This is Max. He belongs to my son and daughter-in-law and family. They are out of town, so I get to enj0y his company. He is a delight.
When I tell him to seek and find, he listens for the object and when I say "shoe," he dashes into the bedroom and returns with a shoe. Of course, I send him back for shoe number two. In the morning I open the door and send him out for the newspaper by saying. "Get the paper, Max," and off he goes, but he may stop to pee on a bush, as, after all, he has been confined all night. He is mostly Lab, and has mostly Lab characteristics, as you can tell by the pix, but he has a fuller face and a black and pink tongue, which says that maybe there is some chow in there.

B-r-r-r-r-r-r

It seems that following 2007, the Year of the Small Appliance Breakdown, 2008 wants to one-up 2007, starting out with a furnace failure. Yesterday, Sunday, I left the house at about 9:30 after shutting off the thermostat in order to conserve on natural gas, it being a fairly warm day in the 50's. When I got home I noticed a strange sound which at first seemed to be water running somewhere through the plumbing. Couldn't find any water running indoors, so I went out into the patio and there heard a clackety, rackety sound from up on the roof. It was something wrong with the furnace/AC unit. The only way I could silence it was to cut off its power at the breaker box. Of course that meant shutting the whole system off, or more simply put, no more heat for Mary. I called my son, Jason, and he checked the offending fan only to find that it wasn't something he could fix. He advised me to talk to his brother-in-law in the morning, as he is manager of a heating and air conditioning supply company. So I bit the bullet, so to speak and made arrangements to manage through the night without heat. It was no where near the problem faced recently by Shyla and family, as our temps get down to the low 30's or high 20's only. But by the time the sun went down, it got pretty chilly. And at bedtime I got out my arctic underwear, put on a pair of sweats, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks and a hat, got out my down comforter and plugged in a heating pad, which fortunately has a timer on it, set it for 2 hours, and crawled into bed all set for the night. I was cozy warm all night and got up in the morning to a 50-degree house. Not all that bad. I just added a jacket, read the paper and ate breakfast and then called Jason's BIL. He was able to connect me with an electrician, who just happened to live on my street (!) and by 2:30 pm he had the bad part replaced and the heat was on again. It cost me only $295, a lot less than I expected, as I had envisioned replacing the whole unit in the thousands of dollars. I counted myself very fortunate when I thought of those sleeping under bridges, on subway grates and in cardboard boxes or those folks in Fargo without heat in winter far colder that here in northern California.

More of the choir

Emma and Grace are on the far right one behind the other. Don't ask me which is which, as I have to be up close and looking at their smiles to tell them apart. The other little girl in the front row next to them is a twin to the boy in red vest at beginning of front row. We have a small congretation but lots of them are kids, and there have been 4 twin pairs born in the last ten years. One twin died and one is disabled in the fourth set. But just such a large number of twins in such a small group sems unlikely to fit the normal statistics.

This is a picture of Ian in the Children's Christmas Choir the Sunday before Christmas. The twins were in the choir also, but unfortunately, they were either behind each other or were just bad shots, so I am not including them. The two boys in the upper left are twins. Actually there were three sets of twins in the choir. One set is a boy/girl combo. It was a very nice concert and all the kids did well, many having speaking parts from Scripture.

Night time surprises

Last night I went to my grandchildren's Christmas concert at our church. Afterwards I enjoyed two cups of coffee and some delicious cookies and other desserts. It was really exciting and lots of fun. I was still pretty wired when I got home, but I thought it was just the excitement of all the great music and the crowd of people who stayed to visit and talk afterward. When I got home (fairly early) I took care of some little jobs in the kitchen and caught up with my e-mail, all pretty routine, and went to bed. It was really hard to get to sleep, but I finally nodded off. However I woke up about 3:30 WIDE awake. Okay, I thought, maybe all I have to do is go to the bathroom and try again. No Luck. So I decided to just stay upl I made a pot of decaf and emptied the dishwasher, cleaned up the kitchen and made lists of what I needed to do. I decided to check on whether the newspaper had come so went out the front door and there I noticed two packages right there on my doorstep. Those UPS folks are really working overtime, as I know that there was nothing there when I went to bed. Oh lucky me, it was two packages from Wanda with two of my favorite things: cashews and WILD RICE! Christmas is now complete. I stashed the wild rice for special treatment, but started right in on the nuts. Even though I had by then switched to decaf, I was still energized, so I had breakfast over by 6 am and a batch of bread started. I guess last night's jolt of caffeine really had me going all day. It is amazing what I got done. What is funny is that I really never wound down. And I can only hope that I have a normal night tonight. Anyway, Wanda, thanks for the goodies! They are heavenly.

And this is the beast which I somehow have to keep in control, lest it leaps from its lair and starts chopping and slicing. I think it could probably slice a bowling ball!

Year of the Breakdowns

In the past year I have had to replace a washer, a dryer, a garbage disposal, a microwave, two cell phones (one broke and one was faulty, as was its replacement), a standard telephone, and (the latest) a food processor. One item still pending is an answering machine, but that can wait to be replaced because I do have voice mail on my cell phone. God only knows what item is next in line. I am beginning to feel jinxed!

Re the food processor: I had bought a bag of oranges from a roadside vendor for my annual marmalade production, and after the first two oranges my food processor broke and I had to finish the rest of the batch using a knife and slicing my hand. This is not easy, as I like the slices paper thin. I decided that I would never do another batch by hand, so I went shopping. Fortunately, I found a discount store and got a beautiful Cuisinart machine, a combo blender and processor for less than half price (but still costly for my Christmas-challenged budget). It is POWERFUL. In fact, it is so powerful that I doubt I will ever have to use the "high" button! It sits on my counter like a powerful beast that knows it is heavy, strong, and beautiful, and ready to leap into action. Needless to say I treat it with great respect. The first orange went through in a nano second and produced "microtomed" thin slices. Amazing. I love it. I will try to send a picture of my final product along with my (I hope) faithful friend.

Antarctica, Relative positions of my ship and Explorer

Deception Island was my first stop in my trek to Antarctica, The other end of the yellow line shows where the Explorer went down, about 113 miles NE near King George Island. I feel I can identify with those passengers to some extent, having been in such close proximity to the spot where their ship went down and having some familiarity with the weather, etc. I was lucky of course to having had milder weather in the late Antarctic summer, and calmer seas once in the lee of the Shetland Islands.

I can't seem to get the hang of posting photos, as I either get only four out of the whole bunch I want to send or I can do tis collage, but I am not sure what good that is if you can only see the top layer. Bear with me while I learn. I may need hands on tutoring.
Give me advice if you can as to how I can have more power over this problem.

Antarctia more pix

More photos of my Antarctic adventure March 2007

Antarctica trip

These are photos of my trip to Antarctica that took me on a 14 day expedition to as far south as as 66º33.3' S Latitude, which is just south of the Antartic Circle on March 4 of this year, 2007. Our first stop was Deception Island, the caldera of an active volcano, located just a short distance from the site of the sinking of the ship similar to the one I was
on. You may have seen the news lately of the sinking of the M/S Explorer. Mine was
the M/S Andrea.

It took two days of very rough seas to reach Antarctica waters and we spend 5 days cruising
and landing on a varietyof interestingsites to view wild life, mostly penguins and seals and birds. From the ship itself we saw many different whales some right along side the vessel,
humpbacks, minckes and orcas primarily. Of course there were dolphins and lots of swimming penguins also.

Sinking Ship

Today a ship similar to the one I took to Antarctica sank in an area not far from where I traveled last February. In fact I think I saw that very same ship at anchor in Ushuaia. Now I feel more like an adventurer than ever before. And there but for the grace of God…..

It has been frustrating getting updates on the news, but I had fun reading the various reports, all pretty much a repeat of an apparent AP news story. The numbers of passengers varied somewhat from story to story, but basically it reported around 91 passengers and 54 crew being evacuated from the sinking ship. The ship I was on, the M/S Andrea, accommodated about the same number of passengers. The Explorer has a max capacity of 108 persons according to one site I visited.

Weather was definitely colder at minus 5 degrees Celsius for this bunch. I had much better weather in February, usually just above freezing, although we did encounter some light snow at one time. I found that exciting. Our landing below the Antarctic Circle was actually the warmest day ashore that we had had. (We were the first tour of that season to get far enough south to cross that line.)

I thought the following comments from viewers on the situation were funny:

dahn_boehner wrote:

Why did Bush let this iceberg get off course?

SF_Mike wrote:

What the Church of Global Warming devotees either don't know or aren't telling you is with all the hysteria about polar ice melting in the Arctic, that the ice cap is thickening in the Antarctic. I guess these passengers discovered that first hand. Glad they were rescued safely. Cheers.

Another post:

Let me see if I've got this straight. A bunch of rich liberals pay big money to go on an "ecological" tour of the Antarctic to see firsthand the effects of man's brutality toward our environment, using copious amounts of fossil fuel to do so. Aforementioned vessel strikes iceberg and sinks, polluting fragile Arctic eco-system with aforementioned fossil fuels from fuel tanks of sunken vessel. Oh, the humanity! I find this absolutely hilarious!

My comment: I am not rich and I am not a liberal, but there are kernels of truth in that last post. I was disturbed by the smelly exhaust from the outboard motors on our zodiacs. It was definitely offensive in that pristine environment. Otherwise the operators of the expeditions were extremely careful to enforce ecological discipline. For example, we had to wash our boots before leaving the ship to land on any of the places we visited. And we also had to wash them immediately upon re-entering the ship so as not to transport any possible contamination from one land to another. In order to accomplish decontamination, we had to walk through trays of disinfectants. And those who had walking sticks also had to decontaminate them.

Anyway, when you see the news of the sinking ship, think of me. I could just as easily been on that ship as on the one I took.

My "fossil tree"

As a gardener and lover of nature and the unique, I have acquired a tree that is really unusual, even rare. It is called a Wollemi Pine Tree. National Geographic calls it a "living fossil," because it has survived for eons, with fossil evidence of its existence from the Jurassic Period. There are only about 100 adult specimens now living, and all are located in a remote canyon in the Wollemi National Park just a short way east of Sydney, Australia. The tree was discovered by a bushwalker in 1994 and kept secret for several years to protect it from exploitation, vandals, collectors and disease damage by other curiosity seekers. It was propagated from seeds and cuttings by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney. The National Geographic is now selling two year old babies (pricey, I might add, but returns a royalty to preserve the tree), and getting them dispersed around the world. It is surprisingly hardy, can tolerate sun or shade and a variety of soils. Some of its growth stages are peculiar, and during the cold months develops " polar caps," a white waxy coating on its buds . This protects its growing tips and is thought to have helped it survive many ice ages. In time it develops bark that looks like bubbly chocolate. More information is available on www.nationalgeographic.com/wollemipine. I am going to keep my indoors until summer and then put it on the patio for a year or two before I put it into the landscape. But it is a fascinating project. It even has its own Numbered certificate of authenticity, a ploy I often suspect, but I have to trust NG.

Hello and Merry Christmas

Howdie all,
I'm new in these here parts, and a little shy of strangers, but once I get to blabbing, there's no way to know where it could end. I could sure use a guide post or two.