I drove here from Eureka on Monday, with early morning cases on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Not worth driving home Tuesday afternoon - 2.5 hrs - then driving back Tuesday evening -2.5 hrs-for the Wednesday hearing, so I stayed. That means two night time strolls from the Best Western by the freeway, to my favorite restaurants up around State Street.

Monday night Patrona is dark. I recalled this after walking there around 6:30pm. Light enough when I started to get this flowering plum shot. There are zillions of these trees in Ukiah and a long stretch of the freeway is lined with them on the eastern side. Beautiful



Turning from dark Patrona on Monday, with a chill in the air, I made my way north on State street wondering if I would reach Ruen Tong or Walter first. Ruen Tong. Had a nice pork dish and a good zinfindel there, met an old friend from the days of the timber wars and caught up with some personal history exchange. Walked home, to the motel. Couldn't have been much over a mile, and Ukiah is practically level. I had my jacket I bought on the last cruise when we reached Patagonia and the air cooled down. Ukiah's got nothing on Patagoinian towns for cold nights.

The camera gathers light nicely, and takes pictures that my film cameras would never have been able to. Here's a tree reflected in one of several creeks that are channeled through Ukiah. You won't guess it, but this picture is upside down. Turn the computer over and you'll see what I saw when I took it. (PS Those are not stars.)



It was 32 degrees this morning. Ice on the windshield. Warming during the day, and definitely warmer this evening. I still wore my jacket, but didn't zip it up. Went to Patrona and had the burger. Not bad, but not the best one I've had there. The fig and gargonzola pizza has been consistently good. Wines marvelous, as usual.

There is a full moon so I got this shot. Hope your computer shows it well. This is a hand-held camera shot. Wait till I get a tripod.

Finally, some home time. The ranch is about 30 acres, but we mostly live on 5 or so, much of it lawn. Every year I mean to mow it during the late winter or early spring so that it doesn't get away from me. Every year I get put off by the rain or the cold or the work schedule and in the early summer I'm out there in 4 foot high grass trying to mow it. Not this year, I told myself (as usual). But Saturday and Sunday I actually got out there with the big DR mower and knocked down a lot of the taller grass - its up to about 1 foot in places. i've been working too cutting a trail up to the barn which has a gentler gradient than the driveway, which is quite steep. With the earth I displace I've been filling in holes and old dips in the lawn, trying to make it nice and mowable. I can now report some success. However I spent much of my lawn time this weekend clearing out brush - especailly a lot of poison oak I cut last fall. I thought I'd leave it until it dried out before handling it much. Good plan i guess. I'm not itching.

Drove to the Townhouse in Eureka for the evening. Just as I reached town the skies darkened and buckets of rain came down. It was just a shower, but a very intense one. Cold too. After checking in I walked off down 3rd street to see about dinner. Thought I was going to the Ritz but I was wrong. I went to the Cafe Waterfront and had the pork loin special. Sprinkled just a bit on my return trip, but I was within a block of the Townhouse and made it back with no real problems.

My trial is settling I think, so I'll hang out in Eureka till my mid-afternoon hearing, then take off for Ukiah. Got to save a truck from forfeiture.

Here are a couple of shots I took last week that I thought you might want to see. First, the court house in San Rafael, for Marin County. In my travels I’ve seen quite a few court houses in Northern California, and most have little character. A couple are quite old, such as those in Weaverville, and Colusa, and these are interesting. But the actual court activity goes on in unremarkable modern buildings sort of hidden behind the imposing old structures. Marin County is the exception. After the war they decided to have Frank Lloyd Wright design their public structure, and the result is the only court house I’ve been in which has docent tours and a gift shop. It’s a destination not only for those immeshed in the so-called justice system, but also for tourists. I admit I’ve never seen a crowd of tourists with their docent, but I’ve never seen Ulan Bantor either. I believe in the existence of both.



When I go over the mountains from 101 to the central valley I normally take Rt 20. There is another road which connects Hopland to the Clearlake highway, but it is slower because it is a two lane road going up and over the mountain without the benefit of the widening and grading that Rt 20 has had. Last week I was going from Marin to Clearlake for a hearing and turned right when 101 reached Hopland. Once I reached the peak I stopped and took a few pictures of the eastern views. Here's one of the best - a little place with end of the road seclusion in the unnamed mountains around Clearlake. You can see a bit of the lake in the distance. I suspect these mountains were forested before civilization arrived.

Remember those country songs about people who live in the big houses up the hill? Well tonight I'm doing that. I'm in El Grande, the Best Western in Clearlake, doing my first Lake County case in years. The El Grande -really, that is its name, every Best Western has a name - has a moorish tiled entrance, and a huge interior courtyard 4 stories high, with natural light at the top, a large fountain on the ground floor.... its really quite impressive. And empty, too. I think there are few of us staying here tonight.



I took a walk through a mile or two of Clearlake this afternoon. California's ocean coastline is public. Its lake front property is not. So access to the lake comes only in one of the pocket parks that Clearlake has established. Like the rest of this part of town, the parks show defered maintenance. Fences leaning over a bit too far, retaining walls partlly fallen over, trees in need of pruning. But they are lakefront access, and the lake is pleasant. Huge flocks of ducks - and I mean many dozens, perhaps even hundreds, were sitting and snoozing on the dock and nearby grounds of the first park. Further along I saw someone tossing huge handfulls of food to another flock.



This part of town is a disaster area. Space is at a premium here because the mountains rise almost directly from the lake. But it never floods, so the buildings start at the water's edge - or even on pilings over the lake a few feet. Lots are small, the houses are small, old, wooden, and in great need of fixing up. They probably were vacation cottages originally. Now I think they have full-year inhabitants. Many businesses are boarded up, or the buildings are for rent or sale. A tatoo parlor remains, as does a piercing center. Dog fluffers are still in business. But the local real estate office has a big banner advertising reposessed homes (and they could not be these small cottages, I imagine them to in be the newer subdivisions a bit back from the lake.)



Perhaps its a left over from the vacation home days, but self-defense and property safety seem to be on a lot of people's minds. There are tons of signs indicating which alarm company is protecting this or that cottage. Lots of fences, and one guy came out to ask me what I was doing taking pictures of his house (I wasn't) and he had 5 huge dogs with him.



Altho most of the lots were small, and often crammed with rvs, row boats, and junk of all kinds, there were many attempts to create a nice space, landscape features, or perhaps art. Usally the space was too small, and the neighbors yard defeated any attempts to make a spot look good. Sometimes it was just an issue of personal taste.



Here's a road a couple of blocks away from the waterfront.



I had dinner in the El Grande restaurant, and was the sole diner at 6:15. There were 3 people in the bar, too. It turns out that beef stroganoff is comfort food. When I grew up it was a wildly exotic dish, like having an artichoke or something. What a difference time and space make.

The people I encountered were very friendly, spontaneously saying hello as I approached (well, except for the 3 small boys playing their radio controlled cars in one block). The El Grande staff have been quite pleasant, too. I hope this mood spreads over into the courts and DA's office.

I really got into Clearlake photography - took about 80-90 pictures. I have to go back in a few weeks, perhaps I'll blog about it again.

All these years and I never got a case in Solano county - now suddenly I have two of them. Breaking new ground I got Mapquest to show me the Vallejo courthouse, and Best Western to show me their nearest motel. The BW turned out to be a few short miles away, by some huge amusement park. You can see the roller coaster tracks from the motel parking lot (picture coming when I get home).



The motel is on Fairgrounds Dr, and is oddly positioned because the main entrance is in the rear. You enter the parking lot from Fairgrounds Dr, and head down a fairly narrow lane to the second parking lot, when you look to the right and there, right next to the lane, is about 30 feet of slidiing glass doors inviiting you into the lobby. Its fine, just out of scale. The whole motel is built to an odd plan with corridors going off at odd angles, suggesting difficulty in fitting the building on the lot. Other than that it was a great place to stay. The staff was polite, helpful, and attentive. The rates low. The room comfortable.

Eating was a bit of a problem. Between the amusement park and the freeways, the natural flow of traffic has been destroyed, and the motel has to give written directions to get you to the mall where the restaurants are. Once there all of corporate dining is spread before you. I tried the Red Lobster, but at 8 pm they were jammed and said I'd have to wait in the bar. No good, I was driving and already looking forward to a confusing route back to the motel. So I drove a thousand feet further in the vast parking lot of the mall, and found an Olive Garden. Never been to one of those before.

It was confusing. Most of the tables were filled with young couples, and the men mostly had their baseball caps on backwards. Seemed low class, like they should have been at a McDonalds, but obviously they were having family dining. The menu suggested wines to go with the dishes (turns out to be an Italian restaurant) so I tried a cheese ravioli with sausage and a Cabernet. Good. But the breadsticks were soft roll types saturated with butter, or so they tasted. I'm a sucker for that combo and ate way too many of them. No desert, I could barely finish the ravioli but there was no point in a doggy bag of it, and I just can't hae it thrown away. About $30 with 2 glasses of wine and the tip.

I worried about being late to court since I had never been to this courthouse before, and thought the freeway might be jammed with morning rush hour traffic. 8:30 arraignment. So I was up and out early, found the courthouse ok (Mapquest). Department 24 was not in room 24, of course. It was room 106 or something like that. But the weirdest thing was that no DA attends the arraignments. I've been in maybe 15 counties and always had DAs at the arraignments. Well, so much the better. It was faster work without a DA holding things up.

I spend a good percentage of my time in court houses doing just what any lawyer who wants to succeed must do: I'm looking for clients. The problem is these clients have already retained me. The trick is to have them show up. In Vallejo my client slipped into the seat behind mine (lawyers get special seating) at precisely 8:30. Great timing. The judge called me first, as I was the only private lawyer in the room despite there being about 100 people on the arraignment callendar. There was a PD with a vast number of files, and it looked to me like he was going to leave with many more clients than he entered with.

We had to give the DA a document, however, and wandered through another maze of oddly shapped hallways - must be a hallmark of Solano county architecture - until we found the office and dropped off the doc.

Later in the day I was in Willits, doing a case, when someone approached me about representation and lo and behold I had my second Solano County case. Second, and possibly last. It is a long trip. I listened to most of World History from the Middle Ages to Modern times on the way down, and much of Pride and Prejudice on the way back.