Apple Progress – Sunday 6/29/2008

These are the apples we’re throwing away. Sadly, the worms found our little organic corner of the earth. Need to find out what to do about them without poisoning us or the fruit.

These are the small apples Hydra is going to attempt to eat without getting a stomach ache. Pacing is probably very important here.

Yeah, I counted them. We pulled more than 80 off the tree so that they wouldn’t break the branches as the continue their march toward ripeness.

They should arrive around October, I think.

Basil growing tip: I finally figured out last year that in spite of the little directions that come with the basil, it’s really happiest out of the kind of direct sunlight we get here in the high desert. It likes the relative safety of the shaded front porch, but it wants more moisture in the soil that is easy to maintain due to the high temperatures and almost constant breezes.

My mom told me about her trick of putting a strip of rag from a pan of water into a potted plant when she goes away for a few days. I thought I’d try this with my basil plant. Seems to be working!

Romi’s in Palmdale – Saturday 6/28/2008

We tried Romi’s in Palmdale for lunch. They’ve set their sights high. It’s a nice change in the high desert.

Nice presentation of butter for the bread and warm toasted pistachios.

Hydra pulls out the haughty, skeptical look he perfected during our visit to France last year, but which he’s had more cause to use here at home.

We had a table near the window overlooking the patio dining area. It’s a comfortable place.

Hydra ordered the Traditional Burger, which comes with portabello mushrooms, smoked gouda and bacon on it. He ordered all the goodies on the side and no bread. It was a good burger and cooked just as he ordered.

He opted for the fresh fruit skewer. The other options were Yukon gold fries or a small salad.

I ordered the Lunch Box. Soup du jour (potato leek today), mushroom/spinach quiche and a little salad with raspberry vinaigrette.

It’s a bit pricey… $12 for Hydra’s lunch, $13.00 for mine. But I think we’ll go back because the food was really good. Service was a little slow, but…

The chef seems to have really good instincts. Nice presentation. Food that makes you slow down and think about it. Mmm.

Remember These? – Friday 6/27/2008

I miss the check-out cards that used to be in all the library books. I liked to look at them and see what sort of life the book had had, based on the dates handwritten in early books and stamped in red, blue and black later on.

Sometimes they had a very active early life, checked out at each possible opportunity in two- or three-week stints for a year or more. Sometimes they languished for months between readings, sometimes they experienced a flurry of attention later in life. Maybe a teacher who discovered the book or remembered it and assigned it was responsible.

There’s no trail left in this book, a 1958 edition of Exploring with Fremont: The Private Diaries of Charles Preuss. There is only this pocket.

See how the fine has been changed from 2 cents, to 3 cents to 5 cents? Now I think it’s 25 cents a day. Inflation-wise, that’s pretty reasonable.

This book is probably experiencing a little renaissance across the country. Like me, others heard it mentioned on a recent episode of This American Life. I saw at least one other person on Good Reads who referenced it.

I worked at the Rosenfeld Management Library at UCLA in the last half of the 1990s, when we converted from a card catalog to an online version. There was a great gnashing of teeth amongst the old-timers and the new traditionalists. As much as I loved the old cards, the new system is really much more accessible and easy to use.

I was one of the people who pulled cards from the books as we checked them out, and added barcode after barcode. I was one of the people who oversaw the dismantling of the old way of doing things. It was kind of sad.

A small beautiful wooden card catalog from the management library’s Special Collections room lives in my pantry now. Rather than cards it holds baby food bottles filled with spare nails, screws and house parts.