Four shillings short at the Farmer's Market

It's a dilemma for those of us hoping to support local(ish) farmers of fresh, organic produce in the Bay Area: However much cash we bring to our Farmer's Markets, we're commonly left scrapping for pennies before we've purchased our last bunch of arugula or bag of purple heirloom beans.

To remind us how often we're near-bankrupted by this guilt-the-green-liberals borderline extortion racket, the Palo Alto Saturday market last week kindly laid on the excellent celtic duo, Four Shillings Short to serenade us as our wallets rapidly drained.

Generally, I'm resigned to paying $6 a pound for salad mix, $3.50 a pound for peaches or $5 a pop for a tiny cheese. After all, you are getting the freshest, highest-quality Californian produce possible shy of growing it yourself. And farmers usually know how to walk the fine line between asking all they can of an affluent community and thumbing their noses at them. 

At today's Palo Alto Sunday market, though, I felt well and truly thumbed when I encountered my all time outrageous Farmer's Market ask: the $10 pot of jam. This for a mere 6oz of the stuff. I was so stunned, I forgot to snap a picture of the Blue Chair Fruit Co. booth. 

It was perfectly acceptable jam (although a little heavy on the sugar). The lady selling it was a delight. The flavor combinations were interesting -- but when the going rate is under $5 for a 16oz jar, that jam would have to be life-changing, the seller a mermaid (Michael would have insisted we have some), the proceeds entirely donated to the world's poor or the local PTA for me to buy.

Unless we somehow hit Silicon Valley start-up gold, $10 jam will not -- I fear -- be in our future. Still, so long as there's music at the markets, we can always just dance.  

Taking Mark Twain's advice on a trip to the Cliff House

Mark Twain would have been an unbelievable blogger.  Take the essay "Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House," which appeared July 3rd, 1864 in The Golden Era, a mid-19th Century literary weekly published in San Francisco.

Its substance, as such, is meagre: everyone has told Twain the best time to see the newly built Cliff House (it was a year old at that point) is early.  So he leaves at four AM to drive the six miles across town and it's windy, foggy and freezing cold.  He doesn't have fun.  That's it.  

The joy, though, for both Twain and the reader is the extended riff he plays on those bare bones.  I won't summarize, since the whole point of the piece is expression, not content.  Go read it. 

From a modern perspective, what's also striking is that here's a perfect blog entry, turning a mundane excursion into something worth sharing, but written a hundred years before the Internet was even imagined. Its only fault today would be its length, perhaps. But really, you can't -- and shouldn't -- stop a writer like that when he's on such an entertaining roll.  

Following in Twain's footsteps, and taking his advice, I visited the Cliff House last weekend with my extended Bay Area family well after dawn. We arrived just before noon and even then the same chilling fog Twain cursed was only just pulling back from the surf. But as it lifted we saw, in quick succession, whales and dolphins swimming by, and dozens of huge grey pelicans crashing into the sea -- all chasing a massive herring ball by the looks of it. We saw seals, too, likely descendants of the very ones the jaundiced Twain described as "writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots."

After brunch, we walked over to the site of the old Sutro Baths, which I'd never seen. Michael was delighted, calling it a 'wreck' and desperate to explore.

It wasn't long before the fog pulled in again, though, and back on went the layers of extra-clothing that any local visiting a San Francisco beach instinctively brings along.

Thankfully, the fog just as quickly retreated again.  We walked to the other side of the Cliff House and played on the beach for a while.  A beautiful day.

"If you go to the Cliff House at any time after seven in the morning, you cannot fail to enjoy it," said Mark Twain almost 150 years ago.  It doesn't make for such an entertaining blog entry, of course, but thankfully, he's still right.  

When is a tarantula hunt not a tarantula hunt?

When one of you, in this case the one aged five, doesn't know that's what you're looking for. 

It's about time for the local tarantulas to migrate and I've never seen them doing it, so this weekend I wanted to go over and search for them at Palo Alto's Foothills Park, where my friend Eva had one all but crawl over her foot last fall.  I knew that Michael would refuse to go if I told him that's what we were looking for, but I thought he'd also be really interested if we just 'happened' to come across one.  Plus he has good scary animal finding karma.

So I didn't tell him about the plan, instead describing it as a generic 'explore.'  Fine by him.

We saw plenty of wildlife, including ridiculously tame deer,

and some very large and very dopey lizards.  

There were also beetles, skippers, hawks etc. etc.  But no tarantulas this time, alas.   I need to read up more on where exactly and when to find them.

The highlight for Michael was clambering up the dry creek beds and then creating a camp out of sticks in the meadow.  For me, it was seeing the Coyote Bushes in full flower.  This much-maligned native has a distinctive scent when damp -- one that brings me right back to the coastal foothill chaparral whenever I catch it, which is why I like it so much and why I have one in my yard.   The flowers are important for the native bee population as they bridge a period in which few other natives are in bloom.

I noticed two kinds of Coyote Bushes growing together at Foothills Park, one with white flowers like this and the other exactly the same but with a distinctive yellow tint.  I much prefer the white. 

What's sad about American happiness

is how little related it is to work.  Take this nifty bit of data-crunching, derived from Facebook status updates.   As Noam Cohen notes in his New York Times report on the project, "There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday."  The peaks are all days off work, too: Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4th, Halloween etc..

It's no surprise, certainly.  And a weekend break brings pleasurable novelty even to people with most rewarding careers.  But it's sad to think that the thing that most of us spend the most of our time doing brings us so little relative satisfaction.

It may be that Facebook's Gross National Happiness Index is missing the many deep satisfactions of work and captures only emotional highs that we wouldn't want to experience every day.  But I'm not convinced that's the case.  Instead I think it suggests a problem with our relation to work and why we choose to do the work we do.

Creator of the index, Adam Kramer of the University of Oregon, sums it up nicely:  “If we know money doesn’t buy happiness,” he suggests to Cohen, “why are we optimizing for money?” 

When it comes to hard work, here's a cure for the Valley's self-regard . . .

So this is the hole, drilled by hand.  It goes about 10 inches deep into solid granite.  Into the hole went gunpowder at first.  Later, nitro-glycerine, a newly-discovered material made to order on site, was the preferred explosive.

This is a blast shadow.  The hole is about two inches wide.  The blast moved roughly a two foot diameter of rock perhaps six inches deep.  Progress overall was under a foot a day. 

These pictures are from Tunnel 6, the legendary 1,659 feet bore under the summit ridge at Donner Pass, near Truckee, dug for the Central Pacific Railroad in 1866-7.  With three teams of laborers working in eight hour shifts around the clock on four different faces (one at each end and two created by digging an access shaft from above), it took 15 months to complete.  In all six tunnels were needed to get around the summit and Donner Lake, down to the Truckee River.  

These are next two tunnels, looking East, with the lake behind.  

The laborers who dug these tunnels were all Chinese and Chinese-American.   According to Stephen Ambrose, a group of Irish workers were hired at one point and encouraged to race the Chinese teams.  Each day, the Irish were handily beaten and eventually refused to compete.  They were put to work elsewhere.

We in Silicon Valley like to think we work hard.  Besides reminding us of the brutal history of California's early settlement, a trip up to the Donner Pass to walk these tunnels (some of which no longer have trains running though them, so they are safe to enter) is to be reminded what hard work really is. 

Coastal Cleanup (and sculpture making)

The annual national Coastal Cleanup event has become a September fixture on our household calendar.   This year we went again to San Gregorio State Beach.  The weather was perfect, with fog to start but with the sun soon breaking spectacularly through.  

The folks from the San Gregorio Environmental Resource Center were great hosts.  They laid on particularly good coffee!

After we'd picked our bit of the beach clean,our group got artistic with the remaining (organic) beach flotsam, in the vein of Ada and Michael's Windy Channel sculptures.

And after that, the girls just wanted to dig by the waves.

A perfect morning.

 

"Watch Your Step!" Or is it, "People are Mean!" ?

You get an interesting -- and somewhat depressing -- insight into human nature at one particular exhibit at the marvelous new California Academy of Sciences.

The exhibit, which happens to be a favorite of Ada's, is called 'Watch Your Step!'   It's presented in the form of an interactive game, played on a floor set between two walls, both of which have boards explaining how it works.

Essentially, you are invited to collect a variety of projected 'bugs' that appear on the floor. You do that by using your foot to shift food that also appears periodically on the floor into several traps.  When the food is in the traps, a few bugs will skitter in and the display screen goes 'bing!' and shows you a big, beautiful image of what you have collected.

So what do most people do when they arrive at the exhibit?  They stamp on the bugs.

This is in a museum dedicated to celebrating the natural world.  Its message is overwhelmingly about promoting conservation.  Interest in, respect  and concern for the wellbeing of all living things is its essence.  Who then, you might wonder, would go in there thinking it would feature a game that invites you to kill insects?

But that's what I'd say at least 50% of people encountering the exhibit appear to assume.  And I've seen plenty, since Ada loves this game and always wants to stay for hours.  The fact that at least half the people who join her want to kill the bugs -- and play the game wrong, darn it! -- is hugely frustrating to her.  

While waiting, I've wondered about the exhibit.  Is it brilliant in its openness -- in allowing people to go in stamping, if that's their first inclination, but then making them realize that it's really about research, and thereby having them confront the reality of their unreflected murderous intent towards small creatures?

For those who (finally) read the explanatory boards (or who meet Ada, loudly telling them they're playing the game wrong), maybe that does happen.  But I've seen as many come in, have fun jumping on a few projected bugs, quickly grow bored and leave.

Does that make this a failed exhibit?  I suppose that depends on whether you think museums should change you or whether you think it's fair for them to assume that you are, on arrival, simpatico, at least to some degree, with their mission.

But the stakes here are high.  A great deal of the Academy is dedicated to conveying the notion that the plants and animals inhabiting our planet are under threat -- most notably from us.  Perhaps we just can't afford to let anyone leave the place thinking that stamping on bugs is ever a good idea.

Don't tell the kids . . .

but I just threw out all of their candy. All six pounds of it.

In a fit of organizing zeal I decided to clean out a pantry cupboard and found multiple goodie bags filled with mini-eggs, jelly beans, small boxes of Nerds, Tootsie Rolls and much, much more, the wages of at least one Halloween, last Easter and several pinata-graced birthday parties since.

By the time I was done I had an extraordinarily heavy bag. I was curious to know exactly how heavy, so I weighed it. It was six pounds of junk.
 
Thankfully, when it comes to chemically-modified sugar confections, Ada and Michael are hoarders and forgetters. They know they haven't eaten everything they've collected, but don't quite remember what's left.
 
In the end I kept a few jelly beans and several of the mini chocolate eggs most likely to actually contain chocolate for when they demand to see their hoarde. The rest is in the trash.