A Slight Detour

It was a nice day for a detour on the way home from the post office.  

The rose garden.

Unexpected blossoms.

Amber waves.

Lunches

I miss Ernest's zoo days.  They gave me the opportunity to see the sights, take photographs, and have lovely lunches.

So nowadays when I get the chance to go out to lunch, I seize it.

Grilled Thai Shrimp and Cucumber Salad at Big Sky Cafe.

Italian Stallion at Mr. Pickles. Love the Dutch Crunch bread!

Loaded Cod Tacos (a special) at Fat Cat's Cafe.

Fat Cat's Cafe. You KNOW I had to go there!

Tameflowers?

It hasn't been a really good wildflower year, 

but they do pop up in unexpected places.  

These were in the parking lot at the grocery store.

However, there are always a lot of planted flowers around town.  

Would you call them tameflowers?

No matter, they're pretty no matter what I call them.
When Ernest was little, he would have called them "dragonsnaps."

Lemon Raspberry Cake

Ernest asked for a lemon flavored cake. The rest was up to us.

Frank used the 1-2-3-4 recipe on the Swansdown cake flour box, with the exception that he whipped the egg whites and folded them in, as was described in a similar Joy of Cooking recipe.  He also added the zest of two lemons, and the juice of one, for the requested lemon flavor.  The cake came out denser than we expected but was still moist and delicious.

The Lemon Frosting recipe was from my 1972 Joy of Cooking. Powdered sugar, butter, lemon juice and lemon zest.

We jazzed it up with raspberry filling: 1 package fresh raspberries, some water, 1/4 cup sugar, cook and mash berries. Mix some cornstarch with a bit of water, stir in, cook until thickened. Cool.

The Handy crew liked it a lot.

The raspberry candle holders were my idea.  So easy!  Ernest said, "There better be 18 candles!" There were.

One Thing Leads to Another

The original purpose of this post was to show Homer on sentry duty, waiting patiently for his dinner.

But then I noticed how absolutely disgusting my kick plates were. Truthfully, I don't look down there all that much. They really should have been made of black material. When Handy built them, he only had white melamine.  When he built the bathroom cabinets, I made sure he got some black!

So I spent much of my day lying on my back on the floor scrubbing the kick plates.  And then I scrubbed the floor, because a couple days ago we had given Homer some medicine and instead of swallowing, he ran through the house dribbling white spots all over the floor. And now I think I'll go scrub myself, because house cleaning is a dirty sweaty workout.

So how was your day?

18 years ago today...

Eighteen years ago today, I birthed a babe.  How time flies.

I would normally have a tribute post here (his brother got a series of 3 posts here, here and here) but it's been a strange and busy week so I will have to come up with something later.

Due to the birthday boy's tight schedule, we aren't celebrating the birthday until Saturday.  There will be some kind of cake.  Frank and I have been given a flavor, but the rest is up to us.

(Photo from Cakes by Marion.)

Cars About Town

Interesting batch of cars around town lately.

Handy's seen Facemelter on the freeway before.

Holy moly, someone went a little crazy here!

OK, if this is a real Ferrari, it's worth millions.  (You can bet Handy did some extensive internet research on this one.) Who in their right mind would put a multi-million dollar car on a trailer by the side of the freeway?

Chairsies

Remember all those rocking chairs I got from my mom's house? 

And how I thought I'd reached my limit?

Apparently not.  

I didn't inherit any rockers from my dad 

(there was one, but I resisted). 

But I could not resist these beautiful oak dining chairs, 

even though I have no place at all to put them.

The fourth chair is hiding in the background there 

because we took the top of it apart.  

It was missing a back slat and 

I found a place online that would make a replacement, 

if you send them a sample.

So I am waiting for Woodchairparts.com 

to come through with the replacement.

And then I will squeeze them in somewhere.  

I think Homer would enjoy sitting on them,

with a little padding so he won't skid.  

They have nice broad seats for a full-bodied fellow.

Tiny's already taken over one of the rockers.

This all makes me think of this chair...

(I took out the name as I was getting too many weird hits.)

Crash in the Night

That middle of the night crash that jars you out of a hard-fought sleep. Burglars, your mind thinks. Intruders. Space invaders. As consciousness returns, you realize it was the metallic clatter of a Tiny-toppled cat food bowl. But since the noise didn't rouse any other human household members, you snuggle back into your cocoon and try try try to get back asleep again. You have a rare success. The crunch of kibble underfoot becomes someone else's morning discovery.

Later that morning, the thundercats, Fifi and Tiny, are busy tearing up and down the stairs, running laps around the couch, teasing the curtains behind the TV.

Like this.

Homer wonders why they are so busy. He takes his leisurely morning security patrol around the premises, then settles in near the coffee cup for the first of many morning naps. 

UPDATE:  Thank you, Common Household Mom, for this:

The Cats

by Ann Iverson

To find such glory in a dehydrated pea
on the tile between the stove and fridge.

To toss the needs of others aside
when you simply aren't in the mood for affection.

To find yourselves so irresistible.

And always in a small spot of sun,
you sprawl and spread out the pleasure of yourselves

never fretting, never wanting to go back
to erase your few decisions.

To find yourself so remarkable
all the day long.

"The Cats" by Ann Iverson from Come Now to the Window. © Laurel Poetry Collective, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The VW

I recently read an article about a couple naming their baby after the car in which she was born.  I had a laugh over that, because my mother always told me that if I had been a boy, I would have been named after my parents' car.  Not Bug or Beetle or Volkie but Craig, after the car's license plate letters which she said was KRG. 

But when I came across these old pictures and saw a different plate on them, I thought perhaps that was a tall tale she was telling me.  However, thanks to a Facebook thread from my father's cousin, I found that California regularly issued cars new plates until 1963.  So her story holds up, after all.  

Here's the car's story, from my dad's autobiography:

Beetling Along:

One of my friends suggested that if we wanted a small car, we should check out the VW beetle.  The salesman handed us the key to his personal VW and told us to bring it back in a couple of hours.   We took the car and wrung it out.   It was fun and agile through town, but slow when we drove up Highway 24 through the Orinda tunnel.  The best it could do up the hill was 45 mph in third gear.  That was disappointing but it was another story entirely when we turned off the freeway right after the tunnel.  We went up Fish Ranch Road, and then along Grizzly Peak Boulevard.  Wow.  I had never driven a car that handled so well.  We were passing all the American cars.

Before we bought the Beetle, we checked other small cars.  There was no Renault dealer in the area.  The Morris Minor dealer took us for a ten block ride, but didn’t offer to let us drive.  The Austin dealer took us on a very sedate drive, then let me drive it the last few blocks back to the shop.  I could have insisted on doing more driving, but after even these short rides we could see they were both stodgy, and neither measured up to the VW.

The Nash Metropolitan had just been advertised, so we went to the Nash showroom in Richmond.  They had a display model on the floor - minus the engine - if you can believe that.  It was ugly, too. The salesman didn’t have a car to test drive, but he offered to take our order for a car.  You can guess what our answer was.

We went back to Berkey-Lee Volkswagen and put in our order for a beige car with a sun-roof.  It cost roughly a dollar a pound, about $1600 for 1600 pounds of car.  We financed it through the Credit Union and waited impatiently for it to arrive.  VWs were shipped from Germany on a boat that unloaded in San Francisco.  I heard the salesman briefing someone on where to go to take delivery.  Cars were shipped with empty gas tanks.  He told the driver to board the boat, put the car in neutral and coast down the ramp to a gas station on the nearest corner, then put in a gallon of gas, enough to get the car back to Berkeley.  Berkey-Lee was a no frills operation.

The car we ordered was advertised to have twenty-four horsepower.   One of the best things about the VW is that they didn’t have to come out with a cosmetic change for a new model every year.  Improvements weren’t announced with the hoopla of a new model.  A very nice improvement was that our car was one of the first with thirty horsepower, a very nice improvement.  This was thirty DIN horsepower.  A few years later VW started advertising SAE horsepower: 30 DIN was the same as 36 SAE!

My VW was the hit of the day when I drove it to work.  I gave demonstration rides at noon for days.  It was a fun car to drive, and cheap to buy and operate, but it did lack certain amenities. There was no gas gauge.  Instead the gas tank had a one-gallon dimple in the bottom.  When the motor stopped for lack of gas, there was a foot-operated lever to switch the gas line to the very bottom of the dimple.  Then you had thirty-some miles to find gas.  There was no air conditioning, not with only 30 horsepower to drive the car.  

You could pack an amazing amount of stuff in the car.  With only two in the car, you could take out the rear seat and seat-back.  The passenger seat was also easily removable.  With the sunroof open, quite bulky things fit in the car, including Christmas trees and ladders. 

Early in the summer of 1954 we took our first long trip in the VW, driving and camping along the coast north to Olympic National Park and then taking the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria on Vancouver Island.  More than fifty years later they are still using the same ferry, the Coho, on this line.  All along the way, ours was the first VW people had seen.  Every place we stopped, people clustered around us to inspect the car.  We had to (were eager to?) open both the front trunk and the rear engine compartment.  It was the right choice for us, fun to drive and reliable.

In the 1950's the typical American car had a soft suspension that made it quiver like a bowl of Jello.   To negotiate a sharp turn in the mountains, the driver had to slow almost to a stop.  Once around the turn, though, his overpowered car accelerated much faster than the VW could.   It seemed to be a point of pride for the driver of a big car not to use a pull-out to let a little VW go by.  I developed a rather dicey passing technique that worked, or I wouldn’t be here writing this.  I am not recommending it.  Not only was the VW faster in the bends than American cars, it also had superior braking.  I would hang back a little, then accelerate as the next bend loomed.  When the driver ahead hit his brakes, I made my decision. If the road ahead was clear, I had enough speed to pass.  If a car was coming from the opposite direction, I could brake and drop behind again.  I never had any close calls doing this, but then I never met a VW driver coming from the opposite direction and using the same technique.   I probably made a lot of enemies with this technique.  One time I passed a hot car coming down out of the southern part of the Sierra Nevada.  We were about ten miles out on the flat when the car I had passed came roaring by.  We were doing 65 mph, and he was doing well over ninety.

A Bayside Break

I had a late lunch in Morro Bay after visiting my M-I-L.  

The Bayside Cafe is a great little place that the locals love.  

Handy and Ernest had fish tacos and berry crisp on Sunday after their visit, 

so I thought I should go there too.

I texted Handy a picture of my lunch and he thought it looked a little "shrimpy."  

He thought I was silly for passing up dessert.

But this was enough for me.

It was starting to sprinkle when I arrived

and the staff was scurrying around to bring in things from the outdoor deck.

I'm not sure if you can see in the picture, 

but there are raindrops.

But by the time I left, the sun was shining again.

It was a pretty day.