Footnotes

We like it best in winter when things quiet down a bit. This is the Venetian Hotel in morning fog, a far cry from it’s sister hotel in Las Vegas.

The lagoon in front of the hotel is a seasonal thing. When the rains begin and Soquel Creek starts to run fast  out of the mountains, it cuts a deep channel to the ocean.

In the big storms, the waves wash right through the Venetian carrying off the garbage cans, planters and anything else that’s not tied down. I was here the day the waves crashed over the wharf. Yeah, I got wet.

Tags: santa cruz beach

I loved this place from the first time I saw it on the cliff at Pleasure Point.

The Road House was built in 1902 with a saloon on the first floor and on the second floor were beds for “extracurricular activities” as well as a massage parlor. Bootleggers buried their contraband liquor in the sand below the cliffs during the 1920s.

It was later converted into a grocery store equipped with a gas station, and the upstairs rooms served as a motel.

Then it became a loosely organized commune of students, surfers, and wanna-be film makers, tenants who tended to stay for years – sometimes decades.

The small cabins were rented out separately and the kitchen, bathrooms and toilets were all in the main house, just a few short steps across the gravel drive.

Many years before the Roadhouse was torn down, a sculptor moved in and built a beautiful iron piece that turned slowly of its own accord.

I was always especially fond of the flower and vegetable gardens that were planted everywhere and lovingly tended. This cabin, with the crooked tree, is where my friend Oren lived for years. Even after he started school at Berkeley, he kept this cabin for weekends.

A lot of people tried to save the Roadhouse from demolition. Hopes were high that it would become an historic building but it needed a lot of work and when the elderly woman who owned it passed it along to her realtor daughters, that was the fatal blow.

A 38,000 square foot lot on the cliff above the ocean, with an unobstructed view, is destined to become a condo community next door to the other condo community…just another pile of boxes crammed into the lot.

Whenever I visited my friends there the main house was always sparkling clean and dead quiet. In fact, I only saw one person in all the years that I trooped through the place.

I finally met the woman who lived on the top floor of what used to be the barn. She had a skylight and a completely open floor plan. She had been there for over twenty years. It shook and rattled in storm winds but that never bothered her.

More photos on Page 2

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Tags: santa cruz

I finally had a chance to go downtown today to pick up my stash of books. I could see that the stash had grown overnight. Some kind elf, who hadn’t been available when I went in the first time, had added a few books on stroke to my collection. I’m leaving on the 12th to go to Connecticut to help my sisters take care of my sister. The little munchkin had a near-fatal stroke on top of having long standing diabetes.

I picked up the Diabetes Association’s list of food exchanges…note the word “list”. It’s a paperback book 603 pages long. I also got the Diabetes Cookbook for Dummies, a fabulous resource, as well as the Eating Well Diabetes Cookbook.  I guess it’s apparent that I’ll be cooking. And yes, I did read that 603 page monster. I also chose Outsmart Diabetes because I’m an arrogant bitch who believes it can be done. We shall see.

It isn’t very often that I get out of a bookstore unscathed. There were a few other goodies on display that I just couldn’t resist. Julia Child’s little memoir, A Life in France, is delicious. I already started this one. Her sister never worried much about the quality of her French and she made some hysterically funny mistakes. For instance, she went to a hair salon and meant to say – would you like to cut my hair before or after the shampoo? Instead, what she said was – would you like to cut my horses before or after the mushrooms? Her car got rear-ended in Paris and the guy who hit her drove off. She chased him down in her car and cornered him right near a flic (cop). She popped up out of the open sun roof and screamed at the cop – this shit-man just spat out into my butt! I’m sure I’ve made similar mistakes and people were too kind to mention it.

In addition I couldn’t resist What Einstein Told His Cook – Kitchen Science Explained.

The Brain That Changes Itself. I figure this one can’t hurt since my sister is having to create new pathways to replace the ones that got killed in the stroke and I might find some material I can use.

Collapse – How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. This one is a bit depressing as it reveals the reasons behind the world’s great environmental collapses – Angkor Wat (I already knew about the bacteria in the water but not the whole story), the Mayans, the Anasazi, the Vikings,  even modern Montana in the Bitterroot Mountains. The author is the same who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond.

Frankly, I miss the library. It’s a closed a lot now that we’re broke. I thought I had enough books to last through the holiday, I took out fifteen but..in this house books are like chocolate – they go fast.

These kiosks were put in after the earthquake in 1989. They are one of my favorite changes made to Pacific Avenue. Even after all this time, there’s still one hole in the ground though where Bookshop Santa Cruz used to be.

The weather changed for the weekend. Sunny and warm. I’ve been checking out Crash’s recent temperature charts on his blog and when I see all of those minus signs I can’t help but remember the day I was in Minnesota to nanny my mother and the temperature dropped to minus 28 degrees.

Tags: Life, santa cruz

This is why I don’t Twitter. Here we go with my day. I checked my email and cleared spam from my blog. Then I went off to the Museum of Art and History to meet Marlene and Judy for a Cafe au Something at Lulu’s. Lulu’s has three locations and the man who owns this little local chain has pulled the plug on laptops. Batteries only. He felt that he was getting too many students, staying too long and not buying enough.

The Museum of Art and History – December 2009

After the museum, I stopped in at the bookstore and having forgotten my Xmas gift certificate, all I could do was leave my pile for a pick up tomorrow. Then I went grocery shopping.

I drove home and put away tomorrow’s dinner. There’s was a note from the mail person that we had missed him and we could pick up the box or call to have it re-delivered. It was my Mac mini. Gigi called to ask if I’d like to take a walk around the neighborhood and of course I did. What luck, we came across the mail truck and I captured my Mac. We’ll be going out for an early dinner in Capitola at the Stockbridge…the place on the bridge.

That’s it. Well, there is one interesting tidbit. Jim emailed a security consultant who said that once the Mac market hits 10% of the total market, Macs will be ripe for targeting and it’s only a matter of time. I live for that day. This is why I don’t Twitter. Ho hum stuff is best kept to oneself. It’s bad enough that I’ve blogged such an uninteresting day.

Tags: Life, santa cruz

Peter Callesen is a Danish artist who uses nothing more than a scalpel, paper and glue to make the most extraordinary three dimensional pieces. His site is worth a visit.

I would have done this sooner but I got hit again (twice this month) with digital filth and even though I keep back ups religiously, it’s a time consuming, boring job to re-load everything. Jim had just built me a new PC, faster and bigger, so I’m isolating this sweet thing from the web and we ordered a Mac mini for surfing the web. So, Happy Holidays everyone and thank you for coming here as often as you do.

The holidays began with making Christmas cookies, something I have never done. They came out ok.

Then we had  a lovely dinner with India, Rhod and the boys. There were British crackers on the table! Not only do they make a loud pop, there are treats inside, a little toy and a paper joke.

As always and along with a lot of other people, we took a walk after dinner along the cliffs on Depot Hill in Capitola. After a long cold spell earlier in the month, the weather turned gorgeous, sunny and warm.

Tags: Christmas, family, Life

Last year, I took part in a telephone survey.  I was sent a copy of “O” magazine (a rag I had never before read) and I was asked to read certain articles. As it turned out, the survey wasn’t about the articles, it was about Olay advertisements. I couldn’t remember having seen a single one even though I participated in the phone interview the same day as I read the magazine. When my attention was directed to specific adverts, I was highly critical of Olay’s use of trickery to get women to buy their crap. Not that it mattered.

I pointed out that they used teenage models to sell wrinkle cream to middle-aged women, models that still had to be photo shopped to make them plastic perfect.

“Send me some and I’ll use it for a month and we’ll take photos,” I said.

Of course I never heard from them.

Now the Twiggy-Olay advert is garnering some well deserved attention and complaints.

In the Olay advert, Twiggy doesn’t even look like Twiggy anymore, even the Twiggy from twenty years ago. They didn’t just get rid of her wrinkles, they whitened her teeth, pumped up the color saturation of her hair, got rid of the little pooch under her chin, the wrinkles on her neck and made her look like nobody in particular, but a young nobody.

During the interview I asked if Olay knew the definition of lying. (If the magic cream really is that good, why would they need Photo Shop?) Not that it mattered.

“Today the Advertising Standards Authority says in a ruling: ‘The post-production retouching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve. However, it added that most older women would understand that Twiggy’s youthful appearance was not solely achieved by using the Olay product.”

That’s a pretty subtle way of saying Twiggy’s youthful appearance was achieved by trickery.…or that Olay lies.

Tags: photo shop disasters

Not any more! It really is about time. There’s a new law that protects passengers who are grounded on the tarmac – no more hostage taking and the passengers have to be freed after 3 hours. The airlines are of course complaining that this will only make things worse. More canceled flights and greater inconvenience to the flying public. As it is, 613 flights were delayed more than 3 hours between January and June. That’s pretty inconvenient.

They also have to stop scheduling chronically delayed flights as well. That practice would have made it fairly inconvenient for travelers on a regular basis. That’s a skill I’d like to learn though.

I was on an inconvenient flight recently flying first class. The airline added an extra row of seats and the leg room was less than in coach. I couldn’t open my tray table at all if the passenger in front of me put his seat back even a bit.  I’m afraid I didn’t let him do that even once.

In the end, the airlines are  probably more concerned that they are now required to feed and water the livestock while they’re grounded on the tarmac, and keep the toilets clean.  We’ll have to wait and see how they use the loopholes. You can read the whole article in Star Tribune.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/travel/79819602.html

Tags: airline delays

Tiger Woods sleeps around. While Tiger Woods was sucking up media bandwidth like a California wildfire, scientists from ten countries announced that they have cracked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers – skin and lung.

Now, on a scale of one to ten, with 10 being a bit of information so exciting it would engorge all media and 1 being something so stupid nobody would believe it was news, how would you rate Tiger Woods and his wanderlust?

Scientists have begun to catalogue all of the genes that go wrong in many types of cancer. The UK took breast cancer, Japan the liver and India the mouth. China is studying stomach cancer and the U.S. is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas. Scientists found the DNA code for melanoma, a skin cancer containing 30,000 errors or mutations. This is pretty fabulous research and it deserves at least as much attention as …yes, Tiger Woods sleeps around.

Maybe if we called it the Tiger Woods International Cancer Genome Consortium this breathtaking achievement would get more media attention.

Being a cynical brat though I’m sure that by the time any cures come our way they will have been patented by big Pharm and most of us wont be able to afford even the co-pay.

So. Back to Tiger LustWoods.

Tags: cancer cure, Tiger Woods

There’s a garden shop in Half Moon bay that sells tumbled glass mulch. Glass mulch for your garden. I don’t know. I’d like to see it in a glass jar or a shallow bowl, but a whole path …it seemed a bit mulch to me. (Click to Zoom is still working though).

Tags: gardening, santa cruz