Small and earnest

You may or may not know that I invest considerable psychological capital in my appearance. I experienced yesterday mostly in terms of heat and friends visiting. The official high temperature was only seventy-five degrees, but it had been a long couple of days in the yard. As afternoon rolled around, and friends began dropping by I worried in no particular order about whether or not I had hat hair, how sunburnt my face was, and whether or not it looked like we'd actually accomplished anything in the backyard.

I also worried that I'd crossed some sort of invisible threshold in perceived maturity because I was considering the shade and comfort of one of those floppy hats.

We do have large-scale plans for our back yard. Two retaining walls, a cast concrete fireplace for the patio, maybe a fountain. Since we also have big plans for the kitchen and the front yard, we decided that incremental progress would be better than letting nature take its course. The first two friends who stopped by could not say what had been done, though they've been unduly generous when surveying our homestead before.

We planted a small vegetable garden, turned an unused patch of bark into a fledgling herb garden, and even mowed the lawn. Of these efforts, the lawn-mowing was the biggest surprise. We're both decidedly anti-lawn, but didn't see ourselves removing it in the next couple of months.

Another friend described our fledgling tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants as,"small and earnest." The garden gets an incredible amount of sun though. A mix of western and south western exposure that stays with the plot through most of the afternoon. I know our garden will appear tall, weathered, and productive.

Floating Holiday

One of the numerous perks of my job is the availability of a floating holiday. It's essentially a get out of work free card, and each year you are given one. With good weather arriving in earnest yesterday, I decided to cash in my floating holiday today. Motivated, at least in part, by a strong desire to not find myself at Home Depot on Saturday morning during the first warm and dry weekend of spring, I started on our garden.

Like most of our projects so far, this one involved reversing certain decisions that the previous owner's of our house had made. In this case, removing chunks of bark that they'd covered raised garden beds with. Two hundred square feet of bark.There might be more efficient ways to dispose of all of it, but I went with these 30 gallon paper bags. Because they look cool.


Tomorrow we'll be mowing our plot of grass, and finding a way to get all this yard refuse to the curb.

Last storm of the season

I don't think of our brick house as having a view on par with other homes in the bay area. No bridges, no bay. The house is elevated from the street though, and you can see across the bay to the peninsula if we stand in a particular sport in the back yard.

These photos were taken a week ago. A storm front was supposed to blow in last Friday, with thunderstorms following Saturday. The rain never materialized, but we had big clouds and dramatic sunsets all weekend. With some luck, it will be the last storm front we see for a while. Here's the view I mentioned from the backyard:

With the Spurs up by 30...

I'm packing some calories in as we head into the last few hours before our "Did he, or didn't he?" dinner. Where we'll open up our long standing debate, over whether or not Werner Herzog really did eat his shoe, to friends. A. contends no way. I'm a Werner-ite, and I glory in it.

It may be a thinly veiled excuse to grab some screen time on day one of the NBA Playoffs - the Spurs are up by 34 over the Kings.

It's been a heckuva day. We made it to Berkeley Bowl, the Grand Lake Farmers' Market, and Arizmendi by 11:22 this morning. Our East Bay culinary hat-trick included nearly an hour of looking for parking spots.

I will now go brown chicken livers, sweep, and wipe.

Soup and Ice Cream for Dinner

It had been a long time since I visited a dentist. Ultimately A. would have to insist. And when she did, it was a short hop from dentist to oral surgeon. You may be asking yourself what the appropriate photo for this post will be. Despite the three (3) teeth in a small manilla envelope on my dining table, I thought we'd go picture free - just this once.

Memorable moments along the way, include a dental hygienist describe my cleaning as, "removing barnacles from rock." She also asked me to stick out my tongue so that she could remove the accumulated plaque flakes from my tongue.

The oral surgeon removed those three teeth, and placed me on a soft food diet for the next seventy-two hours. This will make my other line of blogging , well, challenging. But it should contribute greatly to the health of my mouth.

Of the tooth extraction procedure, I will only say that despite a pineapple flavored numbing agent, a steady stream of nitrous, and the Mostly Mos' playlist on my iPod, the violence of tooth extraction was not lost on me. It came through mostly in the form of a vigorous back and forth motion as each tooth was removed by what looked shockingly like pliers.

Where straight teeth in your mouth
are more important than the words
that come out of it...

There's nothing indicating it's going to stop

At the end of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, there's an observation that's been on my mind lately,"That's the problem with the British, their weather." In the context of the book the weather may explain hundreds of years of imperialist impulse and agression. We're in for another wet week here.


A big storm is supposed to arrive Tuesday. We haven't been able to grill for weeks. The local paper ran an article on how to cope with seasonal affective disorder:

... even folks who don't slip into depression every winter are starting to feel weighed down by the nearly nonstop storms -- especially when there's seemingly no end to the rainy days.

"A lot of people are at least paying lip service to this idea that the extended winter weather is having an adverse impact on the way they feel," said Dan Weiner, a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy in Oakland.

It's April, I have an olive tree, and a book on creating mediteranean gardens. I spent yesterday cleaning the basement.


It's tempting to reconcile this bout of weather with our recent drought, though I fear something more insidious may be at work. Or, as a guy from Zimbabwe asked at the Farmers' Market yesterday,"What have you crazy Americans done?"