workshop also included lessons on flintknapping, fun with atlatls and bows, fire making, and a presentation on general survival skills. A couple of my other coworkers showed up too, but not, surprisingly, the coworker who informed me of the event.

I continue to be amazed at Falcon's general woodworking knowledge. When I got there, he was carving a bowl, and hours later, when I left, he was in the middle of an arrow making demonstration.

In between, I wandered from station to station, taking several turns hucking atlatl darts at targets. Here's my coworker, Kestrel, doing the same:

The guy running the flintknapping station patiently showed his audience how to properly work with obsidian, chert, and glass (and maybe others). At one point, he pulled out a beaver jawbone with a gold tooth, and told a tall tale about how it got that way. I'm thinking of asking him to come up and share his knowledge with the Trailblazers campers this summer. That would be fun. He's associated with this website, which I will explore in greater depth later.

I also met a guy named Douglas, who is an organizer for a group called Middle Earth Rangers of the Bay Area. Given my recent obsessive plow through S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series, which featured a similar group of Tolkien-obsessed young people, I'm giving some thought to checking out what they do.

Mornings

As I was coming home from work this morning, the atmosphere and clouds conspired with the sun to beautify my commute. It's a nice way to end the week. Seemingly oblivious, other drivers inched their way forward. I always enjoy seeing the long lines of people caught in traffic on their way to work, because I'm not one of them. I'm on my way home to go to bed while they're still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes as they gear themselves up for a work day.

Even though I've probably taken hundreds of pictures of colorful skyscapes, I somehow can't resist.

Early Morning Sky

This is what the sky looked like this morning, shortly before I woke up the 130 sleeping campers with some well-timed but poorly executed trombone blasts.

It has been a relatively uneventful week. The rain has stopped for now, leaving water droplets trembling on bare branches and puddles waiting for the unwary.

Fruit

The rain is still falling. Somebody left a bowl of fruit out overnight. If I'd noticed it earlier, I would have brought it in. This is what the bowl looked like this morning. Anybody want to bob for apples?

The Second of the Storms

On my first shift back at work after the holidays, it rained all night. It was a cold, steady rain with occasional gusts of wind rattling the vents and doors. We have around 130 kids at camp this week, all from the same school. For the most part, they slept through the deluge. I killed the time through the small hours by reading and listening to music.

I took my Canon to work and snapped a few photos of glistening cement. Raindrops on the lens left some interesting visual artifacts.

I still have a persistent cough which is accompanied by the usual runny nose and slight headache, but this too shall pass.

Outside, as I type, crows sit on the power lines, probably working out how to power their handheld devices. Crows don't miss a trick.

Evening Light

A little rain has fallen, with more on the horizon. Jeanine and I went for an early evening walk today, watching some promising clouds rolling across the sky. Despite the fact that it wasn't even 5:00 yet, the streetlights were blinking on.

At home, Brian meowed up in the rafters until Eva got tired of listening to him and got him down.

Water, Water Nowhere

I walked with Willow down the street to the creek, although I guess "creek" isn't really the right word. "Drainage ditch" is a better description. Some life manages to exist in the cracks and crevices, but it's still a concrete channel created to control water flow. Right now, there is no water. Perhaps the three storms looming in the forecast will change that over the course of week. One can hope.

On the way there and back, we passed a few abandoned Christmas trees, placed haphazardly in the gutter. Tomorrow, the kids are back in school, and I go back to work. Jeanine gets to take it easy for awhile, since January is a slow month in the birthday party world.

Winter

I've decided that the pictures that I post here this month must somehow tie with the season. I might have to get creative to take 31 Winter-themed photos, but the one below would work even if it didn't have the word "Winter" on it. Winter is, after all, the season of death and dormancy.

After getting chicken feed today, Jeanine and I wandered through one of the local cemeteries under gray skies. Rain is in the forecast.

2016

I spent the morning and afternoon hanging out at camp, supervising the meditation group as they packed up and checked out. Sometime in the afternoon, the temperature dropped and the clouds moved in.

As I left, I noticed that despite the signs, somebody had parked along our driveway inside the gate . As I'm supposed to do, I closed the gate behind me as I left. It's not locked, but I'm sure it will give the owner of the SUV a bad moment. People should read the damned signs.

Oh, Happy New Year.

This month, I'm going to continue posting a daily photo, although now it has to be taken somewhere besides home. This one was taken inside our nature lab at camp. It's a cow.