Happy Birthday, Aunt Laura!

I'm not sure if this Palo Verde tree is in full bloom yet. I decided to photograph it now, just in case it is. If Great Aunt Laura was still alive, she could tell me. After all, Palo Verde are her trees, which bloomed specifically for her birthday (April 15.) Or so she said.

They grow with hardly any water, and once a year they put on a pretty great show. The desert is not all brownish and cactusy. At this time of year, it's rather pretty.



And lest the lowly oleander feel left out, here is a picture of a small one gracing the front of my Aunt and Uncle's house. In the 50s, southern Californians went crazy with oleanders, planting them in their yards and along highway medians. Then they found out it only takes 5 leaves to kill a cow. A lot of people took Oleanders out of their yards. They seem to be back, though--I guess people aren't trying to keep cows in their yards any more.


Oleander is not as breathtaking as the spring rhododendrons in Seattle, but the blossoms are a lovely and welcome diversion from spikey green things.

Happy birthday, Aunt Laura. Inexplicably, the desert continues to bloom without you.

Tired Recipes

I don't like to cook much. But for some reason, I enjoy looking at recipes in magazines and newspapers. Sometimes I pity the writers for being expected to come up with new and interesting things without overtaxing their readership. Sometimes I actually get excited and think: "I could do that!" (I won't, of course, but I could.) I have a book specially made for stashing clipped recipes, given to me by my niece-in-law almost twenty years ago. She cooks. Apparently she had high hopes for me. I'm not sure exactly when she stopped suggesting recipes I might like, but it seems like a long, long time ago.

Reading my local paper here in the Valley of the Retirees, I'm struck by undeniable proof that I'm not in Seattle any more (as if the non-stop sunshine wasn't enough). Seattle has great recipes to read. Everyone is into fresh and healthy, and the Asian influence makes for fabulous flavors (I assume. Not that I've ever actually made any of the recipes. My foodie friends do, though, and I do my job--eating and appreciating.) My current newspaper presents endless small variations of 1950s whitebread comfort food that put me back to sleep at my breakfast table. A few of the Food & Drink section's headlines for your awe and amazement:

- "Sour cream enhances meatloaf "
- "Skillet Chicken Fried rice" (don't even try to imagine it, my foodie Asian friends.)
- "Delicate dumplings not just for stews"
- "Stuff and grill mushrooms for a savory treat"
- "Creamy banana pudding a southern delight"
- "Drink of the week--Orange Creamsicle "(orange juice! ice cream! And…well, that's all.)

Under those titillating articles are:
- An ad for the grand opening of the Chicken Pie Factory
- Five ads for Italian restaurants
- An article written in breathless tones about Denny's new value menu
- A review of KFC's new Double Down abomination (bacon, cheese, and special sauce between two breaded and fried chicken breasts. They claim it has only 540 calories. I think someone forgot their glasses when they added up the calorie count.)
- An ad for the restaurant--which shall remain nameless--that produced the apparently day-old cheeseburger, above.

Oh, there are plenty of restaurants that serve tiny $30 gourmet entrees that look like stacks of checkers with bits of fancy sliced vegetables balancing on their crowns. If that wasn't more than half my food budget for the week, I might even try them once in a while. But alas, reality encroaches.

I'm trying to eat healthy and lose weight, so I'm actually making most of my own food in my own kitchen. It's kind of boring, but it's working. Because of my low boredom threshold, I have to make things that require few ingredients and not much cooking. To that end, I just bought a barbeque. Now, as soon as I get a propane tank, I'll just slap hunks of things on a grill like some of my friends do. (OK, and the occasional foil bag of veggies.) (Arrrr, arrrr, arrrr!)

I might still daydream about the recipes and photographs of beautifully presented food in magazines, though. A girl's gotta have aspirations!

My Welcome Home Earthquake Today

In 1987 there was an earthquake in L.A. where I was living that scared the beejeebers out of me. I'd been experiencing L.A. earthquakes since I was a kid--usually the rolling, rocking kind. But that one threw us up and down like an energetic housekeeper shaking a rug. I moved to Seattle shortly thereafter, not knowing for a couple of years that Seattle has earthquakes--and is situated between two big volcanoes (Rainier and Baker). As my friend Mel says, "Everyplace has something."

I'm back in California now, living on top of a mess of fault lines--one of them the San Andreas--that looks on the map like the creation of a mad spider. Just a few minutes ago, I felt my first "welcome home" quake. The windows shuddered, the blinds swayed back and forth, and the house felt like it was gliding back and forth on wooden rollers. I carried Oliver to the alcove outside my bedroom, which I had previously scoped out as the best place in the house for earthquake survival. We glided and rolled for about 45 seconds. Then we went back into the office with its tall, unsecured bookcases. Perhaps foolish, because--as we all learned from the news coverage on Haiti and Chile--it might have been just a foreshock.

The USGS Website says it was a 6.9 earthquake in the Baja California delta. I learned at a lecture last week that the fault we have here in the valley is a "separation fault." It is separating Baja from the main section of California bit by bit. If your eye follows the fault upward on the map, it goes through the Salton Sea right to the Coachella Valley. Nice. I hope that "bit by bit" is reeellly s-l-o-w. I've always wanted waterfront property, but not bottom-of-the-sea property!

Ah well. We all live with uncertainty, but most of us choose to ignore it. Southern Californias have a harder time doing that.

Welcome home, Bemused Boomer!