foodie joins sixtop foodblog

I've been graciously invited to contribute to the awesome food blog sixtop.wordpress.com
Check it out: http://wp.me/p16cp7-7K

At its heart, the blog celebrates local ingredients. Personally, I am finding inspiration from my own gardens, wooded yard filled with low bush blueberries, and the amazing produce and farm products already the rage and yet to be popularized right here in Nova Scotia.

Cheers.

Public Infrastructure

I'm used to seeing ugly, utilitarian, no-design public infrastructure. Here, even California highways have underpasses with design elements such as Gothic arches and cornices! 

Things overheard in the secret world

Waiting while my wife tries on clothes at White House/Black Market, I saw a glimpse into womens' dressing room subculture. A teenager tried on high heels, but commented "my calves look too muscular." The store clerk, also a teenaged girl (one of several), quickly reassured her customer, "You want to have muscular calves."

Walking through the dressing room and into this conversation, another store clerk say, "Did I just hear what I think I've heard?"
"Why are you talking about muscular cows," she said. "I may want fat cows, but not muscular."

"No. Calves," her co-worker blurted. "Her legs."

Here's where the foolish tourist ventures into the middle of a world in which he has no business, no value, and no skilled defences...

"If it makes you feel better," I say turning to the red-faced clerk bearing he brunt of he girlish assaults on her coolness, "You weren't entirely wrong. Calfs are baby cows."

Smart, right? Wrong!
Now I've only succeeded in making myself stand out (more so than being the only guy sitting in a womens' dressing room). Now all he teenagers, including the customer still standing perched in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, say "he's just trying to make you feel better."

Ouch.

Santa barbara

5am:  Time-zone changes are a bugger. No matter what, I wake up at bread baker's hour here on the Golden Coast.

Speaking of food, arriving in Santa Barbara, first order of business was to eat. Right on the waterfront strip, across the the mile- wide sandy beech that crests this curving shoreline community is a little low slung, terra cotta roofed spot called Eladio's. Denise and I sat in the open-air courtyard among the flowering lavender hedge (never seen lavender trained into a hedge), wild ground-cover strawberries, and the quintessential Spanish-colonial central water fountain. The courtyard smelled yummy, and added to the experience of the seared Ahi tuna salad.

Later, we strolled up the main retail/downtown strip, State St. How can one street remind me of a Spanish tapas tasting? What wasn't going on all at once? Part of the street was blocked off for classic cars and muscle cars on display by their owners. Some Real Housewives, surfer kids, Tourists (yah, we always stand out - we may as well wear 'my name is Bob' stickers on our lapels) car-owning gearheads, and people living on this street all converge. Local and high-end national retailers stand in as the clean- washed, genteel backdrop, as opposed to perhaps their accustomed role as shiny, preppy, eager to please child performing for attention.

This wasn't like a mixing, in the American melting pot way, the traffic of people didn't melt into one another. It was more like seeing rivers or stream meet; muddy water meeting clear water doesn't mix and dilute. The streams just slide by, different densities, different things in-suspension, sharing the same path. Like me in my chinos sitting on a embroidered floor cushion in the lantern festooned All India Cafe on State St!

California Dreamin'

The rains came and decided to buy a condo, giving them a permanent address over Nova Scotia....

                                        Time to change the scenery ...enough said!

Lollypop azalea and other bloomers

It's almost July (just a couple more days) and the late-blooming lollypop azalea is doing its namesake duty -- popping open. I love its habit of opening one bud at a time vs. all at once.





And the single-style tree peony is loving its new (recent) location on a southwest facing slope with shelter from a Japanese maple and a nearby fence; however, these conditions are great for growth, but my buddy goes from bud in early June...









...to blossom



...to baldness in just a couple of days :-(

P.S. Ever notice how the developing seed heads on tree peonies look
like the hat of a court jester?