Very Full Day (Roadtrip, Part 5)

Friday, August 5th, 2011. First we had some meeting-efriends-in-real-life: we went to see R&R in Grass Valley. We know each other through our blogs, and email; when they were blogging from Port Hadlock they were in my mind when I made up my mind to move from the desert to the Northwest; and the parallels and commonalities in our personal histories are practically scary.

They took us on their morning walk, up along ditches, and past meadows, and by a reservoir, and over a fence and home again. I had a violent allergy attack up there. The woods were full of kitkidizze (Chamaebatia foliolosa), a smell I remembered from all those decades ago—'asparagus', said V; 'bug spray', say I—, and it pleases me to think that's what made me sneeze, though there's no reason to assume it. After the walk, sweets and/or bagels and much talking.

Then we had to stop back home because we had forgotten I forget what :-| , and soon were on our way up CA20, destination Grouse Ridge. We stopped in Bear Valley just before getting on the forest access road, to study the map. Traipsed across the meadow through tall grass over to the bank of the Bear River, a place V. used to run away to when it's hot the way I used to run away to the Pecos River when I lived in the desert. Lots of seeds and stickers in the grass, made the dog sneeze and trashed my socks. We detoured to a rock outcrop with grinding pits worn into it. By the small deep shape, thought to have been for grinding pigment rather than food, but V. didn't know exactly what they would have been grinding, and I forgot to ask just who they would have been...

Pigment grind pits on outcrop overlooking Bear Valley (Click for larger image.)

So, then, up and up. Up Forest access road 18 and up forest access road 14, until it turned out the road was blocked by snow (in August!).

Forest on Grouse Ridge near where we parked. It was selectively logged some time ago, and looks good. (Click for larger image.)

Some big fierce vehicles had bullied on past the first or second or third snowdrifts, but sooner or later all the backpackers and the daytrippers each found a place to park and started walking from however far they had gotten.

Grouse Ridge Campground area, vicinity of 7600' (Click for larger image.)Sanford Lake (Click for larger image.)

We didn't make it to the lookout, there was a lot of snow in the woods. (The dog loved it, racing up the snowbanks then wriggling and shimmying down on her back.) But there we were, up up up there, lakes and granite in all directions.

Grouse Ridge, looking north and west: Island Lake, Feeley Lake, Carr Lake

It was properly alpine, sure enough.

Grouse Ridge overlooking Sanford Lake to the East

Then we turned around and came home, down through the woods to the car, down down down the forest roads to the highway; tired, sunblasted, (perhaps a little crabby), ever so satisfied.

Where we were:

Map of Grouse Ridge area (Click for larger image.)

Overview for August 4 and August 5th, putting towns and highways and two full days in the not-very-far-backcountry into context, thank god for acmemapper and I sure wish I would have seen this ahead of time, I'dve been way less confused for the whole three days...:

Overall map (Click for larger image.)

That's quite a neighborhood you have, VMW.

Three Nights in Northeast Nowhere (Roadtrip, Part 2)

Cedarville, California, July 31-August 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)The Warner Mountains (Click for larger image.)

SA was my first boss at Santa Fe Public Library, back 26 or so years ago. ("My claim to fame is that I hired her," she told the librarian at the village library when she introduced us.) Now she's an online bookseller in distant Cedarville, California, elevation 4,300 feet, population 514; the internet and the Post Office are the poles of her work life. I slept in her book room. (They call it 'the sun room', which it was before being walled in for books.)

Views of the guest room... (Click for larger image.)

We hung around, and ran errands, looked out the windows at the fields and the fruit trees and the dry mountains, and went into town every day, and talked books and libraries and the book biz and computers and all. Each evening she checked her email for orders, and ran around the shelves locating what the patrons requested; and every morning she packed books and we'd go in town to mail them. We spent a lot of time watching the cats; and the deer, who came in bunches, with many spotted fawns (MC calls them 'The Bambis'), to feast on the clover patch and the fruit trees.

A Bambi (Click for larger image.)
Surprise Valley & Warner Mountains. Still bits of snow on Eagle Peak. This year the field next door is in grain, previous two summers in alfalfa. (Click for larger image.)

Getting out of the house with nonstop talking going on, and both host and guest's patterns disrupted by the visiting process, is somewhere between comic and tragic at our age. Forgotten wallets, forgotten baskets of books to mail, where is my whatever, oh god now I can't find this other thing. Happened both with SA, and later on in the week with VMW. Oh it's mortifying.

On Monday we drove over the mountains to Alturas, so I could meet SA's friend SM, whom I have known now for many years via our blogs and via email, and had never met. It was awkward for barely a moment, then we talked like the familiar friends we actually are.

On Tuesday the big event of the day was Senior Lunch at the Senior Center. SA is part of the crew who sets up and serves and cleans up. I met everybody, and ate (was directed to the table for the younger seniors, not the table for the older seniors),and listened to what people talked about, and won beaucoup admiration points for washing dishes—the molded plastic trays, the steam tray pans the food comes in (it is prepared at the community clinic), and so on. The pinochle game regulars settled in while we cleaned up. We went on about our errands. We delivered a couple of Gary Snyder books to someone who might be interested in buying them; he kept them to look at, later phoned to say he wanted to buy them. We visited the library and the weaving shop and the store, and mailed books and drove the handful of streets among the little houses.

Frontier has given up trying to fix the pay phone. (Click for larger image.)

Everywhere we went, everyone greeted each other by name. I missed a chance to take a photo of a kid on horseback right at the 4-corner intersection. I mailed @lagina two blurry postcards of local views, and my sister a postcard of the twice-a-year cattle-drive through town, when cowpersons on horseback move the herds from summer pasture up in the Warner Mountains to wherever the winter pasture leases are (didn't quite understand that part). SA had me take her portrait in front of the post office, as I had done 10 years ago when I visited.

It was a long wet winter and cool spring. Relative to being up there in the high desert, everything was very green. "The hotel is for sale," I said. "Is it open?" "It's open. It's always for sale."

Hotel. Library. (Click for larger image.)

On Wednesday morning after coffee and talking and a slow start, set off down the highway to Nevada City, for further visiting.

Jeez

Twitter's been broken for about an hour. I feel, uh, muffled. Hello world, are you there? I can't hear you.

Electronic Woe

Letting twitter tell it (Click for readable image.)

Dropped off PC at the shop this afternoon. They'll tell me tomorrow if files retrievable. Prob'ly not.

Books

Continuing to contemplate my web presence, privacy (both my own and working in a place that is not mine to tell about), and so on. Tried a new social medium, gingerly, and am already over my head. Meanwhile, lying low as I came home with a spectacular head cold, and my inner ears definitely did not fly well.

LibraryThing is bragging on its new widget. Let's see:

In Brief (139 Characters)

hard frost on everything this morning. blue sky. the ocean is calling. no posts on beachbunny journal for a week. displaced by twitterlife?

Today

Addressing a number of important topics, in the 140 character form (Click for larger image.)

There Is No Shelf

Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State, who last year brought us The Machine is Us/ing Us, have a a new video, Information R/evolution. Ooooh they are slick. Made me laugh out loud. This one did too: A Vision of Students Today. Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography students, you rock.

No wonder I'm not ready to give up my profession. Too many things to think about.

Getting All My Input in 140-Character Bursts

At the moment, except for email I mostly just use Twitter for librarianly input, wandering off to the links people post, or to the posters' blogs, or the other links and blogs they point to. When I came back from Europe last week I sat here in a jet-lagged fog, gratefully re-submerging in the cheerful conversation almost always running somewhere out there among librarians. The 80-odd people whose posts come to my timeline feel near-enough like a community as they respond to each other, and to me, and to other people whose posts I never see. 'I missed you like crazy,' I posted when I got home.

One of the weekend's fun finds: a Web Trends 2007 map, which its makers tell us is built on a map of the Tokyo subway system. (Twitter is on the blue Social Networks line, and on the dotted Insiders line.) Lo-Fi Librarian posted it to Twitter, and to her blog, along with a bunch of other very interesting topics. Today's fun (somewhat librarianly): Grand March of the Librarians, a video made at last month's ALA convention. I found it by wandering from from one of DesertLibrarian's twitter posts to her blog, Random Musings from the Desert; thence to Hedgehog Librarian's blog. She'd found the video on Michael Stephens' Tame the Web. Do you see how it goes, reading around and following links?

Several people attending the Techsource Gaming, Libraries and Learning Symposium this weekend were sending tweets via text throughout some of the sessions, giving quotes and links and getting excited about what they were hearing. Gaming in libraries? Yikes, My Former Place of Work certainly knows zilch about the world of gamers... Two different twitterers passed on the remark of a teen panelist, "my teachers tell me to use official sites that end in .gov but who are u going to trust? The government or the people?" And people tweeted many quotes from Eli Neuburger as he presented, two simultaneously giving us "there are more gamers than recreational readers at your library".

I could sit here all day, wandering from topic to topic, librarian blog to librarian blog, and throwing the links and webpages into del.icio.us as I go so I'll remember to get back to them. There's a human computation project called Galaxy Zoo "the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be" which Neil Stewart blogged about in the context of social media. The project hopes to use crowds of internet volunteers to visually classify a million galaxies. Or, did you know there are libraries in Second Life? And onward... If I were still blogging for the library, there could be a whole array of topics and trains of thought which have floated by from emails and twitter postings, what KGS calls "Link Love"; I miss the happy pretense that of course the library's readers are interested in whatever I'm thinking about.