Keep In Touch 2020

Fallen mailbox  March 19, 2011

Grandpa's large old mailbox was knocked down in a fast snowstorm, maybe by the mailman or a snowplow, maybe by a neighbor with a tractor -- tracks were visible under the top several inches after they melted. I left it out there since at least it was a marker for the address -- I was using a post office box at the time. And after a month, someone took it, before I could put it up again.

I have a new, small mailbox now. I am emailing with a family member, and went back on Facebook to get back in touch with a couple of friends. (And started again looking at a couple of groups as inspiration for starting some projects, which I have already collected fabric for.) And this is definitely an opportunity to clean the house. . .

And the OLLI adult education, which cancelled its classes, all on campus, first thing for this semester, has developed an entirely new Zoom schedule of classes for this semester, and is planning for summer. 

Old friends have moved away.

4/24/2020 And I had lost touch recently with a close friend, but it was just a misunderstanding. We are talking on the phone again.

Campus Is Closed 2020

Library, Sierra College, Nevada County Campus

This picture of the library on campus from across the pond is from several years ago, maybe 2013. It was the semester we lost 3 Thursdays to snow vacation. The picture was taken on Friday, the day after it started snowing quickly during class and campus was closed.

I walked home; it's only 2 miles on the wooded trail, a little farther the way I went along the roads. At class next week, we discovered I had reached home before the professor had gotten out of the parking lot with everyone trying to leave at once.

Last October, we didn't have any storms, no rain although some wind. But we had SIX power outages from PGE, the first one over 3 days. No wind here when the power was off. Supposedly only 10 days total. Everyone, including grocery stores, lost freezers full of food. Yes, some of them had backup generators; it wasn't enough.

Now, with the Corona virus pandemic, and shelter-in-place/social-distance, almost everything except grocery stores is shut down. Government offices and some businesses/restaurants are curbside pickup. I was glad to hear hardware stores are open, in case of a stopped-up drain. And I need batteries and light bulbs.

Our wonderful local independent radio station is unusually running many already recorded programs, but still keeping us updated on what is happening. And YubaNet, which we usually depend on for weather, fire, election and meetings information, is moderating regular virtual town meetings.

But schools are coping. They are shut, but at least most California districts are trying to get school lunches to kids. And some online, I don't know details. But I know at least 2 community college students who have been homeless, and certainly many more can't do online courses without the library. Over the last few years, this campus has lost the majority of its on-campus courses to online ones, and the computer lab closed several years ago.

The exception was the adult ed OLLI short courses, all I have taken for the last year, which were all in person. But since they were for older students, they were cancelled first thing. And now they are back! The 2 I had wanted to take are not, but a bunch of interesting things are available this semester on Zoom. They put that together in a month...

Old dogs are learning new tricks.

PS. Minimally Photoshopped -- I took out a garbage can.

Goodby Spot March 25, 2020

Spot on heater March 12, 2011 - 6 months old

The kittens were born in September 2010. Since Lassie died, the remaining three have been healthy and happy, going out on the balcony/low roofs when the weather was nice (which it was all February 2020). They often slept on the bed with me, or near/on a heater. They had a newly cleared table in a sunny window in the bedroom. But this morning, Spot is gone.

Yesterday aft and eve, not eating, crying out from time to time in that deep voice as if to be sick, but not being sick. Sleeping on foot of bed, alone. ( Usually her friend/sister Grey Mouse would have been with her, licking her head and ears. But it was chilly; Grey Mouse was sitting on the radiator heater. ) Then late eve down off bed, curled up there at foot, and after a while, sick. Then she felt better, tried to get up on bed by me (Rexie was sleeping under the cover -  they would have fought). I thought she was OK. This morning when I woke, she was dead. By 10am already stiff. I think she must have eaten something bad while their food and water dishes were empty yesterday morning.

Back at the beginning of the year Spot had a respiratory thing, and was having trouble breathing. I put her in/under a blanket with a bowl of steaming water. An old-fashioned remedy which helped a lot, and warmed her up too. Also, she wasn't eating, so giving her some of the smallest jars of meat-based baby food worked well. She was very hungry, and gobbled it instantly. She had lost a lot of weight, and didn't have any to loose, a small light little cat. She had, I think, by 2 days ago, fully recovered, always eager to eat and drink.

Spot was the friendliest as a kitten, when they had visitors a few times. She and Grey Mouse were friends now, most of the time, sleeping curled up together, or half on top of each other. Occasionally Rexie would tolerate being on the bed at the same time as the pair of them. (And not even sitting on the top of my head growling, as he did as a kitten twice when Buddy came into the bedroom.)

Since January, I have been noticing especially how pretty her eyes and Grey Mouse' eyes were; their eye colors have gone quite grey, very pretty with their cool grey coats. I meant to take pictures...


Goodby Spot. I love you.  I.miss you.

I was probably listening to Bach online - Bach's birthday program in the middle of the night when she died near the foot of my bed. The music was on only softly, so I should have heard her, and didn't hear anything. My favorite composer will never seem quite the same to me, perhaps...

Irrationality? Floating rocks? Rockbergs! Feb 14, 2018

Floating ice and floating rocks, small pond on campus, March 7, 2016

Time to reread one of my favorite books, Irrationality, by Stuart Sutherland. An excuse for a few quotes. He's funny; you have to watch for it.

"What constitutes a rational decision depends upon one's knowledge. There is a rider to this. If one has reason to believe one's knowledge is insufficient, then it is rational, particularly in the case of important decisions, to seek out more evidence: unfortunately, as we will see, when people do so, they usually act in a wholly irrational way, since they only seek evidence that will support their existing beliefs." (p. 5)

"The effects of conformity on beliefs and attitudes are the more injurious because people tend to associate with others who have similar beliefs to themselves. ... the only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it. But because like mixes with like, people are rarely exposed to counter-arguments to their more deeply held convictions, let alone to counter-evidence. Their beliefs conform to those of their associates: hence, there is little possibility of eliminating persistent errors. "(p. 41)

"Everyone is irrational some of the time and in particular everyone is susceptible to the availability error. I give a final striking example ... In 1969, Jerzy Kosinsky's novel Steps won the American National Book Award for fiction. Eight years later some joker had it retyped and sent the manuscript with no title and under a false name to fourteen major publishers and thirteen literary agents in the US, including ... the firm that had originally published it. Of the twenty-seven people to whom it was submitted, not one recognised that it had already been published. Moreover, all twenty-seven rejected it. All it lacked was Jerzy Kosinsky's name to create the halo effect: without the name, it was seen as an indifferent book." (pp. 28-29)

"People have an amazing capacity to remember pictures. After being shown 10,000 photographs just once they can correctly recognize almost all of them a week later. This is in marked contrast to the very poor memory for isolated words."(p. 19)

"The term 'love' was defined in an authoritative dictionary of psychology as 'a form of mental illness not yet recognised in the standard diagnostic manuals'. (p. 115) [The authoritative dictionary was written by S. Sutherland...]

Now, about those floating rocks. I have seen that pond drained. It is about knee-deep, and there are no rocks sticking up in it. What happens is that when the pond freezes over, students throw rocks out onto the ice, trying to break it. At first this doesn't succeed, and in the freeze-thaw cycles, some of the rocks get frozen to the ice. When they finally break it [that's why there are those entirely unnatural sharp edges to the ice], some of those rocks are attached to large enough pieces of ice to support them, mostly invisible under the water, and the rocks go floating around the pond. Rockbergs.

Re-examine what you see. Go over the evidence. There are floating rocks, and underground jumping rocks. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

But real. With rational explanations.


He gives citations for almost everything, but not for the Jerzy Kosinsky story. I have to wonder who that 'joker' was who re-submitted the story...

Summertime, and the living is easy

New sailboat, summer 1969

Summertime, and the living is easy......and the cotton is high.

It's easy to guess that the person who wrote those lyrics had never picked cotton.

Neither have I, but my first job was as summer field labor in an experimental barley field. That was in the pre-sunscreen era, and it took only one day for me to figure out that someone as pale-skinned as I needed long sleeves and a hat.
(Why  it took me that long I don't know, I always burned badly.) And summertime work out in a hot sunny field is not easy at all.


The year I was a freshman in college, the woman who graduated as  the valedictorian that year had earned her way through college picking fruit in the Wenatchee Valley. I was very impressed.


The little sailboat is from a few years later. That's me, and our dad behind the mast, and a brother. And one year an article had been published about PABA (para-amino-benzoic acid). So Dad mixed up some in alcohol, and my sister and I tried it while sailing across the lake. We were amazed that we didn't sunburn at all.

And around here, the living is not so easy in summertime.

True it's not between 42 degrees F and 52 on the main floor (I used a refrigerator thermometer to check that, since the thermometer on the non-functional thermostat only goes down to 52.) Sometimes 52 degrees is a lot colder than other times…

And not between 50 and 60 degrees on the top floor. The higher temperatures are after several sunny days, or when there's been a fire in the woodstove.

And I'm not wading through a foot of snow to carry firewood from the garage to the house and upstairs after several days of the power being out, like a couple of years ago. (Normally I try to carry firewood up between storms.)

Yes, it only takes 5 minutes to dress in one layer of clothes, but more baths/showers and more laundry.

But the main thing is that it takes half an hour to go around morning and evening closing/opening curtains and/or windows, and turning on and off fans and sprinklers. And when it's hot, it's hot.

When the living is really easy here is right now, spring and fall, in the weeks when the temperature is fine and the windows can be left open to screens all day and all night. Between rain or snow storms. Before the weather gets too hot. With fresh spring vegetables or fall harvest at the grower's market.

Except it's pollen season now, or just finished. Drifts of yellow everywhere. Can't leave the windows open to let that blow in. Can't leave them open again until I've cleaned and vacuumed window-sills, porches, low roofs. Then I will be able to see if it's really over. The recent rains might have finished it, but the pollen cones haven't fallen off the pines yet.

It wasn't supposed to snow today....

It often does in early April. But the forecast was only saying scattered rain showers.

Yesterday it was sunny with scattered clouds (cumulus?), and colder than it looked because of the wind.

This deer is sitting in the lee of a tree ( and a Ponderosa which was mature in 1917 provides significant shelter).

Do you suppose that s(he) was surprised by the snow, or knew it was coming?

Picture taken Apr. 13 2011, 11:09 am. It was still snowing then, but is melting now.


It wasn't until I looked at these photos large size to decide which one to post that I could see the head injury. Car? Falling branch? Do antlers when they come off leave a wound?

Autre temps, autre fleurs

Different years, different flowers. Some, like the paperwhite narcissus, which don't need cooling, flower at about the same time each year (Jan through Feb).

Others are very variable in when they flower, especially the flowering fruit trees, which have cooling requirements, like the earliest here, the flowering plums.

The winter iris, Iris unguicularis, flowers for about 2 months, sometime between November and April. It provides enough blooms to cut a few for a vase every few days - except this year the deer (probably) have discovered it, I have to get there before they do.

We usually but not always have several weeks of warm weather with cool nights in Jan & Feb. The years we don't things are off schedule.

This year we had snow in mid-Nov 2010, very early. Leaves still on the trees, lots of broken branches and fallen trees. I lost the vertical top to the oak west of the house, the one that might have shaded the house in late summer someday. On my south slope I usually don't see the first few frosts to take the leaves off & ripen the fruit of the persimmon until Thanksgiving. (Other microclimates are quite different - Grandpa knew where to build a house.)

Planting weather (like for lawn seed) is usually between mid-April and mid-Oct. One year that I was doing spray-dyeing out in the yard, we had warm weather until the end of October. (I'm not sure if that was the year it snowed on Nov 2 or not. I think so.)

It almost always snows in March and early April. The first year I was here, the April Fools day storm dumped about a foot and a half of snow. The year my sister died in March, after I got back here, all of April it was cold, snow, hail, freezing rain. Things were a month late blooming. Apple trees were blooming in mid-May.

I'm planning to do a five-year gardening/weather calendar, with pictures of what's in bloom each week in several years, and places to write temperatures and notes for each year.

This photo was taken in 2006 on March 9, but this year the flowering plums are almost done Feb 23, the leaves are emerging. Last Thursday it snowed enough to close campus; we've just had several partly sunny days with snow on the ground, in the next few days it's supposed to snow 1-2 ft above 2000 ft. It probably won't look like this. 

PS April 14 This year, starting Feb 17th, it snowed almost every Thursday/Friday all the way through March. The one week it didn't snow, it rained. The power went out for days the week I posted this. The first warm weekend was April Fool's week, warm and sunny enough to go for a wildflower walk at Bridgeport.

I am not usually on the roof in December (12/29/10)

Or January or February*, but today I was. I had swept part of the roof before the first big storm came in, but didn't finish because the rain started. And I didn't have a metal brush up there with me to clear out the screen in the chimney cap.

Yesterday, the wood stove started smoking dreadfully; I had to lock cats in the kitchen or outside in the rain, wherever they were, open all the windows wide and close the doors. It was so smoky I couldn't even go back in there.

The large piece of wood I'd put in smouldered all night, and was still there at noon, today, still warm, although it wasn't smoking anymore.

So I swept my way up onto the roof - this sloping roof on the North side is the access route. Since Mom had the roof taken off the stairs, I hadn't been up there, except the once last fall. It feels kind of steep, without anything to catch myself on... But it wasn't really wet, despite all the rain last night.

After I had used the metal brush on the screen in the chimney cap, and was spending some time doing some more sweeping, the chimney started to smoke a lot. Apparently when it had a draft, the fire started burning more again.

It started to snow a little, just at sunset - glad I got the chimney clear enough for a fire.


It is supposed to start snowing again tonight or tomorrow. Feb. 16, 2011 



* The Ectoplasm Incident
Once, years ago, in February, the tenants were complaining that their chimney was smoking.

The chimney sweep had the flu, and I had reason to believe that the blockage was at the chimney cap:

During the night, when I had not been using the wood stove, a long streamer of smoke came out of the stove and traveled horizontally across the room to exit at a slightly open window. The flues only connect up at the cap, under the screen.

And thinking of those complicated Victorian chimneys, which climbing boys were sent up to sweep, I thought an experience of something like that might have originated the concept of ectoplasm.

So I was up on the roof, on a sunny day in February, and from 3 stories up, I could smell the old-fashioned violets in the lawn, strong as wine.

And in the chimney cap, there were a few leaves on the screen, and there was also a small round dented area, just about small-cat size - and I realized why my little shiny white and gray cat, Fussy, had a few days ago, suddenly been all gray...

Ice-fishing

That's a blue heron on that log out there, in the patches of floating ice. The rough-looking areas are ice too. I think the flat white patches may have finally floated loose from where they were stuck to the beaches, underwater, after the very cold middle-of-the-night low tides we have had for several days. The days have been in the 30s°F.

Picture taken 12/12/2009, 5:02 pm.

I am working on a memorial booklet about Mom, like she & I did for my sister, except that in the several years since my sister died, I have gone to school for three years to learn how to do this. Unfortunately, technical difficulties prevent my moving forward very quickly until more RAM arrives for her computer. Meanwhile I am getting an obituary out to the local newspapers.

Jack Snipe miniature narcissus

This picture is from 3-27-06, and is of the Jack Snipe on the South side, with the shingles behind it. This year that South side bunch was done flowering a week or two before that date.

I think of these and Tête à Tête as early-middle blooming dwarf narcissus. They start after Narcissus minimus and Little Gem, and about the same time as Jenny.

My flowering lawn, which includes these and other miniature narcissus, plus Chionodoxa, Scilla, Tritelia uniflora, grape hyacinths, and other miniature bulbs, is the best bit of garden I ever did. (It no longer has crocuses, because one year there was a gopher.)

It is on the East side of the house, where there was a bluegrass lawn in pretty good shape. So for several years, when I was first here, as early in the fall as bulbs were available, while it was still nice to sit out on the lawn, I'd dig out a weed and stick in a bulb. No need to "gently toss the bulbs to achieve a natural-looking distribution". And for 20 years since then, it's bloomed for more than 4 months every spring.

My more ambitious gardening attempts are long gone, eaten by deer, fat jackrabbits, or blackberries and weeds, but the flowering lawn still blooms every year.

The flowering plums were lonely this year

These beautiful flowering plums usually bloom in March. The paperwhite narcissus under them usually start in late January and bloom into March so the two overlap. The violets start earlier, but also usually are in bloom with the trees. This year the paperwhites started much earlier, and were done before the trees started flowering, and the violets were just finishing too. These pictures are from last year in early March, when they were blooming together.

The paperwhite narcissus are the kind usually used for forcing to bloom early, since they do not require chilling like most bulbs. If they're forced in good potting soil with fertilizer, and planted out soon after with bulb food and rock phosphate, they will successfully naturalise here (zone 7, south slope, 2500 ft).

They regularly bloom for 2 months in the middle of winter, cheering up the view. They usually get snowed on or frozen, and survive it just fine. This year we had early rains (September, I think), which started a lot of bulbs growing early. The winter iris and violets started early too. Then we had extra cold in Jan & Feb, so the plums are maybe late.

So the flowering plums were lonely this year.

They finished this last week. The pears are starting to bloom this week.

Violets with a scent as strong as wine

The violets start blooming in late December or January, and bloom for a couple of months. The last of them, in some shady spots, are just finishing now. My very favorite lawn weed.

They don't get tall and luxurious for me, since my fat jackrabbits eat them, and sometimes after a rain or watering the deer apparently weed them out by the roots. But they still bloom like crazy, through the pine needles. White ones too, and lavender.

I like to plant them at the base of roses. They are fragrant when the roses are being pruned, and that is nice, but the main reason is to shade the base of the roses. One year an early hot spell sunburned the bud unions of almost a whole bed of roses, just starting to leaf out, and the bark cracked, and flathead borers got in, and by August almost the whole bed of roses was dead. The only survivor had a violet growing at its base, shading it from sunburn. So I plant violets at the base of the roses.

One year I was on the roof in February. I am not usually on the roof in February, but the chimney sweep had the flu, and the main floor fireplace was smoking, and I had reason to suspect that the blockage was in the chimney cap, not the chimney itself, (the ectoplasm incident), so I was on the roof in February.

And from three stories up I could smell the violets, strong as wine.

My favorite miniature narcissus is blooming

This is Little Gem miniature daffodil. It usually blooms for several weeks in February, surviving snow, rain, and sometimes hot weather too. It, with the old fashioned violets which start in late December or January and bloom for a couple of months, start the season for my flowering lawn.

Little Gem has a beautiful shape and poise to the flower. Even the dried, dead flower is an elegant shape. It is small, only about 10 inches tall.

The ones on the South side started approximately mid-Feb this year, while the East side ones started as those were finishing. Now, Mar21st, the first day of spring, they are almost done, only a last few flowers.

Jenny, another early narcissus on the East side, is getting nearly finished. The Jack Snipes on the South Side are blooming now (Mar 21), and the East side flowering lawn ones are starting.

There's no such thing as "normal" weather here...

More than 20 years ago, shortly after moving here to my grandfather's house, I heard from a local orchard owner, in a gardening class "More years than not, we have spring here in January & February, and winter in March and April." And more years than not, in the years since, that has been true. This year is the exception that points up the truth of the rule.

It is snowing. Again. Twice last week I walked home from work (early) at night in the snow because the buses had stopped running. Others who depended on cars had had to leave lots earlier, or not get home, because it required chains to go downhill from here (2500ft). This is my only day off this weekend. It was not supposed to snow today, just rain. It is supposed to snow tomorrow.

That's the other rule I learned during my years of working outdoors here: "If they say it will snow at this elevation, usually it won't. If they say it won't, often it will." That's been true both ways several times in the last 2 weeks.

But the "no such thing as normal weather" you ask? Well, you might think of "average" weather as normal. But here, average is made up of an El Niño year, and a La Niña year, and several drought years. There is no year in which we have weather equal to the average of all those.

In a drought year, we have lots of beautiful days in January & February, gardening weather. (We can't dig in our red clay soil when it's too wet, unless we want red clay bricks.) This year, we did have a couple of chilly sunny weeks before the snow started.

The year I moved here, it was too wet to garden every day off I had from mid-February though May (El Niño). The year my sister died in March, after I got back here, all of April was cold, snowy, hailing, not just the first few weeks. The apple trees didn't bloom until May, a month late.

No such thing as normal weather. But I miss my favorite days of the year, gardening weather in January & February.

This picture has been Photoshopped, but only to bring out what the eye can see that the camera doesn't; the brilliance of the Geranium blooming on the windowsill against the snow outside; the texture of the screen, pixellating the image; and the color of the trees in the snowy landscape.

The temperature of the ocean water off the Oregon coast...

50°F, 10°C. The temperature in the top floor bedroom when it has been cloudy and cold. The temperature of the main floor after a few sunny days. When it's cloudy and cold, or rainy, the main floor is in the 42°F range. I use the refrigerator thermometer to tell me what the temperature is inside on that floor, since the thermometer on the non-functional thermostat only goes down to 52°F.

When it has been warm & sunny, the top floor can be up to 60°. Passive solar.

I worked outside for over 7 years. I know how to live with this. Lots of layers, lots of blankets. I have a fleece-lined denim men's bathrobe that I call a housecoat, replacing an old wool one of my Dad's. I wear it over lined jeans and several t-shirts and a fleece vest. I sleep in layers, including a hooded sweatshirt, with mounds of blankets. When it's really cold, I add a sleeping bag to the stack on the bed. Plus heater cats, who sleep on me.

I have been trying to keep the electric bill in the $75 range this year, instead of the $300 range of previous years, a legacy from when Enron and the Bush/Halliburton regime screwed California. And still keep the house warm enough to not get moldy.

When the chimney is clean and I can use the wood-stove, it can get positively tropical - over 60°. T-shirt temp.

One of the advantages of these interior temperatures is that there are more days, like today, when it got up to 59° outside on the sunny South porches, when it is possible to have the windows and doors open to air out the house and warm it up.

One of the disadvantages is that in the morning, crawling out of that warm nest is unattractive, and the temptation to go back in with a book and cup of tea, when I wake up early, is irresistible. And then, falling back to sleep... And then running down the hill, almost late to work.


(One other trick - I warm up my clothes & pajamas on the radiator heater, for a few minutes before putting them on. Natural fibers only, not synthetics which might melt. And not with the heater turned on high. And don't leave the room and forget them.)