California dreaming

Mission Beach, San Diego

It's been like a monsoon here all week-- so wet and windy! Relatively warm too, at least for November in Seattle.  Southern California is about the nicest place in the country right now, and lucky us, we're flying to San Diego for an early winter break.  A couple nights on the beach, then we drive east to Desert Hot Springs, where it looks quite toasty next week.

What a beautiful weather map!  I'll check in along the way with some sunny photos, providing the Internet gods are favorable (and I don't get too lazy.)  Ciao!

Saxophone Day

Today is the 200th birthday of Adolphe Sax, the man who invented the wonderful saxophone. He was a Belgian instrument maker, flautist, and clarinetist.  While working at his father's instrument shop in Brussels, Sax began developing an instrument that had the projection of a a brass and the agility of a woodwind.  It's only fitting that this classy instrument has a day of recognition all to its own.

John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges-- there's a long list of great saxophone players.  And of course Charlie "Bird" Parker (1920-1955) remembered and admired for his groundbreaking solo techniques and as one of the founders of bebop. He had an enormous influence on other musicians.

Charlie Parker with Strings, recorded in 1949 on the Clef label, is considered one of his finest albums.  It includes this truly brilliant rendition of Summertime from Gershwin's 1935 opera,  Porgy and Bess.

Seasonal humor!

Maple syrup

 

On Their Way to Camp 

Eastman Johnson

Mrs. Butterworth's syrup just can't compare to the taste of real maple on your pancakes. I can buy a big jug of organic maple syrup at Costco for  $14 and it lasts us about 6 months in the fridge. What a bargain. In the specialty food catalogs (or fancy Metropolitan Market) little bottles of maple syrup are really expensive.

 

Sometimes I use it instead of honey to make delicious granola.  Being a huge fan of the product, I wondered what effect climate change is having on sugar maple tree production.  I always thought that cold winters were crucial, but turns out they found a new metric for predicting syrup production: How many seed helicopters rained down from the tree the year before.

What really matters to syrup producers is the amount of sugar in the sap, and sugar maple sap is 2 to 3 percent sugar.  The rest is just water to boil off, so if you start with sap that's 3 percent sugar, it takes a third less sap to make a gallon of syrup. Both seeds and sugar are made from carbohydrates stored in trees and when a tree produces a lot of seeds one summer, the next spring the carbohydrate "bank account" is low for making sugar.

So weather alone is a bad predictor for how much sugar comes out of the taps. For several years, they have been studying mast seeding events -- years when trees produce far more seeds than usual. In sugar maples, big masts tend to occur every 2 to 5 years.  Looking ahead to next year's harvest throughout the northeast, the seed mast crop was small this year, suggesting the 2015 maple syrup harvest should be a good one. Yea.

There is another type of forest mast. Tree species like oak, hickory and beech product a hard mast of nuts, traditionally used to fatten pigs in the fall.  The November Book of Hours calendar page, one of my favorites, shows a peasant throwing sticks into the branches to knock down mast for the hogs while his dog watches.

The blower man cometh

Bedded down for the winter?

I ordered the compost blowing service again this fall, and the truck came this morning with my seven precious yards. Yes, that's big heap of compost, and it would be a back-breaking job to spread it around by wheelbarrow.  I just tell the guys where I want it, go inside, have a cup of tea and they have the job done and cleaned up in about an hour.  Pure luxury. Better than a day at the spa!  Do I know how to treat myself, or what? 

We've had a string of very warm months and October will end up the second-warmest on record in Seattle.  And it's been wet too, even by Rainy City standards. We're at about 13 inches above normal for rainfall for the year.   What does this mean for the gardener?  More work. The perennials have been growing back as soon as I cut them down, and bulbs are spouting.  Hopefully a nice layer of compost will settle things down for a few months.  Spring comes early to the Northwest.

 

Before

After

All Saints Day

Last night a Seattle witch with red glasses handed out Junior Mints, Hershey bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups by the fistful.  In between, she took some scary "selfies" which reminded her again why she never does that.

We must have had 75 trick-or-treaters!  It was a fun. I wonder where these cute little kids live because you don't see hide nor hair of them around the neighborhood 364 days a year.

Today is All Saints' Day, with ancient traditions going back to the Roman Feast of the Lemures. Malevolent and fearful ghosts of the dead were exorcised from homes with offerings of beans and salted cakes, which apparently made them eat and then go away.  I should try it on our poltergeist, who still lives in the kitchen and likes to turn the TV on at 3 am.

Long after Roman times, Christians came together on the eve of the feast of All Hallows Day (Halloween) to ask for God's blessing and protection from evil in the world. In Ireland, where they never need an excuse for a party, people would dress as saints or evil spirits and act out the battle between good and evil around bonfires. This started in small Irish Catholic settlements and was later brought to American by thousands of Irish immigrants. Not surprisingly, Ireland is the only country where Halloween is a national holiday.

In early American history, the Puritans didn't celebrate Halloween. But between the Great Wars when my parents were growing up, Halloween became a wild, mischievous night.  At least according to their stories about soaping windows, tipping over outhouses and other types of archaic fun.



Tomorrow is All Souls Day, important in many places as a time to remember departed loved ones. Among Catholics, prayers are offered for all saints and also those unfortunates in purgatory, still waiting to get into heaven. In the spirit of the season, the Symphony is playing Mozart's great last Requiem tomorrow afternoon.  Have a good weekend!