Bodega Trip

While my mother moved to Maine last summer, her house has not yet sold, victim of bad timing. I went over there yesterday to check on things and meet with the realtor.

It was the first time I’d been back since she left.

It was cold but sunny and with almost no wind to speak of, an anomaly in this place where there’s almost always an onshore breeze (more like a gale, usually).

I took myself to lunch at the wonderful Seaweed Cafe (baked queso fresco over roast vegetables and amaranth pudding, washed down with an exquisite Ti Kwan Yin). This is a restaurant that takes “local” food seriously, serving, for instance, wine from not just Sonoma County, but WESTERN Sonoma County.

After I walked along the Head, a place I’d walked so many times with my mother, and stopped at the spot where she strew some of my father’s ashes.

Bittersweet. I’m glad she’s moved to a community she can grow to be a part of while she’s still strong and has all her faculties (and can be near the grandchildren). But she’s far away now. This scattering, fruit of choice and opportunity, comes with a certain price…

From Farm To Pie

On an appropriately pie-shaped plot of land south of San Francisco on the Peninsula coast is an educational farm named Pie Ranch. This farm grows all the ingredients for pies: wheat, berries, bees for honey, goats for milk, chickens for eggs, pumpkins for pumpkin filling. This week they opened up a a café and pie shop in San Francisco named Mission Pie, located at 25th and Mission. Why pie? They say:

We call ourselves Pie Ranch for several reasons: 1) because the ranch is in the shape of a slice of pie; 2) pie, with all its ingredients and associations, is a great means for understanding how food comes from the land to our tables and 3) because the promise of pie will encourage city youth and adults to come discover the beauty and importance of rapidly disappearing farms to the future of people in the Bay Area, our food security, health and our understanding and appreciation of life and nature.

(From World Changing).

Freeze

No, it’s not Minnesota here, but we’re having an unusual Arctic air mass moving in. The minimum temperature for the next several days is expected to drop to the 20s Fahrenheit. Right now it’s 37 outside and dropping, with a north wind picking up. We’re worried about our newly-planted guavas; we’ve covered them with gardening fleece tarps that will hopefully keep them out of trouble.

Gobs More Of Weather Data

I’m not quite sure how to directly make use of the data for Pica’s garden, but at least there’s a good source of such information for us. This is CIMIS, the California Irrigation Management Information System. The state Department of Water Resources maintains a set of over 120 automated weather stations in the agricultural portions of California to provide measurements of evapotranspiration — that is, water loss from soil and plants to the atmosphere — for irrigation planning purposes. Conveniently, there’s a station less than 2 miles from our house. It’s a very solid data record, and it’s neat to see an event like last Friday’s bitter north wind reflected there.

Beetles Among Us

Thankfully the stinky beetles that were invading our house this fall have become scarce (though they have been replaced for now in the household insect pest department by Argentine ants). I never did take one into the Bohart Museum of Entomology for positive identification, but my best guess is that they are Nomius pygmaeus, based on appearance and that this species has been described as a stinky occasional household pest.

Happily, would-be California coleopterists have two new resources to call upon. The first is the website of the California Beetle Project at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. This is an online checklist and database describing the more than 7500 species of beetles in California. The second is that UC Press has just published the Field Guide to Beetles of California. I haven’t seen this book yet but judging by the many others in the California Natural History Guide series it should be very good.

Place Blogging Directory

Lisa Williams of Watertown, Mass. has just launched a directory and aggregation site for place blogging called, appropriately enough, Placeblogger. She has been populating the directory with catalog entries these past several months but ever since the site’s public launch at midnight of this new year visitors have been adding entries at a reasonable clip. I added one for Feathers of Hope this evening.

J Street Venture

The Yolo Bypass is an imposing barrier. It’s about 15 miles from our house to Sacramento, but taking the trek over the causeway is not something we do very often, and we don’t know our way around that city very well. But we do have a beat — we head over to Midtown and J Street.

Yesterday it turned wasn’t a very good day to head over there — two of the stores we wanted to go to were closed on account of the holidays. That would Art Ellis, a small family-run art store, and Metro Electronics, something of a rarity, an actual electronics parts store. All was not lost, as there is another art store a couple blocks up, and Pica was able to get her printmaking paper.

After that, we tried the Thai restaurant across the street from Art Ellis, Thai Basil — it was very good. So we have the basis of a good Saturday outing, followed by lunch, and maybe a trip to the Crocker Art Museum near the river. Sundays don’t work though — neither Metro Electronics or Art Ellis are open.

Dark

I write this by candlelight and a failing laptop battery, owing to a strong north wind… we did get to go out today and see the northern shrike, however:

Vertical Garden

Patrick Blanc’s work literally takes landscape architecture to a new dimension. There are more than a few buildings I wouldn’t mind seeing thus adorned.

(Via Urban Cartography)

On Not Getting Soaked

Our Bird Count yesterday was cold, but sunny sunny sunny, and we were able to bike the ridge. It felt good to move, felt good to climb the few hills along the ridgeline, to be startled by the purple finch’s raspberry hue.

One of our area 8 crew got bitten by a gopher snake, however. She was trying to usher it off the road. (It was her second attempt: the snake just resumed its suicidal position.)

I’ll post a photo of said snake tomorrow, but Ron’s doing fine, I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear.

Next year: shall we cycle up Mix? That’s a steep gradient and goes on for almost five miles. I’m not in any shape to do it any time soon, but would like to get that way…

List of Birds Seen in Area 8:

Great Egret 1
Canada Goose 8
Turkey Vulture 38
White-tailed Kite 1
Golden Eagle 3
Sharp-shinned Hawk 3
Red-shouldered Hawk 6
Red-tailed Hawk 18
American Kestrel 7
Prairie Falcon 1 (Count Week)
Wild Turkey 13
California Quail 47
Mountain Quail 1
Killdeer 21
Rock Pigeon 15
Mourning Dove 18
Great Horned Owl 9
Western Screech-owl 1
Northern Pygmy-owl 1 (Count Week)
Anna’s Hummingbird 7
Belted Kingfisher 1
Acorn Woodpecker 32
Northern Flicker 33
Red-breasted Sapsucker 2
Nuttall’s Woodpecker 14
Pileated Woodpecker 1
Black Phoebe 10
Say’s Phoebe 3
Loggerhead Shrike 1
Hutton’s Vireo 3
Steller’s Jay 17
Western Scrub-jay 48
Yellow-billed Magpie 22
American Crow 3
Common Raven 14
Wrentit 31
Oak Titmouse 25
Bushtit 59
Brown Creeper 2
White-breasted Nuthatch 8
Bewick’s Wren 6
Golden-crowned Kinglet 3
Ruby-crowned Kinglet 54
Western Bluebird 11
Hermit Thrush 14
Varied Thrush 21
American Robin 377
Northern Mockingbird 9
European Starling 24
Cedar Waxwing 30
Phainopepla 6
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon’s) 17
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle) 1
Warbler species 1
California Towhee 9
Spotted Towhee 9
Lark Sparrow 4
Fox Sparrow 10
Savannah Sparrow 3
Lincoln’s Sparrow 3
Song Sparrow 1
White-throated Sparrow 1
White-crowned Sparrow 33
Golden-crowned Sparrow 75
Sparrow species 3
Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon) 121
Western Meadowlark 13
Red-winged Blackbird 215
Brewer’s Blackbird 8
Purple Finch 10
House Finch 63
American Goldfinch 7
Lesser Goldfinch 8
Goldfinch species 2