Category Archives: Sense of place

Hummingbird babies

The Anna’s Hummingbird who is nesting next to our main worship space has hatched two babies:

The photo above is far from perfect — the light level is low necessitating a relatively long exposure, and the babies won’t keep still even when I ask them politely. Nevertheless, you should be able to see the bill of one pointing to the left, and the bill of the other one at the right of the nest pointing toward and above the camera; the bills are quite a bit shorter relative to the body than the bill of a mature hummingbird. The baby on the left has its wing spread out over the top of the nest, and you can see the fine white and black pattern of the developing primary feathers.

Spring watch

The front page of the sports section of the San Mateo County Times features a big picture from the Giants’ exhibition opener in the cactus league, and there’s almost a full page of baseball coverage inside. Spring — real honest-to-goodness spring, not this year-round flower-laden pseudo-springtime we have to put up with in the Bay area — can’t be far behind.

Personal to Ms. M: Don’t worry, I won’t be wearing black and orange just because I’m living on the Peninsula; I’m still an AL guy.

Getting distracted

“It’s four o’clock,” I said, “the train will be here soon.” Carol started to get out of the car, and then said, “Oh look!” and pointed at the rainbow. It was low in the sky, and quite vivid.

She ran off to catch her train. I started driving back to the office, and managed to miss my turn because I was looking at the rainbow, which had faded and had lost the top of its arch.

I drove around in one of those suburban tracts where you can never go in the direction you think you want to go. I was a little bit embarrassed that I had gotten lost because I was looking at a rainbow; rainbows are so wonderful that they’re trite; little kids like rainbows; I’m sure the other adults who driving around didn’t bother looking at the rainbow, although they might have had a little kid in a car seat who pointed at it.

Eventually I got back on the right road again. I came back to the office, and didn’t think about the rainbow until just now.

Nothing better

I’ve got nothing better to do
than stare out the window:
the gray clouds not moving,
the planes landing at SFO,
the cherry blossoms waving in the wind,
the rooftops doing nothing.

I’ve got nothing better to do
than to listen to nothing:
a stereo booming in a car stopped out front,
a clock keeping Eastern Standard Time,
a computer fan whirring,
a crow idly cawing about nothing in particular.

Nothing better to do
than nothing.

Nest

Alan said, “Did you see the hummingbird nest?” I hadn’t seen it, couldn’t go see it right away, but finally after the second worship service went to see. The nest was in a shrub right next to one of the doors to the Main Hall; there was a female Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) in the nest, sitting on two eggs….

Click on image above for full 2660×1393 pixel image.

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Crab season

Carol and I both noticed the sign in Trag’s supermarket: cooked and cracked Dungeness crabs at $4.99 a pound; winter is crab season in the Bay area. We asked the man behind the counter how big a crab to get, and he said, “Sounds like you haven’t bought a crab before.” We said we had just moved from the Massachusetts coast. “Oh yeah, lobster and all that,” he said. He picked out a crab, cracked the legs, and wrapped it up for us. We took it home and ate it right away…

Carol had never had Dungeness crab before; I’d only had it once in a restaurant. We ate the whole crab in one sitting. It’s better than lobster, with a lighter, more delicate flavor (and no icky green stuff in the guts that you have to decide whether eat or throw away).

Rainy season

Thanks to El Niño, we’re getting a string of winter storms this week: high winds, cloudbursts, lightning, threats of flooding. The San José Mercury News reported at midnight last night that “effects [of yesterday’s storm] on the Peninsula were mostly minor, but widespread.”

I woke up yesterday to find that power had gone off briefly last night. The commute from San Mateo to Palo Alto was long and slow. It was raining lightly when I left San Mateo, just hard enough to run the windshield wipers. In Belmont and Redwood City, there was no rain but the announcer on the radio said there was heavy rain in the Mid-Peninsula. Within five minutes, I had driven into a cloudburst: the windshield wipers could not keep up with the rain even at the fastest setting; lightning lit up the sky; the road was an inch deep in water; and with the exception of a few idiots who chose to risk hydroplaning, traffic crawled along at 30 miles an hour. South of University Avenue in Palo Alto, the rain stopped.

I’d guess we got well over an inch of rain in the morning, most of it in a few heavy downpours. In the middle of the day, we saw the sun for a brief moment before dark clouds rolled in over the coastal range and let loose another heavy shower which turned the church’s rose garden into a two-inch deep pool of water. The rain has tapered off now, but the weather service predicts that a low pressure system will move into our area over the weekend, bringing “substantial rainfall, and with the ground already saturated hydro problems are possible.” That means more creek flooding is expected.

I wouldn’t wish flooding on anyone — but speaking as a New England expatriate, I’d rather have El Niño flooding than ice storms, blizzards, and hurricanes.

A little earthquake

Day off from work. I was sitting and reading, eating a late breakfast, when I felt our house begin to shake gently. It went on for a good 2-3 seconds, long enough for me to start thinking about ducking under the table. Then it was over. If I hadn’t been sitting and reading I could easily have missed feeling it entirely.

USGS Web site says it was magnitude 4.1 quake centered somewhere around Milpitas.

In the church

There was a memorial service in our church this evening for a woman who died in her senior year of college. An hour and a half after the service was over, I went into the Main Hall to start turning out lights. Two women, contemporaries of the woman who had died, were sitting in the back of the church. They looked up at me, and got ready to go.

“You don’t have to go yet,” I said. “I’m just turning out some of the lights to save electricity.”

They sat back down. “It’s a peaceful place,” one of them said.

I left them alone, but kept thinking about what they had said. The Main Hall at the Palo Alto church is a pleasant enough room in 1950s-style architecture. I tend to think of it from a very pragmatic standpoint: how we’re going to do Sunday worship, how we can arrange the chairs so everyone can see and hear, here’s what needs to be fixed, here’s what we could do to increase functionality. With my pragmatic bent, I can forget that it is indeed a sacred place:– that even though it is a room of no great architectural distinction, people who walk into it for the first time sense something special about the place, and respond to that by feeling soothed and perhaps more centered.

Even though churches are privately owned and maintained, they are public places. One of the central purposes of a local congregation is to keep the literal and metaphorical space open so that people can walk into it and feel soothed and more centered.