Life of Wry

* not a typo

Walked with Vicki along Putah Creek in the arboretum today! This is notable because it’s been over five months since I’ve actually been able to muster even a short walk. Yippee!!

Actually, we didn’t get all that far, cuz, you know, my hip was hurting…

… and that’s why I call this Putah Creak. 

But… it was very pretty and we went slowwwwwwly and I got a chance to take a few nature pics:

The matilija poppies bordering Spafford Lake are nearing the end of their crazy bloom. Theirs fared much better than ours did this year:

I wrote about these last year when we first planted them in our front yard.

It had been so long since we’d been down there, we were both surprised to see how the native grasses had filled in (in the re-designed area near the shovel gateway sculpture). What were small, discreet rows of newly planted grasses last year, are now slopes and fields full of dense, waist-high growth.

We both felt sort of ambivalent about how this has turned out. Some areas look okay, some look overgrown and unkempt, bordering on weedy. Not sure if they’ve achieved their desired objective with this. Will have to ask around.

Nevertheless.. it was a great day to be hobbling about.

My Aunt Ellie sent a few pictures today of our adventures last weekend. Her pictures had us in them! (The best kind.)

Kitchen adventures... here, scooping some Talenti Mediterranean Mint gelato and Straus Organic vanilla bean ice cream to go with fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, organic cherries, strawberries and blueberries. Because California. Thank you Farmer’s Market and Davis Food Coop.

Flowers from the backyard. Alstroemeria. Leggy and beautiful.

Horse show adventures… don’t ask me about the expression (maybe the horse just knocked down a rail). Just a nice, rare family pic.

More horse show pics are here.

A couple of photos taken this afternoon, between things.

In the woof category, we have Roy, the new big dog now towering above the corner at First and E Streets in front of the John Natsoulas Gallery, welcoming people to downtown Davis.

Made out of, among other things, vinyl records… here’s a close up:

And here is a very nice shot of it at night. I found this posted in the Natsoulas Facebook page and would definitely have given a photo credit, if there had been one to give:

And, taking a bit of liberty in the roof category, this trellised breezeway not too far from Roy the Dog, is part of the Davis Commons development. I’ve always loved this spot, and have fond memories of many a dinner or lunch at Fuzio, seated on the patio just to the right:

Woof.

I love the light coming in through the windows in the late afternoon. Just stops me in my tracks. Every time.

Goofing around with different filters.

Tail fins:

HDR:

B/W:

Nothing like out of town guests to help you expand beyond your usual boundaries….

The set up:

Aunt Ellie’s cherished friend from UCLA days (and Eric’s godmother), Nancy, drove up from her current home in Manteca to visit with her son Jim Thompson and his family (Kath, Kylie, Kate and Emma) who live in a charming country home on a few acres off Road 96 where they board horses and manage huge gardens in addition to many other typical Davis in-town things. Here is a view as we pulled up to the house.. very peaceful and shady:

Jim, Peter and I tagged along for Uncle Bud and Aunt Ellie’s visit with them and we found we had numerous Davis-y people and experiences in common with the Thompsons.  We were all treated to a great patio lunch beneath a drapy, plum-laden tree, listening to parachuters falling from the sky above the tiny (and adjacent) Yolo County Airport.  Peter and Kylie are in the same spanish class so that made things even more interesting in that teenagers-thrown-together-by-adult-social-circumstances way.

I didn’t take any pictures of any of this, but it was a lovely scene around that table.

We then mobilized and caravanned out to a rural, hilly place northwest of Woodland to watch one of the sisters (Kate) compete in a horse show. We caught the second of three events–the jumping, which was quite exciting to watch (dressage and cross country were the other two events). Information about these things is here.

The setting was surprisingly un-valley-ish–hills, horses, eucalyptus. It was very pretty and very familiar, reminiscent of Rolling Hills where so many of my friends spent time growing up and participating in the very same horse-related things.

Some shots:

And here’s Kate, early in her nearly perfect run:

(I’ve got to fix my iPhone camera… this blurriness is not an intentional effect.)

On the way back to town, we detoured to a place at the intersection of County Roads 95 and 22: Monument Hill Memorial Park. Wikipedia says it’s at an elevation of 135 feet–a high elevation for us valley dwellers–and the views were gorgeous.

It’s a cemetery …

… but it’s also the site of a significant surveying landmark and point of measurement…

(sorry for the blurriness)

Jim gave us a beautiful explanation of what, exactly, is inside that monument (it has nothing at all to do with its location in a cemetery), its historical importance and how it was part of a system of markers along a very long boundary line cleverly, painstakingly set in the 1800s [… and I wish I could explain this but I’ll have to back-fill once I get a review from Jim. Stand by.]

It was very cool.

We returned home, took the obligatory photo at Dad’s bench..

… and spent the entire rest of the afternoon talking:

Aunt Ellie and Uncle Bud…

Jim and Nancy…

Very fun to find out that my dad hired Nancy to work in Sequoia, way back in about 1954. He had been hired to manage the company that managed guest services at Sequoia National Park. The ink was still wet on his Stanford MBA and this was one of his first official management jobs. She described him as intimidating in that way handsome, confident, take charge guys are (I’m thinking Don Draper, of course). She described my mom as sexy (the actual word she used) and popular with the rangers. She said she and my mom played a lot of volleyball during those years with those same rangers.

I liked Nancy a lot.

Then Peter joined us and we all went to the Buckhorn in the heart of Winters … housed in what was originally the DeVilbiss Hotel, built in 1889 on the corner of Railroad and Main Street (not sure when or why it was called the Empire Hotel)….

Way too much food, as always. But, I have to say, the filet was impossibly tender and flavorful (and fantastic…I’m sticking with filets from now on). It went well with a Turkovich syrah, an extremely creamy but tasty tomato soup, a perfectly baked potato, great bread, etc, etc.  Steakhouse fare. All good.

Nancy then drove back to Manteca; B & E will take off in the morning.

These opportunities don’t come along very often… a long, leisurely two days to really sit and talk with people who you grew up knowing and looking up to. I am adding this weekend to the life’s great memories list. So delighted Peter was willing to hang with us for a lot of it, and was, for the most part, engaged and on his game. He seemed to understand and appreciate the importance and value of family, without my having to coach him (well, not too much anyway).  He received a few well-deserved kudos, too.

Grateful for the whole thing.

Look who came to town… my Aunt Ellie and Uncle Bud!

These crazy kids — 82 and 90 — drove all the way up from Long Beach. Their trip has included stops along the way in Carmel, Santa Cruz, and Oakland.

Our first Davis day included a trip to Farmer’s Market, lunch at Bistro 33, a stint at the finish line of the annual Davis Double Century, and a short tour around Davis which included a drive through campus, a train station drive-by, and a stop at Compassion Corner.

We ended the day with a wonderful bbq’d salmon dinner at our house. Thanks, Jim; great job!

Uncle Bud fascinates [us all, but especially] Peter. He became even more fascinating to our physics-obsessed kid when he learned that Uncle Bud’s doctorate from CalTech was in physics (we thought it was chemistry) and that J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb) was on his PhD review committee. And that Uncle Bud’s research included making adjustments to what was then the accepted calculation for the speed of light (which attracted Oppenheimer to his lab in the first place). And he went to Berkeley. And UCLA.

I think Peter has a new hero.

(No hero will ever supersede his dad. But Uncle Bud is his new physics man crush, for sure.)

And I learned, among many other things, that Uncle Bud is *extremely* humble and would likely not be comfortable with even this amount of sharing. He would not have copped to any of this, but for Aunt Ellie’s giving it up. Accomplished and humble.. one of the better human combos.

(And she’s no slouch… UCLA and Stanford for that one.)

I am very glad to hear he’s taking a memoir writing class at CSU Long Beach. This is great, because there are numerous other parts of his life that are worth documenting, from flying P51 combat missions in China at age 17; to getting shot down over Burma, breaking his leg after bailing out, and getting rescued in the jungle a few days later; to working for Howard Hughes on the Spruce Goose. Ho hum.

I even volunteered to help him write the memoir (wouldn’t that be a great gig!).

Anyway, until now, all this college talk would have been beyond meaningless to Peter, but now, immersed in college planning, he’s pretty impressed with all the family connections to schools that are at the top of his dream list.

Context is everything.

Well, we have one more day of visiting tomorrow; we’ll see what else we can uncover. It’s nice to have so much time with my aunt and uncle.

Do you know how long my Aunt Ellie has been in my life? Well before she even met my uncle (to whom she’s been married over fifty years)…

This long:

In case this isn’t readable, this is what it says, sent via Western Union from Lubbock, TX–where she was on some kind of business trip–at 8:46am, January 26, 1956 (the morning following my birth):

IT’S WONDERFUL TO HAVE YOU IN THE FAMILY SWEETIE TELL YOUR MOMMY AND DADDY I THINK THEYRE PRETTY SWELL AND TELL THEM NOT TO SPOIL YOU BEFORE I GET A CHANCE, SLEEP LOTS AND BE A GOOD KID MUCH LOVE TO YOU KARIN FROM YOUR PROUD AUNT ELLIE

Addressed to me, Karin Ann Peterson, 129 39th St., Manhattan Beach, Calif.

[Note: My name isn’t Karin now, nor was it then. Someone in the Western Union office goofed up.]

It’s five to twelve and I’m about to turn into a pumpkin. I have no photos to share and no stories to tell, so in the next [now] four minutes, I’m going to share a picture I took last week and posted to Facebook with the caption, “hanger management.” Pretty clever, Peterson, I thought.

People who commented had lots to say about how I hang up my clothes and how I should coordinate the colors of the hangers with the colors of my clothes… as though it were truly a post about managing one’s closet.

Which it wasn’t.

I had been hanging up a shirt that morning, and as I did hanger management popped into my head and I thought, “I’m postin’ that!”

So I did, without explanation, assuming people would get the pun.

They didn’t.

Which was kind of embarrassing. I mean, I am not particularly proud of my closet organization, so I’m sure not going to post a picture of it, and even if I were, I certainly wouldn’t post a status update about it. I lean toward the serious stuff on Facebook–vacation foot shots and slo-mo flying peacocks.

(Really, check them out.)

I even posted this today, because I thought it, too, was worth a heh heh.

Not my picture but I liked it. Caption: Mac now supports Windows.

Funny, huh?

Tonight was our second playoff game of the post-season. The early rounds in this tournament are win-or-go-home games, so there is added urgency to win. As of the start of tonight’s game, there were five teams remaining (out of twelve) in the northern division of our Sac-Joaquin Section bracket. The winner of our game tonight would advance to the round of four, a double elimination contest, the winner of which goes on to play the winner of the southern division bracket.

The loser would go home.

The northern-southern matchup is also a double elimination contest, the winner of which is the big fancy champion of the whole Section, earning a HUGE permanent wooden banner to be displayed for all the world to see. We were those guys last year (and in 2000 and 2004)… the tournament’s defending champs!

Still with me? Suffice to say, it all comes down to the post season.

We weren’t even sure we’d have a game tonight, what with a 90% chance of thunderstorms forecast for 7:00pm–the scheduled start of the game. This is the ominous, foreboding sky just before our players took the field.

It didn’t rain, however. It was freezing, and a bit windy, and we had to resort to multiple layers of down and blankets to keep warm… but it didn’t rain, and they got their full seven innings in.

Our kids got rolled. They were way out hit, mostly out played, and just never looked like they were able to get a foothold. Definitely the better team (the #1 ranked Oak Ridge High) advanced to the vaunted round of four.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t brutal. It was. It’s hard to end the season anyway, but it’s at least a gentler let down if the team plays well.  But on this night, we were overmatched (lost 9-0; got only 2 hits, gave up 16; struck out 8 times,… overmatched like that) and just never got on the board.

And last games are sad!  A lot of hugging was going on (not those hasty, gruff-ish man hugs, either). I imagine there were tender feelings all around and maybe some tears. There was the last huddle, the last coach’s talk, the last dugout clean up… and then they walked off the field and out of the stadium together. Many arm-in-arm.

Some seniors are done with baseball, some may continue on with more relaxed club teams, and some have committed to play for their colleges or universities. Nobody in this group is likely to go further than that.

The underclassmen, on the other hand, will be back in a week or two for the summer season.

YAY for that!!

Here’s a sincere thank you to Coaches Dan Ariola, Mark Kenner, Thomas Goykavick, Robby Bronson, Jeff Woodard (and maybe some others) for a pretty awesome season. I had no idea it’d be this fun and so worthwhile an experience for Peter.

So glad to be a part.

This happened today.

I think it actually happened last weekend, but the sign went up today.

This is June’s house, two doors down, and it’s been for sale for a few months. She moved to Atria last fall, but took a few months to fix up some of the dilapidated interior. It’s a scrawny little house (1276 sq ft, with three wee bedrooms and two even tinier bathrooms, a single-car garage, a dated layout and extremely dated finishing features). It hasn’t been seriously updated since the day it was built (1948) and probably went for a lot more than it was worth. She started obscenely high, just under $700k, but I think it came down quite a bit. They were marketing its location (location, location), and, I have to admit, that is a good selling feature.

The buyer, who currently lives down in the Walnut Creek area, is THRILLED to move in.

It’s a perfect arrangement: her daughter, a NICU nurse, her psychiatrist son-in-law and her two adorable grandkids live in the house next door. She’ll be a very happy, very needed built-in back up for busy parents, and apparently her grandkids just cherish her. A win-win-win situation if ever there was one. She’s also excited to be so close to the senior center, the library, Central Park and downtown… (well, and the campus, too). She loves all of that.  She’s a former professor, I hear, and when I met her last week, she seemed really perky, nice and totally together.

In our campus-close neighborhood, owner occupied is a big deal.

We could not be happier.

[Editor’s Note: I have not given up blogging. I have fallen behind because it was too hard to blog while in PV last weekend. And then I didn’t blog on Monday because I’d not blogged Friday, Saturday or Sunday. And this is why I never skip a day; skipping blogging is a slippery slope. It’s like cheating on a diet; once you do, it’s harder to get back on the horse. Blogging is not like dieting, however; I actually like blogging. So I will be back-filling the weekend. (She said to nobody.)]

[Note to self: Remove above note when I’ve finished the back blogs.]

I noticed this past week on Facebook that, according to New England type friends, spring has sprung in Vermont–I’ve seen pictures of budding trees, crocuses, tulips.

Like it’s January in Davis or something.

In honor of that, I’m going to post some pics taken in the hood, on a couple recent trips to and from the Davis Food Coop, because even though spring started showing up in Davis almost four months ago, it is still riotously colorful out there!

So…

D Street. During the summer of 1981, I think it was, I lived in a cottage behind this blue house (though at the time, there was a large, shady lawn where this blue house now sits. This house was brought in on a truck some years ago. Amazing how they do that.)

The alley between F and G. Omg… alleys.

Gardens along 6th and that purple house. I don’t know why anyone would live anywhere else.

The daffs look great against this dark blue house further down 6th…

…and I especially love the look in April when these purple flowers bloom:

Seriously. This neighborhood makes my heart sing.

Also along 6th, this is the alley between B and C. Again, what is it about alleys?

Now back on A, a couple of doors down:

I’m realizing I’m having trouble with the focus on my camera… so let’s just pretend all these blurry photos were intentional.