Fiddleheads

Lest it seem that all is death and destruction around here, I offer this picture of the little bracken fiddleheads pushing through the oak leaf mulch. It was cool this morning as we headed down Channel Drive to the swimming hole with Ozzie. The oaks overarch the road, turning it into a cool, shady tunnel. Bright green grass was appearing along the side of the road, and these little fiddleheads, looking like a green pill bug unrolling on the end of a long stem. Further along, they had unrolled even more, and were beginning to look like the ferns which will carpet the ground under the trees.

We went to the sports bar/burger joint down the road to have some lunch and watch the Giants baseball game. A pleasant young man opened the door, admitting us to face a wall of noise, shouted at us that we could sit wherever we liked, and kept going out the door. We found our way to a table surrounded by thirty odd television screens all tuned to the same channel. We sat, unable to converse for long enough to get the impression that nobody was ever going to figure out that we were there, and then rose as one and walked out. In the end, we just came home and watched the game on our own television with the sound at a tolerable level….

Tonight I'm going to a "girls'" party down the street at Cindy's house. John and Ozzie will be hosting the dispossessed neighborhood husbands for beer and leftovers.

Tomorrow we are going to help our Sebastopol friends and former landlords process the grapes which grow in front of "our" beloved farmhouse. They will be picked by Carmine, and delivered to a winery not far from where we live now, where the owner will open his facility for a "harvest party". We will be shown how to destem the grapes, and pick out the deformed ones and given a picnic lunch.

October heat waves are not particularly uncommon around here. What is, is the fact that it is hitting the 80's at the beach. Usually it starts raining by the end of October, but nobody seems to have any idea whether that will happen this year….