From Craigslist via Curbed SF
Room for a Woman in a No Guests Place
… and please if you decide to rent this furnished bedroom from this piano teacher, don’t come to me a month down the road, crying and twisting your hanky.
June 26, 2007
June 25, 2007
Angora Fire updates
Back from our annual week at Camp, obviously.
Yesterday we were heading south to the annual Men’s Club dinner and had KCBS on. They made mention of a fire in the South Lake Tahoe area. Uh. Oh. We’d just returned from that neck of the woods.
Seems the fire started up on Angora Ridge and the Angora Lakes Resort had been evacuated. Homes were ashes. The fire raged with no control in sight.
This noon, news isn’t much better. 240+ structures burnt. 160+ of those someone’s home. 2500 acres. Less than 10% contained. All from a fire reported less than a day ago, a fire probably caused by human activity as there was no trace of lightning or other natural cause before the fire began.
Camp Richardson, out on Emerald Bay Road in South Lake Tahoe, has been evacuated. I’m assuming that means Camp has been evacuated too. Those skinny, twisty roads that take people into and out of the lakes areas and the Desolation Wilderness would not be the best things to depend on if the fire is roaring down the mountainside toward you, especially if the people on the road include your family, another sixty or seventy families from Camp, all the people with family cabins and the people at the resort across the lake.
The El Dorado County Sheriff has a PDF up which gives the status of homes in the area. So far, the home of the only family we know on Tahoe Mountain has a status of “OK.”
When we were at Camp, we learned that the fire crew stationed at the lake (including the Camp director and other Camp staff) had already been called out on fires four times this season and the season has just begun. “This doesn’t bode well,” we said. We all agreed that the area was a tinderbox and something had to be done to get the fire crackly vegetation crap out from under the trees and do some serious fire fuel/tinder abatement and not dawdle around with a bit here and a bit there and the ten year plan.
Hope our fire teams have the fire under control soon.
Four more months of high fire danger in the state.
x’d fingers.
Update: Map of burned area (so far) courtesy of sfgate.com. “Lily Lake” is mislabeled. Should be “Upper Echo Lake” and “Lower Echo Lake” (the larger one). Weird to think how different it all must be from the area I was hiking in just last week.
Update2: Web site says that Camp was evacuated yesterday afternoon. When staff is given the all clear to return, they’ll pack up the belongings left behind in the cabins and ship them to campers who had to split in such a hurry.
The guy in charge and seven staphers are at Camp to do what they can to keep it from burning but have been told they MUST get on boats and get out to the center of the lake if the fire comes down onto camp grounds and their stretch of the lake shore.
Don’t get heroic, guys. We all love the place, but …
June 24, 2007
Elizabeth Edwards supports same-sex marriage
Well, yay! Hooray!
We were at breakfast in the communal dining room yesterday when a friend stopped by. “Congratulations for making history,” she said to the older younger one and his partner.
History? Maybe. So far as we know, Friday night was a first at Camp.
Friday night at the hugely popular Camp week-roundup slide show, the sequence of “couples photos” taken against the backdrop of Lower Falls included photos of the two.
The photos were met with applause and some cheers. (One of those cheers and some wild applause were mine.)
The pair was congratulated afterwards, although I’m sure some folks had their knickers twisted. Too bad. The guys were disappointed three years ago — the last time the older younger one and his partner had come to Camp with us and a few short months after their marriage was declared void — when, for the first time ever, the Camp photographers chose not to show any couples photos at all in the slide show.
The times they are a-changing.
(What? That nice young man who’s been coming to Camp since he was three is gay? And that “friend” of his whom he brought is his “partner”? Mabel, get the smelling salts! Haven’t they heard of don’t ask, don’t tell?)
June 16, 2007
Eric Burdon, remember him?
I’m just like so bummed.
His nibs sez, “Hey. Look at this!”
Eric Burdon and the Animals are playing at the Chukchansi Gold Resort And Casino in Coarsegold, CA.
Oh.
[heart sinks]
Those were the days, my friend.
[/heart sinks]
MyWire Top Stories
I mentioned I think — or maybe it was in a different space — that I moved all my bookmarks into del.icio.us last week and I’m working my way through, updating, changing, deleting, deciding whether a given bookmark should be “public” or not …
I click on old bookmarks. Sometimes they are dead as a doornail. Sometimes they shift you over to a new URL. Sometimes …
Came across this one just now that had really morphed.
A while ago I was trying to decide whether to give up some magazine subscriptions and (truth tell) piles of old magazines — archives of periodicals that I might look at once every three years and, instead, sign on AND PAY $4.95/mo to KeepMedia, which offered 150+ titles online.
We sympathize with the postal carrier who, not just for us but also for others, walks down 40+ stairs from the nearest street to reach the cross path that connects with our walking path. He walks down the path to our stoop and up 18+ steps to our door to deliver our mail and magazines. And back down again and up and down again and up … as he walks down our walking path, delivering mail.
He walks another almost 100 steps down the steps to the next walking path to deliver another batch of mail.
Maybe, I thought, we could lighten his load.
I thought about it, do I want to give up my physical magazines, um. I thought about it, set it aside, thought about it. …
Turns out good thing I didn’t tie my wagon to that horse.
KeepMedia is now MyWire.com and a fine app MyWire.com may be, but it’s not what KeepMedia promised.
Word to the wise. Those packrats amongst us worry about stuff like this … give up your physical archives? Trust the Web? Trust the vendor not to change his business model?
Ayeeeee!
June 15, 2007
Badgers! Foxes! Rabbits!
New tumbleblog for stashing interrrrresting stuff. Between del.icio.us (still processing thousands of bookmarked URLs) and tumblr and stumbleupon and twitter … I’m getting all Web2.0′d out.
June 14, 2007
Book sorting progress
… of sorts.
Doesn’t help to be tied down here because the solar guys were supposed to put the panels back up on the new roof today but never showed. Maybe tomorrow his nibs will work from home and set me free to sort some more …
Sour Grapes offers in comments re Barchester Towers If I win you can have it. I’ve got it already.
Thanks. I was just feeling left out because I wanted to enter the contest too! I’m pretty sure I have a copy somewhere — probably in a box marked “classics” or “misc” or “fiction” or …
The book sorting goes apace. Well, “at a pace” anyway.
All travel books (except for USA travel) are out of their boxes and shifted over to adjacent bookcases, sorted by continent and country. The BENELUX titles and others of the ilk are a problem. I found multiple copies of some titles, which seems always the case, but not that many multiples. Even with the travel books settled, I get sidetracked thumbing through old travel books about Venice and travel memoirs and … well, I get sidetracked a lot.
After I shifted and sorted the travel books, I moved the cookbooks that were in the shelves over there over thataway to fill in the empty shelves where the travel books had been (adjacent to the bulk of the cookbooks) so now all the cookbooks are in one bank of shelves instead of scattered around. There are still boxes (six or so) that are boxed up because there’s no shelf space plus an additional box with a set of “Grande Diplome” cookbooks that I picked up used somewhere and two boxes that are filled with the Time-Life cookbook series that I picked up used here and there over time. A friend asked if I’d be willing to give her a set of Time-Life cookbooks and I said sure, but she’s got to get herself over and pick them up.
Most of the cookbooks still in boxes are “community cookbook” sorts of titles. I’ve sorted the titles on the shelves into “baking” “country-specific” “barbecue” “old” “San Francisco” “California” sorts of categories.
On the shelves after sorting, I discovered multiple editions of the Household Searchlight Recipe Book: three from different years in the ’30s, two from the ’40s and a couple from the ’50s. (The name changed to the Searchlight Recipe Book in 1942.) Different editions! Keep them all! Well, no. Turns out even though the books have different edition numbers and different publication dates, the contents of the 1st-14th editions are the same, according to this site.
I have multiple editions of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, two copies of Larousse Gastronomique, multiple copies of James Beard books, two copies of Rene Verdon’s The White House Chef Cookbook (and tell me, should that be a general USA cookbook or should I put it in “San Francisco” because Verdon ran Le Trianon here for years?) There are, of course, multiple copies of some Sunset cookbooks, multiple copies of other titles. I filled up two boxes worth of duplicates for the library. The weirdest, though, was the duplicate copy of Madame Chang’s Long Life Chinese Cookbook. Two copies? How did that ever happen?
The cookbooks are pretty well sorted now, although I may find that I have a French dessert cookbook in with dessert cookbooks and another copy in with French cookbooks. Those will sort out in time.
Next up is to start getting the SFF in order. My SFF books are the most likely to have duplicates because my brother and I had copies of the same books in our collections and those collections combined after he died. The most egregious example of too many copies of a title is a Heinlein title for which I wound up with two paperback copies, two hardbacks and one mass market paperback.
I’ll take the empty bookcases that had held cookbooks and setup a rough sort (A-Z by author, ‘natch) of the SFF books and winnow out the duplicates. I won’t be able to get all of them on the empty shelves I have remaining, but I can at least sort through them in alphabetic shifts. Thanks be that I had the SFF boxed separately from the fiction, and labeled so I could find them in amongst all the piles.
After the pass through the SFF is complete, I’ll start sorting through all the boxes labeled MISC and VERY MISC and NFIC and, of course, those boxes that are somehow unlabeled. I’ll get the books organized in some sort of fashion so I can easily see that I have two copies of How to Build Your Dream House for Less Than $3500 and get rid of duplicates. (Yes, I know I have two copies, maybe three of that book. I’d bought one for myself, you see, because I’d loved my parents’ copy. I gave a copy to my brother because I knew he’d love it. I may have bought a spare at some time too. …)
I’ll rough-sort the misc and pull out the fiction titles and the juv and sort the rest into some broad categories: science, essays/memoirs, biography/autobiography, history, reference, gardening, computers … I don’t know. I need to think out the sort before I get seriously into it or I’ll wind up sorting and resorting and …
I also have all the boxes of books that are already labeled “science” and “physics” and “law” and “reference” and whatever that I needs must go through because there was some higglety-pigglety-ness in the boxing up before the move and who knows what may have been tucked into an almost-full box at the last minute.
Once I can lay out all the PHYSICS or GEOLOGY or SOFTWARE DESIGN books in one place I can get a handle on duplicates and other titles that I don’t need to save shelf space for.
Maybe along the way I’ll find my copy of Barchester Towers and Vanity Fair and Morrison & Boyd’s Organic Chemistry. Why own a book if I can’t find it?
Yes, I am being unduly obsessive/compulsive about this (Why do you ask?) but I’m also using the exercise as one enormous procrastination project while I mull over the rewrite on the great American crime novel.
Productive procrastination, I call it. (The dupes and discards will be given to the library to use or sell! It’s for the library! Think of the public libraries!)
(And I have visions of my darlings having to sort through all of Mom’s old books after I take my dirt nap, looking for those of value. Better that I weed the collection now and save them at least some of the effort.)
June 11, 2007
On a Sunday …
Mellow day yesterday.
I’d been planning to sort books but we couldn’t figure out timing what with our evening plans. By the time I started thinking about how to spend my Sunday, it was almost midday and I’d have to get back here before 5 p.m. … and was it worth the going and returning … so we just continued on doing what we were doing: we hung out, French toast for breakfast, Sunday papers, picked up the figs dropped on the walking path, sat out on the wall talking with the downstairs neighbors about the roofers and repair projects, read, watered, the usual.
We left about 5 p.m., walked down to Washington Square Park and took the 30 to Market and then the 71 up Haight to Divisadero. 6 p.m. reservation at Le Metro Cafe (Divisadero and Page) and we were only five minutes or so late. The guy seating us said, “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
“Yes, we had a long conversation about Nepal.”
“Oh. Yes. I remember. I have news then for you. Tonight is our last night serving French food. After tonight we will close for remodeling and reopen serving Nepalese food. Small plates. The plates will be $10 or less.”
“Exciting times,” we said.
So we chatted about the change and how long the restaurant would be closed (“Two weeks, we hope…” We all laughed … “Well, good luck with that,” we said.) and what the new restaurant would be called (“Kathmandu”).
I mentioned that my nephew had just got back from a trip to Kathmandu and Maratika and other places. (He’d spent most of his time with Rinpoche. After he got back, he sent us a very entertaining travelogue about his trip adventures with scenery shots and a shot of him with Rinpoche and street scenes and photographs of the ubiquitous Kathmandu monkeys and roosters and other folk.)
Most of the diners last night were neighbors, stopping in for a last Sunday night meal before the restaurant closed for a bit. We had a nice dinner, which I won’t detail mouthful by mouthful because the next time we’re there the food will be entirely different. Suffice to say, the meal was tasty. He brought us each a glass of port to go with dessert. Must’ve had some in the back and I suppose they won’t be pouring much port in a Nepalese restaurant, but what do I know?
We finished dinner about 7:30 p.m. and walked a few blocks north and across the street to the Independent (Divisadero & Hayes) for the show, and an entertaining show it was, after some initial confusion with “doors open 7:30 p.m.” on the tickets and “doors open 8:30 p.m.” on the Web site …
Opening act was Red Meat, a really good honky tonk band that started out in the Mission District going on fourteen years ago now. Red Meat has a new album due out next month. I plan to get one.
The lead act was Johnny Cash’s Legendary Tennessee Three. Amazing voice the lead singer, Bob Wootton, has. The remaining two of the Tennessee Three — guitarist Bob Wootton on vocals and the legendary (really) WS Holland on drums — are joined by Vicky Wootton (vocals and rhythm guitar)(Bob’s wife), Scarlett Wootton (guitar and vocals)(Bob’s daughter. Scarlett sang a couple solo tunes and has a solo CD coming out momentarily) and Lisa Horngren (upright bass). Wootton joined the Tennessee Three back in 1968 soon after original lead guitarist Luther Perkins died in a house fire.
Last night’s show opened with “Folsom Prison” and closed with “Ring of Fire” and the band and the audience had a good time in between. We had an excellent time. We is just cultured people. I bought a CD. Had the guys sign it after the show.
A numskull next to us was dancing around making twirls and dips with a beer in his hand. I moved a little away from him. He spilt beer on the jacket of the guy sitting at the bar table in front of us. Guy took his jacket off the back of the chair and told the guy to back off. Guy with the beer kept dancing. Kept spilling beer. Guy at the bar table got up to do him bodily harm and security was there before the two connected. Calmed down the guy at the bar table. Told the dancing fool to cool it. And he did for a while and then he just couldn’t not dance. Security kept him away from the guy at the bar table. The evening ended without a fight on the floor. (Did I mention the guy at the bar table was BIG and had TATTOOS and had been drinking beer and looked like he worked out with some serious weights? The dancing fool would’ve been pulverized before he knew that he’d dropped his beer. …)
Waited for maybe fifteen minutes at the bus stop outside NOPA and caught the 21 back to Market and then the 45 back to Washington Square Park. Home again, home again, riggety jig.
The theater in the buses was the usual both coming and going. On the way out we had cross dressers griping because the Haight Street Fair was closing down at 5:30 and they weren’t going to make it in time. Grousing along next to them was a grey, long-haired, paunchy biker type who didn’t like the City shutting down street fairs early and curtailing alcohol … What a buncha mean-spirited types the folks down at City Hall are, they all agreed.
Coming back things were quieter, a bit. No happy drunks like those we had coming back from dinner at our friends’ place a week ago Friday. Seems last night we’d hit the sweet spot (12:30 a.m. or so) and the buses weren’t very full and were relatively quiet. Tucked in soon after 1 a.m.
All in all a mellow day. Another Sunday.
June 7, 2007
cochineal, also known as carmine — derived from the dried bodies of pregnant scale insects
theage.com.au has a terrific article, Meaty Bites (by John Bailey) which begins thusly,
Masterfoods in Britain recently announced that Mars Bars would now contain animal product – specifically rennet, an extract pulled from the stomachs of calves. Sweet-toothed vegetarians the world over howled in protest and the company quickly restored the original recipe and issued a blatant apology for its error. But how many other foods contain sneaky meats and furtive fish?
Number one on Bailey’s list is Nestle Strawberry NesQuik which gets that unearthly pink color from “colour (120)”. That 120 is cochineal, also known as carmine, and is derived from the dried bodies of pregnant scale insects (the yummy sounding Dactylopius coccus costa).
Yum!
His article goes on from there naming most cheeses (rennet there too), anything with gelatin (check the yogurt label), Guinness (Guinness!) and other you-may-not-realize-they’re-not-vegetarian foods.
Bailey also specifically mentions Lea&Perrins Worcestershire sauce, which contains anchovies and has since forever.
I actually knew this (as of last night) because I was making a cheese sauce for the cauliflower (white sauce, shredded cheese…) and added a bit of Worcester sauce for some added punch along with chopped grilled onions and fresh-ground pepper. I said to his nibs, “What’s in Worcester sauce anyway?” and he read the ingredients off the label: vinegar, molasses, high fructose corn syrup (!!), anchovies, water, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, onions, tamarind, salt, garlic, cloves, chili peppers, natural flavorings and shallots.
Anchovies? Who knew? Well now you do, I do, and anyone who read John Bailey’s article does too.
Drop on by with your 5-gallon bucket: Compost program comes full circle Saturday
Live in San Francisco? Don’t put your compostables in your green bin? You should. Don’t have a green bin? Ask and it shall be delivered!
More information on San Francisco’s composting program.
And look! what happens to all those kitchen bits and garden bits and bones and wood and stuff. COMPOST! That’s right, and once a year you can stop on by and get some for free. (Even if you don’t recycle your compostables. …)
Compost program comes full circle Saturday
You’re allowed up to two 5-gallon buckets’ full.
Saturday 9 Jun 2007 8 a.m. to noon
==================================
– City Dump (S.F. Recycling and Disposal) at 401 Tunnel Ave. (Take your hazardous waste down while you’re at it.)
– John McLaren Park, at the parking lot of the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, at John F. Shelley Drive and Mansell Street.
– West Sunset Playground, at Quintara Street and 40th Avenue
– Herbst Road (runs along the east side of the zoo) and Zoo Road.
[...]
The raw materials, about 300 tons a day from San Francisco and Oakland, arrive at the plant near Vacaville in large trucks. (San Francisco’s 2,100 restaurants contribute a large part of the San Francisco materials, including everything from broccoli to fish bones, and their compostable paper waste as well.)
300 tons A DAY! How cool is that?
Reed encourages us all to use our green bins for yard trimmings or food scraps we don’t compost ourselves. You can purchase special biodegradable plastic bags to hold food scraps, but Reed says he’d just as soon you put them in paper bags, milk cartons or other food boxes. Fold over the tops.
Except that that’s something we can’t do because compostables are soggy and the bottom would fall out of any paper bag before we got it down the steps to the nearest green bin. (That bin actually “belongs,” I think, to the publishing house at the bottom of the steps, but they don’t seem to mind and always have room to spare.)
How about the City making it easier for folks like us to do this green bin thing? They want higher participation, but ’tain’t easy for some of us.
Here’s our current operation.
- Large glass measuring bowl with handle on kitchen counter. Stuff goes in that.
- After meals, dump stuff from measuring bowl into menudo pot lined with plastic grocery bag. Pot is stashed on the floor at far end of kitchen (not that we have far to go) next to the other recyclables &c. Put lid back on pot to minimize funky smells.
- When menudo pot gets a certain amount of compostables in it or gets too funky, put grocery bag into even bigger (and more leak-proof) shopping bag (a bright garish giveaway bag from Pier 39) and schlep it down the steps to the green bin along with the yard clipping bits (this time of year mostly consisting of dropped unripened figs that scatter across the walking path and snaky vines trimmed back from the fire escape) that we’ve stashed in the garish bag.
- Empty grocery bag in green bin. Empty yard clippings from garish bag. Roll up grocery bag and put in garish bag.
- Hike back up steps.
Rinse. Repeat.
Where do our other recyclables go? The garbage collectors come down the steps and pick up the garbage here twice a week (bless them…), but they don’t deal with recyclables.
Twice a week, we haul the recyclables up to the blue recycle bin located where the steps meet Montgomery. We share that bin with neighbors and the closer it is to pickup day, the fuller the bin is — sometimes too full and then we have to take our recyclables back home and haul them up again after the bin is emptied.
Why don’t we put a green bin up there, you ask? Why? Because “there might be some pushback” as a neighbor nearby who shares the blue bin said.
The folks living on Montgomery are cranky enough about the blue recycle bin. No kumbayah moments here: One set of neighbors moves the bin away from their side of the steps because they don’t like the noise of people putting stuff in the bin and they don’t like the noise of it being picked up. Over to the other side! and let those folks deal with the noise. The neighbors on the other side move the bin back. Sometimes it winds up on the flat area halfway up to Montgomery.
Can’t we all just get along? (and recycle? and all that good-for-all-of-us stuff?)