We drove up to Ventura for the day. D needed to take his guitar up to a luthier there for repairs.
The fabulous heavy duty guitar case he bought to protect his fabulous guitar flopped shut unexpectedly and one of the latches took a bite out of the finish on the back. That, Alanis, is ironic.
We wandered around, tried out a South American restaurant—some of the food was great, but the ceviche was not ceviche. It was gaspacho with shrimp in it. Went to a couple of museums. Nice nice day.
MM wanted to see the baby squirrel, so here you go. It’s having a great time stuffing its cheeks with Dodger’s leftover seeds.
The funny thing about the squirrels is that they will sit and sort through the food, and come back and pick over it again, until it’s all gone. Why not just scoop it up at all at once and figure it out later? Nope, they want the best they can find every time!
I didn’t even see the quail in this shot till I looked at the review screen on my camera!
Didn’t pick up the mail on the way home, so I had to walk down to the mailbox, about 5 minutes there and back. Bonus! D went with me and then tugged me over to the cross road, and we walked all around the neighborhood for a half an hour. I’d almost forgotten we lived in a neighborhood, we get so enchanted with our own yard!
Sad moment: we found this dead snake in our yard, right by the road. I thought I smelled something! We wonder if it was run over on the road and sort of wriggled into the yard. Couldn’t see a head on it!
Ick, I clearly didn’t get all the snails out of the yard over the weekend. I intend to move this carcass up the hillside tonight. It’s still good coyote food, isn’t it?
EEEEEEEEK. I spent about an hour picking snails off the wall, from behind the wall, from under the damp ground cover. More than 3 liters of snails (I collected them in old bottles).
Even though I used disposable gloves, just washing wasn’t good enough. I had to have a shower.
These empty shells I found are the invertibrate equivalent of mounted deer heads.
I read somewhere recently that the Brown Garden Snail was introduced to California in the mid-1800s as a possible food source for San Franciscans. So I guess we could just wait for them to reproduce again and throw a big ol' escargot fest.
Not bloody likely.
We had let stuff accumulate back here because no one can really see it but us. Old PVC pipes, the frame from a broken glass-topped patio table, our old front door. Eeek!
We carted away the junk last weekend, and this weekend I spent a couple of hours clearing out leaves and rearranging the concrete pieces that we aren’t going to get rid of, but aren’t using yet. It’ll be a nice place to sit outside in the heat of the summer!
Do you recognize this? It’s the cafe from Steven Speilberg’s great TV movie, Duel (1971). It’s been expanded and it’s now a nice French restaurant, Le Chene. Always seems to be busy, even though it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere.
Here's a photograph of it from the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society's wonderful website. This is what it looked like c. 1923.
Sat at the table in the back yard yesterday afternoon/early evening and read. Then my friend B called from Indiana and we talked for about an hour. I’ll get to see her at the beginning of July!
There’s something about sitting outside as the air cools, watching the shadows creep up the hillside—it’s good for the skin. I felt when I went inside that my skin had been revitalized, like it finally got to breathe.
What's better than a blue rooster on a friend's front porch?
This water comes all the way from the Owens Valley—more than 200 miles away—to make the San Fernando Valley comfortable and green. There are no pumps along the way… It’s all done with siphons.
When they built the thing in the early 1900s, there were no engines that could pull the weight of some of the big concrete pipes they built, and they had to be pulled by up to 40-mule teams.
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/geoimages/BainCalif/subjects/WaterOwens.html
