Kickin' it in Our Sagebrush Sandals (Cascades:Crater Lake)

Crater Lake, California

Click on the illustration above,  to really enjoy the details

(co-published with Postcard from California)

While we were walking along the rim of Crater Lake, I was already planning a return trip back to see more of that incredibly clean, blue, blue, blue water in the high, dry air.

I particularly liked reading the informative little sign about a pile of ten thousand year old  sandals an Oregon researcher found beneath volcanic ashes, demonstrating that people were probably living in this area before, and possibly during the eruption that created the crater that makes the lake basin. 

They were made out of sagebrush. Liiiiike, how comfortable would THOSE be to hike in?

There were dozens of pairs of shoes left. How come? Didn't somebody miss them? Could it be an ancient days Cinderella story?

A spot of time travel to solve this little mystery is definitely in order.

Perhaps an ancient Cinderella, ran off and left her sagebrush slippers behind

Romancing the Job: Makin' A Buck

Just Makin' a Buck?

 He LOOOKS like a regular working man from the Andes but in truth he's...

Befuddled by Baht: Sherlock Holsemn’ the Coin

 Please click on the illustration above to enjoy the lovely details

Befuddled by Baht

Sherlock Holsemn’ the Coin

It’s a baht coin (฿) from Thailand.

Sherlock Holmes could, no doubt, have told you that in less than a minute. It took my husband, who spent the off hours of his childhood collecting coins, about a half an hour to find the coin’s primary origin.

But how did it make it way, way down the far reaches of our driveway? More precisely how did it turn up just in front of our back gate?

It’s extreme cleanliness told us that it hadn’t lain there long.

Besides, my husband is a geologist who spends much of his life looking for anomalies under foot. He was absolutely sure that it hadn’t been been there the day before.

Who do we know that’s been to Thailand? Nobody. There are several different different neighborhoods with asian flavors in our area, but as far as I know there haven't been a lot of people immigrating from Thailand. A few restaurants in the area are the extent of our connection. We have some vague sense of a faraway exotic locale full of  elephants, orchids, shrines and curry. Sherlock Holmes would have pointed out, however, that the photo of Bangkok on the web, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room for large mammals.

Sherlock would have considered the possibility that it resulted from automatation. Our garbage, recycling and compost bins live near the gate. Did the great arms of the Recycling Works truck pick up the coin at somebody else house and deposit it on the lid of one of our bins? Then perhaps it flipped off when we banged the lid? You'd think dimes, quarters and pennies would be raining down if it worked like that.

Holmes might decide that someone came looking for us at our back gate, stood there uncertainly for a few minutes fingering the coins in her pocket, and then changed her mind. He’d know it was a woman, of course, because of something to do with the distance between gate and door. Don’t ask me to explain that.

Personally I think the baht coin is a sign. A sign that it’s my turn to do elephant duty.

฿