Shea's Castle

Today I found the last place it could possibly be. I set out around seven...the sun was near setting but not too near. Everything was covered in that sweetlight, the photographers call it. The wind made my little car sway as we headed west. Toward the poppy fields. I figured now would be a good time to go. No one would be out looking at the flowers when they're all curled up tight like pencils against the cold wind. I pass a puddle collected by recent rain on the side of the road. The field to the left is covered with cows, one with a tiny calf shivering between its legs. Almost passed it--an easy to miss dirt road on the right. I take it a little ways, and there it is. The castle gate!

I've heard from people about a castle that's out in the desert somewhere...but no one seemed to know exactly where, or what it was called, or anything else about it. They'd say it was near Lake Elizabeth or Lake Hughes, or by the aqueduct or in this direction or that, and I've been looking for ages on random roads and hikes and never found it.
Geocaching to the rescue! A cache was described to be near it, so in looking for the cache, I found the castle, that I now know as Shea's Castle, or Sky Castle. It was built in 1924 by Richard Peter Shea, a developer from New York who made his fortune with the development of Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He moved to California in hopes that the health of his wife Ellen would improve. He spent two years building what was designed to look like an Irish castle, its 17 rooms, 5 foot thick walls, hand-carved grillwork, and huge stone step entrance costing more than $500,000 in the 1920s. Shea had dreamed of owning a castle since he was a boy, but unfortunately in 1929 when the stock market crashed, the bank took over his "Castle of Dreams." His wife died shortly after, and as the story goes he went to a pier in Venice, and with a bag containing his wife's ashes tied around his waist, lept to his death, dying alone and penniless. The castle has since passed through a variety of owners, including Roy Rogers, Tommy Stewart Lee, a woman named Dolores Fuller Burchett who turned it into a working ranch, and a non-profit flying group who added a runway, lake, and dam. The property also has natural springs as well as petroglyphs, and has been a location for films and tv shows.
I slid under the gate, but as I got closer I could see a man at the front door of the castle like a sentry. I got as close as I dared for fear of him seeing me, then turned around. Seeing the aqueduct running right above the castle property, I went back to my car and got back to the road where I parked and walked along the aqueduct to get a closer look from above, safe on public land.
I never found the cache. But finding the castle was better than any old box of trinkets in a bush.

Eyjafjallajökull!

In the news-- the "island-mountain-glacier" known as Eyjafjallajökull has been active in Iceland this month for the first time since 1823. It is one of the smaller glaciers of Iceland, situated to the south of the country, and its 39-mile-square icecap covers a volcano whose summit is 5,466 feet. The volcano's crater is at 1.9-2.5 miles in diameter and has erupted twice in 2010--once on March 20th and once on April 14th. The volcanic system of Iceland runs directly through the middle of the country from southeast to northwest and has much to do with the beautiful and dramatic landscape of the region. Seismic activity in the volcano area was first detected in December of 2009, during which thousands of small earthquakes occurred. Activity increased up until the first eruption on the twentieth of March in a popular nearby hiking region known as Fimmvörðuháls. The eruption was relatively small in scale up until the second eruption on the fourteenth of April, which was estimated to be 10-20 times larger than the initial one. The eruptions caused quite a bit of air travel disruption across northern Europe, along with some rare electrical storms. Scientists fear that tremors from Eyjafjallajökull could set off an even larger eruption at the neighbouring Katla volcano about 12 miles away. Katla followed Eyjafjallajökull the last three times it erupted, and since it is overdue on its typical schedule of awakening every 80 years or so, there is good reason for the Icelanders to be wary. The two volcanoes are thought to be connected by a network of magma channels, and Katla happens to be beneath Myrdalsjökull, one of Iceland's largest glaciers. Katla has shown no signs of seismic activity so far, but should it do so, it would cause an even more dangerous eruption. Residents would have to evacuate incredibly quickly to avoid flash floods that would inevitably tear down the mountain, along with burning gas, molten earth, and ash that would shoot to extremely high altitudes.
The name "Eyjafjallajökull" is very literal one, made up of the words "eyja" (island), "fjall" (fell or mountain), and "jökull" (glacier). The whole Icelandic language tends to be constructed similarly, such as the word for "library" translating literally to "book house."

The raft floated down the river sank.

Believe it or not, that sentence is grammatical. It's an example of what's known as a "garden path sentence"--a sentence "for which the responder's most intuitive interpretation is an incorrect one, ultimately luring them to an improper understanding of it." So basically they're sentences you begin reading in one manner, before a word or tense conflicts with the original path of comprehension and forces you to backtrack and look for other possible structures.
"The raft floated down the river" makes sense until you reach the word "sank."
Wtf?
The raft, that was floated down the river, sank.
OH! :)
Such sentences are rare in verbal communication due to stress and tone of voice but in written word, meanings often get so tangled up in tenses. The "syntactic ambiguity" is fun to read though. You realize:
"the old man the boat" means "the boat is manned by old people,"
"the man whistling tunes pianos" means "the man, who is whistling, also tunes pianos,"
"the woman returned to her house was happy" means "the woman, who was returned to her house, was happy,"
and "the tomcat curled up on the couch seemed friendly" means "the tomcat that was in a curled-up position on the couch, seemed friendly."
On a related note..."crash blossoms?" Headlines gone wrong. Crash blossoms are newspaper headlines with wild and sometimes humourous syntactic ambiguity, such as "Squad helps dog bite victim" (The squad helped the dog bite a victim? No no, the squad helped a victim of a dog bite!), "Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help" (A man was shot in the chest, and a leg knocks on the door for help? No: the man, who was shot in the chest and leg, knocked on a door for help.) and "Robot helps stroke victims in Portland" (The robot was stroking victims in Portland? OH, the robot was helping victims of STROKES in Portland.)
The girl writing the blog giggled.

All around the world

Circumnavigation is defined as travelling all the way around the world by any method, as long as the route covers at least a great circle (a circle running along the surface of a sphere so as to cut it into two equal halves) and passes through at least one pair of points antipodal (diametrically opposite) to each other. Widely recognized circumnavigations include ones made (or attempted) by sea, air, or soley human power. Nautical voyages are made via the Panama and Suez Canals, making use of the trade winds conducted by the circulation of the earth's atmosphere. In aviation, routes are often taken by way of jet streams, which circulate the northern and southern hemispheres without crossing the equator. To this date no one has quite circumnavigated the globe entirely by human power (by Guinness World Record standards), but notable attempts have been made. The first sailing circumnavigation was made in 1522 by a Spaniard, Juan Sebastián Elcano. In the 1580s, a Franciscan friar by the name of Martín Ignacio de Loyola was the first to circle the world twice, and the first to do so in both directions, westward and eastward. There are many records related to completely sailing around the world, and currently 16-year old Abby Sunderland has been en route since February of this year attempting a solo circumnavigation that if completed will make her the youngest to do so alone. The first aerial circumnavigation was done in 1924 by the US Army Air Service, and nine years later, the first solo one was made by a pilot named Wiley Post. Several people have walked, hitchhiked, or bicycled somewhat around the world, but obviously the oceans are somewhat of an obstacle to complete a circle entirely by land-favouring ways of transport. If I were a braver girl, maybe I'd try it, too.

Geocaching!

A marvelous game of hide-and-seek, "geocaching" is a hobby where people use gps devices to conceal and locate 'caches'--generally small, waterproof containers that contain a logbook, and often little trinkets or toys. Players can make them out of any sort of container and put anything they want in them. Once they hide one, they report it on the geocaching website, where other people can locate and go in search of them. Some are pretty easy to find while others require long hikes, climbing up trees, or even diving underwater to find. There are understood rules of conduct to take part in geocaching, one of which is if you take something from a cache you must leave something else behind. If a cache is vandalized or stolen, it is said to have been "muggled" or "plundered." A modern take on the 150-year-old game of letterboxing, geocaching is played in over 100 countries and on all seven continents. As of this writing, there are over a million active geocaches in activity. There are all sorts of fun things involved such as "travel bugs," which are plastic figurines sporting a PIN-embedded tag, that are moved from cache to cache by geocaching participants who log their travels. "Geocoins" are similar objects, often engraved with tracking numbers as well as a symbol or design representing a certain geocacher's handle. Some caches involve a series of multiple discoveries, some are meant to be found at night by way of reflectors, some you have to solve a puzzle or code to find, and some are meant to be taken once found and hidden somewhere else by the latest finder.
I went in search for the first time today in the desert around my town. I had no luck, but I think I was searching for one too hard for a newbie. I did meet a stranger, however, who gave me some clues and a pointy walking stick in case of snakes ^_^