For reasons unknown to me, I have not been able to upload any pictures since the Supermoon. Last month, we watched the Moonrise from Twin Peaks but we went to Corona Heights, lower and north of Twin Peaks. Because we were lower, I thought the moon would come up slightly later but, because it was the evening of New Year’s Day the San Francisco skyline was not as lite up. The crowd, however, was local.
Category Archives: Around home
A Good Citizen?
Like most people, I think, we scoop out our cat’s litter box and put the contents in a plastic bag left over from some other use and then put the plastic bag, filled with cat urine, poop, and kitty litter in the trash. But, yesterday, Michele bought a box of biodegradable bags made especially for dog poop and by extension, usable for Precious Mae’s litter box waste. Both Michele and I feel like we are being better custodians of the environment and, therefore, better Citizens by eliminating the plastic bags we had used before. But, here is the rub, when Michele got home, she realized that some scoundrel had opened the box and stolen one of the three rolls of the biodegradable pet waste bags. Now we wonder, is the person who stole the third roll, presumably to use for their pet’s waste, also a good Citizen? Even though they stole them, by using these bags, the thief is also keeping plastic bags out of the environment and, it seems to me, the world is better off with two households eliminating plastic bags. Still, they did steal them.
The First Supermoon of December 2017
We decided to go to Twin Peaks in San Francisco to see the Super Moon and we got there just as the Sun was setting over a very pacific Pacific. But it was still about a half hour before moonrise which is what we had driven up for. I don’t understand that, I always thought that, on a full moon, sunset and moonrise were the same time but this was only a 99.8% full moon and that translates into a half hour time difference (I guess). Anyway, after the sun went down, San Francisco just glowed with its new brightest star on the skyline, Sales Force Tower, giving the whole thing a magic touch. 
The crowd seemed younger than Michele and me – Michele said that she thought the next oldest person was twenty years younger than her – and the melody of voices included German, French, and Chinese. I had the feeling that only tourists were on the hill with us and, if that’s true, it’s a little sad. The moon, however, was terrific.
Flagstaff, mile 781.7
We started in in Bakersfield CA and ended the day in Flagstaff AZ, 518.9 miles later. Much of it on back roads. The first part, out of Bakersfield and over Tehachapi pass into the high Mojave Desert at Mojave CA – strangely enough – then down to Barstow however, was mostly on freeways.
Several miles past Barstow, near the famous Bagdad Cafe, we got on Route 66. The first thing we noticed about Route 66 is that almost all the non-locals were foreigners, “75% French”, we were told by Bagdad Cafe’s Boss Lady Andree Pruett. Well, that was probably the second thing we noticed, the first was how dilapidated everything was; when the new I40 went in, bypassed most of the towns that had sprung up to service Route 66’s travelers and the towns just dried up, people just got up and left, taking everything they could carry. The buildings are now old enough to be picturesque but there is still an air of lost dreams. The road was washed out before Needles, so we got back on Interstate 40 and stayed on it until we crossed the Colorado River at the border between California and Arizona, then got back on 66 and wandered through the hills/mountains under impossibly blue skies, through Oatman AZ and, eventually back to the freeway as it got dark.
Pictures from a Saturday afternoon
Last Saturday, Michele and I went to the Inaugural Industrial Arts Horsepower Car Show and Street Fair in the old – for lack of a better word – industrial part of San Carlos. The alleged car show wasn’t much, a large number of Camaros and Mustangs, a heavy spattering of crome covered 50s and 60s cars that reflect Detroit at its most flamboyant, and several hotrods, one similar to the five-window deuce I had when I was 16 or 17. 
The biggest surprise, however, was the change in this part of town. It seemed so Silicon Valley and au courant, I remembered it as a flyover area – so to speak – that was a combination of light manufacturing – actually, it was more like light fabrication – commercial sales places that sold stuff like piping or forklifts, and construction companies like plumbers. Under that memory is a deeper memory, of the legendary Lenkurk Electric Company and Lennart Erickson. The details, and probably the truth, has been sort of lost in my mythic past but Lenkurk was the biggest, flashest, company around, they made electrical stuff for the government, some of it secret and Lennart Erickson was an eccentric genius who even had a round bed with a fur blanket. I read now that Lenkurt Electric Company was a microwave and telecommunications company, it was started by both Lennart Erickson and Kurt Appert and it had about 4,000 employees.
We had a beer from a brewery, Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company, that is now in a building that once housed Varian Associates and, later Tesla Motors, it is now set up for parties. After wandering around for a couple of hours, we ended the day wine tasting at The Russian Ridge Winery, one of the eight local wineries.
