Urban-rural interface wildfire

What is an urban-rural interface, you ask? Well, it’s jargon that firefighters use when describing a specific kind of wildfire, where there is urban development within or adjacent to forested areas. That describes many of the California foothill and mountain communities. Most of the year there is no danger living in such a community….It’s lovely to live so close to nature areas. The problem comes when we have a year or years of well-below-normal rainfall. The trees, brush and grasses become tinder dry by midsummer, and the smallest spark can set off a raging inferno, endangering and often destroying all structures in its path. Sometimes we have “dry lightning” which sparks a fire. Sometimes campers illegally build a campfire and don’t douse it out completely when they leave. Or there’s the thoughtless cigarette smoker who tosses his cigarette butt out the window, into dry weeds or the homeowner mowing dry weeds and his hot lawnmower sparks a fire. The most heinous perpetrator is the arsonist who, for whatever warped reason, purposely sets a fire.

That appears to be the cause of a local fire in Auburn, California, about 20 miles from our house, which began yesterday afternoon, and as of 9 am this morning is still only 50% contained. It has destroyed 60 homes and businesses. Auburn is one of those foothill towns which has grown tremendously over the past 30 years as people have moved up to the foothills to have more affordable housing and cleaner, clearer air.

It began near the intersection of Highway 49 and Bell Road. The search is on for the suspect who set this fire. The photos are from TV stations KSDK and a CBS affiliate in Sacramento, Channel 13. Many of the photos were sent in by viewers.

On His Blindness

I have been posting poems monthly that I memorized way back in 1966 when I was a senior in high school. My teacher, Mr. Robert Ames, promised us extra credit points if we memorized certain poems which he would designate, and so I was highly motivated to meet the challenge. Most of the poems are still back there in the recesses of my mind. Mr. Ames especially loved the poetry of John Milton (England, 1608-1674). By the time Milton was in his fifties, he was blind. He was a devout Christian and in this sonnet he expresses his discouragment with his blindness at the beginning, and then his willingness to be patient and serve God despite his blindness at the end.

On His Blindness
by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

California beauties

These lush California beauties grace the wild areas of our state in the springtime, and a few even linger on into summer. The California poppy is our state flower.


They are like brilliant gems on the dry hills.

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Rows and floes of angel hair

and ice cream castles in the air...

...and feather canyons everywhere...





I've looked at clouds that way. -Joni Mitchell

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Volunteers and helpers of the plant kingdom

Yesterday I had a post about being a volunteer blood donor, and today's subject is plant volunteers. If you read my posts last summer, you may recall that I had a prolific vegetable garden with tomatoes growing like gangbusters. They took over a quarter of the vegetable area of the garden. I made 14 quarts of marinara sauce out of my tomatoes and gave away scores of them, not to mention the scores of them we had in salads and for snacks. Well, many of them fell to the ground and their seeds hibernated all winter, especially the grape and cherry tomato seeds. Late in the spring, we saw little tomato plant volunteers growing all over the place. I pulled up most of them because we surely didn't need that many tomato plants, and they would take away nutrients from our other vegetables. But we decided to let some of them grow. Since the plants were hybridized, we couldn't be certain that the volunteers would produce the exact same variety of tomatoes.

Sure enough, the grape tomatoes were smaller, thicker-skinned and tougher-skinned than their parents due to recessive genes prevailing. But they taste OK. Here you can see the volunteer grape tomato vines growing up the fence.
Tomato plants really do become like a mini-jungle. The one little purple flower is on a plant I put there to encourage bee activity in the vegetable garden.
I love the big brassy flowers of the squash plants, like silent but colorful bullhorns inviting bees to come and pollinate them. These squash have the unique and original name of "Yellow Squash." They taste best when they are cooked the same day they're picked.
Here are more of my flower helpers. These are coneflowers and their blooms stay for weeks before drying out. They're about 2 feet tall and they really attract the bees and other pollinating insects. Having flowers near your vegetable garden greatly improves pollination and production of fruits and veggies.
They also make pretty bouquets! In this bouquet are coneflowers, a type of yarrow and oregano flowers, all growing near my vegetable garden. They are my flower helpers, even helping volunteers.

How does your garden grow?

Save lives - give blood

Wordless Wednesday

My Amazing Azaleas

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Swan and reflected sky

We live on a hillside beside a small lake, and a swan frequently visits our lake when the geese are away. It used to have a mate, but no more.
You can see more reflection of sky than actual sky here.
It was a cloudy day in June--still not too hot.
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Road Trip

The year was 1993 and it was the summer before our oldest son, Nathan, would start 10th grade. We thought it might be the last chance our whole family would have to take a long cross-country trip, so we decided to drive across America. We chose to drive through the southern states from California to Orlando and back. I meticulously plotted out our course, planning our stays about 5 hours’ driving distance each day so that we could stop along the way and see the sights. The entire vacation took 35 days. We ate lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

We took Interstate 10 on our drive east and then Interstate 40 on our return to California. I spent weeks planning the trip, making reservations along the way at inexpensive motels, acquiring maps and tourist information, putting together activities (including math workbooks) the boys could do during the long drives. I painstakingly made a black line drawing of a map of the United States so the boys could plot our course on it. Nathan, 14, carefully plotted each part of the trip, including names of towns we stayed in and some sites of interest that we visited. Ben, 12, started out plotting the drive, but then lost interest in that and began drawing large dinosaurs on the map. I suppose they were terrorizing cities across the nation. Tim, 10, plotted the first stop outside of California (Phoenix), but then he, too, lost interest in doing something so boring, so he drew huge, black scribbled clouds all over the country, saying they were hurricanes.

Each of our boys had a MadLibs activity book which was a source of much hilarity, and they learned (or practiced) what adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs are. Nathan, being an avid reader, brought reading material, which he quickly finished within a few days. I think they each had a Walkman and listened to Weird Al tapes and others. I must say, looking back on it, the boys were really good during those long drives each day, though they were also good at bugging each other.

We saw all kinds of interesting places across the southern states, but it seems that things that went wrong stand out in my memory more than the beautiful sites we saw. I’ve read that it’s the emotion attached to an incident that causes it to stay in your memory. One of those glitches was watching the space shuttle not take off on two different Saturdays at Cape Canaveral, just outside of Orlando, Florida.

Fourteen days after we’d left home, we arrived at my sister’s house in Orlando, on a Friday. The next day there was to be a launch of the space shuttle. We got up early and arrived at the viewing area, 3 miles away from the launch pad, with plenty of time before the launch. There were metal bleachers and a grassy area where viewers could sit. We could see the space shuttle on the rocket even though it was 3 miles away, though it looked very small from that distance. We were unaccustomed to the sweltering humidity of Florida, and it was still morning. We sat and sprawled out on quilts with my sister’s family and waited, trying not to die from the heat. Twenty minutes before blast-off, the announcement came that the takeoff had been “scrubbed” because of an onboard computer problem. Everyone was keenly disappointed, but then we went through the NASA Kennedy Space Center and saw lots of rockets and space vehicles, and the best part was it was air-conditioned!

One week later, the engineers and scientists had planned another launch attempt, so again we got up early and drove the 45 minutes out to Cape Canaveral. We sat on the bleachers, eagerly awaiting the fantastic moment of blast-off. Would you believe that just 19 seconds before blast-off, the launch was “scrubbed” once again?! Oh, were we bummed (Webster’s: disappointed, crushed, annoyed, depressed)!! But now, as they say, we can laugh about it. We had a wonderful visit with my sister and her family for a week. At least we hadn’t driven all the way out to Cape Canaveral from northern California just to see the launch of the space shuttle, as had some friends of ours. They planned their whole trip based on the published date of the next space launch!
July 24, 1993...VanderBeeks waiting near Cape Canaveral for the launch in the sweltering Florida sun. Argghh..my big, permed hair....what was I thinking?

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At the Park

In June we had the pleasure of a visit with our oldest son, Nathan, wife Cori and our grandson, Drew, who live in southern California. They drove all the way up here to northern California (8 hour drive) to visit our son Ben and family (Santa Rosa) and us in Garden Valley. Our grandsons seem to grow by leaps and bounds when we only see them a few times a year. The last time we saw Drew, he was crawling, and now he's a walking toddler! We went over to our local Garden Valley Park, which has a small creek flowing through it.

There's nothing like viewing the world through the eyes of a little child. Everything is new to him, especially when he's a city boy and we're very much country folk.
This was Drew's first experience with sitting in a creek, and he loved it. He found smooth rocks and sticks to pick up and drop in the water.
Ahhh...heaven for a little boy...
We decided to walk over to the playground area. I forget how slowly things move when you're walking with a toddler. He kept stopping and staring. The grass felt strange to him on his tender little feet.
Hmmm...Do I really want to walk that far to catch up with Mommy and Daddy?
I'll taste this stick.
Is someone gonna come get me or do I have to stand here forever?
Oh, it's grandma, my second choice, but she'll do. It's hard walking with this heavy wet diaper on and wet clothes.
We're getting closer to Mommy!!
I guess I'm having fun on this thing because Mommy and Grandma are.
When in doubt, taste your hat.

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