Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 12

Dōh Creamery

★★★★★

An ice cream shop that also specializes in cookie dough. Good selection of flavors for both, and you can mix and match however you want. Tip: add a scoop of oatmeal cookie dough to a scoop of a berry (or other fruit) ice cream and you’ve got a cobbler!

In the area around the Promenade in Temecula, next to Pieology.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking

T. Kingfisher

★★★★★

A fun and original take on the teenage wizard genre. With an immortal carnivorous sourdough starter named Bob (who may or may not count as a familiar).

In case that’s not enough to convince you:

Teenage assistant baker Mona’s only magic talent is with bread. She can make it staler or fresher, keep it from burning, make gingerbread men dance, and occasionally something more dramatic like Bob. (Bob was an accident, but he’s quite handy around the bakery.) She wasn’t prepared to be suspect number one in a rash of wizard murders, live on the run, or to protect the city from a threat as its only remaining mage.

Fun characters, fun concepts, and a quest that runs through the city’s worst slums to the palace. Mona has to navigate both from her comfortable shopkeeper’s life, learning what happens when the system she relied on to protect her is turned against her. And how the system can be manipulated against itself. She makes mistakes in the process – sometimes annoying mistakes, but the kind that makes sense for a teenager to make.

Also: Lots of creative uses of very specific magic abilities. One mage can only work with water…but they can use it to make two surfaces vibrate in sync to transmit sound. Another can only work with air…but is able to use smell and gases to strong effect. Another can only reanimate dead horses.

My 12-year-old son loved it, so of course I had to read it too. Definitely recommended!

Update: I liked Illuminations even better!

More of T. Kingfisher’s kids’ books at her official website.

Toulon Drive Loop

a.k.a. The Frog Hike (Murrieta, CA)

★★★☆☆

A dirt trail curves past low scrub brush toward a hillside on a sunny day. In the distance a handful of trees and the tops of two large water tanks are visible.

Blue sky with small, scattered clouds in lines like ripples, above a hill with mostly brown scrub, but some green bushes.A dirt trail curves past low scrub brush toward a hillside on a sunny day. In the distance a handful of trees and the tops of two large water tanks are visible.

In theory, this is a loop trail. It starts and ends as a dirt service road connected to a dead end, and runs along the top of a streambed for a while until it wraps around a chaparral-covered hill. Very little shade except right by the stream.

If you start going west from the trailhead, you can follow some nice side trails down to and across the stream. A great place to look for dragonflies and damselflies in late spring and summer. Presumably frogs in the right season.

Continuing west around to the other side of the hill, the the trail gets narrower and steeper, and I couldn’t even find where to continue once I got to the water tanks.

Eventually I’d like to go back and try going the other way around, which goes to the top of the hill first and then try to connect up where I stopped last time.

Looking out across a shallow valley at some houses. Some low scrub brushes in the foreground. Some of them are covered with orange vines that look like someone sprayed an entire can of silly string on them.Tree branches reaching across and shading a small stream with smaller green plants along the banks.Lots of plants - low scrub in flower in the foreground, then some rocks and a cactus, then a line of the tops of trees. A brown hillside and blue sky are visible in the distance.A narrow plank sits loosely across a small stream. Green plants line both banks. On the far side, a trail continues through the bushes.

All photos here are my own. You can find more in my Temecula Valley Nature gallery on Flickr.

George F Canyon

Stein-Hale Nature Trail (Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA)

★★★★★

Sunlight shines on a dirt path running between scrub on one side and low trees on the other, leaves still green except a few that are starting to turn red.

Sunlight shines on a dirt path running between scrub on one side and low trees on the other, leaves still green except a few that are starting to turn red.A short, quiet hike uphill along a seasonal streambed. Late winter/early spring is the time to go if you want to see water, unless it’s been a dry winter. Mostly mild, some parts well shaded, others with occasional shade. The last part gets a lot steeper, but there’s a shaded bench at the top of the (official) trail where, on a clear day, you can see across the Los Angeles basin to the San Gabriel Mountains beyond it. The trail continues on, but leaves the nature preserve and crosses into private property.

Red leaves in bunches of three on a low bush. Trees with green leaves behind it, and the edge of a channel, with a hill rising on the far side.Birds, butterflies, rabbits depending on season. Red-tailed hawks like to circle above an area of the canyon near the trail summit.

Water filling station at the gravel parking lot along Palos Verdes Drive East. Additional parking at the nature center at the corner of PVD East and PVD North.

Important: THERE IS SO. MUCH. POISON OAK. There’s a whole lot of it growing along the stream. (It’s part of the riparian ecosystem.) When in doubt, remember: “Leaves of three, let it be.”

Some maps and signs label it as “Georgeff Canyon” instead. Apparently no one knows where the name came from or who George F. was, but the name’s on a 1924 map, so it goes back at least that far.

These are some photos I’ve taken along the trail. I also have a photo gallery on Flickr.

Wide roundish leaves with water droplets on them in front of a blurry view of narrow trees and water. A dry channel with various sized rocks along the bottom, shaded by overhanging trees. Lots of narrow, almost-straight tree trunks forming an arch, bright red leaves in one corner, yellow leaves in another, green on the ground and in the distance, all dappled with sunlight and shadow. A bush with tiny red berries and light green leaves frames a view of a vast suburban sprawl from above, mountains with just a hint of snow in the distance. Sun-drenched view across the canyon. Bare rock cliffs with shady holes in them. Eucalyptus trees along the far ridge. A light brown rabbit with a fluffy white tail, sitting in the shade beneath a bush, its ears perked up and side-eying the photographer.

K-9 Email

★★★★☆

Classic email app for Android: No frills, no ads, no tracking. K-9 stays out of your way and lets you read/write/organize your email across multiple accounts plus a unified inbox. Easy to set up with an IMAP-based email provider. Works well with both light and dark mode, and you can switch modes per message when needed. The optional 2-column layout works great for tablet screens in landscape mode (and can be set to auto-switch based on screen orientation).

Gmail accounts are supported again, and setting them up is super-easy. Unlike the Gmail app, K-9 won’t alter the links in your messages to track which ones you click on!

K-9 is part of the Thunderbird project now, under active development, and will become Thunderbird for Android soon.

There are a handful of bugs/missing features (as of version 6.602) that frustrate me:

  • There’s no “undo” for moving or deleting a message. You have to go to the other folder (or trash) and fish it back out.
  • You can’t add folders from K-9. You have to do it from another device or app.
  • Auto-show images for specific senders.
  • Some (too much!) formatted email is still designed assuming it’s going to be read on a desktop screen, even though almost everyone reads mail on their phones these days. Auto-fit works for most of these, but occasionally the designer has already shrunk the text, or something makes the message super-wide, and by the time the app shrinks it too, the text is completely illegible.