Thing-a-day.com

It is a rare sunny morning in Seattle’s winter, and I biked the three blocks to take a picture I’ve been wanting to take for a while now: Chief Seattle illuminated by sunlight. I took two pictures, and I like them both for different reasons.  The business in the background on the left image announces “Immigration & Citizenship Law”, the tracks behind are the monorail; the image on the right is with the space needle in the background.

A lot of people are expressing sadness that the month is over. It has indeed been an incredibly exhilarating experience. But I slowly came to realize the following over the last days:

The thing is actually just training wheels for truly living and creating and noticing and sharing. That is why it has to end today!

Thanks everyone!

…I know, but here’s the evidence.  We pulled into the Tacoma bus station, our last stop before Seattle, and I had to run one block back to take this photo before the bus pulled away.  Perhaps it is ironic that this city is named after the longtime residents before Europeans arrived (it is also, incidentally the true name of the nearby mountain, that the Europeans renamed “Rainier”); this gun store display seems like the epitome of backwards, stereotyped thinking.

When I returned to the bus, the driver asked what I had taken a picture of.  When I told him, he said “there’s a dark history to that place; that’s where the ‘beltway snipers’ got their guns.”

When I got home, I looked it up, and, yup, it’s apparently true. Shiver.

Stop the war and all the other nonsense, now!!

It’s well worth it for me to dock at the Stanford Mother Ship every now & then.  One of the great advantages is that one can get a jumpstart on spring.  Another is that, as a Stanford employee, one of my benefits is a yearly transit pass that allows me to ride the Monterey/Salinas (MST), San Jose (VTA) and Caltrain transit systems for FREE.  Thus, having secured said pass at Stanford 2 weeks ago, I started my return voyage to Seattle yesterday, taking the route 55 to San Jose and then the Caltrain to SF without spending a penny for my fare.  Then, we hopped on the N/Judah trolley line at the Caltrain station and got off at 7th Avenue in Sunset to get what I consider the best burrito in San Fran: the sauteed mushroom burrito with black beans and rice at L’Avenida. I know this is a fairly bold claim (I encourage any readers to post their personal fave burrito joint in the comment section here). But the mushrooms are sauteed to order, and the balance with the other ingredients as well as the delectable salsas are surely difficult to top. Since our N driver gave us a phat transfer time of 3 hours, I did the return trip on the same $1.50 fare, thus making my grand total $10 from Monterey to SF, with side trip for burrito con cerveza…tip was extra

From left to right: a picture I got just in time before Beatriz ate the last bite; the required elements for the trip and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; two photos crossing the bay bridge on the greyhound heading North, two hours later. Adios California!

I took a video of sea urchin sperm swimming today.  Click on the screenshot below to launch the video montage, which goes from 40x to 400x to 4000x magnification.

I’ve been thinking about sukogirl’s posts lately.  I don’t know if she’s in Saskatchewan, Siberia or Scandinavia, but wherever she is, it’s freakin’ cold.  One of my best shields against the cold is making a huge pot of soup.  When I cook, I’m into efficiency, and soup is pretty high on my efficiency scale: it utilizes a wide range of stuff in the fridge, one cooking event can yield days of enjoyment, vege prep is quick, and it doesn’t make that many things in the kitchen dirty.

Tonight I made a vegan Squash Potato Lentil Soup, as follows:

1) Fill a pot half full with water and heat to a boil.

2) While that’s heating, chop in large chunks (>3cm across):     

1 organic butternut squash, seeds removed, skin retained (only remove peel if it’s non-organic)   

3 small red & 3 small white organic potatoes, skin retained (ditto)

1/2 a large onion

6 cloves of garlic, whole

equivalent amount of ginger

2 carrots

Whatever other veges you want, especially roots like turnips and parsnips 

3) Boil the above until the squash is soft enough for a fork to pass thru effortlessly.

4) Using a slotted spoon, hand strainer, etc., scoop out the veges into a blender, add a bit of the stock, and blend on low until the major chunks are gone. 

5) Repeat with most of the veges and the stock, but retain a few chunks of the squash & potatoes on the side un-blended.  You will probably also have extra stock left.  Strain out the remaining vege pieces to add to the soup, and place the strained  stock in a jar, and freeze.  This is great for making stuff like risotto.

6) Chop the retained pieces of squash and potatoes from step 5 into 1 cm chunks (this will give the soup a bit more chunkiness).

7) Combine all of the blended and chopped veges in the same pot used in step 1.

8 ) Add: 1/4 cup cooking wine, a few Tbsp olive oil, salt & pepper to taste, curry powder, chopped cilantro (or whatever spices you like) and 1/2 cup lentils.

9) Bring to a boil, then turn the flame to low, and continue to slowly boil until lentils are cooked, about 20-30 minutes.  Stir occasionally to prevent the soup from sticking to the bottom.  Add some of the stock if necessary.

I went for a walk today, and saw a gorgeous old oak in a front yard being supported by a column.  This gave me the inspiration to do a photo essay on my walk entitled: Humans partnering with non-humans. Enjoy!

…is the name for “hummingbird” in Brasilian Portugese, literally meaning “flower kisser.” We saw this beauty today here in Monterey. He had a gorgeous fuschia patch of irridescence on his breast, but that unfortunately did not come out in this photo. Nevertheless, I was lucky even to get this pic, as I barely got my camera out for this one shot before he flew away.

Today was the first day in the month of February that I saw my wife, who just got back from Paraguay. That’s a fantastic thing! It made me think of this James Brown song:

I got a good thing,
and I ain’t gonna give it up!
I got a mighty good thing
yeh yeh yeh yeh
I ain’t gonna give it up!

Wednesday, I (along with KSG, ngill, eithni, carolbrowne, napoleah, sukogirl, and millions of others) took pictures of the total lunar eclipse. Tonight when I saw the moon she looked beautiful but neglected; I imagined everyone looking at her saying “Oh well, just an ordinary moon tonight; you should have seen her yesterday!” So I felt bad for her, and took these pictures to make her feel better. Fun with long exposures.

These shots are from about an hour ago, as I was walking home with my friend Amr. Then it got cloudy here, so it’s lookin kinda hazy at the moment.

Quick! Go outside and see the total lunar eclipse right now!!! Or check out the NASA eclipse site.

Marking time in Monterey means counting the days until Tuesday, when three blocks of the downtown core shuts down to auto traffic, and the street comes alive with a fantastic farmer’s market. Yesterday, after a year away from town, I headed downtown with great glee to find many of the same sellers I knew and loved still offering their wares: the no-spray avocado guy, the organic hybrid fruit ladies (this week starring a grapefruit that tasted like lemonade), the Mexican guys getting their organic cert this summer, the strawberry sweeties, the mushroom matrons, and on and on. The breadth of available local fruits and veges here in the central California winter is simply mind blowing. There was also a new (to me) organic seller, pictured below, who was selling some stalks from an artichoke relative called something like “kartune” (please add a comment if you know the actual spelling). I bought 3 stalks for a dollar (!) and made tempura last night. Delicioso!

Here’s a makeup post for a missed day last week.

I’m a total transit geek. One of my first objectives in any town I visit or move to is to learn the bus routes, and in my top 3 favorite bus activities is to stare endlessly at system maps and bus schedules. Every once in a while, after I leave a town, I check in with their transit web page to see how they might have improved service since I moved. One such example is MST, the transit system here in Monterey County. When I lived in Monterey, I used to go to public meetings to testify regarding my ideas for improving transit. One glaring problem with MST was its appalling intercity service. For example, getting from Monterey to nearby Santa Cruz took 3.5 hours at best, and San Jose was one hour further. One can drive to San Jose in like an hour and a half, so who in their right mind would ride the bus to San Jose? Well, I would, but I’m not in my right mind. Anyway, I discovered recently that MST finally improved service to San Jose by leaps and bounds when they added Route 55, the San Jose express! Yay!! I had been wanting to ride that bus for months now, and I finally got my chance this past weekend. It takes 2 hours, and it even has on board wi-fi! Woo hoo!

Aaah….it’s good to be back on the California coast! On Sunday, I accompanied my friend Matt and his colleague Brock (pictured together below) at low tide north of Santa Cruz to check on their ongoing barnacle settlement experiment. Also along were Matt’s wife Sarah & their dog Buddy (also pictured below). The four beaches we visited were incredibly photogenic, each with amazingly different textural characteristics. It was a beautiful day, and the coast was bursting at the seams with vibrant life.

I’ve presented a montage of some of my favorite shots here. Numbered from left to right, top to bottom, the pictures are from Bonny Doon Beach (1-5), Lighthouse Point (6-7), Sand Hill Bluff (8-10) and Terrace Point (11-12). As in all my posts, click on the images to see slightly expanded versions.

This may sound like a street name for MDMA, but it is, in fact, the common name for Lactarius rubidus, one of the most delicious fungi known to me. Restricted to the west coast of North America, and really only common from central California to southern Oregon, this member of the genus Lactarius (milky caps) is distinguished by its clear milk which exudes from any broken part, and its sweet, butterscotch-like smell. In fact, these mushrooms taste like butterscotch as well (the smell really comes out when cooked); some recipes even use them in deserts. My wife and I, however, are partial to this delectable species in all manner of main dishes, from simple sautées to sauces to lasagna. For me, candy caps have the perfect mushroom texture, almost bordering on crispy even after much cooking. We find tons of them near Monterey, CA in native Monterey Pine habitat, and their season seems to extend from about October well into the spring, at least in years without too much in the way of freezing temperatures.

Within 24 hours after arriving in Monterey this weekend, I visited our favorite collecting spot, and in about 2 hours I had collected enough for dinner (I made a vegan candy cap cream sauce for pasta) plus a bunch for drying. They are patchy, but dense in their patches, so once you find one, look carefully in that spot; there are probably more around. Here in Monterey, a co-occuring, poisonous Lactarius species (just icky stomach poisonous, not deadly poisonous) has bright yellow milk, larger fruiting bodies with rings on the cap, and doesn’t smell at all like butterscotch. So, when collecting candy caps for the first time, examine each mushroom carefully for the color of the milk (the difference between yellow and clear is obvious here). Eventually, you will intuitively know the distinguishing features. So look out for poison oak and enjoy the feast!

This is a make up post for a day I missed earlier this week.

Yesterday, I created this icon for our web project designed to teach high school kids about global warming using disappearing Fraser River salmon as an example. The site will be modeled after a CSI, but instead, an ESI: Environmental Science Investigation.

I visited the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve on the Stanford campus today. I’m a big fan of life cycles, and the differing ways that creatures deal with the changing of the seasons, such as oaks losing their leaves (revealing their forms below that always strike me as wise) and pines retaining them. As I took the photo of the giant research satellite dish, I was thinking about the recent finding of a solar system much like ours, 5000 light years away. The cows and trees seem like they’ve heard all this before. Both the dead tree and fence have their own life spans.

Since I manifested this front page yesterday and saw it today, I figured it was more than worth posting. For the last few days, the front page of the Stanford Daily has been reporting on a so-called controversy over the visit to campus of Basque president Juan Jose Ibarretxe. Apparently, 5,000 Stanford folks think that the democratically elected president of the Basque people has too cozy a relationship with the ETA, a separatist organization considered terrorists by the UN, US and EU among others. Now, I am no supporter of killings or kidnappings, but my first thought was: I wonder how these 5,000 people feel about the fact that their university actually HIRED a wanted international terrorist, Donald Rumsfeld, responsible for the deaths of several hundred times more innocents than the ETA? Then, today, it appeared in the paper that the university undergraduate senate has invited the US terrorist to defend his appointment. A petition protesting his appointment has 4,380 signatures (I was one), 620 less than the petition protesting Ibarretxe’s talk. Thus, I guess, here at Stanford if you are a democratically elected individual having tenuous connections to a separatist terrorist organization you are slightly less welcome than a pathological liar and appointed mass murderer.

Palo Alto, CA may be on the way to becoming Amsterdam, USA. While there don’t seem to be any coffee shops selling cannabis yet, the number of bicycles - particularly on the Stanford University campus - is astonishingly heartening. Now, I’m not talking about a bunch of hippies (like me) who think that we can change the world bicycle by bicycle. No, Stanford is a fairly conservative place. They actually hire war criminals like Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice here! Nevertheless, the decision makers on campus at some point had the radical realization that designing a pedestrian and bicycle friendly environment by restricting cars improves the quality of campus life. The result is full bike racks and a healthier student population. This blossoming of bicycle culture is - to me - as inevitable as flowering in springtime.

If you are ever in the region, come rent a bike at the campus bike shop in the student union: 10 bucks a day, 50 bucks a week, helmet and locks included! Pedal power!

With the exception of the guy 3 seats ahead who sounded like he was snoring through a megaphone, the trip to Palo Alto was fine. The guy in the seat behind me was a theoretical physicist teaching his two boys (10 and 7) about quarks (”I wonder if there is anything even smaller in the world, Daddy…”), the woman getting off in Eugene lost her cel phone and camera, the guy going to Medford talked to his girlfriend on his cel phone all the way until he arrived (she was there waiting for him- they must like each other), we slid silently by Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki (Mt. Shasta) in the middle of the night, the Oakland-bound lady told me about her cats, and nobody puked on the whole trip. Here are a couple of pix from the road: the first from our rest stop in southern Oregon (the place to satisfy legal addictions), the second a Hawai’ian-Salvadoran-pizza place around the corner from the Sacramento bus station (tasty pupusas).

Because this is actually a business trip, I’m being put up in a hotel in Palo Alto. It was really nice to have a bed to crash in after the trip. The name of the hotel: Hotel California. Lovely place. Free organic oranges every day. I plan to check out on Friday. I will let you know if I can ever leave, because, if not, I’ll still have free wi-fi in my room.

—–UPDATE FEB 16, 2008——
I successfully checked out of the hotel last night, but I forgot my soy milk in the fridge, so that won’t ever leave. weird…..

I was supposed to be on the Amtrak train from Seattle to San Jose, CA today, but a mudslide in Oregon has shut down that train route for the last 2 weeks. So I’m on greyhound instead. I am writing from our one hour layover in Portland, OR. Portland is, quietly and unassumingly, a far more progressive city than Seattle as judged by its transit system, bicycle infrastructure, free wi-fi (Q.E.D.), and, by my unofficial polling, far more vegan and vegetarian restaurants per square kilometer. Even the greyhound station is better here (the Seattle one is about as inviting as a US-Canada border guard), though I was just thinking about my most recent experiences with bus stations: South America. A city in S. America the size of Seattle, or even Portland, would have all kinds of bus station activity on a Sunday early evening. Here in Portland, the loudest sound I hear is a woman’s heels approaching across the stone floor. I took a couple of pictures outside the Portland station in the last light of day.