Category Archives: All Posts

Powerful Flowerful Full May Moon

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“The moon, like a flower in heaven’s high bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.”
William Blake

It’s been raining in SoCal, and if you have clear skies tonight in your area, take a look at the stars next to the moon. One of them is Alpha Librae, also known as Zubenelgenubi. This star is quite special: if you have eagle eyes or use binoculars, you’ll see it as two stars. That’s no optical illusion as Alpha Librae is, in fact, a double star. To learn more, visit the Sky Tonight app.

As a special bonus, a penumbral lunar eclipse is taking place, too!

Don’t forget to charge your crystals and a jar of moon water!

Not a super great photo of the moon; but I discovered some spectacular tulips and lilacs on my walk.

Bloom Where You’re Planted

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Just like this happy purple pansy I found glowing and growing in a sidewalk crack.

Against all odds, alive and thriving…

 (Did you know that pansy came from the French word “pensee …remembrance or thought?)

Dance of the May Queen

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Elaine Bayley Illustrations

This is the last day of April. Tomorrow we celebrate Beltane and May Day, and while we can weave flowers in our hair and dance around the maypole, it’s also also called Workers’ Day or International Workers’ Day, to commemorate the struggles and gains made by workers and the labor movement. 

May Day is a far cry away from the international call of distress, mayday. I always wondered where that term emanated from. For some reason, SOS didn’t work, so it seems as if mayday was attributed to Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer in the RAF. In 1927, the United States formally adopted it as an official radiotelegraph distress signal, explaining that mayday corresponds “to the French pronunciation of the expression m’aider.” It’s simple meaning in English is “help me.”

Beltane is a Celtic annual festival to signify the return of the light.

Whether you light bonfires, decorate your homes with May flowers, or make May bushes, have a Happy Beltane and May Day!

In May
Yes, I will spend the livelong day
With Nature in this month of May;
And sit beneath the trees, and share
My bread with birds whose homes are there;
While cows lie down to eat, and sheep
Stand to their necks in grass so deep;
While birds do sing with all their might,
As though they felt the earth in flight.
This is the hour I dreamed of, when
I sat surrounded by poor men;
And thought of how the Arab sat
Alone at evening, gazing at
The stars that bubbled in clear skies;

And of young dreamers, when their eyes
Enjoyed methought a precious boon
In the adventures of the Moon
Whose light, behind the Clouds’ dark bars,
Searched for her stolen flocks of stars.
When I, hemmed in by wrecks of men,
Thought of some lonely cottage then
Full of sweet books; and miles of sea,
With passing ships, in front of me;
And having, on the other hand,
A flowery, green, bird-singing land.
William Henry Davies 1871–1940

Tofu Snowball Cookies | Vegan Recipe

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Every so often I feel like Emmymade when I try out or tweak a new recipe. (If you don’t know who she is, Emmymade has a YouTube channel with about three million subscribers.)

Aren’t they pretty? Read all the way through…

I searched for ways to incorporate tofu in sweet recipes and I found a bunch of ideas for tofu cookies.

Here’s my version:

Tofu Snowball Cookies
1/2 cup tofu (silken works best but I used what I had)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 cup oil
2 cups flour

Blend oil and tofu in food processor until smooth.
Add all the other ingredients.
Cover and chill for thirty minutes.


Shape into balls on parchment lined baking sheet.
(The dough felt very rubbery to me as I was forming the balls, very different from other cookie doughs…)
Chill again for thirty minutes.
Bake at 375 degrees for about 10-12 minutes until the top looks dry.


Let cool for a couple minutes.
Roll in powdered sugar.
Cool completely.

They tasted absolutely disgusting!

I’m not a fan, ewww.

I had an old Border Collie named Victor who would eat almost anything and I don’t think even he would have eaten these cookies, that’s how bad they are! It would have been hilarious to watch his face as he spit them out or found a place to bury them in the garden. Miss you, Victor!

If you try this recipe, please let me know if your results are more edible than mine.

I think the rubbery Play Doh texture should have been a huge red flag, but it was an experiment. Sometimes my recipes work out and sometimes they don’t!

#epicfail

UPDATE: After a few hours, I tried another one and the wait definitely improved the flavor and texture, so I won’t toss them in the compost.

Black Gold

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I love to look at historical photos and was fascinated by the pervasive documentation of how little human respect there was (and still is) for our planet.

Whether it was harming the environment by tearing up the earth to find gold in 1848 which caused irreversible damage or pillaging and plundering the ground for oil, it’s tragic to see that we don’t seem to have learned much about co-existing in harmony with nature without polluting and destroying our world.

I remember when my parents would drive up to Los Angeles to visit relatives and I’d see a few oil derricks along the way, but nothing like this.

Venice Beach 1920

Though conventional oil reserves have dwindled, oil drilling in the Los Angeles area remains. Oil rigs dot the city but are often hidden from sight through the use of tall fences, clandestine structures, or by drilling in LA’s low-income neighborhoods.

This is how Los Angeles Times described the Venice Beach–Del Rey oil field in 1930: Today oil derricks stand like trees in a forest… . Steam pile drivers roar on many a vacant lot… . One hundred and eighty permits to drill for oil have been given and twenty-five more are in procedure… . If this fever continues, as it gives every indication of doing, one reasonably may expect to see virtually the entire water-front line of private properties from Washington street to Sixty-sixth avenue or Playa del Rey dotted with a line of oil derricks.

Signal Hill oil field, Long Beach, 1937

Apparently, petroleum had already been in use by Native Americans for about 13,000 years. They relied on oil primarily as a lubricant but also as a sealant to waterproof canoes.

The coast along the Venice oilfield, in what is now Marina del Rey. 1937.

Following the initial oil discovery in California in 1872, Edward L. Doheny struck the massive Los Angeles oilfield in 1892, thirty-five miles south of the Pico Canyon.

Huntington Beach, 1937

FYI…It’s been reported that the recent runoff from California’s historic rainy season has exposed more gold around Placerville, the heart of gold country. Treasure seekers are dusting off their metal detectors and searching for the shiny stuff. With gold prices hovering at approximately $2,700 per ounce, it’s going to look like an episode of Aussie Gold Hunters out there.

Lots of great info at https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/

PoeTree

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Poetry. A gentle play on words makes me laugh.

April is almost over and I nearly forgot it was National Poetry Month!

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer

I looked up at this gnarled but lovely twisty eucalyptus tree trunk and ran my fingers down her bark/skin. It was roughly textured but felt solid and safe. Notice all the nooks and crannies to shelter birds and other living creatures.

I am also protected.

For me, this embodies poe-tree.

Positively Pineapple

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Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Pexels.com

I had to have a tiny little thing — not cancer this time — removed from my bottom lip. I can’t pronounce nor even remember what my doc called it, but it was easily, albeit painfully, removed.

As she tossed me an icepack, she said the craziest thing!

She told me to stop at the store on my way home and buy a fresh pineapple.

What?

Not only was my doc prescribing pineapple to eat, but to dab on my lip!

Apparently this is due to the fact that pineapples contain bromelain, an enzyme found in pineapple that’s thought to reduce swelling and inflammation, and hasten healing.

By the way, it actually worked!

Like I always do, I did a little research and learned there’s a lot you can do with all parts of a pineapple.

Of course you can try to grow them when you cut off the tops and I did that, too. Hopefully, I’ll have some little pineapples in a couple of years.

Try this recipe, it sounds yummy!

Pineapple Water
✲ Clean and peel one pineapple. Save the fruit for another time.
✲ In a large saucepan combine the skins and core with a cinnamon stick, a few cloves, and a decent sized chunk of peeled ginger.
✲ Cover with eight cups water and bring to a boil.
✲ Lower the heat and simmer for forty minutes. Turn off the heat and cool.
✲ Strain the water, discard the pineapple skins and spices.
✲ Pour the water in a container, refrigerate, and enjoy.

P.S. It’s highly diuretic, and bromelain may interact with several medications including anticoagulants and antibiotics. It’s always best to consult a medical doctor before ingesting any part of a pineapple.

Word of the Day: Pareidolia

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Pareidolia: (n.) the instinct to seek familiar forms in disordered images like clouds or constellations; the perception of random stimulus as significant.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, to see patterns in random data.

Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none, like the Rorschach inkblot test.

Studies have shown that facial features aren’t the only thing that we see when we come across an illusory face. It was found that we also see age, emotion, and gender – and strangely enough the vast majority of these funny faces are perceived as male faces, like the man in the moon.

I’m sure my neuroscientist DIL would have a much more scientific and intelligent explanation than I do, but I find it fascinating to discover faces or animals in clouds or common objects.

Check out these examples:

From Bored Panda

Happy Earth Day 2023

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I attended the very first Earth Day celebration in 1970 at Balboa Park in San Diego with a crowd of about 70,000 people. It was Wednesday, the weather was beautiful, about 68 degrees, and I must have skipped school that Wednesday.

I can’t remember who I went with or how I got there but I do recall walking from booth to booth looking for free stuff and having an unpleasant encounter with a San Diego cop, probably about being truant.

There is a vague recollection that I swore at him and he got all puffed up and intimidating, threatening to call my dad until I told him to go ahead, my dad was a lawyer…and then he walked away. Miss you, Daddy, and thank you!

Gaia, known as the mother goddess, was the personification of Earth. She’s described as a caring and nurturing mother figure to all of her children, plants, and other living creatures on this planet.

We’re all children of Gaia, Earth Mother, no matter where we live.

Here’s a photo of boats from my little slice of earth at Agua Hedionda Lagoon, along with a lone paddleboarder.

I walked along a little trail high above the water and this view seemed like it could be anywhere in the world, but it’s right here in SoCal.

Take care of Mother Earth and she’ll take care of you!

How I Go To The Woods

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This intense cosmic energy is not only messing with my sleep, but I was having strange battery issues with my laptop computer so I went back to the Apple store where I had once met Al Gore (yes, VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore) and asked the Genius Bar tech to perform a diagnostic check. The tech didn’t do much but it’s all better, so who really knew what caused the problem, whether it was a hardware glitch or a solar flare, or other planetary influences. The good thing is that it’s back to working perfectly.

There were lots of traffic accidents and horrible drivers everywhere yesterday. The freeway was completely shut down for hours because of an insane situation with a woman who allegedly vandalized a vehicle and carjacked a Lyft. She led the police on a short chase but finally, peacefully, surrendered to police after a prolonged standoff on Interstate 5. It looked like WW3 with all of the military-like Special Weapons and Tactics Team surrounding the vehicle. The woman was taken into custody on suspicion of felony vandalism, brandishing a weapon in a threatening manner, assault with a deadly weapon, carjacking, resisting arrest, and felony evasion of police.

That’s way too much negative energy for ME to deal with and I’m so glad I wasn’t stuck for hours on the freeway. I felt lucky that I had made a spontaneous last minute decision to take an alternate route home. I heard all the sirens though, but had assumed it was simply another accident.

Time to take a deep breath, stay home, work in the garden, listen to the birds, and read a poem or two while cultivating some zen as well as my veggies.

How I Go To The Woods by Mary Oliver

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.