Last Wednesday I featured an episode of Huell Howser’s Road Trip in which he visited the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, so today I thought I would share a few of the many wonderful things I saw there on my recent visit. Though relatively small, this world-class museum is packed with so many amazing artifacts and works of art that […]
I have fond memories of Clear Lake going back to my childhood, when family car trips to Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast meant traveling along the lake’s eastern shoreline (and occasionally stopping at the Foster’s Freeze in Lucerne, which is still there). Of course, Clear Lake, a very large natural lake, has many, many facets and even now I’ve […]
Back in the 1990s the Big Guy and I briefly considered relocating from the Sacramento Valley to the area around Clear Lake, and the city of Ukiah (on U.S. 101, about a 30-minute drive from the lake’s north shore) looked to me like an attractive option. We never actually moved, and I never even managed to visit Ukiah — until […]
Mendocino may be a fairly small village, but it’s seriously packed with historic buildings, numerous water towers, and so many small details that even without stopping to do any shopping — okay, well, much shopping — I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of amazing finds. In this series of images, I’ve focused on a relatively small area that […]
Although these images all came from the Korea photo albums, some of them feel so very familiar to me after 36 years of living with my own dedicated fisherman. For the same reason, I can make a few observations that might at least partly make up for not knowing the circumstances or the locations where they were shot. The two […]
I’ve seen plenty of American Coots in a number of watery locations, but Clear Lake is the only place I can seem to get anywhere near them. There always seems to be something comical to me about these small birds; maybe it’s just that I’ve come to associate them with the expression “a funny old coot” — what my Merriam-Webster […]
The weather at Clear Lake has been interesting this week — not the total washout that we feared, although Tuesday was mostly rainy. The worst of the storm seems to have passed, but with a few threatening clouds lingering we’ll have to wait and see what the next couple of days brings. In the meantime, the views here in Nice, […]
Last Monday, March 20, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere celebrated the first day of spring, also known as the vernal equinox — even though it may not feel a whole lot like spring, depending on where you are! The vernal equinox also marks the start of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The first event of this annual celebration […]
I have frequently admired the blue-green iridescence of the male Mallards’ heads, so it was a nice surprise yesterday to get a glimpse of royal purple on these relatively drab females. I was sitting in my car in Lucerne, on the shore of Clear Lake, when a small group of Mallards settled down very nearby. I think we were all […]