Never before Frog Jump

Camp Connell, CA -- A local expression, transformed into holy writ for gardeners, goes like this:
"Never plant before Frog Jump."
You have to be a resident of Calaveras County, California, in the gold country, or a devoted fan of Mark Twain's colorful prose, to make the link between then - the 1800s -- and now.
Remember the story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," by Twain?
In the current century local boosters of tourism have adopted, or hijacked, the frog story to create a local festival/fair called the Jumping Frog Jubilee, centered at the Calaveras Fair Grounds and the city of Angels Camp. To locals, it is just called "Frog Jump."
It is a REALLY big deal. We even have a Frog Jump Princess, a significant local honor. And we have champion frogs, and brass plates cemented into the sidewalks of the town to commemorate great jumps and jumpers of the past.
But the highlight is the annual frog jump contests. That's plural "Contests" because the folks at the county fair jubilee and the local club that "owned" the frog jump contest had a tiff that resulted in competing jumps.
But people still come for both, enter frogs domestic and foreign, and vie for the jumpiest. Check it out at http://www.frogtown.org/
The big event(s) is(are) planned for the week of May 14, which for most people around the country would be late Spring.
Not for us.
Frog Jump, as we call it here in the mountains, is the date before which you plant your garden at great risk of a late season freeze.
I confess I have not taken this too seriously, so as Spring-like temperatures flowed up the mountainside in the past two weeks I have been dreaming of flowers.
Yesterday, Pat worked in the raised garden beds at our daughter's home, getting ready for planting. The chickens helped by scratching around for bugs in the warm sun.
I took the snow tire chains out of the van and put them away at our house. And just last week, as the ground became almost totally free of snow, I put the snow blower away for the season.
We are currently in Murphys, lower down the mountain, horse-sitting for our daughter and family. It turned cold and rained here at 2,000 feet last night, and then the phone rang early.
A neighbor called to change the weekly poker game location because we have too much snow at home, closer to 5,000 feet. About six inches on the ground and still coming down when he called. About a foot when I checked later on a webcam located near my home.

At least we didn't plant before Frog Jump.
Maybe I should apply the lessons of the local culture to things like snow blowers and tire chains.
I still have to figure out how to get home without chains. Maybe I can borrow the horse.

Gas prices, Spring, eBay, and good friends...

The news is good here this week in Camp Connell, as it always is, though the economic indicators are somewhat less certain. Here are some items to consider:

-- Gas prices hit $4.05 9/10 this past week at the local general store because the tanker arrived.

It appears that the big oil companies, Chevron in this case, set the price at the pump based on some mysterious formula and tell the local sales folks what to charge. Folks at the store this evening tell me they've seen prices as high at $4.29 in the San Francisco area, and the ski resort up the mountain charges more than our local store.
The price of gas doesn't seem like much of a big deal until you consider a long road trip. It was cheaper for Pat and me to fly to and from Mexico, even adding in the cost of an airport motel, than to drive. Next year we are hoping to go to Alaska, but driving seems a unlikely option.


--Weather report: the snow is melting in our front yard.

-- Today (Friday) was my last ski day of this season. The resort up the hill will be open two more days but we will be busy and it really isn't worth it as conditions are not great. The window for decent skiing is so small now, as the sun turns the icy snow into slush by noon, I'm starting to think about hiking at a lower altitude.
One act of faith: I purchased a season ski pass for next year.


-- Spring is officially here at Camp Connell. We have Crocus blooming, dozens of other bulbs fighting their way up into the sunshine -- some coming through patches of snow.
The other sure sign of Spring is that the work has resumed on the garage we were having built for last winter, but didn't quite make it. The site has been cleared of snow and tree debris, and the inspector came by yesterday and gave the go-ahead for pouring concrete on Monday to finish the slab. Then, if rafters and lumber can be found, the walls should start to go up.


Next week I have to arrange to have the snow tires removed from the Subaru. These are REAL snow tires, not your wimpy East Coast type that can stay on the car all summer.

And baseball season is underway for my 11-year-old granddaughter Delaney.

(UPDATE: The forecast calls for some rain mixed with snow in the middle of the week. No matter. It is still Spring.)



-- We have rented our former home in Sacramento after trying unsuccessfully to sell it for four months. As part of the cleaning out, I have vowed to sell off a bunch of small stuff on eBay. Made my first sale this week: a pair of commemorative drinking glasses with Apollo 13 designs. Sold for $1.29 (shipping was over $8, but the buyer in Iowa paid for that). The buyer sent me an email that said, "Say, are you the same LaMont that used to work for the TODAY newspaper in Florida?" Turns out he read the newspaper as a youth, and has been a space buff ever since.

-- Pat and I are back in school now, training the be docents at Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The park is only two miles away, and has over a thousand Sequoia trees, giant redwoods, big trees or -- if you are British -- wellingtonian.. Technically,they are Sequoiadendron Giganteum, and that's the sort of thing we are learning along with how to deal with drunken and rowdy campers (call the ranger). Should be fun this summer.

-- Coincidence, or not? I had a telephone call from Stan Rodimon this past week. Stan was a classmate at Marion Military Institute from 1957-1960, the school I wrote about recently, and then at the University of Alabama where we both graduated before going off into the Army and losing track of each other. He and his wife Linda were struggling married students when we last got together 46 years ago. They were good friends and interesting people. They promise to come see us this summer so we can do a bit of catching up. What a treat!

Just another day in the mountains

Today was a "found" day as we expected to be tied up with contractors, and then on the road to San Francisco Bay to deal with hauling out our sailboat s/v Good News so we can get the bottom painted, a routine and expensive maintenance chore.

We took care of the first business early.

The contractor who is going to build us a garage came by with the county building permits in hand; actually almost, nearly, possibly ready to start the project. We began this process in Spring, signed a contract in June, and have been messing around with ideas, the county permit folk and an engineer ever since.
So far, we are only about $800 over budget, thanks to surprises from the county permit people regarding the required engineering (about $600 worth) and me paying a totally unfair penalty for the fact the wood shed, 20 years old and built by someone else, apparently did not have a permit. I decided not to argue about it, or tear down the shed, which were options that took too much energy and emotion.
We need the garage as the cars take a real beating when the snow and ice come to stay.
Our plan was to have the garage built before the snow flies.
Well, the snow flew a week ago, though it did not last long.
We remain hopeful, based on today's discussions, that within a week a neighbor will show up with a backhoe and start shoving dirt and gravel around. It is a fairly simple design, so if we get reasonable weather for the next 30 days, we may see a garage before the serious snow begins. Last year we had the first snow in late November. This year it has snowed here once, and just up the road, three times, already.

So, just in case, we will make sure the buiding supplies can be stashed out of the weather in our woodshed if needed.
The second contractor, this one a person who install kitchen counters, showed up before the first one left. That discussion required much looking at colorful tiles of various materials, all horrifically expensive, and suggesting multiple options. We will get a bid in a few days, and probably get one or two more.
This became necessary whe our kitchen counter tile cracked one especially cold winter. I have repaired the damage with duct tape for several years, but we agree it is time for a fix.
But then we were done, as the boatyard where I want to get the haulout done is not available this week.
So we went to the park.
Calaveras Big Trees State Park is our near neighbor, two miles down the road, and we almost never go there unless we have house guests.
But today we took off, found a bottle of water under the car seat, and went exploring and hiking.
We have visited the South Grove of Sequoiah (Sequoiadendron giganteum) trees many times, but today we drove all the way down the river canyon to the other side, in the middle of a beautiful forest, and hiked into the seldom-visited North Grove.
It is a beautiful time of year to be outside. The weather was post card perfect; sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-60s. Recent rains have dampened down the forest floor, and created a perfumed scent as a few eager plants have sprung back to hold their heads high.
Only four or five other vehicles were at the trailhead, and it was as if we had a magic place all to ourselves.
The drive down into the park and up the next ridge covered about ten miles of mixed conifer and oak forests, and elevation ranging from 5,000 feet down to 3,000 feet and back up again.
This part of the forest is full of small dogwoods under the larger cedars and pines and oaks, and they have all turned pink and yellow and gold and orange. Quite a sight. And we discovered a tree called a big leaf maple, plendid in yellows down alongside the creeks.
The squirrels are busy everywhere, getting ready for winter, and we even saw a few wooly worms getting ready for cold weather.
The big trees are stunning. They dominate everything nearby, and seem to lurk behind the merely magnificent Sugar Pines and White Cedars which reach upward over a hundred feet. The Stanislaus River and bear and Big Trees creeks were flowing happily.
The guide book says there are more than 1,000 living big trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in the groves in our park. These are not Coastal redwoods, which actually grow taller, but the prehistoric giant trees that are the largest living things in our world today -- the few that are left.
We plan to vsit them all, and not worry about meeting contractors.
We're retired. We have time to do it all.