Welcome to San Francisco, Max!

Max. You are the the Creme de la Creme Tour Operator when it comes to hosting foreigners to your country. With fanfare and flourishes, you guide wayward tourists through parks with truly wild aminals, present interesting foodables to your followers, and point out extraordinary scenery, such as Table Mountain with that special "layer of tablecloth." I would love to show you San Francisco from a unique vantage point! But first...
... you'll need to don some flowers in your hair! There ya go! Let's trip on up to the Marin Headlands where we can get the perfect view of everything "San Francisco"! (There's some gentle doggies there hehee!)
You can lay down here on this log, and I'll do some woofing about those "little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars"... well, according to somebody called Tony Bennett! Tony also says that "the morning fog may chill the air - but he doesn't care!" I'm pretty sure you don't mind a bit of fog, Max. I think I'll just lie down there with ya too and warm up a bit as we check out the view!
Look at that city beyond the Golden Gate Bridge! I can't tell you how incredibly grateful we are that you've woofed so much about South Africa to us all - thank you, thank you bigtime, our 'round the world friend. We know you have so many more pups to visit on your world tour, but we really appreciate your stopping by here on your global trip.
While you hang here in San FranciscoAbove the blue and windy seaI woof to you while we watch over San FranciscoYour golden sun shines out to me!
You will always shine for us, Max! Happy Valentine's Day, dear pup and thanks a billion for stopping by.

Being Creative

"Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive." Madeleine L'Engle from Walking on Water
She continues, "What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think."
Do something creative today, then come back here and tell me what you did. I'm going to create a birthday memory for my oldest daughter who turns 29 today.

Violets

Violets, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

They're violets, but they're yellow. In full bloom on Yucca Ridge behind Cal Poly. Close examination of the ridge-top revealed that there are millions of things getting ready to bloom in the coming weeks.

Day off and a Drive on the Wild Side (Wild Life Loop)

Well, since the beautiful weather from yesterday exited the area and a cold front blew in we figured we'd do some indoor stuff. Started out at the Custer Historical Museum. A really nice museum 3 floors and chock full of interesting stuff.



Off for our drive and we take a detour to do the Stockade Lake Road. There are at least a 1/2 dozen small lakes nearby - got to look into getting some kayaks or a canoe!

As we are drivingthe wild life loop we weren't having much luck seeing anything except some Buffalo way off inthedistance. Gary was going to turn off onto one of the dirt roads but I said let's go a little further - and we are glad we did! Finally ran into the "Begging Burros" loitering in the road.

Springtime and everyone has babies!

So do you have any food for me or what?

No - well maybe I'd having better luckwith them

Hey can the dogs come out and play? How about giving up some of those biscuits?



They finally figure out that we're not going to feed them so they let us pass thru.

Speaking of passing - it's very hard to pass a pronghorn - they can runup to 70 mph.

We decide to take one of the many dirt roads that go off the loop.

Finally - Buffalo

A herd with some young ones

This baby got up and looked quite curious about us. You want to be careful though Mom's are pretty protective of these little guys.





What a great drive. We worked up an appetite so we took off to Hill City to have the Filet Mignon at the Alpine Inn - 6oz or 9oz it's the only thing on the Dinner Menu and reasonable 8.95 or 10.95 with baked potato and salad.

This is an absolutely gorgeous sculpture of a horse made out of cast off things, Wrenches, Pistons, Shovels, Silverware, mufflers, tail lights - you name it. It even contains 5 smaller horse sculptures within it.

Till Later!

Meanwhile we keep on Trek'n

Melissa and Gary

Blast from the Past: I Didn’t Just Cross-Stitch

My ‘craftiness’ hasn’t been limited to just cross-stitch projects.

I’ve sewn a few things — never got good at it; probably because I didn’t much care for sewing.  And still don’t.  Ask me to hem something and you might as well ask me to jump in a lake somewhere!

I’ve done quite a bit of knitting — one of my first projects was an evening gala outfit consisting of a halter top and a floor-length tube skirt in a fancy pattern (I’ll have to see if I can dig up a photo); I also made the usual scarves, shawls, and throws.  I still knit on occasion; mostly when mom is visiting and we can share the hobby.

I tried my hand at crocheting — I still use the spider web shawl I made in the 1970s; I also made an afghan or two, and a granny-square footstool for my father.  I gave up crocheting as I found it to be too repetitive.

When we were living in Salt Lake City in the 1980s, I gave ceramics a whirl.  Now, don’t get the idea that I threw pottery or anything.  Nope, the wheel was not for me.  I simply painted and decorated unfinished forms at a local studio; the firing of the finished product was included in the price of the item.  Boy did I make a lot of things — for us and as gifts for others.  What few I kept are already packed up for storage, but I found a few photos from way back (mostly of the gift items I made).

Left: nursery Lamp; gift when my brother’s first son was born.
right: gift for my brother; he was interested in native american culture.

Gift for Mui; for his basement office
(sadly this was broken in the move from Utah to Virginia.)

Gifts and a few items for us.
I made the chicken (or is it a duck) for mom’s kitchen (yes, it traveled to Turkey).  the nativity in the bottom corner was for one of my aunts; the orange cornucopia was for another aunt.  the three other items were for us; some fell victim to accidental breakage while others found good homes elsewhere when we moved from Utah to Virginia.

Award winning ceramics projects.
the wreath decorated our home for many years; the color in the bottom photo is truer than the one above that shows the wreath decorated with dried baby’s breath.  (I wish I had a close up of this one; the detail was amazing.)  The deer sat by our fireplace for many-a-Christmas before one of them broke at the neck.  The Christmas candy dish was a gift; as was the Halloween spook light.

  I wonder what other treasures the photo-scanning project is going to uncover :-)

Our Kitchen Garden

Here at Circus~Cercis we have a Kitchen Garden. It's exciting to see and read about people all over the country deciding to grow food for the first time by starting "Victory Gardens" - we wish all you Victory Gardeners the best of luck! Our relationship with Kitchen Gardens is longstanding, so for us that name sounds better. Growing vegetables wasn't something we decided to do - it's something we've always done.
Philo remembers long drives to the small town where his grandfather lived, the small frame house and the garden with rows of beets and onions .
I remember my grandmother's small Chicago garden with Swiss Chard and Rhubarb and parsley and remember 'helping' my aunt with her suburban garden.

Where Philo and I grew up, even if there were no rows of vegetables, most yards had some kind of food plants - apple or pear trees, a grape vine for jelly, a clump of rhubarb or a raspberry thicket.
Almost everyone had a tomato patch. I well remember the gross-out chore of picking hornworms off tomato leaves and there's a permanent photographic record of Philo's early success with tomatoes.



As newlyweds in the late 1960's we planted flowers and a few vegetables near the door of our aluminum graduate school hut and squeezed in a few tomatoes and flowers around a rented townhouse in the early 1970's. Once we bought a house on a quarter-acre of land, we could begin the first of 5 real kitchen gardens. In all five gardens we've dealt with clay soil, semi-shade, tree roots and ravenous animals. The first three houses were in the Western Suburbs of Chicago.


Garden #1 (1973-1977) had several large wild cherry trees on the lot but there was a sunny place behind the garage to grow beans and tomatoes and squash and peppers.
Garden #2 (1977-1987) was on a lot with old pear and crabapple trees and wild grape vines. Philo fitted the main bed into the semi-sunny corner of the back fence, eventually adding raspberry trellises and garden grapes.
Another patch in sun on the opposite fence let the kids in the sandbox watch the zucchinis grow and a trellis on the side of the garage let us enjoy the new Sugar Snap peas.
At Garden #3 (1987-1999) we had a reasonably large space at the back of a long narrow lot. Even though the lot was overhung with wild cherries, mulberries and Box elders, this garden really pumped out peppers and tomatoes! Philo had all the salsa he could wish for but I never had enough zucchini. The fence helped keep out rabbits and groundhogs but couldn't save the squash from the squirrels.
Then we moved to Texas, and instead of owning arable land we lived in the deer-filled Austin hills. At Garden # 4 we did our best to grow a few peppers in pots on the deck and tomatoes inside this 4 and 1/2 foot tall, deer-resistant wire enclosure. The soaker hose failed in this situation and the deer nipped every leaf that dared to stray outside the wire. Philo started our current Kitchen Garden #5 in fall .., a few months after we moved to this house and had Swiss Chard & tomatoes by June ... As usual, the plot isn't in full sun, the soil is heavy clay and tree roots creep in from the other side of the fence, but after 5 years of stooping over to fit into the wire house, this feels like a real garden!Instead of either Kitchen Garden or Victory Garden, Yolanda Elizabet uses the term Potager, encompassing not only her decorative vegetable plantings, but grapevines, fruit trees, cold frames, a greenhouse & conservatory. That very cool word may be a little too grand for a 9 X 10 sort-of-raised bed of tomatoes, peppers and a few salad vegetables. We have no greenhouse or conservatory but we've grown wonderful lemons, we hope each year for loquats, pomegranates and figs, were astonished by a crop of edible pecans one memorable autumn and all year long use the herbs planted in troughs and tucked into flower beds. Marjoram and thyme grow in the hypertufa trough above, along with a plant of Italian parsley shared by Rock Rose Jenny. No matter how long you garden, there are new things to learn. We no longer incorporate pecan leaves from our two large trees into the soil, but once the juglone-free Arizona Ash leaves fell this winter we had enough to redo part of the garden using a modified version of Renee's lasagna method. We used timbers to hold up the 'lasagna' in two areas of the garden, one 3' X 4' square and another 2' X 3', making layers of existing soil, decomposed granite, various composts and the dry leaves, then watered regularly and waited. The front edge got a sprinkling of radish and spinach seeds, some shallots and a line of red onions. About 10 days ago I dug the rest of the bed over and made cedar mulch paths. I hunted around to find the soaker hose and decided to give it another try. Last week Philo revised and reinforced the Tomato Scaffolding from last summer and we set it into place. On Sunday we planted a few tomato and pepper plants, adding more soil, compost and granite as we planted. 'Juliet' already has a few flowers but I'm still trying to decide whether it's a good idea in this climate to cover the soaker hose with mulch - what do you think? Even if the drought breaks, the intense summers mean we can't get yields in Austin like the ones in Illinois, but we'll enjoy whatever we can get!In the back of the garden I'm experimenting with an old wooden box discarded by my youngest son and his friends. For years the guys kept it behind the shed, hauling it out once in awhile to use as a backstop. After long exposure to Austin weather one end started to rot off and the box was moved to the trash area, waiting for Bulky Trash Day. But then I had the idea to talk Philo into fixing the bad end and drilling drainage holes in the bottom. I lined it with roll window screen, put it near the fence where nothing ever grows, filled it with potting soil and even though it was a little late in the season, planted seeds. To keep the squirrels and birds out of it I covered the soil with some old racks from the garage. On a recent visit my son took a look at the vegetable garden, and I showed him the seeds sprouting in the repurposed ammo box, saying that it might need a decorative sign. My son knows me too well...he raised an eyebrow and asked, "Peas on Earth?"
Pretty close - what I'd been thinking was "Give Peas A Chance".

Glacial Water

Glacial Water, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

Second Lake, near Big Pine, California.
This lake is fed by meltwater from one of the southernmost glaciers in the United States, the Palisade Glacier. The finely crushed rock washed downstream from the glacier gives the lake its milky, turquoise color.

High Humidity

When I stuck my head out of the door this morning, I was not really sure I wanted to ride this morning. No air moving, hot, humid, and foggy. But I have other commitments Wednesday, and knew I will feel better once I got on the bike.
Early ride (left the house at 6am). Planning to do my normal laps around Lake Manawa. I was off and on the trail at 6:30. Hoping to see a nice sunrise. Really need to be up a little earlier for the best sunrise - but there was some clouds in the East sky, enough to put some color in the sunrise. Stopped on the road so that my sun will be partially blocked by a tree on Boy Scout Island. Anyway - that's today's photo.
The first section of the ride I felt some of a chill from the dampness. Other places I was comfortable. That is, until I was on my second lap when the sun started having its effect. Thankful for the breeze along the East side of the lake (or was it the breeze I was creating when riding?) When I returned to the car, there was NO air moving as I loaded the bike on the car.
Quickly changed shoes and headed over to Panera Break for coffee and some air.

Edinburgh Valentine

Love writ large in the snow beneath the grim bulk of Edinburgh Castle. I caught this yesterday, and I hope that 'KAM' did too, because it's raining today...