Life has been hectic around here lately. Right after we got back from Iowa I made a trip to San Francisco for a girls weekend with a couple of friends. Among other things we saw the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the DeYoung Museum.
I enjoyed the Chihuly show and also really enjoyed going up in the new observation tour at the DeYoung. Here is a picture of the view from the tour. The building in the front is the new California Academy of Sciences which opens in a little over a month. Their website is cool. I can't wait to visit the new academy when it opens.
The day after I got back from San Francisco McCain was in Sparks (right next to Reno) for a Town Hall meeting. Duke and I went to see him. I continue to be impressed by his honesty and competence but he sure doesn't create enthusiasm. One guy McCain called on said "When I vote for you I won't be voting for you I will be voting against Obama because I don't believe you are a conservative. Tell me why you think you are a conservative." I thought McCain gave a pretty good answer but I don't think he convinced the guy who asked the question. After the meeting was over Duke went down front and got to shake McCain's hand. He got stopped on the way down and was told by a secret service agent to take his hands out of his pockets.
The day after the McCain visit my sister came to spend a few days with us and visit Dad. My Daughter and her family came for one night and my niece also stayed with us for a few days. It was all a lot of fun and and My Birthday was in there too.
I was in Oakland last Saturday for my daughter's birthday. It was a sunny warm day. She and I took a docent led tour of Mountain View cemetery. When she told people that we were going to tour the cemetery on her birthday many people thought that was a bit weird and asked Why?? She and I are both big history buffs. The Cemetery is full of famous and familiar names as well as not so famous people whose lives are still interesting. Hearing their stories makes history come alive.
I've loaded all my pictures on to Flickr and I've added captions to most of them based on my notes and what I've discovered searching the web since I got home. You can look at them all on Flickr here but I'll also include a few here
Sara Plummer Lemmon and her husband John Lemmon were both self taught botanists. The tomb stone says "The California Poppy was named the state flower in 1903 due to the persistent efforts of Sara Lemmon" In searching the web I also found a blog written by a woman who had just climbed Mount Lemmon outside of Tucson. She includes more of the Lemmons' story.
"According to an article we found at the new community center in Summerhaven (on top of Mt. Lemmon), written by Eileen Palese:
"The mountain was named for the first white woman who dared to climb it, a vibrant, curious woman who was challenged by the beauty of the mountain's plant life and the harshness of its precipices.It was in 1881, when the US Cavalry still pursued Apaches and gunslingers fought it out at Tombstone's OK Corral that Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon, a slender, dark-haired woman of 45, challenged and then conquered the mountain that loomed over the old Spanish community called Tucson.Sara arrived in Tucson with her husband, John Gill Lemmon, on the first train ever to reach the town. He was a self-educated botanist, respectfully called the "professor", whose health had been permanently undermined during the Civil War when he was imprisoned by the Confederates in the notorious camp at Andersonville, Georgia.Sara and John had met in 1876 at a lecture he gave in Santa Barbara, California, where she owned a lending library and stationery store. She already had an unbounded interest in botany, and, when they married four years later, she was qualified to assist her husband in an ambitious effort to catalog the plants of southern Arizona, a part of the world few botanists then had visited.Their first ascent into the Santa Catalina Mountains was up the south face, the one closest to Tucson, along roughly the same path that the Catalina Highway follows today.
[I've left out much of the story which you can read on Alanna's blog]
Though largely self-taught as a botanist, her work was outstanding. She published many scientific papers, and, thanks largely to her efforts, California adopted the golden poppy as its state flower. She lived to be 93.A mountain peak is not all that bears her name. An entire group of plants was named for her by Harvard's Asa Gray, one of the outstanding botanists in the United States in the 19th century.Perhaps the best description of Sara Lemmon, was provided by her grandnephew, Dr. Harold St. John: 'She was enthusiastic, sincere, intense, a driver and an organizer, cultured, literary and scientific.'All in all, she was a woman far ahead of her times"
These are pictures of our tour. I think but am not sure that the man in the middle of the pictures in the checked shirt is Michael Colbruno. Colbruno has done a lot of research on the stories of people buried in Mountain View and has created a wonderful blog of these stories. The stories he shared on our tour added immensely to the tour.
Mountain View Cemetery is 220 acres and was founded in 1883. Over 170,000 people are buried there. It has views of San Francisco, Oakland and the Bay. It was one of the first garden cemeteries. The annual tulip festival was a couple of weeks ago. It is full of the stories of people's lives from Domingo Ghirardelli to Henry Kaiser, to Julia Morgan to John Lee Hooker.
Allison and I thoroughly enjoyed our visit and will go back again.
We picked a really bad time to try to sell our house. Sales of existing homes fell 4.3% nationwide in August and
San Francisco Bay Area house and condominium sales fell 25% to the lowest for an August in 15 years. I think our house is a great examples of the slump. We have priced it very competitively at more than 10% less than what similar houses were selling for a year ago but our agent says that nobody is even looking right now. It sure seems like a great time for someone to get a great deal. I am not worried because I know that in the long run it will sell and even at these lower prices we will still make a nice profit but still.....
You can see pictures of the house on our listing. We were down in the bay area Tuesday to see family
and do some yard work at the house.
I planted some more flowers. It was a picture perfect bay area day to be working in the garden.
The San Francisco bay Area has a lot of wonderful parks and spring is an especially beautiful time to visit. There are lots of wild flowers and all the hills that will be brown in the summer are beautiful and green right now. Last Sunday we put Aidan in the jogging stroller and went for a hike at Sunol Regional Park. Afterward we cooked polish sausage over a fire and enjoyed them in the picnic area at the trail head.
I am a renaissance woman working full time to live, to love, to learn and to be interesting.
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