September 2009
The Archives
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09.20.09Corn Shuckery
Birds, Crafts, gardening (4)One of the less ambitious projects in Daniel Beard's summer chapter was to make a violin from a corn stalk. In his romantic view any young man would have a pile of dried corn stalks just piled up behind his barn. Well, we were lucky in that we had planted a "corn spiral" in our garden. In other ways we were not so lucky. The Indian Corn cross bred with all the sweet corn, and pretty much took over. Since we never actually ate any of our corn it had to be put to some good use. I researched a ...
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09.13.09We Haven’t Made Any Boats Yet
Autumn, Boats, Fishing, nature study (2)Boat-building (even very simple home-made boats) is big work for little boys. Heck, it's big work for big boys, too, and this big boy and girl already have rigs. One of these rigs is particularly well-suited to habitats where we wouldn't be able to take a canoe: the longboard. The past couple of weekends the kids have been getting acclimated to the cold Pacific surfline, the kelp forests and the occasional cleansing wipeout. So far, no downers but after taking this picture we decided to outfit the kids with life jackets in the surf, just like we would on a ...
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09.10.09Paddling for Bioluminescence
Aquaria, Birds, Boats, Crafts, Fishing, Summer, nature study (13)We have been captivated lately. Until we are ready to stock our home marine aquarium we've spent quality time recently with our fellow sea creatures by several means: we renewed our membership at the aquarium; we've started teaching the boys to surf in Santa Cruz; and we've spent much time paddling up and down the sloughs, bays and byways of the Bay Area. On a recent campout to Tomales Bay we overheard, just as we were laying down to sleep in our tents, an armada of chatty sea kayakers paddling into our cove just bubbling with enthusiasm over something even more ...
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