Nothing But Blue Skies This crazy sun keeps me guessing. I’ve lived here now full-time for ten months and I am still amazed when I go to different parts of my property how the sun is in places where I don’t expect it. Part of that is about me and my orienteering capabilities while on my property and part of it is about the full range of motion that the sun (I guess I should…
Wildlife I have written stories about many different types of critters this year, some real and some imagined (since I cannot swear what caused this noise or that). This morning while showering, I glanced out the smallish etched-glass windows in the shower and saw that a large hawk was sitting in the branches of the seed pod tree of the Agave Americana that had sprung up over this year. That “tree” is about forty feet…
One Million Words I just read Kim my latest story about TeslaLand and it led to me reading my story titles from the past sixty days or so. That led me to look at my blog statistics, where I noticed that I am up to 784 stories posted since I began the blog in February, 2019. When I went up to Sonoma last year to visit some friends, we went to the Jack London homestead,…
A Visit to TeslaLand When I was a kid in grade school, there were two things we spent all summer anxiously awaiting in September, and neither one involved the start of school. One was the new network TV show line-up from ABC, CBS and NBC. TV Guide would dutifully construct and publish a two-page weekly schedule. We would pour over that schedule and curse the network scheduling executives that purposefully matched up head-to-head the shows…
The Heat Is On So far this year I have written about 325 blog stories. I used to write more than one per day (especially on weekends) but I have mostly stopped that practice because I don’t want to wear myself out. Obviously, writing is not physically demanding, but there really is only so much in the tank to say and I neither want to churn out really shitty prose nor overdo it to the…
Tattooed How many times have you seen movies where during a wild and crazy night, the protagonist goes the last yard and wakes up the next morning with a crazy tattoo in a crazy place on his or her body. If it’s a guy, the tattoo is something too cute for words and it’s in a spot where all his friends can see it to make fun of him. If it’s a girl, the tattoo…
Electrical Connections From the youngest age we are trained to be wary of electricity, and yet it is truly ubiquitous, surrounding us in our homes and cars. You cannot go very far without encountering electricity. As naturally beautiful as my hilltop out here may be, if I stop to think about it, I am dependent on electricity in every corner of my new world. Out in the Cecil Garden I have an electric fountain that…
Taking It To The Limit I don’t think I have that gene that causes me to test the limits on everything I do. I know people who have that going on and some are still with us and some managed to exceed their limits and pay the ultimate price. Obviously, not every activity has a terminal penalty associated with pushing too far. Sometimes the reward is simply a proverbial speeding ticket, a slap on the…
Exit Stage Left With COVID-related deaths now exceeding 250,000 in the United States, the news is once again dominated by by two things, the manner of reaction being taken to combat the virus, and the lack of enablement by the current Trump administration insuring a smooth transition of power to the new Biden administration, especially vis-a-vis management of the Coronavirus battle. Rather than celebrating the impact that Project Warp Speed might have had on the…
Making Hay This is feeling like an unusual moment for me and while I’m not in the limbo that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inhabit, it is a bit of a suspended animation moment for me as well. I can’t tell if it is all the build-up to the election and now waiting to find out what the mad man-child will try to do next, or something else. It probably doesn’t help that I am…