County Views.48
Knowing I needed things to keep me busy after the election, I had put up a few sourdough sponges on Tuesday morning, which yesterday became eight of the twelve loaves you see above. Somehow, the demands of my little colony of wild yeast, the need to knead the dough and encourage the yeasties to go forth and multiply in the new flour I’d fed them, was a good antidote to obsessively watching vote-count updates. Furthermore, it’s clear we Americans around the nation need to try to find a few things that we can actually agree on. To the classics of apple pie and baseball, might I suggest adding bread and beauty (beauty = yesterday’s post)? (With apologies to any readers with celiac disease or gluten intolerance…if you’re just anti-carb, well, try one of the round zucchini loaves & let me know…) The little yellow tea loaves are semolina-cranberry quick breads; the rounded zucchini loaves are sourdough base with a commercial-yeast boost, and the multi-grain are the first of my sourdough loaves that pleasantly surprised me with their robust rise, even before the oven boost. Arise, wild yeast, and teach us Americans a thing or two about making the best of mucky circumstances… 🙂 I began this little colony of yeast (also known as a sourdough starter) shortly after returning from Bangladesh – before then, I’d been baking since at least the Ford presidency, but always with commercial yeast and their fairly-straightforward kneading & rising realities. Learning the needs of my colony of wild yeast is a welcome combination of biology experiment, lesson in patience, and introduction to new mysteries. May we all find fruitful and healthy distractions when needed. 🙂
County Views — Election Special #3
Sunday I got out for a wonderful long bike ride, and saw the sign above in one of our local retirement-village neighborhoods. In that ride (25 miles), Biden-Harris signs outnumbered Trump Signs by about 25 to 1. But there were a few Trump signs. I took all the photos in the gallery below this afternoon, near the square in downtown Santa Rosa which has become a place of free speech. While I was there I saw several people on foot holding the signs you see and displaying them for the many cars driving past, some which were trucks with both Trump flags and national flags flying. Raised middle fingers and hot words were exchanged, and motors revved loudly by those in vehicles on occasion, but I observed nothing more than the exercise of free speech and an occasional excessively loud engine, happily. I’m putting these up now, as polls have begun to close on the east coast and we’re all settling in for however long we need to wait to find out who will occupy the oval office, and who will control the senate, come January. Fingers crossed that peace and respectful rule-of-law democratic process will prevail…
County Views.41
For those who’ve wanted more updates, a few photos from my biking excursions on a favorite road at then northern edge of our beloved local state park, which apparently became the fire line when the Glass Fire got closest to my home earlier this month. As I write this, we still haven’t had rain but seem to have made it intact through another week of high winds. I will not invite into the universe the words of the thing that high winds make us fear: use your imagination, please. And then, imagine rain and a world where scientific evidence drives public policy to build a future that our own future generations inhabit healthfully, in fruitful coexistence with all of world’s mysteries and species. These shots were all taken in a short stretch along Channel Drive on the north side of Annadel, where some private homes abut park land. The hills in the background, in the shot with the horses, are in the Mayacamas range, previously featured in the “twice burned” post. That particular property is less than 1/2-mile from where the bottle and burned brush are. Clearly, that house and all others in the area fell under emergency evacuation order the night the fire grew so fast.
Travel Memories, Known & Unknown
Imagine, if you will, boarding a series of flights at pretty much midnight in one time zone, to make connections in two different cities and end up landing halfway around the world, quite literally, about 36 hours later. Especially during covid, with all the uncertainties that implies. (For the record: I’m too lazy to capitalize that disease correctly. I also don’t want to give it any more of my time or energy than it’s already taken, nor do I feel it deserves the respect of me spelling it entirely properly. So there.)
So anyway, one gets confused, and apparently one’s phone also gets confused! The phone believes the above photograph was taken before some of the ones below, which I know to be untrue because, well, it’s the only photo for which I have 100% certainty about what it shows: Mt. Diablo during a beautiful sunset on the evening of July 4th this year. Meaning it was taken as the last airplane I boarded that day was approaching the runway at SFO.
So with these three, I’m about 80% confident they all show the shores of Lake Michigan and the general sprawl of Chicago Metro, most likely as we made our approach to O’Hare earlier that same 4th of July. If you click the individual shots, you’ll see the phone’s time-stamp filenames. Which in this case means it looks like they were taken at nearly midnight, while the amount of natural daylight suggests otherwise. Ah, the confusions of time zones and international air travel…
And we finish with these two below, which I’m more than 50% confident were taken somewhere around the general shores-of-the-Black-Sea area, simply because I remember waking up, looking out the window to see a crumpled mountainous landscape, checking the flight-path screen to learn we were somewhere in the region of the Caucasus. That being a part of the world I’ve neither visited on-ground, nor flown over much, I thought “hey, let’s snap a shot or two.” And even though the camera thought it was middle of the day, my body sent me more or less immediately back to sleep and blissful forgetfulness.
(so much world, so little time....) 