Charmian London, who I assume picked out this wallpaper (ceilingpaper?), had pretty good taste!

I didn’t like the lens flare in this picture at first. But then I realized that it’s not very often that one captures an upside down lightbulb ghost.

For a long overdue adventure, Sarah and I drove up to Jack London State Historic Park
on Saturday. I’d read about the place on Atlas Obscura
and it sounded worth the drive. So we Yelped a burger place in Santa Rosa
(pretty tasty, little pricey) and hopped in the car…

…right into some classic California oh-shit-rain-means-drive-5mph freeway traffic. It took a while to get there and, to be honest, it’s been so long that I was a little nervous about driving in the rain myself. But we made it there eventually!

Right after paying our eight bucks for parking we saw the sign saying the lot closed at 5:00 pm. It was 3:30, so we had to hustle. Fortunately, there was a kindly (if awkward) old docent with a golf cart who carted us around and protected us from the rain.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but ol’ Jack was into progressive farming. He tried growing spineless cactus as a type of livestock feed. It didn’t work out too well: the cacti needed more water than they were worth and some of them grew their spines back.

This whole field used to be full of ’em. Now there’s just a few. With some old-timey ranch fencing to keep them at bay.

There’ve been what seems like a metric ton of spiders around this year. I’ve gotten webbed walking down our path more times than I’d like to recall. (Sometimes I have Sarah go first, but it doesn’t do any good for the face-level webs.)

Anyway, I figured I’d make the most of it!

After yesterday’s depressing picture of our garden, I thought I’d follow up with a much healthier looking plant from somebody else’s garden. I suppose this one does have some gunk on it anyway…

Regardless, Parker St. is a treat to walk down: it’s just loaded with beautiful plants and landscaping. Not like Long Island suburban landscaping… No. More like a jungle, with apple and fig trees, cacti, and redwoods.

We didn’t have a very good haul in the garden this year. I’m blaming it on shitty dirt.

Our bathroom window has frosted glass. Light gets in, but you can’t really make out the details. We hung a bird feeder just outside so that when the window was open you could watch little birds eating.

The birds are usually pretty paranoid. They spend about 90% of the time looking around to make sure the coast is clear. (The other 10% is spent jamming their heads into the feeder holes and shaking out as many seeds as they can, wasting our generous offer by spilling it onto the ground.) They’ll be happily making a mess one minute and all fly off in a hurry the next.

Usually it’s nothing, but the other day I saw a big dark (frosted) shape on the other side of the glass when the flock took off. I got up to check it out and saw our neighbors’ fat bastard cat looking smug on the edge of the garage roof, about a paw’s swing away from the feeder.

I called Sarah over and she told him to piss off. He did, but didn’t go too far. That’s him in the background with the feeder in the foreground. (It’s all blurry because of the screen.)