Two Days in May

Spanning four generations: Adam Harrington, Grace Harrington, Calvin Murphy.

We had an all-too-rare happy circumstance at Ft. Harrington this weekend: a visit from part of the Atlanta branch of the family tree.

My late mother's youngest brother, Calvin, and my cousin Edith's husband, Joe, came by for an afternoon and evening as part of a two-week swing through California. They arrived here after a four-day culinary tour of San Francisco -- but we fed them anyway -- organized by the Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) organization. The next day, they were on their way to Southern California for more action.

Their visit to Boulder Creek was on a Friday, but Grace's teacher let her skip school for the day to come meet her great-great-uncle Calvin, and her Uncle Adam (being his own boss) provided her ride from the East Bay.

The memories and the laughter flowed abundantly, and Grace had the grace (young lady that she's becoming) to listen attentively and smile a lot. She also impressed me with some astronomy that she's been learning, not just of the memorizing factoids kind, but that's a topic for a different time -- the point here is that she's fast becoming perceptive as well as smart, and that served her well on Friday.

In a neat small-world coincidence, a very longtime close friend of Joe's -- childhood and college -- lives in Boulder Creek, so he was invited to the gathering, too. He and Joe spun some pretty good reminiscences about their college days in Southern California (including one from Joe's job as a meat delivery boy involving Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman). Their longtime connections to film and tv production had us all fascinated, but Adam especially so given his profession as a voice actor.

Clockwise from left: Joe, Diane, Calvin, and Dick enjoy the spaniels. If you click on this and view at a larger size, you'll see Kelsey's butt in the background as he watches Adam's posterior go up the walkway toward the gate to the road. Kelsey loves company, and is distressed when any seems to be leaving.

At some point in the late afternoon, one of our three guests -- I don't remember if it was Calvin, Joe, or Joe's friend Dick -- remarked on how rapidly the light changes here in the fort because of the surrounding tall sequoias. I woke early the next morning, just before sunrise, and that remark came back to me. That day, Saturday, was to be clear after the morning fog dissipated, so I decided to set up the camera to try my hand at a time-lapse through the day to see exactly how the light's patterns marched across at least part of the yard.

View of the time-lapser from the front (and the boy spaniel from the rear.)

I set up the tripod and camera to capture a view generally northward from one corner of the house toward the little rose garden with some of our redwoods providing backdrop. I set the camera's computer to take one exposure every two minutes and set the process in motion at 6:15am. I stopped the series when the fog started to come back in at 7:11, 390 photos later.

The result surprised and tickled me for the most part. The one disappointment was that I had selected too shaded an area for the exposure meter to monitor, so some of the foreground during midday is badly overexposed. One thing that I thought would be disappointing turned out to be an advantage: the wind picked up during the day, and I thought that would make leaves and branches move around too much from frame to frame. Turns out, on viewing, that was a big plus -- the trees and bushes appear to be dancing through the day.

View of the time-lapser from the rear.

The surprise was the four chickens. I knew they moved around during the day, but had never paid much attention to just how active they are. Lucky for us, they spent a lot of this particular day in the camera's field of view, rather than in any number of other places in the fort where they wouldn't have been seen.

View through the time-lapser.

You can view the result in the little box below here, of course, but it's really better viewed at higher resolution -- 720 or 1080p if your connection and patience will allow such a large download -- and in full-screen mode. If you don't, there's a lot of little detail trying to flash at you that you might miss, like this, for example:

Small detail, cropped from one of the time-lapse frames.

How ever you view it, watch it all the way to the end (it's only about three and a half minutes long.) The background still photo behind the music credit is worth the wait.

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Automatic Newspaper Delivery

Early this morning: Ft. Harrington's front walkway as a waterfall.

We've been having a little bit of rain around here.

One of the first things I do most mornings is to trudge up the walkway and steps, through the gate at the top, and retrieve the newspaper from the side of the road.

I didn't have to do that this morning.

The storm drain (mentioned in this recent installment of SherWords) up there had become clogged, turning that part of the road into a pool, which emptied under our gate into the pretty waterfall shown above. When I peeked out the kitchen window this morning -- after the shock of seeing a waterfall where there should have been a static walkway -- I noticed that the stream of water had washed the newspaper (snug and dry in its blue plastic baggie) under the gate, down the stairs, and had deposited it near our front door.

Along with a bunch of other junk.

The convenience of such a delivery was sadly negated by the necessity to dress up in my water-gear, grab a trenching tool, and wade into the road-lake to unclog the drain.

While I was mucking at the drain, one of my neighbors (who will remain nameless here) came out and started chatting with me -- standing, of course, at the edge of the pool. He mentioned that he had seen the situation earlier, and would have unclogged the drain himself, but he didn't have any rubber boots.

Mull that over for a second or two.

He doesn't have any rubber boots.

He lives in the Santa-freakin'-Cruz Mountains, where we get about five feet of rain every winter, and he DOESN'T HAVE ANY RUBBER BOOTS.

Sometimes I think there should be a qualifying test of some kind that people have to take before they live around here -- but then I come to my senses and recognize that the most sensible thing to do is not live here at all. Evidently the Native Americans never lived anywhere along the San Lorenzo Valley. That probably should have told us pale folk something a hundred and fifty years ago.

If You're Going to Buy a Fort...

Why it's called "Fort Harrington." Photo taken shortly after the new fence, gate, and sign were installed in October, 2001.

If you're going to buy a fort, don't buy one in a rain forest.

If you're going to buy a fort in a rain forest, don't buy one that's downhill from a road and uphill from the nearest creek.

If you're going to buy a fort in a rain forest, and it's downhill from a road and uphill from the nearest creek, be prepared to deal with drainage issues. Voluminous ones.

Fort Harrington lies between a paved mountain road and Kings Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, a little patch of rain forest on California's central coast. Our area receives about five feet of rain per year on average, almost all of which falls between October and April. The abundance of rain is due to a little kink in the San Andreas fault, which takes a sudden right turn between Santa Cruz and Palo Alto. That abrupt change in direction, over the aeons, has birthed the Santa Cruz Mountains, a two- to three-thousand foot uplift directly adjacent to the prevailing westerlies from the Pacific. That uplift, in most years, wrings cascading amounts of water out of the laden oceanic air in winter, and feeds our spectacular forest of millions of sequoia sempervirens (coast redwoods).

It also feeds a sluiceway directly through our compound, which blasts away merrily at impressive volume during winter storms. The road above us makes a little turn there, a micro-mirror of the San Andreas's jig, but its turn is in a depression, not an uplift. At the depression in the road above us is a storm drain, which channels all the road's runoff from both directions for a long way down underneath our property to the creek below.

Right under our garage.

Right under our house.

When the decking was being replaced in mid-2000, stripping the old decking away exposed the sluiceway's transition to under-house pipe, seen at lower-left here.

The portions of the runoff's course under the structures are large-caliber pipe, from a foot and a half to two feet in diameter. Between the "garage" (a 1930's shed, which is being held up only by vines, as far as I can figure) and the house, though, it runs through a deep, v-shaped, exposed sluice.

When we purchased Ft. Harrington in 1998, many things were in an advanced state of rot, including the simple plywood covering of the 30 feet of sluiceway (and all the decking). Our first renovation projects were fencing around the entire compound (which my sons Doug and Adam were the primary architects and laborers for), replacing the decking (which we put in the hands of a well-respected local contracting firm, along with a large chunk of our bank account), and covering the sluice. I did the latter, fashioning a plank walkway over it with redwood two-by-fours.

That was in early 1999. Now I know how long untreated redwood two-by-fours at ground level last in a rain forest environment: ten years.

My over-sluice walkway had decayed to the point of disintegration by this summer, so re-building it has been item one on my list of honey-dos this fall. Luckily, the big rains have held off long enough for me to progress on the project pretty much adequately before the sluice becomes a torrent.


I started a few weeks ago, before the first big storm of the season. The above photo shows the old walkway; its unevenness is due to rot in the boxes that support the cross-boards. At the back end of the sluiceway, near the "garage," you can see three new boxes that will ultimately support new crossboards. The walkway/sluice covering is modular to allow easy access to the sluice, which provides an avenue for water pipes to outlying areas of the Fort, such as the chickens' compound and the garden house (note the white pvc pipe in the sluice in some of these photos.)

The first few boxes were temporarily covered with plywood; they will eventually be covered by a lattice of two-by-fours. A new box is ready on the table at left. Some 8-foot redwood 2x4's stand ready to be chopped up, leaning against the chickens' mansion in the background.

Today's work: the two longest sections.

Cross-pieces halfway done. The cross-pieces probably could be made with thinner boards than two-by-fours, but I like the sturdy feel of the thicker wood under my feet. What I can't logically rationalize is my choice of fastener: 2 1/2 inch lag screws instead of nails. That's just how I do stuff; if I were doing this kind of thing for a living, you bet I'd do it cheaper, faster, and more logically. I just like the way a walkway cover box that could support a tank feels. (Somewhere, my Dad -- a fine craftsman in woodwork -- is rolling his eyes.)

Finishing today's job as today's light fades.

There's a certain comfort in knowing when I'll have to do this job again. The first walkway decayed to dangerousness in ten years, so I should probably replace this one in nine. So I'll mark it on my schedule: "re-build sluice cover" in summer, 2018.

When I'm 71.

Maybe I'll rope my son, Adam, into helping me out then. He'll be a mere tyke, still, at 48. But I'll still work the power tools, yeah.

All the while I was working today, our Japanese maple was in my field of view, its exuberant November red catching my vision's periphery. It is planted in the decaying stump of a magnificent old virgin-forest redwood, and it's of a variety called "Sherwood's Flame"... which, of course, is why we bought it at the local nursery.

Kelsey's Excellent Encounter

Usually when we have a weekend BBQ for family here at Ft. Harrington, there are many, many people involved. On Saturday, June 27th, 2009, though, we had an unusually small gathering: just Grace-the-Granddaughter, her mom (Adrianne), and her uncle Adam.

Old yellow Kelsey generally has an absolute gas at family gatherings, tripping happily from one person to another until he's so worn out that he collapses. With fewer targets this time, though, for some reason he zeroed in on Adrianne as the object of his attention.

In this little set, we see him wooing her, greeting her, and, ultimately, settling in happily at her side.

What a suck-up my dog is.

Adrianne, Kelsey, and Grace. Kelsey starts by placing himself where he can't be ignored.

Kelsey sandwich! Excellent!

"Please, let me introduce myself!"

"... I am a dog whose refinement belies my breeding, my lady."

(It's interesting to note how he holds his ears in this set compared to how he does when he's at work.)

Kissing the back of the hand is customary, but Kelsey's doing pretty well for a dog, don't you think?

She's let me sit here! Oh, the ecstasy! Oh, the joy!
Oh, the damn' little suckup spaniel, horning in from the left. He always does that.

Settled in.

Little does Adrianne know it, but, at this instant, Kelsey would have followed her through the very gates of Hell. He's also actively guarding her now; note the position of his ears.

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For Ruth: Truly Overdone Raised Beds

Over on "Live in It Then! Five Cents, Please," our good friend Ruth just posted a nifty trio of posts chronicling her and Larry's construction of a raised garden bed. Sturdily constructed of concrete blocks, and located very conveniently to their back stoop, it should serve them well with a minimum of fuss. Except for its somewhat disturbing sedan abuse, it appears to be a very sensible raised bed.

Sensible. Unlike the Ft. Harrington raised beds, which were constructed in June of 2000 with overkill, over-build, over-complexity, and general over-the-toppishness. The hyperthyroid Ft. Harrington raised beds are even visible on Google Earth, if you know where to look.

But they were fun to build, and they are actually still there, in excellent shape, ready to pop out veggies on a season's notice.

Staking out the plan.

We had lived in what would become "Ft. Harrington" for only one full calendar year when we decided that a garden would be wonderful, now that we had the space for it. We cleared the space you see above, which had been just a weedy, overgrown mess under previous owners. (It is also the leach field for our septic system.) We planted the tiny apple sapling at right, and staked out the locations for four 4x8 raised beds.

The first box.

The material for the raised bed boxes is local redwood, which -- even untreated, as it has to be for this application -- is rot resistant. The corners are 4x4 pieces; the sides are rough planks. I had envisioned all four boxes as three planks high, but this first box convinced me that the others could be just two planks high.

Short-box mass production -- Kelsey T. Dog, supervisor.

Note the spiffy new fence at left. That is part of the new periphery fencing that Doug built (with Adam's and my help -- Doug, after all, was the carpenter, so we were the grunts). The fence was built during our first summer here, 1999, in order to allow us to get a dog. We wound up with Kelsey instead. (Just joking, big guy!) Note how skinny he is here; he was only a year and a half old at the time.

New boxes at the ready.

The planks are attached to the legs with high-calibre lag bolts, not wimpy nails or even screws, and the legs extend six inches below the bottom of the boards to be sunk into the ground for stability. These are the DC-3's of raised beds. They will last longer than our house. After Armageddon, cockroaches will use them for mansions.

New boxes entrenched to ground level.

Moles, voles, or terrians can't claw up through this sturdy steel wire mesh at the bottom of each box. Well, terrians, maybe could, but they're not real. Or even highly-rated.

Compost-enhanced soil, shortly after its delivery. A human would be smelling the roses.

Lining the boxes.

The boxes are lined with heavy-duty black plastic sheeting for two reasons: 1) to eliminate water loss through the sides, and 2) to further retard any rot in the planks. Almost ten years after the boxes were built, there is no sign of any rot anywhere on any of them.

Ready for the dirt.

Full up.

Operational.

This view was taken in spring, 2004, in the fifth year of the boxes' operation. Three minor alterations can be seen: posts for jute webbing for a tomato cage on the tall box, a wire trellis for vines on the far box, and wide planks along the long edges of all of the boxes. The last serve as benches for comfortable, lazy gardening.

Corn, peas, and beans, 2004 -- and notice how big the apple tree has become (trunk at left).

Pumpkin, tomato, and crooked-neck squash plants, 2004.

Garden supervisor.

This is JT, a neighbor's cat, and the self-appointed mayor of the settlement we call "Creepy Hollow" that surrounds Ft. Harrington. He approves of the raised beds, overbuilt as they may be.

Why I Couldn't Make the Bed This Morning

Alnitak's Having Fun in Containers Day

(With apologies to Mojo el Jefe for appropriating his posts' title format.)

This is a big part of the reason we put up with them. Within just a few minutes this afternoon:

UPS delivers new nesting materials to Al. It looks like his nephew, Cooper, is about to push him off the bed once he gets all nice and comfy, though.

HALP! QUICKPAPER!!

Al's mobility is temporarily hampered.

DO NOT WANT, West Coast Edition

A while ago, Ruth posted an entry in her blog about the unwelcome approach of a hurricane, apparently headed straight for her home in coastal South Carolina.

Coastal California isn't immune to seasonal hazards, either, and the Fall hazard is fire, especially this year. We have had two straight years of much lower than usual rainfall, and so even the normally fire-resistant redwood forests (such as the one we live in here in the Santa Cruz Mountains) are virtually explosive, especially the undergrowth of hardwoods, Douglas Fir, and brush. So I was not at all pleased a few days ago when I arrived home (after having taken a couple of our animals to the vet) to see this in the cul-de-sac adjacent to a back boundary of Ft. Harrington:

Boulder Creek's Finest in Action

For the past week, the late nights and early mornings hereabouts have been chilly, including the first frosts of the season, even though the days continue to be hot (and very dry). Our nearest neighbor to the north (just across the fence from the gazebo area of Ft. Harrington) lit a trash fire in her wood-burning stove that morning to get warm, since her electricity had been turned off for non-payment sometime in the summer, and she didn't have any firewood. She left while the fire was still burning, and sparks from the paper in the trash fire survived their rise through the chimney and set her roof on fire.

The fire was noticed right away by an alert neighbor on the other side of the creek, who did a 9-1-1 shout-out to the Boulder Creek firehouse, and then drove to the nearest bridge across the creek and back to the cul-de-sac. Not raising anyone with her shouts, she found a hose outside a neighboring house and started trying to spray the roof fire with its pathetic little stream.

The BCFD was all over the case like flies on, ah... well, stuff, though, and arrived right then. The fire was out very quickly after they arrived, according to Diane, who had been unaware of the fire until seconds before the fire trucks arrived when she saw big, gray ash flakes falling on our deck -- and flames leaping from the far end of our neighbor's roof.

Putting away equipment. The derelict truck with the broken-windowed camper shell belongs to our firestarter's ex-husband, and hasn't moved for at least two years. ===>

Emergency flasher reflected in our garden house
<=== window.

The roof in the background of the last photo is the one that caught fire. Due to the telephoto's distance-squashing effect, it appears much closer to our fence than it really is. I don't have a photo of the area of damage, but it was small. It's been covered by a tarp, and our neighbor continues to live in the house.

We're all keeping an eye on her.

Casey's First Ft. Harrington BBQ

I'm not sure if "tradition" is really the right word for it. "Common sense" may be a better term. After all, if some member of your family lives in a place like the Santa Cruz Mountains, then a summer barbeque there is just The Right Thing To Do. No tradition necessary, no bunting, no nothin' but a bit of a travel.

So we do it every summer as a simple matter of course and season.

This high summer, the usual small subgroup of the extended family gathered at Ft. Harrington for the traditional/common-sensical barbeque last Saturday, August 16th... and, for the first possible time, Casey Rose Vickers was in attendance!

Casey Vickers, August 16th, 2008. All babies look like Winston Churchill at some point; it takes a special one to master his gestures at such a young age.

We eat well, but not extravagantly, at these summer gatherings. To demonstrate that, I'll scatter recipes for our eats (in red) between the photos here. (All of these recipes are for a group of about eight people. We had a total of ten, but one of those was an infant, two were very young girls, and one had eaten before arriving. In the aftermath, we had a lot of leftover beans, tiny amounts of leftover ribs, and no leftover desserts at all. Big surprise, that last one, eh?)

Oh, and the photos: Blogger presents very low-resolution images in the body of a blog. If you click on an image, though, you're taken to a file of whatever size and resolution the blogist (is that a word? should it be? crikey, I don't know) has uploaded to Google's universal memory. Mine are of modestly high resolution, and significantly better than what you see on this page, so please click on a few of them.

Grace and her Uncle Adam. The candles are citronella bug-be-gone-ers. They worked.

Pork Ribs
Four slabs of "baby back" pork ribs
(Full-sized ribs would be fine, too, but I use baby backs to conserve volume in a single Weber 22-1/2" kettle.)
Cut slabs into thirds, and rub liberally (in the AMOUNT sense, Dann!) with this mixture (which I cribbed from a story in the San Jose Mercury News in 1995):
1 part each:
salt
ground cumin
ground black pepper
chili powder
2 parts each:
sugar
paprika
(I generally shake up a bunch of this at the beginning of the summer and store it in a restaurant-style cheese shaker for use throughout the season.)
After letting the rib slab portions sit in their jackets of rub for a while (that's a southern while, not a northern one, please note), grill over indirect heat for about an hour and a quarter.
Grilling notes: I think this, and everything else, tastes better over a charcoal heat source rather than a gas grill, but that's like Mac-vs-PC or Beta-VHS or Betty-Veronica, I know. What's probably not just a matter of preference is this: DON'T use lighter fluid (or other petrochemical accelerants) to get your charcoal going. It adds a taste that some like, but which overwhelms other tastes. I've used a chimney for starting charcoal fires for more than ten years, and it's wonderful -- not only odor-free, but much, much more reliable than any other method of starting a charcoal fire.

Adrianne and Grace. I think this is a lovely photo, but Adrianne laughed when she saw it: evidently, this is a typical brace of expressions when Grace is lobbying for something that her mom doesn't think is quite warranted at the time -- so what we're seeing here is parenting in action. (I still think it's a wonderful view of them both, though -- maybe even better when we know the backstory!)

We were all lucky enough to be treated to Grace's friend Scout again, as we were ten weeks earlier. As I told Adam this past weekend, Scout is like Yosemite National Park in one respect: it's almost impossible to take a bad picture of either one of them.

Diane's Cole Slaw
half a head of white cabbage, finely shredded
stir with a dressing of:
1 cup Italian parsley
1/2 cup chopped green onion
4 oz mayonnaise
2 tbs sour cream
1 tsp vinegar (ordinary white, not balsamic, etc.)
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
This is not intended to "age" or "mature": mix immediately before serving.

Kelsey, as always, was in doggie heaven with all the people and children and activity that he usually doesn't get around here with his two old fogie people. This picture was taken on Saturday morning, before anyone arrived, and shows his anticipation, I think. It also shows his gray muzzle. Kelsey will turn ten in just a few months, and his face betrays his aged-ness every bit as much as my hair's color does mine. (Click here to see his black face in youth.) He's still in great health, though (albeit a bit lumpy here and there) and springy-spry. There's something to be said for a "blender dog" (as our vet calls mongrels): they're generally awfully sound for the long run. There's something else to be said for this particular blender dog: he's part of me now. I'm not sure exactly when that happened, but it's not going to change.

Starch:
BEANZ!
Approx. 100 oz. canned baked beans (3 32-oz cans or 2 54-oz. cans are pretty much standard)
1 lb. slab bacon or salt pork (increasingly rare in urban grocery stores; ordinary bacon will do fine but will lack that heart-stopping, chunky toothiness of real 1/4-inch cube wads of pork fat) cut in chunks.
3/4 cup of spicy catsup (such as Heinz's "Kick'rs") or ordinary catsup to which several shots of your favorite pepper sauce have been added. Do not let a teenager or your tipsy brother-in-law be in charge of this.
8 oz dark brown sugar (even if "sugar" is an ingredient on the bean cans' label -- this is a celebration beans recipe, remember?)
3 tbs honey
Half-cook the pork in a skillet, then mix everything together and let the whole thing stand for a day or two, preferably in a really, really heavy metal pot. Not for anything that involves taste, but for the am-bean-ce.

Ribs a-cookin': Lynda, Sherwood, and Adrianne chat on the deck. (Photo by Adam.)

Chicken at the barbeque: Old Lucy chatters at Adrianne. Lucy is our oldest chicken, well over five years old now. (Photo by Adam.)

Dessert 1:
Food Network's Key Lime Pie
Just click on the above link to go to the recipe. However, as it says and warns, the recipe involves uncooked egg yolks, so, to be safe, you'll need to gather six to eight very, very fresh eggs from your backyard chickens in order to make this yummy pie safe. I'm sorry, did that sound smug? Did I break your concentration? Also be warned: the recipe involves a whole can of sweetened condensed milk for a mere 9-inch pie. This thing is downright nuclear.

Casey and Gramma Diane

Much to her mom's amusement, Casey practices her hand-eye coordination on my beard.

Dessert 2:
Diane's Pina Colada Pie
The crust isn't so important for the taste of this, so you can start with a pre-fab, 9-inch pie crust from your supermarket's freezer section.
Other ingredients:
6 oz pineapple-coconut nectar (generally found in a soda-can style container)
8 oz coconut milk (generally found in the Asian foods section of most supermarkets)
1 box of Jell-O instant vanilla pudding and pie filling (3.4 oz is the standard size)
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut
a bunch of whipped topping, such as Redi-Whip (at least a cup)
From here, the foodnetwork.com recipe works just fine:
Pour into pre-baked pie crust and chill in refrigerator for at least 3 hours.
Combine remaining whipped topping with 1/2 teaspoon rum extract. Top chilled pie with whipped topping and toasted coconut.In a large bowl, combine nectar, coconut milk, and 1 teaspoon rum extract. Sprinkle pudding mix over liquid and whisk for 2 minutes. Fold in coconut and 1/2 of the whipped topping.

Formal Group Photo 1
Standing in back: Sherwood, Lynda, Adam, Christel, Casey, Ryan
Others, clockwise from lower-left: Kelsey, Diane, Andrew, Adrianne, Scout, Grace, Emma
Feathery tail under bench: Jax-the-Spaniel

Formal Group Photo 2
Front-and-Center: Kelsey
Others, left-to-right: Adam, Lynda, Andrew, Ryan, Adrianne, Sherwood, Scout, Casey, Christel, Grace, Emma, Diane

Goofin' around, and...

... more goofin' around.

While the others couldn't stay for Sunday, a significant subset could: Lynda, Adam, Andrew, and Scout. They and Kelsey and Jax and I took a little walk in Henry Cowell State Park on Sunday afternoon (Emma had a little limp, since better, so she and Diane stayed home.)

Scout, Andrew, Jax, and Dan'l Boone in Henry Cowell Park. (Photo by Adam.)

Scout and Jax in Adam's car. Can you tell that Scout and Jax hit it off extremely well? As in extra-special bondo joy? (Photo by Adam.)

Scout, Andrew, Kelsey, and Jax at low water. (Photo by Adam. I actually forgot to bring my super-duper Nikon along on this outing, so the only available camera was Adam and Lynda's. I'm trying hard -- really hard -- not to notice that there's not a tinker's damn worth of noticeable difference between these Canon itty-bitty PNC pix and what the Nikon would have captured. But, know what? In most cases, it's the subjects that make the picture, not the box, so it shouldn't really be surprising. Besides, Adam's got a good eye for composition and content, as has been demonstrated here in SherWords before.)

Rocky. Mike and ronnie are in charge of Bullwinkle. (Photo taken with Lynda's camera.)

Lynda and Adam, Henry Cowell Park, August 17, 2008.

So that's this summer's barbeque -- hope you enjoyed it! Next summer, Casey should be able to sample some of the goodies herself, rather than having them cycled through mom first.