Green green rocky road

Dang, I wish the camera were working (and I'd better get it working before June 7). We went down to Hollister on Saturday to watch the concert band and jazz band play and compete in the 2nd annual band review down there. Hollister is mainly known, I think, for its July 4th motorcycle gathering which arises from a historical event in the 1950s when a bunch of motorcyclists and the police had a giant, destructive misunderstanding, and now everybody is just getting along, or something. If you follow the second link you'll see a few inadequate glimpses of the landscape. I wish I could have taken pictures of my own: it was greener than I've ever seen it, and well into May too, when the hills should be getting pretty well yellow. By the middle of June most of San Benito County, and a lot of the rest of the Coast Ranges, will look like this. But for now this is less green than it really was this weekend. (by the way, if you follow that last link, you will see a little label "Eastern Mojave vegetation" but San Benito County is not even in the same floristic province as the Eastern Mojave: the former is the Californian province, and the latter is the Sonoran province: I suppose the picture is there because of the continuities between the regions).

Hollister himself has all sorts of stuff named after him, and is apparently famous for wearing buckskins and fighting bears.

So Hollister was just gorgeous, and the trip was fun, and the host school, San Benito High, was really welcoming because we'd invited them to our Winterguard's "Friends and Family Night." Our kids won their division -- it's a small competition -- but what cooler still was the flattering patter given by the judges. But we were on a bus, and I couldn't go trawling for cherries, so today, the nice fellow and I went back on a cherry-finding expedition, paid tourist prices for cherries, having first bought way too many fuschias and sedums and thymes at the Cabrillo College Mother's Day Horticulture Department plant sale, and learned, again, the great truth:

The best produce prices are always in Watsonville. Not Hollister. Watsonville, where they had the same cherries for half the price as the roadside stands with the yellow and black signs. And why do the roadside stands -- and Casa de Fruta, and "Casa de 17" all have those exact same, supposedly hand-lettered, yellow signs, all up and down Highway 1, Highway 101, and Highway 129 (at least)? What's the story there?

I suspect that cherries are like raspberries and strawberries, grown on "family" farms that are related through a complex web of leases and agreements to vast distributor businesses, and that they operate the cherry stands sort of on the frachise principle.

Dog of mine, I sure do ramble tonight. I'm only awake right now because I fell asleep on the couch and woke up with an extremely painful leg cramp which I'm waiting out. It's almost gone.

One other nice thing we did: we had Mother's Day dinner at the Afghan restaurant, Parwana.

Okay, so those are all nice memories: My useful thing is, sadly, almost keeping up with the dishes.

Edit: for my friends from far away, here is a pretty good representation of how some of the land looks around here. Well, some of the pretty parts, anyway.

appropriate in spite of itself

Or maybe the quiz thing is cleverer than it looks.

I am: Ursula K. LeGuin Perhaps the most admired writing talent in the science fiction field.

Which science fiction writer are you?

This in spite of the fact that there were three or four questions to which I wanted to answer something else.

By the way, I'm compiling a list of sf for a fifty-something lover of Henry James and Willa Cather who has never read science fiction and is only interested in reading it because I write it (we are not close: we just met walking dogs at the park). I've been putting in people who have a kind of "realistic" flavor, and who write a lot about relationships and the consequences of social structure. I'm trying to leave out the ones I like that depend on a lot of science fiction background or that are very fantastical in style. Suggestions? Especially for male authors, for balance, as I seem to not remember very many which fit all the requirements?