We’ve had nearly a week of rainy weather… accompanied by high winds.
Some local areas got twelve or more inches of rain in a week…. this is about one third of a usual year’s rainfall… all in one week. For many places, this would be merely a regular stormy week…but it is the first such weather we’ve had in three or four years.
Here is a flooded area just off the 101 in the Avila area.
Here are two shots I took near our place… one is a downed oak in the canyon.
We had several trees go down in the canyon. The soil is so wet that the winds allow the roots to semi-liquefy the soil by moving the tree back and forth, hour after hour, day after day… for five or more days while the rain comes down, hour after hour, day after day…. this can help the tree topple.
The other photo is a nearby field, used to graze beef cows…. it is years since I have seen this amount of runoff water on this spot. The water has natural drainage swales… these people treat this ground prety good… they never allow livestock in while the ground is marshy… it is bad for the feet of the animals… and it turns the wet spots into mud wallows that don’t provide any food for the animals, and keep them muddy. Their animals are rotated around different fields so they always have fresh clean grasses, and never destroy the structure of the soil.
On the left is a tree that went down on the canyon road … there was no way to get around it. This has happened before.. once I traded vehicles with a neighbor on the other side of a downed tree…. it got me home, and him to work. Some local folks carry chainsaws with them when coming in and out… you never know when a tree will come down…
In a case like this it is local custom that anyone coming along with a chainsaw may take what they can cut… but the first goal is to open the road. In this case, the county came by and cut it. Usually when a tree goes down like this, local canyon dwellers usually cut it up and haul it away before an hour has gone by…. he who waits will not get wood. In this case.. the wind was blowing fiercely, and no one else was about… I went home and waited out the storm rather than risk a tree falling on me. I was going out taking a cat to the vet to be teutored… this is the third time he has escaped his lessons… the first time he got locked in a neighbor’s garage, the second time he clawed his way out of the doggie door while being held indoors overnight… and this was the ‘third-time’s-the-charm’ thing.. and it seemed like God caused the tee to fall to keep this cat’s bloodlines going…. what’dya think?
This is a neighbor’s barn. We had a few hours of decent weather between the thunderstorms…. just after I took this photo the radio sounded off with the ‘Public EmergencyAlert’ (first time I recall hearing an actual messag on it instead of jsut a test), warning of a severe thunderstorm crossing Pismo Beach, and heading inland at thirty MPH. A few minutes down the dirt road hail started falling onto the truck. We seldom get hail… I’ve only seen it here perhaps five times in the last twenty years. The severe thunderstorm was overhead. In a matter of minutes the wind started roaring and blew like crazy again.
Here is a photo of some clouds coming onto the shore at the Dinosaur Cove area near Pismo Beach. On the way back into the canyon I saw a young deer on the road… My first photo used the flash… but the deer was too far away… but I like the deer-eyes glow. You can see what condition our road is in…. four miles each way daily will take a toll on car batteries, and suspension systems.
A storm like this can topple some of our cactus plants also. The large Opuntia ficus-indica to the far left fell over…. it was perhaps seven feet tall, and probably weighs about one hundred pounds.
The middle photo is some of the grasses growing on one of our hillsides.. notice how they are bent over by the rain and wind. I really want the grasses to grow… they absorb water reducing runoff, they also open the soil permitting more water entry, helping the water to infiltrate into the soil. Depending on the situation, we often let the grasses grow, mature and set seeds. We will then mow them to reduce the cover for snakes, and keep the weed stickers down. The cut grasses form a mulch on the soil.
The third photo is one of our outdoor cats, Elizabeth Little-Grey. She sleeps in a little cat-condo… here she sticks her head out. We often lay a blanket over the condo at night, to help keep her warmer. On occasion we’ve brought her indoors during storms, but she doesn’t like being indoors at all… she quickly runs to the door begging to get out. She’s really cute and friendly outdoors though. All-in-all, it’s been a fairly un-fun experience the last week. Plenty of ag and mining operations have lost much production. The tourism industry likely lost some revenue during these storms… but on-the-other-hand… we’re pretty darn lucky… things could have been worse (but we’re not out of the weather yet), most of the country has had much worse weather for the last two months than this one single week has been for us. So we’re really lucky, but still hope we don’t have to go through anything near this again for some years.
After a week of near-constant rain, the sky stopped crying, the air cleared up… we were able to harvest and ship some cactus….
and we were rewarded with a spectacular sunset
Steve Ray Vaughan – The Sky is Crying ( Albert and BB King)
When you’re young is the time to go off and do silly fun things for a while. Yet, you don’t want to get so caught up in it that you lose your future.
I had a great time for a while when I was a youngster…. but then I got caught up in work…. yet I always still try to hang onto the fun in life. And in general each day is a blast, an adventure, and I love it all so much. Yet, I’m tied to a piece of land, chained to the world on this cactus-patch I cultivate. Perhaps that is why when I see folks travelling and exploring this great huge world, and themselves, I have to smile, and hope they proceed safely, and arrive at a destination one day, a destination in which they can, like me slowly age and settle into safely.
I was dropping off our boxes of cactus in Santa Maria yesterday, near the 101 Freeway, I came upon two young scruffy guys with signs, trying to gather money for their travels. Fifty yards further on I saw the honey-pot…. (or honies I suppose). I am sure these girls are travelling with the guys…. they are the ones who get the money, and the guys are close enough to keep the girls safe. It made me smile to see their marketing plan, so I snapped a picture and gave them a couple of hard-earned cactus dollars.
And yes, I’ve always had a soft-spot for those ‘Hippy chicks’, it’s good to see the species is still viable.
Travel safely young-ones!
Travelin', Broke and Adorable
~Boston~
‘Peace of Mind’
Now if youre feelin kinda low bout the dues you’ve been payin’
Future’s coming much too slow
And you wan’na run but somehow you just keep on stayin’
Can’t decide on which way to go
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People livin’ in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Now you’re climbin’ to the top of the company ladder
Hope it doesn’t take too long
Cant’cha you see there’ll come a day when it won’t matter
Come a day when you’ll be gone
I understand about indecision
But I dont care if I get behind
People livin in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Take a look ahead, take a look ahead’
Now everybody’s got advice they just keep on givin’
Doesn’t mean too much to me
Lot’s of people out to make-believe they’re livin’
Can’t decide who they should be.
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People livin in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Dang, I love to eat… I love to look at the things I will eat (If I can’t stand the look of it, I don’t eat it), I love to take photographs of things, including some of the foods I eat. Just as I like to travel, but when I can’t I am content looking at photos of the exotic places I’d like to visit… I also like to look at photos of the foods I’d like to eat.
There are a few websites that specialize in displaying the pretty photographs of fine foods submitted by readers. A few are Foodgawker, Photograzing, and Tastespotting… These sites will often be populated with foodies who enjoy making very professionally composed photographs…. lighting, composition, focus, all of the elements necessary for ‘proper and professional’ photography is utilized to make up the amazing photographs of the amazing foods. Common folks like me can take the best photos we can of our foods and submit them to these sites, hoping to have our amazing photos displayed for the entire world to drool over….
But then common folks like me, who can’t quite make the foods so pretty, the lighting so perfect, the focus as sharp…. we are denied the privilege of having our foods on the ‘premier’ sites listed above. OK, when we get denied the ‘fine’ sites… we always have ‘TasteStopping‘ to submit to! Yes, you can take your ‘off-focus, badly lit and cropped photos of your foods, and submit them to someplace that enjoys the food whether you know how to take good photos or not!
While looking the sites over, I just had to do a search on each for ‘cactus’. Here’s my results…. sadly, none of the photos are mine…
Foodgawker had a pagewith six photos of cactus dishes… including a personal favorite, tripas con nopal
Photograzing and Tastestopping were both devoid of cactus photos…. oh the heartbreak!
I submitted some photos of my cactus dishes to the three that accept fine foods photos….I have to wait until they decline them before I can submit them to Tastestoppers. When submitted to tastestoppers, I have to send them the comments about them that were given as reasons for being declined at the top three sites.
The local La Brea Fire has gotten to some 48,000 acres. The smokehead rises over the Central Coast like a giant cauliflower when the white head shows…. other times it is a big grey smudge all over the sky. The winds change the shape on a minute by minute basis.
You can find up-to-date news on the fire at local KSBY.
One photo shows a field covered with plastic. This is commonly used in this area to destroy every last bit of life in the soil. The plastic is unrolled over the field… the edges sealed to make the cover one huge uninterrupted cover over the entire field…. then when the outside edges have been buried, a machine goes over the field poking a small hole into the plastic, it will then inject a deadly poison into the ground… a patch is placed over the plastic to seal it, and the machine will move a bit further down the field to re inject poison. The covers are kept on for a while so that the poison gasses will have plenty of time to destroy every last bit of life. Then the plastic is pulled off… whatever gasses remain will be released into the atmosphere, and strawberries will be planted.
What we’re seeing in this photo is common… the wind will often get under one edge and cause huge ‘bubbles’ of plastic to rise up… sometimes the plastic will even lift up on the windward side, eventually blowing across a road and causing real problems. The local recycle area has acres of these plastics in a huge yard… great heaps of this plastic piled high… probably coated with toxins.
We can see that this cover has not yet been punctured for the poison….. we see none of the little plastic ‘patches’ that are put over the plastic to seal it after the injector has done its job.
I worry that one day this entire valley will be seen as toxic. Be assured that we live many miles up the canyon (near the fire), and our plantings are not affected directly by the toxins injected into this beautiful, productive and verdant valley.
I’m not a strawberry grower…. and we’re organically certified, so I am naturally against this type of poisoning of the environment and the use of such a huge amount of plastic. Yet being a grower and having to deal with bureaucracy and governmental and public dismay, I am naturally a bit hesitant to critique these foul methods (but I did it anyway).
The big huge firestorm head is called a Pyrocumulus….
UPDATE 081509:
The fire is now at 75,500 acres and ten percent containment.
What a world we live in… full of sights and sounds and emotions….
Sometimes it’s when you look at the tiny things that you can open yourself to the big ones.
The tiny things give you no threat… get down on your knees and watch the little bugs, and the tiny flecks of sand particles…. in a sense each tiny thing is ’The World’ to some little thing on it.
We walk through the world, not even knowing the damage we do to others both human and non-human.
But, we’ll find out all about it one day or another… but we can’t pick the time nor place.
We had a few cool moist nights. This left traces of dew on the spider webs. I was able to get some close up photos of the funnel spiders we have on our place.
Funnel spiders are really cool… very interesting. You’ll hardly ever see them, they are super reclusive (even more than us). They stay hidden down deep into the funnel neck. They sit and wait, their little hands on the various strings. When an insect falls or steps onto the big flat apron of the web, they can tell which section has a visitor due to the vibrations from the web strands they hold onto. Then they will quickly run out to capture their prey.
You can play a trick on these guys… you take a long stem of grass with some grass seeds or husks on the soft tip. Very gently.. let the seed husks touch the web… very gently wriggle it so the spider thinks he’s caught a bug. The spider will usually rush out to capture the bug.. when he gets about half way, he’ll see you and the trick you played…. sure they get a bit aggravated, but they’ll get over it.
