Life of Wry

I absolutely LOVE the late afternoon light (or this time of year, early evening*) as it pours through our west facing windows. The room’s brilliantly aglow, you should see it. It’s pretty great.

(*) 6:58pm, actually.

Picked our first eggplant of the summer. It doesn’t get any better than this!

Oh my, what a fun evening we just had. I joined Sabrina and Bill and we headed to Sonoma State’s Green Music Center for a completely fabulous concert in a stunning venue. Not my pic, but it shows the setting..

A huge percentage of the seating is at tables “on the green” where you can sit and eat food brought or bought. There is open grass seating around the perimeter, and inside that building is a theater (open to the rear) and the actual stage; you can buy tickets to be inside (probably a lot more expensive). Our outdoor table seats were 50 bucks.

Here are a couple shots I did take …

Eating at tables, so civilized!

There are restrooms inside the building, and if you go in to use them, you can sneak a peak inside the theater (gorgeous).. and get a closer look at the stage.

This was before the concert started:

This is the stage when Nickel Creek was playing..a picture I took when I went inside mid-show.

A quick word on the concert… it opened with a woman named Monica Martin.. incredibly lovely voice, a bit saucy and damaged, but loved every song she did (with another woman who played the guitar and did harmonies).. (they projected video on a large screen since we, outside, could not see the stage).

I am just blown away by Nickel Creek, though. They have been together since 1993, played consistently through about 2006, maybe 8-10 albums, a bluegrass grammy, lots of nominations for same, plus Country Music Award nominations, then took a break, and reunited sort of recently. Violin (Sara Watkins), mandolin (Chris Thile) and guitar (Sean Watkins). There was also a guy in back who played bass.

Bluegrassy, folk, roots, country… I was just drop-jawed through a whole bunch of it and totally sucked in for all of it. Some super high energy, some deeply lulling and affecting. All hugely engaging. Definitely a fan.

This guy, Chris Thile, is the center of the universe. Incredible mandolin. He is also the person who took over for Garrison Keillor when he left A Prairie Home Companion.. 6-7 years ago? Wish I had taken a better pic.. he had such stage presence! (Google him.)

Sara Watkins is shockingly talented… (again, not a great pic)

And her brother Sean, the third guy, was slightly more background, but a key player and incredibly impressive. I think all three were regular guests on Prairie Home Companion all those years ago…

Not kidding. It was just amazing, a great night of music. So glad I went.

T’was Janet’s birthday today and we celebrated with a nice dinner on the patio. How ’bout that!

Her birthday was the nudge I needed to clean up the patio.. which meant cleaning the tables, chairs and umbrella, tidying up the garden, knocking dust, cobwebs and debris off of everything, and doing some (quite a bit of) weeding while I was at it. Kinda overdue, glad it’s done.

Some show-off pics:

The ap was humus and baba ganoush to go with the homemade pita we had (dough from Dror, baked and re-baked here). Presentation: Jim

Dinner was grilled salmon, marinated in soy, brown sugar, rice wine vinegar and a couple other things I can’t remember, served on brown basmati with a topping of cilantro, red onions, sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds… which was just delicious! Good job, Jim!

I made a salad with our garden yellow cherry tomatoes, Dror’s clay pot potatoes, avocado, walnuts, dried cranberries, pepitas, red onion (maybe from our garden), croutons, with Seka Hills olive oil and their raspberry balsamic vinegar. Excellent.

Dessert was, by request, that fabulous lemon pound cake we’ve been making for almost two years now.. it’s a keeper.

And here we are!

Cheers to the birthday girl:

Elliot’s and my approximately semiannual Berkeley breakfast and walk. As usual, a true pleasure. Thirty-four-year friendship and counting!

No shots of Bette’s Diner (a departure from our usual Rick and Ann’s), but here are a few from the stroll in Cesar Chavez Park, down by the Berkeley Marina. Chilly, windy, foggy…. a perfect summer day in the Bay.

A foggy SF city skyline…

Carved out of a big boulder!

I thought this walkway art was also pretty clever..

Sorry, just gotta. I pulled all the carrots up. The ones on the end of the big giant flowers were bad. The ones on the end of tiny, delicate greenery were the best. Huh. Lots didn’t even make it into the house! Three of the ones below cannot even be penetrated with a sharp knife… terribly hard (woody?) inside.. like steel! So the entire carrot harvest (today) yielded about three hopefully edible carrots — at this point, can’t speak to the flavor. CONCLUSION: Carrots not really worth it. Will add to the list of veggies we’ll not plant again (this list also includes celery and beets).

Also: yellow pepper (not sure what it is), more candy yellow cherry toms, some chard and one big red tom.

I decided to pick the nectarines.. but they are ALL GONE! How can that be? There were dozens… where did they go? I’m researching now….

Green and yellow were the colors of the day.

Putah Creek’s particularly green these days:

That is not grass, folks! That is rivulets of duck weed.. cool patterns!

And then there were yellow things to see today as well…

Not sure what these pompom blooms are …

And .. a splash of yellow that somebody placed on this marker…

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And, just because I really loved what I made for dinner.. baked chicken meatballs (ground chick, red onion, egg, breadcrumbs, Jamaican sauce, cilantro, garlic powder, s/p) that went over brown basmati with a Jamaican Jerk sauce (pineapple juice, brown sugar, ketchup, Worcestershire, garlic, onion powder, red-pepper flakes, salt, cornstarch). So easy, so good.

I mean…

I rather liked our 4th of July this year. We attended Monica and Dror’s annual Middle Eastern Feast for the first time. For decades, we’ve stayed local and enjoyed all the fourth’s fixins that Davis offers… pancakes breakfasts, bike races, kid parades, fireworks at Community Park, of course. One year, we ventured up to the foothills to see Susan and Jim honored as parade marshals in the Dutch Flat parade and 4th of July celebration, which was very sweet. We’ve been out of town a time or two… but mostly we have loved the hometown festivities. I have to say, it’s not the same without Peter, so happy to find new traditions.

So, this year, the Matalon-Frame shindig it was. Thirty-ish folks and look at this spread!

With only a couple of exceptions, Dror (a guy from Israel), made all of it. Chicken shwarma, homemade pita bread, baba ganoush, humus, labneh, tahini, veggies galore, olives, various sauces… it was just absolutely fabulous.

It wasn’t as warm down in the bay area today, but it was pleasant enough to sit outside!

Jim and I had long, fun conversations with Lucy, Charlie, Monica, Dror, Ben, and Nina. And ate superb food. My kinda celebration.

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I’ll be honest, I’m just not feeling a lot of love for what our country has become in the last 7-8 years. There has been such a profound collapse of morality, truth and decency, all of which I lay at the feet of one person. I am so deeply resentful of the hate and division he’s worked so relentlessly to foment. Real leaders in democracies don’t divide their people, they do everything in their power to unite them. Real leaders wake up in the morning thinking about how to help their people, how they can better their lives. Not divide them, not hurt them, not destroy anyone in opposition. Today, on America’s biggest celebration of itself, the twice-impeached, twice-and-counting-indicted former president — and, shockingly, the leading contender for the GOP nomination in the next presidential election — started his day by reposting a Fuck Biden meme. In trademark petty fashion, his opening message of the day was that he’s more popular because people wear his red hats and fly his giant flags. “No Biden hats anywhere. Never seen one!”

Happy Birthday America.

His small minded pettiness, vindictiveness and vulgarity….all on display. I can’t bear it. So.. no, celebrating America feels hypocritical and hollow these days. Would rather take a break on faux patriotism and eat some great Middle Eastern food with friends in Oakland.

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We got home just in time to hear the fireworks start up in Community Park. No time to get up there (or interest, really), but standing in the middle of A Street, I could catch a few of them:

Today’s colorful bit of magic:

I actually have another motivation for taking these pictures (besides bragging): it serves as sort of a time stamp on veggie and fruit harvests. Seems helpful to know when we can expect things to be ready each season.

(Laughing a bit at my use of word harvest. Like we’re farmers or something. LOL.)

For the record, dinner was: baked gnocchi w/ toms*, red onion*, squash*, rb peppers, garlic*, basil*, rosemary*, parm, oo, s/p; plus a great gardeny salad; plus strawberries*. Rice crispy treats for dessert. Not from the garden.

(*) from the garden with these caveats: we actually lost our basil crop this year, and I’m still drying the garlic.

Apropos of nothing, at least nothing having anything to do with today, I am posting a photo that just made me smile.

May I present the Hesse girls (and one random husband):

I truly love these gals (Art, too, Karen’s husband, but for my purposes here, I’m just going to give a wee backstory on the Hesse girls).

Their dad, Fred, hired my dad in the early 50s. My dad had graduated from Stanford with an MBA, had worked a couple of starter jobs in Northern California, and then, reading the tea leaves, applied for a job in aerospace — the go-go industry of the 50s in LA. He and my mom headed down to Redondo Beach where my dad interviewed with and was subsequently hired by Mr. Hesse for a job at Space Technology Laboratories (which I believe was started by engineers Thompson and Wooldridge, who later partnered with Ramo to form TRW). My dad and Mr. Hesse (who’d just graduated from Harvard) were two of the earliest employees of STL –> TRW, when, literally, there was just a couple/few dozen folks. They would work together for the next 30+ years and grow TRW to became a huge powerhouse in the aerospace and defense industries (with the eventual help of 9000+ employees at Space Park in Redondo Beach, and who knows how many other employees in the other four divisions of the corporation).

Anyway, Fred and his lovely wife Betty lived in a beach bungalow down on 39th Street in Manhattan Beach and suggested to my dad and mom that they consider a bungalow down the street that was available to rent. Which they did.

There was a third couple, Ed and Bev Osborne, who also lived on 39th. Each couple, at that point kidless, was young (in their early to mid-twenties!) and at the beginning of their work lives. The three couples became fast friends. Each started cranking out kids like there was no tomorrow. Pretty soon they each had to relocate to accommodate their growing families: the Hesses moved to a large ranch house in Rolling Hills and had six kids (5 girls, 1 boy), the Petersons moved to Palos Verdes and had four kids (1 girl, 3 boys), and the Osbornes moved to Long Beach and had three kids (3 girls). Imagine…. between about 1953 and 1965, those three young couples gave birth to 13 kids! Imagine, too, that this was the start of a lifelong relationship, not just between the adults, but between those kids.

Today, the friendship exists mostly between the nine girls (Karen, Lundee, Lauren, Kari, Betsy, Leslie, Vicki, Lisa, Anne, in that order). The four boys (Jay, Chris, Matt and Fritz) are there but very peripheral.

Fred, Ed, John, Betty, Ina, and Bev (in that order) have all passed away, but I think they’d be over the moon to know the kids are still hanging in.

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The above picture was taken a couple of weeks ago at Karen’s 70th birthday. She’s the first to hit the big seven – oh, and her sisters celebrated her by gathering in Reno. The came from Oregon, Colorado, MIchigan and Norway! It was a sisters-only-no-spouses-or-Peterson-or-Osbornes affair (except Art lives there, so he was around a bit), but the rest of us were all kept apprised of their week of antics. And they do do antics!

Sisters pictured, left to right: Karen, Lisa, Vicki, Lauren and Leslie. A unique and amazing bunch.