Clouds...

Awoke in our little bungalow...


... to find our friends grazing outside the kitchen window. They love the green apples...



Our first concern for the day was to resolve a problem with the construction project down in Laguna. We had received pictures from our friends Brian and Mary, and had noted what seemed to us a rather smaller than expected pass-through window, where there once was a doorway leading from the kitchen to the sitting room. We checked with Mary via email, and her return note confirmed her agreement that the window seemed narrow. A worried call to our contractor, Larry, to check with him; he offered his own opinion that it was wide enough, at two feet, and that a narrow shelf extension into the sitting room from the kitchen counter might help resolve the visual anomaly. This what I myself had suggested as a possibility, so we asked Larry to make a mock-up of some kind to send us as a jpg.

This business had to be conducted in town, of course, because our phone reception out here at the farm is intermittent. So we enjoyed a cup of coffee while we were there, and made a few necessary purchases—dog food for George from the pet shop, a fresh loaf of bread from the marvelous bakery, Rose’s, for ourselves—and then were headed back to the car when we were startled by the most extraordinary sight: a cloud formation such as I have never seen in my life before. It was a rolling, curving bank of cloud reaching for miles across the sky like a thick braid, so “unnatural” as to be quite spooky.








It's worth clicking on these, to get the larger view. But the pictures, taken in sequence because of the sheer size of the phenomenon, don’t manage to do justice to this amazing spectacle that stopped everyone in their tracks and had the whole street filled with people gazing up into the sky. It looked like a UFO trail from “Close Encounters”—you almost expected an alien spaceship to be emerging from the front end of the trail and landing at the local airstrip.

With the clouds dispersing slowly, we made our way back to the bungalow to change into something warmer: the storm had brought a cold front with it, and we were shivering in summer clothes. Then on down the sound to its southernmost point at Olga’s, where we strolled out to the end of the dock...






... and returned for lunch at the famous Olga’s Café—though not with some dispute as to whether this was the famous one, or the smaller one where I remembered eating an excellent lunch last time we were here. (We were both right: the café where we ate before was indeed more “gourmet” than this one—and had purloined the name; but it had arrived and disappeared in the space of a couple of years, while this artist-run operation has survived for a long time.)

A lovely drive, next, up Mount Constitution, through the clouds, to a height of some two thousand feet.


Once at the summit parking lot, we climbed the last few feet to enjoy the stunning view out over the islands, many of them now obscured by the slow-moving banks of cloud below us.


It was cold and blustery up there, but we climbed the stone tower that crowns the summit, George charging up the steps ahead of us in his eagerness to see what was ahead. It’s one of his most endearing qualities: he is insatiably curious. Another Curious George.

(Did I ever tell you, by the way, where George got his name? Not Curious George. Not George Washington—though that might have been appropriate for this trip. And most certainly not the current occupant of the White House, who will remain unnamed. No, George got his name from George Harrison, the Beatle, who happened to be leaving this life just as our George was arriving. He returned, we like to think, “Across the Universe.”)

We were grateful to get back to the warmth of our bungalow for a nap (for me) and reading time for Ellie. I joined her with my own book—I’ve finished the excellent Alan Furst now, and am working on Barack Obama, with growing admiration—and we spent a good part of the rest of the day engrossed in our own worlds. Late afternoon, we took the computer up to the one spot on the property where I can get wi-fi connection, and spent a while working on our plans for the return trip to Los Angeles, beginning this weekend. And were joined by our host, Mark, armed with a bottle of beer for each of us, for the “cocktail hour.” A pleasant opportunity to get to know more about him, his work as a carpenter/contractor, his wonderful family, and the island he has lived on for a number of years.

Supper at home. Left-overs. A piece of chicken, a piece of salmon, a sauté of tomatoes, onions and potatoes, and nice green salad. A glass of Oregon wine. And, later, a stupid old western movie with Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Jack Palance—on which I got ridiculously hooked, and got to bed too late, and couldn’t sleep for the pounding rain outside.