On Saturday, Kyle and I brought a picnic to the beach. We had fresh bread with goat brie and apricots, Irish cheddar and salami, and other such delicacies. There were some seals hanging out down the beach, but some parks person had put up a rope and a sign to keep you from getting too close. I took some pictures. Here they are:

Do not pick up seals??

Yes, let me pick one of these tiny things up and carry it away in my pocket.

It was a windy day.

“Even amidst fierce flames - the golden lotus can be planted.”

The other week I played hooky and went to the zoo. It was fun. There was almost no one there and I got close to the animals. I liked the owl that swiveled its head to stare at me and the monkeys with handlebar mustaches, but best of all were the flamingos.

I had no idea that flamingos were so weird. They snort like pigs. They stand in hostile groups and then start fighting over nothing, their long necks twisting around like snakes. Their eyes are scaly and yellow. They aren’t pink so much as orange.

The signs said that scientists aren’t sure why flamingos stand on one leg. Most likely is has something to do with preserving body heat. In any case, they were so strange, I could have watched them for hours.

They were starting to fight here.

Wow. Apparently plants ‘recognize’ their siblings, according to this article.

“The ability to recognize and favour kin is common in animals, but this is the first time it has been shown in plants” Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, said. “When plants share their pots, they get competitive and start growing more roots, which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbours get them. It appears, though, that they only do this when sharing a pot with unrelated plants; when they share a pot with family they don’t increase their root growth. Because differences between groups of strangers and groups of siblings only occurred when they shared a pot, the root interactions may provide a cue for kin recognition.”

How is this possible? They don’t have brains or memories, but apparently they are “capable of complex social behaviors such as altruism towards relatives.”

We know so little about this world we live in.

On Friday, my landlord butchered the fabulous quinces outside my office, turning them into nubs. Why? I don’t know. But he reminded me why I need my own house and my own yard.

Nevertheless, I gardened this weekend. I planted spinach and red poppies and chives and cilantro. I hung a hummingbird feeder on the window in the hopes of watching some hummingbirds while I write (so far no luck). I dug up half of the soil in my garden and turned it over so it would be ready when I plant the rest of my garden next week.

I also continued my battle against the swarm of aphids already taking up residence in the rose bushes. A couple of sources said that aphids don’t like the oil in citrus skins, so I boiled lemon skins in water and put the concoction in a spray bottle. It seemed to work–when I sprayed the lemon water on the roses, the aphids fell right off, and haven’t come back so far. And it smells kind of nice.

Despite the quince debacle, at least some nature is left in my yard. I turned over a bag I’d left out and discovered a reddish salamander underneath. I haven’t seen a salamander since I was a kid, so I was excited and had Kyle take a picture.

Salamanders are a lot more like baby snakes than I remember. They are also kind of slow-witted. He didn’t even try to get away. I put him in back in a moist place.

On Sunday, Marcia took me to the Artisan Cheese Festival, which she had free tickets to. It is one of many festivals we have here focusing on a particular kind of food. Throughout the year, there are festivals about oranges, apples, berries, olive oil, mustard, and seafood, etc. I don’t know who goes to these festivals because they are usually expensive. In this case, it would have cost $60 to go. However, since it was free, it was well worth checking out.

The part of the festival we went to was in the Hotel Sheraton, where a conference room was full of tables of cheese and wine samples. We circled the room toting our complimentary bags and sampling cheese, mostly goat cheese and white cheddar. It was very good but unfortunately, within 15 minutes we were starting to get full and a little sick of cheese. Plus, it was gorgeous outside, so we decided to have an adventure. We got in my car and drove to the coast.

Eventually, we decided I should take Marcia to the secret beach to look at tide pools. Kyle and I discovered the secret beach six years ago. It’s hard to find and you have to climb down a steep cliff to get to it. Because of this, there are usually interesting things on the beach. I have seen a naked man, a seal, gorgeous abalone shells, three dead crabs propped up on a log, and other interesting things.

Anyway, I have lived by Northern California beaches all my life, and I can tell you: It is very rare to have a day that is not too hot, not too cold, not foggy, not windy. That’s how Sunday was. The sea was glittering and the hills were green with purple bushes. No one was on the secret beach and the tide was out. We walked around on rocks covered with black wooly seaweed, sidestepping sea anemones with slick pink centers like tiny vaginas (gross!) and crouching over pools of water to look at the sea life.

We saw:

• Tiny purple shore crabs ranging from one-inch to four-inches long
• Purple and orange starfish
• Pale green sea anemones that didn’t look like vaginas
• A bottom-feeder fish with whiskers
• Lots of hermit crabs, including one with tiny tiny blue pinchers
• Snails
• A red crab with yellow hairs that hung off its body like moss
• Buoys that washed off of boats
• A large piece of driftwood that looked like the torso of a man
• The biggest abalone shell I have ever seen
• A starfish that a bird had torn in half
• A purple crab with iridescent green streaks on its back

I enjoy nature situations where you are pulled out of yourself and become unaware of how much you are exercising or whether or not you are bored. The tide pools made me feel like I used my pretty day to the fullest. That, in turn, made this whole stupid early daylight savings thing more bearable. And so I say: Hooray for nature!

I helped my parents move this weekend… in the snow. They are moving to the Sierra Mountains, up by Yosemite. So we dragged my mom’s paintings and my dad’s tools through the muddy paths lined with three feet of snow. It was unpleasant, dirty, cold, and did I mention unpleasant? I do not recommend moving in the snow if you can help it.

To get to their new house, I took a three-hour drive through California farmlands, through Stockton and Escalon and Oakdale and other rural parts of California. On the way, I passed fields of fruit trees all ruffled and frothy in their spring blossoms. That was the best part of the weekend.

On Sunday, I planted some spinach. It’s probably too early, but the back of the package says to plant in early spring, and everywhere I look, it seems to be spring. The daisies I planted last year seeded and my garden is full of baby daisy blossoms, along with crocus and stock and sorrel. After that, I spent hours pruning the rose bushes in the backyard while listening to an audiobook by DH Lawrence on my iPod. There’s something so satisfying about snipping away dead branches to make room for new growth.

It’s one of those days where I feel good about my work–everything is going great and I’m full of inspiration. I’m convinced there’s a way to trick myself into feeling this way all the time. After all, it’s just as possible to feel good all the time–or most of the time anyway–as it is to feel bad.

But what is causing this burst of work-related goodness? Is it because….

… I have been making a conscious effort to thank God for the opportunity and freedom to write every day?

… I have been making a conscious effort to think things like Yay, I get to write now! instead of things like Oh bummer, I have to write now?

… I just finished a large project and I’m feeling relief after the burden has being taken off my shoulders?

… this is the view out of my office window?

Your guess is as good as mine. But my hands are healed–no more pain–and I have a plate full of new possibilities before me. It’s a lovely day.

There are a lot of spectacular hikes in Sonoma County. Maybe that’s why I never paid attention to Helen Putnam Regional Park in Petaluma. I had read it was an easy 2.8-mile hike, and because it seems like it is in the middle of town, I had it in my head that it was going to be a city park with a jungle gym and a lot of planted landscaping.

But to my delight, I discovered that Helen Putnam Regional Park is a lovely park. A concrete road takes you over a series of hills and down to a little lake. In January, with the endless oak trees and everything green from winter rain, it feels like walking through one big meadow. I sat by a lake, climbed a hill, ate an apple, saw a jack rabbit, and looked at a lots of spectacular views. Here’s some photos:

Having a garden means I have to find ways to use up the food it produces. This summer, I’ve made zucchini bread, quiche, pie, and muffins. I’ve made tomato sauce, tarts, and foccacia. I’ve eaten countless cucumber-and-tomato salads and countless mozzarella-tomato-and-basil sandwiches.

Still there is more. I saute it. I roast it. I give it away. Still there is more.

Yesterday, I decided to utilize my over-producing jalapeno plant and my zealously producing tomato plants by making roasted tomato salsa. This meant roasting nine tomoatoes, a half head of garlic, and three jalapenos. To do this, I had to split the jalapenos and take out the seeds. Although I tried to touch the jalapenos as little as possible, it somehow still got all over my hands.

I have been down this path before. You get jalapeno on your hands, you think it’s gone, and the next thing you know, it’s stinging your eyes, your nose, your ear, and everywhere else you have touched. So this time, I was smart. I called my scientifically minded husband and explained my predicament. He got me a glass of milk and told me to stick my hand in it (a base vs. an acid. Science!). I did so. The jalapeno seemed to go away. All was well.

Except, it wasn’t. This morning, I opened my contact case to put in my contacts and

oooooooooooowwwwwwww!

A flash of needle-poking stings and a desperate, desperate grab to pull the piece of plastic out.

Jalapeno: Polluting my contact case and contacts.

Luckily, I had one more pair left. Now I have to go to the eye doctor for a refill.

The good news: The salsa tastes yummy.

Yesterday I discovered that the aphids on my rose bush out front had begun to invade my vegetable garden. So I bought a pack of ladybugs, which love aphids, and released them on the plants.

The aphids didn’t seem alive before the ladybugs came. The other day, I scraped them off with the blade of my cutters and they barely moved. But when the ladybugs began crawling on the bush, the aphids sprang to life and moved to the underside of leaves to hide. Within seconds, the ladybugs were catching aphids beneath their bodies and raising their black bug heads to bring their mouths down, hard, on those tiny green devils.

This morning I read about ladybugs, also called ladybirds, lady beetles, lady-cow, may-bug, golden-knop, golden-bugs, barnabee, and bishop-barnaby. I read how they are poisonous to small animals, how it is considered good luck when they walk on you, how they can apparently copulate for up to nine hours at a time (although that wasn’t what I saw). I was reminded of the following nursery rhyme:

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children are gone
All except one, and that’s Little Anne
For she has crept under the warming pan

There is also an older version of this poem:

Dowdy-cow, dowdy-cow, ride away heame,
Thy house is burnt, and thy bairns are tean,
And if thou means to save thy bairns
Take thy wings and flee away!

I love how those small things that have been around forever can suddenly become fascinating.