In posting my most recent trip to Utah, I remembered I hadn't posted the the pictures from our sojourn there in August. So, forgive me if I backtrack.

We drove up, arriving just at sunset, so we parked in the small park next to Dan and Ann's home and ran up the trail to catch a shot or two. We were also trying out Dave's new camera. We realized, on our trip to Europe, that it would be better if we each had a camera.

Anna Clare had arranged for the Eastmond siblings and their spouses to meet for a dinner at the Lion House. I'd never been there and heard about their dinner rolls. All the rumors are correct--they are something else. We had a delightful meal, with good conversations. Here are some photos of that evening.

Janice and Bruce
(Dave's sister and her husband)

Becky and Bob
(Dave's sister and her husband)

Anna Clare and Earl
(Dave's sister and her husband)

Ann and Dan
(Dave's brother and his wife)

Nick and Irene
(Dave's brother and his wife)

Group Shot

Trip to Utah, October 2007

First order of the trip is lunch at Trio with my sister Susan, then a skip next door to the chocolate shop where, for the first time in my life I had Mole chocolates. Heavens! They're tasty--but spicy hot, with bits of chili decorating the top. Name of the shop is XOCOLATE.

Utah is putting out its fall colors. This tree is outside my parents' condo, and the scene below is the mountain just above them. I never tired of seeing the copper-colored foliage on the mountain.

More flora and fauna, in the way of the Utah Noodle Parlor sign. My mother said she'd never eaten there. I said I never really wanted to, but what a sign.

My father likes to paint. No, he must paint, and this is his latest, based in.

Another day we met my brother Scott for lunch, then went by the place where Dad's art is hanging. The painting is beautiful.

A visit to my Mom's and Dad's wouldn't be complete without scones. He's making some for breakfast, having soaked the dried apricots in orange juice overnight. Heavens! They're tasty.

Fall has come to our house. Kilim pillows on the bed, along with a plaid quilt.

The quilt that was inspired by a photograph of my niece Emma standing in the fall woods, is hanging in the hallway.

Of course, that means that the temperature climbed into the 80s today, and the Santa Ana winds were clocked at 40 mph. I always think of Joan Didion's piece about San Bernardino (Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream) when I hear the newscasters speak about the Santa Anas.

Just to prove that the Internet's one of the biggest, yet more interesting places to waste time, go see Mutato Muzika's website and watch the Quicktime movie of his samples.

I especially like the one where all the people are dominoes falling down, even if it is old.

This guy really thinks outside the box.

I've had these blue bottles for a while, and moved them to my window sill, where they catch the light.

Dave brought me this one from somewhere. The Eye of God bracelet is from a friend, who brought it back from the Holy Land. We like this bottle because it reminds us of Saratoga Resorts, a place owned and run for many years by Dave's grandparents, father, and his sister and brothers. It was finally sold. The most lucrative thing was not necessarily the land, but the water rights.

This bottle is from a small grocery store in Carmel Valley. My parents lived there for several years, and the grocery store was a fascination with all its different things for sale--this water from Wales being one of them. They also had the best bottled artichoke dip ever.

Catchy tune, this one.

This is me, cleaning the house for fall, wearing my favorite leaf slippers. I don't have a black cat, but I do have a raccoon who has taking up sleeping in my arbor outside my study window. At first we thought it was a possum, having had their likes up there before. But when I heard the rustling the other night, I shined my flashlight into a masked face--an early trick or treater?

For the last few autumns, we've hosted a party for Dave's department, to welcome in new students. It was last night, and here's some photo shots.

Dave fills up the water jug--an elegant glass version with a spigot that we borrowed from a friend.

The last few years we've had golden yellow tablecloths. Ta-da! A change to red.

Clipped a few greens in the yard to assemble these centerpieces, along with Target clearance candles.

Potluck! Last year we had over 20 desserts, tons of chips/dips, lots of bottles of soda and almost no main dish. So everyone "corrected" for that and this year lots of main dish, three desserts, no chips/dips or sodas.

We liked the Japanese paper lanterns we'd hung in the patio.

From the 1947 Cookie Recipe Book, published by the California State Grange:

We may live without poetry, music and art,
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends, we may live without books
But a civilized man cannot live without cooks.

Today I made some Panna Cotta, which is an Italian version of Creme Brulee. And before that, for dinner, we had Panzanella, a tossing-together of roasted vegetables, homemade croutons, chickpeas, with a garlic-infused oil and caper dressing. I also added some grilled chicken, cut up into cubes.

It's nice to have some new recipes for a change.

I had to get up early to take Liz to a YW activity. I thought this was a perfect way to start the day.

I'm dreaming bookcases.

Our friend Roger came by tonight with a sketch of how our built-ins might look. I was ecstatic to see a dream on paper. He's really talented--an architect--who can always dream a way to make it better. We joke about that. (It always costs more money, that way, he says.)

While our bookcases aren't seasick like these, they are rather stuffed. And then there's the 16 boxes of books in the garage.

I'd better edit the collection.

Seventy-mile-an-hour photos are what happens when the driver holds up the camera, shoots randomly while driving, and later gets to see what comes out.

Interesting linear rainbow just outside of Kingman Arizona.

To the right, the golden landscape fronted by mountains in silhouette and ever-present telephone wires.

To the left pink diffused clouds, heavy with rain, blend into the rose-tinted landscape.

User Manual

The gold-anodized aluminum case for the "Sound of Earth" recording illustrates how the record should be played.

from an editorial in the September 5th 2007 New York Times, the record's producer wrote:
"Over the past three decades, the gold record has become an article of international curiosity. Spirited discussions continue about what we might do differently if we were making it today. (Having produced the record, I answer that I wouldn’t change much.) At the time, though, the record almost didn’t make it.

NASA officials, worried that Congress would ridicule the record as a waste of public money, had tried to play it down. Press-release photos of the spacecraft almost invariably showed the side opposite to where the record was bolted on, literally hiding it from view.

And after the record was completed, NASA rejected it on technical grounds. Late one night in a New York sound studio, when we’d finished cutting the master, I inscribed the words, “To the makers of music — all worlds, all times,” in the “takeout grooves” next to the label. (The Voyager record is a metal version of the 33 1/3 vinyl records of the day, recorded at half-speed to double its data content. Etching an inscription between the takeout grooves was a trope I’d picked up from John Lennon.)

A NASA quality-control officer checked the record against specifications and found that while the record’s size, weight, composition and magnetic properties were all in order, its blueprints made no provision for an inscription.

So the record was rejected as a nonstandard part, and the space agency prepared to replace it with a blank disc. Sagan had to persuade the NASA administrator to sign a waiver before the record could fly."

---Timothy Ferris

Jupiter's Atmosphere

Voyager 1 reached Jupiter on March 5, 1979, but as early as January, its images exceeded the quality of anything ever taken from Earth. No terrestrial-based telescope could capture the subtle swirling atmosphere seen in this Voyager 1 image. The spacecraft recorded enormous lightning storms crackling in the high atmosphere.

The first spacecraft captured 19,000 images and many other scientific measurements of Jupiter. Voyager 2 brought the total to 33,000 images. In just a few months, the twin spacecraft overturned existing theories, and raised new questions about Jupiter and its moons.

Image: NASA

(text from WIRED magazine)

Thousands of Post-it notes were artfully placed around New York City this summer, with an invitation for onlookers to write what they had to do.

What is on your To Do list?

Fly high.

Balloon Interior
Eden, Utah
August 2007

Happy Eighteenth Anniversary

We went to Mario's for dinner. My first course was a chilled yellow tomato gazpacho, with a garnish of julienned grilled vegetables. We always evaluate our meals out at new places, and this was pronounced the winner for that course.

When we were in Italy this summer, we tried a new dessert for us: panna cotta. That was on the menu as well. Yep. It was the winner for the dessert course.

We had a pleasant time, enjoying each other's company. There's a deepening of the friendship that happens over many years, an easiness that comes only with time. I can't really explain it, only to say that feels like wearing a favorite piece of clothing, all soft and malleable and familiar from time's effects. . . only a marriage of a lengthening duration is better.

So.
I read about the lunar eclipse and was amazed to find myself awake at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning. I took the first shot through my study window. I checked the internet (see blurb below), then took myself, my flashlight and my camera outside for a better look (middle shot). I went back to bed and thought that if I was wandering around the backyard at 2:40 a.m., I might as well stay up for the Big Event at 3 a.m. (last shot).

I was joined by a my neighbor's sprinklers scaring me to death ( a sudden burst of sound while you're standing in your pink gingham nightgown and old sandals in the middle of the night, while using the handle of the barbeque as a photo rest is rather startling), as well a possum scurrying away from the beam of my flashlight.

(click to enlarge)

This is what I wish my camera could take.

(This one's an older one from the NASA website, with this caption: The March 3, 2007, lunar eclipse favored Africa, Europe, and Asia. Photo by Anthony Ayiomamitis.)

When I mentioned to my students that I'd been up for the lunar esclipse, they all looked at me with blank faces. And I'm trying to remember that ditty my dad used to quote to me. Something about "the cow going up to the moon but over; I don't know what made her so lunar a loon--all she'd been having was clover."

That echoed through my head as well, as I watched the moon turn a rusty orange color.

Don't even ask me where this came from. I have no idea.

But it all started when Barbara T. and I were talking about hard drive size, then I looked at the size of my hard drive, and started "getting info" on all my main folders to see where the memory hog was.

Photos.

So then I had to go into photos and see what I could get rid of, because of course, I'm supposed to be grading and this is what I do when I'm supposed to be grading, and I found all these random shots of weird things that would only open up OS9, the old Mac systerm which tells you how old they are. So I had to save a few in the new OSX, but now I'm really feeling like I need to get going on the grading, so I quit when I hit this one.

Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: Weinberger insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break—they're already breaking—in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world."

As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information, creating swarms.

Obviously all my data has broken loose from its organization, which way is another way to say my room is a mess.
(Which also means I'm working on my Mary Poppins act today.)

Fascinating slide show today in the New York Times Online Edition about the redesigning of highway sign fonts. (I loved this graphic.) The new font is name Clearview. Head over to the New York Times, then the August 12 Magazine, then look for this article and the accompanying slideshow. If I had another life, I would want to live it as a graphic designer.

This site has been "dark" for some time, due to the fact that I've been involved in running a Young Women's camp up in our local mountains.

The picture below is me, when I went to camp (aruund 1969--the year the first man walked on the moon). I'm seated, on the right.

And the photo below was taken last week. I was the lead cook, as well as helping to organize and run the camp. When I was beset with other worries and commitments, the fine staff behind me took over. Others rotated in during the week, while some of these cooks left.
I'm in the front, in the lime green shirt.

Here are three other who helped (l to r): Liz, my secretary and Gal Monday-Thru-Friday; Lisa, who worked with the 16 year olds (the backbone of the camp) and kept them running; and Barbara, my daughter and Craft Woman Extraordinaire.

I'm now doing receipts, paying bills, cleaning out the 12 boxes in my front room, but it's over. O-V-E-R.

Yukon Legend, exploded

This has occupied my time lately--getting a permit to plop a faux campfire in the middle of an existing fire ring at our Big Bear Camp. That, and scrubbing out the grout in my kitchen counter.

More, later.

Be Very Happy
Montalcino, Italy
June 2007

"The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can't spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers."
--from the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert