A Flower near Cabrillo Light Station

Flower
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

I noticed this while taking photos of the light station just north of Mendocino. It was alone. No others were to be seen.

Can anyone identify it?

Navarro Vinyards

Navarro Vineyards
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

One day, while Katherine was in her drawing class in Mendocino, I took a wine tour nearby in Anderson Valley. This snapshot shows how beautiful Northern California can be.

A week in Mendocino

Mendocino Headland
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

Katherine took a 5 day long painting workshop at the art center in Mendocino this June. That gave us another chance to check out the restaurant scene in the evening and for me to take photographs during the day. This is the headland (promontory) upon which Mendocino is located as seen from Russian Gulch State Park, some miles to the north.

As for the restaurant scene, Cafe Beaujolais still has the best food in the area by a hair. However the ambiance is poor and the service less than exciting. Everything considered, Albion River Inn is a much better choice. It has a good ocean view, a pleasant all round ambiance, and good service.

Moose Cafe continues to impress us as a simple but gastronomically sophisticated place for lunch.

Camping in the Sierras

Plumas Camping Trip
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

Recently, my son John and I took my grandchildren Alexander and Nicky camping and fishing for the first time. We went to Plumas National Forest in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. John does wildlife surveys there, so he knows it like the back of his hand.

This was an extremely successful trip. The good news is that each kid caught a large rainbow trout. Each trout was about 17 inches long and I would guess weighed about 2 1/2 pounds. The bad news is that the kids have yet to learn that years will probably pass before either catches as large a trout again.

The Pearl Fishers

This evening we were joined by daughter Nancy and her friend Janet for dinner at Indigo followed by the San Francisco Opera presentation of The Pearl Fishers by Georges Bizet. This wonderful opera is a favorite of mine but it is rarely produced. This is the first time that I have heard a live performance. And, what a performance! Charles Castronovo was spectacular as Nadir, the ballet was created for this production by John Malashok, and vivid sets were designed by Sandra Rhodes.

This was the kind of evening that makes us glad to live in the San Francisco Bay area.

The 9th

This evening we attended a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 by the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. This was the second best performance that I have heard. The best being Guilini conducting the 9th with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Roger Wagner Chorale thirty years or so ago.

The soloists this evening were outstanding: Twyla Robinson, soprano; Gigli Mithchell-Velasco, mezzo-soprano; Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor; and Raymond Aceto, bass. I can not think of how they could be improved upon.

We are very lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay area.

OS X Tiger

I have used the new incarnation of Apple's Macintosh operating system for about a week. A few initial impressions:

The Finder, the Dock, and other features of OS X that I have learned to rely on are still there. You don't have to learn a new way of doing things if you do not want to. The new "Dashboard" and its "Widgets" are cute and handy. Widgets are a flavor of desk accessories - a calendar, calculator, dictionary, yellow pages, phone book, yellow sticky notes, etc. Eventually, third party developers will come up with some creative and unexpected accessories.

"Spotlight" the new search engine to find anything in your computer is excellent, but not the quite the birth of a new age in computing that the press has talked about. I did not have a very hard time finding things in the past. Spotlight might be a big help for Katherine though.

From my perspective, the major improvement is in "Mail", the e-mail program. It still has the same deceptively simple user interface. However, it has secretly become a full scale contact manager. It will print envelopes from Mail's address book. It will print labels. (Every conceivable Avery label sheet is an option.) It will dial the telephone number of your contact using your cell phone. It will send the telephone numbers of your contacts to your cell phone. It is not readily apparent, but you can create different categories and labels for your contacts to find and sort them. In short, it will do everything that my old contact manager (which is an OS X version of Claris's "Organizer" of fifteen years ago) can do. I can now migrate completely to "Mail" and stop maintaining two address books. This is worth the price of the upgrade all by itself.

(Converting information from your old address book, phone book, contact manager, etc. is much easier and error free than you might think. Veterans of yesteryear's computer wars can remember trying to convert by exporting text files in a certain order and then importing in the same order. That never quite worked perfectly. Then there were conversion programs. They either did not work quite right or the conversion program for your particular brand of address book was not available. The vCard standard changes all of this. Export the contents of your old address book as a file of vCards. Then import the vCards into "Mail". Everything is converted seamlessly.)

Are there any drawbacks to Tiger? I have only noticed one. Sometimes there is a very brief delay in opening a new window with a list of files. I did not notice this in the Panther or Jaguar operating systems that preceded Tiger. I suspect that a future free operating system upgrade will take care of this.

Citizen Cake

We had dinner at Citizen Cake last evening before the symphony. Now I understand why it is difficult to get reservations. I had a soft shell crab salad and Catalan Seafood Stew. The salad was simple: one fried soft shell crab, one mound of sliced and marinated cucumbers, one mound of watercress, and a pool of aioli on a plate. The stew was more complex, a combination of shrimp, baby calimari, mussels, white beans, and pork chop in a transparent, saffron colored, stock. Fabulous! Frankly, it was superior to any bouillabaisse or cioppino that I can remember.

As you might expect from the name of the restaurant, the desert menu was stunning. The choices were:

"Strawberry Pavlova" Walnut date strudel, halva ice cream, ouzo syrup, and candied olives

"Purple Rain" Warm purple corn polenta with avocado ice cream, purple corn ice cream, and mango

"Cherry Pain Perdue" Chocolate Mayan spiced ice cream, brioche, and cocoa nib croquant

"Bananas Foster Parfait" Banana bread croutons, vanilla caramel swirl ice cream, coffee gelee, cinnamon sabayon, and saute'ed bananas

Chocolate hazelnut petite gateau, coffee ice cream, and poached apricots

Rose petal creme brulee with saffron cookies.

These were prepared by one Executive Pastry Chef and three Dessert Chefs. That may be a larger staff than prepared the main part of the meal. Taken as a whole, this restaurant is "over the top".

The Cleveland

The Cleveland Orchestra was in San Francisco this evening. They played a simple program: Dvorak's Symphony Number 5 and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. The Dvorak was pleasant, but I eagerly looked forward to the Concerto for Orchestra, one of my favorite pieces.

When it was performed, I was puzzled. The sound of the orchestra was wonderful. Each individual instrument was excellent. (Great piccolo!) However, the piece as a whole did not sound like Bartok to me. The Hungarian gypsy quality was missing in the melodic sections. I look forward to reading Joshua Koshman's review in the Chronicle.