Blue

 Having a  hard time taking in recent happenings. There is so much pain and destruction.

Borage, or borago officianalis, is an annual herb that has many beneficial qualities. Its flowers are some of the best blues in the garden, a pure and sky-colored blue.

Both the leaves and flowers are edible, with a faint cucumber-like taste. The flowers make attractive garnishes for salads.

As a traditional medicine, borage is good for treating gastrointestinal maladies, and as a tea or infusion, it helps regulate hormonal inbalances, and relieves the symptoms of menopause, including hot flashes.

As a companion plant in the garden, borage is often planted with tomatoes, because its flowers and fuzzy foliage confuse some tomato predators like hornworms.

Borage flowers are often used to garnish that traditional Britsh cocktail, the Pimms cup. Say...when is cocktail time, anyway?

Sunday flowers

Spring is coming, and we've been busy. This weekend we went to a garden center and bought some vegetables and flowers to put into our deck containers. We also bought a small lime tree to grow in a pot.

The garden is looking tatty, but still beautiful. All the roses are on the brink of bloom - the garden is filled with buds.

In a week or two, the place will be full of roses.

Road kill catalog

Any daily activity gives you the opportunity to carefully examine the minutiae of your surroundings and so it is with the daily morning walk I take with Jack, my dog. A fine connoisseur of coyote pooh, dried turds, and piss-glazed garbage bins, Jack takes his time exploring our rural road. And I tend to focus on its asphalt surface, as a precaution against road hazards in this dog-infested neighborhood.

Jerusalem cricket, from Wikipedia

 So I’ve noticed the annual cycle of small road-kills that appear on the blacktop with some regularity. There’s an astonishing bug that appears, a grotesque creature like a miniaturized human baby, a chitin-armored fetus, its round infant head larger than its claw-limbed body. Pale fleshy gold in color, its appearance made me recoil in horror the first time I saw it, but now I appreciate it. It’s a Stenopelmatus fuscus, or Jerusalem cricket.

Our small local lizards end up smashed on the road too frequently. For some reason, they always appear belly up, curled in a kind of ecstatic agony, something akin to Jack’s own luxurious belly-up defenseless sleep.

Lizard safe on my windowsill

 I don't know how it is the lizards end up smashed on the road, because everytime I see a live one, stock still in the sun, my tiniest movement makes him dart away in a streak. Have they swooned belly up, lolling on the sun-hot asphalt, only to be taken unaware by a car tire?

By the time I see them they’re usually flattened husks dessicated like a cut-out from duct tape, but once I came upon one freshly smashed, its silvery belly like supple leather, its jaws oozing a deep dark red blood as flushed with oxygen as yours or mine. I hadn’t thought before that lizards would bleed red.

Thematic Photographic - Leaves

Carmi at the blog "Written, Inc." posts a photographic challenge each week at Thematic Photographic. This week, the theme is "Leaves."

Here, the intricate shape of the thick, leathery leaves of the California native shrub Fremontodendron stand out against the white plaster wall, as striking as the bright gold flowers.

Joy contained

This weekend, as in past years, I enjoyed the Theodore Payne Foundation's Native Plant Garden Tours. If you're near L.A., it's a great bargain every spring. $20 buys you a pass to visit over 40 private gardens, all featuring plantings of California native plants. What could be a better bargain than that?

There are some truly magnificent gardens on the tour - you can get an invitation behind the fortified gates of the Brentwood and Beverly Hills elite, to see the feats of designers that get free reign with their money. Or you can visit the homey, much-loved gardens of dedicated plantsmen-and-women whose body of knowledge about growing California plants will amaze you.

But one of the nicest gardens I visited this weekend was one that was new on the tour - and it was an unexpected pleasure.

High on air

Click any photo to "embiggen"

 At the base of the tall building, a crowd assembles, waiting. The buzz of excitement fills the air.

Then, high above, a single figure appears at the edge of the roofline, teetering on the brink, and then it slowly leans over and....

Update

Updates on the job-hunting front.

After I met with a person inside my organization to talk about my job prospects, I've had some developments, both good and maybe not so helpful. Since the beginning of March, I've been assigned a weekly creative project that I really enjoy. That's been fun.

I also was asked to pitch in on another project in our department - I met with my colleague and have just begun working on the project.

On the maybe not so helpful front - I also volunteered to help out in another department where there may be an opening soon. There are some staff shortages, and I offered my help. But the amount of time I could offer was not what they needed, so they referred my offer to another division.

Yesterday I reported to work at the other division, and found out that what they wanted me to do was basic data entry as they implement a new software system. Not very challenging, and it's really not a potential transfer opportunity, But my colleagues there are super nice, and it's a chance to learn about the software they are adopting.

In my own department, I filed the paperwork for four of my colleagues to move to other jobs in our organization. Congratulations to them! But it's bittersweet. Today I just learned that another colleague, who was hopeful about a transfer opportunity, was not chosen. He and I both commiserated together. He said to me, "I really hope you get something, but on the other hand, if you weren't here I wouldn't know how to get through this." I told him the same thing.

Yesterday, I was asked to a meeting to help set the policy adapting my work after I am gone. Apparently, my "expertise" is valuable enough that they want me to advise them. But then today I met with the person who will be writing the policy, and it was pretty clear that she wants me to tell her what to write in the report that will be presented under her name.

Amid this, I'm trying to steer the remnants of my department into its final dry dock. Attitudes are bad, people are demoralized, and I can't allow myself to give in to negative feelings, because we have to make sure our remaining clients are properly provided for.

This evening, I got an email from a former colleague, still in the organization, with whom I had clashed in the past. She forwarded me a job posting that she'd found, and kindly asked me if there was anything she could do for me.

Losing your job sucks. Job hunting is painful. People can be kind. Whatever happens will be okay.

Poppy season in California

The state flower of California is the California poppy, or Eschscholtzia californica. These beauties were in full flower at the Sanford Winery in the Santa Rita Hills.

The modern era

LaFond winery tasting room

Though the winemaking trade is ancient, in some parts of Southern California it's almost brand new. Santa Barbara County's rolling valleys were planted with grapes as early as 1782, but by the time Prohibition was implemented in 1918, the wine business in the county had collapsed.

Today's booming wine business didn't really revive in the County until the 1970s. So it shouldn't be surprising that the face of Santa Barbara Wine Industry is a distinctly modern one.

If you've toured the great and ancient vineyards of Europe, and explored the stone monasteries and half-timbered cottages and tower-embellished chateaux, you might find it a little disconcerting that one of the richest troves of wine tasting rooms in Southern California happens to be located in a pre-fab industrial park behind a Home Depot big box store in downtown Lompoc, CA.