Why the name?

I've been fascinated by old bottles since my childhood. I well remember the great vacations we took when we were kids to my parent's ancestral homes. My Mom grew up on a farm near Dale, NY, and my Dad's family had the adjacent farm. I don't remember all the ins and outs of my Dad's families ownership. I'll have to ask him. His family also had a house in Buffalo NY where he lived during the school year. During the summer the family would go out to the farm.
My parents were born in 1925. This was of course pre-polio vaccine. During the summer folks would send their children out of the city if at all possible to try to minimize their exposure to polio.
But I digress. The point is that both properties had a long history of human use. And, this being in the days prior to trash collection, their trash was dumped on the land in piles and the location of the piles was shifted around over time.
Among the many fun things we did while on vacation in Dale was scout for old dump sites and unearth old bottles. I was late on the scene for this endeavor, having some other pursuits I was also engaged in, but I did collect one very beautiful bottle which unfortuately came to a bad end when my Dad shipped it out to me. For an incredibly intelligent person my Dad has a bit of a blind spot concerning how fragile items need to be packaged when shipped.
I haven't spent time scouting for dumps since, but on our tramps we always keep an eye out for old bottles. One of our finds was an old coke bottle. The most interesting thing about this bottle is the writing on it: "TRADEMARK REGISTERED BOTTLE PAT'D DEC 25 1923".
Was the patent office open on Christmas? I had a hard time imagining government workers in the patent office awarding patents on Christmas day. But the bottle seems to be proof that indeed, the business of the patent office was not interrupted by Christmas, at least back in 1923.
I asked my Dad about this. Oh yes, he said. Christmas didn't use to be the big deal that it is now. So I keep the bottle in the collection on my window sill. A very tangible reminder of how much our country has changed over a not very long period.

It's spriiinnggg!

Noticed my Ice Follies starting to bloom in the garden last weekend, so picked a bunch to enjoy in the house.

Simon Boccanegra... At the movies!

Since Frances has become such a big opera fan, and in fact is hoping to turn opera into her life's work, we make a point to listen to the opera when it comes on the public radio station. There are two opportunities to listen to an opera each week, Friday Night at the Opera and the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcast. Sometimes I really enjoy the opera broadcasts, and other times we end up turning them off. However, it is true that opera is much more fun to watch than to only listen to.

Saturday was one of the Met opera broadcasts that was simulcast in HD into participating movie theaters. Frances has been going to these all season, and we arranged to go with her. A first!

The opera was Simon Boccanegra by Giuseppe Verdi. I usually like Verdi operas, Macbeth being one of my favorites. Placido Domingo sang the title role, which is unusual for him since it is a baritone role.

The opera started at 10 am, and there was actually a pretty good house, consisting almost entirely of the senior set. The exception was the small handful of Sac State music students attending. The audience was (except for a few people) what I would consider dressed up (i.e. no jeans and in nice looking duds). Maybe because of their generation, maybe because this broadcast was an Outing. Some of them brought their own snacks and lunches, which they ate during the two intermissions. With running time of 3 hours and 20 minutes, the opera is a pretty long slog.

Did I enjoy the performance? Yes. I particularly was interested in studying the costumes and watching the back stage switching of the sets. Renee Fleming interviewed the main characters back stage during the intermissions. I didn't realize why her eyes seemed so strange until Ted complained about how distracting it was that she was focusing on the telepromter.

There were a couple of interesting things that came out during the interviews. Renee commented that when singing, she couldn't hear anyone else singing. At one point when Adrianne Pieczonka is singing a duet with Marcello Giordani, they are both singing very vehemently, and their mouths move in perfect unison spitting out the words. I almost laughed out loud, their lips were so identically shaped. I imagine it's true, that they can't hear each other. On the other hand, I don't suppose they are trying to blend!

The other funny thing was Renee commenting that she liked the role of Amelia Grimaldi because she is the only female among the cast. She doesn't have to worry about competing with some mezzo. DIVA!!

What didn't I like? The story was pretty hokey. The plot had a lot of holes. I don't think this was a very listenable opera, but I'm not sure. Attending in the theater, the visuals took over. I suspect that if we had been listening to the radio at home we would have turned it off.

The outing was completed by lunch at an Italian restaurant. It was good and in keeping with the theme, but a bit pricey for lunch.

Would I go again? Yes, but not very often.

Bloomin' Garrya

For the third time since I planted it back in 2001, my garrya is blooming. The last time it bloomed was in 2007. Why the long pauses between flowering? Does it take so much
energy to flower that the plant can only muster up the guts to do so every few years? Or is there an environmental trigger, like early rain? We got 5 inches of rain in October, the last time we got such a large amount of early rainfall would have been back in 2005. Very mysterious.

Update 2012

Full bloom Feb5 2012.  Lots more flowers than in 2010. Full bloom delayed due to our drought? Also bloomed beautifully in 2011, Full bloom was Jan 26, 2011.

Desperation leads to action

Ted has a committee meeting here tonight, and that was enough to finally cause us to spring into action on the deplorable condition of our kitchen. This took most of the day and our solution may be funky in the extreme, but it does provide quite a bit of camouflage which at this point is badly needed.
Before:







After:

Old double nickel

For my birthday I wanted to take a trip up the valley to the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge. I'd been reading in the paper (well back in mid December) about the huge number of geese and ducks that had come down to the refuge. So after breakfast and cooking of my birthday pumpkin pie, we headed up 505. It was raining, and I was feeling discouraged about the weather, but the forecast had only been for 20% chance of rain, and sure enough when we got up to Williams the rain had stopped.
We had lunch at Gargenzella's, which was okay. Ted and Frances each got a gelato (of course) and then we headed to the refuge.
What a nice afternoon we had. First we walked around on the hiking trail. In some ways it isn't much of a trail, but we did see birds on that trail that we didn't see on the auto tour, namely the American Pipet and the Cinnamon Teal. We also saw two deer as we walked the trail. Such an interesting pattern on their ears.
After completing our walk we climbed in the car and headed out on the auto tour road. There was a steady trickle of cars heading out on the tour, but we managed to be spread out enough that we didn't interfere with each other.
On the tour road we saw lots of ducks: mallards, coots, widgeons, ring-necked, ruddy, pintails, shovelers, and green winged teals. (I think thats all of them). We also saw greater and lesser snow geese, and white fronted geese (so named for their white faces). There were also numerous hawks, and a few egrets, commorants, and herons.
The funniest thing we saw was an American Bittern. Frances spotted this bird, it had apparently been thinking about crossing the road before we came along, and it was quite out in the open and away from its camouflage. Nonetheless it did its freezing routine, and sure enough, it had more patience than we did. After shooting lots of pictures, we headed on down the road towards home and birthday dinner. My pie celebrated my 55th birthday.

My New Years Resolution-keep up this blog!

I wanted very much to take our annual New Years Day hike up Cold Canyon, but the weather was gray and showery, so we deferred. As it turned out, that was a good decision, since John, Anthea, Lang, and Cammie came to our house on Jan 2. They arrived about 1:45 p.m. Frances was in Davis so we had some coordination issues, but we all managed to rendezvous at the trailhead at 2:30pm.

The weather was unexpectedly warm. Because we started so late, by the time we reached the top of the ridge, we had it to ourselves. We reached the top about 4 pm and stopped to admire the scenery and have a water and snack break. The second half of the hike was longer than I remembered. We continued along the ridge for quite some distance with more up and down, before the trail finally turned downward for good. By the time we reached the turnoff for the dam overlook it was quite dim, so we continued hustling down the trail. The others were far ahead of Ted and myself. The kids go at zoom speed hiking downhill, and the parents wanted to keep up with them. But only Frances was able to keep up with the boys. We finally reached the end of the trail at about 5:20 and it was pretty dark by this time. Great hike but my knees are still sore!