Tag Archives: garden

May 1, 2011 · 3:20 pm

Easter Egg Hunt

We had more than a dozen kids – aged 3 to 21 – plus their parents over for our annual Easter Egg Hunt last week here in San Jose, California. There were about 400 plastic eggs filled with candy, plus one gold and one silver egg to find in our backyard. We followed the same rules as last year with a few additions.

Last summer, one of our experienced egg hunters arrived with bags of empty plastic eggs for us. When she saw the eggs at a garage sale, Galena bought them to help support her favorite springtime activity. Following up on Galena’s inspiration, this Easter we said that kids could take home their baskets and plastic eggs if they wanted to but they could also leave them with us for next year. The parents thought this was great idea! I insisted that any eggs left with us had to be empty and whole – with tops and bottoms matched up (no leaving half eggs). We ended up with several cubic feet of empty eggs, plus 8 empty baskets.

This year I again provided “advisors” in the form of ceramic bunnies of different sizes and styles. Each child can pick any basket and advisor they want before the hunt starts. The advisors support the young hunters so that their parents are not tempted to help. I buy bunnies and baskets at garage sales and second hand stores all year so that the children have a wide selection to choose from.

Several of our Huawei co-workers came with their kids. I don’t think they hold Easter Egg Hunts in China so this was a novel treat. They had fun playing in WP668, our backyard caboose. The potluck lunch included a wide variety of dishes which everyone enjoyed eating.

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as China, garden, Huawei, San Jose, WP668

April 9, 2011 · 5:28 pm

He will live at our house…

Growing up in San Francisco, my brothers and I had far more pets than you might think. From time to time, we had a rescued baby crow in the breakfast room, toads and frogs in the tub, iguanas and bunnies in the basement, a boa constrictor in the bathroom, and cats wherever they pleased to go. My mother’s motto about all of this was from the Dr. Seuss book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish:

Look what we found in the park in the dark.
We will take him home, we will call him Clark.
He will live at our house, he will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this? We don’t know.

At my home in San Jose, we have a more modest menagerie (2 dogs, 2 birds, and a cat) but since we live on the Guadalupe River, we are often invaded by hoards of squirrels, flocks of finches and other songbirds, geese, ducks, and hawks, weird horsehair worms, opossums, raccoons, lizards, and Jerusalem crickets, among others. Our new puppy Gilroy is delighting in all of it during his first week with us. His adopted-big-sister Redda is bored with squirrels but Gilroy still barks at them joyously.

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Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as birds, cats, Dogs, Eleanor, garden, insects, John, San Francisco, San Jose

November 10, 2010 · 9:15 am

Blog Housekeeping, Autumn, Haircuts

It is a lovely autumn here in the Silicon Valley. Like any good geek (even one who is a technology minimalist, like myself), I spend most of my time indoors with my computer, only rarely enjoying the intoxicating colors of the season. I have been blogging more-or-less regularly for over five years – this is my 1,065th entry. In that time, things have changed. I am now working for Huawei instead of Sun, both of my kids are in college, pets have died and we have adopted new pets.

When I moved my blog entries from http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/ here to https://katysblog.wordpress.com/, formatting and image references were lost or corrupted. As the topics I write about naturally evolve, the tags I use for my blog entries also change. From time-to-time, I go back and update old blog entries – fixing broken links and formatting that has rotted and adding or updating tags. Unless there is a spelling or punctuation error, I do not change old blog content, although I might put a forward reference if I have written significantly more on that topic since the original post. This is like getting a getting a haircut – tidying up the mess but not making any essential changes.

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Filed under News & Reviews

Tagged as garden, Geeks, Huawei, Sun Microsystems

October 30, 2010 · 10:50 am

Our Own Personal Flood

After my several blogs about not wanting flood insurance, it would be ironic if my home were flooded now that I finally don’t have to buy it. Our “flood” was only in the back yard, fortunately, and resulted from a cracked garden pipe. This was not the flood of Gilgamesh…

Like pieces of a broken pot lay the pieces of land among the spreading water.
So high did the water go that even the gods scrambled for mountain so high
And cringed like rain whipped dogs in the storm.

This was not the flood of Noah…

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.
And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered;
the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

But it did make a big mess and cost us $500 to fix. What you see in the photo at the left above are the roots and pipe that caused the problem. We think a root from one of our big ash trees cracked the PVC pipe which connects to the hose bib or water spigot. I noticed that there was mud for several days in the walkway near WP 668, our backyard caboose where I have my office. My husband looked at it, dug a hole from which shot up a spout of water, found he could not turn it off, then called Polo’s Landscaping (408-597-5214) to come help.

It turns out that a previous owner of our Willow Glen house had put in a garden water line upstream of the house and garden water shut off valves. So, the only way we could turn off that particular pipe was to turn off the water service to the whole property. We ended up with two large muddy holes – one near the caboose, and the other near the valves in the front yard. After much digging around in my (former) iris bed, Polo found the pipe that should have had the shut off valve on it, buried two feet down. He and his team did a good job. By the end of the day, we had a new shut off valve and a fixed water pipe. The brick walkway sank a little but once the ground dries out some, I will lift the bricks and add some more sand.

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as garden, San Jose, Willow Glen, WP668

October 13, 2010 · 9:15 pm

Autumn in the Silicon Valley

We are having a hot Autumn here in the Silicon Valley. It hit 92 degrees Fahrenheit in San Jose today. We had a tiny rain last week but it may be months before the first real storms blow in. As always, the plants are confused as to whether to bloom or turn colors for Winter – so, we get both together. Right now, it is a balmy evening and the crickets are chirping outside.

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Tagged as garden, insects, San Jose, Silicon Valley

October 9, 2010 · 6:46 pm

We Bought a Fire Hydrant

Saturdays are a good time to see what our Willow Glen neighbors have for sale. Garage and yard and estate sales are advertised with brightly colored hand-made signs on street corners, with arrows pointing the way. I often buy flower pots, small antiques, baskets, kitchen stuff, plants, tools, and holiday decorations.

Today, we bought a fire hydrant from a neighbor on Willow Street. It looks old, is very heavy, and says “Greenberg San Francisco” on the top. (I just learned that Morris Greenberg was the inventor of the “California” wet barrel fire hydrant. Learn more at Greenberg fire hydrants.) I plan to put the hydrant in my cactus garden. Here is a picture:

The neighbor had a pigeon feeder in his orange tree. Every time we came too near, there was a great whoosh as the flock flew onto his roof to safety. The birds would wander around on the roof for a minute, then line up on the edge to see when we would move away from their seed.

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Filed under News & Reviews

Tagged as birds, garden, San Francisco, San Jose, Willow Glen

February 11, 2010 · 11:52 pm

Spring Dogs, Birds, Plants

It is still raining here in Northern California but Spring has definitely arrived. My daffodils and almond trees are in full bloom. The finches are eating through a full tube of thistle seed a day on their feeder. Our energetic new 9-month-old puppy Redda and her patient 14-year old pack mate Juliet are having a wonderful time getting to know each other. Redda is still learning who is a friend and who she can bark at. She has decided that the garden light shades make great chew toys.