Or is it getting grass on high?
The photo shows the fall colors of dead grape leaves in a vineyard, and among the leaves are some barely visible sparkles of light. It should really be a movie; a still photo doesn’t show the effect very well.
For those of you who didn’t get the meaning of my post about J. Jason, here’s a chance to redeem your esteem. This puzzle should be easier. When she was a young kid, Hilary and I made it up over a period of a few evenings, and would use it almost every night before bedtime. As time went on, we made it into a game that I, unfortunately, never really figured out how to win. I’ll explain that as soon as someone comes up with the correct answer to the challenge. Good luck! (Hint: Two languages)
A horse would probably have to be starving in order to eat this orange, even if it were ripe. Raccoons won’t eat them, nor will pigs, squirrels, rats, or vegan rattlesnakes. Even humans won’t eat a Seville orange without at least some sweetening, which makes them perfect for that wonderful sweet-tart taste of marmalade. Come January, we will be braving the nasty thorns on this small tree, picking as many of the diminutive fruits as we can, then going into slave mode to slice, squeeze, parboil, scrape, shred and cook up a big batch of marmalade to die for.
It was a dark and stormy night, which provided perfect cover for a midnight raid by equines that decimated our two half-barrels of strawberry plants. But they were kind enough to leave one berry for each of us, for which we are very thankful.
Give me vegan rattlesnakes any day!
What a workout! We towed the splitter to the wood this time, and tipped it up so we didn’t have to lift the log rounds onto it. Even placing the huge chunks of very wet heavy oak onto the base of the splitter was daunting. The machine moaned and grunted as it reduced it all to nice pieces for stacking in the wood shed. Several times water almost sprayed from the log rounds as the wedge was forced in, splitting them regardless of their having any ideas to the contrary.
The final cut! And we still have all our fingers, our jeans aren’t torn, we’re not bleeding, no bruises, no scrapes — but one finger of one glove has been worn through from handling the rough rounds of oak for lo these many days. We’re not going to lift these last log pieces onto the splitter either. Instead we’re going to tow it over, stand it up, and do some vertical ground-level work for a change.
See the horses eat! Real, natural food. Food that doesn’t cost anything!
The grass is flourishing, and we’re just about to the end of tossing out hay daily for the hungry horse herd. Shown above, with a genuine porcelain Chairman Mao lapel pin for scale, is a sampling of the grasses and forbs now available to the four-leggers. Yesterday morning only three showed up for feed in addition to the usual three we feed supplementarily with the expensive stuff. We tossed out only one bale of grass hay. This morning most of that hay was still uneaten. As we arrived at the corral, a bunch of horses wandered in, sniffed at the hay, and gathered around the pen area to beg for the goodies we were passing out to the old and infirm.
I’m proud of that headline — it’s positively Onionesque. This morning at the Horsie Restaurant, open daily for breakfast only, I noticed an odd wad of grass and shredded baling twine lying next to Reginald’s third entrance. Obviously, due to the close proximity of Reggie’s house, it’s a discarded bed. Has his wife evicted him? Or are things just hunky-dory and they splurged on a California king and tossed out the old double? Or maybe the thing is infested with vermin. Oh, wait. Squirrels are themselves vermin, at least to people who have great big stacks of hay nearby with tunnels through them made by Reggie’s kind.
Our meticulously manicured lawn, until recently the nicest in the near neighborhood, has been pillaged by pigs. Using their super sensitive snouts to acquire accumulated acorns that have fallen from the oak trees, little pods of piggies poke pink snouts into the soil, making many messy mounds.
Shown to the left is an area under a particularly prolific provider of plunder, a live oak. Every night the avaricious acorn aficionados return to wreak ravage repeatedly.
Monday Karla and I fed the horses early and went to Fresno for our occasional shopping trip to buy things we can’t find locally. But the main motivator for Karla was to visit the Whole Foods Market store in Fig Garden Village to buy some Blind Dog Coffee Roasters’ fine brew. That’s as close as this brand of coffee has gotten to us, but maybe it will show up at our local Raley’s sometime in the future.
Looking into Google Analytics a bit further, I see that my biggest reader in California is in Sacramento. Using all the tools available to me, I find that this person usually reads the blog in his Gulfstream jet first thing every evening while being flown to the Santa Monica Airport and home in Brentwood. He spells California Caleefornia and apparently has some kind of government job for which he refuses to be paid. Wish I could find out more; he sounds interesting.
In the past 31-day period, an average of 15 people per day viewed this blog. The smallest number, two viewers, was on November 1, the day of the memorial we put on for Karla’s mom; the largest number occurred November 11, when 69 viewers looked in.
Live oak trees are evergreen, while their non-live-oak cousins drop their leaves every autumn. But perhaps another reason they have the title live is they never seem to really die. The bushy green shrubbery at the base of the tree shown above is the re-birth of the fallen tree. Dozens of shoots are coming off the still-living roots, and will eventually thin out to maybe two to six new trees. In places north of the house where a wildfire went through about 40 years ago are clusters of live oaks that came back from being burned to the ground. A whole ring of trees covers a spot on the ground maybe ten feet (3 m) in diameter, all connected, all growing off the same root system.
It’s end of season for strawberries, which runs from January through November. There are maybe ten berries left in our two half-barrels. Earlier this summer a hoard of hearses — I mean herd of horses came by and munched the dozen or so strawberry plants clear to the ground. It has taken a few months for them to recover and get back to berry-making.
The next sign of season changing is the poinsettia plant I bought at The Home Depot last Christmastime. I managed to keep it alive (that’s a first!) through the summer and it is starting to develop its characteristic red leaves now. It is one of the thirstiest plants I have around here, taking maybe three or four times the water of anything else. Maybe that’s why all its predecessors tanked; I just didn’t satisfy their thirst. We’ll see how it reds-up for Xmas.
(Stale muffins in foreground for scale)
Our lightning-struck tree is a veritable wood mine. So far we have nearly completed cutting about one-third of it. There are other live oak trees that need to be removed because they’re fire hazards, but they’re downhill and the rounds will roll into a dry (right now, anyway) creekbed. About six trees are way too close to buildings and need to be removed before the next fire season starts. Oh, and there’s yet another dead tree whose branches will fall into cactus plants. Already one major limb has been removed, and there are at least ten others. It too is a downhill tree.
We are still working on a live oak tree blasted to smithereens (don’t we wish!) by a springtime 2007 lightning stroke. Shown above is approximately one-third of the tree. For scale, there are two yellow wedges used to keep the saw cut from closing on the chainsaw (lower yellow arrow). They are approximately the size of a human hand. The human in the background, Karla (upper yellow arrow), can also be used for scale. She is approximately the size of a human. Multiply all you see by three and you get an idea of what we are facing.
Actually it was a drizzly afternoon around 3 o’clock, when Karla was digging through yet another box of old stuff of her mother’s and ran across dozens of pieces of sheet music, some going back to 1910. It was very interesting looking at how it was presented — some of the covers had pictures of singers or pianists and words describing the music as something they had performed, as if when you were playing or singing, you might sound like those performers. Also came stern warnings; should you ever dare reproduce the music you’d be in violation of copyright law. Reminds me of the FBI warnings at the start of every movie DVD. The price of sheet music was surprisingly high — 50¢ in the 1930s would buy ten cups of coffee or an entire lunch, not cheap!
It’s that time again. Actually, we are very late for putting away wood for the winter. Fortunately we had a lightning storm last spring that knocked down a very large live oak tree, splitting it in two and laying a substantial amount of premium firewood-to-be on the ground. Another stroke of luck is that it fell near to and uphill from the road. It is only a matter of cutting the wood, then kicking it over the edge to the waiting truck. Then of course we lift the log rounds into the truck, drive the truck to the waiting log splitter, lift the heavy rounds onto the splitter, pull the handle to do the splitting, and throw the pieces in the cart to be rolled to the wood shed to be stacked. Then pick up the pieces to take them to the house and put them in the stove which has to be cleaned of ashes daily which have to be spread evenly on the ground so as not to cause a big alkaline stain on the soil. We are so blessed with the modernity of our lifestyle!
As I write this my trusty Mac is burning DVDs and running the printer to put the labels on. Talk about walk and chew gum! Each of the DVDs takes exactly four minutes to burn, and the printer finishes off labeling them in a little under two.
Karla and I always vote absentee. We live too far from any polling place to make it in time if it’s stormy. The above notice came in our voting materials. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could buy stamps for less than half a cent! The Bureau of Voting and Stuff must have a special “in” with the Post Office to get that kind of discount.
