Refrigerator Woes

I have absolutely no fun food news to report! Summer is heating up, so the kitchen is beastly, and I'm mired in the drear of owning a cafe. The refrigerator in the kitchen is freezing the eggs but is not cold enough for the butter...which is mooky melted when I reach for it in the morning. I've tried switching where I store these two things, but no dice. Aphids took over the big pine trees on the large dining patio in front, so eradication has resulted in little aphid bodies dropping from the trees for a few weeks now! How long can this possibly go on??!!! One of the feral cats we had fixed, is cozying up to people and then biting them...she has reformed for now, resulting in a temporary stay of execution. In the midst of all this...glamour, I decided to go camping.

Harrison and Carter and I packed up our salami and cheese, cherries, tangerines, chocolate covered peanuts and Ritz crackers. We reserved a cabin at the KOA campground in Shingletown, on the north side of Lassen National Park and sped out of here. I didn't give the refrigerator problem another thought! Instead, I immersed myself in the scent of campfire and pine, wildflowers and deer intent on standing in the road, snow on the ground and the sight of majestic volcanoes.

Lassen is all boiling mudpots and poisonous milky aqua lakes. We tested the little trickles across the trails, as we hiked along and either burned our fingers or chilled them in ice melt. The sky was cartoon-blue and the clouds were puffs and then suddenly thunder and lightening...then back to puffs. We drove along miles of highway shaded on each side by dense ceanothus---native California lilac. The blue blossoms completely hid the green so that blue flowers met blue sky! I just keep thinking that I've seen it all, and then I drive through 20 miles of miracle!

Mt. Shasta lured us north, so we visited the caverns at the lake. These are reached by boat, and then by a hair-raising bus ride up a narrow one way road, cut over rock slides. The cliffs rise up on one side of the bus, and drop straight down on the other. The caverns compete though, with hundreds of steps, flying bats, and astounding geology. After ice cream, the kids water-screened bags of dirt that contained rough emeralds, amethysts, rubies, pyrite, peridots, quartz crystals and raspberry quartz. They each collected two handfuls of gems! After driving along the base of the mountain, we hiked to a waterfall and walked through a lava tube, one-third of a mile long!

On the way home, we had marshmallow and boysenberry and Reeses peanut butter cup milk shakes. And so, though I have dozens of mosquito bites and I can't quite wash the smoke from my hair, I can face the refrigerator tomorrow with poise and rationality! What a few days!