Thanks to Don Marenzi for identifying this photo of WP668 (the caboose in our San Jose backyard). The picture is by Eric Bracher, published in the January 1974 NMRA Bulletin (p.12). This is the first picture of WP668 we have found in her Western Pacific orange and silver colors! Here is a more current photo:
Images Copyright 1974 by Eric Bracher, and 2013 by Katy Dickinson
My recent redesign of my garden’s Willow Glen street planting beds is enthusiastically approved of by the alligator lizard community. I took out some large ratty irises and replaced them with lavender and yarrow. Now, there are lizards happily sunning themselves on all of the rocks. One bold fellow even decided to sit on my garden spade for a while.
Images Copyright 2014 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family
Today is the traditional celebration of the birth and death of William Shakespeare – in fact, this is the Bard’s 450th Birthday! I am dedicating this, my 1,500th blog entry since I first wrote posted on 2 June 2005, to my favorite author: William Shakespeare.
I encourage you to spend today with the Bard:
Today is also the birthday of America’s Folger Shakespeare Library, that opened in Washington DC on April 23, 1932 and is home to the world’s largest and finest collection of Shakespeare materials. Whether you loathe or adore Shakespeare, today is his big day!
On 3 May 2014, the St. Andrew’s Shakespeare Reading Group celebrated The Bard’s 450th birthday with a cake:
Antique German collectable card showing Shakespeare’s King Lear and his court
Images Copyright 2014 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Church, News & Reviews
This morning was our annual backyard Easter Egg Hunt – a very popular event among our friends, family, and neighbors. About 15 children (ages 18 months to 21 years) joined the search for hundreds of plastic eggs filled with chocolate candies. For the adults, there were two specially hidden eggs: gold and silver. Only the following poems gave clues to their locations:
I know a bed where the wild thyme blows,
Where iris and nodding rosemary grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious lemondrops,
With sweet musk-roses and with nasturtium:
There sleep sweet bees sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there snake throws her cold enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.I have 3 guards for my home-place
The same number of eyes and legs between them
They keep for me in a safer space.
One would walk if he were fitted for a mind-Chem
but instead keeps me in the cool.
One is anxious but smiles except when asleep
One at ball’s drop can only drool
One was born only to be buried down deep
Can you find my comfy ark?
Or will you get lost in the barks?
Thanks to the Associate Easter Bunny, my daughter Jessica for her contributions to the poems (from Washington DC), and thanks to Paul and John for helping create today’s festivities! Clara and Paul and Dan teamed up to find the gold and silver eggs – and were rewarded with Peeps Chocolate Eggs for their hunting prowess.
Each Spring, I work for weeks to make our garden a demi-paradise for this event – full of flowers and rock borders suitable for hiding eggs. Easter coincided this year with the seed storms of the cottonwoods on the Guadalupe River in San Jose. Fluffy white seeds blow over everything like dry snow – so much spiderweb removal was needed, especially on WP668, our backyard caboose.
It is such a joy to watch the children filling their baskets, then re-hiding eggs for each other once the hundreds of eggs hidden in the morning by the Easter Bunny have been collected. A delightful celebration of new life and renewal!
21 April 2014 – On the day after the Easter Egg Hunt, I am still finding eggs in the garden (some after the dogs have chewed them)…
Images Copyright John Plocher and Katy Dickinson
Filed under Church, Home & Family, News & Reviews
Machete caked with garden dirt, in Kigali, Rwanda
Swords into ploughshares is from the Book of Isaiah:
And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. — Isaiah 2:3–4
I thought about Bible verse many times while in Rwanda last week, particularly when watching machetes being used for gardening. I have many garden tools and, despite living on the Guadalupe River and regularly clearing brush as part of my work on the bank, I have never needed a machete. In Rwanda, I several times watched a machete being used as a hoe or to clear an overgrown path, and reflected that it is a good general-purpose implement if other tools are lacking. However, I also remembered Immaculée Ilibagiza writing of her 1994 experience during the Rwanda genocide:
There were many voices, many killers. I could see them in my mind: my former friends and neighbors, who had always greeted me with love and kindness, moving through the house carrying spears and machetes and calling my name. “I have killed 399 cockroaches,” said one of the killers. “Immaculée will make 400. It’s a good number to kill.” (from Left to Tell, 2006)
Rwanda is essentially twenty years old – its remarkable success since 1994 being all the more impressive because of the depths from which the country has risen. Last week, the TechWomen delegation visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre (in which a machete is prominently displayed as the signature weapon) and saw graveyard/memorials along the road into the mountains. There must be few parts of Rwanda entirely free of the memories and events of 1994’s savagery. Yet, Rwanda has indeed turned swords into ploughshares (or, machetes into hoes in their case) and gotten on with the necessary business of making things better.
Some of my garden tools, in San Jose, California, USA
Images Copyright 2014 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Church, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews
Having just spent ten days with the TechWomen delegation in the lovely if tiny country of Rwanda, I am still thinking through all that I have seen. As a gardener, Rwanda was disorienting. Many plants are almost same as in my home in the South San Francisco Bay Area in California but I kept seeing flowers that looked like those I knew but the plant leaves were wrong, or the color was wrong but the shape was right, or the plant was much bigger than I have seen before. The animals were also different: I am used to watching the Western Lowland Gorilla family of the San Francisco Zoo, different from the Mountain Gorillas we saw in Rwanda.
For example, the common thistle is purple here in California but orange in Rwanda:
| California Thistle | . | Rwanda Thistle |
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Rwanda boasts the largest poinsettias I have ever seen – at home these plants come in small pots as Christmas table decorations:
Fuchsias in California are delicate garden focal points – but in Rwanda, they are used as hedges:
Of course, many flora and fauna were exactly what we have at home (eucalyptus trees, bougainvillea vines, nettles, roses, cats, dogs, chickens, goats, etc.). And then there are plants in Rwanda that are so different, I am not even sure what they are:
Images Copyright 2014 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under News & Reviews
John Plocher and I again hosted the Silicon Valley Lines Model Railroad Club holiday party at our home in Willow Glen last weekend. Highlights included visits to John’s N-scale layout (in our former garage), tours of WP668 (our backyard caboose), assembling a G-scale train route in the house, a potluck feast, playing with this year’s Conductor Duck party favor, and other delights of the season.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family
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