Catching up

I haven’t updated the blog for a while now. Apologies to my faithful followers (and the spammers, too).

Go all the way back to September 15 (it really has been a long time, hasn’t it!). On a little sport ride out Cañada road, I noticed this mailbox.

Then last weekend, I decided to do a killer hike on the peninsula, maybe a little cooler than going inland. Montebello, Stevens canyon, Saratoga summit, and back along the trails west of Skyline, 19.3 miles, 3400 feet of gain.

Well camouflaged. For some environments, that is. Not quite right for here, but at least I didn’t eat him. I can’t speak for the bird population.

And horseshoe lake, near the end of the route. About 50 trail runners started from here today and ran 30 miles. These are the people who think a marathon is too wimpy to bother with. When the leaders passed me, somewhere around the 12-mile mark, they were still running faster than I can go in a sprint! Good for them.

One reason I have been less active on the trails lately is that I am pulling down the overhead trellis structure over the rebuilt deck. The idea is to eventually rebuild something there, preferably something that won’t be full of termites and carpenter bees. Poking around up there, I met a big garden spider, just hanging out.

Removing the lattice was not a really big deal. Removing the cross braces was a little more technical, because they are heavy, and toenailed into the support beams. I left the two final cross braces for last; once they are down, the overhead beams just run out straight from the house, with not a whole lot to keep them from tipping over sideways.

Saturday, 5 October, I spent an extremely stressful morning pulling down the last of the cross braces, and three of the five beams. They are heavy enough to be beyond easy control, everything was wobbly, there were hidden toenails that I needed to cut ad hoc with a hacksaw blade, and once loose, they wanted to shift a little. A little is okay!

The two final beam sections are the ones attached to the house. They are pinned to joist hangers with bolts too large for the wrenches I had, and I was glad enough to leave them for later anyway. Not much later: they also need to come down. It will be tricky: they are longer, therefore heavier than the others, there is no good place to put a ladder on one area that’s being framed in for the new deck, and a misjudgment could damage the house as well as the deck.

Sunday, 6 October

This yard work has been anaerobic, and I have the sore muscles to prove it. But I need some aerobic exercise as well. So I hiked Mission peak to Sunol and back, 15.7 miles, 4000 vertical feet.

Street parking below the preserve is bounded by eucalyptus on one side, houses on the other. Eucalypts are generally disliked here because they are not native Californians. I am not very sympathetic to that view, because I’m not either.

A cool sunny day as I hiked up the secondary route. Dozens of hikers across the way on the main route; I’ll go down that way five or six hours from now.

Half a dozen cows, each with a freshly minted calf. Not completely fresh; the ones I could check out did not still have umbilical stubs. But their mothers were in aggressive defense mode. One pair blocked the trail. I advanced very slowly, enough to stress the mother but not enough to provoke an attack — at least that was the idea. After a few minutes, she moved aside and I didn’t have to spend the day camped in the middle of the trail.

Hours later on the return trip, most of the cows had moved along to find the shade of a tree or three, but one calf had crept through some loose barbed wire, and was separated from mom. There was a nearby gate, but locked, so not a whole lot I could do about it. Everything was calm for the moment, but when Junior got hungry, I figured things might become a little stressful.

As it happened, there was cell phone coverage out there, and the parks guy I talked to said he would let the rangers know. So I hope I did a good thing today.

Stopped at Home Depot to buy two 1 1/8 inch box-end wrenches (that would be about 29mm for my metric-literate friends), the tools I need to detach the final beams from the house.

It’s wildflower season!

2012 May 6

Well, no, this isn’t a wildflower.

It’s one of two ringneck snakes I saw on my 20-mile Saturday hike. Question: how can it be a ringneck snake when snakes have no necks?

Notice the bright orange underbelly.

Here’s the venue, as seen just before reaching the parking lot on the return trip. The hike starts at Montebello open space preserve, whose parking lot is just off the picture to the left, goes down Stevens Canyon, which is the low area to the right (looking down the San Andreas rift zone, by the way), climbs out to Saratoga Summit and returns on the high country to the right of the picture.

And a great day it was for wildflowers. The bees agree!

Understand, of course, that wildflower viewing is a matter of appreciating the minuscule! Some of these are less than half a centimeter across, and I only saw a lot of the detail after I put the fotos up on the big screen at home.

For example, the serrated edges. You  — well, certainly I — would never have noticed that without a close-up foto.

I’m not sure this qualifies as a wildflower, but it certainly illustrates, along with the one below, that they don’t have to be colourful to be beautiful.

This is one of my favourites, the stamen peeking out from behind the petals!

Cluster flowers often appear to be just patches of (in this case) white. You usually don’t see the detail.

And these fluffy pink little guys — who would ever have guessed that they have fuzzy little clown faces?

Again, we often view something like this as a single large (2 cm or so) patch of colour, with a different-coloured center. But look at the detail in the center!

We need to be careful photographing these flowers — they’re poison oak. And speaking of oak, not the poison kind…

On Sunday, Jacky and I went to Edgewood park, which is renowned for its spring wildflowers, and found a few more to photograph.

Another California poppy, again host to an insect, some sort of leafhopper.

This one would be hard pressed to span half a centimeter!

And here’s a Las Vegas starburst that you would only think was dust until you looked closely.

A really beautiful time of year.