DryStoneGarden

Te Hapu

I mentioned that we didn’t have a camera with us at Te Hapu; it got edited when we were trying to get everything to fit on our bikes. Instead, Anita carried watercolors and painted landscape studies at the places where we spent a significant amount of time.

Te Nikau

The watercolor of Te Nikau, on the west coast further south than Te Hapu, scanned in a little differently than the others; I’m not sure why. We got a bit stuck there, waiting over a week for the rains to let up enough so we could keep cycling. It was a beautiful place to be stuck — lush rainforest, dramatic cliffs, wild beaches — and I loved the excess of greenery everywhere, but all that vegetation needs a lot of rain, so I came to the conclusion that the west coast might be better seen from a car. We had better weather and better cycling in the northern parts of the island, Te Hapu, Upper Moutere, Abel Tasman, and the Marlborough Sound.

Upper Moutere

Abel Tasman

Marlborough Sound

People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study from Steven M. Bumgardner on Vimeo.

“I’ve lived and worked in National Parks for almost 20 years, and as much as I love landscape photography, I also like looking at the human footprint and the human experience in our national parks.” Bumgardner

This showed up on the Daily Dish just before I left town, so folks might have seen this already, but it merits posting anyways, among other reasons because the rock climbing at 2:30 is on the Stately Pleasure Dome in the Tenaya Lake area, which I posted about last fall. Very cool to see a time lapse of climbs I’ve done. Yosemite must be the most photographed valley in the world, but as far as I’m concerned there can never be too much Yosemite photography. I like that this collection focuses on the multitudes of people in the park, a significant part of the Yosemite experience; if you want to enjoy the valley, you have to come to terms with how many other people want to enjoy it, too.

‘You take and put a unicycle into the picture and in a way it turns the world into a playground.’ Kris Holm

Random disclosure: six or seven years ago I used to sometimes play unicycle basketball with some riders here in Berkeley. I only played for about a year before I stopped, but it was a lot of fun, especially at first when I had that ‘wow, basketball on a unicycle’ sense of wonder and ludicrousness.

For those unfamiliar with unicycle basketball, (are you living in a cave?) the rules are the same as regular basketball and you do all the same things — dribble, pass, shoot — the subtle difference being that you do everything while riding a unicycle. It works pretty well, and is not as hard as you might think; if you can play basketball and you can ride a unicycle, you can play unicycle basketball. And, actually, I proved that you can still play even if you are questionable at the unicycle part. I was pretty much a flounder on the unicycle, really, and always the worst rider on the court, but the fact that I had played basketball in high school helped to make up for that. I would fall off immediately after every shot, but falling off didn’t matter if I sometimes got the ball to go in. Other players never fell off and could literally ride circles around me, but might struggle to make a simple lay up. Only one player was good at both basketball and unicycling. Games were chaotic and unicycles would crash and fly all over the place, but the moments of gracefulness and actual basketball were very sweet. Few people walked past a game without stopping to watch for a while.

Watching the video (featuring the world’s first known unicycle basketball helmet-cam, stay with it until the end when they score), you’ll see that uni-basketball is not a gentle game. When I played, there were lots of multiple-unicycle pile-ups, there was always someone bleeding after a game, and one guy broke his wrist a little after I stopped. Personally, I never really wanted to treat the game so competitively; it was just unicycle basketball, after all, so who cares about the score? But, to give the other players credit, some of them stuck with it and kept playing, kept improving, and have now formed into a genuine team, the mighty Berkeley Revolution, with a coach and uniforms and plays and everything. Next week, they are competing at the unicycle basketball world championship at UNICON XV in New Zealand. Rock on.

Apparently, they should be the favorites to win. The defending world champion is (of course) Puerto Rico, though I’m not completely sure about that, so don’t wager any money the next time you are doing uni-basketball trivia. I do know that Puerto Rico has for years been head and shoulders above everyone else, but the press hasn’t always covered the unicycle basketball world as closely as I might like (though the Revolution is generating a buzz these days, with a feature in the East Bay Express and now a segment on the California Report, listen here, a surprise to me when it came on the radio), and so some other team might have pulled off an upset at the last championship without me realizing. Puerto Rico won’t be in New Zealand, so the Berkeley team feels very confident. I’ll update this post with the results when I have them.

– Update —

The Berkeley Revolution came up just short, finishing in second place.

Uni-basketball is just one of the events at the unicon and just one aspect of modern unicycling. Photos and descriptions of various types of riding — Artistic Freestyle, MUni (mountain-unicycling), Street, Track and Field, Unicycle Hockey and Basketball, Road Racing — are on the unicon site. Below the fold, I go a little youtube crazy with videos of the Puerto Rico All Stars, MUni hot shot Kris Holm, street rider Dan Heaton, defending freestyle world champion Matt Sindelar, and legendary Bay Area unicycle superhero Pink Man. (more…)

Mt Diablo with Snow

A post about the weather! Or is it about climate? Hopefully climate.

People don’t usually think about snow in the Bay Area, but we do get occasional dustings of snow, especially on the peaks Mt. Diablo, Mt. Tam, and Mt. Hamilton. This past weekend was one of the bigger snowfalls that I can remember, and a garden we planted two weeks ago actually got some accumulation. It was melted by the time I saw the garden today (that’s not me in the photo, we’re just doing plants and irrigation for this yard), two days after the storm, but Mt. Diablo, nearby, was still showing more snow than I’ve ever seen on it. It apparently got 18 inches at the summit, and was even skiable.

This was the first time one of our plantings has had snowfall. Maybe not a big deal to gardeners in other areas, but it caught me by surprise. The snow didn’t seem to hurt the new plants, and a different planting we put in last week on our side of the hills was also unaffected. Slightly spooky to show up and find ice on the ground four days after putting in new plants. Night time lows were 22 on Mt. Diablo and 28 on our side of the hills, which is 6 degrees above the 20 year lows for those spots. Correa ‘Dusky Bells’ (Australian Fuchsia) in the garden that got down to 28 degrees would have probably been the most likely candidate to suffer this year — it’s only hardy to 20 degrees, the plants are in bloom, and they can be fussy about transplanting — but they didn’t flinch. That’s about as tender of a plant as we put in the ground this time of year, and we’ve done December plantings the last 5 years without having any casualties from frost. We’re probably getting a bit blasé, actually, but at this point it seems like any losses would be confined to specific plants, knock on wood.

Mt Diablo, one week before Thanksgiving

Drystonegarden just turned a year old. The blog grew up as a side shoot of our efforts to make our own website, as a spur to start documenting our stonework and gardens and the plants we like, and as a realization that there’s not really enough information about stonework for gardens. A year later, I still feel like there’s a paucity of info on stone (please comment or email me if you have a favorite site, I’d love to check it out), but I’ve been impressed with the quality of the garden blogs I’ve found, and I’ve enjoyed participating in the garden blog world. Thanks to everyone who participates with me.

Berkeley, No. 52 by Richard Diebenkorn

I suppose this isn’t such big news as the Nobel prize (?!), but the Obamas are updating the art at the White House, and I noticed that “Berkeley, No. 52″ by one of my favorite California landscape painters, Richard Diebenkorn, is among the works of art that they chose. Apparently, presidents get to pick from almost the entire Smithsonian collection. That would make for a fun museum visit.

Poppies by Richard Diebenkorn

RichardDiebenkorn.net has images of other Diebenkorn paintings, including others from the Berkeley series, a number from his Ocean Park series, and a nice representation of our state flower, the poppy. I find his abstract landscapes to be very recognizably California.

Marin Landscape by Richard Diebenkorn

I think I'll... by Ed Ruscha

The New York Time has a slideshow of other paintings chosen by the Obamas. “I think I’ll…” by Ed Ruscha, seems like an offering of low-hanging fruit to political bloggers.