Reading Update

Just finished reading Lamb by Christopher Moore. SO funny. Must go pick up some of his other books.

'shrooms

Garden Bounty

This picture was taken in July. Now that we're nearly at Thanksgiving, and the garden's looking pretty bare, I'm missing the fresh strawberries and everything else. The winter crops are in, though, so soon I'll have Swiss Chard, Cabbage, lettuce, and other yummy stuff again.

Vernal Falls Stairs, Yosemite

This picture was taken in May, on the stone steps that lead up to the top of Vernal Falls at Yosemite. The mist from the waterfall was so thick, it was like being caught in a rainstorm. You can see how heavy the falls were in this picture -- they're the white mass to the right of the person at the left edge of the frame. By the time we got to the top of the falls, we were absolutely drenched. And it wasn't even an especially wet winter or spring. I was there again 3 months later, and the steps were bone dry. Here's a picture of the waterfall from then. Quite a difference, eh?

Clouds, Hilo, September 2007

So the sky in Hawaii -- Seriously amazing. I don't know if it's that the atmosphere is cleaner, or if it has something to do with being on an island, or the reflection of the ocean or what, but the sky is like 5 shades bluer than here, and the clouds were constantly blowing me away. Look at the way the sunlight is coming through these clouds. This image is completely undoctored, just taken with the normal settings on my cameral. It almost looks like a reflection, rather than the real thing. I took endless cloud pictures while I was there, so I'm sure I'll post more at some point.

Golden Orchid

Light through leaves

Hawaii Botanical Gardens, September 2007

Reading update 11/5/07

Over the weekend, I reread The Time Traveller's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. I haven't been able to get absorbed into any book I've picked up for the last couple weeks, so it was nice to go back to an old favorite, which I was probably reading for the fourth or fifth time. And it makes me bawl every single time. In fact, my eyes were still a little itchy and red when I got to work this morning. Also realized that the first time I read it must have been when I was in Chicago in 2004, before I officially moved there, training for my job teaching reading classes -- Scattered throughout the pages are the marks I used to figured out my reading speed as I practiced the speed reading skills I was going to be teaching. Hard to believe that I'm going into my fourth year at this job - it's the longest I've been with a company since Sam Goody.

Oh yeah, I'm also trying to do that blog-every-day-in-November thing, but it's a challenge when I don't have internet access at home. I think I'll have to cheat and just post an extra post or two on Mondays or Fridays :-)

Palm Reflection, Hilo 9-07

Boat, South Point, Hawaii

Dan at Bodega Bay, October 2007

Tikis, Hawaii, September 2007

Vernal Falls, Yosemite, August 2007

End of Trail

Volcano National Park, September 2007

Flippers, Captain Cook Monument, Hawaii

Note to self: What I've read for the past couple months

No one will care about this post other than me, but I want to get these books jotted down before I completely forget I've read half of them. Otherwise, I'll totally check them out of the library all over again, only to realize three pages in that there's a good reason the book feels so familiar. Plus, since I didn't write it down, I have no idea what I read all summer. This is my list since about the beginning of September.

Brian Selznick -- The Invention of Hugo Cabret. (Creative idea, lovely black and white illustrations, not as well-written as it could have been).

Maria Doria Russell -- A Thread of Grace, Children of God (Neither was anywhere near as good as The Sparrow, though CoG is a sequel)

JRR Tolkien -- The Fellowship of the Ring. (For the umpteenth time, getting ready to write lesson plans on it for work).

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy (Read them because I really enjoyed the first and third movies. The books are not as good, and I couldn't even finish the second one)

Keith Donohue -- The Stolen Child

Lois Anne Yamanaka -- Blu's Hanging (Recommended by this couple staying at the bed and breakfast with me while I was in Hawaii -- she's a local Hawaiian author)

Michael Ondaatje -- In the Skin of the Lion

Jeremy Iverson -- High School Confidential

Markus Zusak -- The Book Thief (Amazing! Best book I've read in years)

John Clinch -- Finn (the story of Huck Finn's father. Interesting. Pretty depressing)

Michael Ondaatje -- Divisadero (Nowhere near as good as The English Patient, but still quite lovely)

Cormac McCarthy -- The Road (In typical McCarthy style, really dark and emotionally difficult to read, but so well-written.)

Arthur Phillips -- The Egyptologist (The reviewers of this one must be dolts -- the "shocking" ending was SO predictable! I basically skimmed the second half of the book. I've been wanting to pick up Phillips' first novel, Prague, but after this book, I'm not so sure).

EDT on 10-25. Forgot one: Heat by Bill Buford. (The first third reads like a hero-worshipping tribute to Mario Batalli. I mostly skimmed the final third -- not nearly as good as, say, Anthony Bourdain, if you're into the whole behind-the-scenes-in-the-restaurant-industry thing).

Hi Matt

Look, a post. These pictures are from March in Santa Cruz. THAT'S how far behind I am!

So in Santa Cruz, there's this lighthouse that's been converted into a surfing museum. It's on a cliff, up above the ocean, and it's surrounded by benches that have placards that pay tribute to surfers who have gone to the great ocean in the sky, often in surfing accidents.

That doesn't seem to faze these guys, though.

This is a surfer standing on the top of a very high cliff -- 2 or 3 stories tall, I'd guess. He's checking out the waves, which are BIG.

This is that same guy about 20 seconds later. Yes, he's mid-air.



And about 30 seconds after that. Do you see what a MONSTER that wave is?


He survived, though, and here he is climbing back out of the water to do it all over again. Even the way OUT of the water looks scary as heck to me!

And finally, this is a kid (seriously -- he looked about 15) who thought he had the guts to do this. He's got his feet down on a tiny little ledge down below. He sat there for about a minute, thinking about it, then climbed right back up! I think that's a little closer to my style :-)

farm living is the life for me . . .

Hey Mike, what's that on your car?

Is it a cat? Wait, no . . .

It's an Araucana Chicken. Of course. What now?

Careful. . . careful. . . almost there . . .




Oh Crap!

There are many many things I like about living on the farm, but nothing has made me laugh as hard as this pretty much since I moved here. Especially the look on Mike's face in the last picture.

I suspect the chicken was trying to get away from the dog, who has been terrorizing them all afternoon. The dogs around here are great with the sheep, but not quite so much with the chickens

What I've Been Reading 4/13/07

I can't even begin to talk here about the hectic-ness that has been my life the past couple weeks. Suffice it to say that someone else's shit hit the fan at work and I've been busy dealing with the fallout.

So. . . Not much reading lately, but a couple of really excellent books to mention:

Nancy Farmer: The House of the Scorpion

Picked this one up last month when I was in Portland (darn it -- still haven't posted those pics!), from the remainders bin at Powells. It's young adult lit, and has won a ton of awards and rave reviews, for good reason. I read the whole book in less than a day and it was truly fabulous. The premise: It's some unspecified time in the future. Human cloning is a reality and to the South of the United States is a country called Opium, which exists, as you can guess from the name, purely to produce drugs. The main character is Matt, a young boy who learns fairly early into the book that he is a clone of the biggest of all of the drug lords. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say, Matt lives a pretty screwed-up life at the hands of the drug lord and his cronies, but eventually escapes from it all. Really interesting book. Parts of it reminded me of Louis Sacchar's Holes, and other parts reminded me of dystopic writers like Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale or Ray Bradbury. Good stuff. I'll definitely be recommending it to middle school and high school students.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love

I wasn't so sure how I'd feel about this one, not being an especially religious type, and also not having much patience for sappy self-help crap. This book turned out to be quite a lovely read, though. It's a memoir and the basic story is that Gilbert goes through a bone-crushing divorce and then the devastating end of the affair she used to shield herself from the divorce. In search of something, well, not so sucky, she decides to live abroad for a year in 3 different places: Italy (where she eats like crazy and learns to speak Italian), India (where she lives on an Ashram and meditates a lot) and Indonesia (Where she studies with a medicine man and, unexpectedly, falls in love again). This book had the real potential to become sappy, and there are certainly moments where it walks the line. But Gilbert is also pretty darn irreverant and FUNNY, to boot, so she tends to stay just this side of the line. I liked a lot of things about the book, but I think what struck me the most was Gilbert's capacity for self-forgiveness, and her lack of fear at showing that side of herself to the world. I've already recommended the book to a friend who's going through a tough break up. I kept thinking of her as I was reading -- I think there's a lot that will speak to her in this book.

And, really, that's about it for my reading for the past couple of weeks, unless you want to include countless documents at work.

Santa Cruz pics in the next post, I swear.

Oysters!

On the way home from hiking at Point Reyes yesterday, we stopped off at Hog Island Oyster Company on Highway One in Marshall for some oysters. We were totally disappointed when we pulled up and they looked closed. Turns out, they were, but the lovely young ladies that work there were still cleaning up and hadn't closed out the cash register yet. They took pity on our poor oyster-deprived souls and hooked us up.

I've never actually had oysters at home before, but we had fun learning how to open them, aided by an "oyster knife" from the general store in Tomales. Thankfully, the knife wasn't actually sharp. Otherwise, I think we would have had some blood with our oysters -- the damn things are hard to get open! Here's a pic of M. fighting with one of them.

You have to sort of wiggle the knife, which looks like a letter opener only not so sharp, into the hinge end of the oyster. Once it pops open at that edge, you twist the knife around to open the shell all the way. See below.

But, ohh, is the hard work worth it!