Author Archives: Mark P

Some sun, lots of rain

Posted on by

We’ve had a fairly long period of wet weather, interrupted occasionally by a sunny day. I don’t really mind a rainy day. There’s something nice about being warm and dry while it’s cold and wet outside.

One day this week it was foggy — cloudy to those down at the bottom of the mountain — and it had been raining, so I took the dogs on a short walk up to the top of the mountain where power lines cross the ridge. The towers looked like half-hidden alien structures. And there was a crackle in the air. Turn your volume up for this video.

The buzzing sound is caused by what is essentially leaking electrical power. It’s audible only during wet conditions, at least if the power company is doing its job on the transmission lines. It’s called a corona discharge.

I had walked the dogs up a few days earlier when the view was more open. There were still a few clouds scudding about down in the valley.

What might look like a particularly bright cloud near the center of the image is actually a lake.

The maples have turned. It was hard to get a nice, bright image, but here’s one where I tried.

With all the rain, the wet-weather streams are running all over the mountain. I can hear the rushing water everywhere on our walk, even when I can’t see the streams.

This is where one stream crosses Fouche Gap Road near the bottom of the mountain in Texas Valley.

Sam always wants to drink from the ditches beside the road when we start back up the mountain. I usually let him. He didn’t notice this little fellow,

I suspect this is a red salamander, rather than a mud salamander. According to Caudata Culture (“The information resource for newt and salamander enthusiasts”), the two are hard to differentiate. The red salamander is “often associated with the environs of clear, rocky, streams” while the mud salamander frequents muddy areas. Unfortunately, I see their squashed little bodies in the road fairly often.

The rain ended Thursday, although the clouds stuck around for a while. Thursday night is supposed to be the coldest since last spring. Leah feels sorry for Dusty and Chloe, who stay on our front porch, which is soaked with the blowing rain. They do have cat houses with heating pads, and a foam insulation surround. Leah drapes a bed spread over the beds to try to keep the wind from blowing directly on them.

Miércoles

Posted on by

I have mentioned before that Leah and I go to Los Portales Mexican restaurant almost every Wednesday for a lunch of huevos rancheros, and then on to the grocery store. I have also mentioned that we have done it so often that almost every waiter/waitress brings us a sweet tea for Leah, an unsweetened tea for me, chips, regular salsa, burrito sauce and ranchera sauce, without our having to ask. Then they ask, “The regular?” And then they bring us huevos rancheros, which mean ranch eggs, which means fried eggs. We get them with the yolk runny and the edges crisp.

Here’s Leah enjoying lunch.

The sauces are, from left to right, burrito sauce, regular sauce, empty ranchera sauce bowl, and full ranchera sauce bowl. One taste of the ranchera sauce and we knew we would need a second bowl.

Here’s a closer look at the ranchera sauce.

Seeds! Chilis!

The burrito sauce has onions.

And here I am, also enjoying.

I managed to eat my entire meal without getting any stains on my shirt.

Way, way back, we started with just regular sauce and ranchera sauce, but the ranchera sauce was so often so hot that one waiter suggested burrito sauce. That turned out to be a good suggestion. The three sauces are have distinct and quite different tastes. The regular sauce is close to what you might buy in the grocery store. Burrito sauce is a deeper and more flavorful sauce. Ranchera sauce can be very hot, but it almost always seems to have a nice, sharp flavor, not just heat.

We usually ask the waitress if the ranchera sauce is hot. Today the waitress said she hadn’t tried it because she gets heartburn. So we dipped one little edge of a chip into it and tasted. Oh, boy, was it good. It had a little heat, the kind that shows up pretty quickly on the tongue, as opposed to the kind that seems to burn the back of the mouth as well and get more intense as it lingers. The taste was more piquant than picante. Sometimes we just dribble a little ranchera sauce over the eggs, but on Wednesday we spooned it over them.

Then I added burrito sauce over the eggs. And the burrito sauce was also good. This time it had a roasted, smokey flavor.

We take pleasure in simple things.

Visit to the garden center

Posted on by

Tuesday I had to get a few things from our local Lowes. I went through the garden center. These caught my eye, and whose eye would they not catch?

They’re mums, right? These are very commonly planted around businesses that maintain landscaping. At the office building where I used to work, summer flowers were dug out in late summer or early fall and replaced with cold-weather plants, usually including a lot of mums. Although some mums (apparently) can survive as perennials, around here they are treated as annuals. They’re pretty, but I have problems with planting something that I know won’t live beyond a few months.

Fall skies

Posted on by

Fall finally arrived, chasing our later summer away. The days have been mild, the nights cool, and the sky blue.

There was some humidity in the air Saturday morning when I walked the dogs down into Texas Valley.

Since our house faces east, we can see the sun rising, but not going down. But there are still some nice sunsets, even if we can’t actually see the sun setting.