Cracked Earth

It's been some time since we had rain, the ground is dry & cracking, has been for some time.

I was noticing the cracks for awhile, it was odd, the grass was still green & the ground was cracked.

In a lot of northern California there are two seasons, the brown one & the green one.  This green grass with dried, cracked ground confused me. (I will admit that this is not a great picture of the grass & crack but it's what I had.)

Now that we have some time off there are a couple of farmer's markets we planned to go to, the first Wednesday one was supposed to start this Wed, because of the heat they canceled it. There is another market Thursday evening, we have hopes for making that one. The big Saturday market in downtown Des Moines is still going but so is work for us...

Just for something different here is the new Facebook data center going up, they expect it to be operational in 2014

The little & not so little things around me....

Treasure Hunting Dreams

The 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet book by Kip Wagner equals treasure hunting in Florida dreams.

Way back in high school I read a book "Pieces of Eight" by Kip Wagner. It was an early '60s story about a guy in Florida who found a sunken Spanish treasure galleon that sank in a storm in 1715.

The story stuck with me....

Now I'm out and about doing things that interest me & things I've had on the back burner for years.  Walking those Florida beaches 'just in case' a Spanish Real-Eight silver coin has washed up is one of the things I want to do.  My house has wheels.

As this job gets closer to an end I was thinking "what next' & that lead to thinking about that book I read decades ago. The thought that maybe I should read it again crossed my mind... The local library does not have it so I went to the motherload of instant gratification, the coyote's Acme Catalog in real life, I went to Amazon.com!

They had it, it's a collectors item it seems and it's not available as a Kindle (electronic)... bummer. I then went to Abebook.com to see if it was around as a used book & it was!  A few minutes with the key board, debit card & it's on the way! Not "Want it tomorrow?" like on Amazon but soon enough.

It's 1400 miles to the part of A1A in Florida I want to get to and there are a lot of places I'd like to see betwixt here & there. This particular treasure hunting dream has waited 45 years, it can wait a while longer. But now I can read the book again!

Isn't there supposed to be an "X" on the treasure?

Happy Last Friday!

I'm a sucker for VW buses & good signs, this has both!

My workcamping job is going from 7 days a week with it's 6 day work week to just weekends.






Come Monday I don't have to go to work until Saturday, it's been a long 3 months of 6 day work weeks...

I'm looking forward to this forced unpaid vacation.

This 2 day work week will last until the end of September then we are done. I'm ready!

We still have to decide what to do next .... 

That's a good problem to have....

Down by Santa Cruz

 A December sunset not too far south of  Santa Cruz California

My Ever Changing Neighborhood

I live in a good sized camp ground owned & operated by an amusement park/hotel. It's not bad, I work at the amusement park.

For a long time this campground had a lot of empty spots, a fair portion has work campers but there were a lot of empty spots. Some weekends it would start to fill up and then empty out, it was a cycle.  This week the state fair is going on, it's a popular attraction in this area and this park is filling up.

I went for a walk around my neighborhood, from very few neighbors to a lot over night.  Kids riding bikes & babies crying, the odor of wood smoke & bbq and laugher everywhere.
A neighborhood of people who left home to live in their smaller home on wheels for a few days.... Tents too.

It's different to think of a camp ground as your neighborhood but your neighborhood is what it is.

Another case of what you see is what you get

What the body needs is what the body needs

I've been eating lunch at work for months now, it's usually good. There is some sort of special every day and there is always an option of a hamburger, hot dog, mashed potatoes with gravy (or not) or simple sandwiches. For example the special today was pork loin & macaroni/cheese and every Monday it's fried chicken, Tues is pizza, Wed varies, etc. It's not bad & not spendy (I have eaten more fried chicken in the last few months than I've had in the last 30 years <g>).
For just about the whole time along with what ever was for lunch I had a "salad bowl" too.  Shredded lettuce, tomatoes, onions & whatever I wanted to put on it. Every day.

For the last week or so I'd been going by the salad bar without stopping, today I noticed that I wasn't stopping for salad.

I thought about it, I'd been eating a salad at lunch every day for months and I suddenly stopped...and I didn't notice I'd stopped, what changed?
Then it came to me, I'd been having a small 1 serving can of V8 Juice every morning for "awhile". 

I tried it one morning sometime back, it was cold & tasted good. I read the label, a full daily serving of the recommended vegetables.
I figured I didn't eat well anyway, the juice was good and it wasn't going to hurt me, so I started having a can every morning.  As a plus there was 19% of the recommended salt for a day! <vbg>.

Today, this morning about eleven I noticed I had been skipping the salad and thought about it, it didn't take long to connect the dots.

I guess my body needed vegies.... What the body needs is what the body needs.

I'd read about the Fabled Lost City Of Eldorado, who'd have guessed it was in Kansas?