Patchy drizzle, persistent peevitude

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Been grading most of the day. The ground was wet this morning. Fog and low clouds. The sun hardly shone.


Sunny Girl was peevish. Took her outside, but it was no good.


Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but wait, eh Sunny Girl?


P.S. :


Came across this old bottle, a small one. As I recall, my family and I found it, along with lots of other things, in an old abandoned mine in upper Trabuco Canyon, circa 1964. Inside the cave, our dog, Prince, fell into a deep hole that was filled with water. We shone our flashlight down, and we could see old timber coming up from the black deep.

Prince was a great dog. We brought him down with us from British Columbia in 1959. I remember that he was nuts about oranges. In those days, orange groves were everywhere, and the smell of orange blossoms was often intense. That was wonderful—for Prince and me, too.

When we first arrived in Orange County, we did a lot of driving—in our pink '55 Ford station wagon. Prince would go nuts when he smelled those oranges, so we'd let him out, and he'd run out to those groves, biting orange after orange that he found on the ground, just to get the juice. Annie and I laughed. My dad would just shake his head and say, "Heimat Land."

I remember: in that cave, I was awfully worried about Prince. After much effort, we got him out. We almost had to jump in there with him. I think maybe my dad did exactly that. It didn't seem possible that Prince got out, but he did. My dad, too.

The bottle made me remember that episode, and the oranges too. Decided to take some pics.


Sunny Girl says "hey."

—9:00 p.m., Trabuco Canyon