July, July, July!

-What a beautiful month! Peaches from the orchard, nectarines from the veggie box. Plum jam from friends. Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. The garden here on the property is always a few weeks behind those eager beavers out there in farming-land, so we’ll have our tomatoes and most of the squash in a week or so, through August and September. And boy, are we going to have a lot of them! Today would be a good day for me to go and take the tops off of all of the basil so I can help keep it bushy and make the summer’s first batch of pesto. But then I need to go and get all of the other things that go in it and actually go through with it, and I’m not sure that I’m feeling that ambitious today.

Since I’ve been a little behind in posting lately, I thought I’d catch you up. I’m really enjoying my photography class at the local community college. It is a for-credit class, an entire semester crammed into 7 weeks, so the pace is fast, and we have an assignment due every week. We’ve already had our mid-term, and there are only three weeks left. Here are a few of my photos from class, one from each assignment:






I am finding that I really love taking photos. I especially love learning about how to control my camera. Right now, I feel like I’m still at the wobbling-on training wheels stage, but it’s such a positive thing to walk around the world focused on spotting little bits of beauty. Light is always beautiful-- you just have to learn how to find it. It’s good for me. There are a lot of talented people in the class, and it’s helping me to learn to look at their work and figure out how they made it happen rather than feeling envious or defeated, which is an important lesson. I wish I could show you some of their great work, too. I’ll see if anyone in the class wants to start a flickr group, but again, I’m not sure how ambitious I’m feeling or if I want to get into another project. Given the fact that I am once again on hughesnet “fair access” probation (I can think of another word that starts with an f to describe it, but it isn’t nice) I am not going to be uploading anything to anywhere this week.

Besides work, which has been keeping me pretty busy, there’s the small fact that we decided to adopt the dog I mentioned a few posts ago. Yep, that’s right. A puppy. Tam and Mike have a puppy. In spite of the fact that I am now getting up at 5 am to make sure both the dogs are fed and exercised (together or sometimes separately) I am really enjoying her. Of course I love my old cranky dog, too. Always will. He’s my special buddy. But Pixie is such a snuggle-bunny that it’s nice to have her around. I didn't realize how much I needed her until I had her. We only thought of the name so that we could put it on her “Needs Home” poster and call her something at the vet’s besides “stray” but it stuck, and now it’s her name. She’s about 35 lbs now, at around 6 months, so it will be especially funny on her if she turns out to be a big burly girl. Admittedly, it is not the most imaginative name. And my family prides itself on imaginative naming. But Pixie it is.

The more I have her, the more I am glad we decided to stop looking for a home for her. A few months ago, a lady who was picking up some used barrels at the winery brought a puppy with her—one of nine in a litter her dog had that she was trying to find homes for—and one of the guys at work decided to keep it. He brought his dog, Honey, to work a few times and I just loved her. I gooed all over her. She brightened my day. Everyone was teasing me and calling me her mommy.

When I brought Pixie to work the first time and we were still looking for a home for her, Mike Hendry said “Tamara, I think you karmically ordered yourself up a dog—maybe you should keep her”. It’s true. I think I even said out loud then that I wished I could just take a puppy home and try it out, to see if it would work. And then it happened. There are lots of good reasons not to have another dog—we were hoping to be able to travel more in the future, they take up a lot of time, they need constant attention and training (she isn't officially housebroken yet), we weren’t sure how Tugboat would feel, etc., etc., but a good dog gives a lifetime of love, and she is a very good dog.

Today we are going to play with some children in the park. Yesterday we combined obedience training with errands and she went to the post office, the running store and PetsMart. She’s already doing most of the obedience commands. I’ll try to restrain myself from gushing about her overly much.

(Tangent warning!) Right now (almost 6am) there are a handful of tiny birds singing in the bushes outside my office window. They sound like water seeping into concrete. Have you ever put your head down on the side of the pool on a hot day and listened to the sound of the water dripping from your body and seeping into the tiny holes in the concrete? That rough, “no slip” concrete pool edging that grates the butt of your bathing suit to fuzzballs? I remember it very clearly from blistering days made into bliss by the existence of my little friend Rhonda’s swimming pool.

Which reminds me. I have heard recently that some family members get offended when I talk about Modesto like it’s a skin condition. I always had those old-time comedians in mind, the ones from New Jersey or Cleveland (why are those two places always the butt of jokes?) who wisecrack in that classic comedic Jersey-ish accent that their home town is a nice place to be from. Ordinarily I don't address off-line comments in the blog. It's not the venue for it. But I thought I should set the record straight.

I don’t hate Modesto. Au contraire, in the words of the fabulous Jane Smiley, I guiltily “harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past”. Modesto is like an old boyfriend. I do remember quite fondly the good times we had together, but I know it’s not good for me anymore. I’ve grown, moved on. Modesto has grown and moved on, too, but not in a way I like to be around anymore. In spite of its symphonies, operas, restaurants and downtown renovation, it still likes country music, muscle cars and wine coolers. It might still have a mullet. We can’t hang out. (Ok, I’ll admit, I still turn my head and look when I hear the thick, throaty rumble of a V-8 engine.) But am I better than Modesto now? No, just different. It will always be part of me. From Roller King to McHenry Avenue, from Graceada Park to Putt Putt Golf, Water Wealth Contentment Health to TCBY, from Downey High, Downey High, Loyal (Royal?) Knights in Blue to the Hatchet Lady, Modesto will always be where I’m from.

A few nights ago, on one of the hundred-plus days here in the Napa Valley, I was driving home from class at twilight. The temperature had finally dropped. As I breathed in the fresh, barely cool air, I felt that familiar surge of freedom and relief that I used to feel driving the streets of Modesto on a summer night. I still love the nights on the longest days of summer, no matter where I am. Even when there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, it was great to drive at night in Modesto, down straight rural roads lined with row upon row of ambrosia-scented peach trees, out among the subdivisions, or under a full moon with the headlights off, way out in the country. After the languid oppression of the day, the night felt like another universe.

The other day, I read the phrase “a movie in the middle of the day”. It took me back to summers spent working at the Festival Cinemas as a teenager. Welcome to a Festival Enterprises Theater. Please, for the comfort and enjoyment of everyone, smoking is permitted in the outer lobby only. For the perfect gift anyone would enjoy, try a Festival Cinemas gift certificate. Perfect for birthdays, holidays, or whenever you need that certain gift for someone special. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Hot Modesto days were broken into bearable halves by the arctic cool of a dark and cavernous theater. (Four screens, baby, all the time.) If I wasn’t working, I could bring friends to see a movie. If I was working, I was inside in the air-conditioning all day. Granted, I was wearing pantyhose (horrors!), some kind of black, synthetic stretch pants, a butter-colored, grease-stained (butter flavoring with partially hydrogenated soybean oil and TBHQ as a preservative, according to the label) rayon blouse, but I was inside and cool. I don’t remember seeing anything that could qualify as art, and I saw the same parts of the good movies dozens of times on my break, but it was still fun to sit in the cave-like darkness with my diet-coke-and-root- beer and my cardboard box of employee popcorn. I knew all of the songs that ended all of the movies, from "B-B-B-Bad to the Bone" that ended a Stephen King flick (either Cujo or Christine) to the Ewok song "Yo-wah, eecha yo-o-o-wah...." from whichever Star Wars that was. I think Three—right? "Everybody cut, everybody cut- Footloose!" It wasn't such a bad way to spend the summer.

I guess when I realized Modesto was bad for me was the year I came back from living in Santa Cruz. The few years between coming back and when I met Mike were some of the worst I can remember. Santa Cruz was total liberation for me--one of the things that I realized when I got out of my home town was how profound an effect the monotonous weather had on my level of happiness. Dense pea-soup fog for at least three months of the year, followed by the baking heat of over-100 summers made me a not very nice person. I don't like the heat. I mean, I like it in short bursts, but not for weeks at a time. Part of what I like about Napa Valley is that it's a small valley, closer to the marine influence, and our weather, hot or cold, always seems to break in about a week. I need that. When I finally got out of town again and came here, the weather just suited me better.

So. I was trying to wrap this up, but I feel like I want to move on to other things. Hope you got enough stuff to think about. I've got a recipe post that I want to put up now.