Category Archives: Around home

A walk by the Bay

Don Edwards-2603A couple of days ago, I went for a walk in a reclaimed section of the San Francisco Bay shore. It is a very strange place, and I mean that in the best possible way. It is almost flat – because it is the very bottom of the alluvial fans coming out of the mountains around the Bay – and many of the remains, of what used to be there, are still there and they don’t fit any classical notion of beauty. Don Edwards-2586

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Historically, we have not valued the coastline of our Bay. Most of it has been ignored except for that used for some sort of nasty work. In this case, the nasty work was harvesting salt and using the marshes along the shore as a place to run heavy-duty electrical transmission lines. Five miles north is the port of Redwood City, built to ship the cut redwood needed for the Victorians of San Francisco. The cut redwood that had been hauled down from the hills of neighboring Woodside and my home town of Portola Valley.

As an aside and a comforting sign that Nature Always Bats Last, some of the children of those redwoods have grown high and dense enough to block out view of the Bay. End aside.

Five miles north of the Port of Redwood City are the housing tracks of Redwood Shores and then Foster City, with their thousands of houses facing away from the Bay in one last act of indifference. Now the salt harvesting area – what we used to call The Salt Flats, when I was a kid – are being returned to Nature, a job that is not as easy as it might, at first, sound. This section used to belong to Cargill Inc., and it was turned to The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project which describes itself as the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast which when complete…will restore 15,100 acres of industrial salt ponds to a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other habitats.

I am proud to say that Senator Dianne Feinstein was a chief motivator and backer and now everybody is getting on board (including the State Coastal Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Santa Clara Valley Water District, Alameda County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Resources Legacy Fund, and the East Bay Regional Park District). This area of ex-salt-flats is now called the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Don Edwards was a friend of my father’s and he was instrumental in getting me my first real Job. I had just turned sixteen and, in those days, a teenage boy – as I remember it – was expected to work during the summer. The problem was that most of the available work were pretend jobs that didn’t pay very much. The good paying jobs required joining a Union and that was not very easy for a privileged, white, teenager still in school. My dad knew Don Edwards through the Democratic Party and he – Edwards – was able to pull some strings to get me in the Laborer’s Union and additional strings to get me a job with Charles Harney Construction which was building the section of Bayshore Highway between Marsh Road in Menlo Park to University in Palo Alto (Highway 101 was El Camino then and Bayshore was a bypass).

Like a typical privileged teenager – OK, maybe not typical but typical for me and my type – I was both eager to accept the gains of that privilege and felt slightly guilty, which I probably expressed with disgruntlement, that I hadn’t earned the job and was taking it away from somebody who really needed it, which was why the Union made it difficult in the first place. But the money was great  and the guilt was assuaged by my being given every shit job for the first month. The second month, I moved up to the position of SLOW Sign Holder and would have had a great view of the Bay if I had cared.

Like the rest of California, that came later, and with that public care, the birds are starting to come back. The beauty – and some strangeness – was always there, I suspect, we just didn’t see it.
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Walking Russian Ridge, thinking about religion and violence

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Charlie Hebdo being equally nasty to Islam and Judaism

I woke up yesterday morning to the headlines of the attack on the people behind Charlie Herbo and I have been thinking about it ever since. It seems incomprehensible to me, senseless.

It seems to me that even these deranged killers must know that what they are doing will only hurt the Muslim community in France. Maybe that was the point, as I remember, General Field Marshal Cinque of the Symbionese  Army thought their actions would get the police to over react and, thereby, getting the general community to join their side. Maybe these  deranged killers were part of a recruitment drive as Juan Cole supposes. Maybe it is just senseless violence fueled by helplessness and anger. What ever the reason, I don’t see it improving the plight of Muslims in France.

Selma is coming out this week and, as I walk along Russian Ridge watching the sunset over the pacific Pacific, I think of how powerful non-violence is.

Looking down into the mirk on a No Burn Day
Looking east, down into the mirk over the Bay, on a No Burn Day

 

January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
Looking West at the January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
The end of a warm, calm, day
The end of a warm, calm, day

 

 

 

Some of our favorite things at the year’s first Farmer’s Market

I have a disclaimer here, for me a particular pleasure of where I live is its Asianness, so, in my photography of public areas in Greater-Silicon Valley, I may photograph a higher percentage of Asians than their percentage of the actual population. End disclaimer.
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One of my favorite pleasures in life is the San Mateo Farmer’s Market; it is on my short list of hypothetical places I would bring a hypothetical visitor, to this part of the world, if I were a hypothetical tour guide. Any Farmer’s Market is fun, but especially the San Mateo Farmer’s Market, where I know the Egg Lady and can get pasture raised chicken eggs – the chicken are pasture raised, not the eggs, they aren’t raised at all – and some nice Pu’er tea. Michele can get a hunk of bacon to flavor some beans and a steak for tonight.

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Farmer's Market-2444And we can both wander for an hour buying vegetables.

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Portola Valley Jan 3 '15-1378Or pick-up the makings for miso soup.
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Thinking about bird culture and cat’s lack of @ the S F Autoshow

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In what I hope will be a tradition, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I went to the San Francisco Auto Show with Grandson Auggie  and his father, Gabe. The San Francisco Auto Show is not a manufacturer’s show, Like the Los Angeles Auto Show or Auto Shanghai. It is really a local show put on by the Bay Area Dealers and that means that the cars that are there are cars that are available at your neighborhood dealer. It is not as exciting as a big show, but it does have its charms and going with the enthusiastic Auggie was great fun. I think he looked especially proto-macho in a Dodge pickup.

The only cars that were new to me were the Lexus RC F which I thought was stunning,

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and  BMW’s new hybrid supercar, the i8 at only $138,000 – I’m serious with the only, what else could you fantasize about for that little – it was the car of the show for me. It will go 22 miles on its electric motor and go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds when another electric motor and its three cylinder, turbo charged 1500 cc engine kick in (and I have already seen three of them on the road).

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Walking around the show, I was interested in how similar so many of the cars were. I don’t mean similar in They all look alike, similar, but similar in that they are watching each other and stealing good ideas. Which is another way of saying Learning from each other. I was taken by the number of cars that had painted brake calipers. I think it was a fad started by Porsche but I am not sure of that. No matter who started it, now almost everybody with pretensions of having a fast car is painting the calipers on said fast car.

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As an aside, it reminded me of a story the great Bob Lutz – whose motto was Often wrong, but seldom in doubt – told on himself. About six or seven years ago, give or take a couple, Lutz was the designated Car Guy at General Motors – they had brought him in because General Motors had almost completely sunk into a bean-counter culture, even referring to, and thinking of, Cars as Units. Lutz was on board to bring Car Love back into The General’s thinking and he was shown the mock-up of a new Buick that had portholes in the front quarter panel like the great Buicks of old. Lutz said, Get rid of the portholes, they are the past, nobody wants to buy an old Buick. A couple of nights later, he went to a party given by Maserati. All the new Maseratis had portholes. The next day Lutz called Buick design and said Put the portholes back in. End aside.

A couple of weeks ago, The Economist had an article about bird learning. They filed it under Animal Culture and that is probably more correct (if there can be degrees of Correct). The article is fascinating, short, and worthwhile. Two different groups of birds are taught two different  – but equally effective – ways to open a box to get food (say Group A and Group B). When they are released into their subgroups of the general population, their feather-mates learn the same trick from them. However, if a member of Group A gets into Group B – for some reason, lost? – the Group A guy starts doing the box opening the Group B way. In other words, he conforms to the new group. Just like an immigrant learns the new county’s language.

Maybe once a week, either Michele or I will remark about how smart our cat, Precious Mae, is (it is embarrassing, but true). By way of example, a while back, Michele had gone to Napa to cook Thanksgiving dinner with her sister and I was home, alone, with the cat. That’s not quite accurate because I was inside and Precious Mae was outside, but the two of us are the only ones on the property. When I open the door, she runs in to get some food but, then, seeing that I am dressed to go out, she stops, thinks about it, and runs outside so that she will not be trapped inside.

However, I have always thought that the cats that have owned me were extra smart. But, when I watch a cat video on You Tube, and those cats often seem much smarter – except for the ones that are way dumber – and I wonder how much smarter Precious Mae would be if she were exposed to those cats in real life. What we do is isolate our cats and they don’t learn from other cats. What they learn, they learn from us or from themselves. Unlike car designers, cats don’t have a culture.

 

Between rains

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Our impromptu rain-gage is maxed out and everything in the garden – and as far as the eye can see – is thrilled. And almost everybody I talk to is thrilled. I oversee – as in overhear – on the news that there is some flooding and I hope it is only inconvenience flooding (I’m not going to look).

Here, the leaves are being washed off of the trees and the birdbaths are self filling.

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The only one that I know who isn’t thrilled is Precious Mae. For the last couple of weeks, since it started rain, Precious Mae has been forced to lounge around the house all day and that is nowhere near as interesting as hiding out in the great outside.

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