Greetings from Lands End

After breakfast at the hotel buffet, we spent Thursday morning shopping in the suburbs with Adam for things for his apartment while Daniel went to the contemporary art museum downtown. We went to Home Depot to pick up rugs Adam and Katherine had found online, then drove across the bay to Oakland to go to Ikea for furniture. Then we met Daniel outside the museum and stopped at the very good House of Bagels on the way to Lands End in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which has great views of the Golden Gate Bridge (when not covered by the fog that rolled in) and a labyrinth on a promontory by the water. There's a cave, the rocks offshore are covered in pelicans and cormorants, and we saw hummingbirds, baby gulls, even a skunk!

We visited the beach on the Pacific Ocean past Lands End on the way to Golden Gate Park, where there were more gulls and pelicans, some people fishing, a few brave souls surfing, and though it was too chilly for me to wade out to catch sand crabs, we saw evidence of them all over the beach. Later we went to see the windmill and bison in the lower part of the park. Being near the water made me crave hush puppies, so we did research and discovered a restaurant in the Tenderloin called Brenda's French Soul Food which has phenomenal vegetarian (and not) Creole cuisine and chocolate-filled beignets! After eating, we dropped Daniel off at his hotel, stopped at Target for apartment stuff, and went to pick up Katherine from the airport.

Poem for Wednesday and Lava Tunnel

Geology
By Robert King

I know the origin of rocks, settling
out of water, hatching crystals
from fire, put under pressure
in various designs I gathered
pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little,
igneous lust, the slow affections
of the sedimentary, the pressure
on earth out of sight to rise up
into material, something solid
you can hold, a whole mountain,
for example, or a loose collection
of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

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Adam went to College Park on Wednesday morning to do some packing and get some paperwork in order and didn't come back till dinnertime, so I had a fairly quiet day of chores and working some more on the Iceland photo book, plus two Groudon raids. Adam is waiting for the contract so he and Katherine can officially say they have an apartment in San Francisco!

After dinner (veggie ham and cheese pie by Paul), we watched Shazam! because Adam hadn't seen it. It's pretty fluffy, but given the incessant "darkness, no parents" themes of most of the Dark Knight-era DC films, that's okay with me. From our Iceland trip, here are some pictures in the lava tube Raufarhólshellir, created during an eruption about 5000 years ago:

Poem for Friday and Reynisfjara Beach

The Story
By Rachel Carson

In every outthrust headland,
in every curving beach,
in every grain of sand
there is the story of the earth.

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I had a pretty good Thursday -- a little work, a few chores, but I also did a couple of raids after the Pokemon Go Fest started in Chicago and there were lots more Pokemon in the wild (half my local friends who play are there, so local raiding is quieter), and after the morning rain ended and before the evening rain started, it was cool and sunny and beautiful. It was the 10th anniversary of younger son's Bar Mitzvah, which he spent climbing mountains near Innsbruck.

Paul made veggie chicken gumbo for dinner, then we watched the season finale of Blindspot that we missed in Iceland, which ironically was set (and filmed) in Iceland in places we visited, and I'm glad the show is coming back because it had a huge cliffhanger! Afterward we watched the new Elementary, which apparently knows that most terrorists in America are white supremacists. From Iceland, here are Reynisfjara Beach and Halsanefshellir Cave, which you've seen in movies:

Poem for Sunday and Ice Caves Trail

Snoqualmie Falls
By Dennis McHale

The ground beneath my feet rumbles;
softly at first and then with each step
increasing in its timbre.
The air is cold, and damp with a gray light
filtering through the snow-covered
canopy of spruce and pine.

Wet thunder rises and my ears are muted
by the intensity of a half-frozen river
plummeting over slick rock lips;
a roiling, massive death spiral.

Half the volume swan dives elegantly
hundreds of feet into a pounding, foaming,
icy-white pool, while my own heart
matches the outpouring, beat for beat.
The other hangs mistily in the frigid air, gently
nourishing the winter air with its spit.

I cannot help but marvel at the sheer anger of it all,
wondering how many open-mouthed bass
thrust forth into open space, gargoyle-eyed as
the river disappears beneath them -
this is the end of their swim!

Death, anger, power...and yet,
so serenely beautiful!
Rage onward, Snoqualmie, before
the winter’s freeze deprives you of your liquid dance

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It rained buckets all day Saturday until we started having flood warnings. Fortunately (?), we had a lot of work to do in the house, so we spent all morning putting stuff back on shelves in the bedrooms, then since it was Zapdos day I went to the mall to meet my raiding group and did six raids before coming home for more organizing.

We went out to Home Depot in the evening downpour to get an outlet plate that ended up not fitting our outlet, and now we're watching Cloak and Dagger to decompress. Here are some photos from our trip to Seattle when we climbed up to the Big Four Ice Caves in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, where it was damp and cool and gorgeous:

Greetings from the Cascades

Extreme quickie, spent almost the entire day without internet, first at the Big Four Ice Caves beyond Granite Falls over an hour from Seattle where we drove with the kids and had a picnic before walking up the trail through the woods to the caves on Big Four Mountain. Then we headed to the home of Paul's cousin Craig and his wife Lisa and their kittens, where Craig's brother Todd and his wife and four-year-old were also visiting. We hung out and had pizza and a lovely evening!

Greetings from Pioneer Square

Apart from an early morning walk through Belltown to the Space Needle and dinner back in Belltown at the Meekong Bar, we spent most of the day in Seattle's Pioneer Square area. Here is our day in photos, including the Seattle Underground tour at the original level of the city, covering most of its history and lengthy catalogue of misbehavior; the totem poles in several city parks; lunch at Cafe Paloma, with awesome Mediterranean food; a stop at Klondike Gold Rush National Park; and a visit to the Sky View Observatory at the top of the Columbia Center, with views of the surrounding volcanoes, lakes, and landmarks:

Greetings from San Fernando

On Friday we met my parents at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, which they had visited before but we had not. We saw the 3-D movie about how asphalt trapped the animals whose bones are still being discovered underground and took the walking tour of several of the pits, including one which has been excavated and restored for visitors plus another that's in the midst of excavation now, right where the nearby Los Angeles County Museum of Art wanted to build a parking lot but encountered fossils. The biggest things I learned were that there's not actually tar in the pits and that many more predators were found than prey. There were an astonishing number of dire wolf skulls on display.

My parents took us out to lunch at The Counter, a superb build-your-own-burger place in the street level of the SAG-AFTRA building across the street from the tar pits. They went to get ready for services while the rest of us tried to go to Griffith Observatory, but the road was closed at the top with lots of cars and limos around for reasons we were never able to discover. So we drove through the park's winding roads, then went to Bronson Canyon, home of Adam West's Batcave, which offers a wonderful view of the Hollywood sign on the far side of the cave. We came back to change clothes and went to a pre-Bar Mitzvah dinner at the Lebanese restaurant Carnival with my extended Los Angeles family!