july jinkies

This month, I drove home to visit ALL OF THE DOGS:

My family took a walk to Laguna Beach: 

We drove out to see the Cabazon dinosaurs:

Nick got eaten:

But he got better:

The T-Rex had a brain the size of a light fixture: 

We made a very humid pit stop at the Salton Sea:

The sand was made entirely of dead things: 

And we saw the smallest parade ever at Pioneertown. It was so small the announcer was able to name every person and donkey from memory: 

We saw pretty things:

And brought back new friends:

Then we made  a trip to Salvation Mountain:

Go tell it on the mountain:

It was so much better than I imagined: 

I still love wild sunflowers that grow on the side of the highway:

And Addie took a short break in between rounds of licking her butt and then trying to lick my face: 

Nick and I went out to Wine Country and visited Jack London's Beauty Ranch.

And tried a lot of wines:

I was amazed by the colors: 

Addie was amazed by bees: 

 

Addie tended the bar briefly: 

And got stuck:

I knew I shoulda taken that left at Albuquerque:

We love car rides:

Heading back to San Francisco:

We celebrated my 26th birthday!

And saw Star Trek combined with the symphony:

And got to see the Delorean used in Back to the Future: 

We went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival and ate garlic ice cream. Garlic. Ice. Cream.:

So much garlic: 

You cannot escape: 

 

And I'm still floored by these flowers: 

much love,
hedgie

jack london's beauty ranch

A few weekends ago, I got to visit Jack London's Beauty Ranch in Sonoma.

This is where his ashes are buried. He was laid to rest on the same hill that is the gravesite of the children of the Greenlaw family, who lived there in 1870. The giant stone comes from the Wolf House.

 His piece The Valley of the Moon was inspired by this land.

His beauty ranch consists of 1,400 acres that housed his cottage, the winery ruins, silos, barns, the pig palace, the smoke house, the Wolf House, and the house his wife lived in after his death.

According to the blueprints, the Wolf House was going to be 3 stories, with 26 rooms and 9 fireplaces. Among these rooms were a stag party room, a manuscript vault, a gun and trophy room, a music alcove, a reflection pool, refrigerating and vacuum cleaning plants, and a special sleeping tower just for him.

Worried about earthquakes, Jack London hired Albert Farr to design a structure that would last a thousand years. Unfortunately, one month before the Londons were about to move in, the Wolf House caught fire. London always meant to rebuild it, but never got around to it due to his poor health. He died three years later. All that remains are these stone ruins.

London built the first concrete silo in California. 

I bought a copy of The Sea-Wolf in the London house and learned about the time the Londons sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii. It turns out that neither London nor the navigator they hired had any navigational training. The navigator had never even been to deep sea before that voyage started. They decided the best course of action was to just read a lot and figure out how to do it all in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This caused their trip to run late and they were presumed to be lost at sea when The Snark failed to show up to Hawaii on schedule.

"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."

much love,
hedgie

26

Today is my birthday. I am now 26.

On a completely unrelated note, did you know you can just mail sombreros? Like directly to my apartment? Crazy.



much love,
hedgie

the cuckoo's calling review

I just finished reading The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling.

I would mostly describe this book as a genre piece, one of those books you would see people reading on vacation while lying under an umbrella at the beach. The book contains the aspects that readers expect in detective novels--red herrings, plot twists, greed, jealousy, an assortment of resentful suspects, a jaded protagonist, and a pretty woman who gets in the way of him doing what he needs to do. Though it does read like a standard take on the genre without doing anything exceptionally new, the book is a fun read due to the plot and attention to detail.
The story takes place after private eye Cormoran Strike has moved into his office after he is dumped by his long-time girlfriend. His business is failing, but his luck turns around when a temp agency sends him a competent secretary named Robin and he is offered a chance to discover the truth behind the suspicious death of a world famous model.
One of my criticisms of the book starts with the Robin character, who I really hoped would do more than she actually did. Her story begins when she is in giddy excitement after becoming engaged. After that, she does not go very far from meek, female stereotypes. Her most memorable moments include her being grabbed by her breast, gossiping, trying on dresses, and putting up with an asshole fiancé she really should have dumped. With all other main characters, we get glimpses of their history and see what made them the people they are today. Robin does not get that. We do not see her as a child, we don't get any word about her family, she doesn't seem to have any friends outside of her jealous and controlling significant other, and she doesn't seem to have any interests beyond what she sees Strike accomplish in the book.
There were also moments when I was taken out of Rowling's world by her strange choice in descriptions, most notably when she kept describing cameras as "long-snouted". A lot of her comparisons seemed more fitted for a children's book than a gritty crime novel and made it hard to take certain scenes seriously. 
A lot of people also seemed to have been swayed by the pseudonym aspect behind the making of this book. While discovering the author was actually J.K. Rowling didn't change my opinion of the writing itself, it did make me more interested in her as a person, the idea of typecasting, and the ways people attempt to escape it. But as a lot of people set up certain expectations for this book upon discovering who it was written by, I feel the need to warn others that there are no wizards and witches here. 
Overall, the writing was solid. Rowling did a great job switching between past and present to give rounder presentations of her characters. This was especially true with the deceased model, Lula. With most crime books I read, the dead remain impassive and do not have much to do with the story besides kicking off the plot. Here, through interviews, we get a chance to see Lula as an actual person and feel like she was more than just a broken body on the pavement.
If this book turns into a series, I would definitely give them a try and hope that Robin amps up her game.




much love,
hedgie