A Taste for Tidal Salt

Ummmm, yummmm the taste of tidal salt.

Pretty delicious, particularly if your name is Pickle Weed, Cord Grass or Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

You may also enjoy A Baylands Bouquet

Go ahead and click on the picture to enjoy this really salty repast.

A Baylands Bouquet

California buckwheat,

Eriogonum fasciculatum var. foliolosum

Please click on the picture above to immerse yourself in the detail of this lovely buckwheat bouquet

What's so great about the

Baylands Nature Preserve?

• I never saw anything like it before I moved to the Bay Area in 1978. Open, flat views of water, mud, birds and pickleweed gave me a new vision of what romantic meant.
• Though we often drive out to walk the trails, it’s possible to get there on my around-town cruiser bike.
• Birds have priority over people, or as it says on their web site “A substantial resident population of birds as well as being a major migratory stopover on the Pacific Flyway”

I've seen Marsh Hawks, Great and common Egrets and Great Blue Herons many times. And I'm not even a birder out looking for them. Of course there are tons of common shore birds: seagulls, ducks, godwits, willets, curlews, coots and sandpipers.

• Sometimes I get out there and there’s nobody on the expanse of trail but me, but I feel safe because it’s so wide open and people can see me from a distance. So I can sing REALLY LOUDLY

Fine Fruit:Quilt Block, Contest Entry Silicon Valley fusionwearsv

This entry won FOURTH PLACE in the Silicon Valley fusionwearsv contest!

This garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, is where the story that transformed the agricultural Santa Clara Valley into today’s technological Silicon Valley began. When Bill and Dave built their first oscillator in this garage, my husband's family lived just a few blocks away. My father-in-law remembered the area of that time, as a land of cherry orchards. In 1938, my own family was involved in the information technology of the day, as telegraphers. As Silicon Valley grew my family's information skill set evolved with it. My father, sister and myself were computer programmers.

I enjoyed biking over to photograph the restored HP garage that represents an important foundation of the Silicon Valley. I used Photoshop CS4 to alter that and other digital photos I’ve taken, to create my own 1938 vintage-style fruit crate label, honoring the birth of the Silicon Valley. All images are my own. I loved being able to honor the history of the valley by using the technology that it represents.