Horseless Carriages

sittting in a corner of a parking lot near the farmers' market. I don't know why they were there, but they were immaculately maintained and brought a smile to my face. They are Henry Ford's first mass produced  automobiles...model T Fords, manufactured from October 1908 until May 1927. I'm afraid the details of some of these beauties got lost in the shadows, but I especially liked the carriage lamps on a couple of them. The building behind them is Sutter Hospital.

John's grandmother used to tell a story about her drive as a newlywed from San Francisco to Ukiah, a distance of less than 100 miles, which took over a week due to various breakdowns and delays of their Model T along the way....

There was talk that the market would be rained out this morning, but the sun shone warmly in a cloudless blue sky...perfect conditions for chatting with different vendors about everything from sausages to squash. After loading all our bounty in the car, we took Spike on a walk through the sculpture garden with works called 'Geometry in Art'. I put a picture of one that I like , 'Two Rings'. by Dee Briggs in extras.

We had wine and cheese with our neighbors last night and talked about what to do about the tree just on the other side of the fence from our fire garden. It was fairly badly fire damaged but with new growth on about half the branches . It also has quite a large hole in the trunk which appears to be home to a pair of ladderback woodpeckers. Because their house is right on the street and ours is further up the hill the part of their property adjacent to our house is an empty field, I told her that we were more than willing to pay to have all the dead branches as well as the suckers around the base cut. I know that they have much higher priorities than a half dead tree they can barely see from their house, but I didn't want to do anything to it without asking.

Today we looked out to see her gardener up in the tree with a chainsaw. I went out to thank Janet and she said they were planning to get a burn permit to burn all the cut logs and branches if we didn't mind.she was a logistics engineer in the Air Force  and said she knew she would need a fire permit and an air pollution permit and that 'they don't make it easy' I suggested that it would be a lot easier to get Pedro to haul it all to the composting facility at the dump and that we would pay for it. In turn, she promised to plant a row of sequoia redwoods along her fence to provide a screen in front of the bunker house and the camper van seemingly abandoned behind it.

It's nice to have easy neighbors where these kinds of issues can be worked out so amicably....and we enjoy their company.