Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight with dichroic glass elements.

Fire!

I check the traffic map before I leave work. Today there were some yellow diamonds right by home.  The details of the incidents said that there was a fire in the field in the northeast corner of the intersection of Bear Valley Parkway and San Pasqual Valley Road. We live in the southwest corner of that intersection.

Before I left work I saw the details up to about 4:34 PM.

Jerry called to say that I ought to take a different route home since traffic on Bear Valley Parkway was very slow.

Before I got home, Jerry and a neighbor got to watch a palm tree go up in flames.

I got home and went down to the field at the end of the road with my camera to watch the goings on. Of course, I took a movie. It's pretty dull. We get to see helicopters fly around and drop water on the fire. I missed the fixed-wing plane dropping the pretty pink water.

Here's the dull movie. The most interesting thing about it is the strobing of the helicopter blades that makes it look like they spin very slowly.


This is a map of the area. We live in the house toward the bottom. We watched from the person standing in the field. The helicopter landed at the helicopter. The fire was somewhere around the fire. And there's another marker under the buttons just to keep the fire in the picture.

View Neighborhood Fire in a larger map


The fire is out. Its origin is suspicious.

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Red hot poker

Jack's choices of hobbies for me weren't always as successful as beekeeping.

Out of nowhere he gave me a book on how to play poker. I don't remember ever expressing an interest in the game.

The book was filled with the obvious information about the probabilities of filling your inside straights and how likely your two pairs will be beat at a table of four players.

The most interesting parts of the book were about the psychology of the game.

Much of the book was about how to play in a weekly game against a regular group.

We learned how to observe the mannerisms of our friends to understand when they're bluffing and when they have an exceptional hand. We learned how to encourage our friends to give away information through these signals. Of course it taught us how not to have such bad habits ourselves.

It taught us how to win but not win so much that our buddies stop playing. If one of the guys is looking like he's about to drop out of the Friday night game, we were told how to start losing some of our money to him so he'd be encouraged to stay in the game and lose much more money to us.

There were many problems with taking up poker for fun and profit (mostly for profit).

Among them:

1. I was a kid (in high school, but still a kid).
2. Without a lot of money.
3. Who didn't know anybody with money.

But mostly it seemed to be teaching me how to cultivate friendships in order to take as much of their money as I could. That didn't interest me.

There must have been tips on how to win against people we've never played against. But you probably have to get good at the game by first cleaning out your friends' bank accounts.

I never played poker for money.

I wonder why Jack thought I'd be interested in poker for a living at that time.

"Here, little number cruncher, you can make a living at what you're good at."

"Here's something I wish I could have done. Make me proud."

"This is your last best hope."

"Get rich quick."

I'll never know.

Schadenfreude

Jack wasn't always uninvolved in my leisure time. Sometimes he was very involved.

He'd choose my hobbies for me.

One of the hobbies he chose for me was beekeeping. I didn't like honey back then. I'm not much of a fan of the stuff still. Give me jam for my biscuits any day. So this wasn't the most satisfying hobby for me.

But beekeeping was an interesting activity. It let me see what is the rather miraculous process of little insects gathering nectar and pollen and turning it into more little insects and wax and honey.

We got hives from Sears that we had to put together and paint. We filled the frames with sheets of foundation for the little bees to build their combs on.  Jack got me "The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture." We had the jumpsuits, gloves, and hoods that would let us work with the bees without getting stung.  Much.

We ordered the bees from Sears (is there nothing you can't get from Sears?). They came in the mail in wooden boxes with screen sides. Each box held three pounds of worker bees and a few drones and a little box with a queen and a few attendants. There was a can of sugar water that kept them fed for the days they were in the mail.  The queen's box had a plug made out of sugar that the bees would eat through to release the queen. The time it took to release her gave them time to accept her as their leader.

We'd don our protective clothes, open a box of bees, shake them into their prepared hive, hang the queen's box between two frames, put the lid on and wait.

A week later we opened the hives to remove the emptied queen's box. The bees had started building combs! This was fascinating.

My career as an apiarist had begun.

Each year we'd harvest the honey. We didn't have the equipment to spin the honey out of the combs so we'd just hack the combs into squares and put them in plastic boxes. These would get sold at work much like Girl Scout cookies. But better...people got their money's worth. I don't think I was involved in the marketing of the honey. Whew!

Those bees terrorized me for years. The hives were set up in the back yard near the gate that took us to the parking spots behind the house. The bees' flight path took them across the walk up to the gate at low altitude. Now and then one would get caught in someone's hair. Ouch.

When you're a good beekeeper you don't need the protective clothes. You know how to handle the bees without getting them riled up. We never got good at it.

My happiest day at beekeeping was when Jack was doing something with the bees by himself. He got into his jumpsuit, zipped on the veil and went to work. He didn't get the veil completely closed.

The bees found the weak spot in his protection. He got a face full of stings. He was quite the dancer while this was going on.

Finally, a bit of a comeuppance for all the terror he had brought upon me.

Schadenfreude, it's human nature.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight.

Squill trying to satisfy requests

Poss wanted me or Jerry in a picture of the squills to show the scale better.  Your wish is my command!

Squill growing

I showed you my giant squills a few days ago. They're about finished blooming for this year. The tallest one is now 6'7" tall.

This is what they look like today.

Colleen's comment suggested that I should have added something that gives you the scale of the flowers so I did just that this time. You'll notice two Papo fantasy figures that Peggy and Michele gave us. There's Rhino Man on the left and Werewolf on the right. They wear skintight shorts are are very well endowed. Thanks, Peggy and Michele!

The Queen Mary

We spent a couple of nights on The Queen Mary while on the road last week. You've seen what I ate there and you've seen what we did during the day between the nights on board. There's not much to tell about the rest of our experience in the hotel.

Here's another picture I took of the ship while passing it on our way to Catalina. The window I had to shoot through wasn't perfectly clean and had the sun shining on it.

Wikipedia has a better picture from about the same point of view.

In my earlier post, I pointed out the general area of our room. We checked in at the desk near the bow and had to hike to our room near the stern. It's a looooooong hallway. This picture from in front of our room taken with my phone probably doesn't really show the length very well.

The rooms are long and narrow. This is the view of the bathroom door from the bed end of the room. The door into the room is on the wall to the left of the bathroom door. There's a vanity to the right of the bathroom door.

The walls are very thin. You can hear everything the neighbors do. They got a 7:00 wake-up call each morning. We were already awake at that time. It would have been a bit annoying if we wanted to sleep in. The neighbors were already bustling about by the time they got their call.

Here's the original (but not operational) fan.

(I couldn't tell that the picture was this blurry when I took it.)

At the right of the picture is a door that connects our room to the next room in case we wanted to have a suite. Of course it is locked. The second night we had neighbors in that room. They were unsure what the door was to. They tried and tried to open it. The knob would rattle every few minutes. I wondered in a clear and somewhat loud voice why the neighbors were trying to get into our room. With the thin walls they must have heard me. But that didn't stop them from trying to see what's behind that mysterious door. The next morning there were some more attempts to get through the door.

The portholes weren't locked shut. They're big enough to crawl through but I guess nobody bothers to get a room in order to end it. They must just take the cheaper tour and jump from the Promenade deck.

We had a view of Long Beach.

There was a problem with the air conditioning. The thermostat wasn't controlling it. So the room was very cold. We tried leaving the windows open but that didn't help much. And it let the mosquitos in. I got a bunch of bites that were red and a bit swollen but didn't itch at all. Strange.

They fixed the problem the second night after Jerry asked if there was something that could be done about the temperature.

The bathtub had some knobs that don't do anything these days. Apparently you could bathe in salt water in the good old days. Do cruise ships still use salt water?

The towel was nicely hung on the bar. The fandolded washcloth was tucked in a pocket folded in the hand towel.

It was nice to stay on the Queen Mary. I still think I'd feel too confined to spend time on a real cruise.

Santa Catalina Island

We went to Santa Catalina Island on Thursday. Jerry wanted to take the 15 minute helicopter ride to the island but I, being cheap, suggested the less expensive, one-hour boat ride. We had planned on taking the boat from the Queen Mary landing but that is closed after Labor Day. So we had to drive into Long Beach to catch our boat.

But it turned out that we got to see our home away from home on the way out of the port. We were inside the Commodore Lounge and saw the Queen Mary through slightly hazy windows that had the sun shining on them. So the pictures from the boat are rather washed out.

If you follow the line of the mast near the boat's stern (on the left) down to the round portholes just below the rectangular windows on the ship's Promenade deck, you'll be looking at the portholes in our room. Sorry that the picture is so fuzzy.

Here's the boat that took about 65 minutes to take us the 26 miles to the island.

We wandered through Avalon and quickly got bored with their touristy junk shops. After lunch we got tickets for the two-hour Skyline Drive tour. The tour wasn't in the towed bus-thing shown in the tour's video. We were in an old bus. Jerry and I sat right behind the driver and had a great view.

Here's the view of Avalon as we're climbing up the hill.

The road was very windy and narrow. And it had steep drops but was lined with eucalyptus trees to keep us from careening to our deaths. At one point Richard, our tour guide and driver, said that we had to do a stretch of the road with no slowing. I started making a movie just after he started this mad dash up the mountain. I hope this gives you a feel for what we went through.


The tour took us to the Airport in the Sky where we had 20 minutes to recover from the thrill ride up the mountain.

This is the bus that brought us safely up to the airport.

There's a nature center that has a tile map of the island. Here's Jerry looking at the far end of the island. Avalon is at the narrow part of the island near the left end of the island and the airport is about half way to the far end.

A feature of the tour is visiting with the bison that were imported for a silent movie that was filmed on the island.

On the way back to Avalon, we got to stop at a scenic spot overlooking the ocean.  I took five pictures and Photoshop Elements did a bang-up job of pasting them together for me. Aren't computers and some computer programs amazing?

(I guess Blogger has a limit to the width of pictures. This was much larger. The picture is all there, they just shrunk it. If anybody needs to see a more detailed version, just ask and I'll email it to you.)

Here's another view of Avalon's bay as we're coming back into town.

Here are the condos where Richard, the tour guide, says Babs is an owner.

I found this juxtaposition of the psychic and the Coke machine amusing.

Not only can you enjoy a Coke with your Full Life Reading, you can visit the psychic in her Santa Barbara location.  I suppose she uses astral projection to commute between the two spots.

There was a beautiful sunset on the return trip but my camera couldn't deal with it.  Here's a blurry picture to give you a bit of an idea what we got to see.

It was a nice way to spend a day.  Next time we'll have to take one of the longer tours.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A ceramic lamp from Jonathan Adler that we got while on vacation last week.

First, with only the light it's putting out at night.

Then in the day with a flash.

They had a cute manifesto posted by their door (there's a terrible reflection that I tried to soften. I should have used a polarized filter).

Squill blooming after all these years

Our giant squills are blooming this year! They took last year off so I was hoping for an exceptional show. But there are only three stalks. We planted three bulbs and each has divided so I was hoping for six flowers. Maybe next year.

The stalk on the left is 5'11" tall.

These are fun flowers to put in a vase. They sway back and forth. One would be pointing far to the left when we leave for work and by the time we get home in the evening it would be peeking around the corner to the right. They last a long time after you've cut them. If you want to make a statement in your grand foyer, these are the flowers to use. Of course, if you don't live in aMediterranean climate, you won't have a lot of luck growing them.

The flowers open from the bottom of the stalk and work their way to the top. Here's what the section with the open flowers looks like.

The bulbs each weighed about 10 pounds. That worked out to be about a dollar a pound. Such a deal!

It hasta be pasta!

One of our stops on our little trip to Orange and Los Angeles Counties was Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. One of the stores there is Williams-Sonoma. We had been to one of their stores earlier in the week on our San Diego-area shopping day. But we thought we had time so why not browse here.

Good thing we did. There is a new KitchenAid mixer attachment! A Williams-Sonoma exclusive!

We picked up the KitchenAid Pasta Press.

It makes your spaghetti. It makes your bucatini. You want fusilli? You got fusilli. It extrudes your macaroni (both large and small). And it makes rigatoni.

We made rigatoni for supper last night. Jerry made tomato cream pesto sauce from Betty Crocker's Pasta Cookbook that came in one of the more successful General Mills Christmas C.A.R.E packages.

Everything turned out very nice.

I've created yet another YouTube video in the How To & Style category that shows the extrusion process. I didn't bother with the mixing of the dough. Jerry makes a cameo appearance.

Here it is!

And here is supper with its sauce.

Mmmmmmmmm!

Food fit for a Queen

Jerry and I took a little vacation this week. We started the week by doing San Diego activities then headed north for a few days.

Here's what I ate on the road.

Our first stop was Laguna Beach where they have art galleries. We didn't buy anything except lunch. We ate at the Heidelberg Pastry Bistro.

I had the Spicy Heidelberg Wrap and iced tea. It wasn't terribly spicy. It was good.
This was across the street from the Pottery Shack that isn't there anymore. It's now The Old Pottery Place where they have a cafe, an art gallery, tchotchke shops, etc. I'll miss the Pottery Shack.

We then shopped for a while in the downtown part of Laguna Beach for a few hours then headed to our hotel in Long Beach.

Jerry comes up with fun vacations. We stayed on the Queen Mary for a couple of nights. For dinner the first night we ate in the Promenade Café.

I had fettuccine with vegetables. (I forgot to take the picture until I had eaten quite a bit of it. Sorry.)

The next morning we had breakfast in their coffee shop. We had bagels with cream cheese and caffè americano. (Again, I forgot to take the picture until after I had started eating. There's a bite missing from the bottom half.)

We then took the Catalina Express to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. I don't know if the hotel upgraded us to the Commodore Lounge on the way to the island or if it was part of the package Jerry booked. (We were planning on taking the boat from the Queen Mary but that service gets turned off after Labor Day so we had to go to the downtown port. Maybe they upgraded us for our inconvenience.) Because we were in the Commodore Lounge, we got a cookie and a beverage.

Here's my chocolate chip cookie with the usual missing bite because I forgot to take my picture in time.

And my mimosa.

There's not much to do in Avalon. There are tourist junk shops. And restaurants. (There are tours around the island but that's another story.) We had lunch at a café on the water.

I had a mushroom veggie burger and fries. I forgot about taking a picture until I was finished. It's just as well, it wasn't terribly good. The mushrooms had no flavor and the burger was pretty flavorless, too, in spite of all the flavorful ingredients the menu said it contained. Don't bother with the Busy Bee Café when you visit Avalon. Jerry wasn't thrilled with his lunch, either.

Veggie burger and fries aftermath:

(As you can see I finished it anyway.)

Our return trip wasn't until 7:30 so we had dinner in Avalon. It was much better than lunch. Jerry enjoyed the aroma of the smoker cooking food at El Galleon and they had pasta primavera for the picky eater so that's where we ate.

My pasta primavera before even one bite was taken!
(We didn't keep what they called "souvenir glasses.")

We sat on the outside deck of the boat on our return to Long Beach. There was a beautiful sunset.

We had some shopping to do in Santa Monica so that's where we headed Friday morning. We got on the freeway and decided to stay in the carpool lane and held out till we got to the Santa Monica area for breakfast. We had bagels with cream cheese and americanos at Tanner's Coffee.
My Linux netbook wouldn't connect to their free WiFi service so I didn't get to check my email for the whole trip.

We were very successful in our shopping on Montana Avenue but you'll have to wait to hear about that adventure.

We then headed downtown to shop at Penzeys Spices. Jerry stocked up on spices. Later, you'll hear about some other fun stores we happened to run into.

We had lunch on the Third Street Promenade. I had a caprese sandwich. Yum.

We finished with our shopping and headed home. We were not ready to do any cooking. So we went off to another fine restaurant.

That's just a taste of our vacation. I'll tell you what we did between meals later.

Tennis anyone?

Jerry and I went to Pacific Taco #1 for supper tonight. We're on vacation and aren't cooking. The restaurant usually has some South-of-the-Border music playing on the juke box. But tonight there was no music. Just schmoozing between regular customers and the people behind the counter.

The TV was on, but without sound. It was tuned to ESPN and was showing a match from the US Open tennis tournament.

Tennis was the only sport I ever willingly participated in. I was introduced to it through my best friend through my junior high school days (I seem to have changed friends each time I changed schools).

I took lessons in the summer-activities-in-the-park program. One lesson that stuck in my mind was How to Deliver a Killer Serve. The instructor told us to hold our rackets just so, toss the ball into the air, and swing the racket through the ball with a motion we would use as if we were hurling the racket at our opponent. My friend, Kenny, mastered that serve. It would put an incredible amount of spin on the ball so after it curved into the ground it would take off in a strange direction, as if it hit a little wall on the court.

Most of us couldn't quite get the hang of the serve. Some even messed it up so badly that they managed to hurl their rackets at their opponents.

At the end of the six weeks of lessons, we'd have a tournament. The entry fee was a can of new balls. You were out of the tournament after you lost your first match. The loser of each match would get the balls that were used in the match. In one tournament I got to start out against one of the best players in the program. I went home after that first match with the can of balls. I'm sure I lost 6-0, 6-0.

I even participated in the junior high school's tennis program. It was an after school activity where we just played games against others in the program. We didn't play against other schools. It was for fun with little, if any, competition.

I think I kept this tennis thing up for about three years. Each year would start out with a nasty blister on my thumb where it rubbed against the racket. It took a few weeks to figure out how to grip the racket at the start of each year.

Tennis was a good sport for me. I was good enough at it to have fun. And I was on my own. I'm not a team player. Probably because I was always among the last to be chosen for teams in gym class.

(I don't think that any of my family ever watched me play in my few competitions. But I'm not complaining, mind you, just observing.)

I even followed professional tennis. When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-'70s while working in the B-1 Division of Rockwell International ("Where Science gets down to Business"), I went to The Strings' World TeamTennis games at the Fabulous Forum. (I'm stunned to find out that WTT is still in business.) I'd even know who was playing at Wimbledon.

But I don't follow it or any other sport now. I didn't recognize the names of either of the players tonight. The closest I've gotten to tennis in a long time were the occasional emails I'd get offering me hot pix of Anna Kournikova. I had no idea who they were talking about. (Roger Federer, on the other hand...)

I guess I'm over tennis.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A lamp.

Bling! Went the Strings of My Heart!

I was talking with Mom a bit more than a month ago. She said that she was going to Santa Fe or Albuquerque to look for some drawer knobs or handles. I had told her of my attempt at the same kind of project long ago. We wanted to replace the ordinary handles on the doors and drawers at the end of the hall that have been there since we moved into the house. We went to San Diego Hardware to try to find something nice to put there.

There were acres of knobs and handles on display. And even more in their catalogs. After a only few minutes I was overwhelmed. I was hyperventilating and had to leave.

Years went by.

After we lit up the hall with our Solatubes we could see the boring hardware much too well. It had to go. Mom's trip to the hardware store inspired me to give it another try. Jerry was only too happy to work on this project.

We headed back down to San Diego Hardware. (What, you expected us to go to the Home Depot?)

This time, I remained calm. And, in spite of the extraordinary number of choices, it didn't take us long to make a decision.

We chose some Edgar Berebi handles.

Here's the end of the hall, lit up by our Solatubes.
The handles are intricately carved. There is faint detail carved even on the back sides of the handles.
We didn't choose to mount the handles at this angle. That's where the holes are.

The drawers' handles were what got us interested in this line of hardware. We've got some salt and pepper shakers that match our L'Objet turtle napkin rings that are covered with Swarovski crystal that sparkle in even the faintest light. These drawer handles have the same treatment.
These drawer handles sparkle in even the faintest light!

While we were searching the catalog for the handles that had the right widths and same finish, we saw some switch plates and thought they were pretty. But we didn't order one.

Till a week later.

We thought about it and decided that we needed to finish the sparkly treatment of the newly lit hallway. So we went back down to San Diego Hardware, flipped through their catalog and ordered the switch plate that has the same finish as the drawer handles.

I tried and tried to get a picture of the sparkly switch plate. I tried day light. I tried at night with just the Solatube's light. But my lame camera couldn't really capture the sparkles. So I settled for a flash picture. It shows some sparkles.
I guess if you want to see their full beauty, you'll just have to schedule a visit.