Visiting Tor House and Hawk Tower, home of Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una, was an amazing experience yesterday. I still can’t believe I was there, got to sit at his writing desk and climb to the top of Hawk Tower (second picture is the view of the Pacific from the top).
Nevertheless, I’ll be looking for you tomorrow, Jeffers.
Day three. What can you say about these god-trees, the redwoods?
Highlight of day two of our California vacation was the sea lions hanging out, watching the humans at Pier 39.
Holy crap what a day – and it’s still not over. The Indianapolis to Dallas flight was delayed by two hours. Once we finally landed in Dallas, we ran to the connecting flight gate but missed it by less than five minutes. Then we spent two solid hours in the American Airlines customer service line. But the good news is that there is a flight going to San Francisco at 10:45pm.
If all goes as planned, I am three days away from visiting Muir Woods, so I’m reading this in earnest. Very good so far.
Butterfly weed in Green Man’s Grotto is starting to bloom. Come on, butterflies!
Ted Goia on fourteen signs that you are living in a society without a counterculture. This is true. It is, however, ironic that the article takes the form of a listicle consisting of screenshots of tweets. As Cory Doctorow says, the internet has become “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
American Columbo is in bloom.
I made some pawpaw muffins this morning using this recipe. I would have liked them to have a stronger pawpaw flavor, so maybe the pulp should be increased. (I cut everything in half because I didn’t have enough unfrozen pulp to make the whole recipe.) The recipe is actually for bread but I had a notion to make muffins instead so I used this article as a reference for how to convert a quick bread recipe into muffins — basically increase the heat and decrease the time.
Pawpaws are the largest edible fruit native to North America. They’re often described as a mix of banana and mango flavors. This National Park Service article describes the tree and fruit and says the trees are becoming increasingly dominant in the understory because deer do not like them. An interesting case of the interrelatedness of the ecosystem: as deer population increases due to a decrease in predators, pawpaw trees increase because deer don’t eat them and instead eat other species. As pawpaw trees increase, the NPS says, the forest canopy may become more patchy or shorten (see the article for the reasons why).