Flower Friday. : : Matilija Poppy

Also aptly called 'Fried Egg' Poppy. As poppies go, they are really big, over 7cm across. They emerge the same way as smaller poppies do and the wrinkled look somehow adds to their charm. They flutter gracefully in the smallest breeze, and I liked the way this one was catching the morning sun.

Bob and Gail took the train (and the ferry) to San Francisco this morning so we missed them at coffee, but Dan and Tobi joined us at Trail House and Shelby dropped by with a bag of treats for Spike. He somehow knows she is there as soon as she comes in the door. Crystal had put little coffee cups full of wildflowers on the table and has clearly made a lot of good changes to the place, for it was quite crowded this morning.  Back when we lived in Berkeley we walked about four blocks to Peets every day, rain or shine. Ann and Jim remembered that and commented that in some ways, Trail House is better than Peet's because it has much better indoor seating. Peet's was all outdoors in a courtyard but had only minimal seating indoors at a counter.
 
Trail House converted part of its parking lot into outdoor seating, but it definitely feels like sitting at picnic tables in a parking lot. Conversation ensued about how many places here have outdoor seating either in or overlooking a a parking lot. Another artifact of the Covid lockdown and ensuing restrictions, I suspect. The anthropologist in me is still compiling an unofficial list of all the things that have changed quite dramatically as a result of Covid, both personally and community wide. I'm always interested in people's stories and would be interested in compiling some and combining them with some sort of commentary...someday....

Dana and Jim have gone to Bottle Rock, a huge three day music festival in Napa. Another topic of conversation over coffee this morning. Bottle Rock doubles the population of Napa for the weekend, and people rent their driveways for parking for as much as $100/day and their extra bedrooms and couches for far more than that. The really sane ones leave town for the duration. Dan and Tobi used to live in Gilroy CA where they have a huge garlic festival every year, and they said they couldn't go anywhere during that but they had to stay in town because their kids were always involved somehow. We had a similar situation in Berkeley on football game days. The stadium holds 50,000 people and has virtually no parking. The encroachment of the university into the town and the ensuing congestion was one of the things that drove us out of Berkeley.
But that is another story....

Our internet was out most of the day and is still misbehaving. I'm giving up on comments until it works....