Nine More New Things Learned in June

  1. There is a creepy thing that has entered our lives via our cell phones. Here is my experience: I bought a charging device at Best Buy. Immediately, that same day, I began receiving spam emails faking to be from Best Buy. Best Buy did NOT have my email address, nor did they have my phone number. When I returned the following week to buy a new phone, I checked. I am being stalked! This is with Location Services turned off.

2. Learning to use an iPhone 14 is more difficult than I expected. It doesn’t have a push-button, and the whole swipe-thing just doesn’t work very well for my fat clumsy ever-so-slightly numb fingers. There is also a charging problem—the portable charger? the cord? Elevation? Sigh. And although the camera is far superior to what I am accustomed to, I can’t figure out how to make it focus on what I am trying to capture. And what good is it if it won’t recharge?

3. That phone charger went back to BestBuy, along with my phone, the cord, the plug-in unit, and a bunch of questions. The same guy was there, there was no waiting line, and he showed me how to do some sort of a reset procedure on the phone, which is supposed to “clean up glitches”. Then he looked up some stuff about that charger, called a Ugreen Magnetic Power Bank and showed me that it can magnetically attach itself to the phone. When I got home, I tried it, and it worked. Then I found the “instructions” that came with it: many languages, a few tiny illustrations, and lots of information gaps, all of it requiring both cheater glasses AND a magnifying glass. Okay, I admit it: I AM OLD.

4. Thinking through all the potential questions to ask a customer before starting a commission is something that I still don’t always get right. Slow down, JB. Think carefully before picking up your pencils (and this after accepting commissioned pencil drawings since 1985… I seem to be a slow learner.) Because I like to protect people’s identities, I will just leave this learned thing here without showing you the hoops I had to jump through.

Can’t Find Scratch, pencil and colored pencil, 11×14”, $275, unframed, AVAILABLE HERE

5. Biscoff is a combo of “biscuit” and “coffee”, a cookie (because “biscuit” means “cookie” if you are in the UK) to be eaten with coffee. The Duck defines it thus: “a type of spiced cookie, also known as speculoos, originating from Belgium and the Netherlands. It is known for its caramelized, cinnamon-flavored taste”. I learned about this from my friend Elisabeth who has spent the last 2-1/2 months traveling and living all over Europe with her husband and 2 offspring. Optimistic Musings of a Pessimist is her blog. (P.S. I saw some at Winco, read the ingredients and put them back on the shelf.)

Saw this on a recent morning walk.

6. You know how the health industry keeps changing what will help us and what will harm us? The latest evil in processed foods is seed oils; apparently they have overtaken high fructose corn syrup in the category of TERRIBLE FOR YOU. While at Winco, I looked at every type of cracker, and every single one contains seed oils. What happened to butter? olive oil? avocado oil? coconut oil? (because these are now the “good” ones.) Those seed oils are what we used to love, called “vegetable oils”, because they were going to save our lives. Now we learn that they are all RBD: refined, bleached, and deodorized. That just ain’t natural-like; it also ain’t vegetables. Weird.

7. My inner lazy self is beginning to assert herself more than I think is healthy. After listening to Mike Rowe interview Michael Easter (author of The Comfort Crisis) a second time (episode 489 The Hard Way), I put 10 lbs. in a daypack, and have begun wearing it on my morning walks rucks. My walking partner put 2 lbs. in her daypack, and we are just huffing and puffing along together, doing our best to squelch those inner lazy people.

8. A friend in Texas sent me this screenshot from FaceBook (I guess that’s where she saw it) which made me laugh. All those towns except Salinas are in the Central Valley, right here in California’s fly-over country. I’d say this is why Trader Joe’s refuses to come to Tulare County, but Bakersfield has a TJ’s. Who knows where this stuff comes from, or why it says “Advertisement” on the bottom. Here is the link to the actual article: Visalia is the best at being the worst (that’s my paraphrase)

Screenshot

9. One more thing about that new-to-me iPhone: the sales kid offered me a choice of blue or black. Silly me, thinking this mattered—the case covers the phone and the color is invisible. The sales kid should have told me about the % of battery remaining and perhaps I should have known to ask. Turns out that my phone battery is at 79%, and Apple recommends replacing batteries when they drop to 80%. I wonder what percentage of battery was remaining in the black phone? When my phone decides to recharge (see #3 above), if it reaches 100% charged, it is only 79% full. Now I have to figure out how to get the battery replaced. In case you were wondering, I hate all this. I want a landline and a camera. Period.

Now I think I’ll just go read an old fashioned paper book from the library. While sitting. In air conditioning. So there.

OH NO! LOOKS AS IF THE INNER LAZY CHICK HAS ESCAPED AGAIN!

Never again will I wear anything remotely resembling these shoes. Thank you, Lord, for Crocs.

Cleaning up the Jackpots

Cabin Life

Behind and around our cabin is what firefighters call a “jackpot”. This is a conglomerate, a tangle, a giant mess of downed trees and limbs. Let’s not think too hard about their nomenclature.

I’ve been raking, dragging, cutting and organizing this in incremental sessions throughout the past 2 years. It is gradually decreasing, gradually getting cleaned up. Of course Trail Guy also works on this, approaching it a bit differently than me.

A handsaw rather than a chainsaw gives me a lot of upper-body exercise and makes some firewood to share with neighbors. My pace is laughable to Trail Guy, but I consider myself to be a rather productive tortoise.

Then I thought about swinging an axe to bust through a pretty stout limb, something I have only done once before in my life (a Three Rivers neighbor’s tree blew down in a storm, blocking her driveway, and no one with a chainsaw was available so I bravely marched down to her house in the rain with my trusty axe and got it into pieces that we could drag away.)

This piece required a lot of whaling, slamming, swinging, and wondering if I would be able to git-‘er-dun. When I got it this far, I asked Trail Guy for some input, guessing he’d bust through in 10 swings. He swung 15 times (yes, I counted), handed the axe back and told me to use a sharper one instead.

So I swapped axes, and went after it again, this time busting through with a shout of victory. The sharper axe was more effective.

I’ve asked Trail Guy to teach me how to sharpen an axe this summer, (mis)quoting Abraham Lincoln about spending an hour sharpening an axe and an hour chopping wood instead of spending 2 hours chopping wood.

Thus we conclude another look at my quirky cabin life. Perhaps next time I will be able to persuade Trail Guy to fire up his chainsaw, but most likely he will be working on neighbors’ stoves/water heaters/toilets/faucets/refrigerators. There has been way too much of that so far this summer. I helped with a water heater, and took photos and measured for a stove and another water heater to be replaced… I’m good for more than just some axe-swingin’.

Who Moved Franklin Falls? (in Mineral King)

Walking in Mineral King (Not a hike because we didn’t take packs)

Instead of the now normal down-the-road-and-up-the-Nature-Trail walk, or the wussy turning around at Crystal Creek, we went past Crystal to Franklin Creek.

It was a little bit farther this year. Don’t you just hate that?

Looking back
Looking ahead

The flowers were most totally excellent.

This was interesting to your wildflower obsessed Central Calif. artist: a purple bush lupine adjacent* to a seldom-seen pink bush lupine.

This is angelica, not to be confused with cow parsnip. Angelica has lacy leaves, sort of visible at the bottom of this photo.

Here is Franklin Creek/Franklin Falls. This is the stream that rose too high for my hiking pal K and I to cross last year in August. You can read about it here: An Exciting Mineral King Hike

Crossing Crystal Creek is way more my speed than dealing with the deeper, steeper, and faster Franklin Creek.

Oh man! I forgot again to put that dime in my pocket for understanding sizes of little flowers!

The Indian paintbrush were spectacular, particularly interspersed with the grayish green sage.

An Advertisement Because This is Supposed to be a Business Blog

This painting is sold, but I can paint it again for you.

*”Adjacent” is “everyone’s” new favorite word. Podcasters and bloggers love to attach it to other words, like this: “This blog about art is Mineral King adjacent”.

Walking Down the Mineral King Road and Up the Nature Trail

Gird your loins—this is a long post.

With my new-to-me iPhone 14 in hand, I walked down the Mineral King Road to Cold Springs Campground (STILL CLOSED—CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR SOMETHING!) and back up the Nature Trail. This is about 2-1/2 miles total.

Let’s look at the flowers I found along the road. I actually did this route on two consecutive days and was very surprised by how many flowers vanished and new ones appeared in just 24 hours.

From left to right: mariposa lily—a ruffled variety I’ve never seen before; angelica (not to be confused with cow parsnip because angelica has lacy leaves); buckthorn

This view at the top of Endurance Grade always grabs me. Endurance Hill. Coral Hill. Whatevs. It photographs much better with the phone than it ever did with the camera, as much as it pains me to admit.

Most people prefer the view of Sawtooth. Sawtooth isn’t my favorite, but I paint it over and over because most people like it—they haven’t been medivacked off it*.

I love penstemon, particularly this variety. The color just slays me. Maybe I should learn the actual variety name.

A little past the ranger station, we cross the neglected bridge into the closed (WHY?) Cold Springs Campground. (It’s kind of fun to flick off the flaking paint. No, I am NOT telling you to do that! Why would I tell you to do that? Do you think I’m immature or something?)

Here are some yellow flowers on the other side of the bridge: seepspring monkey flower and false lily of the valley.

At the upper end of the closed (WHY?) Cold Springs campground is where the trail begins. It used to have lots of interesting and helpful signs along the trail. The Park removed them all with the plan of upgrading them, but it has been about 10 years so I don’t think it is a priority. (The Park will say, “Hiring freezes! Understaffed!” to which I have many opinions which I will keep to myself in order to keep the tone of my blog elevated.)

At least the beginning of the trail has a nice sign.

This is a Jeffrey pine, which used to have a sign explaining how to tell the difference between Jeffrey and Ponderosa pines and inviting you to sniff the tree, because Jeffreys smell a tad like vanilla.

Aspens are thick along the trail.

Can you see the trail? It’s definitely overgrown. Last week we saw a trail crew guy and I asked if I could prune it for them. He actually said, “If you want to!”

Blog Reader and Top Commenter Sharon calls this “Iron Falls”.

I finally remembered to put a dime in my pocket so that you can see the scale of wildflowers. I didn’t take into account how: A. difficult it is to photograph the 2 side-by-side with only 2 hands; B. to keep my hideous thumbnail out of the photo (yea for cropping); C. to make the phone focus on the blossom instead of the leaves; D. to actually see the screen. Maybe you are supposed to tap the bloom on the screen, but already being shorthanded, this is beyond my capability.

The little footbridge got rebuilt last summer, or maybe the one before. It all runs together.

More Sawtooth

And just in case you are into Sawtooth (Hi, Kathy Wolfe!), here it is one more time, peeking around the ridge, before the phone battery died**.

OIL PAINTINGS OF SAWTOOTH

WAIT! THIS IS A BUSINESS WEBSITE! Here are some oil paintings of Sawtooth available this summer at the Silver City Store (unless they have sold already.)

Sawtooth #67, 8×10”, oil on wrapped canvas, $165
Sawtooth # 68, 6×6”, oil on wrapped canvas, $75
Sawtooth #69, 8×8”, oil on wrapped canvas, $145

*It was 50 years last week so you’d think I’d be over it. I am, but it still isn’t my favorite. So there.

**This is the biggest disadvantage of using a phone instead of a camera. I also bought a charger, but it only works when it feels like it. The frustrations of tech are endless.

Walking to Crystal Creek in MIneral King

The Crystal Creek crossing is about 1 mile from the parking lot at the end of the road in Mineral King. It is relatively flat and easy. We don’t even pretend that it is a hike and it barely passes for exercise. But recently I’ve been thinking that as one ages, one’s body produces and contains progressively more discomfort. Since to hike is to be uncomfortable, one becomes less inclined to add to the discomfort by forcing oneself out onto trails of great steepness and altitude gain. (I AM SICK RIGHT NIGH UNTO DEATH OF THIS STUPID PERIPHERAL NEUROPATHY!)

Ahem. Excuse me for shouting. Let’s take a nice little gentle walk to Crystal Creek.

First, we cross the bridge and admire the classic view of Farewell Gap and the Crowley Family cabin.

Then we head up the road on the left side of the creek which leads to the pack station. The road turns into a trail after the pack station, SO DON’T BRING YOUR DOG.

There were a ton of flowers, and I experimented with the iPhone 14 as a camera with mixed results. All but one of these are dandelions, which are a wildflower in MIneral King, but a weed in your yard. The other is one of many unknowns in my personal wildflower index.

The trail passes through the green tunnel.*

Hey, a non-yellow flower! I’ve always thought these are whorled penstemon, but many books are calling them “small flowered penstemon”. I think “whorled” has a specific botanical definition, but I’m ignorant of it.

Here is the wide and shallow Crystal Creek. (That is kind of like Facebook, but it might be much wider and even more shallow.)

The views back down the trail:

Yea! More colors!

This summer is showing promise of being a terrific one for wildflowers. Everything seems to be about 2 weeks earlier than normal.

Tomorrow: The Nature Trail

*Remember this painting? I feel compelled to show you because this blog is supposed to be a business venture. Yes, it is the yellow tunnel here. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

While I am advertising, this painting might still be for sale at the Silver City Store.

Timber Gap with Bigelow Sneezeweed, 8×8”, oil on wrapped canvas, $145

Cabin Life

I misled you yesterday when saying we’d visit my short wussy walks in Mineral King. Instead today’s topic is Cabin Life: what in the world does one do in a place with no electricity, internet, or phones?

These are the photographical items on the agenda:

  1. Enjoy the views.

2. Help people hold down their porches.

3. Go exploring for things not noticed before, like these 5 trees growing off one downed tree.

4. Split wood (I’m downright scary with an axe.)

5. Test out a new method to oil the cabin. Looks as if nothing happened here; should have taken an “After” picture.

6. Dig through books trying to identify wildflowers.

7. Clean up messes from dropped trees. This is a giant long project.

8. Examine plants that are growing, with cautious victory dances that some transplanting may have FINALLY taken hold.

9. Spy on kids climbing The Big Rock, thinking how cool it is that kids still know how to play without screens (and then discover that they were inventing a way to get a tablet to the top of the rock.)

Non-photographical activities

We also listen to a lot of country music and try to guess the singers, read, and I knit. Trail Guy naps when he isn’t fixing things at other people’s cabins. (“Hey Mike, could you look at my fridge/oven/toilet/faucet/shower/water heater?” This is endless.) We hang out with neighbors, help strangers figure out appropriate hikes or walks, visit with people that we can’t avoid, and sometimes we hide from all the social activities.

And of course, we hike and walk. Hiking is when you carry a pack with water and lunch; walking is when you don’t have to carry all that stuff (but you can if you want—I rarely do.)

Next: Walking to Crystal Creek

Trail Guy Went to Timber Gap (in Mineral King)

Where is Timber Gap? It’s on the north side of the Mineral King Valley.

A “gap” is a low spot on a ridge or between peaks where it is natural to cross over to the other side. I suppose it is synonymous with “pass”, but in Mineral King we call them “gaps”: Tar Gap, Timber Gap, Farewell Gap. (We also have passes, but that is not today’s topic.)

Notice that Trail Guy’s photos no longer have spots in the sky. I passed my camera to him since I have graduated to an iPhone 14 in hopes that it will suffice as a camera. (Charging the battery is the current obstacle to the success of this new photographic approach but that isn’t today’s topic either.)

These are views from the trail.

In case you were wondering, it is about 2 miles to the gap. I don’t know the elevation: either 9400 or 9600’. (Do your own math from the valley floor at 7800’ if you like those types of facts.) Trail Guy counted 17 downed trees across the trail, which he went around, over, and one time, underneath.

Here is the same photo but this time the starting place in the Mineral King valley is circled for you.

Because I am still teaching drawing lessons in June, Trail Guy gets more time up the hill than I do in early summer. I think my numb feet will still allow me to do some hiking, nothing too tough, but more will be revealed as the summer unfolds…

Meanwhile, I continue to take my wussy walks to Crystal Creek or down the road and up the Nature Trail. We’ll visit that topic tomorrow.

FOURTEEN Things Learned in the first 1/2 of June

Last month I had my head in the sand or something. This month I did so much learning that I’m publishing this post 1/2-way through the month, with the (always reckless) assumption that there will be more to learn in the second half of the month.

TECH

  1. My iphone is too old for a new battery because of planned obsolescence. It still worked but only charged intermittently, and although it is an inferior camera because of pixelation, it was able to capture colors and light better than my PHD (Press Here, Dummy) Canon Elph. Thus, I bought a “pre-owned” (remember when we used to say “used”?) iPhone 14 (the latest version that will work with all the portable charging equipment I just spent too much money for) to use both as a phone and as a camera (like normal people do). There is much to learn, since it has no home button, and things just work differently. Good grief, life is So Very Complicated.

2. The new solve-all-your-problems iphone goes straight to voicemail without ringing. When I asked the Duck, the first answer is that it can take up to 72 hours for it to be ready to ring (to “finish porting”.) To quote my Dad, “Humph”. (It fixed itself, so the Learning here was to just wait.)

3. When I told a friend about my tech decision and the need to find a used iphone 14 for photography, she told me about a site called Swappa. Have you heard of this? BestBuy in Visalia had the phone for $399; Swappa has them for $200-$400. Even in this decision, there are many more decisions to be made—14, 14 Pro, 14 Plus, 14 Pro Max.two lenses or three lenses? Locked or unlocked? JUST STOP ALREADY! (Is this why I frequently escape into fiction?) Forget it. I bought mine in person at Best Buy where 2 different very nice helpful and mostly knowledgeable people helped me. (and I read a library book while I waited for all the transferring to finish.)

4. I learned to transfer all the stuff from the old phone to the new one, along with how to set up email in the new phone (by carefully copying all the weird nonsensical answers used on the email account on my laptop, including everything that said “optional” because no, it’s not optional; you MUST fill in all the blanks.)

5. When emails arrive and say “This email has no content”, I can drag the message out of email onto the desktop and the text will appear. No one understands why, so I’m just glad I found this workaround instead of automatically deleting those emails.

Neighbor cat sometimes walks with us.
Pippin, GET OFF THE ROAD!
Tucker loves his grass.

6. Buy It Now is a way to put an easy button on my blog that takes people to Paypal to buy things. That’s great if the item is available. However, I learned (the hard way) that people can search out an item on my blog and the Buy It Now button still works in spite of no longer having the item. This meant that I also had to learn how to go through my PayPal account and delete every Buy It Now button.

7. Because of this Buy It Now button situation, someone ordered copies of Trail of Promises, which was out of publication. I learned that because I have the computer files for both the text and the cover of the book, it can be reprinted one book at a time (AKA Print-On-Demand) on Lulu.com. So, now Trail of Promises is once again available!

BOOKS

8. I learned about a book by some people called America’s Cheapest Family. If it is interesting enough (and if I remember), I’ll tell you about it next month.

9. Trail of Promises is available again after a several year hiatus, thanks to the marvelous print-on-demand services of Lulu.com. This book is a well-written true adventure story, my favorite of Louise Jackson.

10. The Visalia Electric Railroad also now available on Lulu.com. Even if Tulare County history doesn’t float your boat, I think the book is worth it for the photos. Here is my favorite one:

11. Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, finally has a new book out: The Calamity Club. It is based during the depression and is a depressing story with a good ending. Hard to put it down, gave it 5 stars on GoodReads, but I don’t want to read it again.

MORE INTERESTING & MORE IMPORTANT

12. Davidson’s fritillari is a brand new-to-me flower in Mineral King. My new friend TC discovered it, marked the trail so I could find it, and then it still took me forever to spot it. What color would it be under in a wildflower book??

13. Restaurants, especially fast food types, have been closing because so many people are taking those appetite suppressant drugs. People are changing clothing sizes so quickly that stores are raising their prices to compensate for all the lost revenue that results from all the exchanges and restocking.

14. My friend Bill, William R. Winn, M.D., died. We spent 10 years working together on his two books, Tales of TB and Springville’s Hospital. When we met, he told me it was “hard to get through one’s eighties”. He missed age 90 by 3 months. I will miss him for a very long time. Such a fine gentleman, humble, kind, eager to learn, determined to not be beaten by tech or health troubles, persistent, focused.

Trail Guy Went to White Chief

Look at the fancy road! (For my far-away readers, that’s Sawtooth in the distance.)

Trail Guy, being retired, spends more time in The Land of No Electricity, Internet, or Phones (unless one has StarLink, which your Central Calif. Artist does not—surprised by this?) than I do. He actually had time to hike, working around all his obligations/helpfulness to neighbors.

You can tell he took these photos by the spots in the upper right of many of them.

White Chief peak has a flat top.
There is a pond, if you know how to find it. (It’s there even if you don’t know how to find it.)
Everyone’s favorite juniper tree.

When I made it up the hill, I spent some time contemplating wildflowers. A plan is beginning to formulate, but it isn’t ready for public consumption just yet.

Thus we conclude another photo tour of Mineral King.

Clear and Cold in Mineral King

When the fog cleared off, the sun began its work of melting snow. It was a time of much wood-splitting, wood burning, friendship, marveling at the clarity and brilliance, puttering, walks, and for Trail Guy and the Farmer, a time of making sure none of our immediate neighboring cabins had broken pipes from the cold. (A friend one mile down the road didn’t have water from when the snow first fell earlier in the week until he left on Sunday, but nothing was broken, only frozen.)

Okay, enough chitchat. Have a look, first at the changing light on the Crowley Family cabin and Farewell Gap, and then photos in no particular order.

This is Empire, not Sawtooth, in case you only somewhat familiar with Mineral King.

(That last photo is Sawtooth.)