In California: partly cloudy and warm (he, he)

Thanks for turning the forcast upside down and letting me have this day of sun, clouds and breezy warm air! To whomever accomplished this miracle: I am grateful.

I haven’t the time to write much, but I’m hoping the few shots, favoring what most delights me right now (fruits and flowers), will satisfy.

the first signs of Berkeley: two rain-washed faces looking out... 

Paradise flowers in the front yard 

Winter garden: a lemon, a blue sky, blooming fruit trees 

A February garden 

limes at the Monterey Market, after a morning rain 

Buckets on Shattuck 

strawberry prices I'd like to see in Madison 

looking out from Chez Panisse: a saffron gate or the Golden Gate?

Chez Panisse: Quinault River Steelhead baked in the wood oven with braised cabbage and Meyer lemon 

From Cody's, looking out on Berkeley hills 

In California: wet and ch-ch-ch-chilly

Why "Newark" (the place of my overnights)? Perhaps it is named thus because the immigrants from the east, as always, felt a lack of imagination when naming the new promised land and so they brought with them names of places they remembered with great nostalgia.

Perhaps not.

I am in the middle of Silicon Valley so my cabbie told me last night. My kind hosts -- let me call them Mary and Tom (for one thing, these are their names), are techie-bio-sciencie-engineering types. For once I thought blogging would be a breeze.Not so. Here in Silicon-valley-land (if that is where I am) the phone lines have too little juice to push forward a single post. I could publish from a tiny village in Umbria, from the hilly heights of Ravello, from the mountains of Nagano, from the desert of Arizona, but in Silicon Valley I am stumped.

Not to worry. Today I head out of the valley and into the Bay area with computer in hand.

(P.S. I can already tell what sentence I am likely to hear again and again on this trip: "it's never this wet and cold in mid-February, never!" Maybe this whole sunny California thing is a myth. Maybe they actually have terrible weather here this time of the year but they never admit it to those of us in the upper Midwest who struggle with surviving winter.)

(P.P.S. The triple posting from last night -- now corrected and removed -- is an indication of how my partnership with blogger has worked thus far out here on the west coast. Please be patient with any or all posting errors. It's going to be a challenge to get this right.)

In California: wet and warm-ish

I think my computer has a dependency problem. In Denver, it begged to be removed from the case, lovingly to be touched at the Wi-Fi points (basically the airport is one big internet café), then, again, as I arrived in Newark (yes, the odd thing is that I am staying in Newark, California), out it came and dialed itself up to life.

Would it be odd to visit with my mother in Berkeley tomorrow and blog at the same time, given that she does not know about blogs? And how about at lunch time, if I get inspired to comment on the food?

California – it’s a forward looking state, isn’t it? A blogger should feel right at home.