From Wildflowers, posted by Alice Erickson on 4/29/2009 (12 items)
- Don’t really know what this one is
- Or this one either …
- Shooting Star
- These are all over the place and are very pretty, but they might be weeds.
- Indian Paintbrush
- This one’s a Johnny Jumpup.
- Shooting star
- California poppy
- More poppies growing out of a rock
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These pics were taken in late October of 2011 at Henry Cowell State Park. Cowell is the in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Felton, California.
Several weeks ago, we ordered an Aliner Sport, hard-sided popup camping trail, and this was our first outing with it.
Do you ever – ever – do only one thing at a time anymore? I’m not sure I do. If I’m doing something, I’m thinking about something else. If I’m doing something else, I’m doing another something else at the same time. I doubt this works all that well, but I can’t seem to figure out how to stop doing it.
Latest epic fail details follow if you have the patience to follow along with me.
One of the joys of working from a home office is that you’re able to structure your day with a perfect blend of business and personal work. It all fits together seamlessly, allowing you to accomplish much, much more than you would if you had to shlep out to an office job somewhere. Ha! Not only Ha!, but Bwahaha as well!
What you actually get is an avalanche of personal and business tasks, all of which have to be done now. Not later, now. Soooo … I’d finished up an item for a website and I thought to myself, “Self, your husband is likely to expect dinner again tonight. Better do something about that.” Said husband loves anchovy pizza, so I left the desk and went into the kitchen. I got out the sourdough starter (we really cook around here) and started making pizza dough. Got the wet ingredients into the big mixer bowl and attached the bread hook. Opened the whole wheat flour canister, scooped out a scant 1/2 cup of the stuff and dumped a scant 1/2 cup of sugar into the mixing bowl instead. Doh! Dough doh!
If I’d had my mind on pizza dough instead of having my mind on something else and only my idiot hands in pizza dough mode, that wouldn’t have happened. I ran damage control on the dough as best I could, and I think it’ll be eatable. I think.
This doesn’t even begin to be the worst thing I’ve done, all due to doing one thing while thinking and planning on another. This has to stop, but I can’t see how. Anybody got any ideas?
The watermelon-smashing comic, Gallagher, said that about cats. His point was that if you bought a bunch of a type of cat food, then that was the cat food that your cat was never going to eat again. Because they can’t count, but they can compare.
I don’t know how seriously he meant that – knowing Gallagher it could have been anywhere between not at all and dead serious – but I do think he hit on the truth.
Now for the story about my cat, who can’t count, but who can compare.
Quite a few years ago, when the cat was young and pesky curious, I was rebuilding a computer for my daughter. I had the case open and everything all picked apart so I could put in new parts. This was before plug-and-play, so one of the new expansion cards had a tiny ziplock baggy of itty bitty screws and jumpers. The cat wanted the bag. She took it. I took it back, and I wouldn’t let her get it again.
She made one of those cat “hurummp” noises and flounced off. Siamese can really flounce. She jumped up on the computer desk and onto the shelf at the back of it. She started rummaging in a big coffee mug that I kept flotsam and jetsam in. Siamese can really rummage. She pulled out a tiny ziplock bag of itty bitty screws and jumpers, nearly identical to the bag I wouldn’t let her have. With this in her mouth, she hopped down off the desk, onto the floor next to me. She dropped “her” bag on the floor next to “my” bag and looked very pleased with herself.
I’ve told this story to more people than probably ever wanted to hear it, and practically nobody has seen the point. I’ve known people who couldn’t do a comparison like that, let alone remember where they’d seen the like-kind.
This cat probably couldn’t count, but she definitely could compare.
I’m surprised that I’m surprised that there’s any need to post this. But, surprising as it is, there is a need to post this.
No comments show on this site unless I specifically approve them, and I’m never going to approve these types of comments:
- Spam that’s only designed to get your website linked from here
- Any comment that leads me to believe you haven’t read the post. This is a blog. You read the posts, you comment if you like.
- Any comment that’s defamatory, profane, or offensive
- Any comment that tells me I should click a link to see how I can make money from this site. Making money is not what this site is about.
- Any comment that tries to get a reader to click a link.
Liking anything about any post or this site in general is not necessary to get your comment approved, as long as you say it nicely. You can disagree with me if you like. You can post an opposing viewpoint to anything. But stay on topic! If you’re commenting on a hiking post, I don’t want to see your opinions on how the site looks. I want to see your opinions on the post about hiking. If you don’t want to talk about a specific post, then don’t comment on it.
Since we live on the West Coast, we’ve ended up going on several Mexican Riviera cruises. They’re nice. Usually the weather’s good, the departure ports are convenient, and they’re usually reasonably priced. Good deal.
We went on one of these just about two years ago. I’d looked the shore excursions over and liked the looks of a “Sierra Madre Hike” in Puerto Vallarta. My husband and I hike a lot, so it wasn’t a stretch for us to do this. The description sounded good. There was a little notation about “your feet will get wet.” Big deal, huh?
So, we went. They bussed us out to some sort of ranch/restaurant/gift shop place and we took off from there. It was hot, but not killing hot, and the guides were nice and informative. They led us up over a hill and down the other side. The down the other side part was interesting – very steep and there were ropes to cling to so when you fell and broke your neck you could get a rope burn on your hand on the way down. Fine so far.
At the bottom of the hill, we stopped for a break and a soda. Nice shady picnic area type of place. All still good.
Then it was time to start back. The guides led us out the other end of the picnic area, and we immediately came to a river. A fast running, rain-swollen brown river. We had to cross that, so we all linked hands and started out. By mid-calf, it was hard going since the water was very fast and very strong. By mid-thigh, it was getting ridiculous. A lady ahead of me in the human chain lost her footing and went down, stopped only by one of the guides’ hands. She couldn’t get back on her feet! They finally got her vertical again after a lot of pulling while all of us stood there in the river trying not to follow her example. The head honcho guide decided to go back, so we all went back to the shore we came from.
The leader of the guides said he was going to get a horse – a group of horseback riders had arrived at the picnic area just as we were leaving – to carry our cameras and such across and then we’d all give it another try.
I can’t swim. Stupid, I know. But there it is. I can’t swim. And I said so to the guide. I said that nowhere in the hike description had it said anything about anything like this. This didn’t seem to compute with him, but eventually he said that he would send me across the river on the horse along with the cameras. Fine. Another lady in the group immediate informed him that she was going across on the horse too!
We got across – the other lady and I on separate trips on the horse and rest of them clinging to each other in the daggone raging torrent. We started the walk back to the ranch, and it was really nice. Pretty trail. Flat. Cool enough too, since we were all evaporating from the river crossing. After about a half mile going down the trail, the guide led us off it, over to the river where we had to cross again. Nice.
The water was deep here, up to my shoulders, but it wasn’t running fast and I had my husband to hold onto. So, I waded across that just fine.
What’s the point of this whole ramble? The point is that if you’re looking at a Princess Cruiselines shore excursion and it says you’ll get your feet wet, you should just take scuba gear with you and be done with it.
I work from a home office. Really, I do work from a home office. And that home office is nearly always some unholy sinkhole of cluttered awfulness. There’re stacks on stacks. The stacks have married and bred little stacks. About 10 years ago, the cat took over a large portion of my desk and won’t relinquish it, so at least there aren’t any stacks there.
This morning, being in full-on Monday mode and lacking brain cells for productive work, I thought I’d just tidy up the smaller desk, so my dear husband could have a little place to call his own with his little computer that he calls his own.
One thing led to another – one thing being the realization that I had about two dozen manuals for software that went outdated years ago and the other thing being the realization that I really just needed to sort out this mess – and I was off.
First, I carried out four arm-loads of those outdated software manuals and dumped them into the dumpster. That was the easy part.
Next, I thought I’d sort out the cable-spaghetti that lurks under my main desk. I still had plugs snaking around down there for a computer that went away about the same time that the out-dated software manuals went outdated. I’d replaced the computer, but I’d just left the cords writhing around down in the underside the desk.
And let’s talk about the new pen tablet that was sitting on top of an old pen tablet that had lost its little electronic mind. There they were – stacked one on top of the other, next to my keyboard on the slideout tray. If a working tv sitting on top of a broken tv makes one a redneck, what does this tablet nonsense make me? Not sure I want to know. So, I untangled that, which involved crawling under the desk and poking cables down through the cutout. I also needed to undo the cable bundle that had the old tablet cable in it and put the new tablet cable in it instead.
By this time, I was starting to wish I’d decided to spend the day in bed, eating bon-bons and watching Matlock reruns.
Post-it notes? Let’s not go there. Suffice it to say that I found a lot of them, each and every one of which had some probably vital piece of information on it. Or what might have been vital information if it had been readable and/or complete. I wish I had a dollar for every post-it that had a phone number on it but no frickin clue who that phone number belonged to. In between all this frolicking with stacks and crap and stacks of crap, I had to stop the frolicking and actually try to do some real work.
This is how my Monday went. How was yours?’,’
We don’t take long breaks when we hike. It isn’t that we’re demon-strong hikers; it’s just that we can’t get going again if we stop the long. The engines stall, and we have to whine our way back to the trail head.
If it’s a long hike, 6 hours or more, we do need to take lunch. We usually take what we call “trail lunch,” and that usually consists of tuna kits, granola bars, and maybe some nuts. We stop long enough to eat that and then move on.
Fine dining it’s not, but one hiking lunch stays in my mind as a treasured memory. My husband’s grandmother and her family hiked from Tenaya Lake, up over Cloud’s Rest and then down to Yosemite Valley (go look at Google Earth) when she was in her early teens. My husband had always wanted to do that hike, so a few years ago we did it as a day hike. A looooong day hike.
I’d tell you about this hike in detail, but as Alton Brown says, “that’s another show.” This is about our lunch on that day.
We’d huffed it up the Tenaya steps, down the other side, up the Cloud’s Rest trail, and down it. We’d enjoyed looking way down on the top of Half Dome from the Cloud’s Rest trail coming down it. We’d passed some loony backpackers huffing their way up the trail to Cloud’s Rest – carrying lawn chairs and a large boom box strapped to the back of their packs and oddly enough with no idea where they were or even where they were coming from.
Hubby was getting hungry. He wanted to know where and when we were going to stop for lunch. I had an idea on that and said I’d like to have lunch when we hit the intersection with the Half Dome trail. He said fine.
In due course, we came to said intersection and sat down on some rocks to eat lunch. It was getting up in the afternoon, and it was a hot day. As we were eating lunch, a steady stream of perspiring, red-faced, exhausted people came dragging themselves up the trail, Half Domeward. Each and every group of them saw the signpost there at the intersection: Half Dome 2.5 miles. Every one of them just about whinnied in dismay. Two and a half miles! How can that be? Then they flopped down in the shade.
Bad person that I am, and bad person whose hard work was done and who only had to amble down the John Muir trail to Happy Isles, I took great satisfaction in their dissatisfaction.
That’s my idea of a great lunch break when hiking!
Most people have some kind of theory about where everything came from and where it’s going. Probably, for most people, this involves some kind of creation by some kind of higher power and some kind of universal destination, also guided by that higher power.
I’m not a religious person, but I still have a theory. If you have no sense of toleration or sense of humor, read no further. Go off somewhere else and read something else, possibly somebody else’s theory of life, the universe and everything.
I’d recommend the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books, since that’ll at least give you a definite answer.
On to my theory. The universe is an immensely large nut roll. Maybe a Pay Day bar, or possibly a Russel Stover Vermont Fudge Log. But a nut roll.
There isn’t any such thing as a beginning to this nut roll, and there isn\’t any end to it either. Those concepts make no sense. It’s the nut roll. There isn’t anything else. There isn’t any time either. Your entire existence is within a portion of the nut roll. Your life line occupies a given volume or length of the nut roll. You can see backward in your nut roll segment but not, for most people, forward. Such is a nut roll.
A few people occupy part of the outside layer of the nut roll, where the nuts form an irregular surface. This enables some people to see both directions in the nut roll, since they’re a nut that sticks up above the rest. (Now don’t go all awkward on me here and ask how these nuts can stick up above the nut roll if the nut roll is all that there is. Work with me on this.)
You aren’t ever born and you don’t ever die. You just occupy a portion of the nut roll, in some state or another.
This was our first cruise. I’d found out about the total eclipse of the sun in July of 1991, the one that they still call “the big one” due to its length. My first thought was to go to Hawaii, since the eclipse cut a swath across one of the islands. My husband then said that if he was going to go chasing off to see this, he’d just as soon try a cruise to see it on. I checked and found that the Carnival Jubilee was going to be in Mazatlan, right in the path, on eclipse day. So, I booked us on it!
It was several months out, maybe as much as a year, so we had quite a long time to wait. In the due course of time, we found ourselves on that ship in Mazatlan. Which was completely clouded over! There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on aboard the ship, since it was packed with eclipse chasers. I think the ship’s officers dithered around a bit, then they announced that they were going to take the ship back out to sea and try and find an opening in the clouds. They said that anybody who wanted to could get off in Mazatlan and take their chances. Some people did get off, which was probably a big mistake since it was still clouded over when the ship pulled back into port later that day.
The ship sailed out of port, and they started trying to find a big enough clear spot. I spent some anxious hours, hoping that I’d get to see the eclipse and also hoping that if I didn’t get to see it I wouldn’t make a fool of myself by throwing a temper tantrum all over the promenade deck. That was a real possibility!
So, we sailed around through sunshine, clouds and rain looking for that clear spot. We saw a water spout in the distance – a tornado over the ocean. I fussed a lot.
In the end, they did find a clear spot and I was able to enjoy that spectacular eclipse. Unbelievable! Everything going dark. The planets and stars showing.
When it was over, and it was pretty much back to full daylight, a pod of dolphins popped up next to the ship, jumping up and down out of the water like they were trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Which they probably were!
I feel very, very lucky to have seen this, and I hope to see the North America eclipse in 2015. We plan on going North to somewhere in its path. Tentative idea now is Idaho, but this may change. We’ll be camping for this one; nobody will be putting chocolates on our pilows.
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