Beach haiku

Today we walked on the beach on a very low tide and watched the sanderlings and willets scurry along as the small waves met the shore at Miramar. Out beyond Pillar Point is where the huge waves of the renowned Mavericks surf spot build, but the waves on this day were small and peaceful. I waxed poetic in the sand.

little waves ruffling to shore
on a low low tide
small shorebirds jitterbugging

Here is a small bird jitterbugging near the ruffling waves:

Rebecca goes camping

Today I borrow from Wm's web site, where he says:

We just got back from a camping trip, and we are pleased to report that Rebecca is back to being Rebecca. I have to admit that I never thought we would all be hiking and camping together after last month's prognosis; we were thinking in terms of days.

Rebecca has gained all of her weight back and was chasing the raccoons and critters away from our campsite like she always has. We still take it one day at a time but this last camping trip was really special with her; Ellen and I have had dogs all of our lives but we have never seen a dog with so much spirit and true grit. She made us totally forget about the situation and it was a well-needed emotional rest and a slip back into normalcy.

Somehow, it reminds me of getting a second chance like in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life...even if the outcome suddenly changes we will always remember this little miracle and be grateful for the extra quality time we are getting with Rebecca.

 A few photos, of course:


Our campsite over looking Sunset Beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey

Rebecca guarding the food


Yo!...let's go hiking!


Check out the surfer dudes (Rebecca always finds the action)




Rebecca loves the sunset...means dinner, critter chasing, and a campfire.


After the campfire wears down, it is time for the warm innards of Goldie, our home away from home. You can see the snow clouds forming behind...it snowed the following day in the Santa Cruz Mountains.


Goldie is our all-original 1971 Dodge factory-conversion van which sleeps two adults and two small children (or two adults and one large dog), dining area, wet bar, kitchen sink, fridge, and stove, along with lots of drawers and closet space. We just hit 70K original miles on this last trip.



"Hey Dad...stop your yapping...my burger is ready..."

Rebecca's back!

Rebecca, Duchess of Mountain and Sea, does indeed have the heart of a champion. I'm so happy to say that she's begun a course of treatment for her lymphoma and is beginning to spring back. Her prance is back in her step, and she often laughs.

Here's Rebecca on the trail, either laughing or yawning.

During the week or so when she just wasn't eating we coaxed her with chicken breast and barley or rice, mooshed about with homemade chicken broth. We were afraid we'd created a gourmet monster, but as her appetite returns she's turning to her regular food with some enthusiasm. Still, of course, she gives us the stare-down for her treat that contains her medication.

Rebecca's treatment will continue for some months, with the vet gauging her progress and adjusting as we go along. Although we hope for remission, the treatment will at least give her her quality of life back. Thankfully she doesn't seem to be in any pain.

As life returns to normal, our trips to the Half Moon Bay farmer's market have resumed. The Pomegranate Man sings his wares, and the greens, persimmons, and squashes make a happy presentation.

And on days when the weather is fine, we'll once again feel like setting out for a drive in the Chili Pepper, the red-hot Miata... as on this pre-diagnosis Sunday drive.

Chili's bug-eyes look down a eucalyptus lane near Pescadero.

On Highway 1, the misty clifs wind northward.

Blessing Rebecca

Our beautiful Rebecca, Duchess of Mountain and Sea, has been diagnosed with lymphoma and our hearts are so heavy. We don't yet have the full diagnosis and prognosis; the lab work went to the cytologyist on Friday, and we'll know on Tuesday.

Rebecca came to us 9 years ago. We had recently lost our dear pal Kelsey and were strolling in Placerville, a town in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. There, on the sidewalk next to an SPCA table filled with brochures and doggy treats, sat a beautiful creature wearing a blue jacket that said "I'm adoptable!" on it.

We stopped and looked into those golden eyes and she looked back. She wagged. We wagged. She put her foot on Wm's foot, looked up at him, and said Take me home! And we did.

On the drive back up to the cabin she gazed interestedly around from the Outback's way-back. When we arrived she leapt out, ran up the stairs, and sat at the door waiting for us. Once inside, she headed straight for Kelsey's regular spot, turned around three times, and plopped down. She was home.

Here's Rebecca, smiling on the bank of the American River.

Rebecca was already three years old when she came to us, and we had no idea what we were getting.

What we were getting was the gentlest, most intelligent dog either of us has ever met. She barks when there's a reason to, and otherwise keeps her council. She speaks Italian, Spanish, French, and Russian in addition to English. At least, she understands the words for walk, eat, go, she, her, beach, Madame, and Duchess in those languages...and who knows what else that she doesn't let us know about? All attempts at talking around her have failed, because she learns the words quickly and knows just what's up.

Here's Rebecca galloping on Miramar beach.

The vet says Rebecca has the heart of a champion, and we hope that her lymphoma is treatable. We have to wait until Tuesday to find out, but in the meanwhile we decided that the thing to do was get her blessed at the local church's Blessing of the Pets ceremony yesterday, in honor of St. Francis. She donned her yellow lei and off we went in the thin November sunlight.

Here's Pastor Larry, who married Wm and me, blessing Rebecca:

Blessed Rebecca.

Ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties...

...and things that go bump in the night! It's that time of year. Pumpkins everywhere, our neighbors' black cats on the prowl, skeletons dangling from porches... and the Christmas displays going up in the big-box stores. I, along with apparently everyone else, detest the earlier and earlier start to the annual force-feeding of consumerism that has become Christmas. Somebody's got to be buying the stuff, though, nurturing the greed that perpetuates the earlier and earlier force-feeding... 

But enough of that. Happily, we're relatively immune to it in our little community. We're immersed in things autumnal -- Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos, sunny beaches after the summer fog...

.. and of course the Brussels sprout harvest. The sprouts grow along the plant's stem, the bulging little balls poking out all the way down almost to the ground.

The sprout fields are a sea of fluffy leaves, stretching across our fertile bench of land between mountain and ocean.

 To harvest the sprouts, the farmers strip the leaves away, then cut the stems and strip the sprouts off.

A new trend is to sell the whole sprout stalk. That can be a lot of sprouts.

You know how sprouts smell when they're cooking, kind of... pungent? Well, they smell a little that way when they're growing, too. When we were kids passing a sprout field, the cool joke in the car was "who farted?!"



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A few days ago I looked through my collection of New Yorker covers (yes, this proud native Californian has taken the New Yorker since the '70s) and found a couple of classic Hallowe'en covers by the inimitable Charles Addams.

This one appeared on the October 31, 1988 cover... a month after Charles Addams' passing on September 29, 1988. I think he must have loved that.

Pumpkin madness

It's October on the central California coast, and pumpkins are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are in a hilly field near our home in Moss Beach... the view is looking east, with the Santa Cruz mountain range in the distance. When Wm. took this photo, we could hear the Pacific Ocean pounding heavily behind us to the west. A storm was out at sea, moving in.
















October on the Coastside means the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Thousands and thousands of people come for the parade, which features the giant pumpkin. The monster in this photo topped 1600 pounds. Really, shouldn't the winning pumpkin be orange? I think that should be one of the rules......

I'm thinking about pumpkin pasta, with all this pumpkin-ness. Not pasta stuffed with pumpkin, but with pumpkin right in the dough, along with the flour and eggs. I use 2 eggs, a half-cup of pureed pumpkin (sugar pie variety) or squash (try kabocha) and enough flour for a 3-egg pasta... 3 cups or so, depending. Maybe a grinding or two of pepper in the dough.

And how about a nice walnut sauce to top that beautiful golden pasta?

Nice Walnut Sauce for Pasta

2 cups walnuts
boiling water
pinch salt
a clove of garlic
a few leaves marjoram
1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated

1. Soak the walnuts in the boiling water for half an hour or so.
2. Drain the walnuts and zing them in a food processor with a little salt, the clove of garlic, and the marjoram; make a smooth paste.
3. Add the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and zing some more. Right! It's pesto we're doing here. (Pestare means to pound, and the right way is to pound it all in a mortar; zinging in the processor is easier, though, no?)
4. Thin with hot pasta-cooking water before serving, to make the sauce creamy and smooth.

Time for walnuts!

September, and the walnut trees are heavy with their fat green-hulled nuts. When I was growing up on our ranch in California's Santa Clara Valley we grew three varieties of walnuts: Frankettes, small and oblong with hard-to-crack shells; Eurekas, large and round with hard-to-crack shells; and Mayettes, small and round with shells that were soft enough for me to crack with my bare hands.

I took this picture in late summer 1962, looking east from the top of our ranch tankhouse over a sea of prune and walnut trees, toward the golden, oak-studded hills.

In late September or early October, depending on the weather, the thick green hulls began to crack as the walnuts ripened. The ripe nuts fell and we gathered and hulled them, getting green-black stains under our fingernails and burnishing our fingers deep walnut.
We spread the hulled walnuts on big redwood trays in the sun to dry. (The structure in the photo is the drying-tray shed, where the trays were kept between harvests.)

After the nuts had sunbathed for a few days, Dad would test a couple of them for dryness by breaking them open and checking the membrane that divides the sections of the nut. If the membranes crackled, the nuts were dry.



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“You know how to crack walnuts, don’t you?” Dad asked me one day, grinning. “With a nutcracker?” I replied, taking the bait. “Well no,” he said, “here’s what you do...”

Take a walnut and rest it on a seam on a hard surface. With a small hammer, tap the walnut on the seam a couple times, then turn it over and tap it on the seam on the other side. Set the walnut on the stem end, and tap tap on the pointed end.

It’ll break right in two, and you can use a nut pick to pull out the perfect halves. Not only do you have perfect walnut halves for each nut, you have two perfect shell halves. Make Thumbelina a little boat—glue in a toothpick mast and yardarm, then use toilet paper to make a sail.

Use the perfect walnut halves to make...
Mom's Sugared Walnuts

1 cup sugar
dash salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups walnut halves

1. Melt the sugar, spices, and water over a slow fire, until dissolved; bring to a boil and cook until the syrup threads.
2. Remove from the fire, add vanilla nuts, and stir well until the mass sugars.
3. Turn out onto a buttered cookie sheet and cool.
4. Break apart with a fork or chopsticks and store airtight.