Listics

Try these sweet potato fries... or, you can be fat like me and deep fat fry them instead of the lightweight olive oil toss recommended by the health nuts.  Use lard!

2 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into sticks
2 tbsp olive oil

1 clove garlic minced
2 tbsp chopped fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp salt

Place all ingredients in a bowl & toss.
Spread potatoes on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and place
in an oven pre-heated to 400F and bake for 35-40 minutes until they are
cooked through, browned and crispy.

Dervala Hanley has a new one up called Sal’s Paradise.  Ranger Tim has settled into the Santa Cruz mountains scene.  When I was a kid it was all Big Basin and psychedelics. Before that, Bret Harte:

Winter passed, and the summer came
The trunks of madrono, all aflame,
Here and there through the underwood
Like pillars of fire starkly stood.
All of the breezy solitude
  Was filled with the spicing of pine and bay
And resinous odors mixed and blended;
  And dim and ghostlike, far away,
The smoke of the burning woods ascended.
Then of a sudden the mountains swam,
The rivers piled their floods in a dam,
The ridge above Los Gatos Creek
  Arched its spine in a feline fashion;
The forests waltzed till they grew sick,
  And Nature shook in a speechless passion;
And, swallowed up in the earthquake’s spleen,
The wonderful Spring of San Joaquin
Vanished, and never more was seen!

Meanwhile, around the time Sal’s Jimmy was rolling off the assembly line, Neal and Carolyn Cassady settled down there and Neal worked a brakeman’s job on the Southern Pacific.  "Sal’s Paradise," that Derv - she’s a literate one and that’s for sure.  Here’s a link for the Golby in yer, and here’s a link to add texture for anyone who didn’t get the Sal Paradise allusion.

Today was an outdoor day, spiced with radishes, the first crop.  I pruned the honey locusts down by the barn, limbed them up to prevent accidents.  Their thorns are deadly.  A kid or a dog could put an eye out.   It’s said the thorns have been used as nails.  I believe it.

The trilliums are abundant this year. I think it’s the wet spring that encouraged them. 

Late in the afternoon I saved a fledgling robin from the predations of Molly Bloom.  This required summoning up a mega-decibel command voice from the dark side.   Think of the voice of doom.  Now multiply that by eight or ten.  Give it some  basso profundo depth and richness.  How loud do you have to be to distract an adolescent pup from a baby bird?  I was that loud and a little more.  Shocked the neighbor lady.  "Do what you have to do ," she said.  Later we laughed that the cat sitting quietly in the shrubbery had undoubtedly marked the location of the baby bird and was finishing it off while our attention was on the bumbling canine.

Now it’s time for dinner, a gratinée made with our first harvest of spinach, eggs, cream, swiss cheese.  I think we’ll eat it on the deck and watch the reflection of the setting sun off the tops of white cedars to the east.

Life’s okay.

Hamlet’s Cat Soliloquy
By Jack Kolb

To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether ’tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,
Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock’s bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal’s opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there’s the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household’s petty plagues,
The cook’s well-practiced kicks, the butler’s broom,
The infant’s careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear,
Or strays trespassing from a neighbor’s yard,
But that the dread of our unheeded cries
And scratches at a barricaded door
No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
And makes us rather bear our humans’ faults
That run away to unguessed miseries?
Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
And thus the bristling hair of resolution
Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
We pause upon the threshold of decision.

Thanks to the old Kerr Mudgeon for turning me on to this Bish cartoon (© 2024 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.).

Not a sports team, but rather a family of peregrines living on the 33rd floor of the PG&E building in downtown San Francisco.  Mama bird, papa bird and four week old chickies!

Click here to get to the nest cam.  Live action…

From time to time, we have to clean our monitor screens.  There are many ways to clean the outside, but what about dust on the inside?  Here is the method I prefer (Flash required):

Clean Screen Utility

(Thanks to the fertile mind at  http://www.bassfiles.net/ from whence this was lifted, and to Bruce R. who showed me where to find it).

The wedding of Wendy and Matt that began with the civil ceremony in San Diego in February was completed this weekend in San Pedro Sula, Honduras…