Just gathered my modest collection of fungi pictures on Flickr. Here’s the link.
Technorati Tags: mushrooms
January Lights
It’s late. I was just out for a long walk with the dog. A few houses in our part of North Berkeley still display Christmas lights. I took ours down over the weekend; there’s something about late Christmas decorations on my own house that I believe advertises distraction, disarray, or laziness. It may come from a childhood memory of a Christmas tree we didn’t manage to take down until after Groundhog Day. In my big bundle of neuroses, It’s a relatively minor one.
But on the other houses around about, I find I like seeing the lights, even if I wonder why they’re still up. They never mean exactly the same thing to me here as they did back in Illinois, because somehow you need to have snow or at least a dead lawn and a blast of Arctic cold to put the lights in the proper context. We don’t have any of that here, but they manage to bespeak a mildly out-of-season yuletide cheer nonetheless. After mid-January, though, they start to say something else: maybe about a desire to hang on to some little bit of fun while we’re waiting for the sun to come back.
It was a nice surprise tonight to see the place up the way on Cedar Street that still has its modest display of flashing white icicle lights. And another house, at Yolo and Bonita, with a couple of deep blue snowflakes in the window. And a yard around the corner from that place, on Hopkins Street, that I somehow didn’t see until tonight. Someone hung a long string of red lights in a 100-foot redwood and stretched them in a long diagonal down to a house below. Rubies suspended in the night. Beautiful.
Technorati Tags: berkeley
The Fungus File
From a quick trip up to northern Sonoma County with my friend John. We spent about an hour traipsing through the woods to find mushrooms for his dinner tonight; we (he, really) found some black chanterelles in a couple spots that he and his wife know about. There were other fungi everywhere, though; my operating assumption is that very few of the species I was seeing were edible; but they sure are colorful, some of them. [Checking a couple of mushroom sites, this looks pretty definitively as if it’s an edible fungus called Witch’s Butter (Tremella mesenterica); there’s a very similar species (Dacrymyces palmatus); but Mr. the giveaway appears to be that Witch’s Butter is actually a parasite of those leafy little brown fungi you can see up and down the bare, downed tree limb on which all this stuff is growing.]
Technorati Tags: mushrooms
From the Roof
Up on the roof to take down our Christmas lights. Twelve strings worth. Stunning day: Clear, so clear you want a better word. Mid-60s, warm enough that it feels like a break from the few days of gloom we’ve had since the new year.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, berkeley weather
Birth of the Pie
Last night’s dinner at an early stage. Details after the jump.
Technorati Tags: cooking
Hummingbird
One of my favorite quasi-rock ballads from way back is “Hummingbird,” by Leon Russell. But in one sentence, I digress. What I really want to point out today is a cool posting by the son of one of my long-distance riding partners, Rob. The lad hung a hummingbird feeder just outside his bedroom window (he fashioned a perch and the from old bike spokes). Then he started taking pictures, and came up with some pretty amazing closeup shots. I’m confident I’m the first person on the Internets to link to his page.
Technorati Tags: birds
Storm
The National Weather Service reports, and eyewitness accounts confirm, that we’re having a storm. The forecasters have this to say about the current atmospheric proceedings: “A WALLOP OF A STORM CONTINUES TO BARREL ITS WAY THROUGH THE BAY AREA EARLY THIS MORNING.” That’s right — a wallop. Wind gusts up to 75 mph. Rain blowing sideways. If you live east of here, and nearly everyone does if you look at the map the right way, the wallop is headed your way.
More later. I have to brave the tempest for a trip into the city. [Pictures (click for larger versions]: Above, Codornices Creek in northwest Berkeley, over its banks. Below, the entrance to Golden Gate Fields.]
Since 1969
At 17th Street and South Van Ness, San Francisco. I’ve walked by this sign a couple of dozen times in the past month without seeing it; I pass it at a sort of diagonal, and there’s always something happening on the sidewalk that I’m keeping my eye on. Then today, there it was. Faded. Peeling. Shabby. The joint it advertises is several blocks away. If it still exists, I imagine it resembles the sign.
Technorati Tags: san francisco
2008
Happy New Year. That’s it, except to wish everyone who happens by this corner a healthy and interesting 2008.
Last Saturday of ’07
The last two or three days have been alternately drippy and cold; Thursday we had the rare Bay Area day during which the temperatures never got out of the mid-40s. It drizzled and misted all day today until after dark. Then fog billowed in off the bay; this kind of fog — dense, hugging the ground, is sort of rare here; what locals call fog is usually a dense layer of low clouds that blows in off the Pacific, through the Golden Gate, during late summer afternoons, creating a dense, dark gray overcast and swirling over the tops of the hills but never reaching the ground in the flatlands.
The picture above (click for larger versions): California and Cedar streets; I noticed the shadows on that house to the right some time ago while walking the dog and have been meaning to try to see if I could get a picture.
Technorati Tags: berkeley