2009 Last Gasp! It Takes a Village (Idiot) Ravioli Stuffing Event

...a Blue & Phil hand-made food production

Cast: Will visiting from Cleveland. Charlie up from Davis. Laurel home from Korea for a few days and Kirk home from DC. Carl also joined us from Washington, DC and a recent trip to Israel. Dave up from Hollister with much wine and cheese. Even Steve and Dickson stopped moving long enough to join the party.

Here's a recap of the menu (did anyone take pictures?) and crew. Must capture this before I forget the details.
Drinks
- lemon drops (Steve)
- lost count after (groan) 7 bottles of wine (Dave, Kirk, Carl)
Eggplant Parmesan (Dave, Kailey)
Stuffed pastas (Kailey, Laurel, Dave, Kirk, Charlie, Carl, Will)
- crab with lemon cream sauce
- shrimp and  pea with garlic butter
- butternut squash with sage cream sauce
- herbed cheeses with puttanesca sauce
Green salad (Dickson)
Chocolate gelato & coconut ice cream (Will, Charlie, Dave)

MIA this year :-( Marti, John, Laurie, George, and the Southern California cousins. Get well, John.
Tyler, good luck in Mali...you are going back, right?
Colin, Leah and Lydia and all...stay in touch.
Laurie, keep an eye on George. He needs tending...
Happy New Year

Well...Mostly Below the Snow

While it's true that we mostly live below the snow, every 10 years or so, we get a pretty good dump like this one from December 9 when we had 14 inches on the diving board. A neighbor posted this to her facebook page. It was a beautiful time, though we lost power for 24 hours, so we read by the fire and I worked with a phone-only (no broadband) connection to meetings for half a day.

Because it's so obscure, I should also mention that Below the Snow is an admittedly weak double entendre based on the ecological concept of subnivean zone, a space created at the interface of snowpack and earth, exploited by many small creatures as a safe and relatively cozy place to live during the snowy season. So, like our little hometown in the foothills, there is life and substantial activity where casual observers might assume there to be little.

No Apologies

I have dreamied this thing for way too long. I am just plum bad at starting conceptual projects, in large part because I enjoy the scheming and planning way too much. Walter Mitty was better at this sort of thing than me, but I aspire to his examples. This one has been a back burner deal for far too long. Since I am now maintaining 3 blogs at work (WorkSmart, Dept. of Redundancy Dept. and Meetings@Intel...not linked cause you can't go there), I figure my truly personal blog is way overdue. So here goes...

So what is this?
Below the Snow is intended to be a personal journal on life in these Sierra foothills.
Gardening, hiking, wildflowers, water and beaches, cooking, reading, words, movies, dumb tricks I teach my computer and sane economic development are a few passions I'd like to share. I'd also like to generate some dialogue on current issues we inhabitants of Planet Earth face. Not sure where this leads, but governance, health care and life in the slow lane come to mind.

And who's listening? Don't particularly care but I certainly will invite friends and acquaintances who are likewise free to pass it along. This ought to, at a minimum, help me avoid the dreaded end of the year letter to the family and friends.