An infinity of stars, four hundred muffins, and some delightfully intriguing books
Finally, here's the recap of my vacation last week (sorry it's late, but I got distracted by applying for two library job openings AND getting an interview right away! *crosses fingers*).
We drove up on Friday afternoon and got to San Jose in time for dinner. Everyone had yummy sandwiches except for me; I had a sketchy salad. =(
On Saturday, we went to a cool used book store. They have a pet cat in the store and it's name is Isbn. XD! I love it. I'm so going to have a pet named Isbn someday. Oh, and the store itself was cool too. I love how you can get a perfectly good book for almost half-off just because it's "used". So I got three fairy tale books (what else would you expect of me?): Victorian Fairy Tales, Tales from China and Tibet, and Stories from Latin America (¡y son bilingües! No necesito el inglés, pero me encantan los cuentos en esta serie).
On Sunday was the family picnic, which was fun. They brought my grandfather out of the nursing home for the day, and he didn't know who everyone was but he seemed to do okay. And it at least made other people happy that he was there. And he definitely enjoyed the cookies. =)
Then on Sunday night we went through a huge amount of old photographs with my grandmother. And by "old" I mean really old, like pictures of my grandmother's parents from the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were SO cool. I <3 old photographs.
On Monday my mom and I went to Barnes & Noble, where I bought some more books. =) And after that we visited with one of my aunts for a couple hours. Oh, and then my mom and I tried to sand some stairs and failed miserably. Oh well. At least I can bake yummy cookies. XD Oh! And we went out to dinner to ... Fresh Choice!!! =D I think only Jennie will understand the joy of this. But we went there and it was yummy and I smuggled out two corn muffins for later and it made me sad again because we don't have Fresh Choice in Santa Barbara anymore. =(
On Tuesday we drove to Cambria. On the way, I finished listening to my first audiobook on my iPod. It was The Girl Who Married A Lion and Other Tales by Alexander McCall Smith (author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series), and it was a really good audiobook. It was folk tales, which of course are meant to be told and not read, so it was perfect. And I loved the readers. <3 They were all awesome. And for dinner in Cambria, we went to Robin's and I got the Chow which is the yummiest thing ever! And I only get it once a year. It's noodles with broccoli and chicken and green beans and snow peas, and it's in really yummy soy-saucy sauce. And they give you chopsticks to eat it with. ^_^
Then on Wednesday we wandered around town in Cambria. There are several antique stores and lots of art galleries and some random shops. And the antique stores always have really interesting old books. =D So we got four books from one of the antique stores. Firelight Fairy Stories (1919), The Diary of a Goose Girl (1901), The Fall of the Staincliffes (1890), and Little Eve Edgarton (1914). The first two, of course, I bought because I'm obsessed with fairy tales and thus are probably only of interest to me. The latter two, however, are more generally intriguing.
The Fall of the Staincliffes ("with five illustrations"!) is a "prize tale on gambling". It bears the inscription: "Library of the Ladies Improvement Society, of Colfax, Washington." That part is stamped in, but then there is also a written inscription: "Donated by the Colfax N.C.T.U. and to be returned to them if for any reason the Reading and Rest-Rooms are discontinued." Intriguing, ne?
But Little Eve Edgarton is even better! It has eight illustrations and one of them is captioned: "'Don't delay me!' she said, 'I've got to make four hundred muffins!'" I'd read it just to find out why she has to make four hundred muffins, but it also has this excellent beginning:
"But you live like such a fool -- of course you're bored!" drawled the Older Man, rummaging listlessly through his pockets for the ever-elusive match.
"Well, I like your nerve!" protested the Younger Man with unmistakable asperity.
"Do you -- really?" mocked the Older Man, still smiling very faintly.
For a few minutes then both men resumed their cigars, staring blinkishly out all the while from their dark green piazza corner into the dazzling white tennis courts that gleamed like so many slippery pine planks in the afternoon glare and heat. The month was August, the day typically handsome, typically vivid, typically caloric.
Don't you just want to read more? I love intriguing books! XD
On Thursday we wandered around the beaches and I went back to the Bookery to buy a torrid novel that had been calling to me. XD It was only $4.50 so I figured what the heck. It's called Three Musketeers. But note that it is not The Three Musketeers. It is Tiffany Thayer's Three Musketeers (1939) and it begins so:
You can drown a witch--if you tie her hands and feet, put sulphur, nitre or turpentine on her tail and submerge her for an hour and ten minutes in boiling water!
You can rid the earth of a scoundrel--to make room for his successors--if your aim is good, your powder dry, the zodiac auspicious and God on your side.
But there was nothing anything could do about Milady.
Oh but wait, there's more:
The vilest blonde on record--bar none--was the Countess de la Fère, alias Anne de Beuil, alias the Baroness de Sheffield, alias the Countess de Winter, nee Charlotte Backson, and sometimes simply Milady Clarik . . . What a woman!
Doesn't it sound intriguingly turgid? XD
It was cloudy on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, but on Thursday night it was finally clear so we got to do some star-gazing. OMG I've never seen so many stars. *_* It was beautiful and amazing and completely indescribable. There were so many stars that it was hard to make out the constellations, and we could see the Milky Way really well too. I could have stayed out there all night just staring up into the sky. I love stars.
And now for the pictures:
Taken along Highway 101:
Moo! There are lots of cows along the highways:
This is one of the three streets in Cambria (seriously, there's only three streets with anything on them besides houses):
Waves with a big pile of kelp @ Moonstone Beach:
Sea lions! And they weren't really that close, but this is the magic of my camera's 10x optical zoom + digital zoom up to 32x:
And a harbor seal (you can see it's whiskers!):
Pelicans are bloody hard to catch in a photograph; I tried like ten times before I got this one:
Pretty seascape @ San Simeon Beach:
Lighthouse near Cambria:
Pretty ocean:
And that's it! Dude, this is a looooooong entry. o_o;;
Ciao!
We drove up on Friday afternoon and got to San Jose in time for dinner. Everyone had yummy sandwiches except for me; I had a sketchy salad. =(
On Saturday, we went to a cool used book store. They have a pet cat in the store and it's name is Isbn. XD! I love it. I'm so going to have a pet named Isbn someday. Oh, and the store itself was cool too. I love how you can get a perfectly good book for almost half-off just because it's "used". So I got three fairy tale books (what else would you expect of me?): Victorian Fairy Tales, Tales from China and Tibet, and Stories from Latin America (¡y son bilingües! No necesito el inglés, pero me encantan los cuentos en esta serie).
On Sunday was the family picnic, which was fun. They brought my grandfather out of the nursing home for the day, and he didn't know who everyone was but he seemed to do okay. And it at least made other people happy that he was there. And he definitely enjoyed the cookies. =)
Then on Sunday night we went through a huge amount of old photographs with my grandmother. And by "old" I mean really old, like pictures of my grandmother's parents from the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were SO cool. I <3 old photographs.
On Monday my mom and I went to Barnes & Noble, where I bought some more books. =) And after that we visited with one of my aunts for a couple hours. Oh, and then my mom and I tried to sand some stairs and failed miserably. Oh well. At least I can bake yummy cookies. XD Oh! And we went out to dinner to ... Fresh Choice!!! =D I think only Jennie will understand the joy of this. But we went there and it was yummy and I smuggled out two corn muffins for later and it made me sad again because we don't have Fresh Choice in Santa Barbara anymore. =(
On Tuesday we drove to Cambria. On the way, I finished listening to my first audiobook on my iPod. It was The Girl Who Married A Lion and Other Tales by Alexander McCall Smith (author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series), and it was a really good audiobook. It was folk tales, which of course are meant to be told and not read, so it was perfect. And I loved the readers. <3 They were all awesome. And for dinner in Cambria, we went to Robin's and I got the Chow which is the yummiest thing ever! And I only get it once a year. It's noodles with broccoli and chicken and green beans and snow peas, and it's in really yummy soy-saucy sauce. And they give you chopsticks to eat it with. ^_^
Then on Wednesday we wandered around town in Cambria. There are several antique stores and lots of art galleries and some random shops. And the antique stores always have really interesting old books. =D So we got four books from one of the antique stores. Firelight Fairy Stories (1919), The Diary of a Goose Girl (1901), The Fall of the Staincliffes (1890), and Little Eve Edgarton (1914). The first two, of course, I bought because I'm obsessed with fairy tales and thus are probably only of interest to me. The latter two, however, are more generally intriguing.
The Fall of the Staincliffes ("with five illustrations"!) is a "prize tale on gambling". It bears the inscription: "Library of the Ladies Improvement Society, of Colfax, Washington." That part is stamped in, but then there is also a written inscription: "Donated by the Colfax N.C.T.U. and to be returned to them if for any reason the Reading and Rest-Rooms are discontinued." Intriguing, ne?
But Little Eve Edgarton is even better! It has eight illustrations and one of them is captioned: "'Don't delay me!' she said, 'I've got to make four hundred muffins!'" I'd read it just to find out why she has to make four hundred muffins, but it also has this excellent beginning:
"But you live like such a fool -- of course you're bored!" drawled the Older Man, rummaging listlessly through his pockets for the ever-elusive match.
"Well, I like your nerve!" protested the Younger Man with unmistakable asperity.
"Do you -- really?" mocked the Older Man, still smiling very faintly.
For a few minutes then both men resumed their cigars, staring blinkishly out all the while from their dark green piazza corner into the dazzling white tennis courts that gleamed like so many slippery pine planks in the afternoon glare and heat. The month was August, the day typically handsome, typically vivid, typically caloric.
Don't you just want to read more? I love intriguing books! XD
On Thursday we wandered around the beaches and I went back to the Bookery to buy a torrid novel that had been calling to me. XD It was only $4.50 so I figured what the heck. It's called Three Musketeers. But note that it is not The Three Musketeers. It is Tiffany Thayer's Three Musketeers (1939) and it begins so:
You can drown a witch--if you tie her hands and feet, put sulphur, nitre or turpentine on her tail and submerge her for an hour and ten minutes in boiling water!
You can rid the earth of a scoundrel--to make room for his successors--if your aim is good, your powder dry, the zodiac auspicious and God on your side.
But there was nothing anything could do about Milady.
Oh but wait, there's more:
The vilest blonde on record--bar none--was the Countess de la Fère, alias Anne de Beuil, alias the Baroness de Sheffield, alias the Countess de Winter, nee Charlotte Backson, and sometimes simply Milady Clarik . . . What a woman!
Doesn't it sound intriguingly turgid? XD
It was cloudy on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, but on Thursday night it was finally clear so we got to do some star-gazing. OMG I've never seen so many stars. *_* It was beautiful and amazing and completely indescribable. There were so many stars that it was hard to make out the constellations, and we could see the Milky Way really well too. I could have stayed out there all night just staring up into the sky. I love stars.
And now for the pictures:
Taken along Highway 101:
Moo! There are lots of cows along the highways:
This is one of the three streets in Cambria (seriously, there's only three streets with anything on them besides houses):
Waves with a big pile of kelp @ Moonstone Beach:
Sea lions! And they weren't really that close, but this is the magic of my camera's 10x optical zoom + digital zoom up to 32x:
And a harbor seal (you can see it's whiskers!):
Pelicans are bloody hard to catch in a photograph; I tried like ten times before I got this one:
Pretty seascape @ San Simeon Beach:
Lighthouse near Cambria:
Pretty ocean:
And that's it! Dude, this is a looooooong entry. o_o;;
Ciao!