A lovely visit to the California Heritage Museum

I like historic houses. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a sucker for them, but having worked as a historic house tour guide, they have a special place in my heart. My thanks, and my sympathies, go out to the docents and staff who run historic house tours, as they answer questions, go into their canned spiels, when they can remember the details, show people their favorite chairs, or wainscotting, or whathaveyou, mix up dates, names, locations, and generally make history come alive, not least for having lived through some of it, in some older docents' cases, a whole lot of it. As I recall, a typical historic house has at some point been studied, renovated, and decorated according to a finely tuned sense of history, under the direction of a curator or professor with a specialization in a relevant period of American history. The house opens to the public, the curator or professor's colleagues come in for the opening ceremonies, ooh and ahh over a pair of 17th century cast iron andirons or ask after where she found a woodworker to reconstruct the molding, and generally show off their own knowledge of the period the house has been decorated to. Then all the experts go back to where ever they came from and the place opens to the public. Signage has not been installed. Docents have been given, at most, a quick tour by the expert and an idiosyncratically filled three ring binder of photocopies of photocopies of study photos taken of objects that may or may not have been placed in the house, or as it is now known, in the exhibit. From this information, and whatever they can find by googling "historic house [enter period here] [enter region here]", the docents, volunteers, interns, and (under)experienced and  (under)paid staff create a haze of facts, stories, myths, and garbled half-remembered oft repeated research to foist on the occasional visitor. It turns out it is possible to play a game of Telephone by one's self, as conjectures are repeated until believed and delivered as facts and facts morph, get rearranged, and shimmy to fit the interpreter's preferred story. For the rare visitor that asks a question and is given anything more than a off-the-top-of-my-head guess answer, the interpreter may go back to that three ring binder. Or google it.

Yesterday's run destination: cloverleaf around the intersection of Yale and Arizona

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola and banana
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: pesto pasta and bean salad