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?"

Soldiers and Suits Follow-up

My earlier post, on the increasingly present soldier and suit motif, prompted three unsolicited reactions:

• My lovely and talented wife liked it, but wished the post had a more pronounced critical perspective.
  
• An old friend from high school wrote from Cincinatti to say that she found the mural particularly interesting, and that she wished there were more of that sort of thing near her.
• As I mentioned in my last post, another friend responded by requesting more photos of shrubs.

Three unsolicited comments is something of a highwater mark for feedback around here, and for this and other reasons the soldiers and suits have stayed on my mind. Imagine my surprise then, as I walked by the Grand Lake Theatre today and ran into life-sized cutouts of the soldier and suit figures from that mural.


The cut outs were place there by Matt Reynoso, the artist responsible for the mural, who indicated that he'd been placing the soldiers in local cafes, including Arizmendi in Emeryville.

Matt's looking for sympathetic walls to place more murals on. If you have any leads send them his way.

Where are the shrubs?

Received an IM from a friend yesterday who expressed a longing for posts on, as he put it, "...paint choices and shrubbery and stuff". Paint choices are on hold for the time being, but as luck would have it, I did snap pictures of shrubs the other night. I was attempting to capture for posterity what I've described elsewhere as the "slow erratic descent of snow flakes" in our backyard.



As folks with lots of interests, it's difficult to maintain the separation of church and state - where church is our house, and state is the larger world. A. posts on everything from Jazz to TV commercials over at Tear In the Buttonhole. In addition to the more observantly critical stuff I've been posting here, I also sound my food yawp over at The Happy Consumptive.

I imagine each of these sites with a distinct --if modest-- following of colleagues, family, friends, and internet wanderers. Even with our own relatively small media empire, it can be difficult to post regularly. This will keep us, for the time being, a three blog family.

Soldiers and Suits

A couple of days before I started gathering images for my post on the geo-political nuances of the housing market, we noticed a building in West Oakland covered with stenciled images of business men and soldiers. The business men carried brief cases, the soldiers had a shilouette that was distinctly modern. I understood this to be a comment on the location of lethality and agency in our culture. I even felt vaguely guilty about appreciating it. It seemed anti-corporate in a way that wasn't —on some level— ironic.


A counter example might be the comic strip Get Your War On. To some extent, Get Your War On capitalizes on a technique popularized in Red Meat. Each strip relies on stereotypically representative characters, who say unexpected things.

In the absence of spirited dialog, juxtaposed images of business men in suits and soldiers in fatigues can only transcend their status as stereotypical representations through sheer repetition and our very specific socio-political context.

Something about the mural also reminded me of figures we'd seen at a war protest. A group of performance artists were walking through the crowds of people heading up Market Street in San Francisco. Dressed in suits and covered in fake blood. They were acting the part of television reporters - present, commenting, but not participating.


The visual register of the mural was evoked directly by a New York Times article entitled Death Wears a Crisp Black Suit (Requires Times Select). The article makes the point that one thing war might be good for is "making artists directly address political issues of their day."


Of course the iconography of privilege and the iconography of war have been closely associated for thousands of years. Suits have long since displaced more elaborate indicators of political power. These depictions though seem to have more to do with a very specific notion of enfranchisement than than they do privilege.

A Partial Triumph

As a long time fan of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, I am familiar with the concept of the reality distortion field. The uncanny ability that S.Jobs has to make merely incremental improvements seem profound, is legend among Mac cultists.

I believe that our home exists within a similar field for our friends, who have been so genuinely happy for us that they have been able to overlook the fact that most of the front of it was covered in white paint, some more of it covered in blue. We believe that the paint was so unsightly, that the fact of it contributed directly to our actually being able to purchase the house.

With plans shaping up for our garden out front, and March closing in fast, we knew that we'd have to remove the paint before we put anything in the soil. So, we hit craigslist and cross-referenced the UC Berkeley Parents Network and found someone to remove the paint.

When we told friends that we had someone coming by to remove the paint, most of them indicated that they hadn't noticed the paint. One repeated the peculiar locution that she just thought that we had bought a house. I've always associated this sort of seemingly judgement-free observation with a certain midwest-flavored practicality. Compare then with Kewler Truong, of KB Jet Care, who during the three visits it took him to make serious headway against the paint, expressed profound incredulity that anyone would do such a thing.

We still have a ways to go. There are a few patches of brick that are still more white than not. The paint removal will also necessitate some mortar restoral. I found one chunk of mortar more than twenty feet away from the house. So far, the neighbors have been blessedly mum, though the owner of a gold Volvo hasn't parked in front of our house for a few days.

Buying In

We tell people that finding our brick house was easy, that it was the first house we looked at, and this is mostly true. There is an equally true version of the story in which we looked at houses for five years before we found this one.

We often looked at lofts or loft-like condos in West Oakland, an area that extends from downtown Oakland towards the San Francisco bay. It shares a northern border with Emeryville and western and southern borders with a curve of the 880 freeway.


When I came to Berkeley for college in 1991 there was a highly publicized funeral parade through West Oakland, held in memory of a local drug dealer. It was shortly after this that the television program 60 Minutes described the area as the most desparate in America. A city-within-a-city that had no grocery store, no bank, and a high school grade-level reading capability percentage of two percent(2%).

More recently the area has been in the news as the result of a group of rogue police officers who referred to themselves as "Rough Riders", who among other things were known to physically abuse suspects and non-suspects in between bouts of planting evidence.

After college, I worked in a neighborhood that was in a kind of demilitarized zone between the accelerating genrtification of Jack London Square and West Oakland. The streets were named after types of trees. To get to work I would pick up BART at the Downtown Berkeley stop and get off at the West Oakland stop. A fifteen (15) minute walk took me past the old Red Star Yeast facility, a Postal Service Driver Training course, and finally along several blocks of renovated brick buildings before reaching the one I worked in.


Some of the buildings along my route were abandoned, almost all of them had chain-link fences separating the sidewalk from pit bulls. In this area I felt physically threatened only once, by a homeless man who stood chest-to-chest with me and took off his shades to show me his fabulously blood-shot eyes. West Oakland proper was different.

An acquaintance of ours was mugged walking from his car to the warehouse he lived in. A. and I were driving through a stretch of the area near a large abandoned building that I'd been wanting to photograph. We approached one intersection at a four-way stop where every visible window seemed to have a mattress in it. We opted for a u-turn and got, as my mom and dad liked to say, the hell out of Dodge.

I bring these things up to add texture and perspective to a discussion of the Bay Area real estate market. Depending on the property, depending on the block, A. and I cannot afford to buy a house in West Oakland. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case, not the least of which is that we aren't prepared to leave the hills and be urban pioneers in the flats.

The geographical distinction between the hills and the flats of the East Bay, is a real thing. Banks generally aren't willing to finance in the flats to the degree that they are in the hills. Local newspaper delivery teams divide the bay area up in to vertical bands, ensuring that everyone gets some of the hills and some of the flats. A kind of iconic manifestation of this distinction involves two local hoops legends. Oakland native and NBA-baller Gary Payton brought Jason Kidd from the hills to the flats to toughen him up, to get the street in his game.

One side note, this distinction between hills and flats doesn't quite exist in Berkeley. Even as I acknowledge that there is real poverty and painful need in Berkeley, it's impossible not to feel that the entire city is either gentrified or gentrifying. I do not believe it is possible to purchase a move-in ready home in Berkeley for less than six hundred thousand dollars. I tried to for several months last year, and couldn't.


Which is one reason why we were looking to move into a loft or loft-like condominium in an area synonymous with economic adversity and racial tension. Two years ago we were very close to moving into a loft in a development on West Grand Avenue; about four city blocks west of Broadway. The unit we looked at had views of the bay bridge and downtown Oakland. The selling agent for the development described the neighborhood as transitional, a guy on the street offered to sell me a pair of shoes and then to go get me a pair of shoes in my size, the day we got the contract a murder was reported 3 blocks away. In that particular instance, the ultimate deterrent wound up being the cost of the property.

A. spent most of last year on the east coast studying at Columbia and then Harvard. I spent a handful of weekends in the spring driving from open house to open house with a real estate agent. Photographing each one, and emailing the images back to A. During a visit back home, she and I participated in a lottery for another West Oakland development, called West End commons.

"West End" referred to both the West End neighborhood of London, and an old name for the neighborhood where the buildings were being placed. An area known for streets with girl names and old victorian row houses.

West End Commons was being developed by the same folks who had built the Magnolia Row project a few blocks away. The architect for both projects was David Baker + Associates, a community minded architecture firm that volunteered its services for projects like a housing development for farm laborers near Half Moon Bay. Their work on Magnolia Row garnered several design awards, and the design of West End Commons was sone of the major selling points for the development.

On the day of the West End Commons lottery, no fewer than two hundred (200) pre-qualified people showed up for a chance at one of six (6) units in the development. There was a tent and a revival atmosphere. The real estate developer introduced membersof the sales team to the crowd one by one, to applause. The development was opened to the street, to the side walk. The weather was perfect and what I felt was optimism and a kind of belief.

One year later though, despite the metaphorical streets that run through it, West End Commons is essentially a gated community. The heralded design of the compound looks oddly sterile amongs the old brick and steel buildings that surround it. Not markedly different from the cookie-cutter apartment complex a few blocks away in Emeryville.




More disconcerting, The zoned-for-storefront spaces that several of the units touted --we'd discussed opening a cafe or small restaurant in ours-- appear to be being used as residential space.

I've no doubt that these things do take time, but am beginning to wonder if this specific type of community-building --the integration of a grafted-on upwardly mobile population with a long-time struggling resident population-- is really what we should be working toward.

My skepticism is derived at least in part from the stretch of Park Boulevard that runs from the Glen View neighborhood up the hill from us, down to Lake Merrit. A casual estimate of the populated storefronts along Park would suggest a 60% vacancy rate - despite the density of culturally-diverse, and relative financially secure persons living just north of Park Boulevard. I'm not basing these assumptions on much, just the relative density of folks donating to either democratic or republican parties in amounts exceeding one thousand dollars.



The Park Boulevard vacancy rate, of course, has everything to do with the still and yet more diverse population that lives to the south of Park Boulevard - East Oakland. An area known for "sideshows", crime, and good, cheap ethnic food.

The East Bay is simply running out of affordable housing. The various constituencies of its diverse population are not limiting themselves to neighborhood borders based on distinctions and assupmtions that the real estate market has rendered much less relevant. And, to be sure, "the haves" are bringing this to a head.

Once a transplanted community is established in the outlying areas of a major metroplitan area, they inevitably come in to close contact with the results of decades worth of NIMBY decision-making. Witness the continuing dust up between the residents of Magnolia Row and a nearby recycler.

In West Oakland, multilateral community activism resulted in the closing of the Red Star Yeast facility. The vacant land it used to occupy, and other vacant land will continue to be subject to in-fill development along the lines of Magnolia Row and West End Commons. There are simply too many people willing to assume a mortgage in excess of six hundred thousand dollars for this not to happen.

Each new development seems to be more insulated from the community it has landed in than the last. I've no doubt, for instance, that the tree lined 'lanes' behind the iron gates of West End Commons are, at least in part,a response to the experience of Magnolia Row residents who have to park their cars on the streets.


Which brings us back to our brick house. It was surprisingly easy to wind up here. The first time we went looking at open houses after A.'s trip back east, we stumbled on this place. I'm tempted to call the neighborhood suburban, despite the wall our backyard shares with Oakland High and the border we share with some authentic definition of East Oakland. All of the oakland neighborhoods I've discussed are less than five miles apart from one another.

I don't begrudge anyone --well, hardly anyone-- anything, but it doesn't seem like we've found a way to make this work. The plainest example of this is the city of Piedmont incorporating itself to opt out of the complexity of being part of Oakland.

Some Kind of Rhythm

Looking back over the last few posts, seems like we've fallen into a 'once every two weeks or so' rhythm. Rest assured though that we've been holding forth on diverse topics, and slaying various demons. The first half of February was very busy for both of us. I was involved in the planning and media production for an annual company event, while my lovely and talented wife travelled to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Where she delivered one helluva paper to an audience of 3. I suspect you may have an opportunity to hear more about this.

The annual company event almost always falls during the week of Valentine's Day. Turns out most companies prefer to not conduct week long conferences during that week, and so there are deals to be had on hotel ballrooms. Throw in the Sales Guy impulse to have their own room at the expense of certain creature comforts and refinements, and you wind up in Burlingame drinking pints with your co-workers at "Knuckles' Historical Sports Bar" on February 14th.

Only this year I elected to come home after the event kick-off, stopping at Urban Arrangement to grab the flowers you see here. While I was at the flower stand, a guy wearing a t-shirt printed with the image of a sheet of notebook paper walked up. He was holding the hand of his girlfriend. The notebook paper image depicted sketches and statements indicating his intention to get not one, but two lap dances. He purchased his girlfriend a single long-stem rose.

Trying to find a photo of the shirt online, all I could come up with was this.

Break in the Rain

After several days of rain, we woke up to clear skies and slightly warmer temperatures. We'd turned the heat off and had the doors and windows open by 11 this morning. The weather gave us and the cats a chance to spend some time in the yard. Poor guys have no way of knowing that we've pretty much decided to get a dog. This has something to do with how things are going in the neighborhood.

Most days you can watch school kids doing and selling drugs in the street outside our house, a couple weeks back someone was held up at gun point walking from her car to her house, and a week ago someone pointed a minivan down the hill we live on. The car ran into a parked car in the driveway of the house next to ours; took a few hours for the police to show up. Oddest detail to me was that the bumper of a another car was in the back hatch of the van.


So we're thinking dog. Didn't want a Chocolate Lab, too yuppie. Didn't want a German Shepard, too many fascist associations. Looks like we're gravitating toward a Boxer. Implicit in all of this uncertainty is that we're living in a home for the first time, no neighbors living in the same structure.

Still, as we put tarp down over the weed-infested front yard today, more folks came by and introduced themselves. A woman who shares a studio apartment in a building on the corner, a guy who is refurbishing a 4-unit building that "looks like a swiss chalet", a guy who lives one block over that clutched a leaf the whole time he talked to us.

By the way, we had a tree.

By rights this post should have gone up a few weeks ago. There was, however, a week long period when we anticipated hanging ornaments. We never articulated that our aesthetic points of view were far enough apart that the tree would go without dangling balls and little stuffed monkeys. Still, no one would suggest a lack until last night when a friend asked if we'd started to remove the ornaments in stages.

Hosting Christmas Dinner, and it being our first year in the new house, we went big with the tree- had to saw a foot off the top to get it to fit in the living room.


This is the last weekend we'll spend with the tree. In what's become a three year old tradition, we'll saw the branches off the trunk and let it dry for a year before throwing them in the fireplace next holiday season. Probably some ecologically disastrous reality that completely undermines the sentiment of our tradition, but I don't think we have to worry about masses of people following our lead here.

Taking it all in

Had a setback today with what should have been a reasonably simple repair to the house. The previous owner's installed a water heater that was bigger than the old one.... this had the unfortunate side effect of meaning that the vent hole that had been cut into the brick was below the heater's vent level. So the technical term for what we have is a "negative grade condition", i.e. the pipe points down toward the vent, and in the crook of the vent gas can build up and explode.

You would think the previous owner of the house would be responsible for this. They are after all responsible for ensuring that water heater is strapped into place so that a minor earthquake doesn't topple it, causing it to explode. But we are not so sure. The previous owners disclosed that the vent from the heater to the exterior of the house had become decoupled and that they weren't responsible for coupling it. It has since been coupled --by a nice guy that their real estate agent dispatched-- in a manner that could only be described as a code violation. Still, I can't be sure we're not going to have to take the hit here.

These sorts of things pile up after you move in. The rainy season comes along and the next thing you know there's an inch deep puddle just outside your front door. The brick at the bottom of the puddle, is thick with algae and getting thicker. The puddle is right where your doormat should go, only if you put it there, it gets soaked through and fools people into thinking they should use it.

Meanwhile the brick paths in the backyard are slowly being overtaken by weeds tall enough for the wind to blow them around. Where do these things come from? The plant beds in the back yard were covered in tarp, the tarp was covered over with bark and yet --no matter-- the weeds just keep coming. The problem implies a range of products that I am only dimly familair with, in an aisle of Home Depot that folks who shop at Farmer's Markets probably aren't supposed to venture down.

I am experiencing strange reactions to the weather. I know it takes wind to for a storm to move on, to clear out the clouds and fog. But a morning of 20 to 40 mph winds toppled my olive tree and prompted some sudden staking and lashing of a tree still very much in its' pot. Now we have more atypically warm sun, which makes A. and the cats much happier. But every time the sun comes out, more of the weeds appear.

Maybe the rain going away is a good thing after all though, because I've just noticed that rain water has taken to streaming into our basement. Confounding all expectations, the previous owner placed a drain right where the streaming happens. This is one of the few design considerations that seems to have held up to even the most casual of scrutiny.

The door from the kitchen to the backyard for instance has a threshold that is routinely below the waterline for for the doorway. It is constantly wet, and we've both nearly slipped on it numerous times. All of this does not deter the ants though, who have arrived and just keep on arriving despite daily mass executions. Despite the occasional rendering of their tribe into a kind of paste as we slip our way into the kitchen.

Most of the time I feel that the onus is on us to handle these things with aplomb, to not sweat the small stuff, and to not let the bastards get me down. In closing, I'd like to give a shout out to one such bastard. I don't know who he is but his tag is on the telephone pole outside our house, and also on our garage door:

I Have an Olive Tree

A couple of christmases ago we visited the Ridge winery on Lytton Springs Road. They had large olive bushes on a patio outside the tasting room, and I was hooked more or less immediately. When we entered escrow on the house, one of our first trips was to East Bay Nursery, where I lobbied for a couple olive trees in the backyard. I didn't have to lobby hard. The tree makes a pretty compelling case for itself, and there's an enormous one across the street from the house. Any olive trees of ours would have contextual relevance.

Still, I was thoroughly surprised to come home from work on the night of my birthday and find one in the backyard. I was, to be fair, more surprised to find stakes for it in the bathroom - my first thought was that they were giant rain sticks of some kind. As a friend of mine said,"Wow. What a f*cking thoughtful gift."

It's taken a few days for the weather to be dry enough for me to get out there and photograph it.

Lights out

We took our annual Christmas walk through the neighborhood the other night. We usually stick to our side of the lake, but this year we crossed over the 580 freeway and followed Trestle Glen Road for a few blocks before heading up into the hills between Grand Lake and Park Avenues. It's the sort of neighborhood that folks aspire to live in (whereas people describe our neighborhood as cool or nice). For instance, a guy pedaled up to our place a couple of weekends back sporting several hundreds dollars worth of bicycling footwear. It turned out that he lived on Trestle Glen and was considering buying a place in our neighborhood for his daughter.

It's difficult to describe this area without addressing the relative wealth that distinguishes it. An interesting and possibly telling point: of the 10 businesses Google Maps flag as local to or serving Trestle Glen none are actually on that road. Houses throughout the area are typically large, impressively appointed, and unusually well maintained. Along Trestle Glen in particular, a housing association maintains strict guidelines with regards to yard maintenance (I'm dimly recalling that there is a preferred yard services vendor for the association that is more exclusive than preferred) and appearance in general. In one 2 block stretch I counted 14 wreaths that looked haltingly similar. While this sort of thing is pretty common in subdivisions these days, it is also thoroughly contrary to most people's perceptions of Oakland.

Visiting wealthy neighborhoods to check out christmas lights brings its own set of expectations, and for the most part we were let down. A few houses really went the distance, but mostly we saw big Christmas trees in large street facing windows. Along the way we did notice some new types of christmas lights, including the large nested orb of light you see below.


A tree full of these is pretty impressive:

Light in December

Winter is gathering some momentum this week. We've made multiple braises, concocted multiple squash soups, and the days just keep getting shorter. I grabbed the shot at left after aelis pointed out the sunset, I think it was just after 4:30 in the afternoon. She finds the shorter days depressing, whereas I feel as if I have a special relationship to the accelerating darkness - my birthday falling on the winter solstice. We fall on either side of the question of rain as well.

The quality of light this time of year reminds me of a trip we'd taken to Ireland a few years ago. We arrived in late December and it felt as though there were only a handful of hours of full sun to be had. The photo below was also taken at about 4:30pm, just after we'd come back from an early dinner in Belfast.


Of course, this being California and us living in one large city and very near another, we have pollutants to help give our sunsets additional postmodern oomph:

Frustrated Freudian Flogs Mailboxes

Confession being my preferred rhetorical ploy for introducing guilty pleasures, I will confess to what I see as an entirely uncharacteristic fondness for Federalist-era mailboxes. In addition to the ornate stylings, the eagle motif is a dead give away where Federalist carbon-dating is concerned. Something very satisfying about all of that brass, though for reasons that I guess will only get funnier by the end of this post I'd prefer a black one.

Here's the paragraph of marketing copy that describes the mailbox:

Whether you look at the thickness of the brass, the innovative drain pipe surrounding the flag shaft or the powerful closure magnets on the mail door and locking access door . . . one conclusion is apparent . . . the Classic Mailbox Collection is the best quality money can buy.

You know they are targeting a discriminating audience when the words thickness, power, and shaft all wind up in the same sentence.