Observations, phenological and

I've been traking the dogs to Meder Street Park -- actually "University Terrace Park." It's a good place to go when you have an extra dog because there's a moderately long moderately steep trail that is offleash all the way, which means no handling of two dogs on the leash (both of whom are almost well-behaved but severely undertrained). It's alongside Moore Creek (where I have done observations for Snapshot Day on two (three?) occasions), which is bordered with eucalyptus and a mix of native and invasive understory plants. Chiefly, at this time of year, poison oak, which is in its vine phase there, climbing up the eucalyptus trees (which are a very tall and robust species, the kind Californians actually think of when they say eucalyptus -- probably one of the species that was mistakenly planted in a lot of places to provide wood for railroad ties). The poison oak is very lush right now, all green, with berries, very attractive if you don't know what you're looking at.

Poison oak is a really important plant in several plant communities in California. It has different growth habits depending on the habitat. In the riparian habitat succession, it tends to grow as a shrub before the tall trees grow, and at this point, it provides a protective cover for little baby willows and stuff. When the willows are replaced (normally by oaks and other native trees, but hereabouts the eucalyptus has muscled in), the poison oak becomes a vine that climbs the taller trees. All along, the poison oak provides food for a whole community of animals -- birds and rodents and insects, and everything that eats them.

I think in open parkland the posion oak stays in shrub form like it is at Lighthouse field, forming dense clumps that the animals use for food and shelter.

Poison oak may be a nuisance because of the tashes we get when we touch it, but it's also a vital -- necessary -- part of the landscape. I am lucky in that I have never "gotten poison oak" except possbly this one time when I had slightly red, slightly rashy, slightly swollen skin around my ankles but no itching and it just faded away after a few days. Other people can get amazingly severe reactions.

The part of Moore Creek below the eucalyptus stand has been undergoing an extensive habitat restoration for the last few years. For a long time it looked just awful -- it was all raw and there was landscape cloth everywhere. Now its banks are lush with horsetail and baby cattail plants, and there's blackberries everywhere.

The blackberries in the upper part of the trail are on a different schedule from the ones on the lower part of the trail. In the upper part they are less advanced. I'm not sure they're exactly the same berries. The blossoms and leaves on the upper blackberries are bigger. Sometimes plants do that when they are in shadier areas, though. The blackberries in the lower part are in that stage where there are still many new buds and blossoms but there are also ripening berries. I actually had a substantial snack of small ripe blackberries yesterday! I know that blackberries are early summer treats in some places, but hereabouts the usual peak is in August.

Another observation: to walk from the top of the trail to the bottom and back takes a bit over an hour for me, and I am very fat and slow these days (apparently my reaction to every setback is to eat like a crazy person and huddle in a little heap. But I'm back at work a lot of the time now, so I should be recovering). My back muscles actually do not like pulling so much weight up the hill, so I have to stop and do stretches. So for another person, or myself in better shape, maybe a bit less than an hour? So it's maybe a mile and a half (three kilometers) each way? The steep part is really quite steep. Not steep enough that it's scary to go down, but steep enough to make you have to walk in a somewhat different way going either way. The dogs love that. They love everything about it.

How many ticket agents does it take . . .?

So Saturday I had to drive over the hill -- in the entirely unseasonable rain -- to the San Jose airport to show my credit card (debit card) to a Delta ticket agent. Nobody I've talked to has ever had to do this, but apparently Accra is one of those places that has substantial fraud associated with it, and this is some kind of extra assurance that the card is real and so am I.

Lately I've had a problem reading the map: this is because the major north-south freeways have east-west patches in Silicon Valley and I've been looking at small map patches on Google maps and they're all weird at those places so I keep getting the wrong idea about which side I need to get off the freeway on. I need to invest in a new set of actual paper road maps for the car. So I hada small but extremely frustrating detour. Other than that it went pretty smoothly except . . .

There were several ticket agents standing around doing not much when I arrived. Good, this meant that my small mission would be quickly accomplished. But no. Only one of the ticket agents got what I was talking about, and he was all over that and smugly efficient until . . .

This fellow showed up with a weird story. He had gotten a call from Delta telling him that his flight was delayed, but when he got to the airport, he found that it was not delayed, it had already left. First they sent him to the next door airline that actually flew his flight, but they sent him back because he had ticketed through Delta and the false delay message had come through Delta. They had no problem agreeing that he was entitled to a re-ticket or a refund, but it took six Delta agents, including the one who was processing my car, and two Horizon agents, to work out the logistics. For some reason. So the officious but competent-seeming little nerdy guy in the black turtleneck who had apparently forty or so fields to enter things into to register the fact that my card had a physical reality kept leaving the screen that he was working on my problem with to look at other screen relevant to the other person's problem and I was standing there with a very impatient bladder and an expensive parking place (well, expensive by my standards, I don't think it's all that expensive in the grand scheme of things)for much longer than I expected or intended.

My issue went without a hitch, eventually, and I got to pee and to get out of there in less than an hour, and I got to Ranch 99 and I got back over the hill and picked Emma up at the fabric store and returned her to her house and I have Gelatinous Mutant Coconut Strings! And Frank is good to go to Ghana, despite the fact that he's forgotten his bank password and the kindly Czech bank won't tell him his password or allow him to reset it (what?).

In the course of listening to this drama next to me -- the guy had a really complicated itinerary involving flying to LA for one day, flying up to San Francisco for another day, and then flying to Florida -- I learned that in fact, a lot of passengers had been getting random false messages that their flights had been delayed. Nobody knew where in the system the problem was -- was it the airport? was it Delta? was it in the computer system? where? The moral of that one is: if they tell you your flight is delayed, go at the original time anyway and take an extra snack and an extra puzzle book.

But really, eight ticket agents to solve that? When all they actually had to do was to check if there was a flight to get him to Los Angeles that evening? (there was, and there was exactly one seat left on it)

On another front, mutant coconut on top of roasted pumpkin makes a really nice desert.

blue cheese, beer, walnuts and onions quick bread

For my own recollection
Mix
3 cups of flour
not quite a tablespoon baking powder
a teaspoon or so of sugar because the recipe I adapted had 3 tablespoons and I was too chicken to leave it out altogether in case it was doing something chemical with the beer and baking powder

Fill a two-cup measure with
blue cheese
jack cheese
parmesan
ground walnuts
fried onions that you get in a bag from the Arab grocery store

I think the cheese was about 1-1/4 cups, and the onion and walnuts were both about 1/2 cup, because the whole was over the 2-cup line

Mix the stuff in the two-cup measure with the dry stuff. Pour a 12-ounce bottle of beer into it and mix it until just mixed. Butter a pan, put it in a 375 F oven for a bit over an hour, and put a bit of butter on top for the last ten-fifteen minutes.

Yeah, there's six ways I shouldn't eat this, but I still have this huge lump of blue cheese.

On another front: My friend Marilyn lent me these two CDs by "Brave Old World," a no longer existing group her cousin Michael Alpert was involved in. The one called "The Upward Flight" just ended. It has the Internationale in Yiddish. Twice. It's a tribute to S. An-sky, a Yiddish folklorist from the turn of the last century, and has worker's songs, children's songs, and some Hasidic stuff. I have never been so thoroughly charmed by a cimbalom before.

The reason I am spamming lj today is that I have determined I will really finish this chapter tonight, and I find that posting on lj is a less distracting distraction than reading amateur romances.