Rain

I was up in Oakland for some music last night, and when I exited the venue shortly before 1:00 AM, the ground was wet. I got hit by a couple bursts of rain as I drove home too. It rained in the South Bay this morning, although I slept through most of it.

We had some sun in the afternoon, and I took some photos of our backyard wildlife. Right after I finished, there was a sudden downpour.

This squirrel is eating an avocado while sitting in a persimmon tree. That just seems like too much work for me.

Sage Advice

This is Mexican Sage, which is not only drought tolerant, but appealing to hummingbirds. Jeanine got some cuttings from a friend, and they seem to be doing really well.

It's a good plant to have in the yard during times of drought. I can't remember the last time we actually watered them. I wish the rosemary was doing as well.

Mask

To a certain extent, we all wear masks. Jeanine puts some of hers on the wall.

Our walls are full of strangeness. Our decorating preferences aren't very "grown-up", meaning that we tend to be whimsical in our approach to our surroundings. Sure, it also means that the house is often messy looking, which may be an entirely different issue.

Rain

It started raining in the middle of the night last night, and it is raining again now. I slept until almost 4:00 PM today, so it was already starting to get dark by the time I was vertical.

Here are a pair of photos celebrating the rain. The first is a view looking out the window in the front door. The motion sensor porch light, either activated by a package being dropped on the front step or the blustery wind whipping the nearby bushes around, provides a warm glow.

The second is a view from the back door into the yard. There is something satisfying about being warm and dry while looking out into a rainy night. I try not to take this for granted. It's always good to remember that wistful feeling one gets when walking in the rain past a warmly lit-up window.

House of the Rising Sun

Out my window, I see a blue sky, painted with a few white wisps of cloud. A lone dove is perched on a power line, perhaps expelled from the covey lining the wires farther up and away. Brian the kitten has just been kicked out of my lap for biting.

Here is the sky at camp. I took the picture right before waking the kids up with some delicately-played trombone music.

Once I got home, I got a rare picture of Dexter and Brian sitting quietly together while they waited for Jeanine to come back in from letting the chickens out. Speaking of chickens, our one remaining rooster, Noodle Soup, finally started to crow. I heard him at midnight the other night, so not only is he crowing, but doing so at strange, random times. Jeanine immediately set the wheels turning to re-home him, and he now lives in Modesto with a flock. That leaves one bird, a chicken named Shelly, from the batch that hatched from Safeway eggs awhile back. We're keeping her because she is quiet. Loose lips sink ships, or perhaps, flappy beaks cause leaks...

It's Better To Light A Candle...

We're closing in on the shortest day of the year, and this week, early sunset is joined by uniformly grey skies, making the afternoons gloomy affairs indeed.

I love it.

There are not many better things than lighting a candle or two in the early evening (in this case, one candle with two wicks) and putting on some appropriately autumnal music. The soundtrack to these small flames was one of the newest Time Released Sound releases, Olga Wojciechowska's "Map and Mazes".

Survivor

For this overcast Monday, I present to you a gargoyle. This is the only thing I own that broke during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It was shaken from its perch and decapitated in the fall. Note the sloppy glue job and missing chips of gargoyle skin.

I suppose this serves as a reminder that more earthquakes lurk around the corner. At least our earthquakes are natural, not like the ones in Oklahoma.

Conspicuous Consumption

Our house if full of shelves, including this one.

Where music is concerned, I never made the jump from physical to digital downloads. Being a resident of the real world, I like to hold objects in my hand. I like to look at lyric sheets and flip through CD booklets. This means there are shelves of records, CDs, and even cassettes peppered throughout the house. I plan on cutting back on my music expenditures, because it's one area of my life that is somewhat out of control. I'm also aware that, as an environmentalist, it's a bit hypocritical of me to insist on owning physical objects made of plastic and paper when I could acquire music through the aether. Humans are weird.

I now notice that this particular shelf needs dusting. The various objects sharing space with the CDs are mostly gifts. At least my CD shelves create extra space to display favorite knick-knacks.

Hiding

I got up early this morning so I could take Willow to the flea market, where she hawked unwanted items with her girl scout troop so they could fund future excursions. We stayed up sort of late last night because we were celebrating my birthday, so it wasn't fun getting up before dawn. After I dropped Willow off, I came back home and climbed back into bed for a few hours.

A beautiful sunrise helped compensate for the lack of sleep.

On an unrelated note, here is a picture of Dexter, "hiding".

Corbies

This is the time of year when the crows rediscover the neighbor's persimmon tree. Sometimes, the tree is blanketed with a whole murder, but today there were only two (or should I say, twa?) corbies. Unlike the pair in the old Scottish ballad, these two didn't even have to discuss what they were going to eat.

There are persimmons in yon auld fail tree
I wot we can have them all for free...

Oh, and happy birthday to me.

If I Fits, I Sits

This time of year, there are more boxes than usual. Dexter takes full advantage of this.

It rained today, although I missed it because I was asleep. I got to watch a nice sunrise though, with dark clouds blowing toward a date with dissolution.

Eggs In One Basket

I'm in the middle of the first of the final three camp weeks for the year. We have 206 kids, which means an extra room has been converted into a cabin (really more of a dorm than a proper cabin, I suppose, but "cabin" sounds more camp-like). I've been telling stories in the morning because Scooby, who usually does it, isn't around this week. I keep meaning to record them, but haven't gotten around to it. One of the stories exists in written form, but it has changed enough through constant retelling that it's virtually unrecognizable from its origins.

Willow is out seeing One Direction and Five Seconds of Summer tonight. She keeps worrying about something she calls "Post Concert Depression", which is her way of describing the feeling of sadness after the concert, long anticipated, is over. It's almost like she makes up things to feel sad about. I've never once felt sad after seeing live music. Kids these days are funny.

Here is a photographic reminder to disperse one's eggs. These are real chicken eggs, and although the basket is really a miniature flower pot instead of a basket, I think the meaning is still clear. These eggs, being tiny and oddly shaped, are the reject pile. Most of them were laid by Penelope, who bequeaths us about one egg a year. Jeanine puts them in the pot, and they remain on the sill above the kitchen sink.

Here's a bonus photo of the sunrise, taken around 11 hours ago:

There was a nice sunset today too. It's nice to have a day book-ended with beauty.

Photos

It's December now, and at the end of the week, another year in my existence will have become memory. I'll be 48 years old. This page serves as somewhat of a memory vault, a place where I can keep track of things that I otherwise might have forgotten. I sometimes find myself scrolling through previous years, laughing at little things that I've recorded here. I wonder if this tendency will increase as I age.

It is cold right now, and rain is forecast for Thursday. I love this time of year.

I've decided to post a photo every day this month. At the moment, I'm thinking that the theme will be a photos taken at home. I'll start with a benighted view of where I now sit, taken just a moment ago.

Here is a bonus photo of Dexter, taken yesterday, or possibly the day before. These days, he looks huge when compared to Brian the kitten. He also has his winter coat, which makes him look excessively shaggy. Brian has been relentlessly terrorizing him, which is odd, considering that Dexter, if he had a mind to, could take Brian apart. He shows admirable restraint in not doing so.

The Future

One thing you’re excited for:

For the following year, I’ve decided to reign in a lot of my bad habits and focus more on my good ones. Rather than waiting for the start of 2016, I’m going to start on my birthday, which is in less than a week. Now that I’ve written about it, I’m more likely to not backslide. I think that I’m going to set myself some sort of challenge for December as well, probably a photo challenge of some sort. At the moment, I’m thinking of doing a photo-a-day challenge, with the stipulation that I can’t use my phone.

I’m also looking forward to the holiday season. It has faded with time, but I still retain a bit of that childlike excitement for this time of year. It's more for the cookies and less for the toys these days though. Willow finally gave me a list of things that she wants, and today I'm going to head out and see what I can find. Like always, we had nothing to do with the national travesty called Black Friday. Somebody should digitally match the voice of the radio announcer covering the Hindenburg disaster with a compilation of Black Friday scenes, and it would be comedy gold with a side helping of schadenfreude. For now, click here and here and imagine...

Since she is a party entertainer, Jeanine is already dressing for the holidays. Since he is a cat, Brian is napping:

A Long Time Ago...

The night of your 21st birthday:

I truly don’t remember. I don’t drink, so the often-discussed rite of passage of going to a bar didn’t happen. I’m not much of a partier either. Sometimes I think this writing challenge was geared toward people with an entirely different personality type than mine. Turning 21 wasn’t a big deal for me.

Growing up happens in small increments, not with the sudden flip of a calendar page.

Spoken Word

The word/phrase you use constantly:

This changes with time, but lately I’ve been using the phrase, “very good”, as a default reply to anything that isn’t bad news. I think that any constantly used word or phrase is mindless filler, but despite my awareness of this, I find myself occasionally mindlessly filling. It comes with being old and lazy, I guess. I really should be more rigorous when it comes to mental discipline.

At least I don’t say “like” all of the time. Some people seem to use it as verbal punctuation. Even that isn’t as bad as this one poor guy I once had to listen to though. He was an employee of the Marine Science Institute, and he’d come to my work (which at the time was the Children’s Discovery Museum) with a Leopard shark and perhaps another critter or two. It was fun to pat the shark, which felt like sandpaper, but it was a chore to listen to the presentation because the man used the phrase, “you guys”, as verbal punctuation. It was very distracting, and I’m betting he had no idea what he sounded like to his listeners. The fact that I remember this, more than a decade after the fact, is an indication of how noticeable it was.

It pays to be aware of our speaking habits. I try to be aware of mine.

Clothed

What you wore today:

It’s not even noon yet, so I’m still wearing things.

I’m wearing a whole set of clothes: T-shirt, pants, belt, underwear, socks, and shoes. On top of that I’m wearing a Lava Beds National Monument sweatshirt emblazoned with pictures of stick figures caving. I’m not concerned with things like brand names, so I’d actually have to look at tags to remember what brands my clothes are. I’m not motivated to do that. I just don’t care. There is, no doubt, something on the front of my T-shirt too, but it’s under my sweatshirt, so I’ll have to look. Oh yes, It’s a Solstafir shirt that I got for free when I purchased the CD box set version of their most recent album.

Earlier, I was wearing a jacket too, but I took it off. It was kind of cold this morning. Jeanine and I went to a harvest festival in downtown San Jose. We mostly bought things to eat. I ogled some drone flutes but didn’t buy any because they’re expensive. I did take a business card though, and I’ll probably get one online at some point.

Ex Marks the Spot

Things you'd say to an ex:

This writing prompt seems to have been written under the assumption that “an ex” is one person. I suppose I could choose an ex to focus on here, and the most obvious choice would be Jen, my ex-wife, but there isn’t really anything I feel a pressing need to say to her. Pretty much everything that needed to be said was said, sometimes repeatedly, back in the initial months after our break-up. In the present, I have moved on and so has she, so mostly what we say to each other these days has to do with scheduling, since we share a child. That said, most of our conversations manifest themselves as text messages and e-mails. Ah, the impersonal nature of modern life. Truth be told, in some cases I prefer it that way.

Since it’s Thanksgiving today, I suppose I could say (and mean) something like I’m thankful for the time we had. After all, if we hadn’t met and married, there would be no Willow. I can’t imagine life without Willow. Anything else is just water under the bridge, flowing toward the sea. Besides, if I had anything else of emotional import to say to her, I wouldn’t share it publicly.

Weird Traits

Four weird traits you have:

I can do a couple of weird things with my tongue, which either counts as one or two weird traits, depending on how many others I can think of. I can put my tongue above my soft palate, making it look like I’ve swallowed it. That always grosses out kids. I can also fold it in from the tip, making it look forked (actually, it makes look like there is a miniature person inside my mouth, mooning the world). I haven’t met anybody else who can do this.

I’ve always been good at meeting people on their levels. When I was younger (high school age), I often spent time with friends who enjoyed altering their consciousnesses with illicit substances, and I would sometimes find that I was the only person in the group who wasn’t drunk or high. Despite my sobriety, I would be able to successfully spend time with people who were decidedly not functioning normally. Currently, this skill helps me relate to kids at work. I’m able to put myself into their world in such a way that I can better relate with them. I can be childlike without being childish, and I guess that helps me be better at my profession.

Despite the fact that I enjoy quiet and solitude, I like making noise. Give me an object, and I’ll figure out how to make music with it. If I was more organized, I’m sure I’d have a discography (I do have a page on Discogs.com, but it’s solely based on my contributions to my friend Matt’s work). I have done a few live performances over the years, including one solo performance (opening for my own brother). Once I did a duet with a clarinet player. What was I playing? A plastic drinking straw. Jeanine usually just rolls her eyes at this tendency of mine.

Awkward social situations, job interviews, and even such things as routine appointments fill me with more anxiety (or at the very least, irritation) than wrangling rattlesnakes (of course, wrangling rattlesnakes doesn’t fill me with anxiety at all). I guess I could say that I both love and hate routine. I feel the same way about structure and deadlines. I don’t like them, but I seem to require them, at least to a certain degree.

Missing

Something you miss:

In my day to day life, I don’t miss anything of note. Life is good, my needs are met, and I have spare time and money to pursue the things I love, and more importantly, be with the ones I love.

One thing I miss is traveling. I feel like I missed out on the opportunity to do more of it when I was younger. There are good reasons I didn’t, of course. Young people don’t often have the resources to travel extensively, and I was no exception. Later in life, I find that I’m typical in at least one regard. I have enough responsibilities and obligations to prevent me from dropping everything and hitting the road on a whim. Up until last year, we managed to do an annual family vacation, but Jeanine’s mom needs us nearby these days, so we can no longer leave the area for overnight stays. I don’t resent her for this, but I do miss our vacations.

Fortunately, we live in an area where interesting day trips are possible. Here are some photos taken over the last few days. Saturday, Willow and I went to an upcycling event (basically, arts and crafts made from re-purposed items) in Alameda to do a little holiday shopping, and also to say hi to my friend Colin, who was selling his amazingly packaged CDs there. Among other things, we got a Lithuanian spit cake (as in turned on a spit, not spat upon) to enjoy later in the week. On the way back, we stopped at Coyote Hills to watch the sunset. Along with clouds of insects, we admired the view for awhile before deepening darkness ushered us back down the hill and back into the car. Despite it being the weekend, the freeway was bumper to bumper brake lights. These days, I really don't like getting on the freeway at all. This outing was worth the aggravation though.

Yesterday, I went with Jeanine, Eva, and Eva's friend Montana to San Francisco. We spent some time on Haight St. so the girls could wander and I could get rid of my money at Amoeba Records, and then we headed west to Sutro Baths where the low sun lurked behind clouds and the water glittered with the promise of evening. Eva had her camera with her because for her, the stated reason for our trip was photography. I only had my phone, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing:

On the way back to the car, we passed a bunch of tweens descending the stairs with selfie sticks. All is vanity, and our society seems to encourage this with products aimed at narcissists.

I'm off work this week, and the last couple of work weeks have been relatively easy, with the exception of a crucial water pipe breaking, leaving us without running water for around 24 hours. For one night, we had a row of port-a-potties at the end of one of the buildings. They were pretty high-end though, with lights and sinks.

Finally, my cousin Peter has moved out here with his family. He has been in town for around a week, starting a new job. He came over on Sunday afternoon so we could meet his twin daughters. They were very cute, and spent a lot of time exploring the house. They especially enjoyed a pair of hand-knitted snakes that were a wedding gift from our friends Jack and Jackie. Here's a picture of Willow with one of the twins:

Oh yeah, looking at the picture reminds me - Willow got braces last week.