"Summer" Doldrums

It's been 60 degrees inside our house mornings this week. Esther is not pleased. She likes to be wrapped up in this fleece blanket like a big burrito for her morning nap. "Why are you bugging me, mom? I'm chilly!" I've been breaking down and turning the furnace on.



We went to the Festival of Sail on Sunday to check out the Eagle, a sailing barque that my brother is going to meet up with in Panama City and sail through the Panama Canal and back up to their homeport of New London, CT. I told one of the crewmen (they are so young, they look like babies to me) that my brother was excited about joining them and he said that the Panama Canal is "interesting for about the first 15 minutes."




It' a very impressive tall ship. It looks even cooler under sail. There is a video of it coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge last week.

I snapped one shot of the cooks in the galley below dishing up some lunch. Looks like meatball sandwiches, mac and cheese and broccoli that had seen better days.





I didn't get to see the parade of ships coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge because I was doing my civic duty of being a juror for a criminal trial last week. I was even the foreperson of the jury! Nobody else was stepping up, and I wanted to move things along, so I decided, "What the heck?"

Real criminal trials are nothing like what you see in the movies or on tv. The courtrooms on even the most low budget shows look plush compared to the courtrooms in the SF Hall of Justice, which have seen better days. This was a gun possession case. This guy was stopped by the CHP in downtown San Francisco for not having a front license plate. They smelled alcohol on his breath so they asked him to step out of the vehicle and were doing a routine patdown and the guy told them he had a gun in his back pocket. Turns out it was loaded.

I thought it was difficult to decide the case because of the guy's story that he had just taken the gun from a 13 year old son of a friend of his in the projects and was on his way to dispose of it, which is an exemption from our concealed weapon law. There's no Judge Judy there to scream at him, "WHY didn't you put the gun in the trunk?" You're left with a lot of unanswered questions at the end because of so many things that are inadmissible or hearsay evidence. Standing back now, and reading what I just wrote, the story seems flimsy. But in the moment, I guess I get caught up in feeling bad about sending someone to jail and messing up their future, unless I feel certain that they really did something wrong.

On the bright side, I was lucky NOT to get picked for the jury for this trial, which was getting chosen the same week I was booked for jury duty. The Ramos case is about an illegal alien gang member who shot a father and his two sons and killed them for cutting him off in their car.

Necklace

I've had this on my "to do" list for after returning from Surtex. Now, almost two months later, I finally can check it off. I wanted to make a necklace with some of the silver beads I worked on patterns for with Nina Designs.



I made some earrings to match too.



I purchased the lampwork glass beads for this necklace from Heather Davis. I think they are just gorgeous. The center pendant's text is a sonnet titled Love's Growth by John Donne.

The smaller beads came from a shop in Noe Valley called Forbeadin. My friend Fiona works there. She helped me design and finish these pieces. Thanks, Fiona!

Ya snooze, ya lose...

I was waiting for this one beautiful tomato to reach the peak of ripeness before picking and enjoying it. Guess I waited a little bit too long. Someone beat me to it.


Do you think this guy is the culprit? I wouldn't be at all surprised. Here he is demonstrating his "hanging by the feet" method of poaching black oil sunflower seeds from the bird feeder. You can see how just well those plastic baffles work to deter squirrels.

I did manage to harvest this Sweet 100 cherry tomato before it fell into enemy hands. Steve says, "Where's the other 99?"


I enjoyed it on top of my healthy lunch.


One of my surviving sunflowers has started flowering. I have high hopes for the other 5.


The sweet peas have blossomed out again. I picked a few bouquets a couple of weeks ago, and the plants were bare for awhile there.

So, you might be wondering where I have been lately and imagining me on summer vacation, lying on the beach soaking up rays and sipping a pina colada. HA! Not exactly. I have been jamming on presentations and getting picked for jury duty for criminal court.

The jury duty part is not too bad. It's for a misdemeanor trial that starts Monday afternoon. It's supposed to wrap up Tuesday, and then to to "the jury"...hey, that includes me. I want to get done Tuesday, because the Parade of Sails Tall Ships are coming into SF Bay on Wednesday at noon. The ships will sail in under the Golden Gate Bridge and sail over to the Bay Bridge. My brother is going to be sailing on the Eagle through the Panama Canal and up to Connecticut. (He is way cooler than me and an excellent sailor.)

I can't tell anyone about the trial until it is over. The judge even told us, "Don't BLOG about it."

I can show you a couple of my new designs I've been working on.


This is a design for a Christmas plate.


TGIF.

Christmas in July

Christmas in July is the title of a Preston Sturges comedy. It was the film that we saw on our first date. We took the bus to City College to watch a free screening. (I should have had a clue at that point, wouldn't ya think?) Anyhow, we've been having a mini Preston Sturges film festival at our house this week. We love The Lady Eve and were laughing out loud. Last night we watched The Palm Beach Story.


You can't even see halfway down our block this morning, it's so foggy. It's a dripping fog. They say that Eskimos have 100 different words for snow, well, we have a lot of descriptive words for fog here. One of our favorites is "VBF", which stands for "Visible Blowing Fog" that's when you can look out and see puffs of fog blowing by. So, although tomorrow is 4th of July, we are donning fleece vests instead of tank tops. And here I am working on Christmas images. Seems like a lot of the manufacturers we met at Surtex will be reviewing images for Christmas 2009 in the next couple of months. I was thinking of digging out the Bing Crosby Christmas albums to listen to for inspiration, so I can have "visions of sugarplums" dancing through my head. But wait, I don't even have any idea what a sugarplum looks like, do you? Apparently, this is what they look like.



A morning check on the garden came up with both good news and bad news. The good news is: 1.)The sweet peas are blooming.






2.)One of the tomatoes is ripening. This is a Sungold cherry tomato, and it's turning yellow, despite adverse growing conditions.



Ok, now the bad news:



I'm pretty sure this is a gopher mound in my tiny patch of lawn that I struggle to maintain. Well, it's not as bad as our previous rodent problem of 7 dead mice under the floorboards of our shed during a heat wave while Steve was out of town. It's all relative.

Girls' Summer Lunch

Yesterday we got together for our quarterly Girls' Lunch. In the summer we like to have it at Janet's house in Marin so Linda and I can escape the fog of the city. It was toasty warm in Janet's backyard and we had a lovely afternoon.



Here's the lunch:


Janet got these great Pesto Tarts from Delicieux Fine Desserts in Fairfax. They sell them at the Marin Farmer's Market. They each contain many entire cloves of garlic, but they are cooked perfectly so that they have a silken texture and great taste. Be forewarned of having overpowering garlic breath afterwards.



Janet is catsitting for her neighbors. This guy spent the afternoon alternating between coming over for attention and crashing out in the shade.

It was an idyllic day for all of us. After lunch we had show & tell. Each of us brought our latest work to be admired and critiqued. It's so great getting feedback from other illustrators. Janet is illustrating a children's book and showed us her rough sketches. I can't wait to see the final art. Linda is writing a trio of children's books, which she will illustrate. We got to see her latest draft. They are going to be fun. I showed my Surtex images.

I'm already looking forward to our next get-together.

Sports bra saves US hiker in German Alps

I really liked this news story and some of the comments that people put up. They had it posted under "Weird News"

Monday, June 23, 2008

(06-23) 12:44 PDT BERLIN, Germany (AP) --

An American hiker stranded in the Bavarian Alps for nearly three days was rescued after using her sports bra as a signal, police in southern Germany said Monday.

Berchtesgaden police officer Lorenz Rasp said that he helped lift 24-year-old Jessica Bruinsma of Colorado state to safety by helicopter on Thursday after she attracted the attention of lumberjacks by attaching her sports bra to a cable used to move timber down the mountain.

"She's a very smart girl, and she acted very resourcefully," said Rasp. "She kept her shirt and jacket for warmth, but thought the sports bra could work as a signal."

An Alpine rescue team, including five helicopters and 80 emergency workers, had been searching for Bruinsma since she went missing June 16 after losing her way in bad weather while hiking with a friend near the Austrian border.

She fell 16.4 feet (five meters) to a rocky overhang, where she spent the next 70 hours on the narrow ledge, sustained by water that she found by breaking into a supply box on the ledge.

She badly bruised a leg and dislocated a shoulder in the fall, and the cliff was too isolated for her to climb free, Rasp said.

Rasp said the cable was only within reach because the timber transport system was out of service. When a repairman restored the line on Thursday, the cable car started moving up the mountain and Bruinsma's bra reached the worker at the base. He knew of the missing hiker and immediately called police.

Rasp said his team followed the cable line up the cliffside in a helicopter and found Bruinsma standing on the ledge, waving with her good arm. After circling once, they lowered a winch to Bruinsma and lifted her aboard.

"She did so well because she is in very good shape," Rasp said. "She has been training for a marathon — her goal is to finish in 3 hours and 10 minutes."

Bruinsma told Rasp that she has scrapped plans to stay in Berchtesgaden to learn German and plans to return home to Colorado Springs with her parents. He said she still plans to run the marathon, if she recovers in time to keep training.

Advertising Claims

I guess I'm a sucker for advertising claims. The latest product I've fallen for is Cranergy. It has green tea extract and vitamins and claims to give you more energy. I like the raspberry flavor, which has only 50 calories and is sweetened with Splenda. It probably contains caffeine, but I'm not sure. I feel like I have more energy after I drink it. I wonder how much of it is placebo effect? If you click on the name, it will take you to their website, where you can download a coupon for a dollar off so you can try it for yourself and let me know if it gives you more energy.

I remember back when I was about 6, I got a pair of PF Flyers sneakers. They claimed to "make you run faster and jump higher." This appealed to me very much, since I was short and slow. (When I was around 10 the neighbor kids gave me the sarcastic nickname of "Thunderbolt" because I was so slow at running the bases in kickball. I knew they were making fun of me, but I sort of liked the nickname because it sounded a lot cooler than some of the other nicknames kids could give you.) I was really convinced that the sneakers made me run faster and jump higher. Check out this YouTube video of one of their commercials from the 50s. It is pretty hilarious. I sort of miss the good old days of wild unsubstantiated advertising claims, don't you?

I think our parents were right about the warnings that tv would rot our brains. Although I often forget my own cell phone number, I can still remember advertising jingles from the 50s. This one still rattles around my brain, "Look both ways when you cross the street so you'll be around to live and eat Waleeco, Waleeco, coconut bars are the best I know!"

They still make PF Flyers. I did not know that. I wonder if they can still make me run faster and jump higher?