Sunday morning in California

[mrissa]

I managed to sleep until 6:00 a.m. local time. I am so proud. Of course, we're not leaving for Half Moon Bay until 10:30, so it's not like I needed to be up -- but getting on a schedule where I sleep until 4:00 a.m. and am worn to a nubbin by 9:00 p.m. is not really the goal here. Sort of interferes with one's social agenda, is what I'm saying. Also inconvenient to other people trying to sleep in the room without the glow of the monitor for half the night, maybe.

The smell of not-winter was immediate as soon as I got off the plane. It's raining now -- raining pretty good, actually, not like the half-assed drizzle we used to get here a lot. If it's still raining when we get done with lunch, we will go to San Gregorio in the rain. We've done it before. I greeted the eucalyptus by the side of the road (startling the guys as I called, "I can smell you!" out the car window). I had forgotten a lot. The shape of the evergreens is not like the shape of our evergreens at home. The tile on the roofs: we don't have that at home. It's kind of neat, but a good snowstorm would ruin half the tiles. (Are you having a good snowstorm without me, Minneapolitans? Curse my timing!)

timprov's aunt Judy had a hearty stew and bread and salads and baked apples and wine and biscotti waiting for us when we got there. Mmmmmmmmmm. And the stew was not half onions. I hate it when you have a perfectly good stew otherwise and keep running into excessive onions.

So here's the thing about my mail: I cannot access mail that was already in my inbox yesterday afternoon. I can get new stuff you send me, but the old stuff is stuck inaccessible at home until I get there. So if you e-mailed me something you'd like me to know before Friday, please re-send it to my gmail account, or just re-send it. I should be able to pick up new stuff. Mark has fixed it for the moment. Ah, the joys of travel.

Soon: stuff. Then: more stuff. Yep.

Comments

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I'm curious: if you don't have tiled roofs, what are your roofs made of? I'm used to the alternatives for houses being roofing felt (for flat roofs) or thatch.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have shingles. They have shingles here, too, but with a lot of tile roofs intermixed with the shingle roofs and the flat ones.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

(Pause for Wikipedia...)

Do you mean asphalt shingles? I was confused at first because the first examples I saw looked exactly like a slate roof to me, then the next one was wood, and I thought that sounded unlikely for the roofs of a whole state. In conversation I'd refer to both as 'tiled', although I'd also use that to refer to the ceramic material specifically. Does 'shingled' refer to the design of having overlapping flat things on a pitched roof, or is it only used with specific materials (and where do ceramic tiles fit in)?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Separated by a common language once again! Ceramic/baked clay tiles are the only thing I would refer to as "tile roofs." Asphalt, wood, slate, etc. are all shingle types to me, but ceramic/clay tiles are not. This random Stanford building image, found on google (http://email.powweb.com/sqmail/src/webmail.php) (ignore the guy in front of it -- I don't know him) is the kind of thing I mean by "tiled roof."

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I would ignore the guy if I could but I'm afraid I can't see the picture - apparently I need to be logged in, or something.

I've just realised that I've come across the idea of a 'shingled' roof in fiction from the U.S. and have been picturing it as something like a very coarse, almost pebbly, roofing felt (probably by analogy with shingle beaches). No doubt some passages of fiction would now become much clearer, if only I could remember where I'd read it. Anyway, thanks for sorting out my confusion!