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After my weekend in Port Costa, I went through nearly a week of abject depression, which was interrupted by a trip to spend Thanksgiving with the family up in the Sierra Foothills. My brother picked up my nephew in Hayward, and then came up to Cotati to pick me up. Then we drove up to my Mother’s place in Cameron Park, before going to dinner at the historic Bennett House in Placerville.

Nothing really eventful happened, except that I saw my Mother’s apartment for the first time since she moved to Cameron Park (we met a couple of times nearby for her 85th and 90th birthdays, but I also saw her a few times when she came down to the Bay Area or Sonoma County).

I did receive a call from my (now) current roommate in Graton, letting me know I could move in on the first of December– so that was good news.

We had breakfast together at a strip mall diner in Cameron Park (which wasn’t bad), then we headed back toward home in the greater SF Bay Area.

The day after returning from my adventure in Port Costa, I went to check on a potential living place in a rural area just North of Graton, CA. Which is itself just North of Sebastopol (off the Highway 101 corridor, thank God). Needless to say, I get the place, and moved in over the weekend. I’ve fallen way behind in my blogging, due to about a week of depression, then the Thanksgiving Holiday, then the actual process of moving to Graton (sans assistance).

This is a view up the driveway from the road:

 …

After checking out the place, interviewing, and taking a few pictures (my current wallpaper was taken of the ground next to the driveway above my house), my (now) roommate drove me back into Graton to get a bite to eat, take a look around, and catch the bus back to Cotati (the whole trip was 3 1/2 hours each way on Sonoma Transit).

I didn’t find out that I was accepted there until I went up to Cameron Park to visit my Mother for Thanksgiving, so I’ll do the follow up to this story after writing about my Thanksgiving trip.

Sorry for the delay– to many excuses even to count…

After dinner at the Bull Valley Inn (mentioned in the previous post) we went across the street to catch “some band from Ireland”– Seneca– and as we arrived they were still setting up.

The entrance to the Warehouse (more pictures here):

The band had arranged a national tour of the US before they had difficulty obtaining their visas in a timely manner, concert dates were cancelled, and the gig at The Warehouse was pulled together somewhat quickly. Their band set up (with a borrowed PA system, which had some problems) beneath a stuffed Polar Bear in a glass case:

 

(sorry about the picture quality. I’m still having difficulties shooting indoors under less-than-adequate lighting)

They played really well together: bassist Yvonne Conaty and lead guitarist Brendan O’Gorman contributed mightily to shaping the overall sound of the band. Unfortunately. this was not necessarily reflected in their debut record, Sweeter than Bourbon which, while compelling in its own right (and which landed the group two spots on the UK’s Top 25 charts), focussed primarily on the singing and songwriting of singer/rhythm guitarist Robert Hope (whose vocal efforts this night were ironically thwarted by the hastily arranged sound system), but the production on the CD didn’t fully covey what the band was capable of in their live performance. Rounding out the combo was drummer Daragh O’Loughlin, who also added to the overall sound and texture of the music, rather than being contented to merely stomp out a beat.

All in all, an enjoyable evening. I look forward to listening to them when they come around the area again. I tried to pick a song from the album (below) which I felt best represented what the band was able to accomplish musically onstage.

(sorry, but I’ve been waay late in my posts for a variety of reasons)

Last week, the Love of My Life called me, asking if I could help her paste up her (mostly) annual calendar, featuring her photographs in and around Port Costa, CA.

She came out to meet me in Cotati, unfortunately when she got here, she didn’t have her photo files along with her, and we decide to go out to Port Costa so she could retrieve her photos, and take some more photos around town while there was still daylight.

We drove the scenic route to the Carquinez Bridge. This is a picture from the Highway 37 bridge over the Napa River (and those two peaks in the background on the left are Mt. Diablo):

She had to stop at her bank in the town of Crockett on the way, so it was getting pretty late in the day when we got to Port Costa.

We arrived in Port Costa, and used the remaining light to take pictures of the town. And when we arrived at the downtown, a few friends informed her of some “band from Ireland” whose name they could not seem to remember (their name is Seneca, and I will be posting about them next), but who are supposed to have a couple of songs in the Top 25 in the UK, were playing that night at The Warehouse.

The downtown:

 

We headed back to her house, where we went through her photo files (she apparently had lost several when her old computer crashed), and when she wasn’t able to find the material she was hoping to find. We sat at her kitchen table, mostly in silence, as the light faded away outside, and tried to decide what we were going to do: get a bite to eat, and whether she wanted to drive me back to Cotati that night (which is a fairly long drive), or whether I would just crash on the couch.

We decided to get something to eat in town at the Bull Valley Inn (below), a bar and restaurant she used to manage a couple of years back.

 

She ran into a few of her friends there, and talked with them as we ate dinner. Then we headed over across the street to The Warehouse to see Seneca, a band from Limerick, Ireland.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gotten pretty busy the last few days (alternating with bouts of huge depression).

Thursday night, I attended a meetup of the North Bay Ruby Users Group, which is a group of people working with, developing, experimenting– or just plain learning– Ruby on Rails, which is an up-and-coming web application development framework, using Ruby as the programming language, and Rails as the framework (Rails can apparently also be used with other programming “languages” like AJAX). I was having trouble getting my Rails Server to run on my laptop, and I received hands-on assistance in working out the bugs. Now I have to learn how to use the framework to develop web applications.

I’m just getting started in this endeavor. …

Here’s a picture of the people attending the meetup (I’m absent from the phot because I’m the one taking the picture):

For more photos, click here; and…

For those living in the North San Francisco Bay region, here’s the website where meetups are announced. Sign up today! The more attendees, the more opportunity to host these gatherings where we can further our knowledge of web development, and socialize with some very helpful and nice people.

PC bumper-stickers in a vast Suburban Wasteland

 

(for more pictures, click here)

When I was in High School, in a little Hick town in an inland valley (soon to be part of the greater San Francisco Bay Area Suburban Sprawl – SFBASS) called Livermore, most of my cool friends (all six of ’em, more or less) were a year or two older, and about half of them ended up going to Sonoma State University in Cotati. I didn’t visit there much, but it was discribed as a cool little college town. There was also a “planned development” to the North (soon to metastasize) into a bloated generic-looking suburb called Rohnert Park (which unfortunately spread to infect the town of Cotati itself). …

Cotati still retains some vestiges of the quaint little college town it once was, but now it mostly consists of a suburb of Santa Rosa (which, having no actual industry to speak of, is itself a vast suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area). Which currently makes Cotati a weird little town. There are still some very cool people here (I found out about a local Zen Sangha from a gentleman at a local cafe). Sonoma State University is actually (although I really haven’t checked this out lately) a fairly hip college. Project Censored, a nationally renowned center for media research and First Amendment issues, and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States, was founded, and is headquartered at Sonoma State. Unfortunately, the town in general has a very “hick” vibe to it– as do all of the towns in Sonoma County along the Highway 101 corridor.

At this point it appears that the University crowd seems to pretty much stay to itself, and avoids the “townies”– a term I never heard of until after college. Probably because Humboldt State University– my alma mater— was built high into the redwoods on the slope of some pretty tall hills, and the University crowd pretty much took over the downtown from the “townies”, who at one time worked in the local Lumber Mills– now mostly defunct (according to Government statistics, the #1 industries up there appear to be pot growing and alcoholism)– and who confined themselves to an area of town disparagingly referred to as “The Bottoms”.

Here are some grapevines taken at the foot of Sonoma Mountain. I absentmindedly left the ISO set to 1600 (I took some pictures of the moon the previous night). And through the magick of Fotochop, I came out with a photo that doesn’t look entirely like crap.

Before:

 

Voila!

Ta daaaah!

Also, I’ve started a new album in the 365 photo group. Let’s see if I can keep this up!