Happy New Year! And Food! And Dog!

Bernie's grand experiment this past fall was to attempt to grow Brussels sprouts in pots in our front yard farm. I'd given it a half-hearted try the previous year, but planted them too late -- I got to eat some of the foliage, but they never made those cute little mini-cabbage shapes. Bernie has had much more success.

Today he decided that some of them were big enough to eat. So we cooked them in bacon fryings with diced onion. Melt the bacon fat, add the onions, let them sweat down a little, then put in the halved Brussels sprouts, stirring gently now and then. When the color is bright green, cover them and let them steam themselves for a few minutes. Then flavor with salt and garlic powder, stir and steam again. They're done when a fork can penetrate them tenderly.

Holy smoley, they were delicious! Of course, as with just about all food, the sweet intensity of the flavor was so much better coming out of the garden minutes before. Yes, fresh is better than produce that sits in bins for days or weeks.

I love how they look like little knobby palm trees, and based on our culinary experience today, Bernie says he wants to plant a lot more of them next fall. I agree. More Brussels sprouts, more red-leaf lettuce, less spinach and chard and collards.

Yes, of course I have a picture of Kermit on his office chair near the table where I work. When I picked up the camera, he looked at me as though he expected to be photographed. He was very proud of himself today: he helped me unload the throw rugs from the dryer, every one of them. He's a working dog.

2017 is coming in with a deluge. I even heard a rumor that some of the reservoirs are going to fill to pre-drought levels. I certainly hope so, but I'll believe it when I see it. In the mean time, we have tentative plans to visit a somewhat flooded soccer field on Monday -- we're supposed to get a whopper of a rain over the weekend. Kermit is going to love it...

You Could Take a Bath in That

Having been promised a wet winter -- which California desperately needs -- Bernie and I embarked on some home improvements to prepare for rain. This morning we got to see our plans in action.

We love having a sliding glass door that leads from our bedroom to our brick patio, largely because we can leave it open and feel like we're camping out. However, when we left it open, the rain from the roof above splashed right down on the bricks outside the door and ... into the room. So we put up a gutter to re-direct the water -- right into a rain-barrel. Water conservation and home improvement in one!

At six-thirty this morning, the barrel was overflowing. Last night it was empty. An inch of rain can do that, I guess. Using the chain as a "downspout" was a total failure, though. We may need to re-think  that one.

We also put up a gutter over the garage door on the side of the house, which re-directs water from the roof that used to make a lake of the north side to a little waterfall out onto the driveway, where the slope sends the rain into the gutter. The Stanislaus River down at the end of the street can use the extra water.

Outside our kitchen, water used to collect on the patio there, too. In 1997 I dug a trench on the south side of the house to draw off that El Nino rainfall, but over the past 18 years much of it filled in, so it couldn't handle all the runoff.

This past summer Bernie dug a retention pond off the patio, which was darn hard work, but it worked. The geranium in the pot sunk in the pond won't mind the extra water too much, but we might have to relocate it before the next wave of rains roll through.

All in all, we're feeling quite festive about our first heavy rain of the winter, and hopeful that the winter will help with the drought.

Storm of the Decade?

News services have been running around with their hair on fire all week about the biggest rain storm in a decade to hit California.

"It's going to flood! It's going to cause power outages! It's going to make mudslides and pooling water and mushy ground that makes trees fall over in the HIGH WINDS!!!!"

In the winter of 1997-98, the El Nino rains found me on the south side of my house in knee-high rubber boots with a pickaxe, hacking a trench to try to get the water off my back patio. Our pool had been completed in October, and I'd been trying to grow a lawn...but every time I reseeded, the rains would pour down and drown the seedlings in two inches of standing water. The lawn failed, and we eventually gave up on it, but the trench on the south side worked just fine, and we had no water in the house.

Obviously that was more than ten years ago. Let's try seventeen. So this storm, if it panned out, would pretty much be the Storm of Two Decades -- but that doesn't sound so cool. And indeed, in seventeen years, we all forgot just how icky a big rain season can be. I myself was an idiot, and when I needed to dump a bunch of landscape river rock somewhere, I used the trench on the south side of the house. Quite wrongly I thought water would flow through a channel of river rock. Maybe it would for the first rain, but after years of Valley dust and crumbled falling leaves, no, it sure doesn't.

It's easy to forget heavy rains here in the Central Valley. Spring arrives in February, and Summer ends in November. At Thanksgiving you know you're going to be planting tomatoes in ten weeks, and you just hope there's going to be enough rainstorms to allow you to irrigate your lawn and garden between March and November when it doesn't rain.

And so yes, we have flooding, and power outages, and mushy tree-falls. (The mudslides and sinkholes belong to the Bay Area, not the Central Valley.) Yes, we FORGOT how to maintain the drainage needed for a big storm.

With three days to prepare for the storm, I re-dug part of my south side trench, taking eight buckets of soil (laboriously separated from damned landscape river rock) out to the ranch to fill a hole that Dink had dug in his paddock. I thought that would be good enough.

NOT. Two inches of rain in a little over two hours required some new trenching to allow the water to flow out to the street. Hmm, I've got my own little creek -- can I name it? And the drainage solution we used for the new beautiful brick patio was not up to the flooding, but Bernie was very clever and took one of the pumps from the fish ponds and used it like a sump pump to clear the water from the back of the house.

It's been an interesting afternoon, all righty. I paced from back patio to bedroom patio to kitchen window (where I can see my southside trench) to garage entry to front window to make sure the storm drain in front of our house was clear of leaves, repeat, repeat, repeat. We went out to feed Dink his supplemental senior horse food, and the ranch out there west of town is practically afloat.

Water, water, water, as long as it's flowing, we're good. Fortunately the wood stove is keeping us feeling warm and dry, and the power is on so Bernie can make pizza, which is just the thing to keep hopes up on a rainy, rainy day.

Thank you, God, for the rain.

Life With Rain

What a beautiful sight: my brick patio in the rain!

Water has been falling out of the sky for about three hours or so, thanks be to God. Yesterday I cleaned up the south side of the house, gathering mouldering leaves for Alex's compost bin, pulling river rock out of the ground (dumping the excess river rock on that side was one of the dumbest things I've ever done) and then trying to hack a drainage channel into the hard, dry soil.

Back in 1997, I went out there in high boots in the unrelenting rain and used a pickaxe and shovel to make a drainage ditch to the front of the house. But after that winter, the rains weren't bad, and I more or less forgot how poorly the hard clay soil of this area soaks up water. And if you don't maintain your infrastructure, nature fills in with dust and leaves, and homeowners dump rocks into it.

Well, I wasn't having much luck yesterday with the digging, so Alex offered to use her younger muscles to scratch a drainage basin. Chopping at the nearly cementitious earth was hard even for her, so she got some much younger muscles to help -- Mr. Let-Me-At-It Eperis.

Bernie calls him "Eperussell," because it's become fairly obvious that there is a healthy portion of Jack Russell terrier in his blood. Remember how I said he wasn't? Well, I believe I was wrong, and I also believe that the previous owner found out that he wasn't what she was told he was and that's why she ditched him. Anyway, what do terriers do? Right, they DIG.

Ep pitched into the excavation with the vigor of foolish youth and the determination of a race of ratters. It was like a light bulb came on in his brain and he realized that digging crazily was what he was meant to do with his life. Alex merely directed the vector of those flying white paws.

Of course, it is a double-edged sword: the ditch got done (at least as much as we needed for this storm) by puppy paws ... but now that he knows how much fun it is to dig, he's going to need lots of supervision while he's outside.

Especially since we can't keep him from jumping onto the top step in the pool every time he goes out. Oh, yeah, he's a water dog, too. Dirty digging paws in the pool? Heaven help us.

And thank you, God, for this beautiful rain.

Hail of a Thing

"HAIL!" shouted Lillian, charging through the house to the front door. "IT'S HAILING!!!"

I dropped the meat fork I was messing with and scurried after her. We stepped out onto the front porch to see hail bouncing along the sidewalk to the tune of thunder peals. "Look how big they are!" She cried in high glee. "I'm going to get some!"

We don't often see hail here; we can go years at a time without thunderstorms, and few of them have hail in them. This was a doozy, however -- those hailstones were bigger than fat peas, and they were coming down hard. When they began pinging off us and the front of the house, we retreated, and simply ran from window to window, laughing and marveling at the miracle of ice flying down out of the sky.

The weather service had forecast a possible thundershower for Friday afternoon, and they got it right in that regard. It did rain, and it did thunder, but they neglected to point out that it would come down so hard that in a matter of minutes, we had two inches of water standing on the back patio, and a veritable river streaming down the south side of the house, and piles of hailstones four inches deep against the fence.

Lil ran outside to glory in the elements for about five seconds -- hailstones hurt when they hit. And the temperature had dropped from a balmy 68 degrees to 48 in about ten minutes.

The little chair is on the front porch, which was sheltered, mostly. By that point, the hail and downpour had stopped, and I had returned to the kitchen and the pot roast I had been browning (it was a little dark, but not burnt), glad of the heat from the stove.

Bernie and I went for a walk later, just to peer at the piles of hail still melting in peoples' gardens and lawns. The air was scrubbed about as clean as it ever gets here in the Central Valley; in addition, if there were any leaves waiting to drop in this area, they were now done.

The geraniums in the background took a bit of a beating, and we lost some tiny oranges that had just set, but the blueberries, the tomato blossoms, and the cherry tree were fine.

The only thing I should have done was shovel up some of that hail and put it in the freezer, so that I can look at it on Wednesday, when the temps are supposed to soar into the 90s.

At Last, Rain

I've been praying for rain, even just a little shower. The Valley air has been so dirty that all of us have been suffering from sinus irritation. Last night, our prayers were answered, and we got that little shower. What a beautiful sound to wake up to: raindrops on puddles.

By afternoon, the rain had stopped, and the black phoebe that usually is our harbinger of rain showed up. We laughed and chided him for being a bit late on his forecast. However, about three hours later, the sky darkened and it began to rain again, indeed, to pour, putting an end to Bernie's tile-cutting outside.

The tools were put away, and then the gutter filled up and overflowed onto the sidewalk, the back patio was under about half an inch of water, and the rain still came down. I went out front with a rake and cleared the storm drain, and John got a shovel and dug a trench on the south side of the house to drain the back patio, bless his heart.

Thank you God for the rain.

Ten Reasons to Be Thankful Even if I Was Worried about the End of the World

1. California Decembers are still clement enough for geraniums to bloom. Red and green at Christmastime are apropos.

2. Even if the Fiscal Cliff thing were to come to pass, our lifestyle has put us outside the grid. We'd have little impact on our way of life, if any.

3. Our two favorite supermarkets have begun carrying potato chips cooked in olive oil -- this means I can eat them. (I can't eat the ones cooked in sunflower or canola oil, as they make me unpleasantly ill. ) Merry Christmas or Armageddon, I have had potato chips to snack on in the evening!

4. The longest night of the year will shortly be a thing of the past until a year from now. (Daylight Savings Time should be adopted year round. Night-time at 5pm is just stupid.)

5. In seven weeks, I'll be buying tomato plants for the garden. (God willing and the creek don't rise.)

6. My 6-month-old grand-daughter smiles broadly when she sees me, and she just cut her first tooth.

7. My 10-year-old grand-daughter is creative, well-spoken, and a welcome guest in other people's houses. And respectful, and loving.

8. We're getting lots of glorious rain this winter so far. Everything feels damp, but I can live with that. Fill those reservoirs! Max that Sierra snow-pack!

9. Our household is stable, and at peace with one another. Three generations living together can't always say that, but we can. We're a team, and it makes us strong.

10. The "Perfect Ten" is my marriage to Bernie. We've just celebrated 38 years since he asked me to marry him. I still remember how the world changed that day, and how I knew that I would never again feel alone, that I would always have him at my side, that we could conquer anything that life threw at us.

It was a kind of innocent assumption ... we never know how long we'll have with anyone, not really. But on the other hand, for 38 years, we were right.

Happy End of the Mayan Calendar!

October Rain

The high today was supposed to be 73 degrees, but I don't think we got there.

Partly cloudy and cool as I prepared to go riding, the weather dictated the first delve into the winter clothes bin for a flannel shirt to wear over a heavy t-shirt. I figured that once I was in the sun and warmed up, I could tie the flannel shirt around my waist and be comfortable.

But by the time we were saddled up, the clouds had moved in, and the air felt chill. By about noon it was 68 degrees, and then it began to drizzle rain and the temps dropped to 63.

This evening I wish I had a long flannel nightgown to wear, but have to content myself with fluffy slippers for my feet, and freshly-cooked chicken wings to warm my belly as I watch very lousy football.