Storm Patterns & Mushrooms


My nephew got a cool Weather Station from my parents this Xmas. We set it up on the back porch down in Monterey and watched it as a storm front made its preparations. The station has a little four armed wind thing that spins around. It was intermittent, which was kind of interesting for all of us, as we thought it might be constantly spinning. We got a few millimeters of rain last night in the little rain catcher thingie. The temperature at 7:30 am was 55 deg. Farenheit. Ah, maybe I can be a weather anchor!!

Driving over highway 17 I found a very heavy, lowlying fog on top of the Santa Cruz Mountains. SF, though, was shining and sparkling. Friend who lives in South Beach told me we had just had a storm pass through.

Yesterday watched the surfers off of Lover’s Point down in Pacific Grove. About a dozen were all lined up for the big waves. I saw one guy get a wave, then fall backwards on the ridge and do a double-flip, landing in back of the wave on his back. A little sea otter was playing around near the cove. All very exciting to me, especially since that cove is usually calm as glass, and I’ve spent a lot of time swimming in it. It is very cold water, as it’s the closest you can get to the Monterey shelf to the deep ocean, and the water is pretty much right from there and not warmed up at all.

Walked through a redwood forests down near Pacific Grove (PG to those in the know) and there were tons, tons tons tons tons of mushrooms. My sister didn’t know the name for all of them, so here are my amateur descriptions: that mushroom that is in Alice in Wonderland, lots of little light brown ones, huge ones that push through the foliage like a submarine emerging, and really dark black ruffly ones that remind me of truffles though I have never seen a truffle.