Picnic in the Vineyards

 

Last Friday the Geek and I met with our friends P and B for a lovely picnic in the vineyards. We had thought about that for quite some time and finally we could settle on a date that worked for all of us. We chose to go to Navarro Vineyards in the beautiful Anderson Valley.

Navarro Vineyards is a family owned small winery that has been making wine since 1974. Most of their wines is not available in stores, but can be  purchased directly in their tasting room or through their website. We have been drinking their wines for several years now and we have yet to find a wine of theirs that we don't like. The winery is located in Anderson Valley in Mendocino County, away from the crowded Wine Country hype in Sonoma and Napa Counties. This results in no tasting fee, more affordable wines and less crowds, so reservations are not required. There is ample space to sit and sip some wine or have a decent picnic with a bottle or two of their wine that can be purchased in the tasting room.

We had our picnic right at the edge of the vineyards under the wisteria cover.

Our table was covered with a lot of tasty food that the four of us had brought from home.

I had baked a whole wheat bread, which was delicious with red pepper aioli and smoked ham.

You can see that we had a wonderful time!

Let's see what kind of drinks we can find for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday: a bottle of Rosé of Grenache, a bottle of Pinot Gris, several re-usable bottles of water and grapefruit juice and a glass bottle of Gerolsteiner sparkling water (I simply refuse to buy sparkling water in plastic bottles which leaves only German and French sparkling water). The food we had included meatballs, smoked salmon, several cheeses, bread, red pepper aioli, tuna bowl, chocolate and vanilla pudding, blueberries, peaches and tomatoes from my garden. It was a feast!

Navarro not only has vineyards, but also beautiful gardens with mainly drought-tolerant or native plants. I found some inspiration for my garden. Roses right next to a vineyard is something you see often here.

We stayed in the vineyards for three and a half hours. We decided to drive back along the coast, via Highway 1 - THE ONE, as my husband would say. It certainly is THE ONE for us - one of the most beautiful roads that hugs the California Coast in an often spectacular way.

We stopped at Point Arena Lighthouse, at 115 ft (35 m) the tallest lighthouse on the west coast of the US. It is also the closest location in the lower 48 to Hawai'i at a distance of about 2,350 miles (3780 km) (you always wanted to know that, right?). The first Point Arena Lighthouse was constructed in 1870, but was damaged in the Great Earthquake of April 18, 1906. The current lighthouse that is built to withstand earthquakes began operation on September 15, 1908. It features a 1st Order Fresnel Lens (built in France) that is made up of 258 hand-ground glass prisms. These prisms are all focused toward three sets of double bulls eyes which gave the lighthouse its unique light "signature" of two flashes every six seconds (that was before the installation of an automated aircraft-type beacon on the tower balcony in June 1977). This is probably more information than you ever wanted...

This is a very windy, often cold location, but oh! so beautiful. I never get tired of it, and I have been here many times in the past 22 years. The geology is interesting and just like at Salt Point, I wish I knew more about it. The Coast Buckwheat (Eriogonum latifolium), a California native, is found in abundance here.

This is also close to where the infamous San Andreas Fault (the bad boy of 1906) dips into the ocean.

I leave you with a last picture of the lighthouse and the interesting fence that was built just a few years ago. Before that, there was a white picket fence. For this fence, older growth mica schist hand split flagstone material from the Mojave desert was used. From a distance it looks like wood, but as you apporach it looks more like a thick jagged stone wall.

May a light shine throughout your week.

Solar Art

Lacking some real art of my own for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date, I turn to the solar light I recently bought for my garden.

This decorative solar lantern is made from durable Tyvek® material and is weather resistant in rain as well as in snow (which we don't really have here). While the lantern looks beautiful on its own, its true magic shows up in the dark hours when illuminated patterns appear on the ground.

Isn't that pretty? I know it doesn't quite fit Rain's theme of "silhouettes" this week, but maybe just a little bit - with a lot of imagination?

We're still having a lot of tomatoes, both from my garden and the farmers market. I'm not someone who uses tomatoes to make tomato sauce - a little bit, yes, but there are so many more ways to use tomatoes in delicious meals.

We love gnocchi. One of our favorite dinners is crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter. When I found a recipe for crispy gnocchi with burst tomatoes and mozzarella I thought I give it a try. It asks for small tomatoes and I had tons of them from the garden.

I only used half of the amount that is given in the recipe, and it turned out delicious. Cooking gnocchi directly in a pan without boiling them first leaves them crisp outside but chewy inside. It is heavenly. You can find the recipe here - it is from NYT Cooking, so for those of you who don't have a subscription the recipe is at the bottom of this post.

Over the past two and a half days we got a new roof. Those were noisy days, but the company's employees did a great job and cleaned up everything afterwards. My porch has never been that clean! We chose a local company since we believe in supporting local business. We also opted for light colored shingles for reflecting the light - it looks beautiful. The stanchions for the solar panels that will be installed toward the end of the year were already put in as well - another local company. Going solar has been on our radar for a long time and I'm glad that we finally took all the steps in the right direction.

Yesterday we got a stark reminder that we're living in earthquake country - at 6:39 pm, I had just started to make dinner, the ground beneath us woke up with a jolt and some very strong rumble, immediately followed by a second, weaker aftershock. We learned that the first quake was 4.4 and the second 3.9 - not much, but the epicenter was less than 3 miles from our home, therefore it felt much stronger. A few things fell down, nothing was damaged and I had the presence of mind to immediately shut off the stove. Our dinner was just delayed by about ten minutes. However, Otis, one of the permanent feline residents in my garden, took off like a rocket and I haven't seen him since. His owner told me later, that he showed up at her home, and that's where he should be anyway.

I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

Do you know this Carole King song? The title of the song became reality for us this past weekend. At 3:20 on Sunday morning precisely.

I had just woken up when seconds later I heard a rambling that grew louder, and the house started to shake, becoming more violent the longer it took. Both the Geek and I lay in our bed motionless until finally the spook stopped after a very long 20 seconds.

My first highly intelligent words were "Holy moly". And they were loud. Then we saw a bright flash outside, like some very strong lightning. Our first thought, of course, was our daughter, and we rushed across the landing to her room - I saw our big glass lamp over the staircase swinging from side to side. Kaefer had woken up during the shaking and rattling, "was that an earthquake?", when the second flash hit.

Of course we thought our power had gone out as it happens so often after an earthquake of that magnitude.

But to our surprise, we still had power; other neighborhoods in our city had not. The Geek then went around the house, looking for gas and water leaks. Nothing. We were more than grateful.

Our next move was to go to the USGS website and find out where the earthquake's epicenter was and how big it was. All we knew by then was that it was a bigger earthquake, bigger than anything we had felt in California so far (the biggest being 4.3) and also bigger than the earthquake I rode through while I was living in Taiwan in the early eighties, which was a 5.6 and pretty scary for me at that time (that one had also happened during the night).

The epicenter was in American Canyon which is about 25-30 miles from our home, as the crow flies. Its magnitude hit 6.0 on the Richter scale, some even say 6.1. A magnitude 6 temblor has a seismic energy yield of 15 kilotons, the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In other words, it is very powerful.

Napa was the place that was hit the hardest. Damage is estimated to be up to $ 1 billion. Fortunately, there weren't any deaths and only a handful of people who were seriously injured. We were lucky. This time.

Given that both Napa and Sonoma Counties are wine country, there was a lot of wine spilled. I know of stores in Napa that remained closed because every single wine bottle had fallen off the shelf. Some tourists were so spooked that they cancelled their wine tours and tastings, and headed back east instead. But as they say here - the show goes on.

As I already mentioned, we were lucky. If you live in California you know that the earth can move and shake under your feet, without any forewarning. Many of us are aware that the BIG ONE will happen sometime in the next 30 years - that can be next week, in five years or in twenty. We don't know. We only know that this one wasn't IT. Although it was the biggest earthquake in the Bay Area since the Loma Prieta earthquake (6.9) 25 years ago.

But we can be prepared. We have an emergency kit in our garage that contains a lot of water and food plus our camping gear (let's just hope the garage doesn't collapse). Batteries, flashlights, a radio. Blankets and a big tent.

I hope we will never need it.

The Second Girl - WIP

I'm late this week for Sneak Peek Friday over at JRU Studio. All morning I was reading and trying to get more information about the enormous earthquake and devastating tsunami in Japan. Living in earthquake country myself, every earthquake hits home with me. Christchurch in New Zealand only a short time ago, and now Honshu. My heart goes out to the people in Japan, my thoughts are with them.

Therefore, I went to my blog only half-hearted and then decided to leave it all together. In the afternoon, my husband's company had an Open House for the families of the employees, there were tours and demonstrations about the products they are developing. Interesting enough, they talked about GPS that have the ability to measure along fault lines that can trigger earthquakes like the San Andreas fault. I wish there was a device that could give us an early enough warning of earthquakes, more than just a few seconds (although, if you get a signal for example through a special tone on your cell phone, 10 seconds would be enough to dug under a desk - an early warning system, by the way, that is already practised in Japan and unique in the world).

Compared to this disaster, my efforts of creating some art appear meaningless and small. I was struggling all day whether I should even blog about it and then decided to do it, against all odds.

This is my second girl I'm creating as a result of the She Art Workshop by Christy Tomlinson that I am currently taking and that gives me so much joy (you can find my first girl here). As you can see, this is a work in progress, the girl is not even glued down. I enjoyed making the background on a 10x10 canvas and getting my hands dirty again. I think what I really like about this work is how my hands are getting into the paint, how messy they get, it's downright dirty and incredible satisfactory. Honestly, I feel like a child who got permission to play in the mud to her heart's desire. I used some stamps (the houses, tree and flower heads) because I'm not good at drawing/painting (which would be the right word?), paper and acrylic paints. Next I'll work on the girl; I wonder how she will turn out in the end. I'm a slow worker, I really enjoy the process.

Actually - I'm really glad I blogged about this. Somehow I feel better now. Thank you for your patience.