Let me hitch-hike through the yarrow
Feb. 17th, 2012 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanThe subject line is going around in my head but may not have much relevance to what follows.
First, most sadly, Jordan, the last of Raphael's Arizona cats, died at the end of January while I was in California for a short visit. She was the great cat of the world and we are very mournful. I was so sorry not to be able to say goodbye and help Raphael out. She was eighteen and had chronic renal failure, but seemed stable enough for me to risk going away. However, she always did have her own ideas about what was appropriate.
Other than that, says Mrs. Lincoln, the trip to California was excellent. I had not been on an airplane since October of 2008. I didn't enjoy my flights, but I survived them. My right ear is still not working properly, still feels as if it needs to pop definitively. I also had interesting experiences on the way home. My Frontier flight out of San Francisco was delayed because of mechanical failure, so that I missed my Minneapolis connection in Denver. Frontier originally offered me a stand-by seat on an eight pm flight leaving Denver the same day, and an assured seat on a seven am flight the next morning. Since it was their fault I'd missed the connection, they would pay for a hotel room. I agreed, but the more I considered it, the less I liked the idea. I would get very little sleep, I wouldn't get home to my sweetie who needed me, I might miss a dinner with my brother Mike, who had arrived in Minneapolis while I was still in San Francisco, and I might miss seeing David before he left for a short trip of his own.
I kept catching mutters about a storm that was supposed to hit Denver. When I talked to Raphael, zie looked at Weather Underground for me. I could have done that on my own laptop, but I was discombobulated. Sure enough, there was a great lot of snow headed right for Denver. In fact, it was late, having originally been expected at one in the afternoon. On the weather maps that Frontier showed alternating with flight information, the storm looked like a huge white hand obliterating much of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to pick up Denver and environs and take them who knew where.
I ended up changing to an American Airlines flight to Chicago that left at 6:30 rather than 8 pm, with a connection from there to Minneapolis. De-icing the plane took so long that I felt sure we would end by being ordered back to the gate, but we managed to leave. The plane was minute; its overhead compartments looked as if they belonged in a doll house. But everything went smoothly after we took off. I arrived home weary and sad but temporarily distracted, courtesy of an extremely talkative Somali taxi driver who had been working for years on a book about what had happened to his country. I did my best to encourage him, though what he was trying to do is far above my pay grade.
Denver did in fact endure a massive snowstorm, with 600 flights cancelled, so I feel that I was lucky.
I arrived in California around dinner time, and after some confused exchanges via text message, Eric and I found one another. We had a protracted comedy of errors with the rental car because Eric had forgotten to bring his travel itinerary, and another with the location of the hotel, since I had forgotten to print out directions to it. Some reviews had complained about how you had to overshoot it on 101 and double back, so we ended up sitting on the floor in an elevator lobby of the airport so Eric could look things up and memorize maps and exits. The hotel was there and essentially fine, though it turned out to be harboring a non-working laundry. We didn't find that out until later.
We drove into San Francisco, pointing out landmarks and reminiscing, and found a parking place right on the same block as our destination, the Herbivore, also very locally (that is, by Eric and me) known as the Sign of the Red Pepper. We had an extremely fine dinner, including sauteed kale as an appetizer. Eric had wasabi noodles and I had the horribly-named but completely delicious and warming "soy potato pie." They gave us so much bread and so many greens that we had no room for dessert.
Raphael called in the middle of the night from the emergency vet's to tell me about Jordan, and we talked several more times as the situation developed. After I had slept in, Eric and I went to the Whole Foods in San Mateo and got things for lunch. I talked to Raphael again in the car. We no longer had a Jordan. I would be fine for several hours and then suddenly tearful, for the rest of the trip.
Eric and I went to the Native Plants Botanic Garden in Tilden Park. This is one of our touchstones. Eric once said it was the Liavekan version of the Acrivannish Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. The manzanitas were blooming exuberantly and a little redwood sorrel was also blooming, but it was a quiet time of year for the garden. All its nice bones were visible, though, terraces cascading down to Wildcat Creek, silvery buckeyes, pale alder trunks, prickly-pear cacti, walls of redwood, Douglas fir, Chamaecyparis, dark red manzanita branches, twisted oaks. We visited the coastal redwoods and the mountain redwoods and the California bay laurels and wandered among the strange prickly constricted plants of the Channel Islands. But Eric was hankering to return to a park he had only discovered shortly before he moved away from California, so we got back into the rental car and went to Briones Regional Park.
After a false start during which we climbed an exceedingly steep hill encumbered by horse droppings, saw some spectacular views, and realized that the trail we were heading for was well-populated by cows, we went down again and drove to a different trailhead. First we walked through a classic oak savannah, perfectly recognizable to anybody who has hiked much in Minnesota. The leafless oaks were big and gnarled by the wind into fantastical shapes. Their branches almost reached the ground and nearly went in S-shapes. There were ravens.
Then we took a woodland trail with a very sharp slope on one side, full of evergreen oaks, bays, and California buckeyes, some of the latter just starting to come into leaf. We thought that there must be a myriad of tiny micro-climates, because very close to one another would be a buckeye with half-open leaves and another that barely had pink buds as yet. We startled a flock of juncoes. The woods were green but dry. The trail wound up and down and finally came out into a clearing with a bench and a grand view of hazy hills. We sat down. I noticed that to our left the hill ran up very steeply indeed, and that next to the barbed-wire fence that separated the woods from a nearly-vertical hill of long golden grass, someone or something had made a trail. I pointed this out to Eric, who promptly decided to go up to the top of the hill. I gave him the binoculars. He made steady progress, stopping halfway up to wave to me. After that, there was a brief time when his legs were moving but he didn't seem, from my perspective, to be getting any higher; that was the very steep bit. It was like a nightmare or a cartoon.
Then he gained the top and went along the ridge and out of sight. In a while he shouted down to me that he could see Mount Diablo. It was hidden from me by the shoulder of the next hill on the right, but I was happy enough with my view. He came back down, and we returned through the woods to the car.
We drove to Oakland and went to the restaurant that I may always think of as Manzanita, although it's now called Shangri-la Vegan. We had the full meal, which was a lentil and black-eyed pea soup, and then collard greens with a leek and miso sauce, mixed greens with balsamic dressing, brown rice, some white beans cooked in a way that made them the profound opposite of boring, and a collection of slivered root vegetables. It was blissful.
Eric said that since we had room for dessert, we should try our luck with parking at the Herbivore again. But it was earlier in the evening and much busier in that neighborhood. Bicyclists kept zipping by, scooters zoomed out of their parking spaces into our path, pedestrians wandered about with no regard for their own safety, and there was no parking. We went back to the hotel and ate some chocolate.
I called Raphael and we talked about Jordan.
I will continue this tale soon, but this entry is long enough.
Pamela
First, most sadly, Jordan, the last of Raphael's Arizona cats, died at the end of January while I was in California for a short visit. She was the great cat of the world and we are very mournful. I was so sorry not to be able to say goodbye and help Raphael out. She was eighteen and had chronic renal failure, but seemed stable enough for me to risk going away. However, she always did have her own ideas about what was appropriate.
Other than that, says Mrs. Lincoln, the trip to California was excellent. I had not been on an airplane since October of 2008. I didn't enjoy my flights, but I survived them. My right ear is still not working properly, still feels as if it needs to pop definitively. I also had interesting experiences on the way home. My Frontier flight out of San Francisco was delayed because of mechanical failure, so that I missed my Minneapolis connection in Denver. Frontier originally offered me a stand-by seat on an eight pm flight leaving Denver the same day, and an assured seat on a seven am flight the next morning. Since it was their fault I'd missed the connection, they would pay for a hotel room. I agreed, but the more I considered it, the less I liked the idea. I would get very little sleep, I wouldn't get home to my sweetie who needed me, I might miss a dinner with my brother Mike, who had arrived in Minneapolis while I was still in San Francisco, and I might miss seeing David before he left for a short trip of his own.
I kept catching mutters about a storm that was supposed to hit Denver. When I talked to Raphael, zie looked at Weather Underground for me. I could have done that on my own laptop, but I was discombobulated. Sure enough, there was a great lot of snow headed right for Denver. In fact, it was late, having originally been expected at one in the afternoon. On the weather maps that Frontier showed alternating with flight information, the storm looked like a huge white hand obliterating much of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to pick up Denver and environs and take them who knew where.
I ended up changing to an American Airlines flight to Chicago that left at 6:30 rather than 8 pm, with a connection from there to Minneapolis. De-icing the plane took so long that I felt sure we would end by being ordered back to the gate, but we managed to leave. The plane was minute; its overhead compartments looked as if they belonged in a doll house. But everything went smoothly after we took off. I arrived home weary and sad but temporarily distracted, courtesy of an extremely talkative Somali taxi driver who had been working for years on a book about what had happened to his country. I did my best to encourage him, though what he was trying to do is far above my pay grade.
Denver did in fact endure a massive snowstorm, with 600 flights cancelled, so I feel that I was lucky.
I arrived in California around dinner time, and after some confused exchanges via text message, Eric and I found one another. We had a protracted comedy of errors with the rental car because Eric had forgotten to bring his travel itinerary, and another with the location of the hotel, since I had forgotten to print out directions to it. Some reviews had complained about how you had to overshoot it on 101 and double back, so we ended up sitting on the floor in an elevator lobby of the airport so Eric could look things up and memorize maps and exits. The hotel was there and essentially fine, though it turned out to be harboring a non-working laundry. We didn't find that out until later.
We drove into San Francisco, pointing out landmarks and reminiscing, and found a parking place right on the same block as our destination, the Herbivore, also very locally (that is, by Eric and me) known as the Sign of the Red Pepper. We had an extremely fine dinner, including sauteed kale as an appetizer. Eric had wasabi noodles and I had the horribly-named but completely delicious and warming "soy potato pie." They gave us so much bread and so many greens that we had no room for dessert.
Raphael called in the middle of the night from the emergency vet's to tell me about Jordan, and we talked several more times as the situation developed. After I had slept in, Eric and I went to the Whole Foods in San Mateo and got things for lunch. I talked to Raphael again in the car. We no longer had a Jordan. I would be fine for several hours and then suddenly tearful, for the rest of the trip.
Eric and I went to the Native Plants Botanic Garden in Tilden Park. This is one of our touchstones. Eric once said it was the Liavekan version of the Acrivannish Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. The manzanitas were blooming exuberantly and a little redwood sorrel was also blooming, but it was a quiet time of year for the garden. All its nice bones were visible, though, terraces cascading down to Wildcat Creek, silvery buckeyes, pale alder trunks, prickly-pear cacti, walls of redwood, Douglas fir, Chamaecyparis, dark red manzanita branches, twisted oaks. We visited the coastal redwoods and the mountain redwoods and the California bay laurels and wandered among the strange prickly constricted plants of the Channel Islands. But Eric was hankering to return to a park he had only discovered shortly before he moved away from California, so we got back into the rental car and went to Briones Regional Park.
After a false start during which we climbed an exceedingly steep hill encumbered by horse droppings, saw some spectacular views, and realized that the trail we were heading for was well-populated by cows, we went down again and drove to a different trailhead. First we walked through a classic oak savannah, perfectly recognizable to anybody who has hiked much in Minnesota. The leafless oaks were big and gnarled by the wind into fantastical shapes. Their branches almost reached the ground and nearly went in S-shapes. There were ravens.
Then we took a woodland trail with a very sharp slope on one side, full of evergreen oaks, bays, and California buckeyes, some of the latter just starting to come into leaf. We thought that there must be a myriad of tiny micro-climates, because very close to one another would be a buckeye with half-open leaves and another that barely had pink buds as yet. We startled a flock of juncoes. The woods were green but dry. The trail wound up and down and finally came out into a clearing with a bench and a grand view of hazy hills. We sat down. I noticed that to our left the hill ran up very steeply indeed, and that next to the barbed-wire fence that separated the woods from a nearly-vertical hill of long golden grass, someone or something had made a trail. I pointed this out to Eric, who promptly decided to go up to the top of the hill. I gave him the binoculars. He made steady progress, stopping halfway up to wave to me. After that, there was a brief time when his legs were moving but he didn't seem, from my perspective, to be getting any higher; that was the very steep bit. It was like a nightmare or a cartoon.
Then he gained the top and went along the ridge and out of sight. In a while he shouted down to me that he could see Mount Diablo. It was hidden from me by the shoulder of the next hill on the right, but I was happy enough with my view. He came back down, and we returned through the woods to the car.
We drove to Oakland and went to the restaurant that I may always think of as Manzanita, although it's now called Shangri-la Vegan. We had the full meal, which was a lentil and black-eyed pea soup, and then collard greens with a leek and miso sauce, mixed greens with balsamic dressing, brown rice, some white beans cooked in a way that made them the profound opposite of boring, and a collection of slivered root vegetables. It was blissful.
Eric said that since we had room for dessert, we should try our luck with parking at the Herbivore again. But it was earlier in the evening and much busier in that neighborhood. Bicyclists kept zipping by, scooters zoomed out of their parking spaces into our path, pedestrians wandered about with no regard for their own safety, and there was no parking. We went back to the hotel and ate some chocolate.
I called Raphael and we talked about Jordan.
I will continue this tale soon, but this entry is long enough.
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 02:36 am (UTC)I'm very sorry about Jordan. She was a fine cat and I'm glad I got a chance to hang out with her.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 04:27 am (UTC)We should have lunch and/or see some Shakespeare soon.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 05:27 am (UTC)So glad to hear you had a good trip.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 11:45 am (UTC)Your trip to California sounds wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 02:51 pm (UTC)And YaY for a good trip, despite the airline adventures.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 06:56 am (UTC)P.