Blossoms on Weeping Cherry

I’m shooting pics of it every few days as it blossoms up. Grass is green, wildflowers starting in hills, my time of year! Taurus and the burgeoning energy of Spring…

Post a comment (1 comment)

The Compleat Blogger

I have to tell you, doing this blog is too much fun. Ridiculous. I am getting such good feedback. We were stymied by Blogger’s (Google’s) refusal to help fix something that was broken in Blogspot (couldn’t make change on template, etc). So we put it in a post, got immediate feedback and as a result, I believe, Rick’s got it fixed. Shame on Google, they are behaving like monopolists here.

Tiny Homes On the Move I realized the other day that for a month or more I have mysteriously been getting just enough material (photos and text) to do layout. It’s coming in from contributors in a flow that’s just about exactly equal to what I can handle in doing the rough 2-page spreads.

   I’m getting close to the halfway mark. Here’s what just got finished:

-4 pages on the Moron Brothers, two Kentucky buddies who play bluegrass and fish, hunt, and trap on their shantyboat in the Kentucky River. These guys are fun! Check them out here.

-4 pages on Sisters on the Fly, a group of over 1,000 women who have vintage trailers and go fly fishing and horseback riding and sit around campfires in camp-outs, just us girls. They are also fun.

-A high-speed asymmetrical catamaran, a “Proa” that recently crossed the Pacific, from San Francisco to the Marquesas Islands.

-“Guided By The Stars,” the 6 Vaka Moana 66-foot outrigger sailing canoes from Polynesia, which spent a few days in our bay in 2011. We’ve got photos of them here and in other parts of the Pacific Ocean. They navigate by the stars; wind is their only power.

-A beautiful little (54 sq. ft. floor space) Vardo, gypsy wagon-shaped, on a trailer that’s a great spare movable guest room.

   The studio here is pretty out of control. A blizzard of notes to self. So going on right now. Hey, maybe this is the golden age of communication…

Post a comment (5 comments)

Panorama on Beach


iPhone 5 panorama. Distorted, but I like triangle of glassy water. You can never tell what the ocean will be like until you get there. It’s a being of infinitely different moods.

Post a comment (2 comments)

Blogger Problem — No Response from Support

Rick, who handles tech maintenance for this blog has been unable make changes on the blog’s template for the last several months. He’s tried repeatedly to get in touch with Blogger support, with no success. (Blogger no longer offers any direct support — just a forum where users can commiserate and try to answer each other’s questions).

The problem in detail is here. The quick summary is that every time he tries to get to the Edit Template page, it redirects immediately to a blank page, so that no edits can be made, and the template can’t even be replaced with an older backup.

This has been going on since Blogger stopped access through the old interface several months ago.

No support email gets any response, and repeated posts on the forum don’t either. Many other reports can be found in the forums concerning people who can’t get any help from Support.

If any of you have any suggestions, or especially if you have an inside track to some human being at Google who might help, we would really appreciate it. It’s time to change the masthead and update the listings for our books.

Post a comment (12 comments)

Music/Mussels/Pigeons/Broth

Sunday afternoon, am listening to “America’s Back 40,” great Sunday afternoon program on KPFA by Mary Tilson. All my kind of music. A lot of pleasant surprises by Mary, who’s obviously got a great collection.

   Also, our local radio station, KWMR has a unique selection of music.

 

A few days back, I drove north and took a long beach walk and returned with mussels and seaweed (for garden and food). These days I get the smaller mussels, big ones are pretty tough. If I’m in a hurry, I’ll just steam them in a little water, red wine, and chopped parsley and garlic.This time the broth turned out purple from the wine. Infusion of ocean essence.

  Had a pigeon 2 nights ago. They’ve proved tough, so I hung this one for few days and it was really good. With red wine, rice, garden greens.

   I just read the chapter “Aging Game Birds” in Hunt, Gather, Cook by Hank Shaw, a very good book (Rodale) on obtaining and cooking from the wild. Also was reading about cooking pigeons in Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli/Alice Waters. They serve a lot of pigeons at the restaurant, they say. They have a recipe for making broth from the bones, which are baked or grilled, then chopped up with big cleaver and simmered an hour in light beef or chicken broth. I’m going to try it in the next day or two, with the pigeon bones and duck bones. Got to be good.

Post a comment (3 comments)

New England Stone Walls by Kevin Gardner

This sent us by Eva. It’s pretty long, and I haven’t watched it all, but I sure would if I lived where there was stone. Looks like a very thorough explanation of the principles of stone walls with and without mortar. A great explanation of why stone wall joints should not be lined up under one another.

   I loved this part: “Every stone in the world has an ambition…” — pause, twinkle in his eye –“that ambition is to sink to the center of the earth as soon as possible…”

https://www.chelmsfordlibrary.org/anytime/videos.html

Post a comment

Dr. John/Great Blue Heron/Hopi Artifacts/Blogging/Rain/Chickens/Etta James

Ooo-wee! I’m totally alone, a very rare circumstance on this half acre of land, with all the multiple activities going on here. Playing Dr. John doing “Such A Night” with The Band at their “Last Waltz” concert (my all-time fave music movie). (If you go looking for this song, you have to clickon “albums,” then scroll way down; it’s on the left.)

Great Blue Heron Yesterday Rick and I were working in the office and I noticed movement outside the window. This magnificent creature had landed on the roof, and was peering over the edge at our fishpond. Stunning. Royalty.

    It wasn’t like seeing ducks or pigeons or doves or quail or crows or even Oregon Juncos or Rufous-sided Towhees. This was something else.

  You rarely get close these very wary birds,  I think, due to the fact that it takes them so long to get airborne, they’re extra cautious —  continually scanning 360.

  I shot photos through the window. He flew down to the pond (bye-bye goldfish!) and I snuck out of the office slowly and came around to the front door of the house, hoping to get pics of him at the pond. As soon as I moved the (glass-paned) front door, he took off. He spotted me through two panes of glass, at a distance of about 40′. Wary.

Read More …

Post a comment (10 comments)