Night Photography by the Lake

While walking in the grass last night near the Lakeview Library in Oakland, the REM song, "Night Swimming" came into mind, especially the first verse.

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night.
The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago,
Turned around backwards so the windshield shows.
Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse.
Still, its so much clearer.
I forgot my shirt at the waters edge.
The moon is low tonight.


As I do with many songs, I tried to change a few words to make the lyrics match my current activity. One would never go swimming in Lake Merritt as it is pretty gross with pollution and bird crap. We were carrying our cameras and I played around with the words "Night shooting, deserves a quiet night." Although all we were doing was taking photographs, the reality of gun violence is too great here. In fact, after we got home last night, we were watching some KQED short videos and we thought that we had heard a gun shot somewhere in the neighborhood. With that event so fresh in my mind, I could not bring myself to title my post with such a saddening pun.

So where are the pictures that we took at night? Where are the streetlights? Where is the water's edge?

Well, happily and unfortunately, I'm currently in the middle of a reinstall of windows on my computer. My computer is now lightning fast with turning on and shutting down. But, I haven't installed any of the photo processing software and since I haven't learned macbook language yet, I can't use Grant's computer. You'll have to wait a few days to see my pictures from the evening, but for now you can feast on the photos taken by our very talented friend Jane. And if you want to see more of her work, check out her webpage: Kilmer Photography.

Mid-Week Warriors

I stumbled upon this site while reading a blog and found this picture quite funny. So funny that I called Grant over to see it. This joke has kept with us for over a week now so I thought I would share it with you. This joke followed us to Sonoma Valley this week.

For those of you not familiar with California geography, I live in Alameda County (home of cities like Berkeley and Oakland). Across the bay, to the west, is San Francisco County. Just to the north of SF, over the Golden Gate Bridge is Marin County, where there are crazy amounts of breast cancer. Then just north of that is Sonoma County. To the east of Sonoma is the more well known Napa County, but we don't go there because it's a little too "touristy".

The highlights of the trip for me were our visits to Gloria Ferrer Champagne Caves and Sonoma Coast State Beach.

We have visited this winery twice before, once with Grant’s parents and once with two friends of Grant from his time in India. We visited this winery first on our trip north through the valley on Tuesday. We rolled in around 11:30am and decided that this would be our lunch spot. Gloria Ferrer doesn’t do “tasting” for their champagnes. So you either buy it by the glass or bottle. Usually we get a bottle, but since it was just the two of us, we opted for glasses. Grant got the Royal Curve and I got the Rose Brut. This was the best lunch that we have shared in quite a while. We were both so relieved to be out of the city. We haven’t been under too much stress, unless you think the act of figuring out how to best fill your time while on summer break as stressful. Still, it was so nice to be on a mission, checking off another summer goal on my list.

On the second day of our trip, we drove about an hour west from the valley to the ocean and spent the next two days wandering along the coast taking pictures with our twin cameras (that’s a good topic for another post, maybe I tell you tomorrow). It is so strange the feelings that arise when I am by the ocean. I didn’t necessarily want to go in it, in fact most of the beaches in Northern California are not really safe for swimming. But, like snow, the ocean just seems to be a place I need to go every now and then to remind me how life is like outside my city boundaries.

No matter how much fun I have on these trips, by the last day, I’m always ready to come back home. As we were crossing the Richmond Bridge (across the northern part of the bay) about 25 minutes from Oakland, I found myself signing to myself, “oh I want to be back in my city by the bay, whoa, oh, ohhhh.” Who can name that reference?

More picture of the trip can be found here.

In the Garden

I love this time of the summer when the fruit are actually changing colors and getting ready to be eaten. Click on the picture for more from our patio garden.

I'm Back

Well, sort of. You know how these things go. I've been having lots of trouble doing some things on the internet. Some websites have become such a great pest that I don't even try logging in to them very ofter because I get soooo frustrated. These include yahoo groups, myspace, and xanga. Each requires several presses of F5 to get anywhere. Yes this might just be our internet service (which I'm not sure where it comes from... somewhere in our apartment building)... or it might be some weird setting within firefox that I don't know how to fix... or it just might be my computer's own moral judgments about which websites are acceptable for my eyes (thank you, my loving lati610). So my xanga account is useless. And, most of the people that I subscribed to on xanga aren't blogging anymore, so I'm out. It's over (use the teen girl squad voice) there, but starting again here. More updates to come, well, sort of, you know how these things go.