June 15, 2020 at 6:25 pm (Books, Conversations, Personal Bookshelf, Weather)
Tags: causes, climate change, COVID Reading, environment, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, science writing
Self is reading fast as none of the arguments are new.
- “We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast.” — p. 198
There is a big, big elephant in the room, which is the impact of Greta Thunberg, who is never mentioned. (She shows up, finally, on p. 257)
- “Any number of dead is a tragedy, but more than 10,000 die each day, globally, from the small–particulate pollution produced by burning carbon.” — p. 203
Never in a million years, at the time this book was published (2019) could anyone have imagined that a pandemic and the need to find a vaccine would soon eclipse climate change in urgency.
Back from picking up prescriptions (which always require a doctor’s visit: $162). She catches a Gavin Newsom presser. He’s addressing the ongoing need for masks. This morning, self asked the doctor if he had a test. He did, but it cost $150. He reassured her that all of the patients he’d tested had tested negative.
“Do they all live in the area?” she asked.
“Some of them,” he said.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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May 4, 2020 at 4:43 pm (Flowers, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, postaday, Weather)
Tags: Garden, Mondays, Redwood City, spring
- Maybe you’ve just given your pet a bath, or perhaps the dewdrops on your garden have given you a smile. — Tina R. Schell
Here are a couple of images from self’s archives:
Cistus (Rock Rose) on front porch after rain
Also After Rain: Clematis Montana Rubens
Backyard Watering
Stay safe. Stay tuned.
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April 9, 2020 at 12:00 am (Books, destinations, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, short story collections, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: COVID Reading, Ernest Hemingway, Italy, Milan, reading lists, restaurants, seasons
Food in this story: chestnuts. In Milan. In the fall. The war is just over (Which war? Self had to google: World War I)
Also, the Café Cova, “next door to the Scala” which “was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours” (a tourist trap now, according to Yelp)
We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them, a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket.
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March 27, 2020 at 9:08 pm (destinations, Holidays, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: blogs, Cee Neuner, New Mexico, photography
Cee Neuner: Pick a topic from this photo.
Possible topics: black and white, tree, sky, road, vanishing point, landscape, horizon, clouds, weather, country side, early morning, or come up with your own topic.
Self picked SKY.
All from her first visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, late December 2019
Museum Hill, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 28 December 2019
On the I-25 from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, 28 December 2019
Still on the I-25, Still 28 December 2019
Check out these other takes:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 29, 2020 at 6:34 pm (destinations, Flowers, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Places, postaday, Weather)
Tags: Garden, Redwood City, Saturday
This week’s Tuesday Photo Challenge, YARD, is a great one, practically tailor-made for self. When the weather is good, self spends much time in her yard. She’s extra-inspired now, as the trellis has been painted.
This was the day the painters arrived:
And this is what her front yard looked like when the plumbers arrived (She decided to take her son’s advice and have the decades-old galvanized iron pipes replaced with copper).
Meanwhile, in the backyard, her plum tree is starting to bloom.
Spring is a gorgeous time of year in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 21, 2020 at 4:36 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, destinations, Weather, Women Writers)
Tags: California, English writers, Garden, novel, reading lists, seasons, spring
c. 1948: Rose and Cassandra are daughters of an impoverished father (he’s a writer, what do you expect) and he has moved them and their stepmother, Topaz, to a dilapidated castle in the country.
The author, Dodie Smith, is English but wrote this novel in Malibu (She’s long gone, in case you were wondering)
Self started this book six days ago and is only up to pp. 43 – 44. There’s hardly any drama yet.
“There’s quite a bit of spring in the air to-night,” I told her. “You go out and smell it.”
Rose never gets emotional about the seasons so she took no notice, but Topaz went to the door at once and flung it open. Then she threw her head back, opened her arms wide and took a giant breath.
“It’s only a whiff of spring, not whole lungs full,” I said, but she was too rapt to listen. I quite expected her to plunge into the night, but after some more deep breathing she went upstairs to try on her tea-gown.
“It beats me,” said Rose. “After all this time, I still don’t know if she goes on that way because she really feels like it, if she’s acting to impress us, or just acting to impress herself.”
“All three,” I said. “And as it helps her to enjoy life, I don’t blame her.”
The novel’s been inspiring her to spend more time in her backyard. The gorgeous weather helps. The scrawny lemon tree has five fat lemons.
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February 6, 2020 at 4:59 am (Artists and Writers, destinations, Flowers, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Surprises, Weather)
Tags: art, California, exhibits, Garden, museums, Redwood City
Self loves the idea of REST.
REST is crucial to her creativity.
Recently, she had an opportunity to see an amazing exhibit at the Bakersfield Museum of Art:
Night. Rest. Nocturnes. What a beautiful theme.
Not to mention: The paintings she saw were otherworldy, powerful in their depictions of this special and mysterious time of day.
For instance, Jessica Dunne’s, which showed a San Francisco street in fog:
Just after she drove down to Bakersfield, the Bay Area had a brief string of sunny days. Gorgeous! Self went to the backyard, for the first time in weeks, and saw an eight-foot-high bush completely covered in bright, yellow flowers. So many flowers, she could barely see the green.
What is the reason for such a ridiculous display, flowers? She never fertilizes and barely waters. This is a common euryops, which is the landscape plant of choice for new subdivisions. But she’s never seen them throw out flowers in a display so in-your-face! That’s the ony way she can think to describe it. It is so overpoweringly extra. She took this picture early in the morning:
Euryops, February 2020
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 20, 2020 at 8:10 pm (Books, destinations, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Albuquerque, California, memories, Menlo Park, Mondays, New Mexico, photography, websites
Leading lines carry our eyes through a photograph. They help to tell a story, to place emphasis, and to draw a connection between objects. — Tina R. Schell on the blog Travels and Trifles: Expressing Thought Through Photography
Self loved the quote from Pete Bridgewood:
- Unlike the painter who starts with a blank canvas and builds up his image by the addition of paint, as photographers we work in the other direction.
The photos below are from December 2019, during which, as usual, self did a lot of traveling.
Old Albuquerque, December 2019
On the I-25 from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, 27 December 2019
Kepler’s Books, Downtown Menlo Park, December 2019
Thanks for the interesting prompt, Lens-Artists!
Stay tuned.
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January 5, 2020 at 3:20 pm (Conversations, Family, Places, Sundays, Weather)
Tags: Australia, causes, climate change, news
Thank you for thinking of us. Most days we wake up with smoke haze, some days worse than most. There are a few bad days where visibility is less than 100 m.
My brother-in-law lives seven minutes away. He lives close to the bush. He received a text to be ready to evacuate. He asked if he could stay in our house, just in case. There were spot fires near him.
It is sad that people have lost their houses and homes, right after Christmas.
I sometimes wonder if this is the “new normal”? It is not sustainable. Definitive proof of climate change.
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December 10, 2019 at 11:18 pm (destinations, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: England, London
Love the Tuesday Photo Challenge. Take a look at my guilty pleasures while you’re at it.
“Of course, mist is more than just a fog, as it can also be a gentle, diffuse rain, which can provide very interesting light play.”
All London Blackfriars, November 2018:
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