Good Year for Cactus

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  Opuntia Santa Rita in bloom, June 2020

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  Opuntia Santa Rita in bloom, June 2020

Regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires, and terrible air quality, my cactus garden has been happy this year. Several species which usually only flower once a year have bloomed again. The local honeybees are delighted to roll around in the pollen of huge flowers. There was enough prickly pear cactus fruit that my daughter Jessica made syrup from it, and John made pancakes to celebrate!

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  Prickly pear cactus, June bloom

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  Prickly pear cactus, Oct fruit

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  Prickly pear cactus, Oct fruit

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  Euphorbia mammillaris, Corn Cob Cactus, Oct 2020

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  Making cactus fruit syrup 1

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  Making cactus fruit syrup 2

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  Making cactus fruit syrup 3

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  Cactus fruit syrup

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  Pancake breakfast with cactus fruit syrup

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  Peruvian cactus, Sep 2020 fruit

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  Peruvian cactus night bloom, Oct 2020

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  Peruvian cactus bloom with bees, Oct 2020

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  Peruvian cactus bloom with bees, Oct 2020

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  Balloon barrel cactus in bloom, Aug 2020

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  WP668 caboose with cactus, Oct 2020

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  Night blooming cereus cactus, Oct 2020

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  Crassula perforata succulent, Oct 2020

More on the WP668 railroad caboose.
Updated 21 Oct 2020.

If you want to receive Katysblog posts by email, please sign up using the Sign Me Up! button (upper right on Katysblog home). Image Copyright 2020 by Katy Dickinson and Jessica Dickinson Goodman.

20th Wedding Anniversary on 4 July

John and I are looking forward to our 20th wedding anniversary this weekend. Thinking back on some of our adventures and looking forward to many more. It is fun to be married to your best friend!

2020 virtual family dinner
2020 Mother’s Day
2018 family vacation
2018 Paul SJSU graduation
2018 St Andrew’s
2017 Reno
2016 Ashland
2016 Ashland
2016 Dunsmuir
2016 Klamath River
2015 Amtrak trip
2015 St Andrew’s
2014 Lalibela Ethiopia
2012 St Andrew’s
2012 Natural Bridges
2012 Jessica CMU graduation
2011 Jessica + Matthew
2011 Jessica + Matthew
2010 Lair of the Golden Bear camp
Lair of the Golden Bear camp 2010
2010 Teatro Zinzanni
2010 Teatro Zinzanni
2010 Teatro Zinzanni
2010 Egypt
2010 Cairo, Egypt
2008 Flying to Baja Mexico
2008 Baja
2007 India
2007 India
2007 WP668 Caboose move
2007 WP668 move
2006 Dead Sea, Israel
2006 Dead Sea, Israel
2006 St. Peterburg, Russia
2006 Russia
2005 Beijing, China
2005 China
2000
2000 wedding
2000 wedding

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Images Copyright 2000-2020 by Katy Dickinson.

Making a New Vegetable Garden

Inspired by my daughter Jessica’s gardening efforts, I am branching out. I have always been a serious gardener but mostly focused on flowering plants and cactus. Jessica’s enthusiasm for gardening edible and native California plants is infectious. We have lived in the San Jose neighborhood of Willow Glen for over twenty years – on the bank of the Guadalupe River. Chuck and Kathleen Purdy who owned our house before were great gardeners. They passed on to us many fruit and nut trees, including a small orchard.  Some of the fruit trees have died over the years, leaving space for my son Paul to store his curing logs for woodworking, and for me to create a market garden next to the prickly pear and yucca hedge.  Paul and John used some old steel beams we had for the six foot by eight foot raised border. Jessica brought over some of her seedlings and 12 bags of garden soil with fertilizer which I have dug in to create a good planting bed. Paul also took the wheels and handles off of two old wheelbarrows for small beds. (Other than the new soil, plants, and mulch, this new planting area was created with materials I already had.)

So far, I have planted:

• Three Sisters (a gift from Jessica): corn, beans, and squash (with a sunflower) – 6 sets
• Cherry tomatoes (“Husky Cherry Red” and “Cherry-Red”) – 3 plants
• Marigolds for edging

I am getting ready to plant carrots, potatoes, snow peas and snap peas as well. I bought seeds from Plants of the Southwest – and added a 3-sided trellis to support the pea and bean vines. A Meyer Lemon I planted many years ago is thriving next to the apricot, apple, and white peach trees. I added a brick border for the lemon trunk and tossed in all of the stones I dug out of the planting bed for decoration. Three garden cats (only one of whom is actually ours) – Princess, Ketchup, and Charlie – help us manage the property. I am concerned that the raccoon marauders will dig everything up – I may have to add a wire cover to the planting bed like that of our neighbors.

22 April 2020 – everything planted!

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Images Copyright 2020 by Katy Dickinson.

Updated 26 April 2020

Redesigned WP668 Web Site

I just redesigned the WP668 caboose website. I am still reviewing and posting old photos but the basic structure is done. It is restful during the coronavirus lockdown to make progress on a project I have been wanting to work on forever. After reviewing hundreds in our online family archive, I keep discovering wonderful photos I had forgotten.  I have finished 2006 and am about half done with 2007 now. More about WP668 :

WP668 is a historic Western Pacific Railroad caboose being restored by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher, a private family in San Jose, California, USA. More information and pictures are added as WP668’s story evolves.

For a summary of the WP668 story, see Katy’s May 2017 Western Pacific Historical Convention slides: “The Story of Western Pacific Caboose 668”. WP668 is the office for Mentoring Standard. Please join the WP668 Western Pacific Caboose Facebook group. WP668 was originally built as a boxcar in 1916. In 2018, the Mayor said that WP668 was the coolest office in San Jose!

As always: Please tell me if you have pre-1960 photos of our WP668 caboose. Thanks to all who have already contributed historic caboose images – especially Don Marenzi.

Thanks to John Plocher and Jessica Dickinson Goodman for technical web support!

2006: SN1642 and WP668 cabooses, at the Golden Gate Railroad Museum in San Francisco
2006: WP668 caboose on truck
2006: WP668 on Highway 101
2006: WP668 in storage in San Jose
2007: WP668 in the air over the trees
2007: family on WP668 in their San Jose backyard
2007: WP668 on the front page!
WP668 in 2020

Images Copyright 2006-2020 by Katy Dickinson, John Plocher, and Danek Duvall

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Update for eleanordickinsonart.com Art Website

Thanks to my daughter, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, for updating my mother’s website, eleanordickinsonart.com. We put up the website after Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson died in 2017 as a way of keeping information about her and her remarkable art and legacy in circulation. Unfortunately, Jessica just had to remove all of the e-commerce features of the site because it attracted bad behavior rather than buyers.  At least once a month for two years, I was contacted by someone through the site who purported to want to purchase an artwork but really wanted to use us for money laundering. It seems that the web is not a good place to sell high-end fine art. This site redesign still makes information available but asks buyers to contact us in email. I hope the site maintains communication but reduces the fraudulent contacts.

My brothers and I are trustees of the Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson Charitable Art Trust. During the last three years, my brother Pete Dickinson and I have been working with Natalie Piazza to inventory and properly archive my mother’s art collection. During this Corona Virus lock down, I have asked Natalie to work from home preparing a selection of photos and descriptions of Eleanor Dickinson’s art for display on eleanordickinsonart.com. This site redesign will make that expansion of materials much easier – thanks, Jessica!

More about the eleanordickinsonart.com website:

Eleanor Dickinson Art contains selections of original creations from the archives of Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson, a remarkable American artist who was actively creating, teaching, and exhibiting fine art for over 75 years.  Her work has been exhibited at many dozens of galleries and museums around the world, and is collected by a wide variety of individuals, universities, museums and other major institutions, including:

• Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• Tennessee State Museum
• The Oakland Museum
• University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections

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Images Copyright 1971-2005 by Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson.

Solitaire game with Notable Women playing cards

Solitaired just published a new online card game featuring the Notable Women playing cards! Play it here. I am glad to see our project featured in celebrating Women’s History Month. Jessica Dickinson Goodman and Susan Rodger and I created the project in 2014 and it is now in its 4th edition. In the original version, 25% of the 54 world-renowned honorees did not have a Wikipedia page and some had no known photo – now they all do! See the whole list of honorees.

Notable Women playing cards are associated with the long-term “CRA-W and Anita Borg Institute Wikipedia Project – Writing Wikipedia Pages for Notable Women in Computing” project.  We encourage you to use this information to inspire students and teach computer science, and write or improve Wikipedia pages – especially creating new pages about remarkable women who have none. Please watch our 2014 Kickstarter video about why we picked these 54 women from among all of the remarkable technical women.

See the Solitaired announcement for more information

The Notable Women project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

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Christmas 2019

May this blessed Christmas season bring you and your family joy! It has been a busy Christmas, starting even before I turned in my last (16 and 18 page) term papers at the Graduate Theological Union. So far, our adventures have included:

• Reading Charles Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” aloud with my Shakespeare Reading Group
• Hosting the Silicon Valley Lines and John‘s train club lunch group’s annual holiday party
• Dinner with my Education for Ministry class, after the Bethlehem pageant at Santa Clara First Baptist Church
• Lunch with the Interfaith Speakers of the Islamic Networks Group
• Shopping in Chinatown, San Francisco, with Sally Hambridge and Paul
• Receiving my certificate of appreciation from the US State Department for being a TechWomen 2019 mentor for Team Algeria (my 10th year as a citizen diplomat with TechWomen!)
• Dickens Christmas Fair day of music, high tea, and shopping with Jessica and Paul (including buying an amazing Christmas candle)
• Seeing the new Star Wars movie with John, Matthew, Jessica, and Paul
• Cheering on Paul for finishing the many Christmas orders for his reclaimed hardwood cutting boards
• Sitting with John and his teen video crew recording the Christmas Eve service at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
• Bringing services to two Elmwood jail dorms with John on Christmas Day (on behalf of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and the Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy)
• Enjoying family, food, and gifts with John, Jessica, Matthew, and Paul at home on Christmas Day!

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Images Copyright 2019 by Katy Dickinson.