Blue Wren

I'm outahere.

2009-08-23T19:12:00.001-07:00

No, no, I'm not going to stop blogging. I like blogging. But I've moved Blue Wren over to WordPress, so I humbly as you to click over to me there. I made the move because I wanted a little more flexibility regarding the look of the blog, using my own photos for the header, etc. I hope you'll put my new address, www.bluwren.wordpress.com in your favorites and visit soon.

Showing 'em how to do it

2009-08-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

Senator Barney Frank speaks truth to a wingnut.

Finally. I hope the rest of our Congressional Democratic leaders took notes.

Symbiosis

2009-08-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

The right to decide

2009-08-13T11:16:00.001-07:00

Right now one of the big “issues” surrounding health insurance reform is that by putting a mandate for coverage of “end-of-life counseling” costs into the bill, we’ll be condemning the sick, the disabled, the injured and the elderly to euthanasia.

This is ridiculous.

I recently had that counseling myself. I had a routine quarterly appointment with my VA rheumatologist a few weeks ago. During the pre-appointment check-up (weight, temperature, blood pressure, “how are you feeling today?” questions), the nurse surprised me by asking, “Have you thought about doing an advance health care directive?”

Caught off guard, I stammered that I had, indeed, thought of it, but hadn’t followed through.

So she explained exactly what it was and went on, saying gently that while this sort of thing is uncomfortable to think about when we’re relatively young and healthy, we never really know what tomorrow might bring. By filling out an AHCD, the nurse explained, I can make it clear how I wish my family and doctors to care for me should I ever become so severely ill or injured that I’m unable to make that decision myself.

This is both sane and sensible. I wouldn’t want to be a living vegetable, kept alive indefinitely by machines, running up horrendous, impossible hospital and doctor bills that would certainly bankrupt and impoverish my family. What a horror! I don’t know anyone who would want that, personally, but I realize that there are some people who feel that as long as there’s life, there’s hope for recovery. I respect their feelings, even if I don’t agree.

The thing is, by having an advance health care directive available, people who do want heroic measures taken to keep them alive can make that perfectly clear, in writing, in the directive. And it’s a binding document.

The AHCD takes that horrible decision out of the hands of my grieving family members and makes it my decision, no matter what.

The VA nurse at my appointment was doing exactly the “end-of-life counseling” that would be covered by every health care insurance plan if the bill passes. All it means is that rather than having to pay for that counseling, the individual would get it for no cost. I don’t know about you, but I think arguing against free counseling is pretty silly.

The VA nurse didn’t force me to do anything. She simply informed me of the potential importance of such a directive, filled out voluntarily by myself. She told me how to get the paperwork through the VA should I wish to go ahead. She also explained that I could change that directive at any time after it was made. I’d simply submit a new one if I changed my mind regarding what sort of care I wanted at the end of my life.

And that was it. Sure, it was a surprise to find myself talking about my inevitable death in such a routine way. None of us really wants to think about that. But I left that appointment knowing more than I had before I walked in. I left with something to think about. And I’ve decided that I will, indeed, fill out that paperwork and take the simple steps necessary to make it legal and binding. Instead of frightening me, the idea gives me a sense of peace, knowing that when the time comes for me to die, I’ll die. That event will be hard enough on my family without bankrupting them by dragging it out indefinitely.

Want to learn more? Click on this link for a good explanation of what an advance health care directive is.

Update: Well, so much for having your health care provider cover "end-of-life counseling."

"... it appears, according to the Wall Street Journal, that the Senate Finance Committee will not be including a provision to reimburse Medicare doctors who provide end-of-life counseling to dying patients in its bill."

Hooray, health care insurance reform opponents. Your malign misinformation and propaganda campaign won one for the Gipper.

Inspiration in odd places

2009-08-10T13:39:00.001-07:00

After zipping down-mountain to take my daughter’s fiancé to the doctor following his shoulder surgery, we stopped at Wal-Mart for a prescription. As we were leaving, we passed an elderly woman with a little dog.

“What a cute dog,” I said.

“I walk him a mile every day,” she beamed. “And I just turned 90!”

“No! Really?”

“Yes!” she laughed. “I stay real busy. That’s how I do it.”

“Well, happy birthday!” I said. “That’s wonderful!”

A second elderly lady joined us. “I just turned 90, too,”she grinned. They were obviously friends.

“Happy birthday to you, too!”

Now that’s inspiring.

Why do they want to kill Grandma?

2009-08-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

Well, they don't. Proponents of health care insurance reform want your insurance to cover end-of-life counseling. Think "living will." It's so you can decide what you want done if you're terminally ill. Pull the plug, or don't pull the plug? It's up to you.

In addition, the ugliness we've been seeing at town hall meetings about health insurance reform isn't a "grassroots" movement. It's an orchestrated attempt, by big corporations and the Republican party, to keep Americans like you and I uninformed, terrified, and angry. They're manipulating us into acting against our own best interests, gang.

Here -- watch Rachel. She's just about the only one on TV these days telling the truth.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Put up or shut up

2009-08-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

House Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) challenges House Republicans to put up or shut up regarding government run health care, which they vehemently oppose, by introducing legislation to repeal Medicare, here and now:

"In the end, despite Wiener’s “double-dare”, all the Republicans voted no (how often do you see a unanimous “no” vote?), thus proving on the 44th anniversary of the signing of the Medicare Act that nobody’s going to mess with Medicare anytime soon."
--Matt Yglesias

Hypocrites.

It’s personal

2009-08-01T16:10:00.001-07:00

Health care reform, with a single payer system like that in Great Britain and Canada – or at least, a public option for health care that’s affordable for all Americans regardless of income – is vital.

Fifty million Americans are without medical insurance in this country. Many millions more are a mere paycheck or layoff away from losing their health insurance. Individual insurance is so inordinately expensive that many people simply can’t afford to buy it. Many of those who can are denied because of pre-existing conditions.

This really has got to change.

As some of you already know, I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis since I was 28 years old. For almost 15 years I suffered frequent, painful flare-ups of the disease that often rendered me temporarily disabled. One day it would be my hands; the next an ankle; the one after that a hip. I even had it in my jaw. Each flare lasted anywhere from 24 hours to five days. Sometimes there would be a brief reprieve between flares; more often there was no reprieve at all.

For a great portion of that time I was under the care of an internal medicine doctor – the nearest rheumatologist was a four-hour drive away. We tried just about everything available to the Army medical system at the time – NSAIDs, injected gold, malarial drugs, aspirin and Tylenol. None of them had any effect at all on the RA, though a lot of them came with bad side-effects. To ease the pain when the flares were unbearable, I was given opiate painkillers in limited amounts. I was even hospitalized once. Eventually, no longer believing that modern medicine could do anything to help me, and fearful of adverse side-effects, I stopped taking any RA drugs – except the opiate painkillers, which were the only ones that worked even a little. They had no effect on the disease, but at least they muffled the pain.

Eventually the RA flares became less frequent. Then they stopped. I was normal again. I could walk without limping and gimping. I could use my arms freely, twist caps off jars and open doors without first steeling myself against the inevitable pain. And oh, I was glad. The RA was in “remission.” I went backpacking, fishing and camping. I hiked. I lived without wondering each morning when I got up which of my joints would plague me that day. And after a while, I started forgetting how it had been.

But rheumatoid arthritis is incurable. For its own mysterious reasons, it sometimes does go into remission, often for many years. It’s a disease of the autoimmune system – the body actually turns against itself, attacking the synovial fluid between the joints and causing inflammation and pain. And it attacks different individuals in different ways. One person might have it for years and years with only minor pain and little or no disability. Another will contract it and be wheelchair-bound, unable to walk, within a couple of years. Some people end up with twisted, gnarled wrists, hands and fingers. RA can also attack the body’s internal organs, like the lungs, the heart, or the vascular system. It can cause blindness.

I lived flare-free for almost ten more years. Then, in 2007, my hands started flaring again.

I was unemployed. I couldn’t afford individual health insurance. Fortunately, I’m a veteran, and although I had to wait nearly a year before I was destitute enough to qualify, I was able to get medical care through the Veterans Administration.

Today I’m being treated for RA by a VA rheumatologist. I’m back on RA meds. I’ve been lucky so far – while my hands ache and twinge nearly every day, they’ve not got so bad I couldn’t use them. Not yet. And so far, beyond a few, thankfully transient twinges here and there, no other joints have been affected.

There are new drugs available now that weren’t the first time I went through a period of “active” RA. The ones I’m taking can slow the progression of the disease, which at least buys me some time. But there is still no cure. It means that I’ll be taking these drugs under the care of rheumatologist for the rest of my life. In time I may, even with the drugs, become permanently disabled because of it.

I have a dear friend who’s been very ill for some years now, plagued by a cascading series of serious ailments, from diabetes to uterine cancer. She’s survived, but she’s bed-bound, no longer able to walk. Her days are spent fighting over the phone with employees of the health insurance company that continues to cover her only reluctantly and which frequently denies care ordered by her doctors. She’s constantly having to appeal the insurance company’s decisions; the appeals take weeks and months, and her condition worsens before resolution can be achieved. She lives in mortal fear of being dropped from their insurance roles – and she is covered by her husband’s medical insurance. He’s a doctor.

In today’s society, with so many pre-existing conditions, my friend could never find new insurance, even for the highest of premiums. Her care has depleted their life savings already; they couldn’t afford individual care for her now, anyway.

And here’s the worst of it. If her insurance company drops her, without affordable care she’ll probably die within a year.

We need to reform health care in this country. Not just for me and my friend, but for the millions of Americans who face potential devastation or catastrophe simply because they fall ill. Please write or call your Congressperson and tell them that Americans must have a public option for health care. That without it, we condemn millions of our fellow citizens to bankruptcy, poverty, untreated illness and even death.

It’s that important.

Note: Jonathan Alter of Newsweek asks "What's Not to Like?" about America's health care status quo. Do read.

h/t: Lance

Mr. Potter gets a clue

2009-08-01T11:11:00.001-07:00

Surfing the ‘net over coffee this morning as per my usual habit, I clicked on a link posted by Duncan Black of Eschaton for a Bill Moyers’ Journal video.

I didn’t watch the video, but instead read the transcript, which is conveniently placed directly below the video. And as I read, my blood began to boil.

Moyers was interviewing Wendell Potter, who until he retired recently, was the head of corporate communications for CIGNA, the gigantic health care insurer. Potter, during the course of the interview, proceeded to blow the top off what’s behind the current opposition to health care reform in both American political parties.

We all know that health insurance companies are in the business for profit. What we may not know (or perhaps would rather not believe) is that they’re in the business for profit even if it means bankrupting us with catastrophic health care bills, denying us coverage for vital treatments and care, or even dropping us and allowing us to die. Their bottom line is profit. If you or I get too sick, despite faithfully paying premiums year after year, then to hell with us. Will we die without treatment? Who cares? That’s our problem if we start costing our health insurance provider more than they want to pay. If we start cutting into their profit margin, we’re dead weight.

This didn’t come as huge surprise to me. What did was Potter’s candor. Apparently he’s afraid of going to hell if he continues to sit by, complicit, while the health insurance company he worked for and all the others profit from American illnesses and death. Potter, on a whim, visited a health care expo in Wise, Virginia. There he saw hundreds of uninsured Americans lined up to see doctors who’d volunteered their time and expertise in an attempt to bring some sort of health care to those who couldn’t afford it. Potter was stunned. He went back to his job shaken and unsure about what he and his company were doing to those who relied on them for, in many cases, their very lives.

“And it was hard to just figure out. How do I step away from this? What do I do? And this was one of those things that made me decide, "Okay, I can't do this. I can't keep-- I can't." One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."
And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."

Mr. Potter finally got a clue. He testified before Congress in support of a public option that will allow all Americans to get quality health care, regardless of income or health, and in support of health care reform.

Most of us know of someone who’s had medical procedures or medications denied because their health care provider refuses to pay for it, even with a co-pay. Some of us know people who've had their provider drop them entirely. And some of us know people who cannot get health care insurance at all –or who face huge monthly premiums that are beyond their means – because they’re already sick. It would cost the provider way too much to help them, improve their quality of life or even save their lives.

This is a horror.

It is vital that health care reform includes, at the very least, a public option. Please watch the Moyers video or read the transcript. Then call or write your representatives in Congress and tell them to make fair, affordable, quality health care available to all Americans, not just to those who can afford to feed the profits of the health care industry while praying that they never, ever get really sick.

100 Words – Day 11: Nightfall

2009-07-22T22:42:00.001-07:00

Sun’s down. Stars prickle the blueblack sky. There is no city light here to dim the view of sparkling red Mars, low on the horizon. The air is soft, a caress of fleeting coolness in harsh mid-summer. A cricket chirrups in chorus with the tree frogs. The robins have gone to sleep in spite of the crazy hilarity of one or 12 coyotes downhill, a cacophony of laughter rippling the still night air like whale songs in deep water. The fan whirls while the dog sighs, sleepy at the foot of the bed. The cat rumbles, snug against my hip.

100 words - Day 10 of 50: Fat clothes

2009-07-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

I have three big bags full of clothes. I’m donating them to the local hospice thrift store; I need the closet space. Some of the clothes are pretty old. Some are almost new. They’re my “fat clothes.”

They’re all up to four sizes too big for me now. Today I wear the size I wore about 20 years ago.

This is a big step for me. I’ve never banished my “fat clothes” before; I was afraid I’d need them again. But I know I won’t. I’ve learned.

Those stuffed bags represent decades of blumphy discomfort. They no longer weigh me down.

Almost 3000 words: Spirit Walk

2009-07-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of an unfinished story I wrote a couple of years ago. I'd love to hear what you think.

My friend Ellie says I should write this so I guess I will.

I was born on the reservation in Montana on October 25, 1969. My father, Terrell Gray Wolf, was 17. My mother, Rosa Spotted Owl, was 15. They were just dumb kids and they never got married. Terrell died when I was five months old. He got beat up behind a bar by a bunch of drunken Anglos. He probably deserved it, he was always getting too drunk and picking fights. He had a bad temper. That’s what my uncle Henry Spotted Owl says. When I was three Rosa got tired of living so she drank some Drano. There were no more women in the family to take me so Spotted Owl and his woman Jewel Limpy took me.

I don’t remember these things. Spotted Owl told them to me. He says my father was big like I am now and my mother, his youngest sister, was very pretty. He says if she hadn’t started drinking maybe she would be alive now, but almost everyone drinks too much. Spotted Owl thinks alcohol is the Anglo way of killing off all the Indians the slow way. Sometimes I think he’s right.

He says he drank too when he was young but he stopped when he was 15. He went on a spirit walk then because old Jim Running Horse told him he should do it before the alcohol took his spirit away. Spotted Owl says while he was on his spirit walk Old Grandmother walked with him a while. She told him he would be a good medicine man. He thought this was crazy because she looked like a mouse and she was very funny, but he never knew mice could talk before, so he decided maybe she was right. He took her advice and it worked. He is a good medicine man. He has helped many of the People and even some Anglos.

I was in trouble a lot as I was growing up. Jewel Limpy got sick from diabetes when I was 10 and went away. I think she had a sister in Oklahoma so she went there. I missed her because she was nice to me. Spotted Owl missed her too but he never said much about it.

I had a bad temper like my father and I drank too much with my friends. I also liked to smoke weed, which was better than drinking because it didn’t make me angry. But weed cost too much and it was harder to get, so mostly I drank. I did OK in school but I had trouble with reading so I just listened hard but the teachers didn’t say all the things I needed to know.

When I was sixteen I got into a big fight at a party with some Anglo kids in Ashland. We were all drunk but the cops only arrested me. I stayed in jail for ten days because a girl said I tried to rape her and I beat up some of the boys. They beat me up, too, but that was different. It was true I wanted to sleep with the girl, but not that I tried to rape her. The Anglo cops didn’t believe me, though.

After a while the girl’s spirit felt bad so she admitted that she had lied about me trying to rape her. That was brave because she was in a lot of trouble with her parents. I was very glad she decided to tell the truth. I never saw her again. Her family went to live somewhere else. I hadn’t done anything wrong but get drunk and get into a fight. Lots of people did that, so the police let me go home.

Spotted Owl was mad at me for being stupid like my father and getting drunk and fighting and trying to sleep with girls. He told me I was dishonoring my ancestors. I knew he was right but I was mad at him for saying it. He said I should take my spirit walk but he thought I wasn’t strong or brave enough. That made me even madder so I did it. I wanted to prove that I was a man and not as weak as he thought I was.

I lost track of how long I walked but Spotted Owl told me later it was 12 days. At first I thought it was stupid to walk all over the prairie. I thought Spotted Owl was stupid, too. I was going to trick him and go to the highway and hitch a ride to the town and shack up there for a while.

But I got lost. I couldn’t find the highway or find my way back home. I got real hungry, too, but then that stopped and it didn’t matter if I was lost. After I walked a while I thought I would sit down under some trees and look inside the medicine bundle Spotted Owl gave me. I was curious.

I found two little stones, a black one and white one. There was also a wolf tooth. This made me happy because I was named for the wolf. There was also a handful of cracked corn and a little, blackish, dry, wrinkled disk. It was about as big as my thumbnail. I knew what it was, even though I’d never seen it with my own eyes before. It was peyote. I remembered what Spotted Owl said. When I found the right place I should stop and wait there. So I stayed. I softened the corn in my mouth until I could chew it, and then I chewed the peyote button. It tasted terrible, but I knew it was right that it did. I just kept it in my mouth and chewed until I could swallow it.

It made my stomach feel sick for a while, but then that stopped. I drank a little water to take the bad taste out of my mouth and then I just waited. I got bored. I wondered if all those braves in the old days who took spirit walks got bored too, or if they had adventures. I thought they probably had adventures, but I wouldn’t because I wasn’t a real brave.

I was a little mad because I knew peyote was supposed to give you visions. I didn’t know what those were like, but I wasn’t getting any. It was a gyp.
The tree I was sitting under was nice. The shade felt blue. I slept a little because my legs got too heavy to walk more.

When I woke up the moon was in the sky. I drank a little more water, and then Rosa came and talked to me for a while. She was only a little older than me and real pretty. I didn’t recognize her, but I knew it was her because she didn’t have a throat or a belly. I could see the prairie and the stars through the holes where they’d been. It didn’t bother her any.

Rosa sat with me for a while. She told me I had an animal spirit. She knew this because since she was a spirit, she could see mine, and she told me I should think about that. I didn’t understand what she meant but I told her I would. That made her smile at me. We talked a little more about my animal spirit but mostly I didn’t understand. It was crazy talk to me because I was still thinking too much like an Anglo.

When we stopped talking about that she made me get up and follow her, so I did. She showed me where there were some camas plants and told me I could eat the bulbs if I could dig them up. So I found a sharp stick and dug them. I couldn’t cook them but that didn’t matter. They didn’t taste very good. Rosa said my belly would like them anyway. She was right.

After I ate some camas I asked her if she ever saw my father. She said no, but there was no hurry. I wanted to ask her why she’d drunk that Drano and left me, and if she was ever sorry she did that or if she missed me, but I couldn’t make those words. I knew then the answers didn’t matter. So I asked her how she knew about the camas. She giggled a little and said all the People knew about camas. I didn’t, until she showed me, but I was just a dumb teen-ager.

A while after that Rosa walked away into the tall grass. There were stars over her head. I was sad when she left but I knew she didn’t need to say good-bye to me. She could see me whenever she wanted to. That made me feel better.
I stood up and walked a while but then I got dizzy so I stopped and just sat down. It was a good camas place. There was lots of tall grass. I thought maybe I would die and be like Rosa, except I wouldn’t have holes in me, so I waited. I wondered if I would be a human spirit or an animal spirit. I hoped I would be a wolf, like my name. I wasn’t afraid though.

To give myself something to do I looked at the two stones Spotted Owl gave me. They were smooth and round. I thought they might be river stones from the Tongue. I put one in each hand and looked at them. After a while I could see that the white stone was me now, with my spirit strong and well. The black stone was me when I was angry or drunk. Both stones were beautiful, but the black one was heavy and dragged my hand down. The white one had no weight. It was like the stars.

I thought maybe it was better to be like the white stone, if I could. I felt dumb thinking I could be like a stone, but then I remembered that even though the stones were small and didn’t do anything, they were as old as the world. A long time ago they were mountains. They were very patient and never got angry.

Sometime after that Coyote came. He sat down pretty close to me but he didn’t talk. He just looked at me and I looked at him. Once in a while he scratched his fleas. He went away for a while, but he came back. He had something in his mouth. He dropped it in front of me and walked back into the grass. I didn’t see Coyote again after that.

It was a ferret he dropped. He was generous to give me this good ferret he caught so I could eat it. But I couldn’t eat the ferret. I didn’t have a knife to skin it or a way to make a fire to cook it. And it wasn’t dead. I was sorry for it, though. It was a nice ferret. It didn’t deserve to be caught by Coyote just so its death could be wasted on a stupid man who couldn’t even eat it.

I had a little water left so I put some in my palm for her. The ferret was very brave. She drank the water and asked if she could have some more. She was very polite. I gave her more. She said the places Coyote bit her hurt. So I used a little more of my water to clean them, and then I tore the blanket and wrapped her up in it. She went to sleep. I thought she would probably die.

She didn’t die though. After a while she woke up and told me her name was Ha’hahn’e. Coyote had eaten her four babies, but she understood he had to. It was the way of things. She had never been a mother before, so she was still learning the right way to hide them.

Ha’hahn’e asked me if I would make her hurts stop. I told her I didn’t think I could, but I would try. She said that was OK. But when I touched her fur, I could feel the places where she hurt. I could see brown fuzz in those places. It was ugly, and bad. It scared me a little.

But I told her I would try, so I did. I found out I could make the fuzz stick to my fingers. It didn’t hurt me. So I started taking it out of her. It wanted to stick to me but I knew I shouldn’t let it do that. I shook my fingers and it floated away. Ha’hahn’e was very quiet and only bared her teeth and snapped three times. She apologized, though. I told her I was sorry if I hurt her, but this was my first time being a healer. She told me she understood.

It took me a while to find all the brown fuzz. Some of it was very deep inside her. But I didn’t have anything else to do. I was too dizzy to walk anymore. I was afraid the wind would blow me away, but if I sat on the ground like a stone it couldn’t. So after a while the brown fuzz was all gone. Ha’hahn’e said she felt better. I was glad for her, but I was very tired then so I went to sleep.

When I woke up the moon had moved some. I thought Ha’hahn’e might be gone, but she wasn’t. She told me if I didn’t mind, she would stay with me. I said OK, she could stay. I liked her. She was my first animal friend.
I stayed at that place for a while, watching the sun rise and set a few times. I thought a lot about what Rosa told me. I had always liked animals. I guess that was because I had an animal spirit but I didn’t know before. Now I could see the brown fuzz and take it away so they could be well. So I thought maybe this was what I was meant to learn on my spirit walk.
I should be a medicine man for animals.

Also I learned I should not be like Rosa and make myself die. Life is very hard sometimes but it’s better than walking alone in the dark. Rosa told me she didn’t mind being a spirit, but sometimes she missed hugging people. I thought maybe I would miss that, too. It would be better to live until I was old. To be like the white stone, like the stars.
I thought I should walk back home. I didn’t know the way but I started walking even though I was dizzy and it was hard. My legs didn’t want to walk anymore. Ha’hahn’e rode on my shoulder. Sometimes she ran ahead of me and teased me. She made me laugh because she didn’t only run, she leapt and bounded and did funny somersaults.

When the sun rose I saw the town. I was surprised because I had been looking for it but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Now here it was, like always. I walked down the street and the people all looked at me and Ha’hahn’e. Some smiled and some only stared but no one stopped me or talked to me. Later I found out some of them thought I was drunk, because I was walking funny and I was only wearing that stupid loincloth. When I got to Spotted Owl’s house he was waiting for me on the porch. He said he had water and food for me.
I never told him about my mother Rosa or about Coyote. Spotted Owl didn’t mind if Ha’hahn’e stayed with us, but he asked me to tell her she should go outside like we did if she had to make water or pellets. I told her and she did that. She was a very cooperative ferret.

When school started I worked harder than I ever had before that. I had two more years to go and I wanted my grades to look good to the Anglos. I knew if I wanted to be an animal doctor I had to do that. So I had to stay after school for help most days.
I stopped drinking. It was the hardest thing, because it was in my mind, like a blackness. My old friends got mad at me because I wouldn’t party with them. I wanted to, because it would be easier and more fun than doing homework, but I was afraid my animal spirit would leave me.

100 words - Day 9 of 50: Young people today

2009-07-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

Oh, he looked a sight!

Young people today had no sense of decorum, Gertrude thought as she surveyed the young man standing in her kitchen. He held a steaming bowl of her mutton stew, wolfing it with a soup-spoon as if he hadn’t had a bite to eat all day. He wouldn’t sit down proper at the table – said he had no time, he was due at the dance in just 15 minutes – but she couldn’t see why that meant he had to stand to eat, like he was a young horse. All that was missing was the feed-bag.

100 words - Day 8 of 50: Dusk walk

2009-07-16T08:33:00.001-07:00

Dusk gathers, the shadows beneath the great trees deepening. The earth is dry and spongy from the fir and pine needles slowly, slowly dissolving into the soil but if he steps just so, even in his thick-soled hiking shoes, he makes no sound. The air is sharp and chilly; a light breeze lifts his dark hair and caresses his ears.

A jay – a Steller’s, with its aquamarine and royal blue body and wings, its sooty-black, tufted head and feet – scolds him. Shhh, bird, you’ll alert them to my position. He steps deeper into the trees, making himself a shadow, invisible.

100 Words – Day 7 of 50: Why peppermint tea?

2009-07-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Summertime and peppermint tea. They go hand-in-hand, like winter and gloves or autumn and orange leaves. Spring and changeable weather. You get my drift.
My reasons for loving peppermint tea? Three:
1. Gloriously refreshing on hot days, made strong and mixed with lots of ice.
2. Blessedly therapeutic boiled, steeped, set on a kitchen table and inhaled while tenting a towel over your head. Clears blocked sinuses in minutes.
3. A tea brewed from peppermint leaves is so whimsical and magic, it’s hard to believe it exists. It’s a faerie drink.

100 words - Day 6 of 50: Girl in black

2009-07-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

Later, on the train, Tom took his laptop out of his briefcase and, sitting with it on his knees, started typing.

“I met the most intriguing young woman today,” he wrote in the journal space under the day’s date. “Her name is Emma. She works in a book shop in the Canal Road. She was wearing black from head to toe, a black clip in her hair, jet chips in her ears, a slim black dress and black Mary Jane-type shoes. Only her skin, rose-tinged porcelain, and her lips, pink as dawn, provided contrast.

“I think she is quite beautiful.”

100 words – Day 5 of 50: Little white lies

2009-07-13T18:27:00.001-07:00

It had been a fishing trip, a fact-finding mission. Tom had known the man for years, and he was often a very good source of information, moving as he did through the shadowy world of arms buyers and sellers. A devout Muslim, he had no more moral problem with his work than did the Christians from whom he often bought his inventory. What Mohammed did was perfectly legal; in fact, he’d purchased this particular high-powered automatic rifle from the Americans.

He felt a little bad about his white lie to Emma, but he couldn’t have told her all that, anyway.

100 words – Day 4 of 50: Sunday bells

2009-07-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

Church bells sounded through the heavy sea-fog, flat and fey, everywhere but nowhere in the small German city on the sea. The bells competed with lonely foghorns. Seagulls mewed. In summer, when the sun bathed the cobbled streets and stone buildings in clean yellow light, the church bells sounded bright and reverent, a soundtrack for red geranium petals drifting to the sidewalks. But when the wind blew topsy-turvy the Sunday bells wavered and rippled, and in heavy rain the peals sounded underwater, as if they were calling Neptune and his mer-people to worship.

There are no church bells here.

100 words – Day 3 of 50: Firewood in summertime

2009-07-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Mr. Wren and I bought three cords of firewood this week. We had it delivered – read “dumped on the driveway” – and then stacked, all ready to go. We won’t need it for three or four months, but there’s a quiet security to knowing our
winter’s warmth is already paid for and waiting. Now we’ll have the chimney sweep out with her odd, spiky brushes and traditional black clothes. She brings us good luck: no chimney fires in bitter February.

The almond wood smells spicy-dry. It evokes chilly days and warm sweaters in the middle of short-sleeved, barefoot summer. I’m smiling.

How my garden grows ...

2009-07-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when the muse returns after a long absence, she comes loaded for bear. Other times, like now, she knocks politely on my mind and asks to be allowed in once again. I'm letting her in. She brought a camera and told me I should tell a garden story. So here it is: Mr. Wren is a master gardener (I am decidedly not). He has ideas about gardens and their creation. This year, he wanted to try straw-bale gardening. The idea is that you plant your vegetable starts in holes forced into bales of straw that have been soaked thoroughly. In the hole goes soil and the small plant. Doing this means that many of your plants are at about knee-level, meaning that you don't have to kneel or bend to reach them, which he appreciates because of his disability. Me too -- I'm not as young as I once was.

So he placed the bales for planting. I weeded out about a half-ton of soil and compost that had been ... seasoning ... and we filled the empty middle sections of the bales for further planting. All this took place in late April. I lost 10 pounds in the doing. No complaints.

Once everything was planted,we waited. And now things are growing like crazy. The tomatoes have little yellow flowers. The crookneck squash has big orangy-yellow flowers and a couple of actual squashes. I took the first one this morning and am now considering the best way to serve it. Battered and fried? What a temptation.

I got to work on the rest of the garden in May, clipping and deadheading and weeding. More weight loss. I can't complain. And the result of all that work is a thriving, colorful garden that makes me smile. The foxgloves were glorious. The blackberries are coming and so are the grapes. Daylilies glow and roses are blooming in Technicolor. Even with the gray June we had, everything is busting out in wild, fecund good health.

Butterflies flutter and loop. Bees hum. Even m'ol dog Logan is getting in on the fun.

I'm looking forward to August, when the tomatoes will be nearly ready for picking, the crooknecks will be overwhelming, and the Japanese eggplants purple and

sublime. I intend to make spaghetti sauce by the gallon, eggplant parmesan, and salads filled with bright yellow cro

oknecks. Not to mention yellow and red bell peppers and fiery little jalapenos.

I musn't forget The Girls, our five Rhode Island Red hens. They're strangely menacing but they give us four or five big brown eggs a day and eat up all our stale bread and elderly store-bought veggies, along with scratch and feed. Nice Grrrrls.

This is what I've been doing during the long blog silence. I've been reading, too. Organizing old stories and considering which to bring back to life. I've missed you all, but it's been good. Really.

100 words – Day 2 of 50: Summer gray

2009-07-10T07:35:00.001-07:00

It was the strangest summer she’d ever spent in sweltering-hot Northern California. Nearly every day in June was gunship gray and cool, but there was no rain. The daytime house looked winterish, flat and shadowy inside. Flowers bloomed without benefit of sunshine. Tomato plants grew. Haunting wind-chimes dingled in the breeze. Twice, thunder ba-boomed. Once, hail rattatatatted for thirty seconds.

Years ago, her elderly friend Magrit in Germany complained the weather there had changed drastically since she was a girl. She blamed it on jet contrails.

Oh cool, quirky un-California June. Global warming? Or just the bitter surprise of age?

100 words – Day 1 of 50: Inspiration

2009-07-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

OK. I note that Blue Girl is doing the 100-word, 50-day challenge again. As you may have noticed, I have not written anything for quite a long time. Why? My muse has deserted me. For the last couple of months I’ve been unable to think of anything I care enough to write about. Or maybe I haven’t been able to think of anything to write about that I want to share.

Anyway, I think I’m back. I’m going to follow in the inspirational BG’s footsteps and make myself write 100 words every day for 50 days.

Let the Earth bear witness

2009-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

By the Waterboys' Dublin singer, Mike Scott.

Attaboy, Jesse

2009-05-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura calls torture torture on The View:

I'm thankful for people like Ventura for having the guts to tell the truth on national TV. I actually clapped.

2009-04-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Rep. Barton (R-Texas) seems to think he stumped Energy Secretary Steven Chu with this tricky question:

Incredible. People like Barton are making decisions about our lives in the House of Representatives. No wonder this country is in such deep trouble.

Hat-tip to TPM.

Food enough for a week

2009-04-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

Daughter and I went out yesterday to buy a new wireless router, a chore neither of us was really looking forward to. But once we'd done our duty, it was lunchtime. We decided to stroll Placerville's Main Street and, once we found a restaurant that was actually open (many businesses in Placerville seem to think no one wants food or anything else on Mondays, for some reason) we'd have some lunch.

We didn't stroll long before we discovered a new restaurant in an old location. Mexican food! We love Mexican food. So in we went.

The meal was fabulous. Much better than we expected, actually. And once we'd eaten, the very nice waitress suggested that we might like dessert, and proceded to reel off the dessert menu for the day. The first choice was "chocolate tower cake with raspberry sauce and vanilla bean ice cream."

For some reason, daughter and I could conjure up no willpower. We decided we'd share a single order of the cake and ice cream, expecting that the portions of both goodies would be rather small. Heh. Well, to the right you can see what the grinning waitress brought to our table a few minutes later.

That's the largest serving of cake -- meant for one person -- that I've ever seen. We laughed and laughed. And then we dug in.

It's been nearly 24 hours since that meal and I haven't gotten hungry yet. This is fortunate, since the calories and sugar I consumed yesterday equal about what I'd eat in a week.

I figure I'll eat again on ... Saturday.

An open letter to the President

2009-04-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

Dear President Obama:

First, I want to make it clear that I voted for you in November. I did so in part because you inspired me to have hope for America's future. I liked the fact that you'd worked for the disenfranchised as a community organizer in your early career. I liked that you'd been a professor of Constitutional law. You'd proven yourself a good representative of the people in the Illinois state legislature and as a junior senator for Illinois in the U.S. Congress. The story of your life was inspiring, as well. As I listened to you speak during your campaign, paying attention to what you were saying, over time I became convinced that you were sincere, inordinately intelligent and honest – a rare attribute in a politician.

The other reason I voted for you was because you promised change. This was very important to me after eight years of watching helplessly as the Bush administration set about destroying the very things America stands for: democracy, freedom, civil rights, equality and justice. The rule of law. A country run by the People and for the People.

As someone who served in the armed forces and later, as a civilian employee of the Department of Defense in Europe, I was proud of America's reputation overseas. I tried to be a good "ambassador" while I lived there. And so it was terrible to watch President Bush and his henchmen methodically destroy America's reputation both at home and abroad. He changed our system of taxation so that the rich got richer on the backs of the rest of us. All those things America stood for were under attack by our own President. I was apalled.

And I was angry. President Bush had started two wars. The first, in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban, was arguably just. The second, against Iraq, absolutely was not. Our soldiers were dying for no good reason. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were dying because of our President's ego. As a nation, we were spending billions to prosecute a war that was both unnecessary and wrong. President Bush turned America into a nation that tortured her prisoners, held them in indefinite detention and refused them the right of a fair trial. He spied on the people of his own country without the right to do so and without apology. And it went on and on and on.

You promised to make it all right.

Since your inauguration you've worked hard to change and repair many of the things the Bush administration wrecked. Guantanamo is being closed down. You've set a timetable for the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. You've put some good people into important government positions so that they, too, can start the long task of repairing the damage that was done by the previous administration. You've stood up for workers and reversed the ban on stem cell research. You've ordered Bush's CIA "black sites" all over the world dismantled, once and for all. You've made it clear that torture will no longer be used by this country. You've proven your mettle as America's most powerful representative and diplomat during your recent travels across Europe, going a long way toward restoring respect for America and our reputation abroad.

And you've worked as quickly as possible to try to save our economy, which President Bush and his cronies left teetering on the edge of the abyss after enriching themselves, with our money, to the point of obscenity. Time will tell whether your solutions worked or not, but I feel confident that you made your decisions in good faith and with the wellbeing of the people of the United States foremost in your mind. I have hope.

For all these things: Thank you.

Mr. President, you ran for office on the slogan, "Change you can believe in." But recently you've made some decisions which disturb, disappoint, and concern me. I always knew that I wouldn't agree with everything you did – that's impossible and this is a democracy. But these decisions are not consistent with your campaign slogan or the promises you made to us.

I never thought you'd hide, as George W. Bush did, behind the excuse of "state secrets" in the defense of "national security" and continue to defy and break the laws of the land and deny us our civil and constitutional rights without offering a truthful and valid explanation.

So once again, I'm appalled. The laws and constitutional civil rights of Americans apply equally to all of us, regardless of party, gender, skin color or religious affiliation or lack thereof. I'd be a hypocrite if I wasn't upset and angry with you and your administration regarding these decisions. Here's why:

You've decided to maintain the prison at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, continuing to refuse the detainees there access to a fair trial and the justice that they, as human beings, deserve. Many of them have been held without charges for six years or more, living in limbo, some of them treated like animals.

The only reason? "State secrets." "National security." This is wrong, sir, and you know it.

You've decided to continue wiretapping all Americans without a warrant. I say "all Americans" because Bush's reassurance that he was only wiretapping our overseas communications to the Middle East was a bald-faced lie, as you well know. This is, simply, spying on your own people for your own reasons, just or unjust. We don't know which because once again, the only reasons for your actions we're given are "national security" and "state secrets."

President Obama, wiretapping our communications – listening in – spying – without a lawful warrant to do so is against the law, it's unconstitutional and it violates the civil rights of all Americans. You were a professor of Constitutional law. You know the Fourth Amendment intimately, sir. And yet … you continue its flagrant violation. Why? Why would you thumb your nose at our Constitution just like your predecessor did? This is an ominous development.

Finally, your administration is holding back documents which could, if they were released, indict members of the Bush administration as war criminals. Why would you do this? We've been offered no explanation at all, so far. Could it be that these documents might also incriminate people you've kept in your own administration? If so, buck up, sir. It's crucial that the people who defied the laws of the United States of America and the Geneva Conventions be brought to justice. It's crucial to our democracy and to our respect, standing and credibility in the world at large. And you know this, too.

It is my hope that you are maintaining these atrocities – because that's what they are, sir – only until you know the full scope of the damage that has been done by the criminal Bush administration and have worked out a viable way to stop them once and for all. I hope that you really are the good man I and millions of other Americans believed in strongly enough to vote for as our President. I hope you'll stop hiding behind the craven excuse of "state secrets" and "national security."

I hope you're a better man – and President – than that. We're depending on you to do the right thing, the lawful thing. President Obama, our democracy stands in the balance.

State of the Village report

2009-04-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

If the population of the world was represented by a village inhabited by 100 people, what would it be like? How many would be black, or white? How many Christian or Muslim, or Hindu? How many would eat well and how many would go hungry? How many would know how to read? Have computers? Internet access?

Visit The Miniature Earth and find out. You'll be surprised.

Blogoversary 3

2009-04-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

This month marks Blue Wren's third blogoversary. My very first post was on April 5th, 2006, actually, so I missed the Big Day, but I've always had a terrible time remembering birthdays, anniversaries and the like so I'll give myself a pass.

Since then, I've posted 535 times and Blue Wren has collected 44,119 "hits." I know – not many when compared to blogs like Daily Kos, Eschaton, and Firedoglake, but I'm happy. I have a few regular readers who comment occasionally. Who needs more? I consider each of you friends.

My first first post on Blue Wren was short. "Hello, world. This is Wren," it was titled:

"I'm Wren. I'm an American, a disgruntled Democrat, a veteran, a Mom, a wife, an artist and a journalist, a non-believer. I've never been political. But I can't sit silent and watch while America is taken over by the religious right and our democracy and great Constitution are shredded away by inches.

"I'm deeply worried about America. I don't want to see the day come when we find ourselves, by virtue of our silence, powerless subjects of an imperial theocracy. I have a lot of questions and not much in the way of answers. But I have a sharp, questing mind and increasingly, feel compelled to speak out.

"And so, I'll blog. I hope to get a good conversation going here so that perhaps, between us, we can find our way home."

The second post was a story about a visit that I and some friends made to East Germany in 1990, a few months after the Berlin Wall fell.

In that first month, I wrote posts about my concern over the war in Iraq, about how America had changed since 9/11 and the frightening idiocy of the Bush Administration's nuclear sabre-rattling at Iran. I also told the story of how Mr. Wren and I met, and his fabulous-but-smelly musical abilities. I wrote about our chickens, affectionately and collectively named "The Girls." I wrote about the Japanese maple outside my bathroom window, and about the connection I discovered between my dog and "The Emissary," an old Ray Bradbury short story I read years ago.

In the months that followed those first tentative posts, George W. Bush and his administration fed more and more of our Constitution into the shredder. I wasn't alone in my unease at the dark, violent road my country was taking into the New Millennium. Millions of other Americans were also appalled, and when the 2006 mid-term elections came around, we spoke out decisively through our votes and tossed a bunch of the Congressional bums we were saddled with out and voted a bunch of saner people in.

Since then, bloggers have become a force to reckon with in America. A lot of them, like myself, started blogging because we felt that as citizens, we had no "voice" anymore. The news media we relied upon for a truthful and balanced account of what our leaders were doing in our names was falling down, shamefully, on the job. Under Bush, many people were afraid to speak publicly about their opposition to the needless war in Iraq, the warrantless wiretapping, and the ongoing destruction of our civil liberties.

Blogging gave those of us who love to write an outlet for our thoughts and opinions. It still does.

I supported Barack Obama for president wholeheartedly and voted for him in last November. He went into office facing a huge task: fixing an economy that had been looted with gleeful, greedy abandon during the Bush years; a huge deficit that now can only grow huger because of the need to stimulate the economy so that it doesn't collapse entirely; changing the course of the country in terms of its relationship with the rest of the world; reworking how we react to and fight terrorism; how we can best protect ourselves and maintain our national security without being bloodthirsty warmongerers; and and yes, how to restore and protect our Constitution, our precious civil rights and our very democracy.

I think President Obama has done a fine job so far in most of those areas. He hasn't been in office very long yet, and none of this can be accomplished overnight. The economy, in particular, is in such gargantuan trouble that it's almost unbelievable.

But we haven't found our way home yet.

Like many other progressive Democrats, I'm deeply concerned about and disappointed in the Obama administration's latest moves regarding warrantless wiretapping and the declassification and release of important documents regarding the Bush administration's torture policies. I want the wiretapping to stop, and I want those who made "torture" synonymous with "America" brought to justice and punished.

But I'm not ready to condemn Obama – not yet. I believe there's a lot we don't know – and a lot that the Obama administration doesn't know and is still finding out about regarding the nasty, quicksand swamp that was the Bush torture policy and its policy of spying on Americans. That not knowing – or perhaps discovering far worse things than we can imagine – may be what's preventing Obama from taking the steps toward governmental transparency that he promised during his campaign.

So far, we haven't received a good explanation for that lack of transparency. We haven't received a good explanation for his administration's seeming decision to go along with, continue and even expand Bush's policies in warrantless wiretapping and presidential imperial power. This is truly, deeply upsetting.

I'll be writing more about those subjects in the future. That's why I created Blue Wren in the first place – so I could give voice to my opinions. But I've never been so partisan that I couldn't perceive my own party's failings, and I'll not start being that way now. Obama has achieved many good things since he took office on Jan. 21, and he's done some things I'm not so happy about, too. I expected that, to be honest. He's not going to be able to please all of us. Democracy is slow and it's quite messy.

But I still have hope.

Thanks to all of you who've read my posts over the years. And a special thanks to those who've read them and then commented, too. I can't begin to describe how much I love being part of this new, fluid form of communication – or how much I appreciate all of you.

Do re mi

2009-04-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

Forgive me, but I discover I have a deep sentimental streak running through my being. After awakening in a foul mood this morning (for no particular reason), I found the video below. And then I was laughing and crying at the same time. I simply find this sort of thing ... wonderful:

Nothing has changed, but my day is looking a lot brighter.

h/t: The usual. Thanks, Andrew.

Boom

2009-04-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a young adult and my idealism less battered by experience and disappointment, I believed that problems could always be solved without resorting to violence. I wish it could be so, but I no longer believe that as a species we'll ever really accomplish it. There will always be one person in the group who won't go along. Peace -- real peace -- doesn't seem to be part of our internal make-up.

And yet ... and yet ...

Maybe it's just a matter of changing weapons. And then sharing a drink.

Tipping my hat to Sully, again. He always finds the best videos.

Six Things

2009-04-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting here just minding my own beeswax yesterday when the strangest feeling came over me. A thought-voice, not my own, was whispering in my head, as if there was someone else in there besides me.

Unlike our former President, I'm not given to hearing voices in my head, so this seemed rather unusual.

The voice was distant, yet close. Right there. I couldn't quite make out what it was saying. I closed my eyes, thinking that maybe if I wasn't perusing Facebook and trying to think of witty things to say, I might hear it better.

It was a male voice. "Bagged," he whispered.

Bagged? What in the world? What was bagged? Some groceries? A rabbit? A thief? None of these things had any immediate relevance in my life at the moment, though the word did remind me that I needed to run to the store. I didn't, but today I have to. I'm out of soy creamer for my coffee. That's serious.

I put my hands over my ears to block out the birdsong coming in the window. Little feathery suckers are really loud right now, it being Spring and all. Especially that little wren. I listened harder to the Voice.

"Not bagged," he said. I think I heard a little chuckle, but I'm not sure. "I said wagged."

Right. Wagged. "Wagged what?" I asked out loud, also whispering because I wouldn't want my future son-in-law to hear me talking to people who aren't there. Might make him nervous.

"No! Not wagged!" There was a disembodied sigh. "Tagged! I said tagged!"

Oh! Tagged.

"Like, tag, you're it?" I inquired, remembering long, warm, giggly summer evenings playing tag with the neighbor kids on the front lawn, dodging mosquitoes and turning my feet and ankles green with grass stains. I smiled. This could be fun, but I wasn't quite sure how one played tag with a voice in one's head.

"Well, sorta like that," the voice said, going all velvety and persuasive. "I know - go visit the Sprawling Ramshackle Compound. Everything will be clear."

He was gone. I was alone in my mind again and oddly relieved. It's a strange feeling to have someone else talking in there after a lifetime of total mental alone-ness. I took my hands off my ears, opened my eyes and, oddly compelled, clicked on Sprawling Ramshackle Compound in my blogroll.

He was right. It was all clear by the time I'd read the post he'd left at the top of the page. What a relief that the "voice" was that of Bubs, one of the Chicago area's finest, a handsome, friendly family man with a penchant for cocktails, mannequin heads and the weird crime juxtaposition between Germany and Florida. He also has an irrational fear of clowns and alligators, but I won't hold that against him. While I've never heard of alligators stalking the streets of suburban Chicago, I'd be afraid of both if they showed up unexpectedly around here, too. Live and learn! As Bubs says, you can never be too careful!

Now, it seems that Bubs, along with having a twisted sense of humor, has been practicing up on his telepathy skills. I'm here to tell you he's getting pretty good at them, and I'd advise any crooks out there to watch out should they choose the Chicago area in which to commit crimes. Bubs will know. Believe me.

Anyway, what Bubs meant by "tagged" was that he'd tagged six of his blog buddies to complete a meme he'd been tagged with recently himself. He was being dutiful and passing it along, as per The Rules, but decided to test his telepathic powers instead of doing the tagging in the usual way. It's hard to say if he really meant for me to be one of his six 'taggees," but maybe telepathy isn't all that easy to control, after all. His thoughts could have leaked out and infected people at random, all over the country.

For all I know, there may be some confused old lady in Florida who can't figure out what all that "tagging" was that she started thinking about, right after her 4:30 p.m. supper at the hofbrau with her fellow retirees.

"Really, Joseph! You want to play what? You're in a wheelchair!"

Anyway, since I'm still feeling strangely compelled, I'll complete the meme as Bubs ordered. Here it is – but first

The Rules

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Well, Bubs certainly followed The Rules, even No. 6, even though he chose to do so in a typical Bubs-sort-of-way. Now I warn you, I'm pretty boring in real life (other than being virtually acquainted with a telepathic, tiki-hut-nut cop), but here goes:

1. I'm a natural blonde, but my hair is falling out, brushload by brushload. It's because of the wicked arthritis drugs I'm taking. My hair isn't falling out in patches but in strands all over my head, slowly, so my hair, which was once luxuriously thick is now distressingly thin. Given the choice between gnarled, useless hands before I'm 55 or wearing quirky, interesting hats for the rest of my life, I'll take the latter. Maybe Bubs will send me one of his old policeman hats. Or maybe I'll pretend to be Sinead O'Connor before she found religion. After all, bald is beautiful!

2. Speaking of Irish people, I hope to go to Ireland someday and spend a year there, at least. I'd like to see the Republic too, but I really want to go to Belfast in Northern Ireland so I can learn first-hand about the Troubles. See, I'm trying to write a novel about the place and its people but it's hard to do having never been closer to Ireland than Massachusetts for a summer vacation with my grandparents. Also, I have no money and the world's economy is falling apart. But I can dream, can't I?

3. One of my favorite poets is Rainer Maria Rilke. This poem, in particular, stopped me cold one day a long time ago. I first read it in a different, more lyrical and less rhymy translation, but it's still beautiful, even translated this way:

I live my life in widening gyres
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God's primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
And I still don't know if I'm a falcon,
a storm, or an unfinished song.

Those last two sentences got to me. I burst into tears.

4. I wish I could meet Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip in Buckingham Palace like President Obama and the First Lady did yesterday. I was so envious! Of course, I'd have to buy new clothes and I hate shopping, so maybe it's better that I don't try for an audience with Her Majesty anytime soon.

5. I've nearly kicked a lifelong addiction to coffee. I know, that doesn't mean much to you, but it does to me. I still love the stuff, but I can't take the caffeine anymore. I'm down to four cups a day. I savor each one, slowly.

6. I absolutely love maps and I have no trouble at all reading them. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do on rainy days was peruse the gigantic Atlas that came with the set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas my Dad bought when I was a baby. I'd open it on the floor in the living room and lose myself in it. That Atlas awakened my wanderlust before I even knew what a wanderlust was and made me want to travel all over the world. I've traveled some of it, but not all, so I've still got work to do.

And that's it. Like Bubs, I don't really want to tag anyone and make them feel they have to complete this meme, but I'll try exercising my telepathic powers to contact those of you I'd like to know more about.

There. You know who you are. Start writing.

Green jobs

2009-04-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Is marijuana part of the solution to our problems?

Our economy is in the dumpster. Maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is long and treacherous and a lot more people are going to lose their livelihoods, their retirements, and their homes before it's all over. And that's just in America.

Once it is over, our world is going to look a lot different. I don't think it will ever again be like it was a year ago, or even six months ago. The era of mindless consumerism and consumption is dying fast.

Now, I don't think that's all bad. As a nation we were on a ruinous road anyway. The silver lining to this economic disaster we're facing may be that we'll somehow save ourselves and the rest of the planet from annihilation courtesy of global warming or nuclear war over oil. That doesn't make the challenges we face easier or less painful, but it does offer a little hope in the middle of the maelstrom.

During the White House's Electronic Town Meeting the other day, a question regarding the legalization of marijuana and the possible economic benefits to be had from its sale and taxation, and that legalization's effect on crime and the costs associated with it, was put to President Obama.

His answer was stunningly un-serious, even mocking, making it sound as if the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for the question be asked were nothing but a bunch of blissed-out stoners.

That's regrettable, because I'd bet the vast majority of those who supported that question are no more stoners than most people who enjoy an occasional cocktail are alcoholics.

Granted, the sale and use of marijuana is illegal right now. But that doesn't stop people from buying it and using it, any more than Prohibition in America between 1919 and 1933 stopped people from buying and drinking alcohol. The prohibition of marijuana powers a huge criminal industry and wastes billions in taxpayer money each year as our government attempts to fight it. The prohibition of alcohol in this country was eventually, wisely overturned – and alcohol is arguably far more harmful to the physical and mental health of those who become addicted to it, to their families and to society at large, than weed is.

And yet even now, in 2009, we can't seem to look at this issue with any real seriousness or clarity.

It's been more years than I like to count since I last smoked a joint. And except for an occasional and rather rare glass of wine with a meal, I don't drink. And yet I support, wholeheartedly, the legalization and government taxation of marijuana. I voted for that question to be put to the President during the Town Meeting. I wanted to know if our government would finally treat it with the sober adult attention it deserves.

Sadly, no. It wouldn't.

I was married to an alcoholic once. It was miserable. I loved him and he was a good person at heart, but the booze made him mean, verbally abusive and irresponsible. He didn't have the willpower to stop drinking. I don't hold that against him, though I did finally leave him for my own and my daughter's sake. There are many, many people in the world addicted to alcohol who, tragically, will also never be able to break their addiction, people who are also good at heart and who, when sober, would never hurt anyone. Just like my ex.

But I've never met anyone who turned mean or abusive after smoking a joint. In fact, most people (to use an old but apt cliché) just mellow out. I have met a few who became so dependent on marijuana that it took over their lives. They and other like them are the unfortunate "stoners" that make President Obama snicker. But I believe they were the exception rather than the rule.

Today, I know that many of my peers smoke their doobies secretly. They're upstanding citizens, parents, taxpayers, and good people all around. They aren't stoners, just like most of the people I know that drink alcohol aren't drunks.

America imprisons more of her own citizens than nearly any other country in the world. A large percentage of those prisoners are people who have dealt or used marijuana. This is insanely stupid. It creates and perpetuates violent crime and ruins people's lives just for selling or using a substance that does them and society less harm than, potentially, a six-pack of beer. I know. A six-pack was all it took to turn my ex from a nice man into a slobbering, irrational monster.

I expect that in reality, President Obama would like to legalize pot. It would make a lot of money that would go directly into the nation's coffers and help pay down the huge debt we're all facing, like it or not. Those who use it won't suffer or cause any more harm than drinkers do now, and perhaps less. But Obama is a very new and different President. He has enemies all around him, hoping to bring him down and make him politically impotent. Backing the legalization of marijuana at this point in his young presidency would probably be disastrous, given the general attitude about it on the right, which unfortunately still represents around half the nation's citizens.

So, while I'm disappointed in President Obama for laughing off the question – I'd have liked it much more if he'd been dead serious – I understand why he said "no" to it's legalization right now, even if I vehemently disagree. But I think that its time is coming. Perhaps in a few years, when we're all adjusting to the Brave New World we're staring down right now, the legalization and taxation of marijuana, just like alcohol, will become a practical reality. And perhaps (I can hope, can't I?) it will mean fewer alcoholics, as those who start drinking as a way to relax and unwind turn to the gentle weed instead.

Oh – and as for the title of this post: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs chortled over the idea of marijuana creating "green" jobs during a presser yesterday. In fact, he chortled a lot (see the video, below) and blubbered through his answer. It was excrutiating to watch -- and it was just as disappointing to me as his boss's reaction to the question of legalizing pot a couple of days earlier.

But President Obama and Mr. Gibbs, the question was sober and pragmatic. It deserves a serious response. Imagine the "green jobs" a new and growing American industry in marijuana would create. The sky's the limit, eh?

Whaddadog

2009-03-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

When I was a teen-ager, I had a Boston Terrier named Hector who sang as beautifully as this dog, but he wasn't tall enough to reach the keyboard, so I had to play the notes for him. I'd laugh til I cried, and ol' Hec just loved every minute. Whaddadog.

Ephemeral books?

2009-03-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Should we rely on electronic technology to provide us with books?

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been posting his thoughts about the Kindle e-book reader for the last couple of days. As a lifelong, voracious reader myself, I've also pondered Amazon's Kindle with a mix of fascination and apprehension. The device is far too expensive, at well over $300, for the likes of me right now, but I'm guessing the price will fall considerably over the next couple of years – or that I'll win the lottery or something. And then maybe I'll get one.

My fascination comes from the idea of being able to have a good book, magazine or newspaper – or many – at hand all the time, tucked into my purse or briefcase for those idle moments at doctor's appointments, etc., without having to cart them around with me. And of course, I'd use my Kindle at home. It's much lighter, weight-wise, than a book, so I'd appreciate it for that quality simply because of my arthritic hands. Holding a book of several hundred pages for extended periods hurts these days and makes reading a lot less enjoyable. It's hard to "fall into" the story when your hands, wrists and fingers ache from holding the book open. And while I know there are stands available in catalogs that will hold the book open for you, they strike me as clunky and inconvenient. You sure couldn't carry them around. But the Kindle would eliminate the problem.

However, like Josh, I'm ambivalent. I LIKE books. I like the look of them on my bookshelves and I love curling up in a chair and reading them. I love the sound the pages make when I turn them and the tactile "feel" of the book in my hands (even as I fight RA), particularly hard-bound books. I love the scent – that unique musty and particular smell of paper and ink, bindings and glue. Libraries send me into ecstasies.

Books have been my dear friends ever since I learned to read. Is there anything as singularly wonderful as opening a new book in anticipation of the journey ahead? Books are chock-full of fascinating people and places and adventures I'll never experience in any other way. Space travel, anyone? A voyage to the bottom of the sea? How about life on a pirate ship or a sword-and-magic battle with goblins?

I feel that way about newspapers too, though not with the same sense of wonder. I get most of my news online now, something I thought I'd never be able to adjust to back when the Internet was still in its toddlerhood. Read a newspaper on a computer screen? Miserable! But I do it without a thought these days and don't mind it a bit. I rarely buy a newspaper anymore, even as I miss the crackle of the pages and the aroma of printers' ink. I even miss having ink-smudged fingers. As a journalist and a long-time reader of newspapers, I'm in mourning over their current demise. I can hardly imagine a world without them. What if the electricity fails? What if I can't afford an Internet connection? This is a real concern, and not just for me. Lots of people still don't have computers at all. What happens if we can't get online? It will be like the Dark Ages.

Yes, there's television. But as with the Internet, these days TV pretty much requires a cable connection or a satellite signal. If you can't afford one, you're in trouble, unless you have a set of rabbit ears or an antenna on your roof. And since the switchover to digital television signals, which has already started in many parts of the country, no cable connection means no television, period.

Besides, I don't know about you, but I'd hate having to rely only on teevee for my news. I'd never know the whole story, and frequently I'd be unable to get both sides. I'd be forced to understand what was happening in the world through a filter of biased opinion and 10-second news bytes. I'd be forever wondering what was propaganda and what wasn't. Television is a corrupt news medium – in all senses of the word.

This whole line of thinking brings me to another problem. Josh mentioned that he can no longer access the college papers he wrote because they were saved on floppy disks – and most computers now don't even have a floppy disk drive, not even for the small, plastic-cased disks that were ubiquitous a decade ago. The big ones of 20 years ago? Forget it. Even if the computer drives were available to read them, the software required to read and translate old word-processing programs aren't. So those papers – that information – is gone unless it was printed on paper and saved by the creator or user.

It was interesting to me that Josh brought that up, because just the other day I was thinking about it myself. There are things I wrote, saved on floppies and in no other place, that I can't access anymore. Worse, I've lost many of the floppies themselves over the years during moves and the occasional clean-out of stuff no longer needed. All that writing, all that thinking – saved indifferently and whether important to others or not – is just gone. Vanished. It made me sad.

If we stop making books out of paper and cardboard, bindings and ink, what will we do when the Kindle is outdated, like floppy disks are now? What if there's no simple way to transfer the electronic data from the Kindle to some newer, even better reader? Will those books, that data, simply be lost forever? The thought is sobering.

Therein lies my apprehension and my ambivalence toward the Kindle. I have several hundred books in my home now, collected over many years. A lot of them are new. A lot of the older ones I re-read every few years, and I enjoy them as much as I did the first time. As long as they live on my bookshelves, quiet, holding worlds inside them, I can enjoy and learn from them. I can take mind-journeys, bone up on a myriad of subjects, from birding to world history, and even teach myself to weave tapestries.

But if all those wonders are turned into strings of zeros and ones, there's a good chance I could lose access to all of them, someday. So could everyone, all over the world. And that would be the saddest thing of all.

Poof

2009-03-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

In his column today, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the steep decline of American financial prowess and influence in the world:

"Indeed, these days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along."

I'm no economist – far from it; I have to hunker down and sweat through balancing my measly bank account each month – but even I knew there was something terribly wrong going on with our economy throughout the Bush years. It niggled. I edited a weekly newspaper from 1998 through 2006, and I watched in fascination as the Sacramento bedroom community it served grew from a small collection of nice neighborhoods governed by the county and a community services district (CSD), into the county's prime money-making behemoth.

When I started editing the paper, there was a single grocery store in a strip mall, two fast-food restaurants, a pizza parlor and two gas stations, the nice neighborhoods, a high school, a middle school and a couple of elementary schools, and a brand-new, very exclusive country club and golf course with a fabulous"gated" community that was still mostly a gleam in the developer's eye. All these were on the north side of the highway. On the south side was another gas station, another fast food joint and a small mobile home park, the "poor" end of the community. A couple of miles further south down a two-lane country road was a slowly growing industrial park.

When I left, there were three giant grocery stores in their ubiquitous strip malls, four more gas stations, an eight-theater movie complex, a Mercedes Benz dealership, a huge, high-end retail center, a gigantic sports club, and several more restaurants, including one that claimed four-star status from the moment it opened. More neighborhoods were constructed seemingly overnight, including several high-priced "gated communities" that quickly sprawled out and dominated the surrounding, once-pristine hillsides. A second middle school was constructed, along with two more large elementary schools, and plans were in the works for another high school. The industrial park filled up so quickly with huge office buildings, techie firms, storage facilites for boats and Rvs, and light manufacturing centers that it had to expand. A gigantic company that did billing for other companies across the nation built a monster "campus" there and quickly became one the county's largest employers. And the sleepy local chamber of commerce grew into a powerful political entity with hundreds of active members.

At the same time, a huge migration of people, taking advantage of the suddenly inflating real estate prices in the San Francisco Bay Area and southern California, used the profits they made on the sale of their houses and bought themselves new ones in the growing community. They wanted a better, safer place to raise their children while enjoying far more house than they'd enjoyed before. Real estate prices, naturally, skyrocketed. It was nothing for a modest, 30-year-old home to go for well over half a million dollars; the new ones – the now infamous McMansions – sold for far more than that, some of them easily approaching two million bucks. If the house sat on a little land, too, the sky was the limit.

To serve the exploding community, the local fire department grew from two small stations to four, and added ambulances, a water engine, a ladder truck and many more firefighter/EMTs. One of the new stations was huge and included heated bays for its trucks, a marble-floored lobby and a gigantic kitchen, dormitory and gym for the firefighters. A fifth fire station south of the highway, was under construction when I left in 2006. It was slated to become a state-of-the-art firefighter training center for northern California, along with providing wildfire protection to the new retail centers and homes that were rapidly sprouting up all around it.

It was all dazzling. As a newspaper editor, my salary was peanuts, though I worked as hard as anyone else in the community. I couldn't afford to live there myself – as time passed, I could barely afford to buy groceries there. And I wondered how the residents could afford those gigantic houses. Even making $5-$6K or more a month (an income I could hardly imagine) their mortgages had to be crushing. And then there was the expense of furnishing the many rooms, of landscaping the yards and then maintaining them to the satisfaction of the snooty neighborhood associations and the CSD, the cost of cooling those houses through the long, sweltering valley summers and heating them through the mild winters. Yet everyone drove SUVs, gigantic trucks and high-end cars, even the high school students. Hummers abounded. And one of the main "issues" in the community was an increasing irritation with traffic gridlock as residents commuted to and from work each day.

Then it all started melting down. The year I was laid off (because my paper's parent company was "downsizing"), the real estate market was already tottering, and in spite of my attempts to get them to do so, no one was talking about it out loud yet. Some of the new, upscale stores had already gone under and the fancy four-star restaurant was barely getting by, depending heavily on evening alcohol sales in its beautiful bar. Construction was slowing down. One of the big homebuilding firms went into bankruptcy and the powerful local developers were putting some of their plans into holding patterns.

Today, my old weekly newspaper is about a third of the size it was when I left. It's struggling and no longer maintains an office in the community itself. Because its big advertisers have vanished (real estate and car sales) and the smaller businesses haven't got the money to advertise as much as they used to, the paper's editorial and sales staff has been decimated. A second weekly newspaper the parent company started in an adjacent, also-exploding community no longer exists at all. The parent company is shrinking as I write and layoffs have already put many local journalists and newspaper production workers out of work. One of the papers in this newspaper "family" now publishes only online.

Lots of the community's new storefronts and office buildings stand empty and echoing. There are many fewer Realtors. A lot of those pricey McMansions are dead husks and families are quietly moving away, victims of employer layoffs, guttering new companies and "creative" mortgages.

A lot of Americans knew the galloping economy was a fantasy, even if we couldn't prove it and were prevented by the prevailing attitude in the nation from even whispering much about it. I knew, even though I don't know much about economics. That old adage, "you can't get something for nothing" was ringing in my ears even as I watched the bubble grow and grow … and grow.

Well, it popped. As one of the millions of unemployed persons in America today, I don't feel so alone anymore, but that sure doesn't make me feel any better.

Hedgehog in the Fog

2009-03-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

Hedgehogs and fog: These are two of my most favorite things.

As serendipity would have it, back in the 70s a Russian artist animated an old Russian folktale that involves both, along with several other things that have long been on my personal Favorites List: An owl, a bat, a bear and a luminous white horse.

Beautiful creations like this give me hope for humankind. And hedgehogs.

Tip o'the hat to Designer-Daily.

Semi-deep thought:

2009-03-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Everyone is angry about the dreadful state of the economy. They're looking for someone to blame: President Obama, Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner, Sen. Chris Dodd, AIG, the Big Banks, or perhaps all of us hapless middle-class Americans who believed the money peopel when they said getting rich was easy -- just use credit! -- and the value of our investments could only ever go up.

But I think the real blame lies with George W. Bush and our Congress -- mainly the Republicans but some of the Democrats too -- who sat and watched the bubble grow and grow over the last eight years and did ... nothing. Nada. Zip. They're the ones we should be blaming. They're the ones we elected to make sure that this sort of thing couldn't happen. They should all be facing, at the very least, intense public humiliation. Ideally, they should be tried for criminal incompetence and greed.

Whimsy

2009-03-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

powerlinerflyers from wes johnson on Vimeo.

Hat-tip: Sully

Rafting the river of American life

2009-03-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite bloggers is Will Divide, who writes the blog Huck and Jim. Ostensibly a big-shouldered Chicagoan (one of the whimsical things about blogs is that you can visualize the blog-writers any way you like), Will posts infrequently but everything he posts is well worth reading.

At the moment, he's guiding his circle of readers through the great Mark Twain's great story, Huckleberry Finn, posting a synopsis of a new chapter each Sunday along with his take on the deeper meaning Twain wove between the lines regarding America, slavery, bigotry, poverty, etc. The result is fascinating, educational and intriguing, and Will invites further discussion in comments. And here I thought Huckleberry Finn was mostly a story written for children. Heh.

But what has really drawn me to Will's blog over the last several years are his astute, witty and deadly-spot-on posts about America's ongoing political situation, how it's affecting our lives and where it's taking us. Here's a bit of his latest, in which Will characterizes the Republicanism of the last 30 years as delightfully entertaining for that party's members – and then points out that they haven't realized yet that the fun is over:

"I'm not sure when the entertainment began to drain out of GOP land. I think the bubble broke apart in several places: Mission Accomplished, the Katrina flyover, the Terry Schiavo soap opera (interesting that all three featured that little war criminal in a plane going somewhere). But drain out it did, which is not to say that the parched inhabitants of the Repub desert isle are not still thirsty for it. Hell, their lives once depended on it and now it is mostly all gone."

Go read the rest. Huck and Jim will hook you like a Mississippi catfish.

How we got here ...

2009-03-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Unexpected smiling

2009-03-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

Nothing much has inspired me to post here lately. Sorry about that; I've been stuck in the doldrums, but I'm digging myself out bit by bit. We can all use a bit of help at times like this -- and look what I ran across this morning at Sully's blog:

By the time that video ended I was grinning and shaking my head in delight at what I'd just seen AND at the sheer audacity and optimism making the ad must have taken. THEN I saw how they did it:

I completely agree with the lady at the end of the second video.

If you have a few minutes and need a lift, watch the first video. If you want to really do some unexpected and sustained smiling, do watch both.

Shall we overcome?

2009-02-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

I read an interesting column by New York Times columnist Charles Blow about racial prejudice this morning. In it, Blow talks about the innate negative bias whites seem to have against blacks, even when they are trying not to be prejudiced. He mentions Attorney General Eric Holder's recent speech in which he accused America of being a “nation of cowards” because we don't have “frank” conversations about race.

Mr. Blow also talks about a study called Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by the University of Washington and the University of Virginia, that seems to back up this assertion – much to the chagrin of those “prejudiced” whites who took the project's online test.

I was one of those who took the test. I've never thought of myself as prejudiced – indeed, I've tried since I was old enough to understand what it meant not to be – and yet my score in the test did show that I have a positive bias toward whites and a negative one toward blacks. It disturbed me. Yet I have to admit that I wasn't entirely surprised at what the test revealed about me. Nor was I surprised to learn that a resounding majority of the whites who took the test, and who think of themselves as unprejudiced, also harbor this hidden ugliness in their souls.

The theory posited by the makers of the test is that our unconscious minds are “set” when we're very small – by the age of six – and that try as we might, changing that unconscious bias is close to impossible. But if this is really the case, that even if we consciously try not to be biased but deep-seated mental triggers make us so anyway, how are we ever to overcome it? How can we ever achieve a truly “equal” society?

The test's creators think that if whites can be taught to distinguish individuality in black facial features – if we can learn to see each black man or black woman we encounter as an individual – then we'll overcome this handicap. Mr. Blow feels that we can do it through dialogue – whites talking frankly to blacks, and vice versa – as well.

Certainly, having a black man (yes, I know he's half white, but this is the general perception in our society) as President will help break down these racial barriers, especially in the youngest of our children. Perhaps when they're grown, this innate bias won't be so marked. Or perhaps it won't exist anymore. But that's 20 or 30 years out. What about now, when prejudice, conscious or otherwise, still darkens our culture and society? Even the words we use, like “darkens,” work to further the bias.

I don't have the answer. Mr. Blow's idea is a nice one, but when and how do we have this dialogue? Who will teach whites to look beyond skin color to the subtleties of facial features as a way to see blacks as individuals? Is this something that will be taught in Kindergarten? And what about the other, myriad biases and prejudices we all harbor? What about gender prejudices? How about the prejudices against other skin colors and cultures? Here in America, the most volatile struggle for equality has been between the white and black people and cultures. But there are many, many others, equally as serious. Look at America's xenophobia regarding Hispanic immigrants, legal or otherwise.

And how about our geographic divides? In Philadelphia and New York City, in Boston and Savannah and New Orleans, black and white people live closely together, for the most part. But in my county, I can count the number of black people who live here on one hand. There is a visible minority of Hispanics here, but nearly everyone else is white.

I didn't grow up here, but the town I did grow up in was just the same, except there were even fewer Hispanics. My parents were both prejudiced against blacks; indeed, against anyone who didn't have a white skin like ours. Dad grew up in Detroit; his experience of blacks there and later, in the military, wasn't positive. He felt his prejudice was justified. Mom grew up in northern Idaho. Until she moved to California as a young adult, she'd never had any experience with black people, but her times and culture shaped her anyway. And, as a woman who came into adulthood in the '50s, she naturally adopted her husband's views on the world.

And they passed that prejudice on to their children. It wasn't overt. They were affected by the Civil Rights movement, just like everyone else in America, so they didn't talk about their own prejudices much. But where we lived said a lot – in suburbs that were basically free of black, brown and yellow faces. The subject, naturally, rarely came up.

My experience isn't unique. We do self-segregate. How do we overcome the natural inclination to live near and with those who look like ourselves? How do we overcome our ingrained fear of the “other” if, even when we consciously make a sustained effort to do so, our unconscious minds tenaciously hold onto that fear? Is this instinctual? Is it ancestral memory? How do we break this mold?

I can only keep making my conscious effort not to be biased and prejudiced and hope that by doing so, I help to change my culture for the better. It will naturally take a very long time. Mr. Blow's ideas are good ones and will help move us all in the right direction, too. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “We shall overcome.”

What do you think? Can we overcome our prejudices?

Update: This is a fascinating read on this subject. Highly recommended.

Thanks to greed ...

2009-02-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

This is the best explanation of our (OK, the world's) economic crisis I've seen yet. I can actually understand it though it makes me angry. I'd say "enjoy" but ... well, you know:

http://vimeo.com/3261363

I tried to embed the video itself but blogger didn't like the coding. Sigh. Do check it out anyway when you've got 10 minutes to spare. It's quite eye-opening.

h/t Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish.

Collapse, cont.

2009-02-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

First, I shoveled a new path around the collapsed carport to the driveway. That bit where the corner is sticking out over the path is dicey. I don't like it.

Once I'd connected up to yesterday's path, it was just a matter of shoveling an inch or so, all the way up to to the lane. And there I stopped, turned around, and took another photo. Pretty, isn't it? Except for the carport. And my poor old Celica.

It's well after noon and the insurance people haven't called yet, so I'm going to call them. Again. While I was out there working, making sure that whoever they send can get to the house, I realised that the cart we use for bringing wood inside was under the carport, too, and impossible to get to right now. That's a real problem. We've got about 24 hours worth of wood in the house, so I guess Mr Wren and I will be carrying in precarious, heavy armloads.

In addition, the weather is supposed to get bad again this weekend. New snow? Just rain? They're not saying yet. But this mess just has to be cleared by then.

And finally, my daughter and her fiance are moving home this month, and we'd planned to get as much of the move done as possible this upcoming weekend. If the collapsed carport is still blocking the bottom of the driveway then, it's gonna be pretty tough carrying boxes, furniture and etc. in.

Later: I reached the insurance folks. The claims person hasn't called yet because "frankly, we're swamped." Apparently they've been deluged with claims following the series of storms that went through the state. Which means that my claim will just have to wait until they can get to it.

This would be a wonderful moment for a smoke and a stiff drink. I can't have either one.

Collapse

2009-02-18T08:42:00.001-08:00

Last night, a little after 10 p.m. I’d just fed the woodstove a couple of fresh logs and I was warm and comfortable, even with the world outside clogged with heavy, slowly melting snow. I thought of snuggling into bed under thick quilts, laying my head on a soft pillow and closing my eyes. I yawned.

There was a deep, muffled, ominous whumpfffff from Out There, loud enough to get my attention but not loud enough to make me startle.

“What was that?” I wondered, a little concerned.

“Dunno,” said Mr Wren, not taking his eyes off the television. Disinterest oozed from his every pore.

I went to the slider and turned the light on. Everything looked normal. I went around to the laundry room door and hit the porch light switch. Opened the door and peered out.

OMG. The carport had collapsed under the weight of a foot or so of snow on its roof. Beneath it, buried, was my late father’s 1988 Celica. My old Celica. It was because of that car, and the damage the weather was doing to its ragtop and general, overall condition that we got the carport in the first place.

I called to Mr Wren, “You’d … um … better come look.”

“What? What is it?” I heard the thump of the recliner’s footrest snapping down in the family room as he stood. “What happened?”

“The … the thingy fell.” I couldn’t for the life of me remember the word “carport.” In my shock, it just disappeared.

“The what fell!?” His irritation was palpable.

“The … um … the over-thing. Out here…”

He got to the door, looked out. For a long moment he said nothing, then cursed and stalked back to his recliner and his TV, leaving me standing there, blinking.

I don’t know how badly my dear old car is damaged. I can’t get to it. There was nothing else under the carport of any value, fortunately – we’d moved the new Kia up the steep driveway to the lane so we could get out if we needed to go anywhere. So we’re good there.

But I spent quite a while outside yesterday, moving back and forth beneath the shelter of the carport as I shoveled my way through the snow to the woodpile. Halfway through the chore, I went in for ice-melter to scatter and a little later, for a hot coffee to sip while I worked. Thank goodness the carport didn’t collapse then, while I was standing under it.

I’m still a bit stunned. I’d never have guessed that a thick cover of snow would stress that structure to this point; the carport roof was pitched and it seemed quite sturdy. But it’s been a decade since we’ve had this much snow all at once, and we’ve only had the carport for a little over two years.

Live and learn.

I called our insurance company last night and made a claim for the carport and the car, which I figured was damaged, though I won’t really know until we can get the carport removed. I’m waiting for a call back from them now. Don’t know yet if they’ll cover this, but I’m hoping they will.

More later.

How I earned my lunch...

2009-02-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

First, I shoveled snow:

Then I carried a lot more firewood into the house.

As I was resting from my labors and thinking about what to have for lunch, I saw these newcomers out at the feeders:

House finches. Haven't seen any of them since last summer. Another gift.

Be careful IV ...

2009-02-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

Update, for those who care:
The snowstorm continues. Yesterday it spat rain, icy pellets and snow off and on all day; then it snowed overnight, leaving a fresh two-and-a-half inches on top of the rotting snow from previous days. And today, it started snowing again at around 7 a.m., sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, but continuously. It’s hard to say how much of it is sticking; it’s 36 degrees, so it’s a wet snow with fat, clumpy, feather-like flakes. The sound of the older snow melting from underneath – drip, drip, drip – is prevalent outside.

Inside, the woodstove has been blazing night and day, its little fan blowing heated air into the room. By mid-day, the temp reaches between 68-70. It depends on how faithful I am about feeding the stove fresh firewood. But the rest of the house is chillier. My den ranges between 55 and 60, so I’m spending most of my time in the sitting room and kitchen. So are the cat and the dog. They’re smart.

And I’m grateful I don’t have anywhere else I have to be right now.

Hedgerow

2009-02-16T15:02:00.001-08:00

Thirty-some years ago our next-door-neighbor planted a long line of fir trees along the edge of his property. His lot is right above ours – literally above, as in perhaps 20 feet up an abrupt embankment cut into the mountainside. He wanted a privacy screen between the houses.

The firs grew. Every few years he’d lop the tops off them, so that over time they formed a dense evergreen hedge about five feet high. In the meantime, he planted table grapes and tall blue irises next to them, and they grew and multiplied as the seasons passed.

Today, H’s hedge completely hides his property from ours, and likewise. The firs’ trunks are about a foot thick and sturdy, but the trees still only stand about five feet high. Woven all through them are grapevines and blackberry brambles. On our side at their roots is a thick groundcover of tough blue vinca, a volunteer cherry tree, a variety of other trees both large and small, and some no-name, very hardy shrubbery. All of it has been here since long before we arrived.

It was this hedgerow – that’s what I call it – that made up my mind about buying this house. Though it was wild and messy and unruly, at least on our side, I loved the idea that within that hedgerow a whole ecosystem thrived. It was a little world all its own.

I was right, too. Within the hedgerow live Bewick’s wrens, titmice, nuthatches and bush tits. Stellar’s jays launch themselves from the top of the hedge and, in fall, dine on the overripe bunches of deep purple grapes that hang here and there. The cherry trees bear fruit in late spring each year, but the cherries are small and bitter, not tasty by human standards. But that doesn’t matter to the birds. When the cherries turn red and ripe, they last about two days before they’re gone. Mr. Wren and I have talked for years about taking that cherry tree out – it leans precariously over the patio and isn’t particularly attractive, but we always end up leaving it there because the birds enjoy the fruit so much. And of course, they perch in its sparse, leggy branches, too, giving us a year-round show.

Other creatures also live in or near our hedgerow. We’ve seen opossums there at dusk, and raccoons after dark, their eyes glowing from the cover of grapevine and evergreen branch. We’ve often seen (unfortunately) big gray rats. There are alligator and blue-bellied lizards, and a host of insects of every kind, from ants to beetles to black widow spiders to butterflies and bumblebees.

As I stand at my kitchen sink, I love to gaze out the window at the Japanese maple branches just outside and the hedgerow beyond. I’ve seen mama and baby hummingbirds perched in the maple. Goldfinches, too.

I was washing out a casserole dish a little while ago, mostly paying attention to that, but glancing out at the hedgerow now and then, too. There’s still snow along the top of it in patches and down at the base of the embankment. Today, under a low gunmetal sky, the dead leaves of the grapevine and the branches of the firs rustled by gusts of wind, the hedgerow looks gloomy, cold and damp. It made me feel glad to be inside, dry and warm.

And then I saw, perched in a hollow of the hedge, a junco. He was all puffed up, staying warm, but mostly protected by the hedgerow itself from the wind. And he wasn’t alone. Within moments I realized the hedgerow was absolutely stuffed with juncos. They were perched all through it, each one of them with their feathers puffed as they hunkered down over their tiny pink feet. I’d always wondered where the flocks of juncos go at night, or when the weather is rough. Now I know. It made me laugh to see so many of them sheltering right before my eyes, yet so easily missed. I pointed them out to Mr Wren. And a few minutes later, it started to snow.

I was feeling blue today, and restless. But seeing the juncos in the hedgerow was an unexpected gift from the world. It lifted my spirits right up. All I had to do was stop thinking about myself for a moment – and look.

Oh, this is fun ...

2009-02-15T09:39:00.000-08:00

In the right-hand column you'll see a new widget I just posted called "Write or Die" by Dr. Wicked. I found it through Samcandide's blog "Otherwise" and thought, sure, I can do this.

So I did, setting a goal of 100 words in 10 minutes. As you can see by the widget, I beat my own clock! Here's what I wrote:

Today is the first day of the rest of your life, so they say. I have to agree. How can you not? After all, the other days of your life are already gone. Yesterday is yesterday, lost. You can't do it over. You've really only got today. And today, there are so many distractions that keep you from doing things just as you'd like. Although today, I did do something just as I liked. I took a shower with the window wide open, and just outside, it was snowing and windy. I pretended while I was in the shower that I lived in Norway, and that soon, I would run outside naked and throw myself into the snow and roll around and get all tingly down to my soul before running back inside to get dry and warm and drink hot chocolate and maybe eat a big steamy bowl of potato soup with crusty bread.

Heh. Not Hemingway by any stretch, but it was fun. And great practice. Writing, like any other skill, requires constant practice if it's to be any good at all. I keep striving.

Give it a try.

Careful What You Wish For III

2009-02-14T07:40:00.001-08:00

(In an awed, slightly quavery whisper) woo-hoo.

It’s like the world was covered in whipped cream while I slept.

I measured the snow out the patio door with my trusty old ruler. Six-and-a-half inches. It’s still snowing, though just lightly at the moment. I’d entertained fantasies of perhaps running a few errands today. Um … I think not. Well, unless I can figure out how to put sled runners on the yard cart and teach the dog to mush.

Seriously, though. This is the most snow I’ve seen in more than 11 years living in this town, at this elevation. It’s more snow than I’ve seen in the more than 15 years since I came back to the Placerville area from my German adventures. The first winter we lived in this house we had a lot of snow, a whole lot more than we’d expected. That was a cold, cold winter for the Wren family, but we’ve never had that much since, until now. In fact, there’s more snow right now than during The Freezing Winter of ’97, which went down in family history.

Fortunately, we’re much better equipped to deal with snow now.

Oh, hey (looks around guiltily) … Do you suppose all my complaining about the unseasonably warm, mild weather we were having angered the weather gods? The snow god in particular? I just had to go off, didn’t I, badmouthing sunshine. Got my comeuppance, I did. Holy Schnee, Batman!

Heheh (a little weakly) … According to the National Weather Service, a fine group of meteorologists whom I will never denigrate again, I promise, there’s another hugemonsterholyf**kingsh*t storm coming in tonight. This is the one they’re warning, and I quote: “May spread heavy snow and strong winds over the region tonight into Monday …” and urges us seriously and without the slightest hysterical note to “Continue to monitor NWS forecasts on this potentially dangerous storm.”

I think tonight would be a good one for potato soup and brown soda bread. What do you think?

Be careful II ...

2009-02-13T17:56:00.000-08:00

“WEST SLOPE NORTHERN SIERRA NEVADA - INCLUDING THE CITY OF...BLUE CANYON
305 PM PST FRI FEB 13 2009
...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 4 AM PST SATURDAY...
...WINTER STORM WATCH NOW IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY MORNING THROUGH LATE SUNDAY NIGHT...
THE WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW IS NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 4 AM PST SATURDAY. THE WINTER STORM WATCH IS NOW IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY MORNING THROUGH LATE SUNDAY NIGHT.
SNOW SHOWERS WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THE NIGHT. SNOW MAY BE OCCASIONALLY HEAVY. SOUTHWEST WIND GUSTS UP TO 40 MPH OVER MOUNTAIN PASSES WILL CREATE AREAS OF REDUCED VISIBILITY IN SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW AT TIMES.
4 TO 8 INCHES OF SNOW MAY FALL AT THE LOWER ELEVATIONS...WITH OVER A FOOT ABOVE 7000 FEET OVERNIGHT. SNOW WILL TAPER TO LIGHT SNOW SHOWERS TOWARD SATURDAY MORNING.
A MUCH MORE POWERFUL STORM MAY SPREAD HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS OVER THE REGION SATURDAY INTO MONDAY. THIS STORM COULD HAVE A MAJOR IMPACT ON TRAVEL THIS HOLIDAY WEEKEND. CONTINUE TO MONITOR THE LATEST NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORECASTS FOR UPDATES ON THIS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS STORM.”

Oh, yes. Now THAT’S a “Severe Weather Alert.”

Putting aside my admittedly freakish enjoyment of this Actual Winter Weather in a state where the people consider 70 degrees “chilly,” we really, really need this snow. Higher up in the mountains feet of the stuff is building up. There’s not enough up there yet to know if this series of storms will produce enough snow (and in spring, water) to relieve the dangerous drought conditions we’ve been living with, but my fingers are crossed.

Years back we had a bunch of very dry years. The state authorities were seriously talking water rationing. When the rainy season came, there wasn’t any. It was dry as could be. January and February passed with almost no rain, and very little snow in the higher elevations.

And then March arrived, and it was as if someone had thrown open the “storm doors.” Along the coast and in the valley it rained and rained and rained, day after day of rain and Californians everywhere were moaning and groaning about the grey, wet, chilly weather. And up in the mountains, it snowed.

“Miracle March” saved California’s butt that year. I’m hoping that perhaps this will go down in history as “Fabulous February.” We’ll see.

I did get outside and shovel paths through the snow again this afternoon, but as you can also see, it’s snowing again. No matter. I enjoyed the shoveling after my sore muscles warmed up a bit. And though tonight I’m dealing with achy, arthritic wrists and fingers, I don’t mind. I made tomorrow’s shoveling chore easier.

And I just realized: I’m live-snow blogging!

Nordic dreams

2009-02-13T12:00:00.001-08:00

“I've a friend who worked on an ice breaker ship that went to the Arctic regions. I have a feeling you would have been a good shipboard companion.”

So commented Bill Stankus in response to my post (scroll down a bit), “Your Wren at Work.” In it I bragged about shoveling a path through the snow from the patio slider, around the house and up the steep driveway to the lane. Now there’s a lot more snow out there and my path is buried. We’ve had 7 fresh inches since 5 a.m. Since the snowfall has finally stopped for a while, I’ll be out there again soon, but my muscles are a little sore-ish today. Heh. Guess what? I’m not looking forward to shoveling that snow quite so much this time.

But back to that comment. Bill, your feeling is spot on. In fact, you made me grin because one of the things I’ve most wanted to do in my life is to take a journey by ship – icebreaker or otherwise – to the Arctic. The fact of the deep cold and that I might get seasick doesn’t deter me in the least. Given the opportunity, I’d go. Tomorrow. I dream of icebergs, with their incredibly beautiful array of blues and purples contrasting with the white of snow and the black of the ocean they float on. I dream of seeing the mysterious and otherworldly aurora borealis shimmering and folding and flickering in the night sky. I dream of puffy parkas, mittens, scarves and hats, snowsuits and boots, blizzards and when they’re over, the primeval silence that falls over the world. And I have to admit, I dream of the comfort of coming in from the cold to the toasty warm, of tingly fingers and hot cups of joe spiked with a dollop of good brandy. Yes, I know. My dream is of something outside of the hard, actual reality I’d encounter in the Arctic. But it doesn’t stop me.

I really do think that my attraction to snow and cold is ancestral. A strong quarter of the blood in my veins is Finnish, and I have the blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin to prove it. Another dream, this one less unrealistic, is to visit Finland someday and see it for myself. I’d like to go there and stay a few years so I could experience all the seasons and meet as many people and do as many things as possible. I’d write about it all. I’d take photographs. What would I do? I’d love to take a ride on a Finnish icebreaker; I’d love to go Nordic skiing through the vast forests of birch and pine, then bake for a while in a sauna before crawling beneath a thick feather blanket to sleep. I’d love to see real reindeer and again, the northern lights. This particular dream also includes train travel, a journey up the coast of Finland to Lapland and across, over to Norway and Sweden. Perhaps I’d even venture into Russia and see St. Petersburg, and Moscow. And of course, it would need to be winter. For the snow.

I know I’ve written way too much about the weather lately. But I can’t apologize. My delight in the snow, that cold, clear grey light that comes with it, and the glowing ultramarine of the snowy dawn is seated deep in my bones, my blood, my being, and my soul. I’m going to enjoy it while it’s here, because this is California. It won’t stay long.

Note: Once again, Blogger won't publish with the usual spaces between grafs. Anyone have any idea why?

Be careful ...

2009-02-13T08:12:00.001-08:00

... what you ask for. You might get it.

I took these shots about a half-hour ago.

8:15 a.m. It's still snowing. Wind's gusting. Inside, the woodstove is blazing, the beasties are snoozing in front of it and I'm near it too, telling you about it. So much for my path-making yesterday. If it keeps snowing like this much longer, I won't be able to tell where it was. Once again there is no sound outside, as if the world has been wrapped in cotton. It's 28 degrees, by the thermometer. Dog went out, came back in covered with snow and happy with it. He barrelled past me, headed for the pantry, from which his breakfast appears each morning. He shook all the snow off just as I caught up with him, giving me a snow shower.

As long as the electricity doesn't fail, life is good.

Your Wren at Work

2009-02-12T12:04:00.001-08:00

Rumor has it that there's another storm coming in tonight, with another 3-5 inches of snow. So I donned my trusty fleece jacket, my snow boots with the grippy soles, my gloves and a hat and set to work shoveling a path up to the road. I figured if we do get another good snow, I'll only have to shovel the new stuff.

The wood ring on the hearth is down to about half-full, too. So de-iced paths from the stacked wood to the door will also make life a little easier.

It took me about an hour and 15 minutes to make my path, and shovel the area in front of the mailbox up on the street so the mailperson can get to it. Did my neighbor's box too, since I was right there. And our other neighbor, J, was out on his little tractor with the snowplow on front, scraping the lane so that everyone living along it can get down to the main road.

I like J. He and his family have lived here almost as long as we have, and I've never seen him without a big smile on his face. A few winters back, when he first got his tractor and snowplow (he's one of those boys who loves his toys), I happened to be out shoveling the first time he used it. The sheer joy on his face as he scraped a half a foot of snow off the lane was contagious. When he saw me watching him, and saw the shovel in my hand, he offered to scrape off our entire, steep driveway.

I wasn't going to turn that down. I still had the steepest part to do, the snow was the wet kind -- very heavy -- and I was getting tired. So J got busy and just did it for me. That big smile of his never left his face.

Just because ...

2009-02-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

... deep winter has swooped back into Northern California with a series of cold, wet storms all the way from Alaska. Naturally, I had to take photos. This first one is a close-up of nandina berries.

We've had snow over the last two nights. The first storm left about three inches. Last night's storm put us up to about 8 inches. The hush that has fallen over the immediate world is striking. So this is what it was like 100 years ago, before highways and cars and chainsaws and sirens.

Mr Wren put suet blocks out for the local birds. They'd gotten used to the warm, spring-like weather, but now have to hunt for food in a world gone icy and white. Below is a rufous towhee, but a brown towhee, a variety of sparrows, and a small flock of Oregon juncos have also been enjoying the feast.

I took this shot at around 5:30 yesterday morning. It's a strange one and probably not the best, but I like the way it came out. It's of the top of an arbor-style bench and table on the side patio and the steep, vinca and kamchatka rose-covered hill. At its top is the road.

Yes, I do love the winter snows, particularly since I don't have to struggle through it to get to work each day. Soon enough, I won't have this luxury anymore. I'm savoring it while I can.

Bacon sarnie

2009-02-11T10:45:00.001-08:00

So, I was surfing the BBC News site this morning. It's a nice way to start the day – the bad news in Great Britain doesn't seem quite as bad as ours. Or maybe it is, but it's a different sort of bad. Anyway, the BBC is enticing. Before I move on to other websites, I've usually read four or five news stories from across the pond.

One that I read today was "In Orwell's Steps," by Paul Mason, BBC2's Newsnight economics editor. Mason decided he would follow the route taken in "The Road to Wigan Pier," written by George Orwell during the Depression in 1936. The book is an account of how the dismal economic times affected the people and countryside of England.

And today? Mason wondered. Roughly 2 million people are now unemployed in Great Britain, a great many of them recently. How is the recession affecting the people living along the route from London to Manchester and Wigan Pier these grim days?
Mason's article is excellent. Do go read. Then come back, because I'm not done yet.

You're back already? OK, we'll move on. At one point in the story, Mason describes stopping to eat a bacon sarnie. Well, the name stopped me. What in the world is a sarnie? So I Googled, naturally.

A bacon sarnie* is a bacon sandwich, I discovered, "sarnie" being British Cockney rhyming slang. I also discovered a recipe, which I devoured with my eyes.

I'd been thinking, vaguely, of having some breakfast. What to have, what to have? A bowl of granola? Maybe some of that brown basmati rice I made a couple of days ago to eat for breakfast, with a banana and a sprinkle of cinnamon and a little soymilk? Egg on wholegrain toast? Lowfat and un-sugary, yes, but none of those sounded very appealing. But after reading that recipe, I had to try a bacon sarnie.

Trouble was, I didn't have any bacon. And even if I had, it wouldn't have been the meaty, British-style "rashers" they love so much. But I did have thin-sliced, packaged lunch ham from the deli section at the grocery store. Might that work? I decided I'd give it a try, got out the fry pan and went to work.

Ohmigod. That has to be the most delicious thing I've had since Christmas. I've been eating very carefully these days, slowly dropping excess poundage and keeping it off, so something as decadent and fattening as a bacon sarnie hasn't passed my lips in, well, just about forever.

Substituting the ham for the bacon worked well, for me. It's still very rich, and when fried until it's starting to brown and crisp, it's delicious. I always have wholegrain bread on hand, and by a strange stroke of serendipity, I even have a bottle of HP "brown" sauce, that British staple, in the fridge. And, because of all the mild, sunny weather we've had around here, The Girls (our five Rhode Island Red hens) have been fooled into thinking Spring is here and have started laying eggs again. So I fried one of those, breaking the yoke on purpose and cooking it until it was soft, not runny, and then put it on the bread with the ham.

The world seems to be righting itself, for now, and the weather is how it ought to be the second week in February – cold and snowy. Having that bacon (OK, ham-and-egg) sarnie really hit the spot. Was it calorific? Yes. Was it probably bad for me in a variety of nasty but subtle ways? Indubitably. But it was worth every single, savory and sensuous bite. Besides, tonight's dinner is spaghetti squash and salad. Look at the recipe I found!

Note: The photo is of the second half of the sarnie I made this morning. I ate it immediately after shooting the photo. There WAS a second photo, for a while, of the snow outside my window. But I didn't like it stuck at the bottom of the post, and Blogger wouldn't let me place it anywhere else without screwing up the text. Sometimes I hate Blogger.

*"bacon sarnie" is also Cockney rhyming slang for "Pakistani." I'm not gonna go there.

Voodoo heart

2009-02-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

watch more at aniBoom

Saturday night cat blogging ...

2009-02-07T20:18:00.000-08:00

... because only a cat can be this comfortable.

It's Witch Hazel!

2009-02-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

"I love seeing the witch hazel outside the window when I wake up," Mr. Wren told me the other morning. "It's just so bright and cheerful."

I hadn't noticed that it was blooming, myself. But a little while ago I went out and looked, armed with the camera. I picked my way down the soggy path behind the house, trying not to get my feet tangled in Mr. Wren's wisteria prunings, which he left for picking up later. And then, there she was, illuminated by the setting sun: Witch Hazel.

We actually have two witch hazel shrubs. We planted them beneath the master bedroom window when we first moved into this house. Now they dominate the window, but witch hazels aren't at all dense with foliage. Instead, the long, whippy branches have big leaves every six inches or so along, alternating sides. In summer, they're thick and greeny-yellow and leathery. In the fall they slowly, slowly turn brittle and brown.

In winter, the leaves still cling to the branches, shriveled and rattling in the breeze. But then the tiny buds open, right in the coldest part of the year. The flowers are no bigger around than, say, a quarter, but they're all over both shrubs, tiny wild yellow mopheads, like scraggly pom-poms. They've no scent, just brilliant color. And, I discovered today, the local honeybees are quite fond of them.

I wanted witch hazel because of the winter-blooming flowers. But this is the first year -- 11 years after they were planted -- that they've had so many. It may be too warm around here for me these days, and too aggravatingly nice, but my witch hazels lift my spirits and remind me that winter isn't quite over yet.

The bare truth

2009-02-05T16:51:00.000-08:00

I just have to say that I'm pretty tired of hearing the same ol' BS from the Republicans that we've heard for most of the last decade. That our Republican senators are so partisan, so politically motivated, and so full of their own sense of power and worth that they'd allow their own country to fall apart, literally and figuratively, just for the satisfaction of having thwarted the opposing political party, disgusts me.

Fortunately, since Jan. 20, my fellow Americans and I have someone on our side:

"In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

"So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action."

-- President Barack Obama,
speaking at the Energy Dept., Feb. 5, 2009

Thanks, Mr. President. Most of the Republicans are not going to listen, but we are. America is. And we'll remember who was working for who in the end.

Singing for love ...

2009-02-01T18:49:00.001-08:00

Our local wren, as he sang for his mate in Italian musical terms:

Allegro, forte, delicamente, dolcessimo, expressivo, festivimente, fuocoso, animato, bravura, brillante, calore, con brio, gaudioso, magico, pastorale, scherzoso, soave, e sognando.

And in English: Brisk, loud, delicate, very sweet, expressive, cheerful, fiery, animated, bold, brilliant, with sparkle, warm, spirited, joyful, magical, peaceful and simple, playful, smooth and dreamy.

We heard this fellow while bringing in groceries from Costco a few afternoons ago. His song stopped Mr. Wren and me in our tracks as we listened and smiled and said, almost simultaneously, “Oh, I love that!"

To hear the Bewick’s wren’s songs, click here.

Just a quick note ...

2009-01-29T13:06:00.000-08:00

...that we're back to perpetual springtime here in Northern California. Outside my window, through which the sun is shining, there's a bird singing the most lovely song.

It's January 29. Sigh.

Atheism and morals, oh my ...

2009-01-29T09:40:00.000-08:00

As an atheist, I don’t so much reject the ideas surrounding “God” as I reject the rigidity of the people who believe in that “God” and feel it’s their duty to force me to believe like they do.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the posts over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, regarding the merits of theism vs. atheism. Sullivan controls which comments from his readers we get to see, so in that regard he’s “moderating” the discussion. In the latest post, the writer, who studied philosophy, points out that really, a belief in “God” is not so much in a personified “old man in the sky” as it is a concept encompassing human morality as a force for good. As such, the writer feels, it’s ridiculous for atheists to refuse to accept God’s existence. After all, that would mean we’re refusing to believe in morality.

I’m no philosopher and it could be that I’m taking the writer’s meaning wrong, but I think this is complete horsepucky.

It may be different for other religions, but all the Christians I’ve ever known have believed with all their hearts that God is an actual living being and takes the forms of both the “old man” and the amorphous “everywhere” being who’s invisible but is involved in every single thing happening on Earth at any given moment, from the fall of the tiniest sparrow from its nest to the ingrown toenail I wish fervently would cease to exist.

Not only that, but a great many of the Christians I’ve known do their daily best to convert others to their beliefs. They have absolutely no respect for my non-belief or in the beliefs of other religions; in fact, we’re all condemned gleefully to burn in the same hellfires, while the good Christians herd cloud-sheep while strumming a harp with their god-father-brother Jesus in heaven.

Furthermore, most Christians seem to believe that since I don’t – and won’t -- believe in their God, I’m an evil person who’s guided by their wicked snake/red devil/fallen angel Satan, and I’m a grave danger to them and their children and their way of life.

Heh. Ants on my kitchen counters have reason to fear me, but that’s about the extent of it.

Here’s the thing: I’ve no problem with Christians believing in their God-trio and his/their rules regarding how to live. I actually agree with most of the Ten Commandments and with most of what Jesus had to say about getting along with my fellow human beings, particularly his wise advice to reserve my judgement on the behavior of others, since I’m no saint myself.

I really wish Christians would listen to their "God" more closely, actually. Jesus offered a lot of good advice, like doing unto others as we’d like them to do unto us. (Sorry, I mangled that, but you catch my drift).

But it seems to me that a lot of Christians don’t walk the walk, except maybe on Sundays when they're showing off their "goodness" to their fellow Christians. They frequently pass righteous judgment on people who don’t share their beliefs, and some of them do violence to disbelievers and even start wars against them and revel in their deaths. It’s OK for Christians to hate, I guess, never mind what Jesus said. They hate us “sinners” but they sin quite frequently themselves. The difference is that because they’re “saved,” their sins are already forgiven. They believe that their places in heaven are already arranged, simply by virtue of their belief.

Now, to me, that’s not being moral. That’s not being kind to our fellow human beings, or treating them like we’d like to be treated ourselves.

As an atheist, I think I have pretty high morals, but I don’t put my nose up in the air over them. I don’t hate other people, even the ones I don’t agree with. I don’t feel an urgent need to convert anyone to my non-beliefs. I like doing good deeds and helping people when I can. I probably differ with most Christians when it comes to my sexual morals, but my deepest philosophy there is to do no harm. I’ve no fight with gay men, lesbian women, the transgendered or the bisexual. I’ve no problem with out-of-wedlock sex or even teen sex (it’s natural, after all, and pretty much irresistible) just so long as it doesn’t harm either person, they practice safe sex and avoid unwanted pregnancies. Finally, as long as people are good to each other, and to me, we’ll be friends and I wish them all peace, love and happiness.

I’m just another old hippy, bucking the status quo.

I think atheism is equally as valid as Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or Wiccan, or any other belief system. Anyone can choose to be moral and good without the benefit of a belief in some “god” or other. I agree that there’s a certain comfort in believing that there’s more out there for us than just this short life on Earth, but I don’t think it’s vital to leading a good life or to happiness.

Instead, I believe that we’ve got just one life. And because of that, we might as well use the gift of breath and consciousness well by being loving, kind and generous beings who care enough about the planet to try to make sure it stays a good place for future generations to live out their lives.

I don't need to believe in "god" to justify my existence. I just try to follow the Golden Rule. It's enough for me.

"War on terror" ends

2009-01-28T13:25:00.000-08:00

Today marks a week since President Obama first walked into the Oval Office, sat down at the Big Desk and got to work.

The man’s no slouch. He’s made instant changes to a lot of things that needed changing in order to make America a democracy again, ruled by the People, the Constitution, and the law. Obama is working hard to rebuild America’s credibility at home and all over the world. If he keeps on like this, he’s going to succeed.

And on Monday, with little fanfare, President Obama put an end to Bush’s catastrophic – in all senses of the word – “war on terror.”

I didn’t parse this by myself. I listened to Obama’s interview on the al-Arabiya news network online on Monday. I thought his responses to the interviewer’s questions were calm, sane and thoughtful. As it was his first one-on-one television interview since becoming president, I thought it both interesting and strategically clever for him to have given it on Arab television.

But it took the observant and wise Roger Cohen, who writes the blog Passages for the International Herald Tribune, to point out to me what Obama really did on Monday: end the "war on terror."

I read Cohen’s post, “After the War on Terror” this morning. It stopped me dead in my tracks.
Because nothing has changed, really. There are still terrorists in the world. The conditions – societal, cultural, political – that give rise to terrorism, still exist, and as long as the tactic works, terrorists will still kill innocent people to make their point. Terrorism isn’t new in the world; indeed, it’s one of the oldest tactics on Earth for manipulating governments and their people, and it’s been used since time out of mind by disenfranchised individuals and groups, and governments themselves, to do just that.

No, what’s different now is that finally, after eight horrendous years of treating terrorism as if it’s a foreign army, fightable with air strikes and phosphor bombs and the occupation of foreign countries by American soldiers, Obama has given America a shake and said, forcefully, “Think!”

Before the idiot George W. Bush and his enablers came along, America knew how to fight terrorism. We weren’t always real good at it, but we knew the basics, and one of the first rules is "Don't fight terrorism with terror." Instead, you fight terrorism first with prevention, then with intelligence and finally with solid, boring police work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s effective. Once caught, the terrorist faces the laws the land and stands trial, like any other criminal. The punishment, if he’s found guilty, fits the crime and is not excessive. And if the country doing the prosecuting is moral and fair, then the issues which motivated the terrorist to commit his crime will be studied and, if they’re credible, steps will be taken to resolve them.

That’s the moral way to fight terrorism. It’s the right way. The only way, really. But the most important step is that first one – preventing terrorism in the first place. Doing so is difficult. Governments are notorious for disenfranchising populations – we only have to look to the decades-old, ongoing tragedy involving the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Gaza Strip to find a perfect example. Another is Northern Ireland. As the years pass the injuries grow and become more complex, more ingrained on both sides. Grudges deepen and hurts are not forgiven or forgotten. As the crimes committed by both sides go unpunished – or overpunished – and unresolved, things only get worse and worse, until it seems impossible that any solution can be found. The disenfranchised groups, which are weak and have few means, fall back on what they see as their only option – terrorism and guerrilla war, which are cheap and occasionally effective. Governments respond by becoming terrorists themselves, raining death and destruction down on innocent civilians. And the vicious cycle continues, sometimes for generations.

That’s why prevention – avoiding situations that lead to the disenfranchisement of certain populations and, if it’s already happened, then working diligently to find a solution that is acceptable to all sides – is so important. Once the terrorism monster escapes its bonds, it’s very, very hard to stop.

But that’s what President Obama did when he sat down to that interview with al-Aribiya on Monday. He took the first, most important step in fighting terrorism: He offered respect to the Muslim world, showed he understood the issues involved, and spelled out America’s new, rational willingness to work with them for peace. He put the responsibility for an end to terrorism on the shoulders of all sides, equally.

That was clever. It was moral. And it’s like a deep breath of fresh, clean air after eight long years of breathing the Bush administration's hot, noxious swamp gas.

Winter returns ...

2009-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

...to Northern California.

The high pressure area that was stalled over the state has finally dissipated or moved on or whatever they do. It's snowing. Lightly. I doubt we'll get much of it at this elevation (3,200 ft.) but it's good to know that above us, it's snowing, too. And up there, it will be steady all day and sticking hard.

It's hard to describe how relieved I am. There are few things that I have any control of in the world, and in terms of day-to-day life, predictability is tenuous, at best. But one of the things I've always been able to hold onto is that in the winter, the weather will be chilly and wet. Here in California, it might not be as cold as I'd like, but I could always look forward to the rainy season, short as it is. This season, after a lovely Christmas teaser of truly cold temperatures and plenty of snow, the weather went haywire and suddenly, we were living in a balmy, very early springtime. For me, it was jarring. A betrayal, almost. It really did affect my mood, making me mopey and hopeless.

I guess I really need seasonal changes. Being able to experience them was one of the main reasons that we moved to this area, along with the wonderful, fertile soil for gardening and my love of evergreens and Stellar's jays. At this moment, watching the snowfall, I'm at peace.

Sky-water

2009-01-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

Ohmygosh, we may get snow this weekend!

That’s right – after more than two weeks of bland, warmish, sunny weather up here in the Sierras, a “cold low pressure area will drop down over the region this weekend … and could bring good snowfall to the mountains Saturday and Sunday.” That’s according to my old friend the National Weather Service. The snow, they’re saying, could fall as low as 2,500 feet. Heheheh… that’s me.

And it’s raining right now. It started late yesterday afternoon, while I was outside sweeping dead leaves and pine needles off the little patio out back. The rainfall was very light – hardly more than a mist – but taken along with the welcome gray sky, it was a tonic to my parched soul.

Last night was the first time I’ve built a fire in the woodstove in a long time. It just hasn’t been cold enough. Sure, the temp drops considerably overnight, but a woodstove fire is a thing of nature. Once it gets going, it’s not like you can just turn it off. So if I built a fire first thing, early in the morning as is my winter habit (the second thing I do in my somnambulistic morning ramble after feeding the dog, who insists on being my first priority, without fail), we’re sweating and ripping off clothes by mid-morning because outside, it’s a balmy 60 degrees, the birdies are tweeting and the bees are roaming the camellia bush, which is the only thing blooming right now. From that point on, I can’t wait for the fire to die. I throw open windows and bitch about the weather. It’s just plain too warm for January.

But right now, this morning, the fire is blazing, there’s a good, soaking rain falling (and has been all night – I woke several times to the soft drum of it on the roof) and, while it’s not very cold, it’s damp and chilly enough to make the fire welcome and, did I tell you? It just might snow this weekend.

My delight in this is far more important than my own, selfish and admittedly strange obsession with the necessity of Winter Weather in the Winter and my own creature comforts. California has been drying out for about three years now, with each successive winter just as dry or dryer than the one before. The state is literally panting for water. For people who love the sunshine and hate gray skies, it’s paradise. For the rest of us, not so much.

The fact is that most of California is naturally very dry, even in normal, wet years. We humans, however, have altered the land so much that it needs far more water than it would naturally get, and if we don’t get normal rainy seasons, and snow up here in the Sierra, our water supply is threatened and the state suffers. Spring and summer, with their higher temperatures and lack of anything resembling rain are tinderbox seasons anyway. Wildfires start easily. Now, add a prolonged drought to the mix and the whole state is poised to become one mass firestorm.

So we who live here depend on our short, wet winters, even if we bitch about them, spoiled children that we are. But If the winter isn’t wet, we’re in real trouble.

I hope this change in the weather stays for a while, like through April. I hope it rains and rains and rains in the valleys and snows like hell up here in the mountains. And then, when the weather inevitably changes and warms with the angle of the sun, all that snow will melt and fill the reservoirs all over the state to overflowing. Summer will bring fires because summer always does. But there will be plenty of water with which to fight those fires that threaten communities, and plenty of drinking and irrigation water for us here in the north part of the state and our thirsty, desert-transformed-to-parkland neighbors down south.

Even without global warming, California goes through occasional droughts. It’s just the way of things. But I hope, with this refreshing, cleansing rain I’m watching out my window right now, that this particular drought is over.

The Voice of the Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and
yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

No regrets.

2009-01-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

"History will be the judge of my decisions, but when I walked out of the Oval Office this morning, I left with the same values that I took to Washington eight years ago. And when I get home tonight and look in the mirror, I'm not going to regret what I see -- except maybe some gray hair."
-- George W. Bush, on the evening of Barack Obama’s inauguration as 44th President of the United States of America, Jan. 20, 2009

This … 60-year-old adolescent – spoiled, ignorant, self-important, callous – this monumental, malicious fuck-up still feels he has nothing to be sorry for. He regrets nothing about his catastrophic presidency except a little gray hair, which interferes with his image of himself as a sexy, handsome youth. That he’s slightly disturbed by his gray hair, which came as a natural result of genes and aging, not because of any real worry or stress during the last eight years, makes me sick to my stomach.

George W. Bush caused the deaths of more than 4,000 American soldiers by lying this country into an illegal war against a country which posed no threat to us, but he has no regrets.

He ruined the lives of tens of thousands more Americans when they were dreadfully injured or maimed in that war, both physically and psychologically, but George has no regrets.

He caused the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, but he has nothing to regret.

He shat upon America’s Constitution and her People, but he has no regrets.

He presided over the collapse of America’s and the world’s economy, bringing us all to the brink of global depression through his policy of giving to the rich at the expense of the poor, looking the other way as the deregulated market and financial sectors gleefully took part in a massive, global Ponzi scheme, and encouraging Americans to buy, buy, buy even if they didn’t have the money for it. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their life savings, and their chance for a quiet and respectable retirement, yet George has no regrets.

There are countless other disasters Bush was either responsible for or was up to his neck in, including the government’s shameful response to Hurricane Katrina, the detention without trial and torture of prisoners taken during his propaganda War on Terror, the lawless spying on Americans and destruction of their civil rights, and the total corruption of the nation’s Department of Justice, but except for the fact that he’s grayer than he was in January 2000, he has no regrets.

This man is a monster, a horror. He’s both a common criminal and a war criminal. If this nation does not abide by its own laws, which require his prosecution and the prosecutions of his cohorts, we will squander any credibility and good will that the election of Barack Obama as President restored to us as a nation and a people.

If we allow Bush and his gang to go free, to not face justice and a fair trial; if we turn our faces and allow them to be above the law; if we try to “move ahead” without at least trying to cleanse this monstrous stain from the moral fabric of our democracy, we will have lost our democracy once and for all.

Finally, Osama bin Laden will have achieved his goal of destroying America, helped along handily by George W. Bush, who has no regrets.

President Barack H. Obama

2009-01-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

His inaugural speech:

My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition. Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government. Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all. For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true.

They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]." America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

President Obama wrote those words himself. Today is a great day in history, one that I'll remember with thankfulness, relief and pride in my country and its people for the rest of my life.

Yes we can.

Prayers and poems ...

2009-01-19T23:21:00.000-08:00

I don’t believe in a Great Sky Spirit, whether it’s the Christian God or any other. But I do believe that people, when called together under a common cause for the good of all, generate a kind of power. Call it the Power of Good, if you will. I’ve been irritated by all the hoo-haw over Pastor Rick Warren giving an invocation for Barack Obama’s inauguration because, first of all, I think this is an excellent occasion to show the pragmatism and seriousness of “the separation of church and state.” A public prayer sort of ruins the whole concept, you know?

But despite my irritation it seems that Mr. Obama wants the bigoted Mr. Warren there, presumably to lay a little soothing on all those panicky fundamentalists out there. I can understand that even if I don’t like it.

So I was glad to find out, after weeks of liberal upset over Warren, that Obama asked gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robison to open Sunday’s Inauguration concert with a blessing and prayer. At least a real, live, loving and non-bigoted person would be giving it, I thought. And then I read the text, thoughtfully provided by Joan Walsh at Salon.com:

“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger -- anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen."

You don’t have to believe in God or be a Christian to wholeheartedly join in that prayer.

Later. MUCH later …

I was just looking at my Yahoo home page, which I have nicely arranged with lots of news. And there I saw, under “NYT Opinion,” an editorial titled, “Mr. Bush’s Gentlemanly Goodbye.” This made me snort with disgust. I ran the cursor over it and the teaser appeared: “The Bush administration may be leaving the country with big policy problems. But George W. Bush deserves a big gold star for the way he is leaving his office.”

I yelled at poor Mr. Data, my faithful Dell laptop, who certainly didn’t do anything to be treated that way, unlike Mr. Bush. “A gold star! Codpiece doesn’t deserve a gold star! He doesn’t deserve friggin’ anything! Maybe an F-! Or detention! Ghahhhhh!” Then I clicked on the title to read the editorial, which was posted an hour ago. I had to know which gasbag wrote this one.

It was Norman Ornstein, whom I’ve never heard of. But he’s a “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, that rabid colony of right-wing, neoconservative, fundamentalist Christer thought. If you can call what they do thinking. Honestly, looking at our country and the trouble we’re in right now, who in his or her right mind would give Bush a gold star for the job he’s done as president except one of these malicious vipers at the AEI?

Yes, I should calm down. In reality, Ornstein was writing about how nicely Bush has accomodated Obama in the transition. Never mind that such an action should be automatic, given the gravity of the situation and the office. We should expect nothing less of any outgoing president. For this Ornstein thinks Bush should get a gold star? For being a good boy? Not throwing a temper tantrum? For not putting a whoopee cushion on the oval office desk chair?

After eight years of BushCo's and the neocon's nasty, dangerous, destructive bullshit, I’ve just about had it. I don’t have any more patience. Call me crazy, but these rattleheads need to be certified and locked up forever in a securely guarded warm place with soft walls, rubber spoons and plastic bowls of Jell-o. They’re … well. This:

let’s save pity
for the millions of victims
of bush’s conscience.

for bush
there ought to be
only howls of ’shame’
execrations, and
a speedy trial
where he stands in the dock
with his co-conspirators and -perpetrators.

he is the best proof
of the truth
of his argument
that there actually is
such a thing
as evil

That poem was written by commenter Steve Elkind on Judith Warner’s "Domestic Disturbances" blog post, "Bush and Bauer, Running on Empty," yesterday. Warner posited the idea that we ought to find some pity for Bush in our hearts because of his stunning inability (or outright refusal) to perceive his many mistakes.

But Elkind has it right. Bush and his cronies don’t deserve pity. They’re evil. Evil can be stupid as well as smart, as we’ve seen since the turn of the century. And it has nothing to do with “Satan,” who I don’t believe in any more than I believe in “God.”

Yet I do believe in evil. I’ve witnessed it in action on a daily basis for years now.

It's almost time, President Obama. You don't mind if I call you President, do you? In just a few more hours, you'll be inaugurated and you'll go down in history with that title, anyway. I already think of you as the President of my country. You're going to do a good job, with the help of the People. You've made me proud of America, and us, again.

You got here just in the nick of time. Let's get rid of this evil, shall we?

Needed: Ideas

2009-01-17T23:17:00.000-08:00

I'm stuck in the mental mud these days. Though I'm itching to write, I can't think of anything interesting to write about. It's lame, I know. There are millions of topics out there, and goodness knows America is standing on the cusp of some profound -- and hopefully good -- changes. I should be brimming over with ideas for posts.

But no. Here I am, wordless. Bereft.

Perhaps you, my patient and beloved readers, will give me a little nudge with some ideas? I'll be quite appreciative. In the meantime, have a great holiday weekend. And, hey! How about that Obama?

I'm blue.

2009-01-11T20:22:00.000-08:00

There are honeybees looping around the yuletide camellia blooms outside my kitchen window. The dog is exploding little cream-colored tufts of wispy under-fur, the prelude to his annual spring/summer Shed-Like-a-Musk-Ox Phase. Up on the street, small children are screaming and laughing as they run and play in the bright, sparkling-clear sunshine.

The fire in the woodstove, which had gone out overnight and which I re-lighted, shivering, with some considerable, sleepy, cussing effort at six this morning, is finally blowing cozy, heated air into the living room, but now I want it to stop. I peeled my fleece jacket and socks off an hour ago. Now I’m considering changing my sweatpants for shorts and just doing away with my T-shirt altogether, because when I look at the outdoor thermometer I discover, with sputtering disbelief, that it’s 64 balmy degrees out there. It’s only 10 a.m. I turn the woodstove fan off and slide the windows open.

It would be a pretty spring day if the trees weren’t bare. Some of them still have a few, tenacious dead leaves. Those tiny, swelling nubbins that will be fresh green leaves a few months from now are barely starting. It’s not spring yet. It’s winter, and early winter at that. Solstice isn’t even a month behind us and dusk still comes before five.

On my Yahoo home page, the Weather Channel has added an asterisk to the name of my town, meaning that the National Weather Service has posted a Severe Weather Alert.

Hah, I think. Boy, have they screwwwed up this time. What’s it gonna be? There’s not a frickin’ cloud in the sky. Rain on the way? Sleet? Snow? Wind? Oooh! Blizzard conditions! White out! Should I stock up on cocoa and soup bones, root vegetables and dried apples? In the hedgerow that borders the patio, a wee wren hops, quick-quick, hunting for tasty bugs to gobble up. A helicopter whaps by, high overhead, out of sight. I wonder, instantly, where the wildfire is. The only reason helicopters fly around here is to fight wildfires. Jeez, it is close? No, wait. It’s not late spring. It’s not summer. It’s not even dry, baked-out fall. I suppose a wildfire is possible, but it sure as hell isn’t probable. Not in January, even here. They’re probably out for a Sunday fly-around with the windows open.

I click on the red caps spelling out SEVERE WEATHER ALERT, rolling my eyes, wondering how the NWS could possibly think there’s dangerous weather imminent in this relentlessly sunny, chirpy, blue-skied little corner of the world.

And then I start laughing. The Severe Weather Alert is warning me that a gigantic high pressure area has planted itself over California, effectively diverting all that lovely rain that’s falling in the Pacific Northwest around us and then on eastward. Down in the valley, it says, it will be a little cooler than up here on the West Slope of the Sierra due to an inversion layer that’s formed, pushing the warm air up the mountain. Forecasts for the next week are for sunshine and temps in the mid-to-high 60s.

This counts as Severe Weather to the NWS? What wusses they are! I guess if I really tried I could get a sunburn, or perhaps if I decided to take a 15-mile hike without bringing water, I could suffer a heat-stroke, but it’s more likely I’d just wear a blister on my big toe. Hell. I’m sorry, NWS. This is not Severe Weather. This is strange weather. Twilight Zone weather. Why-Did-I-Buy-Three-Cords-of-Firewood Weather.

I suggest you try a new category for your Weather Alerts as a nod to global warming. How about “Alarmingly Mild Weather Alert”? Or maybe, “Freakishly Unseasonal Weather Alert”? Don't worry. If the daytime temps drop below 80 or it starts snowing in July you can still use them.

I know. I’m getting bitchy now. But I miss winter. I feel gyped. We hardly had any winter, and it only just got here! I know, I should be grateful for what did come. We actually had a white Christmas. It really did get bitterly cold for a while. The streets were icy. Going outside required first uploading a hat, gloves, a heavy coat and boots with a good tread on the soles. If the fire in the woodstove went out, it got really cold in the house and when I looked at the woodpile, so neatly stacked against the harshness of winter, I felt pleased. Secure.

Now I just feel duped.

And yes, it’s possible that it will get cold and wintery again in February. It has the last two years, anyway, so I have a little hope to hold onto. Both years, winter lasted about two-and-a-half weeks, and both years the winter weather was replaced before February ended by day after endless day of mild, coolish nothing. Rarely any clouds, and no rain if it did happen to cloud over. The temps went from frigid to … today. Mid-60s. And then it got warmer, and warmer, and then it was May and it was just plain hot. Still no rain, and no hope for any. We had wildfires instead. The high temps finally started cooling down in mid-November, stayed coolish but mostly sunny through December and even well into January.

And now? Has winter really already come and gone? This is making me seriously blue, folks. I cannot articulate how freaking tired I am of mild, sunny weather.

Oh. Maybe I just did.

Vote for the best

2009-01-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

My friend Blue Girl in a Blue State (formerly a Red State) is up for Best Diarist in the 2008 Weblog Awards, and I would be most pleased if all of you would just click that little link for Best Diarist and vote for her, because you know what? It's really easy. And she is the best.

BG is a warm, talented writer. She pulls you right in with her stories about life, family, politics, and her peony bush. She even raises her voice in song every Christmas. Blue Girl is funny. She's sometimes sad. She's wise. She's very observant. She has a wicked sense of humor -- and of justice.

Oh, yeah: She'll make you smile. Everybody likes to smile.

So just go vote for her, will you? For me?

So much for that ...

2009-01-07T12:00:00.001-08:00

We took the Christmas tree down yesterday.

Yes, I know. Most people tackle that grim chore somewhere between Boxing Day and January 1, but I’m slow. I like to drag out that ephemeral holiday spirit a little bit longer. Because, when it finally hits – for me, right around the Solstice – it’s such a sweet feeling. I get all grandma-y and little girlish. Hearing “Little Drummer Boy” filling the air while I’m getting fleeced at the grocery store makes me all weepy with sentimental memories. Rum-pa-pum-pum, rumpa-pum-pummmmm … sorry.

So with only a few days to go before The Big Day, I haul the 7-foot-faux-fir tree and Christmas ornaments out of storage and get busy as Bing Crosby croons Xmas tunes in the background, logs crackle in the woodstove and the cat snores on the ottoman. It’s like my mind turns into a bowl full of jelly. Pathetic.

Because no Christmas would be complete without non-working twinkle lights, this year the middle section of the tree didn’t light up when I plugged it in. After about an hour of fiddling, changing tiny light bulbs and tinier fuses – and surprising Mr Wren by whipping a wee set of screwdrivers out of the junk drawer – we decided, both of us still amazingly jolly, that it didn’t matter. Once we put the ornaments and tinsel on, no one would notice the dark part of the tree.

We spent a cozy hour decorating it, oohing and ahhhing over the various ornaments, nearly all of which have some story attached from years past. When we were done, the tree looked beautiful and glittery, homey and sweet in a trimmed-down, spare, Thomas Kinkaid sort of way. At any other time of year, Kinkaid’s paintings make me reflex gag, but this was different. I was awash in Christmas spirit.

Before long, I started having urges to bake cookies. But they went away quickly when I ran the list of required ingredients through my mind. I’d have to make a special trip to the store just for sugar, fresh flour and milk, and don’t forget the red and green and silver sprinkles. And then I’d need to hunt down that old set of cookie cutters, which are genuinely retro (read ‘old’) and really cute, but where in the world did I put them? I think I last made sugar cookies in 1987. And where would I roll out the cookie dough? Do I even still have a rolling pin?

Oh, never mind, I told myself. There’s no one around to eat all those cookies anyway, since Mr Wren and I aren’t allowed to anymore. Note to you youngsters out there: Someday, the triple whammy of high cholesterol, too many accumulated pounds around the middle and alarmingly high blood glucose levels will come to live with you, too. So enjoy those sweet, spicy Russian tea cakes and gooey pecan pies while you can. Heh.

But back to my story, whatever it was. Yesterday, after fairy-lighting our lives day and night for two and a half weeks, the bloody Christmas tree came down. Off came all the tinsel and all the gew-gaws. We packed them all away in their dusty plastic bins without a second thought. Then we broke the tree back down into its three, strange sections, stuffed them back into the coffin-like box they came in and as Mr Wren held it closed, I sealed it tightly with silver-gray duct tape. Mr Wren suddenly discovered caked mud on his gardening shoes and went off to clean them, and I dragged Christmas 2008 back to storage, where it will remain, forgotten, until Solstice 2009, when I expect the spirit will hit me again.

This all took maybe a half hour. The place the tree had occupied for a little over two weeks looked cold and empty, suddenly bereft of all that twinkling, sparkly warmth. I kept looking over there, a little nostalgic. And then in the distance, Bing choked on a chestnut and the last of the Christmas spirit dissipated. The house looked normal again, except for the dying poinsettia plant Mr Wren insisted on buying.

And now to the point.

What is Christmas spirit, anyway? I’m not religious, so for me it has nothing to do with the highly-suspect, miraculous virgin-birth of a god-man 3,000-and-some-odd years ago. Is it just relief from finally succumbing to two solid months of merciless, relentless Christmas advertising, Christmas songs, and Christmas decorations everywhere I look? The ol' “if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em” syndrome?

Or is that moment, during the Solstice, when you realize that the solar year is, indeed, about to end forever. The trees are mostly bare and the sun’s arc through the sky is low and cool. Winter has arrived, and while it will be cold and bleak for a while, we’re on a straight shot to the first crocuses and daffodils of spring and then, the warm, fecund abundance of summer. Does Christmas spirit descend on that moment when we stand on the cusp of all that’s already happened in our lifetimes and everything that will come, good or bad, and realize it? When all we can do is look forward with hope?

And then the magic wears off. The decorations of the season start to look shabby and more than a little gaudy. The leftover. broken candy canes just won’t disappear and the turkey carcass, so lovingly bagged and tucked into the freezer for turkey soup, now looks like a bunch of unappetizing, desiccated, pointy bones -- and more than a little morbid. Everyone has already told their Christmas-with-the-family stories, the gifts so carefully chosen are gathering dust already and the bills are coming due, just like they do every year. The future, which was put on hold for a few days, then kept on hold for a few more, just won’t wait anymore.

So yesterday we took the Christmas tree down. I think I’m ready for 2009, which is saying something. Last year, I left that damned tree up until July.

What's old is new again

2009-01-05T16:58:00.001-08:00

Since I was old enough to hold a crayon, I’ve loved to draw. As I grew up, losing myself in my imagination while drawing probably kept me from going crazy with boredom. Doing it took intense concentration and a willful letting-go of the here-and-now, a break from the grinding reality of school and cleaning my room. It got me in trouble sometimes, because I’d draw rather than do math homework. I’d draw rather than play with my cousins. I couldn’t help it.

When I was older, people started calling me an artist. I believed them – there were indeed original drawings and sketches appearing on the paper in front of me. And I was, and still am, possessed of an artist’s mentality. I daydream. I procrastinate. I’m sort of quirky and nerdy. I’d rather be creating people and worlds in my mind than interacting with them in real life. My home is filled with color and movement, with art and whimsy. Bare spaces disturb me. Neatness makes me nervous. I get bored easily and always, always need something to keep my mind occupied.

But as a young adult I lost confidence in my art. I had to make a living, and everyone knows that artists starve and live in garrets. I was an average student – my A grades were always in art and English – and because I’d been told I’d “be an artist when I grew up” for so long, I didn’t know if I could do anything else. I had to find out. I was working but broke all the time, and it seemed that I was never really going to be a “famous artist.” I had no idea, really, how to go about being one. I just sketched and painted whenever I had an opportunity.

So, one day, in a fit of boredom and with a longing to see some other parts of the world, I joined the U.S. Air Force. There I discovered that I could, indeed, do other things besides draw. I directed fighter jets in aerial dogfights. I got married, had a child, was divorced, served my time in the AF and was discharged honorably, and found other jobs. I married again, went to live abroad, returned to the U.S. and divorced again. Found work as a journalist, as a reporter and an editor. And I married a third time – to the man I’d originally married, the father of my daughter – and kept on working. And working.

And during all that time, I rarely drew. Instead, I turned my creativity toward writing. I love to write. To me, it’s like painting a picture with words, when it goes right. The skill and craft of it fascinates me.
And then I was laid off from my job as an editor. I haven’t found a new job yet, though I’ve looked. I’ve spent my time off work writing – something I’ve dreamed of doing. So far, though, no Great American Novel has made an appearance. I’ve written a lot of blog posts and I’ve done some freelancing for actual money, but it looks like I’m never going to be famous for my works of literature.

My talent for drawing, while long neglected, remains as strong as it ever was. I’ve been thinking about taking it up again for quite some time. But man, I’m rusty. I’ve been fearful. What if I can’t draw anymore? What if what I draw isn’t any good? What if it really sucks? And who decides that, anyway?

Well, I’ve decided none of that really matters. I know I can draw. I know it gives me pleasure and joy. Who cares if what I draw isn’t very good? The more I draw, the better I’ll get. And drawing will open up another, long-neglected part of my mind. There are worlds in there, waiting to come out. Opening that doorway to them will make me happy.

Inspired by this incredible website, I bought myself a couple of Moleskine notebooks and hunted down a good drawing pencil. I decided I’d bring the notebook with me whenever I was out and about. If I had to wait for something, rather than reading a book, I’d draw whatever was in front of me. Or whatever I felt like drawing. A cottage in the clearing of a dark forest? A galloping horse? An owl’s fierce, yellow-eyed gaze? My own foot? It didn’t matter. I’d just draw.

Shown above are the first two drawings that came as a result of my decision to draw again. I enjoyed doing them. I was a little self-conscious, sketching in public, but I’m sure I’ll get over that as I do it more. They’re not great art. But I’ll get better, and faster, at capturing scenes, at rendering perspective, at shading for depth. After all, drawing while waiting around is deliciously stolen time that would only be wasted otherwise.

Who knows where making a new beginning at something so old will take me? Might as well find out.

P.S.: You can click on the drawings to "embiggen." I love that word.

Satisfaction is ...

2009-01-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

... a full wood ring.

It occurred to me, as I was loading heavy, stove-length splits of firewood into the wheeled cart I use to bring them into the house, that this is one chore I never mind. There I stood in the 28-degree, early morning, just out of bed. I was wearing rubber-grip gardening gloves on my hands, thick socks with wool slippers on my feet, and a fleece jacket over my thin cotton pajamas, enjoying myself.

Bringing in wood is far more satisfying than, say, scrubbing the bathroom or unloading dishes from the dishwasher. It beats vacuuming and mopping the floor by miles. I’d much rather fill the wood-ring than do laundry, though I do like the smell and feel of clothes, towels and sheets fresh out of the dryer, still warm. But there’s something special about bringing in wood.

For one thing, there’s a price. My hands are getting worse and worse with rheumatoid arthritis, so there’s a certain amount of pain involved in bringing in firewood. I used to be able to grasp each split one-handed; now I need to lift each one with both hands, carefully. It slows me down, but now that we keep a couple of racks of wood under the carport, protected from the weather, I don’t really mind. When I finish the chore, and the ring is full, I’m always rather proud of myself. I did it in spite of the RA. I took care of myself. I’m a tough little bird.

Then, there’s the simple, physical labor of the chore. We buy almond-wood each season. It’s a good hardwood, dense and nice-smelling. It’s very heavy. Each split weighs at least three pounds. It doesn’t sound like much until you need to lift and stack 50 pieces of it. Now, this isn’t exhausting work, by any means, but it’s truly what I regard as a chore. It takes some strength. Some determination. By the time I’ve moved those 50 or so pieces of split wood from the woodpile outside to the ring inside, I feel like I’ve done something.

Then there’s the security of a full wood ring. As most of my readers know by now, Mr. Wren and I heat our house through the winter only with the woodstove. Our house, built in the early 1970s, is equipped with electric baseboard heaters. To our dismay, we discovered upon moving into the house in November of 1997 that keeping the place warm was going to cost us about $100 per week. There was no way we could afford that then, and we still can’t. So buying wood, stacking it, and burning it in the woodstove became not only necessary, but vital. Today, that full wood ring symbolizes at least three days of day and night warmth. It means old man Winter has to be content with howling outside the windows, not freezing us inside, too.

And finally, there’s the reward. That’s the delicious, comforting warmth of a wood fire. There is just nothing better than backing up to the blazing stove and feeling that heat penetrate my cold, stiff joints and muscles. When my hands are aching, holding them in front of the radiating wood stove is sublime. It feels so very good. Without the work I did, this warmth would not exist. And that gives me a deep and abiding feeling of accomplishment.

It doesn’t hurt, either, to know that the three cords of wood we buy each summer for the winter ahead costs us about the same as one winter month of electric heat.

Now that’s satisfaction.

Same procedure as every year, James ...

2008-12-31T13:37:00.000-08:00

We've reached the year's end and stand, tired and a little apprehensive, at the cusp of the new one ahead.

I decided to share the wonderful "Dinner for One" with you again this year. Every Silvestre, or New Year's Eve, Germans watch this delicious old British skit, televised for the first time in 1963 in Hamburg, and laugh uproariously as it unfolds. They've seen it countless times, but that hardly matters. It just tickles them. Interestingly, it's hardly known in Great Britain, where it originated, and now only comes to America via the Internet.

When I lived in Northern Germany, we spent each New Year's Eve with our friends Colin and Marian, walking the four or five blocks from our flat to theirs. He was British; she German, and there was just no way that the New Year could be born in their company without many, many glasses of Champagne. At least two glasses would be toasted and quaffed before 8 p.m., but as the clock chimed the hour Marian would turn the TV on, Colin would fill each of our flute glasses, again, and we'd watch "Dinner for One" with 90-year-old Miss Sophie, her loyal (and amazingly dedicated) butler James, and her four dear old gentleman friends, all of whom had long since passed on to the Great Beyond.

And we'd laugh. Each time Miss Sophie proposed a toast, we'd raise our glasses to her in tandem with James, and by the time the short skit ended, we'd be gasping with laughter and like the butler, more than a little tipsy.

For Colin and Marian, watching the skit every New Year's Eve was an old tradition. For us, it was new but a tradition we quickly came to love. We looked forward to joining Miss Sophie and James each year, just as we looked forward to celebrating the change with our friends and braving the sub-zero temperatures to bang pots and pans on the balcony at midnight. We added our noise and shouts to the ships blowing their foghorns in the harbor, the cars and trucks laying on horns and all the other people just like us throughout the city, ringing in the New Year with laughter, hope and joy.

We saw the turn of six New Years before we left Germany. During that time, the Berlin Wall fell and East and West Germany reunited. The Cold War ended. Much has changed in the 20 years
since the first time I saw James trip over that tiger rug, yet even without the benefit of a glass of bubbly, it still makes me giggle and before long, laugh out loud.

"Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?" Well, of course. Happy New Year, everyone.

Tock-tick-tock-tick

2008-12-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

The year slips quickly away. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and then it's 2009, an auspicious year for many reasons.

It's the year Barack Obama takes over as President of the United States and George W. Bush slinks out the back door with a shit-eating grin, having failed at yet another endeavor. It's the year America starts cleaning up George's mess, but it's going to take a long time. A whole string of years.

And 2009 is a year of unknowns. Yes, all new years are like that. We don't know what the future holds. But we know that the world's economy is in recession, that the world's oil supplies are running out, and that global warming is causing dangerous climate change. 2009 ushers in, I believe, a lot of drastic, shocking change. We'll have to learn to be patient with each other.

Perhaps we'll learn how to get to know our neighbors, and be better friends, and reach out to help others less fortunate than ourselves. Because we'll all be facing the same problems, and we're going to need each other for help and comfort.

As far as I'm concerned, 2009 can't come fast enough.

Ho Ho Ho

2008-12-24T23:04:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas!

Gentle Christmas ...

2008-12-23T10:15:00.001-08:00

My Solstice season wish for all of you

is for a happy, peaceful and very gentle Christmas Eve

and Christmas Day.

May this magical season be filled with

love, warmth, and joy

as we look ahead with hope to the new year.

--Wren

We're cool, either way

2008-12-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

Heh.

Tip-o-the-cap to Sullivan.

Snowy memories ...

2008-12-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

The snow has stopped for now. It’s cloudy, but there’s some blue sky and a little sun. The forecast calls for a little more snow today. Tomorrow should be sunny, and then snow again on Thursday.

As I shot the photos above out my kitchen window, the scene – snow, branches, evergreens, blue sky and thin white clouds – brought up some memories. So I made myself a cup of coffee, cleared the hot ash from the dying woodstove fire and started a new one. As I watched the hungry flames lick around the dry wood, I let my mind wander ...

It was January, 1988. I was working as a civilian writer/editor with the U.S. Army Norddeutschland Public Affairs Office in Bremerhaven, Germany. Winter in the north of Germany is a long, drawn-out season, filled with frigid wind, rain, occasional light snow and ice. Lots of ice. By this time, after living there for two years, I’d learned the hard way how to dress for the weather, and every morning was a ritual of donning a hat, gloves, a thick wool coat, a knit scarf and warm, sheepskin-lined boots over several layers of clothing that included ski socks and at least one sweater. I carried my dress shoes in a tote to change into once I’d reached the relative warmth of my office.

I’d made a good number of friends since arriving in Germany, and a couple I’d grown close to suggested that we get a group together and go skiing. Now, Norddeutschland is flat as a pancake, except for the dikes that hold back the North Sea, and there’s not enough snow to ski on, really.
So I asked, innocently enough, “but where?”
“The Alps!”
The Alps. I’d heard of them, of course. I’d seen stunning pictures of those snowclad, craggy peaks and swooping valleys. I’d even seen Clint Eastwood in “The Eiger Sanction,” though it wasn’t exactly encouraging, all those climbers falling off the mountain and all. But my friends were insistent. Civilian DoD workers, they’d lived in Germany for many years and were avid skiers. They were tired of the wind, the rain, and the flatness of the terrain. And they convinced me that not only could this be done, it would be a blast.
So we put the word out. Before long, we had a group of 12 who wanted to go skiing for a week in the Alps and had both the money and the vacation time accrued to do so. Somehow, it became my job to organize the ski trip – find the right place, make our reservations and get everyone lodged, figure out the train schedules and set it all up.
I should say here that at this point in my life, my only experience on skis consisted of one horrifically cold, school-sponsored, day-long ski trip to Mammoth Mountain when I was a sixth-grader. I learned to snowplow, but once I fell down, I stayed down. I just couldn’t get the hang of standing up again on skis unless I took the damned things off. In addition, I’m afraid of heights.
The big day arrived. We met, the 12 of us, in the wee hours of the morning at the Bahnhof in Bremerhaven, loaded down with suitcases, skis, poles and ski-boots. We were headed for St. Veit, Austria, via Bremen, Franfurt, and Munich in West Germany, and then on to Salzburg, Austria. At each station we’d need to change trains.
It had all looked pretty easy on paper. In practice, it was chaos. Changing trains was a only minor hassle in Bremen, which has a medium-sized train station and only six or seven platforms. It helped that my friend R and her husband T, both of them ex-CIA agents, spoke German rather well. We humped our gear off the Bremen train to another platform and waited for the Frankfurt train to arrive. When it did, we all climbed on, found our compartments and got our tangle of gear stashed, and settled down for a pleasant ride to Frankfurt. We even indulged in a nice, hot breakfast with lots of strong coffee in the dining car. Yes, they really did have white tablecloths and roses on the tables.
The afternoon transfer at Frankfurt to the Munich train was pandemonium. We had a very short time to make our way, carting all our stuff, to the new platform and train. And the Frankfurt Bahnhof is huge – a crowded, noisy hub with what seemed like hundreds of platforms, row after row of shining trains, and thousands of people of all colors and nationalities. The train we were booked on, of course, was at the other end of the station. We made it, but barely, and by the time we found empty compartments and storage, everyone was puffed, sweaty and tired. There was talk of driving the whole way in caravan next time, if there was a next time.
We had enough time for plastic-wrapped sandwiches off a cart and a rest between Frankfurt and Munich. Spirits, both emotional and literal, were raised. The transfer at Munich was much simpler – we didn’t have so far to hike to find our train and by now, we’d worked out a system for dealing with skis, poles and luggage. On we went to Salzburg.
The whole journey, so far, had been lovely – the Germany countryside is picturesque and colorful. But now, the scenery turned beautiful. The hills and meadows, with their small villages, were glorious, dusted with snow, and of course in the distance there were glimpses of the famous Alps. The sun was headed down the sky by the time we arrived in the city of Mozart and the Von Trapp family, and changed trains one last time.
This final train was a local, a milk-run train that stopped in each little burgh along the way. The snow cover grew thicker. Finally, we reached our destination station. I can’t recall its name now, but it wasn’t St. Veit, as St. Veit didn’t have its own train station. We unloaded once again. This was a very small Bahnhof, with just one track and platform, and a tiny, empty hall. Except for the stationmaster and a bundled-up woman behind the magazine and candy counter, the 12 of us formed the entire crowd. It was breathtakingly cold.
We’d booked our week with SiegiTours, a ski school, resort and lodging operation in St. Veit. Within 15 minutes two vans arrived at the station to take us there. We all piled in and off we went, winding along narrow mountain roads that were clotted with snow and ridged with ice.
When we reached the village of St. Veit it was dark, but the fronts of the chalets and the village square were all lit up, including the magnificent, 1000-year-old church that dominates everything. All around us rose the Austrian Alps. Snow stood two feet deep. Icicles hung from the eaves and underfoot, the pavements were treacherous.
I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.
Stay tuned … there’s more to come. Also, please pardon the lack of spaces between paragraphs or even indents -- Blogger is not cooperating.

Old world ...

2008-12-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

Just as I anticipated, the snow is falling and my world, such as it is, is nearly silent.

I can hear no traffic from the freeway down the mountain from us. Either the snow has closed the passes up above us, making it impossible to get over them, or people are just staying home.

What I can hear is the chip-chip-chipping of a small bird in the tree in my side garden, and the sound of the wind whooshing through the evergreens, rhymically, like ocean waves. I can hear, through my open window, the sound of the fine, dry snowflakes when the wind blows them against the glass, a sound like tossed sand. Now and then a neighborhood dog barks. His voice is muffled. No echo.

It’s just beautiful.

In the living room, the fire in the woodstove crackles and pops over a three-inch bed of hot, glowing coals. The stove-fan blows the super-warm air into the room, making it cozy, but as this is our only form of heat in the winter, the further away from the stove you go, the cooler the air gets. So we pad around the house in sweatshirts and sweatpants and thick socks. I wear my wool slippers over mine. The cat and dog both have decided they like the space five feet in front of the stove best of all, and it’s there that they nap, off and on, all day.

The dog also enjoys being outside in the snow, since he has the kind of thick fur that’s meant for this chilly weather. I let him out a while ago. When he came back in, his back and head were coated with snow and he was absolutely joyful. He shook it all off, nonchalantly, on the middle of the kitchen floor before heading for his water bowl for a drink.

I’ve been thinking about what it is about snow that delights me so much. First, it’s a stark, even startling change from the norm. We’ve had warm, or hot, or warmish weather now for nearly a year, almost constant sunshine, and few clouds. To those who live through harsh winters and chilly springs and falls, I know it sounds nuts that I could get bored with sunshine. But I do. I believe that, instinctively, we need to experience the natural change of seasons. Without that change we get discombobulated. Complacent. We need to be able to look forward to something, to prepare for the future, even if it means stacking firewood against the imminence of winter.

Second, I just prefer the cold weather to the warm. I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. I’d much rather put on warm sweaters and thick socks than shorts and sandals. Perhaps it’s the Finnish blood that runs so strongly in my veins. I’m out of my element in the relentlessly mild California weather. I get bored with it. My personal sense of balance, of being, needs cold weather and snow to reach equilibrium.

And finally, it’s the way snow silences our noisy civilization and remakes the world into something old. It takes me back in time, this silence, to a world not filled with the roar of traffic and the constant jabbering of the TV. I don’t watch much of that even on warm days, but Mr. Wren does. When the snow comes, though, he sleeps in late, burrowed under the down comforter, while I wake early and with joy to the gloriously white, muffled world. I love that I can be inside, warm and cozy, and look out at it. I love the deep, crystal quiet.

I’d probably feel much differently about the snow if I had to be out working in it. But for the moment, this moment, I don’t have to be. And, while it’s freezy cold and snowing right now, within a few days the temperature will rise again and the snow will melt away. Snow is always temporary at this elevation. So I’ll be back to longing for the next snowstorm very soon. With luck, we’ll have several more of them before the California spring comes, way too early.

The first year we lived here was an El Nino year. We moved house in November, 1997. The weather was cool but dry. Within a week, though, it changed. First there was rain, and then it started snowing. And it kept snowing, day after day, week after week, month after month. It even snowed in May.

To say we were unprepared is an understatement. We discovered in the first month that running the electric baseboard heaters would cost far more that we could reasonably afford. The old iron woodstove insert that had come with the house was woefully inadequate. I’d stuff it full of firewood and get it so hot the that the stovepipe that ran up the chimney would glow red, but the stove only warmed the air a few feet in front of it and no more. It was a long and very cold winter for us.

The following summer we got rid of the old stove and, using our tax return money, bought a new, far more efficient stove. I call it Damnthing, a name it earned through no fault of its own, but because it took us inept snowline newcomers a while to learn how to tell seasoned firewood from green and how to start the fire and keep it going. Trial and error. Now, 11 years later, I’m an old pro with the firewood and the stove. I still call him Damnthing, but very affectionately. He keeps us warm even in the chilliest weather as long as we treat him right.

With the economy the way it is, I figure that we’ll live right here, in this house, for at least several more years. I dream of moving back up to the Pacific Northwest (I lived in Washington State for many years, off and on, and loved it there). But I’ll just have to put that dream on the back burner for a while. In the meantime, it’s snowing. There are four inches on the ground now and it’s still coming down. I’m content.

Snow's arrival

2008-12-14T13:37:00.001-08:00

Sunday, 1100 hours: Oh, Snow is here! He just belled my old wind chimes on the back patio!

Sunday, 1245 hours: Not sticking on the pavement yet, but everywhere else…

Sunday, 1330 hours: It seems Snow may stay awhile. The cat has taken up his position near the woodstove. Perhaps I should put his bed there. That slate has got to be cold on his undersides.

Still waiting ...

2008-12-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

It’s like waiting for an absent minded-visitor, this waiting for Snow.

I keep looking out the windows, hoping to see those first, tiny, floating flakes that dance on the air, preceding the real snowfall, the one that sticks to the ground and the tree branches and coats parked cars in strangely cozy-looking, thick white blankets.

My visitor, Snow, was supposed to be here Friday night. But he didn’t show up. Instead, Rain and Wind swept through, staying only long enough to wake me several times, rattling the window over my bed as they danced around the house and left their calling cards in the form of dampened walkways and new drifts of wet, dead leaves underfoot.

Cold came Friday night, too. Unlike Wind and Rain, who moved on, she settled in, preparing to embrace her lover, Snow. Now she’s everywhere. When I go into the kitchen, away from the glowing woodstove, Cold whispers around my calves and raises prickling goosebumps on my lower back. She’s waiting, too, as impatient as I.

Because Snow is coming, I’m hesitant to leave the house. I don’t want to be away when he arrives, because though I love him, he can be a difficult guest. Snow brings me gifts, among them a deep quiet. When Snow comes, the highway a quarter-mile down the mountain goes totally silent for a while. My neighbors – the fellow with the noisy leaf-blower and motored, unmuffled go-cart; the shrieking children; the old man with the diesel truck that he insists on warming up for 20 minutes every morning, summer, spring, fall and winter – all retreat into their houses and stay near their hearthfires, like I do. The birds go invisible, huddling in the laurel hedge and high in the evergreens, sheltering until Snow moves on. When I venture out, bundled in my thick coat, my cap on my head and my achy hands protected by gloves, his stillness is weighty. He makes me hear my own heartbeat, makes me aware of my breath in my lungs, and how fragile my life is, really.

Yesterday, Snow sent his emissary, Frost. He mimicked Snow for an hour or so and moved on up the mountain, leaving a thin rime of icy, powdered sugar in his wake. Snow sent him to tease me, I know.

And so I wait.

Anticipation ...

2008-12-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

A glimpse into Wren’s mind as she learns there’s a good chance of rain and, possibly, snow during the upcoming week-end:

OMG! I’ve got to get ready! I should make a list! Snow! I need to cart enough firewood in to last a few days and nights, at least, and I need to find the ice-melter stuff and put it just outside the door, close at hand. I need to make soup and keep it simmering on the back of the stove just in case we get weary, snow-clotted, half-frozen travelers at the door. What kind would be best? Potato? Beefy vegetable? Chicken? Maybe all three. I’ll get started today. And I should probably make bread, you know? (I don’t know how, but I know I can learn between now and Friday evening.) I need to stock up on storm candles and make sure I have enough coffee and soy creamer to get me through the coldest hours. Hot cocoa! I’ll need some milk to make that. Forget the marshmallows, I’ll just add a dollop of whisky. And there’s all that whipped cream leftover from Thanksgiving. YES! OMG snow! I should probably toss those four, 25-pound sacks of cat litter back into the trunk of the Celica. That’s just in case I’m forced to try to go somewhere during the storm, like in an emergency or something. And I’d best park that dumb little muscle car up on the street or I’ll be stranded, stuck at the bottom of our steep hill as the snow and ice grows deeper and deeper and the wind whistles through the eaves …

Yes, this is a fantasy. The National Weather Service is warning of much colder temperatures, rain and possible snow, but I’ve lived here long enough now to know that the NWS is sort of like an excitable old auntie who thrives on crises, real or otherwise.

Still, I can’t help but to be pleased by this news, which was waiting for me on my Yahoo homepage when I got up this morning. You must understand – the last real weather I saw was back in February, folks. It snowed then, off and on for a week or so, and I was in absolute heaven. Then it stopped. The sun came back out. The snow melted.

Since then, it has rained maybe three times. The longest rainy period lasted a day and a half.

I am longing with every fiber of my being for gray skies, rain, wind, sleet, hail, and snow. I want that nasty weather to come and stay for the winter, like it’s supposed to. California is facing a serious drought and we need the snow desperately so the reservoirs will fill with water come spring. The whole state is dry as a tinderbox.

And those of us who thrive on interesting weather, which includes just about anything except the daily, dull blandness of clear skies, season after season, are just about to jump out of our skins.

Cold, yes! Rain, yes! Snow, YES! What a perfect early Christmas gift. I hope this first real cold front of the season brings a whole series of storms, real storms, all the way through April. Rain and snow. Come on, Old Man Winter! Get those silly Californian weather-haters complaining loudly, bemoaning the gray skies. Make them really appreciate summer when it comes.

That would be … fahhhhbulous, dahling. Just fahhhbulous.

Note: The photo is of the snow outside my kitchen window back in January of 2007. That snowy period lasted roughly two weeks. Then the sun came out again and stayed until February 2008. Sigh.

Moral America?

2008-12-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to get my head around the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and a small host of others may never be brought to justice for the war crimes they committed during the eight-year Bush Administration.

I’ve read all the arguments. Mr. Obama wants to look ahead, not back. He wants to move Congress, and America, toward bipartisanship and unity. Prosecuting the previous administration will only push Americans further apart, not bring them together. Mr. Obama has a full Thanksgiving turkey platter loaded with hot smoking crises in front of him, not least of which is an economy that’s in the dumpster and is rushing willy-nilly toward the landfill of history. Prosecuting the main players in the Bush Administration would take his attention, and that of Congress, away from critical issues that affect all Americans today, right now.

I read. I attempt to grok. But this disturbs me deeply.

This issue – the prosecution of Bush and his cronies as war criminals – is one I believe needs serious and sober attention very soon, and it haunts me. No, it’s not an unhealthy obsession. I go whole spans of hours without thinking of the crimes BushCo has committed against America, her citizens and the world. Nevertheless, each day it comes up. Each day I’m reminded. And each day I read, somewhere or other, that Mr. Obama isn’t interested in bringing these despicable criminals to justice.

That worries me. What does this dismissive attitude say about America? What does it say about us as Americans? What does the world think of us? What will it think of us if all we do, in the end, is pay lip-service to our war crimes without taking honest action?

In 1945 the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France, having just won World War II, conducted the Nuremburg Trials in Nuremberg, Germany, at the Palace of Justice. The point was to publicly air the war crimes committed by high-ranking (and not so high-ranking) Nazis and try them fairly in a court of law. The trials lasted until 1949.

There were those, notably Sen. Robert Taft, who condemned the trials as “victor’s justice.” He had a point, just as those today who would prefer not to prosecute the Bush Administration, have a point. And yet, as a moral people, can Americans really just shrug off the actions of Bush and his cronies as if they weren’t all that important and blindly move on?

After all, we’re not talking about your basic, everyday petty crimes, here. These were huge crimes, monstrous crimes, committed against not just us as Americans, but against the people and governments of many other countries around the world. I say "were," but in fact, the crimes are still being commited and will continue to be commited until January 20, 2009, the day Bush steps down as President and Barack Obama steps up.

There must be a reckoning. In the illegal war in Iraq alone, we’ve lost more than 4,200 American soldiers. That’s 1,200 or so more than lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack by al Qaida jihadists on U.S. soil. Iraq had nothing to do with it, but Bush lied America into war by implying that it did.

Far worse is the fact that more than a million Iraqis have also been killed because of America’s invasion of their country. The maimed and injured on both sides, totaled together, are in the many millions. Their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, have been altered forever.

When WWII ended in 1945, the Allies conducted the Nuremberg Trials because the Nazis had not only attempted to invade, occupy and take over the world, killing and wounding thousands and thousands of soldiers and civilians everywhere, but they also attempted coldblooded genocide. They tried to annihilate the European Jews, persecuting and murdering some 6 million men, women and children through a systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored program of imprisonment, torture and death. Other groups were included in the massacre as well, including the Roma, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the disabled, gay men, and political and religious opponents.

In all, an estimated 9 million to 11 million people lost their lives to the evil that was Nazism. It was important to the Allies and to the world that the men and women who perpetrated such a horrendous and inexcusable crime against humanity be made to face their victims, be fairly judged and be punished appropriately. Only then could the world attempt to move on and rebuild what was lost and destroyed in the war. Only then could the world recover its morality.

And yet America, it seems, may not undertake such an action in regard to its own war criminals – not for the sake of their victims, or for the sake a shocked and disgusted world. We may not prosecute Bush and his cronies even for our own sake, for our own morality and peace of mind. It’s as if our leaders would rather let the war criminals who ran the country for eight years just fade away into private life, continuing to profit from their crimes while their successors try, desperately, to clean up after and whitewash the disaster and the horrors they left behind.

Implicit in their non-prosecution is the sanguine acceptance of the damage they did to America and her credibility and standing in the world; of the fact that the direct consequences of their actions were the maiming and deaths of millions of people, most of whom were innocent of any wrongdoing; of their sneering disregard for the laws America was built upon; and for the international laws put in place since WWII to protect all the people of the world.

If we, as moral Americans, don’t insist upon a thorough investigation and fair, serious prosecution of the men and women who perpetrated these war crimes against us and the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in the world, we are, ourselves, willing accessories to the crimes. I understand that we have huge problems ahead of us which must be solved – many of which also can be traced directly to these same villains – but to ignore their crimes against humanity makes all Americans complicit. Those crimes will haunt us forever.

Doing the right thing will be extremely difficult. It will hurt and embarrass us. Doing the right thing – prosecuting our war criminals – may bring up ferocious new problems, and it may rock America to her foundations. But if we, as Americans, really care about freedom, human and civil rights, equality, our Constitution and our country, and the world at large, then we must do it.

Turning away from it, trying to forget it, letting the war criminals slip away without facing justice is craven and cowardly. It will be a disaster of far greater proportions than anything we’ve faced as a nation to this point in our history. I believe that Barack Obama is an honest, intelligent, good man. He’s surrounding himself with others like him as he prepares to take on the monumental job of President of the United States. I hope he realizes that America stands, here and now, on the edge of a historical precipice. It’s will be up to him to decide whether we step back from it or close our eyes and fall in.

We're depending on him to do the right thing.

It's magic ...

2008-12-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

My friend J is here this morning, sitting across from me in my living room. The fire is blazing in the woodstove. It’s cozy. While I write this on my laptop, J is talking to a couple of her entrepreneurial business buddies in Paris, a Frenchman and an Englishman, using her own laptop and Skype.

This fascinates me. It’s a little after 6 p.m. in Paris. She’s talking to these two guys on the other side of the world, laughing and making jokes. She’s talking to both at once – it’s a three-way, overseas telephone call. But there’s no telephone. She’s wearing a headset plugged into her computer. She’s lolling as comfortable as can be on my loveseat.

No “telephone.” Skype is free.

When I was living in Germany in another lifetime, calling home was something we did once a month. We arranged with our family and friends, via the original snail mail – it took at least two weeks to cross the ocean and the U.S. before arriving in their mailboxes -- a day and a time for a conversation. Or we’d make arrangements for next month’s phone call before saying good-bye, if we remembered. The reason the calls were limited to once monthly was the expense.

My German phone actually had a counter on it that rolled, quickly, during our long-distance, overseas calls. It was counting pfennings. Ten pfennings per minute, actually. So an hour-long call cost about $60. There was my family to call, and my husband’s family. Occasionally, we’d talk to old friends back Stateside. My phone bills were stunning.

But here’s J, right now, today, talking basically for free to her friends in France. Isn’t that incredible?

Indulgence ...

2008-11-25T12:56:00.001-08:00

I'm sorry, but Blogger doesn't seem to recognize returns or paragraph breaks today. I'll check later and try to add them. Sigh.

Just for fun, here’s a quick, terribly fattening and delicious favorite from the Wren family, with irreverent comments. I originally typed it up and e-mailed it to Daughter Wren, who’s been craving it and plans to bring it along to put a twist into the traditional Thanksgiving feast (turkey, ham, dressing, mashed taters, green bean casserole, corn pudding, apple pie with ice cream and pumpkin pie with whipped cream) here at the Wren’s Nest.

Gramma Wren's Tamale Pie

1 chili brick (available in grocery’s meat dept., in the frozen case);

1 can corn;

2 eggses, beaten;

2 cups milk;

1 can beef broth;

1 1/2 cups cornmeal;

1 lb. hamburger, sauteed and drained;

1-8 oz. can tomato sauce;

1 can whole, pitted olives, drained;

and 1 small can mushrooms, drained (you can leave these out, but Gramma Wren says "They're so good in it! She can pick them out!" Heh. When I was a fledgling, she used to tell me, "You're eating those mushrooms if you have to sit there all night!" Personally, I think canned mushrooms are slimy and horrible. If you're gonna use 'shrooms, buy them fresh, slice them up and add them raw. But the canned ones were used a LOT in White Male Patriarchal Society recipes in the 60s and 70s, which I think was when canned mushrooms were invented or something.)

But I digress. I'll get serious now. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Heat the chili brick in the beef broth, slowly, in a Dutch oven over low/medium heat on the stove. It will melt. The brick is made of concentrated, beanless, traditional Mexican chili con carne. It's packed with yummy beef and authentic chili spices.

While the chili brick is melting, saute the hamburger (in a separate skillet, then drain off the grease) and put the hamburger and all the other ingredients into the Dutch oven with the melted chili brick. Mix everything up. Put the Dutch oven into the oven to cook. Check every fifteen minutes or so and stir. The mixture will thicken as the cornmeal bakes and the other ingredients heat through. You'll know it's done when the Tamale Pie is thick and moist, but not too wet and gooey or too dry. Gramma Wren thinks it takes about an hour to cook. Be patient -- the end result is hella delicious.

Calories: Twenty-hundred-billion. But Tamale Pie is a rare and greatly anticipated treat which must be indulged in once in a while or life's not worth living.

Note: The best and only chili brick still being made in California is Delores Chili Brick, made by Delores Canning Company in Los Angeles. The chili bricks are a bit rare at grocery stores anymore, but can still be found. Call around or visit http://www.dolorescanning.com/ to find it. Additionally, you could always add cooked pinto beans to this recipe, and finish it off with grated, melted cheddar cheese... with a dollop of sour cream on each portion ... oh, my.

Have fun...

Zzzz

2008-11-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes there's just nothing to say except "Happy Sunday."

Why I love autumn ...

2008-11-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

Finally, the days are cool and crisp. And while summer is beautiful, in autumn everything goes flamboyant, one last, wild fling of color, tone and hue before it's all blown away in winter's winds.

I love my Japanese maple tree and the Yuletide camellia. Mr Wren and I planted both right after we moved here in the autumn of 1997. If you look close, you can see the season's first camellia bloom just under the kitchen window; the bush will produce those simple flowers well into January, even as everything else fades to black and gray as the winter gets a good, cold grip on the world.

Setting a precedent ...

2008-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

Students at Princeton have taken the concept behind Prop H8 and run with it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59IK28ry9eQ

I'd really love to post the actual video, instead of just the link, but for some reason, I can't copy the whole embed code for YouTube. Sigh.

The real meaning of turkey

2008-11-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

Honestly, Sarah. Please, stop talking. Do it for the children.

(click, please. I can't get the video to embed.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8DTSPzU0RI

... in the present moment

2008-11-20T09:51:00.000-08:00

How strange to find myself so accurately tagged by a computer:

“The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

“They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.”

I’m a “Performer,” according to Typealyzer, a Swedish website devoted to analyzing blog-writing styles as a way to get at how the author thinks and, in some cases (like mine) lives.

Typealyzer pegged me well. I do love soft fabrics and bright colors. As proof, I offer the photo above: It's my kitchen. Some scents, like cinnamon, are my long-time favorites and I don’t quite know what I’d do in a world without them.

And, I really do have difficulty with planning for the future – nothing seems “real” to me, except “now.” I’m living through the consequences, right now, of having exhausted myself for so long I’ve forgotten how to recharge.

All the other stuff that "types" me is spot on, too. The people who worked for me when I was a newspaper editor always told me I was the best boss they’d ever had, but the people I worked for often wished I’d been a little less likeable. My feeling was that if the work got done – and done well – and the deadlines met, then I wasn’t worried if my reporters showed up twenty minutes late for work in the mornings. I knew they often worked through lunch breaks and after hours on their stories, just like I did. They gave a lot of themselves for little reward. It was easy to cut them some slack.

On the other hand, my own bosses leaned hard on me to rigorously maintain traditional office discipline. This meant I had to compel (OK, implore) my reporters to show up on time for work each day, an action I hated and they knew I didn’t believe in.

Some of us just aren’t meant to be hardcases. I’m afraid I’m one of them.

I'm confused, now ...

2008-11-18T22:17:00.000-08:00

According to Newsweek:

According to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a third of white evangelicals believe the world will end in their lifetimes. These mostly conservative Christians believe a great battle is imminent. After years of tribulation—natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets)—God's armies will vanquish armies led by the Antichrist himself. He will be a sweet-talking world leader who gathers governments and economies under his command to further his own evil agenda. In this world view, "the spread of secular progressive ideas is a prelude to the enslavement of mankind," explains Richard Landes, former director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America's millennialist Christians. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University's law school, says he does not believe Obama is the Antichrist, but he can see how others might. Obama's own use of religious rhetoric belies his liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, Staver says, positions that "religious conservatives believe will threaten their freedom." The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they're not nuts: "They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared," Staver says.

Wait a minute, wait a minute! Time OUT!

Now, maybe I’m all mixed up about the sequence under which the Rapture is supposed to happen, but isn’t the Antichrist one of the dire things, along with floods, famines, great winds and the like, which must happen before a really pissed off God floats all the precious “saved” Christians up to heaven? And once they’re safely being issued wings and cloud blankies, Jesus returns to Earth in a huge snit to lay gory, disgusting and gleeful waste to the rest of us?

If that’s right, why are Christians so scared of the Antichrist, whoever he may be? I mean, wouldn’t they really want to welcome him right in? The sooner the better?

Don’t they really want to go to heaven?

Veteran's Day

2008-11-11T00:20:00.000-08:00

I was going to write something new for Veteran's Day, but while searching my files for inspiration, I found what I'd posted here in 2006. It's all the more relevant now, given the results of the election a week ago today:

It’s Veteran’s Day.

Here in the Wren’s Nest, this day represents more than a sale at TJMaxx. Mr. Wren and I are both veterans; he served in the U.S. Army, I in the U.S. Air Force. Both of us were fortunate that during the years we served, there were no active “hot” wars – only the long, ominous Cold War that began its end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and finished, finally, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

I’m proud of my military service. But to my mind, the real veterans are the Americans who’ve served in wartime, the ones who literally put their lives on the line to protect their country. I know many of them and met and worked with many more. Some of them were drafted, others were volunteers, like the men and women serving our country today in Afghanistan and Iraq, South Korea and Europe. Some saw battle, but many served at the “rear,” supporting the fighting troops. They were vital, each and every one of them.

One of the things I loved about the military was its diversity. People from all walks of life form the Army, the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, the National Guard and the Coast Guard. Black and white, Asian, American Indian, Hispanic – the military is a compressed American melting pot working and living closely together, all over the world.

If you’re a bigot, you’ll find yourself at a loss on an Army post. Nowhere is it more crystal clear that people are people, no matter their gender, the color of their skin, their economic status or where they’re from. They have a job to do, a common cause, and they do it together. Their hearts all look the same.

For this white woman who grew up in a mostly white, California suburb – my high school class had one, single black student in it – the Air Force was an eye-opener. One of my favorite memories comes from when I was in training in Texas as an intelligence analyst. The tech sergeant in charge of a work detail I was assigned to one day asked me a question – and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He repeated himself, twice, and I still didn’t get it. Finally, he said, “Airman, where you from?” in a drawl that was as slow as cool honey.

I blinked. “California."

“The laaaand of the frooooots an’ the nuts,” he grinned, as if that explained everything. “I’m from Miss’ippee,” he said, relenting. “I’ll help y’out. Read mah lips ...”

It was the first time I’d ever heard that phrase used – and it was long before Bush 41 used it in regards to taxes. Because the sergeant was being very patient and speaking even more slowly than usual, I understood him this time, and before he was done giving me his instructions -- where to go dig rocks out of a corner where grass seed would be planted -- we were both laughing. He hadn’t insulted me, only teased, and it served to close the wide gap between our disparate cultures. I later learned that this man had served in Vietnam, a draftee, and when he’d come home, he decided to stay in the Air Force and make it a career.

Over the years I became very good at sussing out accents, drawls and colloquialisms. After I was discharged, and later went to Germany to work for the U.S. Army as a civilian, everyone sounded pretty much the same to me. My country, and the world, had become a much smaller place – a village.

I’m blathering on, here, so I’ll get to my point. Today is the one day of the year that America pauses to thank its veterans, our friends and neighbors who took an oath to protect our country in times of war and serve as guardians during times of peace. While there are as many reasons they signed up as there are colors, genders and cultures within the armed forces, all of them share a deep love for America – so deep, they were prepared to die for it. Many of them have seen war first hand, seen friends and comrades maimed or killed and have lived under dreadfully difficult conditions so foreign to American civilian life they might have been on another planet.

Many are still serving, all over the world. And there are thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, right now, who are serving their country as volunteers – our future veterans.

All of them deserve our deep respect and our thanks.

Mixed emotions

2008-11-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

[Wren pads into the living room and sits down in her favorite overstuffed leather chair, the one that’s so big and plumphy her feet don’t quite touch the floor when she sits down. It makes her feel like a little girl. The chair is snuggly. She sips from the big mug of hot coffee she brought with her and sighs with pleasure as the steam clouds her glasses. To her left, the woodstove blazes, radiating cozy, welcome heat into the chilly room. Wren puts her feet up on the ottoman and covers her legs with an old throw. The cat hops up and fits himself between her ankles, his chin on Wren’s shinbone, his paws tucked beneath him. It’s fairly early in this clear, crispish, deep autumn morning; the sun is up but still stretching, the birds that haven’t already headed south for the winter are yelling at each other in the trees, and for the first time this season the temperature outside has dipped down into the mid-30s overnight.]

Hi there.

Did you hear? Last night, Americans chose Barack Obama to be their next President. I know – I shouldn’t say it too loud. I’ll jinx it. But I woke up this morning with these words: “Obama is President!” on my mind, and all the time I was feeding the dog, building the fire in the woodstove, boiling fresh water for coffee and considering (and rejecting) cold pizza for breakfast, the words danced through my head, providing breathless, giddy background music to my sleepy morning activities: “Obama is President. Hey! Obama is President!”

Yes, I know. He’s really President-Elect. He has to wait – we have to wait – until January 20, 2009, before he can take office. I’d like it better if he could just take over right this minute, since we all know that the President-Reject, George W. Bush, is doing his gol’-damndest to further fuck America before a disgusted history can drag him, grinning like a brainless maniac, off the world stage.

I must try to be patient. Obama needs this time to prepare for his new job. After nearly two solid years of campaigning, I bet he’d love a week or two at home, doing nothing much at all. He could sleep in, play with his daughters, eat homemade waffles and read a good book as the burnt-orange autumn afternoons fade to cold winter gray. He’s worked hard. He deserves a little time.

President Barack Obama. President Obama. Wow. A Democrat. And just in time. Bush and the Republicans nearly pushed the whole country off a cliff. Even now, with Obama representing our last, best hope, we’re teetering on the edge. We have a lot of work ahead of us.

And now, checking out the latest news, I discover that California’s Proposition 8 has passed, 52 to 48 percent.

As happy as I am that Obama won the presidency, this makes me equally as sad. And angry, too. It’s simply terrible news.

For those of you who haven’t been following California’s peculiar politics this election season, Prop Hate fixes in the state constitution that the only marriages that are or can ever be legitimate in California are those in which men marry women. In banning single-sex marriage, Prop Hate strips away, once again, the right of gay couples to marry under the law in California. It was only in May this year that the California Supreme Court finally declared the ban on single-sex marriage unconstitutional. Getting to that decision took years.

And now? Back to square one.

We took historic steps yesterday in this country when we voted for a young, mixed-race African-American man to become President of the United States of America. It was huge. Bigoted preconceptions were also shattered when Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic nomination for President and later, Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate in his Republican bid for that office. Imagine: Women in positions of high power in America. Now, I believe Palin was a reprehensible choice for Vice President because of her general lack of experience and stunning lack of intellect, but I was heartened, nevertheless, that she was chosen at all. Next time, gender and race won’t be the deciding factor in a race like this.

And yet, right here in good ol' fruity, nutty, progressive, liberal California, many of the same people who voted with hope in their hearts for Obama also voted to coldly strip away a basic civil right – the right to marry whomever one pleases – from a minority. This makes our gay neighbors and co-workers, friends, acquaintances and family members … what? Less than equals? Less than citizens? Less than human?

As an American, I’m pleased and relieved at Obama’s historic win. As a Californian, I’m ashamed of my state for its continued, inexplicable, backwards bigotry and support of inequality, which was very well funded and fueled by those “good Christian” purveyors of hate in our midst.

Across the nation, Americans have taken a huge step forward and a few big steps backwards since yesterday morning. It looks like we still have a long way to go.

And President Obama. Oh, my.

Finally ... !

2008-11-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

Miracle dog

2008-10-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been dog-sitting for my Mom since Monday. Today is my last day.

Used to be that when my Mom and Dad traveled, they’d take their Boxer dog, Mugs, with them. But sometimes bringing a 75-pound bundle of goofy energy along wasn’t practical, so they’d kennel him at the local vet’s office. They never liked to; when they picked him up he was always sad, skinny, and had managed to catch a dog-cold. They felt guilty and it would be a week before Mugs got back to normal and fully forgave them.

Dad died in 2005. Mom hasn’t done a lot of traveling since then, but when she does, she can’t bear to put Mugs in the kennel. And so I dog-sit while she’s gone.

We always laugh when we do this. And it is sort of funny, the idea of baby-sitting a dog. But Mugs is very special. I know – all pet owners think their little darlings are special. Mugs really is.

In 1998, my dad had heart surgery. It was the second major heart operation he’d had – the first was a valve-replacement in 1986. This one, 12 years after the first, replaced the wearing-out replacement valve. Both surgeries were dicey and the second far more dangerous than the first. He was older. There was more disease. They had to do bypasses too.

Mom and Dad's previous Boxer had died two years before. They missed him – we’ve always had a Boxer in the family – but he and Mom traveled frequently and, finding themselves dogless, decided they didn’t want the hassle of kenneling yet another dog.

It was a rough surgery. Dad was on the operating table for nearly 10 hours while they replaced the valve and did three bypasses, discovering the need for those after they’d opened him up. At some point during those hours he suffered a small stroke.

Dad survived the surgery, but spent two-and-a-half more weeks in the hospital, recovering very slowly. There were several set-backs. It was a miserable experience for him.

We knew when he came home, his convalescence would be long and arduous. Dad was an avid golfer, and in the years since he’d retired following his first heart surgery, he’d become a very active senior citizen. He was always busy – doing taxes for seniors through the AARP, volunteering his time with the local Sheriff’s Dept. in their senior program, and getting together with his buddies. He played poker, he golfed three times a week, he gardened. And he and Mom traveled frequently.

Now all of those things would be out, at least for a while. The doctor estimated it would take him six months to a year to regain his strength, and at that point we didn’t even know how the stroke might affect him.

My sister and I decided that what Dad needed when he came home was another Boxer. Mom was a little reluctant – she didn’t want to have to look after a messy, rambunctuous puppy and Dad – so we decided to check out the local Boxer rescue organization, hoping to find a full-grown, house-trained, nicely mannered dog.

We found Mugs. He’d been picked up by the dog catcher. His owners had disappeared. He was pathetically skinny, about two years old, full of energy and friendly in the way that only Boxers can be. The rescue people had bailed him out of the animal shelter and set about finding new owners for him, people who really loved Boxers and would give him a loving home for the rest of his life.

That was us.

When Dad was finally allowed home from the hospital, Mugs was there waiting for him. Oh, was Dad surprised. He was absolutely delighted with his new Boxer buddy. See, my sister and I sat down with Mugs before Dad arrived and explained to him what his job would be – he needed to be gentle with Dad, keep him company, and make him laugh. Dad really needed to laugh. It sounds strange, I know, the idea of explaining such things to a dog. But we believe dogs can be very special people.

Mugs was. He knew exactly what to do with Dad. Though he was only a couple of years old and full of young-dog energy, he was incredibly careful – and incredibly gentle – with my Dad. When Dad regained enough strength to walk slowly without a walker, he’d go out onto the deck that stretched the length of the house and overlooked his garden. He'd walk from one end of the deck to the other, over and over again, enjoying the sun and the fresh air while rebuilding the surgery-wounded and wasted muscles in his legs. It was painful and exhausting. But Mugs would be right there with him, walking alongside. Not in front. Not behind. Right next to Dad. He walked slowly. Steadily. Dad talked to him and Mugs listened with his big silly ears cocked, his droopy brown eyes on Dad’s face. His ridiculous stub of a tail wiggled madly. He was Concentrating.

Mugs understood what his job was and he did it. It was amazing, really. He helped my Dad through that long, long recovery time, and when it was over and Dad was strong again, he remained central in both Dad’s and Mom’s lives. They spoiled him rotten. He was a “talky” dog, making the funniest “mwah-mwah-mworf-mwooo” sounds in response to questions, or when he wanted to be walked or fed. He cracked us all up. Both of my parents were delighted by him. They loved him dearly, and we were all convinced that without Mugs, Dad would have had a much harder time recovering.

The stroke hadn’t impaired Dad physically at all. We noticed a few small changes in his personality and the way he dealt with frustrations, but they were minor. Dad made a complete recovery. He got almost all his strength back. He started golfing again – twice a week! He walked on his treadmill every day, even though it hurt his feet and legs something awful. He picked up his volunteer work again. He and Mom traveled, together and with friends, all over the country.

And then, in May 2005, the chair Dad was sitting on slipped out from under him while he was tying his shoes to go play poker with his buddies. He fell and bumped his head on the tile kitchen floor. He was all right, but he had a big knot on his head. He went out and played poker anyway – it was just a bump, after all. He told my Mom it didn’t even hurt. But a few days later – after he started getting a little sleepy and disoriented and, finally, developing such a severe headache that he could barely hold still – Mom took him to the ER. And it turned out that there was a massive bleed between his skull and the membrane that protects the brain, caused by the bump on the head and the fact that Dad was on Coumadin, a blood thinner.

This was to be my Dad’s last stay in a hospital. Although the bleed stopped by itself, he never recovered. The damage to his brain was too massive. Two weeks later he died, peacefully, in his hospital bed.

As you might imagine, we were all devastated. We’d called Dad the “Miracle Man” because he’d survived his two earlier heart surgeries – and not only survived, but thrived. He’d refused to give up. Dad had a huge circle of friends and acquaintances, made during his many years as a CPA, and even more after he retired. We all knew we’d lose him someday, but we figured it would be his heart, not a silly household accident. He was 77 years old.

And where does Mugs come back into this story? Well, after the funeral, after everything was settled back down to something like normalcy (though it could never be truly normal again without Dad), Mugs turned his full healing attention on my Mom.

She was lost in grief. She and my Dad were one of those lucky couples who never fell out of love. They were together for 49 years, and he’d been her everything. Now she was alone, trying to figure out what to do with her life post-Dad. Mugs did with her just like he’d done with Dad seven years before. He never left her side. He was with her constantly, whatever she happened to be doing. He started “talking” even more, which made her laugh in spite of herself. He took her for walks. He curled up with her on the sofa for naps and hogged most of the queen-sized bed at night. He kept her company, filling her long hours alone and giving her a reason to get up each morning.

Mugs has this way of coming up to you and laying his warm, hairy cheek up against yours, just holding it there, being gentle. Understanding. He knows.

He's 12 years old now. He’s got arthritis in his hips and knees, and his muzzle has gone white. So when Mom decided this year, for the first time since Dad died, to go on the yearly trip to Monterey she and Dad used to take with several other couples, and asked me to baby-sit Mugs, I was delighted to do it. Spending this week with her dear friends, people who’d also loved my Dad, was a big step for her, a new step into life. Mom will be 78 in two weeks.

She's healing. And Mugs, that sweet old dog, is still doing his job perfectly. Keeping him company 24/7 while she's gone is the least I can do.

Meme without politics

2008-10-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

Lucy over at A Commonplace Book has a nice meme going in which she eschews speaking or thinking of politics. She’s burned out. I understand and empathize, so I’ve stolen her meme for use here. I don’t think she’ll mind too much.

See, there’s so much politicking and stress going on in the world right now, I’ve found myself at a loss for words again. I get overwhelmed. And I don’t have anything new to say about it all. It’s been about a week since I posted to Blue Wren, and I was out of ideas. Fortunately, Lucy came along just in time. She's my hero.

It took me a couple of days to decide to pick up the meme. I was thinking it would take too long or perhaps dig into personal areas I didn’t want to touch. But in reality, it was fairly quick and much easier than I expected. Painless, even. Feel free to have at it yourself:

What is your favorite thing to wear? I have an oversized, patchwork shirt made from lots of old, worn fabrics stitched together. It’s a wonderful hodgepodge of blues, muted purples, lavender and green. It’s soft and flowy. Not showy. I like wearing it with my comfy old jeans. And on my feet? Fuzzy chenille socks and German woolen slippers.

Last meal you had at a restaurant: It was a café, not a full-fledged restaurant. I had a so-so spinach and mushroom omelet, crunchy-creamy hash browns with ketchup (they tasted even better for being verboten), half an English muffin, and great coffee.

Name one thing that scares you: Being helpless and dependent. A close second? Wasps.

Who was the last person in your bed? Me.

What were you doing at 7:00 a.m.? I was filling the electric kettle with fresh water so I could make a cup of coffee. I did this while tossing lamb-flavored treats to the dog, who does not understand the words “wait a minute!” He was drooling on my knees, so I had to keep him occupied.

Last person you hugged? My friend J., for being so dear.

Does anyone you know want to date you? If he had any money, my cat would take me out on the town.

When was your last encounter with the police? About four years ago a young neighbor from up the street failed to make the turn at the end of our cul-de-sac and zooped headlong in his Toyota pickup down our short, very steep driveway. Apparently he forgot where his brake pedal was. He reached the bottom of the driveway at roughly 30 mph, where he crashed through the chain link fence dividing our property from our next-door neighbor’s. After taking out her second fence and heading into the forest, his Toyota finally stopped when it got stuck between two pine trees. The poor guy was, as you might have guessed, very drunk. Miraculously, he wasn't hurt, but he was dazed and disoriented. I helped him into our kitchen, gave him a cup of coffee and called the sheriff while he sat there alternately apologizing and complimenting the decor. The officer who showed up arrested him for driving under the influence. I felt bad – the guy was young and obviously messed up – but what do you do? There'd been damage done to our neighbor's property, and it was just sheer luck that I’d happened to park my own car up on the street the night before. Normally, it would have been right at the bottom of the drive, and he’d have crashed right into the back of it. At the time of morning this happened, my daughter and I could well have been getting into the car to go to work. We just happened to be running a little late, so we weren't walking up the driveway when he flew down it. So ... yeah. It was an interesting encounter. It was made even more memorable when the officer, who was sorta cute, flirted with me.

Have you ever driven without a license? Only by accident when I left my wallet at home.

What time of the day is it? It’s 11:43 a.m., by my laptop clock. I should probably try to be a little more productive than this today.

Who/What made you angry today? I haven’t been angry even once, so far. It feels good.

Do you want anyone? Not really. I’ve learned that what we want and what we get are rarely the same thing when it comes to people.

Do you like birds? I love birds because they make me smile, every single time.

Do you download music? Occasionally, through iTunes.

Do you care if your socks are dirty? Only when I don’t have any clean ones handy. In which case I’ll put the dirty ones on, wrinkling my nose, but I soon forget all about it.

Opinion of Chinese symbol tattoos? I’ll pass, personally. I’ve always loved the look and design of Chinese characters, but since I don’t speak Chinese, I’d be afraid I’d end up with a tattoo that said “Kick Me” (or worse) in Cantonese or something.

What are you doing tonight? I will attempt, once again, to progress a little further as I write the Great American Novel.

Do you like to cuddle? Briefly. Then I get too warm and start feeling claustrophobic, and I have to break free. Gently. With apologies. I think I like the concept of cuddling more than the actual action.

Do you love anyone? Oh, yes.

Whose bed did you sleep in last night? Mine.

Have you ever bungee jumped? Nope, and I never will, either. I’m a shivering coward when it comes to heights. I’d pee myself. It wouldn’t be a good experience.

Have you ever gone whitewater rafting? Once, by accident.

Has anyone ten years older than you ever hit on you? Yes. It was both flattering and distressing.

How many pets do you have? Two – my cat, who velcroes himself to my legs these days, and my dog, who loves me best at mealtimes. Oh, and then there are the five hens, but they’re not exactly pets.

Have you met a real redneck? Yeah, I’m married to one.

How is the weather right now? It’s really nice. Temp’s in the mid-sixties, there’s an intense blue autumn sky studded with clouds, plenty of cool, shifting sunshine and a light breeze. The Stellar’s jays are yelling in the trees just outside.

What are you listening to right now? The clock ticking over the hearth, the hum of the refrigerator and, through the open window, a firetruck siren, moving away.

What was the last movie you watched? That one with Kevin Spacey as the guy in the mental facility who thought he was from another planet. Maybe he was. Or not. It ended ambiguously. I was bemused.

Do you wear contacts? No, I wear bifocals. And they’re not working so well these days. I guess it’s way past time for an eye exam and new specs. Sigh.

Where was the last place you went besides your house? The tiny local post office a few blocks away. I needed stamps so I could mail a bill payment. The postal worker at the counter was very friendly and had a nice smile, which he used freely. I was pleasantly surprised, so I gave him my smile in return. And so the world turns.

What are you wearing? Don’t laugh. It IS noon now, after all. I’m wearing warm, comfy, black-watch-plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a very old, holey, Natalie McMaster "In My Hands" T-shirt.

What’s one thing you’ve learned this year? I’m much stronger, physically and mentally, than I would have believed.

What do you usually order from Starbucks? I rarely go there, unless it’s to meet my buddy J. When I do, though, I get a small mocha or a chai latte. The merchandise – the coffee cups, the coffeemaking paraphernalia, the music CDs, even the little tins of mints – always tempt me. “Waste your money!” it yells at me. It’s terrible. I have to tell myself to be strong before I walk through the door.

Ever had someone sing to you? Yes. When my daughter was six and we were living in Germany, we heard some music through the window of our third story flat one winter morning. We went out on the balcony. There on the sidewalk below was a very old man, dressed in a threadbare overcoat, a wool cap and baggy old clothes, playing an accordion. He saw us standing up there, turned our way, bowed and started playing a new song, singing to us in German. We were both mesmerized. Charmed. He sang two songs for us. We made him a cup of hot cocoa and took it down to him, along with all the German change I had in my wallet – about four Deutschmarks, I think. It was just lovely, one of those special moments that comes along now and then over the course of a lifetime. I’ll never forget that wonderful old man and listening to him sing to us in the cold.

Have you ever fired a gun? Yes, but only at target ranges. I fired an M-16 semi-automatic rifle in Air Force basic training, and then years later fired a sniping rifle (and hit a distant target on my first try, which was sobering), a .22 pistol, and a Magnum that kicked so hard when it fired I nearly knocked myself out with it. Except for the M-16, I fired the guns as research for a story I was writing at the time.

Are you missing someone? My Dad.

Favorite TV show? The only TV I watch is Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and that’s only occasionally. So I guess that’s my favorite. I’m one of those annoying, self-righteous people who hate television and won’t watch it unless forced. Sorry.

What do you have an obsession with? Writing.

Has anyone ever said you looked like a celeb? Not even once. When I was a kid, I thought I looked a little like Hayley Mills. Now I'm not so sure.

Who would you like to see right now? My daughter.

Ever had a near death experience? No, and I’d rather not. I can just imagine the medical bills.

Are you afraid of falling in love? Not afraid, but I’d be very, very wary.

Have you ever been caught doing something you weren’t supposed to? No. I’m either really clever or deadly boring.

Has anyone you were really close to passed away recently? My Dad died in 2005, and my aunt and uncle died, several months apart, in 2007. It’s very strange knowing I’ll never see any of them again. Most of the time, I don’t think about it, but once in a while something will bring them all to mind, and I’ll miss them. Sharply, hopelessly, and with love. And then I move on, as we do.

What’s something that really bugs you? Hypocrisy.

Taco Bell or Burger King? When I was in my twenties, I liked Taco Bell better. Burger King was (and still is) off the list because I got violently sick right after eating a Whopper one time. I don’t think it was the burger that did it – I was coming down with the stomach flu, as it turned out – but for me, it ruined Burger King burgers for life. Today, I don’t eat fast food, period. It makes me fat.

Next time you will kiss someone? Does the cat count? I’ll probably kiss his fuzzy head several times today. Mr. Wren will get a few kisses, too, if he’s nice.

Favorite baseball team? Don’t have one. I’ve loathed baseball ever since I found out there was no half-time entertainment to relieve the tedium.

Ever call a 1-900 phone number? No.

Nipple or Nose rings? Argggh! Dang, both would hurt waaay too much. I had to be tricked into getting my ears pierced, you know. I'm a total wuss.

What’s the longest time you’ve gone without sleep? Years and years ago, when I was taking part in an Air Force training exercise, I stayed awake for about 48 hours straight. It’s a very odd feeling, that. I didn’t like it.

Last time you went bowling? In 1989, at the bowling alley on Karl Schurz Kaserne, in Bremerhaven, Germany. I rolled many, many gutterballs and two actual strikes!

Where is the weirdest place you have slept? In the dark, creaky wooden hold of a tall ship docked at the Embarcadero in San Francisco. I was doing a story for the newspaper about a group of local fifth-graders who were taking part in an historical “experience” during which they acted as the “crew” of this beautiful old schooner for 24 hours. The ship was authentic and had carried cargo along the West Coast until around 1910. I didn’t sleep in the ship’s hold alone, though – I shared it with 23 exhausted, overexcited, giggly kids and one very grouchy, 350-pound newspaper photographer.

Who did you last speak with on the phone? Mr. Wren, as I roamed the aisles at Costco searching desperately for the restroom.

What does your last received text message say? “New blog!” It was from my daughter, who writes the blog, Dream of the Dragon.

What’s the closest orange object to you? A pillar candle that , when lit, smells delightfully like cinnamon. It makes me think of autumn. Now I’m going to have to light it, you know.