Westward, Ho!

Tonight I made a rough approximation of carnitas [pork] fajitas for dinner. The highlight was making homemade guacamole to serve with them. I love avocados, so when Von's had them on sale, I bought a few. Yum! Yum! Making my own guacamole is a really neat benny of living out here. Not that they don't sell avocados elsewhere, but they're bascially LOCAL here. Tonight I used a prefab spice mixture to turn them from avocados to guacamole, but eventually I'll graduate to making guac from scratch.

I've been keeping a tally of the odd things which end up on San Diego freeways blocking traffic. (Earlier entries in the list have included surfboards, sheep and various appliances). Last week a dairy tanker overturned and spilled hundreds of gallons of milk onto I-5. It is unknown how many of the people stuck in the resulting traffic jam found themselves crying over their predicament.

Yesterday I went sailing again for the 2nd of 3 on-the-water lessons for my Basic Keelboat rating. While we were maneuvering out of Oceanside Harbor, I saw something that looked from a distance like a giant sea snake, writhing in the water. I asked my boat-mates what I was seeing. They told me it was a seal. It still looked like a snake to me.

On the way back in to the harbor a few hours later, we saw one up closer, and indeed it was a seal, not Nessie Jr. Very cute. Swimming and cavorting off the edge of the dock where bait is sold, which I was told is a place where you will always see seals, as they are hoping to snag anything that's dropped off the dock. Growing up on the East Coast, I never saw seals. So, another thing for me to mark down in my "How California is different" log.

There are also birds and such on the water which I don't recognize. Our instructor keeps us too busy for me to pay much attention to the wildlife. Hopefully I'll eventually get to learn more about the native critters out here.

Living in an area where palm trees are ubiquitous changes the Palm Sunday experience a bit. This morning we waved palms which had been contributed by parishioners who snipped branches off the trees in their back yards, rather than ones purchased from some palm-farm in TX or Fla or Africa, which is what congregations elsewhere have to do. Having ready and free access to large palm trees also means that the church itself was more decorated than is the case when you have to pay exorbitant prices for "palm fans" shipped in hermetically-sealed bags... There was an arch over the entrance to the nave made from palm branches, and some *very large* palm branches forming elegant V's in between the pillars of the nave (or the closest thing All Souls has to pillars). I remember the most obnoxious part of Palm Sunday from the behind-the-scenes church worker's perspective was managing to find enough space in the parish frig. to store the bags o' palms from the time they arrived to Palm Sunday, which was often a week or more, and keeping them just moist and cool enough for them to stay fresh and flexible but not so moist that they mildewed. None of that necessary here in San Diego, where parishioners just snip them and bring them by the day before....