This Makes No Sense At All

Feb 2015 update. There is now an excellent pdf guide online: https://www.caminomozarabedesantiago.es/documentos/guia-eng.pdf May 24, 2011 - update. We finished trip early at Córdoba due to knee problems. I did a trip report blog: Camino Mozárabe Images and Moments 2011 . Also, I'll add some comments below as to the reality of the trip. A running chronology of my planning process might help others. I am still doing this, so can't guarantee results. We don't have photos yet, so courtesy of Wikipedia, here is one of Mérida, our end point. This route starts at Granada, and joins the Via de la Plata at Mérida. First step, guide books. We have Alison Raju's Via De La Plata which covers Camino Mozarabe, but it is 2005, so ordered the Confraternity of St. James 2009 guide by Alison. As I check Amazon, I now see that Alison has a 2010 Cicerone Guides for DLP , but too late, I've already ordered the CFSJ Guide. ## we got the Cicerone Guide, and mainly used it, though...

Friday evening, we walked a few yards with friends, sat on a bench, sipped hot beverages from our insulated cups, and watched the sun go down over San Francisco Bay. The still of the evening seemed to mute the city noises, and it was just the flat bay, ducks in the foreground, in the far distance a freighter. For a few moments the peace brought me back to memories of sitting by lagoons in Baja California, seeing whales break the surface, and sometimes hearing their moaning calls. No peace now in Baja, but that's a different subject. The day before, we walked around our neighborhood for an hour, finding new routes, new yard art, and some Christmas displays still out. One I liked gave sincerity to a plastic Jesus. We live in an area formerly serviced by trolleys, trains and street cars, all supplying San Francisco with workers. Houses were up in the hills, transportation down in the canyons, so there were paths, stairways down to to the transport. Many of these are gone now, sinc...

This tattered, yellowed newspaper clipping has been my possession for many years, but it's been several years since I made scones. Today it seemed a good task to share with seven year old granddaughter, so searched for the recipe, and searched, and searched. We are always clipping and saving recipes, and somehow the scone recipe had vanished, displaced by some untried upstart. Susan fortunately is more persistent than I and managed to uncover it. 15 minutes of flurry with gd, measuring, sifting, squeezing butter & flour, and success once more. The recipe came from the Oakland Tribune Oct 23, 1991, courtesy of Marcy Turner, originally from the Fisher Flouring Mills 1933 Fisher Cookbook. Makes 8 2 1/2 cups flour 2 1/2 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter (original was 1 tbsp lard, one butter - I sometimes use 3 butter) 1/2 cup raisins 3/4 cup milk Sift all dry ingredients Work butter into the dry ingredients with your...

A bearing of about 99 degrees from Oakland, and a distance on that southeast path for 207 kilometers, puts you in the foothills of the Sierras, at a spot that we have visited biannually for at least twenty years now. Once in late fall to plant daffodil bulbs, and once in the spring to view the results. This property is much loved and little tended. Trees fall, creatures make little paths, seasonally, creeks flow, seasonally tarantulas roam and lizards scurry. Our friends, who own it, use it as a retreat, for years using a trailer that came with the property. They finally succumbed to the lure of running water and a flush toilet and have a more permanent structure. Last weekend was the planting weekend -  a wet one. I took an early morning walk - quite beautiful, once I adjusted to wet feet and a water table at a depth of about one inch. These are some shots from that stroll.

I have a vast appetite for avoiding doing the things at the top of my list, so when Susan got lodging discount tickets for joining Yosemite Association, and suggested a mid week weekend getaway, I was ready. My brain was Kindled out from digging into details about converting a book to Kindle. Off we went in the Subaru, expecting that we might need four wheel drive, based on snow forecasts. About 50 miles out, I realize I've left the chains at home, so we opted for the longer and lower route up through Mariposa rather than up and over the mountains via Crane Flat and down to Yosemite valley. For our last pct trip, we had invested in an Ipod Touch, so we would have some means of internet access at our resupply points. It worked well for that purpose, but I hadn't used it for much else, other than my calendar. I had loaded all our music cds down to it, but did nothing with them. A few weeks ago, I got this car charger for the ipod that also had a little fm transmitter, that wo...

One dark day near Halloween, we took our grandson south, hoping for better weather. We are surrounded by regional parks, most with hiking trails, but some with historic value. Our destination was Ardenwood, a working farm from 100 years ago, now farmed by the park district. Blacksmiths, horses, cows, corn, pigs and pumpkins all are kid worthy attractions. Since Halloween was upon us, we expected some special events. Alas, the budget cuts have struck, so no special activities. The blacksmith was there, pounding away, but he didn't even have his forge going. So, after surveying the farm animals, and getting hot dogs at the little cafe, we huddled under the cafe porch roof, keeping out of the rain. What now? Well, Coyote Hills was just west of us and it had a boardwalk out into the freshwater marsh. Maybe we could surprise some ducks. Good choice. The rain stopped, and we strolled along the boardwalk, taking in the fall scene. Finally wrapped up the day by going out to the fishing ...

This is an as it happens log of my efforts to convert our print book We're in the Mountains, Not Over the Hill  to Kindle. In the process I hope to clarify my own thinking about how to do this. The book has about 20 b&w photos and a lot of carefully crafted layout. Several fonts, use of bold, italics, multiple paragraph formats, all to make the book look well done to the reader. The intent is to have the layout help communicate the book's message. Our print version was created with Pagemaker and resulted in a pdf file which was sent to the printer. The book sized Kindles require an Amazon proprietary format which is a subset of html. You can give Amazon a Word, PDF or HTML file, and they will automatically convert it to their format (free). You have the most control over the resulting appearance if you give them html, the least control if you give them a pdf. There are Kindle readers on all sorts of devices: IPhones, IPads, etc. Kindle is b&w and only a couple...