My tomatoes have also been a runaway success this year. I gave up on the cages, because there’s really no point for plants that are all of about 2 feet. But some of the tomatoes I planted this year really like me, and had started sprawling all over the garden. Demeter offered me some “sticks” to stake the tomatoes. I can take a hint: if Demeter tells me my tomatoes need to be staked, I should stake those tomatoes.

It turned out the stakes she was offering were geniunely sticks and other tall thick objects to which tomatoes could be tied, but they work every bit as well (maybe even better) than commercial stakes.

I felt like a horrible dominatrix tying up on the tomatoes. I tried very very hard not to hurt them, but I’m sure a section or two was broken in the process. Surprisingly, the tomatoes look happy, and the plants they were sprawling over (like a sad little jalapeno pepper plant) have a chance to see the sun again.

On the other hand, a pumpkin plant has already started sprawling and taking over my deck, in a way the tomatoes wouldn’t even think of doing…

Paul and Mary are visiting. Before they came, they told Peter Paul had reconnected with one of his college track team buddies who happened to own an organic farm in Marin, and that they planned to take a day to visit him. I turned it into a field trip for Charybdis and Scylla. Farms are educational! Besides, I still have fond memories of our visit to Green Gulch Farms a few years earlier.

Their friend’s farm, Star Route Farms, was located beyond Green Gulch Farms, just past Stinson Beach, in the reportedly reclusive little town of Bolinas. His farm was right next to a charming little school, which we got to see because Neil had had a rough journey over Mt. Tam and needed to use the bathroom. I was reminded how rural (deliberately or not) Marin can be: between this school in Bolinas and its sister campus in Stinson Beach, the enrollment was all of 102.

As it turns out Star Route Farms was not just your ordinary organic farm. Warren Weber, former Cornell track star, started local organic farming before organic farming became trendy. Star Route Farms is the oldest organic farm in California, and now it’s where many of those upscale restaurants promoting fresh California cuisine buy their produce from.

Warren (or Dr. Weber, if you’re not related to someone he went to school with) gave us a tour of the farm, which included a glimpse of a wild deer along a small creek.)

In between sharing anecdotes about what collegiate sports used to be like back in the day with Paul, he told us about the farm. I was expected to see more bugs, but apparently if you grow the crops that are right for a climate and don’t stress them (say, by planing them too close to one another), they grow quickly enough that pests aren’t a problem: and if they are, you can introduce a bacteria (not chemicals) that’ll take care of things.

Most of his clientele is still upscale Bay Area restaurants, and they usually work so closely with him, so if a chef wants to add a new kind of green to his menu, he calls up Warren to grow it for him. As for weeds, he takes a similar approach as my neighbor Demeter: plow ‘em under, let ‘em grow if they aren’t impacting the other plants, and best of all, eat ‘em. I wasn’t suprised to see him growing dandelion greens, but he also had wild nettles, which local chefs also buyin now to put in soups and add to polenta. I have holistic recipes that call for nettles, but they don’t grow wild in my garden! They do grow in Bolinas, and now that chefs are asking for nettles, he just has to open up a field to let them grow. Now if he’d gone on an all-out war against weeds, he might not have had any nettles to grow today.

In a way, his method of working the land wasn’t all that different from my homesteader friend Dave’s conservationist philosophy. Know the land, and let the land and nature do what it wants to make it work for you. That way, there’s less work, and less impact on the environment altogether.

After we saw some of the farm, we walked back to Warren’s house for lunch, where Neil cut some lemons, thus getting some practice at what working at an organic farm might be like.

Then we had a fabulous fresh lunch, and met Warren’s wife Amy, who showed Kelly where the toys were. We had to return home before Bay Area traffic got to bad, but Kelly (seeing Stinson Beach twice from up above on the road to and from Bolinas) made me promise to take her back.

The last time we were there, both Neil and Kelly loved it: imagine nothing but nature, and little to do except maybe watch a video or pet some dogs. Now Neil’s more of a computer guy, and, well, rural internet connections don’t compare to urban DSL. His high-tech moment of the day was testing out this solar hat, as he did on our short midday hike:

Two small solar panels on either side got a fan going whenever it was in sunlight. It really did work, creating a little cold breeze above your head on a cold day, but Neil was more focused on its whirring noise and whether the blades could injure. Neil also wasn’t very happy that the wildlife we were going out to look for might include rattlesnakes as well as rabbits.

The big surprise was Dave, and how he had come into his own in his own homestead in a remote area I think of now as Sunshine Gulch. In our semi-urban neighborhood, he’d always been too modest and reserved to come out to neighborhood barbecues, but if any one needed help, he’d be the first person on the scene. Out here, nearly a mile away from any neighbor, he and his wife knew everyone in the entire area, even if getting to their place required a 4-wheel drive with enough oomph to scurry up a gravelly mountain and cross small rivers. A small restaurant near the junction of three counties functions as the community center and post office. The folks who farm or grow produce share their extras with those they know well, and Dave and BJ can it, smoke or cure it and put it away to consume at leisure.

Most of all, Dave had become interested and involved in conservation, which I wouldn’t have imagined about him before. But in context, it made sense. He’d always loved to go out camping in the large public park lands, and now he is actually conserving rural land himself–by having bought it for himself and his family to protect. Now he’s trying to make others aware of the importance of conserving the natural resources in any one particular area, and taking advantage of the native environment. His ideas were similar to those my environmentalist-minded homeschoolers have mentioned, such as having maximum insulation on a house to minimize heating and cooling costs; implementing solar power in sunny regions, like Dave’s region of California; and planting native and drought-resistant plants instead of a lawn with heavy watering requirements.

I’d taken their daughter Liz (who doesn’t drive) over to visit them on Tuesday, and when I went back on Saturday to pick her up, I asked Dave for a recommendation for a solar-powered shed light. He gave me a whole catalog of solar-powered devices: it’s impressive how many devices can be run with solar power (or other alternative power sources) from water pumps to air conditioners. Unfortunately, they’re also all very expensive, but when you’re miles away from the electrical power grid, or the California ISO has to ration power, solar’s more reliable.

That said, it’s a suprisingly long drive to get there, even though their home is close as far as the crow flies. To get to their homestead involves lots of switchbacks over at least two mountains, plus unpaved road, unlocking a gate and then driving in for a distance through a gravelled dirt road. Luckily, my new car can handle it better than my previous one, which almost slid off the hill last time. Both Neil and Kelly suffered from carsickness, and out of respect for Neil, at least once I took the long (but pretty) way home. It was straighter, but it was more than twice the milage. On the other hand, Kelly loved the doggies, and they (as well as the low-key homey atmosphere) had her not missing the company of zillions of other girls any more.

So we’ll probably return to Sunshire Gulch some time, even if Neil will have to make do with less-than-lightning-speed internet.

Although I was still thrilled to be able to see the new museum, my family and I were disappointed overall. On the one hand, it is an aesthetic marvel that uses light,  form, and technology for a unique experience. On the other hand, I found it over-crowded, over-priced, and off-puttingly eco-smug.

There were lines and crowds around everything in this museum, including the bathroom. Kay had joined the museum when it opened in November, and told me it had been even more crowded then: in fact, by 11 am, all the tickets too all the shows in the Planetarium had been distributed. On this day, we had better luck: Kay stood in a long line to get the tickets while the children and I hung out in the one uncrowded portion of the museum: the “climate change” section. There, you could calculate your carbon footprint based on how many miles you travel each year in your preferred mode of transport and by what you eat.

In short, I’d be a little less of a burden on our great green Gaia planet if I became a hard-core organic vegan bicyclist. Of course, then I’d be so bitter that I’d become the sort of person who enjoys this sort of self-righteous eco-preciousness. I also found it a bit disingenuous: after all if the Academy of Science really believed what it preaches, it could just be a web site and turn its former location into an organic farm.

The aquarium was downstairs, and the fish (and related animals) were attractively displayed. It was crowded, but to be fair, it was all crowded with polite tourist- and museum-types, and the children had plenty of chances to admire the creatures as well as play in the touch tank. There were a few clever displays where waving your hand could bring up a fact, but I saw no-one actually bothering to read the facts after being impressed that a wave of the hand changed the display.

The best parts of the museum, that is the more classical ones, were off to the side in various ways. The penguins were in the Africa section which mostly had fresh (stuffed) animal from the African Savannah (in the mode of a good natural history museum. A few dinosaur and large animal skeletons were on display and mostly hanging from the ceiling. The albino alligator is in exactly the same display that an alligator used to be in in the original museum. The library and study, where you can get up close to actual musty specimens and directly quiz a scientist, is upstairs, and now includes a few puzzles and games for younger children, too.

Naturally, we had to see what we had been observing for years: the green, growing roof. Smartly enough, the museum put a deck on top so visitors can see it for themselves, as well as look over Golden Gate Park. On this day, a band (not the Golden Gate Park Brass Band) was playing in the music shell, which you could also see and hear from the top. Not so smartly, the growing roof suddenly struck me as immensely impractical: in the distance, I saw people weeding the roof, and I imagine it also needs to be watered and replanted and resodded now and again.

Kay persuaded us to go into the rainforest globe with her; I’d been resisting it because like so many other things, it required waiting in a line. But I’m glad she did, because it was only right I check out the museum completely my first time, and it had a delightful asethetic touch by having a bottom which also happened to be the top of an aquarium, which itself was a tunnel. The marvelous effect created was that it looked like museum visitors were below you in the bottom of an aquarium:

Inside the rainforest globe, I was considerably less comfortable. Even though I have no respiratory problems, after a few minutes of being inside, I started feeling suffocated. I tried to relax; I told myself it was perhaps it was just the warm, misty air, but by the point I felt faint and black spots started forming before my eyes, I begged Kay to watch the kids and dashed for the elevator. My unfounded theory is that even the sacred glorious rainforest inside this globe wasn’t enough to process all the exhalations of thousands upon thousands of carbon-spewing humans, and without proper circulation with the outside, there was less oxygen in the air. Or it may have just been my imagination, because no one else seemed to be on the verge of passing out.

My impression overall was that it was the same museum it had always been, content-wise, except that now it was cloaked in a more stylish and far more expensive guise, with a heavy dollop of eco-smug added on. I also thought it was overpriced, though obviously the vast horde of visitors who arrive every day and pay, disagree. Most of the cultural/educational attractions in the area offer reciprocal admission with similar institutions at a certain level of membership: for instance, if we become members of the Exploratorium, we also enjoy free admission to OMSI and Chicago’s Museum of Technology and Industry; if I join the San Jose Museum of Art at the advocate level, the same membership also gets me into the Asian Art Museum, the Legion of Honor, or the Quilt Museum. If I join the San Francisco zoo, I can also visit most other zoos in the nation, but I think you’ve got the point. The only other such museum that doesn’t have reciprocity is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which classifies as a major tourist attraction, and is bigger than most nature museums, including the Academy of Sciences.

With the new building, the Academy of Sciences abolished reciprocity: in short, membership with them is only good with them, and no other museum’s membership will get you in there. At $25 per, adult admission ranks with the bigger Boston Science Museum ($23.50) though it’s slightly less than the Monterey Bay Aquarium ($30). And the Academy of Sciences’ family membership is no bargain either: it’s $159, whereas even the Monterey Bay Aquarium (whose eco-lecturing only goes so far as advising you what types of fish you oughtn’t buy) will let your whole family in for a year for $120. That said, as long as people are paying the ticket prices (and they obviously are), there’s nothing wrong with the Academy charging the price people are willing to pay. It wasn’t enough to sell me: I’ll continue to check out fish at other aquariums, natural history at the admittedly more run-down Oakland Museum or the irregularly-available University of California, Berkeley, and live animals at zoos. Perhaps the hype will die down and the Academy will go back to being the regular science museum it used to be; or it will become (or should I say, continue to be?) an international destination, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s fine either way, but I’m only buying into the former.

Kay wanted to let the children run off some energy before we drove home, so I directed us to the blue playground, which is semi-hidden off the concourse, under two underpasses:

Kelly liked the playground best of all, because she got to play with babies and found a nickel buried in the sand. I plan to go back to Golden Gate Park more often again, even if that’ll be for its many other pleasures, like the De Young Museum, Stowe Lake, and the Botanical Gardens.

The weekend before, we’d gone downtown to see the fireworks and thanks to our office building, were able to drive in half an hour before the fireworks show and enjoy our parking downtown. Afterwards, we had the comfort of being able to stash our stuff in our office and stroll to Pizza My Heart, enjoy a snack, and wait out the massive jam of people trying to leave. On our way out, Peter bought group discount tickets (and advance tickets for The Dark Knight) at the Camera 12 Cinemas, because now he and his staff can walk to see new comic book movies together.

And then for this week, Peter snagged discount tickets to the Thursday night show at the San Jose Rep, The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s All the Great Books (Abridged.) We left Kelly with a sitter, but took Neil, since his education is, after all, based on the great books. Walking over to the rep, we walked through the Pete Escovedo concert in the plaza. Neil had no idea who he was, and Peter just made it worse my telling him he’s Sheila E.‘s dad. If they’re not in Guitar Hero or on one of my alt-rock stations, Neil’s never heard of them. I told him Pete Escovedo is a legendary salsa musician.

But we had come to see a play, not a concert. Needless to say, All the Great Books (Abridged) was funny, erudite, and even better if you were familiar with the books. As far as I’m concerned, their synopsis of Ulysses was probably better than you’d get in a lit class–and took a lot less time. There was some improv, and at one point, the actors rolled with a tangent so long they had trouble getting back to the script. I was worried about how much Neil would enjoy the play, but he loved it. In fact, he asked to see the books on the “class syllabus” and I pulled all the classics we had from our shelves. As a result, when he left for scout camp yesterday, he’d read half way through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The next day Friday, Neil, Kelly and I took light rail downtown for one of our regular “Day in San Jose” excursions. As it turned out, Peter never made it to his own office there, because he was too busy waiting in the interminable line for the new iPhone. I had a huge pile of books to return, so the kids and I went to the downtown library first, where I met up with my friend Michael. I dragged Michael along with us to the farmer’s market, where we each bought lunch, and I bought several pounds of seedless grapes to turn into raisins. Michael had to go back to work, but as it turns out, another friend showed up. Loretta had come by for the farmer’s market, too, so we hung out. Then I dressed Kelly in her bathing suit, and she splashed around in the fountains at Plaza de Cesar Chavez. Kelly wanted to see the Tech, so we fetched Neil (who’d just been reading in the office) and closed it down. Peter finally had an iPhone in hand (at the mall near our house) at 5 pm, so we took light rail home. He arrived home minutes after we did, and told us of the tale of horror, which involved several iPhones not being able to accept his cellphone plan, and an enviro-Nazi argument about how “green” the “green” iPhone cozies were. Really, if you care that much, just go live on a subsistence farm already, will you? That said, the iPhone is pretty cool. Neil doesn’t have a cell phone, but he was bonding with the iPhone so avidly, if he had one, he’d want the iPhone.

Tomorrow Kelly and I are going to see the San Francisco Symphony perform in the Circle of Palms. So San Jose’s giving us a pretty good summer close to home.

This year, when she mentioned she needed someone to take care of her plants while she was out of town for a month, I volunteered to do it in exchange for being able to glean her garden’s copious summer produce. Normally, she uses cookies to bribe a French Lebanese neighbor who shares the inscrutable Mediterranean gardening know-how to do the job. She agreed to let me do the watering this year, but I think we’re both a bit nervous about how the plants will pull through, given my long history of plant abuse, which I’m only beginning to overcome.

This year, to my surprise, my own little vegetable garden is doing quite well. I actually ended up with a glut of pumpkin plants, though it’s really Neil’s doing, not mine. He built me a giant pumpkin-growing contraption, and to our mutual surprise, it really worked. Marcella gave me some new tomato plants from her garden, and I showed them to her as they were on the verge of dying, just like the tomato plants she’d given me the year before. She watered them once, and they’ve been thriving since. The rest of my plants, like lettuce, green onions, peppers, a watermelon plant, and a late-blooming but proliferate heirloom broccoli plant, are also growing, which is pretty good. On the other hand, I dug up some lavender plants I loathed and gave them to Marcella, but they’d been neglected so brutally for so long, and dug up with so little care, that even she couldn’t save them. I think that’s when she started to get really worried about my ability to keep her plants alive.

During the week before she left, Marcella showed me how to water her garden, but I don’t think she was comfortable trusting me with the hose. I vaguely got the idea that some plants need a lot of water every day; some plants need some water once a week; the trees need a good soaking every two weeks; and don’t soak that plant, because its pot has no hole and it will drown. Now I sneak in every day or so, grab a bunch of fruit and water everything. I feel like I’m committing a sin against nature just being there, and that the plants resent having me, instead of Marcella, doing the watering duty. The roses actually seem to be reaching out in order to scratch me up, and one exotic flower is already looking depressed. Oh, please, plants, don’t die!

In the hope of making up for any mishaps, I planted some of my extra pumpkin plants in the section where Marcella wanted to put the lavender plants, and I may move over the pumpkin growing contraption to give them an extra chance at life. And the French Lebanese woman is coming to take over from me during the last week of Marcella’s absence so all may end well, even if in a deus ex machina way. And, well, in the meantime, I’m well set with fresh oranges, tangerines, cherries, lemons,and tomatoes.

I was mortified. Had the time been changed unexpectedly? Had we completely missed the parade? Well, there was nothing to be done but to walk over the parade end point, and catch whatever we could of the festival.

As it turned out, the parade route had simply changed, so we happily waited at the parade route end instead. As usual, it had everything a good Memorial Day parade should have, even though it is still on the small side.

The parade was led by the local ROTC together with representatives from the Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marines:

There were clowns, both from the local high school’s drama department, and adult professionals. This one delighted Kelly by asking her to blow bubbles for him:

There were two marching bands, including this one:

Behind them was a boat that doubled as a float for the childrens’ choir; the cub scout troop Neil used to belong to; the girl scouts; and neighbors in costumes, decorated wagons or bikes. A new float this year came from Our City Forest, or as I like to think of them, the sane type of environmentalist:

They come from old-skool, Arbor-Day-not-Earth-Day-Gaia-Worship, environmentalism: plant a tree, it cleans the air, gives you shade, and possibly even food you don’t have to drive to. They were there to donate public trees to people willing to plant them in their sidewalk fronting, and interestingly enough, had played part in a local trees-vs.-solar panels conflict. In short, some trees had had to be cut down so some new solar panels wouldn’t be blocked from getting the maximum amount of sun. Our City Forest (and other flora lovers’) argment is trees work 24/7, not only in bright days; trees save energy by providing shade; and trees are a huckuva lot cheaper, efficient, and (duh) biodegradable than solar panels. But you don’t get green cred just for planting a tree, or growing a garden, do you? I was happy to see a green group that wasn’t all about carbon credits, global warming, or government control.

Getting back to the parade: another regular feature is the fancy antique cars. Here’s one that was decked out for the parade as well:

I’d say that’s our local councilwoman Nancy Pyle riding in the car, but I don’t think it is. She was there, however, as she is every year, making a brief speech and awarding the costume contest prizes. She’s up for re-election this year, and I’m voting for her. How could I not, when she nominated Kelly for “most beautiful” in the costume parade two years ago? That’s what local politics is all about! I’d also like to note her opponent didn’t bother to show up for our parade this year, BTW.

It all ended with a fire truck and…a hot dog van. We followed the end of the parde into the back of Parkview Elementary School, where the festivities continued with Memorial Day rememberances and patriotic songs. I said hi to some of my neighbors whom I recognized. This year, the festival had added a crafters’ fair to its set of booths. I bought Kelly a ball from the local high schools’ booster club, but we headed home for lunch instead of buying food there.

One of the plants, however, came up like this:

It didn’t quite taste like broccoli, but it didn’t taste bad, either. Had my romanescu broccoli mutated in some way? I googled “purple broccoli” and found out that what grew in my garden, from what I thought was a broccoli seed, looked an awful lot like a different type of heirloom plant, namely purple cauliflower. When I went back and tasted it again, it did indeed taste like a slightly more flavorful cauliflower.

I suspect my romanescu broccoli packet included at least one purple cauliflower seed as well: the seeds certainly looked identical and until the cauliflower actually sprouted, the plant looked the same as well. So maybe I got two heirloom vegetables by accident, or maybe some romanescu broccoli plants grow very strangely in my odd little garden.

Update: The purple “cauliflower” turned out to be purple broccoli. When I cooked it up, it turned green, just as purple broccoli is supposed to do. It was delicious, but it still wasn’t romanescu broccoli.

I eschew thin little plastic bags and prefer to stick stuff in my backpack or some sturdy plastic bags I have because it means I can carry more stuff easily in a single trip back to the house, and I don’t have a pile of annoying baggies to toss in the recycling.

I walk or bike whenever it’s not totally annoying to do so, because I want exercise, and like me, Kelly prefers travel in anything but a car. Plus, I’ve hated spending money for gasoline since long before it reached $4 a gallon. Unlike environmentalists, I don’t look down on those who drive; and in fact, when it comes to school field trips and scout camping trips, I am grateful to those generous souls with mini-vans, SUVs, and extended cab trucks. They’re the people I mooch rides from when my little fuel-efficient car shows its limits.

And I have a vegetable garden not because I like gardening, but because I take pleasure in being able to have the freshest food available right outside my door without having to make a transaction. I also like farmer’s markets because of my freshest possible food fetish, as well as the novelty opportunities, like finding heirloom vegetables not sold in stores. The fact that the produce is also often organic doesn’t matter to me. In fact Peter still teases me about the star-shaped zucchini I bought with a cutworm still crawling on it (“that’s how you know it’s organic” said the hippie gentleman farmer as he flicked the worm away.) My own garden is pesticide free not for any holistic reason, but merely for the fact that I’d rather pull out and toss a bug-infested plant than have to go and buy some stinky chemicals.

Back in the day, one of my acquaintances could drive by and see me pulling a wagon laden with groceries and a passed-out-from-boredom toddler, and wave to me. From within the air-conditioned splendor of her mini-van, she was perfectly happy she wasn’t out in the heat with me, having to listen to a rant about the evils of gasoline or the pleasures of sidewalk strolls. These days, at least one perfectly innocent mini-van driver has professed a pang of guilt while witnessing me on the sidewalk, as if her need to drive her child to school is killing polar bears or some such nonsense.

Just because I do “green” things doesn’t mean other people are remiss in not doing them, too. But it’s hard to tell people you’re just eccentric and cranky when they’re busy praising you for being so saintly and fashionable.

Biking is absolutely the best way to go, but unfortunately, Kelly’s outgrown the bicycle seat she rode in last year. I seriously thought about buying a bike trailer for her to ride in. I could get one on Craig’s List for as little as $40, but I wouldn’t be able to use it for enough miles to make it pay for itself, and honestly, she’s probably too big for that, too. And she’s still not trustworthy enough on her own bike for me to let her ride behind me.

So there’s bus and light rail, but those cost money, and more often than not (especially since I have a fuel-efficient car) taking them costs me more than the cost of the gasoline I burn. The cost for a one-way fare on public transit is $1.75, with a day pass costing $5, and most of my trips by car cost less than that. Well, we’ll still take light rail downtown, since it also spares us from having to pay for parking and it’s fun to ride in a trolley. And just out of curiosity, I tried riding the bus to Neil’s school the other day. Our public transit authority has actually made some smart changes in routes recently, so, though the bus is a further walk from my house, it runs more frequently, making it a more practical option. And to my pleasant surprise, I found out they’d classified the route so that a one-way trip was $1 for an adult, and 50 cents for a child. It’s still more than I’d pay for gas to the destinations I’d want to take along the route, but it’s close enough that I may ride again.

My only other option is walking. This can be particularly difficult when Kelly’s doing the walking too. She’s a diligent walker, but she likes to take lots of breaks to sit and explore. This is great for hiking, but not so great when you have a destination you need to be at at a particular time. One car-less day though, I put her in a wagon and pulled her to Neil’s school and back. The walking took up almost 2 hours, but Kelly loved riding in the wagon so much she had a fit when I used the car for the same trip the next day.

I’ll be trying out all my options over the next month. I made a goal to spend $100 or less on gasoline this month, which seems realistic, which even at the $4 a gallon rate buys me about 714 miles of driving in my car. I miss being able to bike easily, I wish transit fares were cheaper, and, sure, I wish gas were cheaper too. But I have to deal with things they way they are and see what I can do.