Lately It Occurs to Me

An Archdruid on the Internet?

2011-08-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

It sounds oxymorony, but it's true, there is an archdruid on the Internet. Probably not the only one. I like this blog that my dad recently introduced me to, The Archdruid Report. Thoughtful and intelligent though somewhat predictable stuff about life yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His post last week, "The Twilight of Meaning," inspired me to make this comment:

I thought when the post opened with "this is hard to write" and then led to "unplug" that you were leading up to saying that you were ending your blog. Very relieved to find that that's not the case.

But I have the subsidiary reaction of .... well, do we unplug or not? I suspect my habit of spending so much time reading one pundit, blogger, commenter, tweeter, or what-have-you or another expostulating on his or her theories of life, the universe, and everything is probably at least as mind-numbing/culture-killing as watching a few episodes of "The Wire" or "Arrested Development," if not more so.

I also suspect that contemporary popular culture has not really changed so much throughout history, whenever your version of "contemporary" is. It's the same as the "kids today" complaint... the same lament, repeated generation after generation; why can't we hear ourselves being our grandparents? Popular culture is never good enough for the people who consider themselves "cultured." Charles Dickens was not revered as a literary master in his day. He was more like, say, Stephen King. I can easily imagine that one day Stephen King will be respected more like Charles Dickens.

And I have to ask, why does everyone who wants to take a pot-shot at popular culture use Lady Ga-Ga as their target? Because it's easy? Requires no research, no verification of any claim? Because lots of people who have also not investigated will chuckle and nod? That's certainly one formula for appealing to the lowest-common-denominator. I'm not an art historian, I'm not a teen-ager, not a hipster, not even a Lady Ga-Ga fan. But it doesn't take too much investigating to see that Lady Ga-Ga is a phenomenal and powerful cultural force, delivering messages that seem to be going over most of our heads. Next time you need a cultural punching bag, I suggest you use a Kardashian, Justin Bieber, or maybe The Wiggles. But maybe, for the integrity of your argument, at least Google them first.

Stalling -- Master Class

2011-01-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

Why am I stalling? I've been here at my computer for, wow, three hours, reading, tweeting, doing basically nothing, and not opening this window and starting to blog. Why not? I had a couple of ideas of things to write about -- the great story by Stephen Millhauser that I read in the New Yorker this morning. Something else that I can't even remember I've fooled around so long. It may be that I felt pressure to write well about those things, that's why I couldn't get started. I'm keeping in mind what the Pomodoro man said. Fear of not meeting my own expectations causes me to interrupt myself, or in this case prevent myself from even starting.

The trouble with this, what I'm actually writing right now, is that it's the worst sort of drivel that exists in the civilized world. Writing about not writing. And I'm doing it, because, seeing as it's the worst thing there is, I can't possibly not meet that expectation. Not writing is better than this writing. That is a low expectation. I'm not intimidated by that.

Don't want to take this into a "what causes me to be so easily intimidated by expecations" vein. That would be sickening for all parties. Especially my parents, probably. And they don't deserve that. How chickenshit is that to blame my parents for the fact that I sit here in my pajamas and tweet while I should be writing or taking down the Christmas tree? Especially since I now have kids who are mere moments away from being old enough to start blaming their disappointments in life on their mom and dad. Especially mom, of course. Everything is always the mom's fault.

Okay, Christmas tree. Brace yourself. You're coming down.

Hoppin' John and Mom

2011-01-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm not a real cook. I can't really tell the difference between my mom's Oklahoma-born Hoppin' John and Deborah Madison's vegetarian Hoppin' John. I follow a recipe when I cook just about anything, but, in essence whichever recipe for Hoppin' John I follow, I'm dicing onions and peppers and cooking beans. I don't put ham or any meat in it. Not because I'm a vegetarian, just because I have never liked the flavor of cured pork that has cooked a long time. This year will be interesting because I forgot to buy peppers. I've got chili flakes, but there's usually sauteed bell pepper in there too. We'll see. And I bought kale instead of collards just because there was so much fabulous kale at the grocery store. I cook that without pork too. Same reason. I use Deborah Madison's trick of cooking it with brown butter. It's an excellent trick, make a note of it. There's probably another reason, apart from whether I am a real cook or not, that I can't tell the difference between my mom's Hoppin' John recipe and Deborah Madison's, even though my mom is just...my mom who cooks, and Deborah Madison is a renowned chef. My mom is a kick-ass cook. I mean, people hear you talk about "mom's cooking" and figure well, yeah, everyone loves their mom's cooking. No. Everyone loves MY mom's cooking. She's just really damned good at it. She learned from books. Joy of Cooking and James Beard, specifically. But of course there has to be more to it than that. She's got some certain knack that just makes everything she cooks taste exactly like it should. Even when she cooks something that turns out to be a disaster -- I'm remembering some chicken mole thing one Christmas about 40 years ago -- she manages to salvage it so that it's still good, just not what she intended. She can walk into a kitchen where there seems to be "nothing to eat" and next thing you know you're having a sundae of granola and chocolate sauce, or toast with garlicky tomato sauce. As I mentioned, she's from Oklahoma, there was no cuisine there beyond well-done steaks and Campbell's soup. Her mother was not an enthusiastic cook, my mom did not learn from Grandma. My mom came to San Francisco and noticed the people smelled different. Before long she realized it was garlic. Italian restaurants used lots of garlic and everyone ate Italian food. So she used garlic. Maybe garlic was her gateway flavor. After living in a boarding house and eating prepared meals for a year or so, she got pregnant, married, and was suddenly responsible for producing meals. She says the first time she and my dad went to a grocery store to stock their kitchen, a friend came with them. My dad said he was going to read magazines while she got the groceries. She looked at the friend and said, "What do I buy?" He was equally mystified. They wandered through the store, guessing at groceries. After that she knew she needed to know more. She went to a bookstore and found The Joy of Cooking. And she studied it.

Mom's 1952 Edition of "Joy of Cooking," in 2010. She Still Uses It.

Maybe another thing that contributed to her knack is her appetite. She's not greedy, she doesn't eat a lot, but when it's time to eat, she's going to eat. Delaying a meal is wrong in every way. It can be somewhat unpleasant to be with her in a restaurant if the service is delayed. She wants her food and she wants it now. Of course, 50, 30 years ago people didn't eat fast food or any restaurant food as readily as they do now. Even when she was a swinging single girl in San Francisco they ate most of their meals in the boarding house and went out to dinner occasionally. But once married, almost every meal was prepared and eaten at home. Maybe because she'd had that year between leaving her mom's home and starting her own, of having meals prepared for her, she'd gotten more into a rhythm of "proper" meals three times a day. No grabbing a bowl of cereal here, a cheese sandwich there. In any case, she became the cook she is today. Now when I talk to her on the phone, if she starts telling me what she made that day, or reminiscing about something she always likes to cook, I flip open my laptop and start typing. She's chatting about food and I'm typing as fast as I can saying, "uh-huh, uh-huh, go on...." so I can hand some of this skill, talent, and magic on to my daughters.

Here's one of her recipes just as I captured it during a phone call:

ground meat. 1/2 lb
onion. dice
green beans 1 lb

par-boil beans, crisp-tender.
brown onions and meat.
toss all together.
lots (3 Tbspns) of soy sauce
serve over rice.

And it works, just like that. It sounds absurdly simple, but it's also simply delicious.

Beautiful Crazy Soup

2010-12-02T20:36:00.000-08:00

The carrots, bell pepper, and bok choi combine beautifully in this straightforward soup. When I made this, I roasted vegetables in the oven too with the idea that I'd have sauteed and roasted beautiful crazy soup. But the soup seemed so complete without the roast vegetables (rutabaga, parsnips, turnip, purple potatoes) that I served them separately after all.

Makes about 10 servings.

3 tblspns olive oil
1 onion diced
1 lb chicken, red pepper, spinach sausage, sliced
2 carrots sliced thinly
2 stalks celery sliced thinly
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp cumin
1/8 tsp cayenne
2 cans (or equivalent homemade) pinto beans (drain one, use one's juice)
1 quart chicken broth
1/2 a large bok choi, washed and sliced, whites separated from greens

In a big soup pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and sausage. Cook, stirring frequently, until onions begin to soften. Add carrots, celery, and bell pepper. Stir well. Add spices. Cook, stirring frequently until vegetables begin to soften. Add beans and broth. Add whites of bok choi. Cook until broth begins to simmer. Add bok choi greens. Cook until soup is hot and greens are wilted. Serve.

Got crunchy bread? Parmesan might be nice. Mmmm, maybe a dollop of pesto.

Nick Kristof Does It Again

2010-10-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Here is my cheater-version of the brilliant quiz that Nick Kristof wrote for us in his recent NYT Op-Ed column:

Q1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?
a. Koran
b. Old Testament
c. (Hindu) Upanishads

A1. b. Deuteronomy 22:21.

Q2. Which holy text declares: “Let there be no compulsion in religion”?
a. Koran
b. Gospel of Matthew
c. Letter of Paul to the Romans

A2. a. Koran, 2:256. But other sections of the Koran do describe coercion.

Q3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Hinduism

A3. c. Most early suicide bombings were by Tamil Hindus (some secular) in Sri Lanka and India.

Q4. "Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” This verse is from:
a. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
b. The Book of Revelation
c. An Islamic hadith, or religious tale

A4. c. Hadith. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet to be revered.

Q5. Which holy text is sympathetic to slavery?
a. Old Testament
b. New Testament
c. Koran

A5. All of the above.

Q6. In the New Testament, Jesus’ views of homosexuality are:
a. strongly condemnatory
b. forgiving
c. never mentioned

A6. c. Other parts of the New and Old Testaments object to homosexuality, but there’s no indication of Jesus’ views.

Q7. Which holy text urges responding to evil with kindness, saying: “repel the evil deed with one which is better.”
a. Gospel of Luke
b. Book of Isaiah
c. Koran

A7. c. Koran, 41:34. Jesus says much the same thing in different words.

Q8. Which religious figure preaches tolerance by suggesting that God looks after all peoples and leads them all to their promised lands?
a. Muhammad
b. Amos
c. Jesus

A8. b. Amos 9:7

Q9. Which of these religious leaders was a polygamist?
a. Jacob
b. King David
c. Muhammad

A9. all of them

Q10. What characterizes Muhammad’s behavior toward the Jews of his time?
a. He killed them.
b. He married one.
c. He praised them as a chosen people.

A10. all of these. Muhammad’s Jewish wife was seized in battle, which undermines the spirit of the gesture. By some accounts he had a second Jewish wife as well.

Q11. Which holy scripture urges that the "little ones" of the enemy be dashed against the stones?
a. Book of Psalms
b. Koran
c. Leviticus

A11. a. Psalm 137

Q12. Which holy scripture suggests beating wives who misbehave?
a. Koran
b. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
c. Book of Judges

A12. a. Koran 4:34

Q13. Which religious leader is quoted as commanding women to be silent during services?
a. The first Dalai Lama
b. St. Paul
c. Muhammad

A13. b. St. Paul, both in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, but many scholars believe that neither section was actually written by Paul.

Rage Strudel

2010-10-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe rage is a good spice to have on hand for strudel emergencies...

Filling:
4 granny smith apples, peeled, cored, sliced thin
juice of one lime
1 tblspn cinnamon
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup almond meal
2 tblspns butter
Mix all that, set aside.

Dough:
One package phyllo dough
Mangle whole thing badly, getting flakes all over kitchen.
Abandon all hope, foment blind rage.
Move on in desperation.

Rage Dough:
Crust for two crust pie
2.25 Cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup shortening
2 tablespoons butter
5 - 6 tablespoons water
Dump it all, except water, into the mixmaster.
Add water, one tablespoon at a time until dough is all slightly moistened and starts to stick together. Divide dough into two equal portions, form into balls, wrap in wax paper, refrigerate for 15 minutes. Take out one ball. Roll it a bit, fold it in half, roll it a bit more. Repeat a few times. Then roll it out into a thin 8ish x 12ish oblong. Transfer to a parchment covered baking sheet.
Oh, now's a good time to pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Also, EndGame:
1 tblspn butter, melted
1 tblspn almond meal
1 tblspn cinnamon sugar mixture that you happen to have on hand
Just hang on to those for a few minutes.

Take out the other ball, do the same thing, but end up with a slightly narrower, shorter oblong.
Dump the apple mixture onto the dough on the baking sheet. Neatly. It's probably pretty juicy by now, gonna slop all over. Try to confine it. Keep the outer inch or so of dough free. Now take the second sheet of dough and cover the apples. Brush melted butter onto the free inch of the bottom sheet. Fold that bottom inch up and pinch it onto the top sheet. I don't know how, the whole conceit is absurd. Just finagle it as best you can. When you've accomplished this, brush the top of the Rage Strudel with melted butter (I meant to do this, not sure if I actually did it). Dust the top with almond meal; sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Tell yourself oh well, you did your best, and bake for 40 minutes or until it seems about right.

This is as far as I've gotten. I really don't know what to do with it now. In one hour I'm supposed to transport this to the 7th grade German class; I don't even know how to get it off the baking sheet. Sheesh.

Okay, relax. I just had to use a spatula to pry it away from the melty caramelly sauce that oozed out and then it slipped right off the baking sheet onto the cutting board. Let it cool a bit; it sliced up fine. I am amazed. It's pretty good!

EPILOGUE: January 16, 2011. So, months ago, not long after I first made this, a mom in the class asked me for the recipe. She said her daughter reported that it was "the best thing EVER." I was happy to hear that report. I'm making it again today. But this time, just because I have it and am not going to make Apple Dumplings after all, I'm using the biscuit-y dough I made yesterday for a recipe in the Cook's Illustrated "Best of America's Test Kitchens" 2011 Annual magazinie-cookbook thing I bought at Costco this week. I'll report on how this turns out when I know more. So far, it is baking and smelling good.

Mmmm! Tasting good too. Didn't seal the sides up well enough and apple caramelly saucey dripped all over the bottom of the oven, smoking up the house and necessitating the whole-house fan, but that's to be expected. The doughier biscuit-y dough didn't take as long to bake, about 35 minutes. Might have been better if I'd baked it at 400 instead of 350. But overall, yum.

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

2010-08-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

The title says it all, echoes my experience quite accurately. The only point I would add is that I once found myself part of a class action suit against paypal, and was awarded damages, and I was so naive I had them put my award in my paypal account, because I believed that after THIS surely they'd be different. Not different. I have never been able to access that money. Or the $10 they "gave" me for being one of the first people on earth to ever sign up with paypal.

Paypal causes money to unexist.

Read John Cole's story here.

Half a Chance to Not Look Stupid Half the Time

2010-08-19T10:39:00.001-07:00

I haven't blogged in a while. That can mean a few different things. One, my life has been so mundane as to seem unworthy of any noting. Two, my life has been so scintillating that I haven't paused to reflect on it. Three, I'm distracted by mundane idiocy and consider it unworthy of sharing, but can't tear myself away from it to share other topics.

I think this current dearth is attributable to Thing Three. I got a new phone, a smart phone -- also known as a smartphone -- and I'm so busy employing it to make my life better that my life is currently all about it. As shall be this post. Abandon me now, all ye who care not about this crap and all ye who already know 100x more than me about this crap.

Hello? Anyone? Seems that covered just about everyone. Blogging to myself again...

It's an adorable little HTC Hero from Credo Mobile, this new phone of mine. The greatest downside to it is that my kids are SO JEALOUS they can't even begin to be happy about their new phones, which are very fine phones as well in which I, like the kids, take no interest. Their phones just aren't as smart. And we all know there's nothing as sexy as smartness. By sexy, I mean distractingly appealing. But smartness costs $25 a month extra, and I'm not forking it over for a twelve-year-old, sorry. I'd consider it for the 15-year-old if she had a demonstrated academic need for it, but so far she doesn't. And not even that much interest. It's really the poor little 12-y-o who runs technological circles around the rest of us. But it's not need, it's interest. I'm spending her portion of the family fortune on school and lessons and food. Not digital signals. For now.

BACK TO MY HERO -- it's so adorable. It's my first touchscreen anything, I think. I spend quite a bit of time just screwing up the typing. I don't know why this doesn't enrage me, but so far I just find it amusing and keep struggling. Also, the first call I got, I hung up on. And then once we did connect, and finish the conversation, and I tried to hang up, I called them back instead. There's a bit of a curve, learning/adapting-wise with this thing. I think I mainly just love it cuz it fits easily in the palm of my hand and my whole world is right there. My calendar, emails, texts, files, tweets, everything. Especially the calendar. I can make an appointment for the orthodontist and know if it conflicts with the karate lessons, even if the lessons changed from 3:30 to 3:45 two weeks ago -- I don't have to count on myself to have raced through the calendar pages erasing all the :30s and changing them to :45s. The same calendar that I see on my computer at home is right there in my purse with me. I heart it. I feel it gives me half a chance to not look stupid half the time. These are not chances I feel I have all the time.

I also like that it's Credo. They are also "Working Assets," remember them? The groovy credit card company. They openly commit to making a portion of what we pay them into contributions for liberal causes. Since AT&T and Verizon clandestinely make portions of what we pay them into contributions to right-wing causes, I'd just as soon not give them my money. Especially when their service is CRAP. If I'm going to pay for crap, at least let it not conflict with my core values for pete's sake. It's bad enough to be reduced to a simpering puddle of impotent fury by a "customer service" encounter of any kind; add to that the knowledge that they are also taking the (amazingly large) profits generated by my dependence on them and using it to undermine liberty and justice for all, well, if you think about it too much, it could give you an aneurysm. I don't want to think about that. I said to heck with it and switched. It helped quite a bit that Credo was willing to buy out my existing contract (up to $200 for up to three lines -- bingo! that's us). "Buying out" seems to mean they give me credit toward my bill equal to what I pay my old carrier in contract termination fees, but that's still money. I'm okay with it. I was so disappointed in Verizon from the get-go that I am just happy to be able to say so long!

My next step in the project is to get rid of our land line. I'm a bit intimidated by this step. We have our phone and Internet service through AT&T U-Verse cable, which I'm far less than happy with. Our phone calls have sounded scratchy ever since we made the change and it drives our answering machine nuts, recording the dial tone after every call. And our internet connection has been herky-jerky. Honestly, I am TOTALLY dreading calling AT&T and talking to them about what my options are. The nightmare web of "press or say..." and "please hold while we transfer you" and "thank you for holding, your call is important to us" awaits me and I am full of dread.

The Governor Wounds Me

2010-08-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

Here are the Governor's remarks: http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2010/08/schwarzenegger-were-not-taking.html

Here's my comment at The State Worker blog, now buried by the hundreds of other comments:

Those are the most personally hurtful remarks I have ever experienced from a government official. I feel as if I have been slapped. And then kicked. It is insulting on so many levels that he feels it is appropriate to accuse the questioner of ignorance in order to answer the question. That isn't a response, it's bullying, plain and simple.

State employees know what's going on in the private sector. There is no possible way to not know--the lives of private sector working people and public sector working people are inextricably linked. The people of one "sector" cannot even function without the other. All workers need state employees and state employees need grocery checkers and car mechanics and babysitters and on and on. Not to mention that all the workers in these two sectors are each others' spouses, sons, daughters, parents, neighbors, lovers, bffs...

This, I'm afraid, is where we completely diverge from the lives of the Schwarzeneggers, no matter how many millions he generously hasn't made in the past 7 years. It is physically sickening that he thinks it is valid to compare his choosing to stay as rich as he is, instead of becoming richer and richer and richer, to the plight of the working people in California. There. Is. No. Comparison.

That was yesterday and it's still bothering me that he said these things. I am not even opposed to furloughs; I'd be FOR them if they actually seemed to help with California's deficit, but there is too much evidence that they don't -- the State still owes workers either the time or the money and it's costing a bundle to fight the legal challenges. Politically I may be a Democrat, but at the molecular level I seem to be a Socialist; I am never comfortable having more than others. He's misguided when he thinks that everyone who disagrees with his approach is merely greedy.

I strongly object to the insinuation that the people who depend on every dollar they earn every month are simply whining when they say they need that money. His statement that "the banks immediately offered" to cover workers' salaries if budget problems caused them not to be paid is patently false. IF you bank with a local credit union, and IF you have direct deposit, and IF the minimum wage threat took effect, it was announced last month that the credit union would cover your salary. But before that we were told no, they wouldn't. One reason was that it was possibly an ethics violation for State employees to receive 0% loans. No relief was ever offered for bridging the salary gap brought on by furloughs. If you don't have direct deposit at a participating credit union, you could apply for a loan at 4.9% and good luck with that.

Face it, movie stars and people with trust funds and others who do not depend on your salary every month to make ends meet, people who don't even know what the ends are -- you do not understand what it means to live month to month. It means so much more than the math of how much comes in vs. how much goes out. It means that every little incident in your life ripples out in unpredictable ways; ways that can be inconsequential, or catastrophic. There is a level of uncertainty that cannot be quantified continually taking its toll on your peace of mind. A leaking pipe, a broken down car, a sick parent, any routine little incident of daily life can spin your world into a dizzying spiral of calamity. That knowledge is always there. And it's not theoretical. At the least it's about threadbare towels vs fluffy ones, but it always carries the potential of food vs. hunger, safety vs. danger, life vs. death.

You Runs, I Chases

2010-07-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

This article at SF Appeal, San Francisco's online news'paper', prompted this comment from me:

No banning or outlawing or rule-making is going to stop dogs from being a potential danger that runners have to be prepared for. Unless we somehow manage to rid the world of dogs altogether. Or maybe we'd do better to rid the world of runners.... Neither of these ridiculous extremes solves anything. Any dog, no matter how well-bred and well-trained and well-cared-for, might respond in a dangerous and/or frightening way to a person running. The perfectly plausible scenarios are endless -- dog protecting a new baby; dog sees another dog playfully chasing and gets the wrong idea; dog's fence blows down and it finds itself unexpectedly at liberty in the wide world.... And none of those scenarios justify blaming anyone, dog or owner.

Animal lovers are a lot like English Majors. They measure their love by considering their version The Correct One, and those whose love (or grammar, or spelling) is expressed differently just don't love as well and are bad and not as good and neener-neener-I-am-holier-than-thou. I believe you can love animals and still have some compassion for humans. You can even love animals and consider a particular dog an asshole, pure and simple. I mean, really, they are individuals -- they can't all be noble help-meets; that'd be boring and kinda sick.

Runners have got to carry protection. One commenter mentioned several products -- pepper spray, some sonic thing, a stun gun...maybe you could use a phaser? -- to deter the random, typical dog from pursuing and/or injuring you. And runners should be able to use these non-harmful but very discouraging deterrents with impunity. Even if you find out afterwards that Fluffy was just wanting to tell you that your shoe is untied, it should be perfectly kosher, culturally, among us, to first mace any dog who rushes up to you, and ask questions later.

Although commenter Jayne's remark that every runner should bring a man along gave me a good laugh, I do agree that no runner should go out alone at any time of day or night without some kind of protection from unexpected encounters of all kinds. Golden Gate Park is a wonderful, magical, enchanting place, but it's not Disneyland. Nowhere is Disneyland.

Call Me Crazy

2010-06-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

We're not calling it a "diet." We're calling it a "menu." We want to get a handle on our sugar/simple-carb addiction, so we are following an adapted version of the South Beach Diet's "phase 1." Simplified, it's a lot of protein and vegetables, no fruit, no grains, no sweets, no potatoes, no corn (is corn a grain? Anyway, none of that). Considering that our family could probably go for days barely eating a vegetable and otherwise consuming ONLY starches, this is a fairly dramatic shift. We started Monday officially, Sunday night a little sorta.

To cheer ourselves up, we have sugar-free, fat-free Jello Instant Pudding (chocolate fudge flavor) with sugar-free Land-o-Lakes heavy whipped cream from a can at night after dinner. And it is, truly, quite cheering. And that worked so well that in the afternoons the girls and I make ourselves iced coffees, using the spray-on whipped cream as both creamer and sweetener. So, a lot of it is required in each coffee. We have not quite used two cans in two days. Of course there are four of us. Husband is at work in the afternoon, so he doesn't participate in the afternoon coffee fest. So, maybe that's more like 3.3 of us. Oh, who's counting?

No one. We're counting nothing. Fat does not count; calories do not count. We just want to get through from Monday to Saturday without eating any grain or sugar. It's now Wednesday and we're doing okay. Actually, Old Daughter is doing pretty well. She started feeling more energetic and perky after just over a day of eating more protein and veggies and less other stuff. Husband just always says fine when he is reporting his status. Make of that what you will. Yesterday Young Daughter looked like she thought she was a character in a Twilight movie -- humorless and self-pitying to an unnatural degree. Much better today already, but she's still pining for the noodles. Me, I am eating ceaselessly.

Here is some of what we've been eating. Add coffee and V-8 and nuts, and this is about the size of it:

Breakfast [I had imagined I would make things, like frittatas and omelets, but so far that has not happened even once. I just throw things into the skillet and scramble em]:

Egg and something, like smoked salmon or sausage or cheese & chives or canadian bacon
V-8 (we use the low-sodium kind and add salt. It's still probably lower sodium than the regular)

Snack:

Slice of turkey sandwich meat in a lettuce leaf w/cilantro mayo
A cheesestick or two and carrots
Hummus and cucumber
Celery and cream cheese

Lunch:

Caesar salad (with chicken or extra anchovies or something)
Cobb salad (with bleu cheese and canned crab]
Gazpacho and a hamburger patty
Taco salad with no taco, but salsa and cheddar cheese cubes okay

and more V-8

Snack:

Same as morning snack, or...

Mozzarella and tomatoes
Hardboiled egg and some crunchy veggie, maybe a bell pepper, or sugar snap peas [sugar! yay!! oops, sorry]

Dinner

Lots of SBD's (no, smarty, in this case it stands for "South Beach Diet") menu suggestions call for chicken or fish. I'm not taking advantage of too many of those good ideas because we just bought a quarter of a grass-fed cow and I am too stubborn to buy any other meat. So we are eating mostly steaks and ground beef. No complaints.

Like,

Steak and a salad and broiled tomato halves
Cheeseburgers with romaine leaves in place of buns (very messy, and actually, truly delicious)
Steak with spinach stuffed mushrooms and salad
Beef, cabbage salad (thinly sliced cabbage tossed with rice vinegar and a few drops of sesame oil), snow peas
Beef, asparagus, fennel salad
Beef, cauliflower mashed not-potatoes, green beans

And I already described our fabulous dessert.

Maybe I should've weighed or measured myself before I started this so I can dazzle you with the results. (I had to resist very hard the urge to put "results" in "quotation marks.") But, regardless of the numbers, if my kids and I can go three days without sugar or dough, and with very little suffering of any kind, I call it three days of WIN. (I guess three is a number. Whatever. I coulda just said "a few" -- still, it's all WIN WIN WIN.)

Meanwhile, tonight, for dinner, cuz we're on, you know, like, a diet, we had tasty, refreshing gazpacho, and this. Except ours had no feet, tails, or head and were DELICIOUS.

A Better Flour?

2010-06-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

I want to recommend Eagle Mills All-Purpose Unbleached Flour to you. But I'm not sure if I can. If the mere fact that I have been using it and love it is enough, then there's your recommendation. I have been using it (I guess I'm on my 30th pound...) and I do love it. I don't know much else about it though.

I buy it at Costco, but I've never seen it anywhere else (haven't looked), so I don't know if the price is competitive, I'm just assuming it is.

I use it for everything -- pie crust, cookies, bread, muffins, whatevs. It bakes up just like white flour, except not icky. It seems to have the good properties of white flour, light, crisp, flavorful but not dominating, without the bland, pasty, whiteness of white flour.

According to its package, it's just about perfect:

"All Natural"
"Replaces Other All-Purpose Flours Cup For Cup"
"Double the Fiber Of Other All-Purpose Flours"
"9 Grams of Whole Grain Per Serving"
"A Wholesome Blend of White and Ultragrain (r) Flours"

Uh-oh. That trademark symbol. That is not a good sign. At one time I searched the whole label and found something that reassured me about its content, but now I can't find it. Maybe I'd gone to the Eagle Mills website. I'll check and report back. But for now I'll just tell you that the ingredients say

"Ingredients: Unbleached Flour (Wheat Flour and Ultragrain (r) Whole Wheat Flour)."

Seems like it's gotta be GMO. Or something.

OK, here we are at at the Ultragrain Eagle Mills FAQ. All natural, all natural all natural. They're really touting the all-natural, cup-for-cup angle. Finally, way down the page:

"Is Ultragrain(r) genetically modified in any way? No, Ultragrain(r) is an all-natural, 100% whole grain product."

I don't know the law, but I think GMOs can be called all natural. They grow outta the ground after all. And being whole grain is not going to affect whether it is GMO or not, so the answer seems...can I use the word specious here? I'm gonna try it. Also, I don't know that GMOs are all bad. But, as we also don't know that they are all safe, I prefer to steer clear of them.

Anyway, as comforting as Ultragrain(r)'s "all natural" assurance may be, I also learn on this page that Ultragrain(r) is made by ConAgra Foods Inc. (sounds like the name of a recent movie, don't it dot dot dot). I have never known ConAgra to do anything for me that doesn't benefit them tenfold. And they are certainly willing to do do things that benefit them and do me no good at all. For instance these pies. This fairly neutral site gives a general sense of the nature of the company. The sense I get is that they aren't about the food. They're about the stockholders.

So, there you have it. I use this product, I like it, but I'm looking over my shoulder.

Follow Along With Kitchen Katastrophe!

2010-05-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

I woke up at three this morning, yes, 3:oo a.m. The thought of what my kid would eat while she was out all day with her class -- oh, you know, one of those bravery team-work adventure things that classes do -- struck a chill in my heart. I have been sick all week and the house is not at its toply hummingest. Do we even have packable lunch foods? She's going to be out exerting herself all day. That's a 100% increase over her usual level of exertion. I thought of my good old reliable whole wheat muffin recipe and got out of bed to start cooking. The muffins are reliable indeed and turned out well except for when it came time to turn them out. I used my non-stick heart-shaped muffin tins, and I even sprayed that nasty cooking spray in there. But the muffins still stuck. I had to pry them out with a lettuce knife (hey, it's thin, and it's plastic and it's not like I have any other use for it). Half of them came out split down the middle. But half of them came out okay. So that's okay.

Then I went on! I made these little mini muffin frittata things that I saw a recipe for yesterday. Once I looked at the recipe, I thought four eggs is not that eggie for 12 muffin cups, and I wanted to give her something with a lot of protein. So I added an egg. And I omitted the half an onion because I didn't feel like cutting up an onion at 5am. So, I mix it all up, mix mix mix, gotta mix a lot because our backyard hens' eggs don't mix as easily as store-bought eggs. I don't know why but I'm sure it's another indication of our eggs' betterness. I did not use my heart muffins for this. Just a regular ol' muffin tin. Yes, it's true, I didn't wash a single dish in between recipes. I'm on a deadline! She's gotta leave at 6:30.

I guess I over-filled my muffin cups, because I could only fill seven of them. I was expecting to make 12. And again, non-stick pan, icky spray, and they're all sticking to the pan like glue anyway. Not like glue, okay. I am able to pry them out. But they have clearly been traumatized by the experience. Gah. Am I going to have to start individually greasing each cup in each tin when I make muffin-shaped foods? What is this -- the middle ages?!? Next time I make this I will use more eggs, more flour, and perhaps a lower temperature and longer cooking time.... Anyway, they aren't bad. Her dad got up and ate one and he said it was good. I felt successful. I packed her a yummy lunch and snacks that would make any traveling athlete happy.

When she got up at 6 she reminded me that two months ago we wrote a check for eleven dollars -- to pay for her lunch and snacks at the event. She doesn't need to bring any food.

Now What Am I Getting Myself Into?

2010-05-10T01:24:00.000-07:00

Another thing to drain me of any pretense of "privacy"? For some reason the fact that I learned of Empire Avenue from Adriel Hampton makes me think, Oh, then it must be a good thing. I only "know" him from Twitter. But I've been following him for a pretty long time, and he's a public figure who seems to have values that I respect, so...so, yeah, like that means anything. Let's face it, we're living in a world where words like "privacy" and "know" make more sense in quotation marks. Which, I think, means they are heavily qualified by tacit yet widely understood qualifiers.

This Empire Avenue place says when I copy this code
EAVB_MCQPSUZQHL
into a blog post, it uh, verifies my blog. Or something. I don't know. The whole thing's so crazy! Hold me.

Not that you need any advice

2010-05-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

I started to make a kitty suggestion on Dina's facebook page, and then it turned into two, and they got a little long, and next thing you know, I'd exceeded the unspoken facebook wall page comment length protocol. So, instead of politely making it shorter, I just hauled the whole job lot over here.

Handy tip #1: with kittens, start trimming their nails now, while they are young and little. Do it ALL the time, like daily or even more often, with lots of cuddling and treats. Don't trim a lot, just teensy snips. You don't even have to actually trim them every time, just hold their paws and touch their claws with the trimmer. Make a life-long habit of trimming their claws. The more you do it, especially while they are young, the easier it is. If you can take care of their claws with regular, gentle trimming, the whole scratching question becomes a non-issue. Chris trims all four of our cats' and our dog's claws (if you do the math, that's a lotta claws).

Handy tip #2: Get a good, big, carpeted cat-tree and put it in a choice spot (near a window maybe, or in a part of the house where they can see who's coming and going, but feel unobserved....). Don't skimp on the cat tree. Get them something sturdy with lots of surfaces to lounge on and jump to and from and lots of scratching area. Play with them there. Pet them there. Give them treats there if they like treats. They will shred that instead of your furniture. You'll still end up with a shredded thing in your house, but at least this way you planned it. Generally they mostly shred from the bottom, so you may be able to buy some time by putting the tree behind something so at least the bottom half is obscured from view.

Handy tip #3: Don't play with them with your hands. Always use a toy or wear gloves. Otherwise, your hands are toys and even to the gentlest cat, play means claw use.

Handy tip #4: I hated this tip when I first read it, but it really does seem to be a good idea: multiple cats means one litterbox per cat, plus one. We are doing okay without the +1, but no matter how often you clean it, they really do seem to like to have their own territory.

Handy tip #5: I read this in some Cat Obsession magazine years ago, I'm sorry I can't give the originator of this tip credit...unknown tipster advised that you give your cat a bear hug every day, tight enough that they get the air squeezed out of them for a teeny moment. Especially indoor cats, this really does help them stay mellow.

Handy tip #6: Young adult cats can be pretty obnoxious. Their hunting play gets pretty serious and you are their favorite playmate. Kinda like dogs and humans, it's not the most pleasant time to live with them. Personally I ignore them during this phase. And then they grow to be comfortable, lazy companions. I know there are people who say that they want a lively playful cat, but you can't turn on and off the Play switch on a cat like you can on a computer or a dog. And they are naturally active at night. So, if you want someone to play with, be prepared to play when they want to.

Handy tip #7: You may have heard some fantastic tales about cats who will play fetch. It's true! Our family has had two cats who were committed fetchers and a couple who would indulge their humans when they were in the mood. My sister figured out the formula for bringing latent fetchery to the fore. She started by whenever she fed her kitten, Pebbles, she would say "Pebbles! Here Pebbles!" Even if Pebbles was already right there. Gradually over time Pebbles got to where she would come when called, just from habit. Pebbles also liked to carry her little toys around in her mouth. Sister called Pebbles while she was carrying the toy and Pebbles just trotted over. Sister took the toy and threw it, Pebbles went after it, picked it, and came when called again. In Pebbles's case that was all it took. She caught on and played every day with anyone. My mom had a cat who loved fetch so much he would drop slimey little scraps of paper into my mom's hand in the middle of the night while she was asleep, trying to get her to play. Many cats just aren't into it. And there's that whole middle range of the spectrum who can be encouraged to play along.

Handy tip #8: Let go. Let cat.

Obsessive volcanism

2010-04-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

Eyjafjallajökull (click the image to get the full effect)

Here's what I have learned about this volcano from going to Wikipedia and following many many links on the subject. If you'd like to retrace my steps, this is a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruption_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull

No idea how you really pronounce it, but the "listen" link on Wiki sounded kinda like: ai'yavuhlo'vik (they say it's pronounced AY-ya-fyat-la-yo-kult)

E-etc (sorry, I am way too lazy to type Eyjafjallajökull) is the name of a glacier; by Icelandic standards a small one. This smallish glacier, known as an ice cap, is over a volcano which has been erupting from time to time since the last Ice Age.

An ice cap is a type of a glacier that isn't a gigantic sheet, or stream, of ice. It's just a huge blob that covers everything around it, including mountains. The ice will flow from the highest point of the ice cap, called the ice dome, down in all directions.

Earthquakes in the area of E-etc became frequent in December 2009. In February geologists noticed that the Earth's crust in that area had shifted south about 3 centimeters--it shifted 1 centimeter in the space of four days. That's fast for crust. This told geophysicists that magma was moving from the crust to the magma chamber of the volcano.

A magma chamber is a large pool of molten rock under the Earth's surface.

Between March 3 and March 5 nearly 3,000 earthquakes were measured at the epicenter of the volcano. First volcanic eruption was 20 March 2010.

The area is not heavily populated. About 500 farms were evacuated. Flights to two airports in Iceland were postponed, but only for about 24 hours. On 22 March, the farmers were allowed to return.

This eruption was a fissure, 500 meters long, with 10 to 12 erupting lava craters spewing lava up to 150 meters into the air. So far it has formed a 200 meter long flow of lava.

"On 25 March 2010, while studying the eruption, scientists witnessed, for the first time in history, the formation of a pseudocrater during a steam explosion."

A pseudocrater looks like a volcanic crater but it is formed when lava passes over a lake, swamp, stream or other wet surface--in this case, a glacier. Pseudocraters do not have any connection to the magma below the surface as real craters do.

Another smaller fissure opened on 31 March. It shares the magma chamber with the first fissure.

This eruption is considered small by Icelandic standards. It did not happen under the ice, but instead in a mountain pass to the side of the glacier. This was good for the community because there is less flooding from melting glacial ice.

At first there was not a lot of volcanic ash from this eruption. But after two days an explosion sent eruption columns 4 to 7 kilometers into the air.

Eruption columns are the ash rising into the air out of the volcano. Everyone loves lava, but eruption columns are pretty danged amazing on their own. In a major explosion they can go 40 kilometers into the air, reaching the stratosphere. This can cause short-term climate changes globally as well as locally.

The volcano paused for a couple of weeks, then on April 14 the center of the glacier erupted about 20 times stronger. This eruption sent glacial meltwater flooding down the sides of the ice cap in two flows. 800 people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which is mostly farmland.

The cold water from the melted ice chills the lava and fractures it into tiny particles of glass that are carried up into the eruption column. This formed a plume of volcanic ash and glass that drifted eastward to Europe.

This sort of plume is a major hazard to aircraft. It can "sandblast" the windshield, preventing the crew from seeing. But more severely, the ash and glass are sucked into jet engines. The glass melts onto the blades and other parts which can cause jams and destroy parts.

The volcanic ash plume from E-etc has caused flights to be canceled all over Europe. An air traffic halt on this scale has never happened before. Although there hasn't been a crash from planes flying into volcanic ash, planes have flown through volcanic ash plumes in the past and it is very dangerous. It can cause the engines shut down and that's never good. Flights were canceled and airports closed starting in Norway on April 14; by April 16 flights have been delayed or canceled in at least 19 countries, including the United Kingdom. Several students at our school were on a trip with to the UK with their history teacher during break. They returned over the weekend. If their return were scheduled just a couple of days later, they would be able to give us a first-hand account of what it's like to need to fly in a land with no air travel. Many European leaders were just in Washington for the major nuclear summit with President Obama. Some of them are now stranded as they are not able to fly back to their countries. I read that the prime ministers of Germany and Norway both had to fly to Spain and then take a train the rest of the way (that's a long way by train -- Spain to Norway!)

As of April 17, weather and air travel authorities are not certain when flights will begin to return to normal. Other issues that arise when all air travel is halted like this are shipments and deliveries. The UK, for instance, imports 90% of its fruit.

The ash is dangerous for planes because it rises so high into the atmosphere. This ash plume, though it is causing so much trouble for aircraft, is not expected to cause health problems for the people who live under its path. It is too high to have a serious effect on the air we breathe.

However, it could have an effect on the weather. People in Europe will be able to see fantastic red sunsets as the sunlight slants through and reflects off of the glassy ash.

In the past, volcanic eruptions in Iceland have been severe enough to lower the average temperature of the Earth's surface by up to half a degree for one to three years. In 1821, a relatively small eruption began and continued with varying degrees of intensity through 1823. In 1783 a volcano near E-etc, called Laki, erupted for 8 months, affecting both summer and winter in Northern Europe to the extent that many crops failed and people starved. It is believed that Laki contributed to the French Revolution because of its effect on food crops.

East of the vent that is erupting now is a much bigger volcano called Katla. It is also under a glacier. It has been known to erupt when E-etc erupts. But... it is a volcano and cannot be relied upon to behave consistently.

P.S. I love Wikipedia.

Oh, and Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yahooeditorspicks/galleries/72157623855495574/

Relative Greetings

2010-03-07T22:33:00.000-08:00

Hi Dad!

Cripes. I've already blown it.

2010-03-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

I thought this sounds like a good little project -- I can't string the letters together right, but it's a take-off on NANOWRIMO, instead it's blog everyday for a month and you can pick your own month. Which is good for me because I don't seem to be novelable and because November is about the busiest month of the year for me. Lotta family birthdays. Anyway, I picked March. And then February -- well, you know how February is, it just slips out the back door while you're in the bathroom. You hardly know it's gone it comes and goes so quickly. So, yeah, I missed the first of March. Duh. Gives ya that gee-you're-a-dope feeling. I guess this is my warm-up month.

Harry Reid's "Negro" Problem

2010-01-10T16:07:00.001-08:00

I've read lately that Reid was instrumental in convincing Obama to run. He wanted Obama to be President. When a party is selecting a presidential candidate, the gloves are off. They are going to weigh every aspect of that potential candidate...is his nose too big? breath too bad? scream too shrill? hair too thin? accent too thick? mole too ugly? Politicians and strategists are in it to WIN. They aren't going to pretend to not consider *any* factor that could influence voters, no matter how petty or even insulting those considerations might be. At a cocktail party, or a chat over coffee, a white person discussing a black persons' blackness would be base and conniving. But in a presidential campaign, it's the nature of the beast. The party, and the candidate his- or her-self, have to examine that candidate under a harsh light and a very unflattering magnifying glass. No sacred cows.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Speaking of Baked Alaska...

2009-12-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

...we were speaking of Baked Alaska, weren't we? Well, SlowChristmas.org and I were. I made this comment on their Facebook fan page:

I made Baked Alaska for two birthday cakes in 2008 using Amy Sedaris's recipe in her funny yet practical "I Like You" cookbook. It's fairly straightforward. But for some of us, just baking a cake is a major undertaking. (I made brownies.) Maybe I'm just not a skilled enough cook to bake one component, have one frozen, one whipped to defy gravity, and then broil all of it at 500 degrees without burning and/or melting and call it easy. It's a lotta dishes and a lotta work. But it's delicious! and spectacular! and fun! I heartily recommend it, just don't underestimate what you're getting into.

Slowing Christmas is a great idea. You might want to be their fan too: http://www.facebook.com/slowchristmas

Grammar Police on a Rampage

2009-12-06T20:25:00.000-08:00

Here is a great list of 32 common grammar mistakes in English, very helpful:
http://helptutorservices.com/blog/the-32-most-commonly-misused-words-and-phrases/comment-page-14/#comment-989

However, it touches on a philosophical point for me, brought home by reading the comments on the page. Here's my perspective, as I commented on the post:

The more multicultural we become the more important it is that we be tolerant of each person's level of mastery of English. It is fine to feel superior if you have superior knowledge, but remember it's not actually a sign of intelligence or breeding or any other such nonsense. It's certainly not a sign of graciousness to hold someone's mistakes against them.

Turkey in France

2009-11-25T23:38:00.001-08:00

Dear Jane,
We have mostly nothing in common. My mom is a spectacular cook, I'm an okay cook, and it's too soon to tell for my daughters. I admire the life-choice of watching suns set and herbs grow in Italy, but here in Sacramento County, I can't see the western horizon and I tend to let my herbs parch and or bolt. I don't travel to report on travels or food or for any other reason, generally. When I write, it's ... well, like this.
BUT
I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner in Paris. In 1986 I was an au pair. At 25, I was old for an au pair, but there I was nonetheless. I had never cooked Thanksgiving dinner before. My mother, having no idea the difficulty of the undertaking, suggested I cook our national holiday dinner for my French family. She sent me a detailed shopping list and Thanksgiving-dinner-step-by-step how-to. The family I lived with was intrigued enough to agree to it. They weren't your typical French family, as you may already suspect. The mom, Helen, was a New Zealander and the dad, Thierry, was born in Egypt to a Swiss mom and French dad. They had an international circle of friends. But none who had ever cooked them Thanksgiving dinner. Especially in their own apartment. The shopping, of course, was the first challenge. Helen managed to convince her butcher that she really did want a turkey. She had greater difficulty convincing him not to stuff it for her, but she managed that too. I searched everywhere for cornmeal -- cornmeal stuffing is our family specialty too. They just don't eat that much corn in France, it seems. I finally settled on a small packet of polenta. Being the kind of person who is never organized enough to have buttermilk when I want to use it for cooking, I took care of that the same way I did even when I lived in San Francisco: put lemon in the milk. I knew how to make mashed potatoes pretty well. Lumpy with lots of cream and butter. Since I'd already ruined gravy multiple times on my home continent, I was sure I'd do that here too. Anything that had to thicken intimidated me. I know there was also some kind of green vegetable, but the only other menu item I remember is creamed onions. I held out little hope for their success.
My mother's instructions included how to "quickly" peel the dozens of teeny white onions. Helen, willing to go along with the other weird American traditions, scoffed loudly at peeling your own onions. She said, "I know an even quicker way," and showed me a big bag of the congellee ones from the all-frozen store. (Why don't we have those? I loved that place.) The onions turned out delicious, smooth, tender, creamy. I haven't included them in subsequent Thanksgiving dinners, I don't think I could top them. The turkey was even more challenging than I expected it to be. It was pure chance that it fit into the oven. Technically, I suppose that when your food presses against all four oven walls it doesn't really fit at all. But since we were using the turn-turn-turn method of turkey roasting, it was handy to be able to wedge it in there, held on its side, back, or front by the close fit. The turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and gravy were all, miraculously, delectable. I was the only American present. My co-hosts and nearly every guest told me how completely surprised, shocked, astonished they were that it was so good. They did not expect to enjoy a meal based on American cuisine. Maybe it wasn't so good considering the low expectations. I didn't even expect it to turn out. I have to give most of the credit to my mom's instructions. I questioned nothing. Except for using frozen onions, I did everything exactly as written. It is one of the great regrets of my life (I have a few) that I do not know what happened to those pages. I can still picture them. One page for each menu item. One page listing what to do when so that it would all be ready together. White pages, typed on an IBM Selectric. Everything centered. A few splatters of gravy.

Responding to Joy

2009-10-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

Here's my comment to Joy Green McGann's evocative post, (read it!) and her husband David's reply, about racism and all of us:

Great job, Joy. It's such a difficult thing to express--to explain to caring, loving, open-minded people that they are probably contributing to the perpetuation of racism in America. I have known this my whole life. When I'm not actively working against racism, I'm letting it happen. I know, even tho I'm a white lady, because I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood. I can relate to David's perspective of having lived as "different" although I was able to grow up and move away from my "differentness" in many respects. In other respects, it follows me wherever I go and inserts itself into all of my relationships. Obviously I'm not black. I don't blend into that culture/community. Not so obviously, I'm not completely versed in white culture either. I tire early of criticizing someone's punctuation errors or obsessing over whether my food is organic enough. So I live in both worlds in my own way. I don't need to raise awareness of life as a white person within black culture; every day is a lesson in whiteness. But I do try to bring a little perspective to the flip side of that coin. I try not to be too tedious, but I know my friends are sick and tired of hearing me say, "Think, what if you were black" every time they get pulled over or go on a job interview or have to explain their mistakes to an authority.

Mugcakes!

2009-10-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

Somehow, Larissa got it into her head that she wanted chocolate cake. Being the resourceful modern gal that she is, she Googled it and found this link: http://cocoa-chocolate.com/the-5-minute-chocolate-cake-recipe/

Yes. A homemade chocolate cake that you mix in a mug and bake in a microwave. And shock of shocks, it's pretty tasty!

As you can see, it rises pretty well.

Don't even need a potholder to take it out of the oven if your mug has a handle.

Light and fluffy.

Hey! It didn't occur to us at first that we could actually get it out of the mug, but it just slipped right out. Heck, we could even frost it if we wanted to go whole hog.

All in all, the experiment is judged a success. Although we did have to keep testing revisions. This first batch, we decided, had a bit too much peanut butter and baked a smidge too long.

Here's Lana, mixing directly in the mug.

Ready for the microwave.

Whoa, a little overflowy!

But tastes great! As you can see, Lana is quite astonished at her accomplishment. This one had 1/3 the peanut butter as the first cake. Judged better, but why add peanut butter at all?

Turns out Larissa is a tireless mugcake baker.

This one has no peanut butter and we cooked it just over two minutes.

Perhaps that's not enough cooking. But maybe that's not a bad thing.

I mean, doesn't that look...FESTIVE?

And, ultimately, mugcake hangover.

Grocery Policies I Follow or Wish I Followed

2009-10-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

I realized I have these policies as I stood in line at Walmart the other day. The woman in front of me easily qualified for the title of "morbidly obese," as did many of the other shoppers around us. Her cart was full to overflowing with pizza rolls, frozen hashbrowns, salisbury steak frozen dinners, chips, cookies, etc. She spent close to $300.

It made me hungry looking at all that greasy salty wonderfully snackiness. But it made me pretty sad too. I know how I feel after I've been particularly irresponsible or self-indulgent and eaten two or three of those kinds of things in one day. BAD. Maybe she was going to go to another store and buy some fresh foods too. But that seems doubtful; she must have a lot of kitchen space if she could bring home all that food and real food too. I couldn't help but imagine that I was seeing her staple diet. I hoped she didn't have kids.

To keep those bad-feeling foods out of my grocery cart, even though they seem like you get so much taste and satisfaction for so little money, I follow these simple rules:

Really, I do follow these:

No high fructose corn syrup.
Nothing with more than 25% of daily allowance of sodium. (Twenty-five percent! That's a huge amount. And some foods have even more than that. Astonishing.)

Hmmm, maybe those're the only ones I have virtually no exceptions for.

These, I follow, but I'm not rigidly blind about it:

No partially hydrogenated oils.
No "enriched" flour.

Makes it sound like we must eat that cardboardy brown pasta, if we eat pasta at all. But we do eat pasta and we don't eat cardboard! Barilla PLUS in the yellow box is great--better than most dried pastas at the grocery store. It's high in protein and fiber. A little more expensive, but if you are willing to stoop to shopping at Walmart, you can generally find it for under $2 a box. I used to not be able to resist Cheez-Its occasionally. Especially when they started labelling it as "Zero grams trans-fat per serving!" But it's still got partially hydrogenated oil, not to mention the white flour. They are allowed to call anything less than one gram per serving "zero grams." That's some kinda math, ain't it?

These I'd like to follow, but usually I feel too ...er, ah... fiscally compromised:

No factory-farmed meat.

And we are on our way to being able to follow this rule too. We've invested in a chest-freezer and are currently seeking out and tasting local grass-fed beef providers. If you buy it in bulk, it brings the price down significantly. I was at Walmart in the first place because I'd had a rendezvous in a nearby parking lot with Chris of Chaffin Orchards in Oroville to pick up some frozen steaks and roasts.

These I wish I could live without, but not sure life would be worth living if I did:

Bacon, hot-dogs, salami, cured meats in general.
Ice cream.

And although I don't have the gumption to even put "no refined sugar" on my list, at home I usually substitute honey or agave nectar for it and do not feel deprived in any way.

A couple of my responses to Sac Bee's commenting survey

2009-08-15T09:09:00.001-07:00

"Do you read comments?"
Typically I like to look at comments when reading news. But I've had to actively avoid reading Sac Bee's. So many hostile, vindictive, bitter condemnations of people in the news! I've seen this in other local papers too -- don't know if it's actually worse here, or if it just hurts more to see it here because I live here. Discouraging to think these commenters are the people in my community.

"When do you flag?"
Personal attack or violent wording. The "they deserve what they got!" comments directed at people who have suffered some terrible fate are sickening to read, but oh well, they're that commenter's opinion. But sometimes it gets very close to or crosses the line of "personal attack." I make a great effort to not be offended just because I disagree with the commenter's perspective, no matter how vigorously I disagree. However, any threat of violence, no matter how metaphorical, I think is unacceptable.

"What about anonymity?"
Oh, I see the conundrum. Anonymity allows the really hostile people to vent with no inhibitions (KluKluxKlan model of extremism). But part of what encourages comments in general is being able to just fire one off. Having to register is too much trouble, or invasive, or too much commitment. I've often started to comment at a site and then just clicked away when I realize I haven't already registered there and I don't want to bother to do it now. What really makes it easy are sites that use my Google or facebook ID.

Of course, the best solution: more intellectually active readers. Yeah, I know that's a pipe dream. But you could help. On Twitter I'm @pkapk -- have you noticed how frequently the reason I retweet a SacBee tweet is because of funny mistakes in the headline? Maybe better sentences from the Bee would generate better comments to the Bee? Like some kinduva karma zen mojo thing...

whoa, lame

2009-05-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

maybe it's just because i'm kinda sick and feeling kinda weak...but i can't think of a single on-going project that i'm working on. not of the kind that would ever have a 'completion.' i think this is a symptom of having no faith in myself no more. how lame!

a little catchup

2009-05-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

I got "Food Matters" by Mark Bittman as a Mother's Day gift from my kids and I LOVE it. I want to write all about how I love it and what I would add. But that just reminds me of what I want to write--and left hanging--about Sharon Astyk's book. So I'm gonna see if I can resuscitate that post. Then I can come back to this...and now I have two dangling posts....

Okay, so I'll give this post a little more substance before I leave it. Today is a beautiful, gorgeous day. Warm; it'll be hot later but right now, just plain loverly. I'm inside, but I don't feel too guilty about it. I can see our verdant yard from every window. I hear birds twittering, breezes rustling, and squirrels scolding outside, and light streams in from the skylight above me. It's quite nice in here. I like that about this house. One can appreciate The Day even if one is inside all day.

Oh, and I have some "No Work Whole Grain Bread" from Bittman's book rising on the stove. We'll see how it turns out. I didn't have enough of the right kind of yeast, so I improvised. I used the little bit of instant rise yeast that I had and then supplemented with active, which I proofed first even tho the recipe calls for just throwing it all in there. So. We'll see! It was impetuous--we actually happen to have plenty of bread right now. But I wanted to try it.

Daughter One is out with friends, visiting the Whole Earth Festival which we never attended (maybe once) while we were in Davis because I considered it too crowded. Now she's a big girl and can handle that sort of thing. Daughter Two and my husband/her dad are at (I hope) our new gym, having a swim. It may seem counter-intuitive that we are joining a gym even as we are transitioning to a rice and bean diet anaconda we are out of money...but finding a consistent way and means of exercising has become a health and well-being imperative. And we're doing virtually no other summer activities. This is our summer camp/class/trip and everything. And it's something that the whole family benefits from. Because we can't do everything should not mean that we don't do things that are important.

Book Review: "Depletion and Abundance" by Sharon Astyk

2009-05-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

The whole title is:
Depletion and Abundance; Life on the New Home Front; or, One Woman's Solutions to Finding Abundance for Your Family while Coming to Terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times.

By Sharon Astyk, who is described on the back cover as...

...a former academic who farms in upstate New York with her husband and four children, raises livestock, grows vegetables and writes about food, climate change and peak oil. Check out her widely read blog at sharonastyk.com.

My View
This is a book I loved and hated. I have found myself quoting from it and referring to it in conversations multiple times since I read it this winter. But as I read it, I had my pencil in hand to cite all the things that, while they may be true and right, just bugged me. I know the mere thought of it is revolting, but I'm going to share those citations with you.

I think my expectations of this book were perhaps unfair. I read "one woman's solutions" and twisted that into "everything I'll need to know to survive whatever calamaties lay ahead." It's not that. I'm still looking for my Martha Stewart of the Apocalypse. Sharon's not her. Sharon tells me a lot about what the "apocalypse" might look like and a bit too much about what might bring it on, and some about what to do to get ready for it and a little bit about how to cope when we're in it. I wanted this in different proportions. Mostly, I want the how to get ready and how to cope. I think that anyone who would read this book is likely doing so because they've already had a good dose of info about what could happen and why.

She uses Katrina as a case study of what can happen in a disaster--everything breaks down. And it's certainly true that we are likely not cognizant of how utterly dependent we all are on our civic infrastructure. It's not just electricity and water, although even if only those two are seriously affected for any significant amount of time the safety and security of everyday life are seriously compromised. Garbage, other power sources besides electricity--gas for instance, transportation, fire services, and all kinds of medical care, FOOD... In a true disaster, all of these things can be dimished or even completely unavailable. We saw it with our own horrified eyes on network television in a well-loved major American city. It can happen anywhere.

Okay, now I'm doing it too. It's such an easy point to make, it's very tempting to just park on it and hammer. But okay, we've got that. Astyk also emphasizes that what we saw is that we cannot rely on our government to prepare for and get us through this sort of disaster. Which I agree with. It's just not something politicians seem to be able to look squarely at. I was however, put off by her way of talking about "the government and the media" versus her own observations. She maintains that her observations are more realistic because she buys food and has to feed her kids and she can see the data on oil depletion. It's too easy to invent this entity of The Government, attribute characteristics to it (I think it's also called Straw Man in some versions of the story) and then compare yourself favorably to it. But this "government" of which you speak...it's just a bunch of people. So is The Media. In fact, Astyk, as an author and blogger, is The Media too. Every human has to eat. They aren't any less able to see what Astyk sees. Whenever we de-humanize our adversary, we've lost an important part of our argument.

The good point that Astyk makes is that by their nature governments follow, they don't lead. It really comes back to that great quote from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." That's us, guys. Let's get to it. Okay, we're at it already. Good. Let's keep on keepin' on then.

Another thing that sets off my alarms for less-than-rational arguments is the "things are so much worse now" argument. If you want to argue that point with regard to the burgeoning human population and its affects on the planet, okay, you've got the cards in your favor. But in pretty much any other context related to human behavior, it's a fallacy. Astyk asks, rhetorically I imagine, "Has there ever been a time when citizens felt so powerless to stop the forces that were driving them to disaster?" I'm no historian, but the Civil War era comes quickly to mind. I think of this argument as the "kids today, tsk tsk tsk" way of thinking. This argument just pretends or forgets that human nature hasn't changed one iota and the strife and conflict we face today is a problem of ...what? I don't know, it just seems like the arguer wants to blame someone. It seems to me that it would be more fruitful for someone who wants to convince us that we need to do things dramatically differently to argue that Hey! It's been like this forever and see where it's gotten us? We got turn this Titanic around--we gotta go in another direction because we don't want to be the same as we have been! Maybe that's too scary.

Here's an excerpt that I like, it reflects my feelings on this whole doomsday vision thing (but that doesn't mean I think it's reasonable.)

When I realized everything's going to change, I was at first afraid. Because I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren't going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?
But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that invovled changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.

I grew up worrying about The Big One(s). Either the Big Earthquake that would shake San Francisco into the ocean or Big Bomb that would flatten everything and cloak us in a nuclear winter. And I was conscious of a little piece of myself that almost wished it would just happen. To get it over with, for one thing, but also because getting it over with would mean starting over. Starting fresh. A new beginning. An even playing field. Like going all the way back to Eden. Utopia... Perhaps you can see how a little kid could get kinda swept along by this romantic ideal. I'm not saying that Astrk suffers from this childish notion. But I do have that as a reference point from which to listen to the folks who are so closely, relentlessly (hopefully?) monitoring for us our impending doom/rebirth.

2009-03-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Helen,

Sorry to have ignored you for a coupla days...in case you ever come back, here's how I make chicken stock in a slo-cooker: plunk in the picked over carcass and a peeled onion or two, sliced in half crosswise. cover with water. set cooker on low and go to bed. in the morning, after wondering for a while why the house smells so good, see the crockpot on the counter and remember your broth. pour the broth into a bowl (you could be fancy and strain it through cheesecloth). then transfer to jars (probably about two quarts) and refrigerate. later you can skip off the fat and make matzo balls.

2009-03-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

My comment in response to the comments at this econowhiner post veered off into a new subject, so I'm posting it here instead:

"...skipping the most basic grooming (brushing teeth) and tethering yourself to electronic time wasters will lead to clinical depression."

Isn't that kind of like saying that a sore throat and runny nose will lead to a cold? Once depressed, can we really just tell ourselves to stop exhibiting the symptoms?

I picture depression as the "hot lava" and our worthwhile quotidian activities as the pieces of furniture we hop around on to avoid falling into it. It's always there waiting for a few days not spent being useful and then schlkup it sucks you in. Is it a game, and we can just say 'that fall doesn't count cuz the cat hogged the end table' and get up on the coffee table? Or do we just sink lower and lower and glup gone under until mom comes along and says 'you kids get outside; don't waste this beautiful weather'?

Give it to me straight, Nate Silver

2009-03-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

So is it the apocalypse, or just time to knuckle down?

It's not the atomic bomb or a massive earthquake suspended over my head now, as it was throughout my childhood. Now it's the triple-whammy of global warming, peak oil, and economic collapse. One way or another, the whole house of cards is coming down. Some folks chuckle and say what a load of crap. They may very well be right. We got through the cold war without dropping The Big One (bomb). I got out of the San Francisco Bay Area without falling into the ocean. I think it's even been 30 years since the last time I read The Big One (quake) is definitely coming sometime in the next 30 years. Back then we were supposed to hide under our desks and keep flashlights handy.

Now it's global warming which means droughts *and* floods, water and food shortages; peak oil which means no lights, camera, action, heat or motion; and economic collapse which means "the check is in the mail" ha ha. Again, there are those who scoff. And there are those who get very earnest and pro-active. They wash and re-use their zip-lock bags. They bike to the food co-op. They stay warm with hand-knit sweaters. They use reclaimed bathwater to drench their little tomato sprouts.

I don't scoff. Maybe it's just my natural gullibility, but I think it all sounds pretty plausible. Ice caps melting, sea level rising, oceans warming, COsomethingorother increasing.... I mean I can SEE the air is bad, I know it hasn't rained for years -- air and water messed up, you messed up. Seems like fairly straightforward line of reasoning. What I question is, Is there any point to all this conserving, scrimping, saving, etc. How much longer have we really got? In addition to gullibility, I guess I have a natural fatalism too, because I figure if it's all going down the tubes, can't we just relax? Should 5th graders really do their homework? Will there even be colleges to go to?

Writing it down, its obvious that I'm CRAZY. But that is what my mind does to everything I attempt to accomplish each day. "Oh what's the use," says my defeated little mind, "we'll be back in caves in 20 years anyway."

I want some serious reassurance. Or I want to make long-term decisions that are in line with our real long-term situation. I don't want global warming denyers. That is mostly motivated by greed, near as I can figure. And the Save the Earth crews have been messaging so hard that it's REALLY BAD WE'VE GOT TO ACT NOW they've skeert me right off the checkerboard.

What I need is Nate Silver. Give it to me straight, Nate. What are our odds?

Oh crappy shitshit

2009-03-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

I guess this is an example of why I don't want my kids reading my blog.

Right. I'm not even going to write this. Because someday they will. Without a doubt, someday they will.

A Recipe, with chocolate (and little else)

2009-02-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

Here's my entry in The EconoWhiner's Chocolate Recipe contest:

Keenly Nostalgic Chocolate Covered Graham Crackers

Sorry, I don't know how to make a good Graham Cracker, but Joe does. So the first ingredient is

A box of Trader Joe's Cinnamon Grahams (the good kind, in the clear plastic boxy package that you can use again after)

And the second, and last, ingredient is

A coupla cupsa semi-sweet chocolate chips (get the giant bag of Nestle's at Costco. The bag itself will be over budget, but you won't use it up all in one recipe. IRREGARDLESS, don't get cheap chips.)

Okay, that's it. Only two ingredients. So follow directions and get the good stuff.

Now, cover a large tray or baking sheet with waxed paper.

Put your chocolate chips in a Pyrex bowl and microwave on medium power for 40 seconds. Take them out and stir well. Easy now, don't beat them, just gently but decisively stir. It may not be a "them" anymore; and that's the idea, to make it an it -- a bowl of melted chocolate. If it's still a them, put the bowl back in the microwave on half power for 15 or 20 seconds. Once the chips get started melting, a lot more will melt just from stirring. So don't stop stirring prematurely. But don't keep stirring fruitlessly either for pity's sake, use your good judgment.

[Unnecessary details: Skip this paragraph if everything's going fine. If, however, your chocolate is a dried out looking paste, it got too hot. You may be able to let it cool, then try melting it again, this time at lower power. Or you may not. If not, just add a coupla tablespoons of cream, or even water, maybe a few drops of orange or rasberry extract and melt it till it's liquid and you've got yourself a lovely chocolate sauce for ice cream. But it won't work for the grahams because once you get even a leeetle drop of water in there, it won't return to it's non-melty state. That's why I don't recommend the whole melting-in-a-pot-over-a-pot-of-steaming-water double-boiler technique. That can lead to itty bitty drips of water in your chocolate. But go ahead and do it that way if you prefer. The worst that can happen, after all, is two delicious cups of ice cream sauce. Carry on.]

Where were we? Right, we've got our smooth, glossy melted chocolate here and our grahams here. Dip em! Then set them on the waxed paper, not too close together. Your fingers will get messy. Hint: use one hand to pick up the dry grahams and the other to dip and set down the chocolatey grahams. Continue until you've run out of crackers, chocolate, patience, space, or time or until some outside force acts upon you.

Put the trays in the fridge if it's warm in your kitchen and there's room in your fridge. Or leave em out overnight. Either way they'll harden. Then you can put them back into the box they came out of, only now they don't all fit, which is not a problem because they will be gone soon.

Why's my picture blacked out?

2009-02-15T23:31:00.000-08:00

I blacked it out in support of Internet users in New Zealand. A law, Section 92A, is set to go into effect there that will force Internet Service Providers to cut off the service of anyone accused of downloading or using pirated or copyrighted material. Accused? Cut off. That's not right. Check out http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html if you'd like to learn more. Google "New Zealand Section 92A" if you really want an earful.

A Good Dinner

2009-02-15T13:23:00.001-08:00

Roast chicken (Just a chicken, salt&peppered -- maybe a few garlic cloves stuffed inside, roasted at 450degrees till it's 165degrees. Pour white wine into the roasting pan to keep the drips from smoking too much.

Baked potatoes. (Use that oven. Work it, work it!)

Steamed broccoli. (I make a "dip" of mayo and plain yogurt. A squirt of lemon juice if we feel fancy.)

If ambitious, make stock of neck and giblets with an onion while chicken roasts. Use this and the white wined pan drippings to make gravy.

Simple and delicious.

After dinner, throw the carcass into the crockpot with another onion, cover with water, and let crock overnight. In the morning, strain it, cool it. In the afternoon make chicken noodle soup with broth and throw in any leftover chicken from the roast.

My Mortgage Company and How It Loves Me

2009-02-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

Got a notice from First Horizon about how I could SAVE $80,069.80 on my mortgage! Isn't that sporting of them to look out for me in this way?

All I gotta do is sign up for the "Equity Accelerator Program." That's where they deduct my mortgage payment right outta my checking account every two weeks. They'll take a teeeeeeeny bit more than half of my monthly payment every two weeks. That teeeeeeeeny bit more, $8ish, won't hurt a bit and will add up so niftily that I'll save tons of interest over the course of 29 years. I'll have more equity in my house sooner and pay that much less -- $80,000! Isn't that swell? I feel so loved and nurtured by dear old First Horizon. Some MBA works there and came up with this beautiful program to help simple people like me.

/sarcasmOff

As it happens, I can read tiny letters as well as the bold print. In the tiny letters they mention that they'll charge me a one-time $49 Enrollment Fee. Oh, and a monthly Participation Fee of $9.00. Not sure why, since I could set this payment schedule up all by myself with my bank's online payment service, which costs me not a thing ($0).

It also happens that I have an MBA of my own in the house. Well, my husband has one, but he's in the house with me having it. And he's clever enough to notice that it's not the leeeeetle monthly increase in the payment of $8ish. It's that by paying every two weeks (26 payments per year) instead of monthly (12 payments per year) we'll end up making three payments some months. That'll hurt, especially since we only get one paycheck a month. It's those two extra payments per year that make the real difference in the faster interest paydown, not just the $8/mo increase. That part I might not have noticed by myself. Gotta fight MBA-think with MBA-think.

Imagine going to grad school and then getting a job coming up with near-scams like this for a living. How demoralizing that must be, poor soul.

A good use of one's life

2009-02-07T10:26:00.000-08:00

Watching TV and broadcasting your snarky remarks to all and sundry. May sound trivial, even pointless. But if you're Ana Marie Cox, using Twitter, and livetweeting CSPAN stimulus talks...it starts to seem worthwhile for all.

Good singin'

2009-02-06T12:02:00.000-08:00

Saw the Sacramento Children's Chorus and the RSVP Choir perform last night in a free benefit for W.E.A.V.E. (Women Escaping A Violent Environment). Great concert! As well as the choirs there were drummers, piano, violin, guitar, flute, bass playing on different songs. My favorite was the one about California's mild weather. Funny and beautiful, and timely. I didn't get a program so I can't credit anyone particularly, but if you see this and you're in the area, and you're free tonight, there's one last concert in the series -- go! And if none of the above is true, you still might want to throw some love at WEAVE. They are a terrific organization, doing a lot of good in our community. As is RSVP, for that matter. The RSVP Choir is all-volunteer, and all of their concerts benefit community organizations like WEAVE.

Economic Life Blather

2009-01-27T09:57:00.001-08:00

Maybe it's good to be a little scared, like seriously wary, on high alert, like a mouse who has to run out for a berry when the owl is on the wing. It can be invigorating. It's like we've been numb for the past 30 years and now the feeling's coming back as a tingling in our fingers and toes.

Last night we drove over a high arching bridge in a dark rural area. My daughter wondered how we could be sure the road continued beyond the black horizon which was all we could see. It really did look as if we'd go over the crest and then --------- free fall. We drove on. The road did continue beneath us. We felt lucky.

We've been a one-income family ekeing out a living on credit cards for eight years. We're fairly safe from losing that one income, but in this environment "fairly" isn't so safe.

Gaza on my mind

2009-01-22T11:05:00.000-08:00

My friend Miguel shared a link to this great article by Gideon Levy, a dissenting voice in Israel. An excerpt:

We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel's image.

Thanks, Miguel. This guy does a great job of making a point that has been really bothering me: How could the Israelis do this to *themselves*? How could they do it to the people of Gaza is sickeningly mystifying on its own; it makes the first question seem trivial, but it's still a deeply troubling question. I'm amazed, in fact, to realize just how deeply troubled I feel by it. I don't have any particular emotional attachment to either Israel or Palestine, but I just can't get this off my mind. It's really a nightmare emotionally, morally, politically -- on every level.

Surprising to find what I've been doing.....

2009-01-21T23:09:00.000-08:00

I musta clicked something somewhere, and I guess it worked, which I guess I wasn't expecting because I was a little startled to drop by here and find a poll, with buttons and everything, as one of my blog entries. I guess I'll leave it up until something alarming, not just startling, happens because it is an issue that I just can't get out of my mind. But it is so not a subject that can be even approached with a "YES" or a "NO." I think that's a major symptom of the problem. Not enough acceptance that YES and NO are both true at the same time. It happens.

MicroPoll : Should the U.S. have stepped in to stop the bombing of Gaza?

2009-01-17T09:41:00.001-08:00

View Poll |View Results

Website Polls PoweredBy MicroPoll

DON'T FEED THE MONSTER

2009-01-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

The Do Not Click List
Sarah Palin
Any Member of SP's Family
Joe the Plumber
Wurzelbacher
Michelle Bachmann
Ann Coulter
American Idol
Virginity Auction
Any Fox News
Inauguration Attire

The Limited Clicks List
Rod Blagovich
Caroline Kennedy
Faked Suicide
Sasha and Malia
Celebrities' Opinions

It's not that subtle

2009-01-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

If you're dealing with a culture in which the people are more than willing to die for their beliefs or for vengeance or to make a point, killing them is not going to work as a negotiating tactic. It only kills. And makes you look bad. Very, very bad.

This description from Bob Moriarity is especially chilling:

The Gaza Ghetto is 139 square miles, about the size of Philadelphia or Seattle. Within the Ghetto 1.5 million people live in abject poverty with an unemployment rate of 65%. It's one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Israel maintains a total and complete blockade on the Ghetto (In comparison, the Warsaw Ghetto contained only 500,000 people)

Freakish Realization

2008-12-31T14:20:00.000-08:00

2009 marks the beginning of my second half-century. ahem.

I loved this comment -- no, LOVED it

2008-12-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

Here's an off-topic comment from the EconoWhiner blog. The blogpost is about tasting cheap wine. The commenter went off on her own topic...whining and economics. I'd love to read more of her, but googling her turns up no hits .... not even this comment. Roberta Shearson, where are you? Who are you? Tell us more!

[i write this as my heater blasts]

Roberta Shearson

Cut your energy bills, and you can buy more wine.

Respect the British Thermal Unit(BTU); don’t throw them away. (The BTU is a unit of energy, like the dreaded calorie, only bigger.)

For example, consider the BTU and natural gas.

You buy natural gas in units of one thousand cubic feet. That is what the letters MCF on your gas bill mean. This winter, one MFC (1,000 cubic feet of gas) is predicted to hit $20 in Ohio where I live. A few years ago the same quantity of gas cost $5.

I have a keen interest in natural gas at $20 a MCF. My house is planted square on the bank of beautiful Lake Erie. In the winter, the Lake morphs from balmy blue to howling wilderness. Here the wind roars, fresh from Canada, over 60 miles of ice at speed 70 mph. Temperatures cower in the teens for weeks on end. In brief, prime BTU territory.

Now one cubic foot of natural gas at normal pressures contains around 1,000 BTU, so one MCF of gas has 1,000,000 BTU.

Wow! you say, that’s at lot of BTUs for only $20. What a bargain! Well, hold on. A small, forced air gas furnace burns 50,000 BTU in one hour. That’s one twentieth of a MCF of gas up in smoke (or, to be more precise, up in carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and water). So every hour your furnace runs, it burns up $1 of your hard-earned money. If your furnace is on 8 hours a day (a reasonable time), your basic monthly gas bill will be $240. That’s just for the furnace. Add the cost of heating water, drying clothes and cooking dinner if these appliances are also gas. If you have a 100,000 BTU furnace, your bill will be $480. This plus a flat service fee of $12.50 for the gas company to read your meter and fiddle around with their service lines. And don’t forget the tax.

So what’s my savings plan? Insulating and installing thermal pane windows are, of course, the first step. Then turn down your hot water tank to 120 degrees and wrap it in an insulation blanket. Buy some clothes line and abandon your clothes dryer.

Now the BIG step. Install a programmable thermostat for your furnace. Set the thermostat for 45 degrees (45 is as low as regular thermostats go) at night and 50 degrees in the daytime. This will get you to a point where the furnace runs one to three hours a day.

The temperature of your house at night is relevant only to your water pipes. You yourself will not be cold. Breathing 45-degree air puts you, not to sleep, but into coma. You will sleep like baby. Don’t worry about having to go to the bathroom. Feet hitting the 45-degree floor will cause your bladder, normally not a thoughtful organ, to reconsider the severity of its distention.

In the day you must dress as your stalwart pioneer ancestors did. Put on long underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, and finish with a wool sweater and a wool vest. A wool tube scarf and fingerless gloves add a nice touch. (But don’t answer the door bell clad in scarf and gloves. You will be hauled off to the funny farm.) These wool garments should be knitted with 5-ply gansey wool or merino wool and with fine stitches–7 to the inch. (Try the Goodwill.)

Above all, don’t sit down. This means getting rid of you TV. No TV reduces your electric bill slightly and eliminates the cable bill altogether.

Above all, keep busy.

Also buy a small electric heater and run it when, for some reason, you are forced to sit down, for example, when you’re paying your gas and electric bills or calculating your income taxes.

You may actually save on the electric bill by running a small,700- or 800-watt electric heater for a few hours a day, that is when you are absolutely must do the no-no, i.e. sit down. This is because, even though you had added the heater, the electric fan on the furnace will be running less.

The scientific, small-heater theory is based on the fact that the heater warms mostly YOU…not vast empty spaces in far off rooms, or the pictures on the wall, or already well-clad, over struffed furniture, or any other such inanimate object. These things have no interest in heat and being warm. (The exception is your piano. Heat, causing excessive dryness alternating with summer dampness, is not good for it.)

Another idea from the treasures of thermodynamics. Remember the Second Law–i.e. everything tends to go from bad to worse or, put another way, houses can easily go from toasty-froasty to lukewarm and then on down to wintry. The speed at which this terrible process happens is directly proportional to the temperature difference between the bad and the worse, in this case, between the inside and the outside of your house. The hotter your house, the quicker it loses heat. Read: money. (Picture a child in a white dress eating a chocolate ice cream cone on a very hot summer day. Nature abhors temperature difference and color contrast!) On a cosmic scale, the ultimate purpose of your furnace is to heat the great outdoors. So the more you crank up the thermostat, the faster the furnace accomplishes its divine mission.

So stop whining. Turn down your thermostat. I dare you.

Hey, it works for me. I’m seventy years old. If I can live and thrive at 50 degrees, so can you. I haven’t had a cold in two years. I read that flu and cold viruses like cold, but I think even they have a threshold of discomfort below which it’s not worth their effort to go out and find a nostril to crawl up.

Why my grandfather, born in the last year of the Civil War, told how, as a boy, he woke up with snow on his bed covers. He had to break ice in the water pitcher to wash his face in the morning. He went “on the Lakes” (in Ohio that phrase means to became a sailor on the Great Lakes) at the age of thirteen–his early years spent on sailing ships. You can bet he was cold. In his later years, and much to my mother’s horror, he bragged that he took a bath only once a year, at which time he also changed, most unwillingly, his long-johns.

Now there was a man for you–frugal,hardy–no whiner he.

November 20, 2008 at 9:47 pm

A good blog about the economy and real humans

2008-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

Here's my comment to today's EconoWhiner post:

Don't let your friend's experience with the bankrupt 26-year-old put you entirely off the idea of giving them a set amount (say, a hundred bux) and letting them take care of their own needs. That's exactly what we've done with our daughter for the past year and it has worked very well for all of us. Maybe there's more to the snippet of that story that you told -- maybe? okay, clearly there's more. There are more dots on the line between a 15-year-old with financial responsibility for his own clothes and lunch and a 26-y-o going bankrupt. For one thing, in an economy like this, I don't think we can cavalierly attribute catastrophic credit card debt to careless spending. In this climate, one could go bankrupt just buying groceries and paying rent.

Melissa Etheridge and Rick Warren

2008-12-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

I like Melissa Etheridge's statements in her HuffPost post. An excerpt:

Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Jotting

2008-12-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

I've been using Jott, mostly in the car.

I'm always lamenting that while I'm driving I'll think of something clever or something I need to do later, and then never think of it again -- or even worse, remember that I thought of something worth noting but can't remember what it was.

This Jott thing, see, addresses that lament. While I'm driving, or anytime, I call Jott, say "Jott Notes," then say what I want to note and hang up. Later I can log on and all my notes are there for me on my Jott dashboard. If I wanted to pay a little monthly fee (I think it's $3.95/mo for the cheapest plan), I could Jott directly to my Google calendar or other link. Even for free I can Jott to twitter (where I am paprikapink, in case you wondered. So far it's another thing I'm not so sure about.)

So far, Jott is okay. My car's hands-free phone speaker is not okay. "Did you say 'call job?' Did you say call jog?' ... and then when I do reach Jott, some of the transcriptions of my notes are less than helpful. When they jumble "Cassini" into "messina" that's no big deal. I can unscramble that by deduction or from memory. But "Ask Carolyn to check" -- what's that mean? I know one Carolyn, but I didn't jott about her, I don't need to check anything with her....I think I said something completely else, and I'm left back in paragraph one. I blame the speakerphone for these miscues.

It's a potentially useful tool. Could stave off dementia for months. But it may take me months to get efficient at it, so, could be a wash.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown Urges Repeal Of Proposition 8

2008-12-20T08:31:00.001-08:00

If you factor in that this is a society founded on the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state .... does that help? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are our rights. That includes practicing your religion as you see fit, and not infringing on anyone else's life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
About Gay Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Not Another Word on Gay Marriage Until They Execute an Adulterer

2008-12-20T08:22:00.001-08:00

@DeAne: I civilly disagree. Thank you for making your point so thoughtfully. I think you've hit the nail on the head.

At this point is it even about "marriage" any more? It's getting to the point where it's just one group wanting to invalidate the other's beliefs. Marriage has become the stick we're beating each other with. And meanwhile, some innocent (gay) bystanders get left out in the cold.

If your child were gay, would you want him or her to grow up knowing that society wouldn't recognize them as equal -- equally decent, equally deserving of legal protection and recognition, equally whole and human? Can you imagine how that must affect a young person? These people fighting for gay rights are fighting for the dignity and self-respect of generations to come. They've already had the internal fight to find out for themselves that they really are human, their feelings are real, their love matters.
About Gay Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Not Another Word on Gay Marriage Until They Execute an Adulterer

2008-12-20T08:13:00.001-08:00

They're adulterers and they're gay too. In fact, there is no "they." We are all all of these things. None of us have any business going all righteous on anyone else. These poor misguided people who think a god cares who we snuggle with, they need our love and compassion.
About Gay Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Green Myths

2008-12-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

Read the whole article by Matthew McDermott at treehugger.com. The article includes references to back up the claims. Here's a brief summary:

Green Myth #1: Genetically Modified Crops Have Higher Crop Yields and Help Reduce Poverty

But really the only ones benefitting from GMOs are the companies who make them.

Green Myth #2: Clean Coal Technology Will Solve the Coal Pollution Problem

No one believes this, do they? Coal is dirty, dirty, dirty period. Okay, maybe that's too negative -- maybe someday they'll figure out a way to make coal clean; but for now, just reducing the carbon emissions doesn't come close to making it "clean." At all.

Green Myth #3: Developing Nations Need to Stop Having Babies

Uh, how 'bout developed nations stop using up all the resources and generating so much trash and pollution? Spread out the resources and an evening-out of birth-rates is a likely consequence. Even if not, we've still gotta stop hogging the Earth. Also, this article doesn't mention it, but aren't people in developing nations living longer? If undeveloped nations are supposed to birth less, shouldn't develop nations share the burden and die more? The whole line of reasoning is unsound and inhumane.

Green Myth #4: Wind Turbines Are a Serious Threat to Birds

Our pet cats and windows are killing as many if not more.

Green Myth #5: Small Green Steps Won’t Make a Big Difference

This is the myth I fall prey to. It's easy to get discouraged. But at least taking small steps puts you on the moral high ground. And from there you can make a much better argument for the big steps.

Heartbreaking

2008-12-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is America....this is part of all of us. It has to stop. This story needs to be read.

Katrina's Hidden Race War

A.C. Thompson : Law & Justice

White vigilante justice tore through New Orleans after the storm. But no official investigation has shed light on the violence.

Shhhhh

2008-12-17T23:03:00.000-08:00

The cat is licking the tablecloth.

Don't worry, we put on a new tablecloth every day. Well, most every day.

From "The Big Storm Picture" blog.

2008-12-13T09:28:00.000-08:00

I love those moments when the sky is dark and roiling and the earth is bright and bucolic.

What makes me want to chime in? Why can't I shut up?

2008-12-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

Again, I'm provoked to comment. Comments are so useless. I really appreciate it when blogs have no comments field because who the hell reads them and I don't seem to have the will power to just "let it go." This time it was some parenting blog at the NYTimes talking about that movie "Orgasmic Birth."

I am astounded, amazed, dismayed even, by the number of commenters who feel that their own birth experience qualifies them as authorities on what other women's experience could possibly be. Some of these commenters haven't even given birth, they've only observed it. I don't care if you've had 12 kids -- 17! You're still only one woman and you can't know what's it like for anyone else. We're not all exactly the same. Everyone responds differently. Sheesh, how many people do you know who are tender-headed, vs others who can have their hair yanked with a brush and not complain? How many people do you know who love cilantro? And how many hate it? And yet you think that birth is going to be a uniform experience? BIRTH??

It's also interesting to see how vehement the commenters are who feel that birth = pain. "It hurt me and you'd better believe it's going to hurt you too!!" Maybe it will hurt you, I hope it doesn't. Mine didn't hurt. It was long, hard work, and it wasn't comfortable, but it never hurt. I don't know if the fact that I went into it open to the idea that it didn't have to hurt contributed to that or not. I did, now that you mention it, have an experience at transition that was very similar to an orgasm. My husband had nothing to do with it -- I was in the "don't touch me, I'm working" camp of laboring mothers.

more on oprah (no pun! no pun!)

2008-12-11T08:31:00.000-08:00

I had to chime in to Gretchen Rubin's blog with this:

Don't we all know someone (or are we that someone) who looks at an overweight person and sees someone who is "lazy" "greedy" "weak willed"...that judgement is so strong in our culture. I think it is a misguided, unkind, and frankly, ignorant view of others. Just as we now understand alcoholism to be a disease, I think we have to learn that there is a powerful physiological aspect to hunger and cravings. Even if you are someone who has lost weight personally and you feel very successful, you don't have the perspective to declare that anyone else's experience would be similar. We can't use ourselves as a case study for the rest of the world. Doing the same thing that someone else is doing is not the same as being them doing it. Maybe you have more insight than someone who has never been on the same path, but stow the judgement. It's not helpful.

I was actually responding to a comment more than to Gretchen.

Is religion weird?

2008-12-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

Saying magic words as we slit an animal's throat, wearing clothes that cover certain parts of us and expose others, this one's okay to eat -- that one's not, having a guy in funny clothes say special words before we become a couple, it's all made up. We made this stuff up because we needed it at one time in history for something... maybe to protect us from real threats like tainted meat or inbreeding, but usually, it seems, to scare someone less powerful into doing what someone else needed them to do. Like accept their miserable living conditions and work like slaves to build big buildings or grow cash crops instead of food and tithe, tithe, tithe. That kind of thing. In most cases these beliefs aren't necessary anymore, they're optional. But we've grown dependent on them. Or something...they're fun? What? Why do educated modern people accept these stories as reality? Do they think they would run amok without these restraints, dictates, decrees, commandments? Why do we have to have all these rules and rituals to believe in some other more powerful thing than ourselves? What about considering the possibility that that Thing does exist, but it's up to us to figure out for ourselves the right way to live? Too scary? What?

Bullets in Bollywood: No Eid For Me

2008-12-10T09:45:00.001-08:00

Sometimes it seems like the most amazing miracle of all is that there are any people anywhere living in peace. But there are. At any given moment, somewhere someone is serene, healthy, secure, happy. It's hard to believe but it's true.
About Mumbai Attacks
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Oprah: "I'm Mad At Myself, I'm Embarrassed" Over Weight Gain

2008-12-09T16:39:00.001-08:00

Oprah! Stop it. You're beautiful -- gorgeous, fabulous, magnificent. Don't be any different than you are and don't beat yourself up for not being something that's just a phantom. Your size is not a matter of self-control, or greed, or laziness. We'll never be healthy when we're telling ourselves crap like that. We don't criticize people with allergies for having runny noses. We don't condemn people who need glasses. The foods we crave are our responses to our body's nutritional deficiencies and imbalances, not to mention just being hungry. I'm just y'know, a person who eats, but I'm really convinced that our dependence on simple carbs has created a nation of addicts, all loathing ourselves for not having control of our dependency. We've learned better about cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, alcohol -- you can't just decide to quit and be done with it (okay, some people do, but they are the exceptional exception; we should put them in labs and study them). Cravings are a true physical drive that we don't have as much control over as we imagine. I don't believe this thinking that it means that we can't control our health and we are all just doomed to be fat and diabetic. I think that when we accept that it's an addiction we can finally respond appropriately and really care for ourselves.
About Oprah
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Sandra Samuel, Mumbai Nanny, Moves To Israel With Boy Orphaned By Attacks

2008-12-09T08:50:00.001-08:00

"...a recent widow has left her own two sons and her homeland..." Why such a fleeting reference to her family? If they are adults, why not throw that word into the sentence so we have the right picture of what's happening. When I was 44 my kids were 5 and 8 years old.... And I've known enough nannies even here in the US who have had to leave their own kids unsupervised or with grandparents so that they can take a job babysitting someone else's kids. Sometimes it almost seems as if there's an unconscious perception that one socio-economic group's kids are more valuable than another's, even to the people in the "less valued" group. It's a romantic ideal of the nanny who loves your kids so much she'd even put their needs above her own or even her own kids' needs. No one can live up to it. Instead we install nanny-cams and measure the level of bourbon in the open bottle.

I don't intend to diminish any of the importance of this woman's role in Moshe's life. But why couldn't the article acknowledge what the cost is to her and her family?
About South Asia
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

what's the thrill?

2008-12-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

what? do i think there's going to be a check in my email? why do i want to open my laptop first thing every morning? next thing every morning? right when i come home from anwywhere? after every task i complete? i go back and open it up again. check my email. check the news. check my recommendations. check ... uh, let's see, there was another thing i was going to look up, i know....well, i'll check the news again. check for recipes. checked everything. time to get up. get busy. check my email one more time. check the news. check my buddy's blog. okay, i'll find out what jennifer said about angelina. check my horoscope. check the news. oh, hi kids! did you want breakfast? i'm busy!

Giving Me Something to Say

2008-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Gretchen Rubin's Happiness blog and been moved to comment lately. In a recent post, she quotes Jung:

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” --Carl Jung

Which elicited this from me:

I can't say that it's always true, but I've also found that the things we say to another that they do that they shouldn't...are what we do. I say "we" not just because I write funny; I first noticed that on more than one occasion a close co-worker or friend, if we had a frank airing of grievances would "grieve" at me my exact grievance of them. This made me aware of it and gradually I realized that the things I wanted to tell my husband that he was doing that he should stop...were things that I was doing. It's not always true, but frequently enough that I've found it's a very accessible way to get true insight into my own, uh, foibles.

"Don't Perform Random Acts of Kindness"

2008-12-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

My comment on Gretchen's post:

There once was a time when there were lots of op eds and headlines about the elements in our society committing "random acts of violence" and "senseless cruelty." Naturally, this morphed into a bumper-sticker: "Commit random acts of kindness and senseless beauty." It set of little alarms for me, because we were still in the "random acts" business. It sounds accidental which would make it prone to misdirection, misinterpretation, mistakes. Maybe if we substitute "spontaneous" we'd be moving in a better direction. I think this is what Gretchen was getting at. Plotting "I'm going to do X to the next person I see" has a nefarious feel to that next person. Being genuinely, mindfully open to seizing the many opportunities to be kind and compassionate to each other that present themselves throughout each day, that makes the world a better place. Forgiving the guy who took your turn at the four-way stop-sign is a start....

California Gay Marriage Banned As Proposition 8 Passes

2008-11-05T09:58:00.001-08:00

I feel terrible about this proposition. We care more about chicken's rights than human rights? I feel I bear a lot of responsibility for this proposition passing. I didn't donate money, I didn't volunteer time, I didn't even put up a freakin' sign. I didn't think it would make any difference. I was giving what little money I had to Obama's campaign. But the Obama campaign has clearly demonstrated that the little things that each of us can do really can make all the difference. I was so proud to be a Californian when our Supreme Court recognized the legality of marriage for all. Now I just feel terrible.
About Gay Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Union President Defends Obama Against Racism (VIDEO)

2008-10-05T15:04:00.001-07:00

If you ever send messages to "EVERYONE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK! LET EVERYONE KNOW!!"...you know the kind -- about sick kids who don't exist, and reasons women are better shoppers, and how you know you're over the hill, and warnings about viruses that have been defeated for months -- don't send those. Send this speech. Every American man, woman, and child should see and hear it. They can disagree with it if they are so moved, but they should know what they are choosing.
About Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

I know nothing and so can you!

2008-09-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

One poster said she couldn't belong to a group that had members who belonged to "Grouply" another said that was insane. Debate ensued. In most cases there were two classes of response. Class One: I haven't looked into it, but I don't worry about those things and you shouldn't either. Class Two: I have looked into it, and there are issues, and here's what we can do about it. Made me want to post the following, because I find it sociologically and perhaps even historically interesting, but that's not really the purpose of the group.

---------------------------------

Just to defend a bit the "sanity" of the poster who didn't want any contact with Grouply whatsoever, anyone who *has* checked out Grouply can easily get the idea that it is a potentially so-called evil thing. It's only been around a year or so and when it started it did not have all of these limitations that Ann's helpful and informative post outlines. Through googling, I have read that early users had some very upsetting experiences with it (repeated messages going to their entire address book without their consent or knowledge) which they felt they had not initiated and had no control over. Grouply it seems is working hard to establish themselves as a legitimate business, but they got off to a very rocky start with quite a few people certain they were up to no good, or at the very least insensitive to privacy and security issues.

In some respects, so what, big deal...don't like it, don't use it...but on the other hand, we all know there are computer viruses out there and malicious worms and bots and miners and who knows what all else; it is vital that we be informed and vigilant. So many of us have *everything* on our computers -- including all our kids' school records -- that it is not unreasonable to be extremely careful. (We all make regular, secure back-ups, right?) What can make the horrible experience of being infected by a computer virus or snared by a phishing expedition even worse is that feeling of "how could I have been so gullible? why wasn't I more careful?" or even worse than that, our fellows' response of "well, if you were stupid enough to click on it I guess you got what you deserved...." (The logic that leads to an ignorant person "deserving" to suffer does not add up for me. How about mean people deserve suffering? That's math I can get behind, but even then, c'mon -- no one deserves to suffer for pete's sake.)

I suppose many major technological innovations have gone through periods of explosive growth, then some explosions, then more stringent safety standards. Electricity, dirigibles, pesticides on food, lead in fuel...To me it seems inherently reasonable, especially for the non-technical person, to exercise caution with any new Internet product.

And of course, what we are going through with our computers and the internet is just a tiny taste of what our children will likely experience in their lifetimes.

I'm Voting for McCain... And Yes, I Wrote the Us Weekly Cover Story

2008-09-07T08:36:00.001-07:00

Okay, I admit I only read the top six comments -- but not one of them was relevant to the topic of the post. She mentions that she is pro-McCain as an incidental, to illustrate that she is not a "liberal media," knee-jerk, Republican-basher: she "bashed" Palin because she had no choice. Palin is just that bashable; even thoes who want to like her and be her fans are in trouble. She's got so much baggage (all full of dirty laundry) Palin's becoming a liability to everyone connected with her. I think this author deserves plaudits for telling it like it is even in the face of hostile, delusional readers. I'm sure she came here for a little relief, to write for thoughtful, realistic readers...and this is the reception she gets? Sheesh.
About Sarah Palin
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Damned Good Spam!

2008-08-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a sample of what's showing up in my spam file lately. They all say they're from MSNBC. I wish they were real!

BREAKING NEWS: [video] Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Di...

BREAKING NEWS: Iran Kicks America In The Nuts

BREAKING NEWS: Elvis is alive! Watch the proof.

BREAKING NEWS: Gays Banned From Owning Pets In New York

BREAKING NEWS: Rapper 50 Cent To Be John Mccains Choice For Vp

BREAKING NEWS: Unemployed To Be Used For Soup

BREAKING NEWS: School Board Adopts Gay-Ass Uniform Policy

BREAKING NEWS: Brave Suicide Bomber Survives Blast!

BREAKING NEWS: Barack Obama Caught In A Time Warp

BREAKING NEWS: Arkansas Democratic chair shot at HQ dies

BREAKING NEWS: Michigan 'Joker' Sentenced To 1 Day In Jail

BREAKING NEWS: UK Government Put on 'Special Measures' - Private Managers t...

BREAKING NEWS: Airlines Roll Out New Punch-In-The-Face Fee

BREAKING NEWS: Exclusive: Barack Obama Can Fly Through The Air Like That Gu...

We Should Never Scrap Books Out of Fear of Fanatics

2008-08-14T07:47:00.001-07:00

The only criticism of a religion that can have a constructive, lasting effect on that religion will come from the practitioners of that religion, or from people who have grown up in that culture. In many ways it's similar to race, or nationality, or even family. I can spend hours complaining about my mother, but if you do it, hey - shut up! Not to say that it's reasonable for any group to respond to criticism with violence or censorship. But it's not reasonable to assume that the only reason not to criticize is fear of violence or censorship. The other reason is because it's simply not constructive.

Too many religions over the centuries have suffered tremendous oppression and suppression by others who wanted to eliminate their beliefs or even the culture that those beliefs grew out of. How can we be certain that our disdain for the values of another religion is any different from the disdain that European Christians felt for Native American spirituality [or, insert any historical episode of religious persecution here] and used to justify their oppression of that religion (or genocide, as the case may be)?
About Religion
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Halfway home!

2008-08-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

Three of our foster kitties have found homes. Two to my mom and one to a classmate of DD1. Three still to place. And they are such sweeties! Look:

Toby Keith's Pro-Lynching Publicity Tour Hits Colbert, CBS and More

2008-07-29T11:30:00.001-07:00

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

summahtime!

2008-07-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

We're having a fun, mellow summer. We were going to go to Bend, OR next week, but we canceled and are having a "staycation" instead. This always happens to me: I'm riding the fat part of the bell curve. Everyone else is having a recession and so are we!

We did escape the worst of the smoke by spending a few days at Dillon Beach and a few days in Santa Cruz. That was nice. It was pretty awful here for a couple of weeks. But it's much better now.

OK, here's where I reveal how crazy I am. Or maybe Chris is. I guess we're co-dependents. Firstly, we went up to four cats. (!?!?!) You've met Gus and Oprah and newcomer Mimi. Now we also have Karma. Crazy, I know. But we couldn't help it, honest! Chris and I went out for a little walk after dinner the other night and she followed us home. Three times! We tried to return her to whencesoever she came, but couldn't shake her. Plus, she's really a sweetheart. Don't tell our other cats, but Karma's somehow special. Spunky yet docile.

And that's just the intro to this story of craziness. I've always heard that it's a slippery slope with cats...after the third, you're a kooky cat lady and the sky's the limit, right? Turns out, yeah. In addition to the four we call our own, within 24 hours of adding Karma, we had ten. TEN! These last six are foster kitties, but still. It's boggling.

How did this happen? The caretaker of the vacant house next door is a feral cat feeder. In the interests of neighborliness we assist with that effort. I've been waiting till we were a little better acquainted before I suggested we start TNRing (that's crazy cat lady lingo for Trap, Neuter, Release). Of course feeding cats leads to breeding cats. Somehow for the past six months we've managed to not see any kittens around. Two days ago however, just as we were taking Karma to the vet the first time, six itty-bitty teeny-weeny kitties were tottering up the neighbor's walkway. And within a few hours we had them all in our bathtub. Of course. Right? That's what anyone would do, right?

We've already found a home for one of them. Yay us. And possibly two. And, when you tell your friends this story, be sure to remind them that adopting one of these babies is the best way to get a cat. It's like the "Orphan Kitten Project" at UCD Vet School: a) they are rescue cats, so you're not contributing to the cat population by buying a "purebred" cat; b) they had three good weeks in the wild with their mom, so they are healthly and vigorous little critters; c) they are hand-raised and very socialized and people-oriented; and d) they've never been in a shelter so they are spared exposure to infectious diseases and stress.

And they are so cute! So, now you know. I'm a nut. Oh. You knew that already?

Things I've Lately Learned

2008-07-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

A kitten can't use the "Advantage"-type of flea control until it's about 2 months old.

In the meantime, you can bathe it in baby shampoo or kitten shampoo (not flea shampoo), get as many fleas off as you can that way, then spray flea-killer onto a towel (not directly onto the kitten) and rub the towel on the kitty.

It also helps to use a flea-comb. Have a little cup of isopropyl alcohol within reach to drop fleas into as you pull them off with the teeth of the comb. Kitties endorse this and condemn the previous method.

They are ready to be weaned and eat solid food at about 4 weeks of age. You can tell a four-week-old kitten because its eyes and ears are open and though wobbly, it can walk. A good food to start them on is cat food mixed with a little kitten formula. You won't need the kitten formula for long; they are hungry and once they figure out what canned food is, they eat it eagerly. Keep a dish of kitten kibble out for them to "free-feed" and give them a hearty serving of canned twice a day. If the kitty is reluctant to try the food, hold it in your lap and put a little food on a spoon. Smear a little food on kitty's nose and as she licks it off, her interest will be piqued!

They can also start to use a litter box at this age. Just put a pie pan with litter in it into their enclosure and set them into it from time to time. They will have accidents the first couple of days as they learn to control themselves, but just clean those up. You don't have to do anything to train a cat other than put it in the litter from time to time so it knows the litter is there. Kitty's prefer to go in litter once they get their land-legs.

Not a Gaffe: A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Iraq

2008-07-22T19:25:00.001-07:00

About Iraq
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Vilified: What You Don't Know About My Brother, Angelo Mozilo

2008-07-18T09:01:00.001-07:00

About Economy
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

An Interesting Conversation

2008-04-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

"Everyone in my class is so mean. They don't care who they're mean to. They'll say mean things."

Larissa was feeling fearful about giving her oral report this coming week.

I went for that old chestnut, "You can't change them. honey. You can only control what's in your mind, how you react to them."

Dad was more direct, "Just ignore them."

"I can't!" and other things best described as wailing and gnashing as teeth.

I told her that her classmates were there to help her to be able to do it, to ignore them and to control what's in her own mind.

"They are not. They just want to say mean things."

"Right. But the ultimate affect is that you get to learn to deal with it. You are learning to not let anyone else tell you whether you did well or not, whether you are okay or not. It has to be up to you. You're still young; it's hard to do. But you are learning."

She didn't say, 'gee you're right, I hadn't thought of it that way.' But she did calm down, eat her dinner, and start planning how she'd present her report.

Redirected.

2008-02-14T09:22:00.000-08:00

Leechblock sent me here because I went to one of my blocked sites after my alloted time/per hour there was up. Isn't that wonderful!?! I'm giddy with joy. Let's see what I get done now.

jjdebenedictis's first page

2008-01-31T21:21:00.000-08:00

At her blog, OxyJen, jjdebenedictis has been generously (too mild a word) giving crits of the first pages of novels submitted in Nathan Bransford's contest to all who request them. A lotta all have requested. To return the favor in one dinky way, here's my crit of jj's:

Holy shit! That is intense. I don't like or willingly read horror or gore or anything gothic but, wow, you hooked me with your characters, the vivid imagery, the breathless pace...girl, your first page is all that! In the first paragraph or so I was briefly confused because I thought Wyhkman (or whatever) and the cart driver were the same guy. That straightened itself out quickly enough and whoosh, I was caught up. I really want to know what a blooddrinker is. Although, probably, I don't really want to know.

Gotta Start Somewhere

2008-01-31T12:17:00.000-08:00

This is my entry in Nathan Bransford's first page contest. I can see now changes I need to make, but I'll post it here the same as it is there for uniformity. 'Cause, damn, ya just can't get good uniformity these days. Feel free to comment/crit if you are so inclined.

Deanna ripped open the door and jumped into the car, throwing her jacket into the back seat. There she saw a bag from Sargent's. "Shopping! I knew you'd be shopping, leaving me standing here, waiting. That is so typical. So typical," she sneered. It was important that Lisa understand how her inconsiderate behavior was not appropriate. "If you had one ounce of consideration, you'd have come straight back here. You could wait in the car for me much more comfortably than I can wait on the curb for you!" She stressed the word curb as strongly as if she were saying cross or bed of nails or some other agonizingly uncomfortable location.

"Yeah, good thinking. Maybe I'll try that next time," Lisa said. She carried on, ignoring her sister's palpable rage, "If they'd had your size, I would have gotten you one too, but I was only able to get one for me. It's this really neat top, made from hemp, and it has a wrap-around front -- really flattering -- and only $30! Marked down from $36! I can wear it with those drawstring pants I got at The Barrier. Those pants are so cool, but I don't have anything I can wear them with."

Deanna had had enough. Flying into a rage came naturally to her, and she was good at it, but it was time to get back to business. "Oh, shut-up. Mom will be home at 4:30. That's not a lot of time. I got the forms from the county. I want to look them over before she gets home. I want to be sure we have every single thing we need before we even talk to her about it."

"You got them? Was it hard?" Lisa asked. Like their mother, Lisa was thoroughly intimidated by any intimation of paperwork. Or any work.

"Just had to stand in the right line. The lady knew what I wanted and told me what other forms went with it."

"Then you already know what we have to have. Why do you need to look them over?"

"I want to be absolutely certain! You think I'm going to take the word of some clerk at the county?" Deanna sneered triumphantly at so naive a remark. "Plus, some of these forms require other documentation. Like deeds and stuff. I think that's all in the filing cabinet in the basement. But I have to check." Deanna was so much more competent than her sister and mother in all official matters. It improved her mood to hear Lisa be so stupid about it. Faced with the officious clerks at the County, Deanna's customary sense of superiority had ebbed.

Lisa sensed Deanna was cheering up a little. "Tell me again, the whole plan," she said. When these mood improvements came along, Lisa liked to pitch a tent right there.

Deanna took the bait. "We're going to explain to Mom that the back porch is rotting, the wood is all mushy, and the whole

... Pencils Down! That's 500 words.

Invisible Circle

2008-01-29T23:44:00.000-08:00

My signature in my posts on the Absolute Write Forums:

I'm proud to be part of Dawno's Invisible Circle.
... When he left for Iraq I reminded him that there was this huge invisible circle of people, some I don't even really know, that see his picture and send their good thoughts, prayers and support his way. He was very moved by it and I know it's one of the things he relies on when he's down or afraid. ~Dawno

And it's true too. I've never met him, hell, I've never even met Dawno in person, but I think of her son Matt every single day. Several times a day. And I know lots of other people do too. The war is far away, and yet it reaches all the way here. I wish we could, I hope we can, reach all the way there.

Don't throw the booth out with the wires!

2008-01-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

That's where we went wrong. We got rid of pay-phones, right, don't need those much anymore. But hey! We still need phone BOOTHS. That is what's missing in the new age of portable communication. A sense of decorum and privacy and consideration. They didn't put pay-phones into booths for technological reasons. They could just set it on a counter somewhere and have you slip in a dime. They put it in a booth because a phone call is between you and the person on the other phone. But if you have the conversation out in the open, by nature it becomes a conversation between you and the person on the other phone and everyone within 20 feet of you and, worse case scenario, everyone within 20 feet of your conversant. So of course people are behaving badly -- we took away their mechanism for manners, but left them with the device for disturbance!

Bring back the booth!

The Sex and Race Race

2008-01-09T12:29:00.001-08:00

I am one of the most "race aware" people I know. Maybe the most. If one of my friends tells a story about being pulled over by the cops, they know I'm going to say, "Now, think if you were black and that happened."

I'm a white person, but I'm attuned to the "black experience." While I was growing up, ours was one of the only white families in our neighborhood in Richmond, CA. I had to develop a keen awareness of the mood and make-up of the folks around me -- particularly the kids at school -- or I was likely to get beat up every day. I think the odd-kid-out in any school setting faces a similar threat to one degree or another. In California in the 60s, black families taught their kids to stand up for themselves, don't let anyone push you around, fight if you have to. A friend of mine's dad punished her brother for not hitting a kid who had hit him. I think those parents felt that their kids had to be able to defend themselves or they would perish. That I got through my entire childhood without ever being hit is a testament to my ability to assess situations quickly and to talk my way out of just about anything.

My neighbors were black, and to a lesser extent latino, but most of my close friends were white and asian. My high school was at the foot of the hill. Up the hill, everyone was white. Down in the flats, hardly anyone was. A day didn't go by when the difference between life as a white person and life as a minority wasn't clearly demonstrated to me in one way or another.

I also consider myself a feminist. As the daughter of a single mother and a socialist father whose young girlfriends were all feminists, I had more than ample opportunity to absorb the lessons of "women's lib." We subscribed to Ms. Magazine from the very first issue and I read them all cover to cover. Plus, hey, I am a woman. I worked as a secretary in an office in the 70s and 80s -- if that won't learn ya about sexism, I don't know what will -- and I worked as a writer in software engineering in the 90s. The opportunities to see the disparities in opportunities never ceased.

One other thing about me, that I can't explain, is that I have tended to be on the leading edge of demographic waves. It's uncanny how many times I've taken up a habit, and next thing I know it's in the papers as "America's new habit"... eating fast food, buying new cars, exercising in clubs, marrying younger men, having children late, being addicted to the Internet, getting old and creaky ... I'm a statistical cliche. It's downright embarrassing.

But perhaps I'm breaking away from the pack at last. I hear people talking about the presidential election, and they are talking about race and gender as if that matters. Actually, come to think of it, I haven't heard any people talk about it. I've heard it on the radio and read it online. Maybe no one is saying it to me, because it doesn't matter to me. When it comes to voting for President, I am not going to vote for anyone based on their race or sex. That is just NUTS!

I heard a woman call in to a radio station and say that she just had to vote for Hillary because she wants to break the glass ceiling, we need a woman president. My job literally dropped and I gasped. I couldn't believe someone would even consider that as a criteria for choosing a presidential candidate. I heard another woman say that she liked Edwards, but how could she vote for a white man? She had the chance to vote for a black man, or a woman, and she just had to do it. I could only shake my head in dismay.

Maybe I'm just lucky that I happen to find Obama to be such a great candidate. Maybe if I prefered Edwards's approach, I'd feel more conflicted? I don't know. I don't feel even the tiniest bit conflicted about not prefering Hillary, who is a girl, like me. She's not who I'd prefer to see in the White House. She's too pro-corporate, she's been too willing to go along with Bush over the years, she seems to have too much of an adversarial approach to problem-solving.

If Clinton, or Edwards, became the Democratic candidate, I'd happily support either one, but my number one choice is Barak Obama. I hear he's black. SO WHAT????????????

Not Gonna Link to the Fool

2007-09-25T12:48:00.001-07:00

A guy in Chicago wrote an article saying how much he enjoyed seeing Andrew Meyer tazered (tasered? whatever) and listing other folks whom he believed were suitable targets. It was a vapid, inane "article" and I'm pleased to report that of the 88 online comments, at least 80 were along the lines of "you sadistic fool..." etc. I had been almost afraid to read the comments for fear that I would lose all faith in humanity/Americans. But it was okay.

I even pitched in. I said:
"I think it's true that we all have someone we'd *like* to taze. I think that's why it's essential that we have laws that prevent it. And even the police need to be governed by the rule of law. If we let our annoyance dictate our behavior, we wouldn't be a very civilized society. I know being "natural" is very popular, but we don't really want to comport ourselves like animals -- snapping, snarling, and scratching at everyone who displeases us? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is the same crowd who'd like to go back to pawing, groping, and goosing people who do please us. Please, people, let's move forward."

And then I thought of another point:
"Oh, wait -- wait, wait, wait. It seems that some people think the statement "Andrew Meyer should not have been tazered" means that the speaker: a) is defending or agreeing with Andrew Meyer; or, b) thinks tazers are inherently bad; or, c) thinks police are bad. I can't speak for everyone who says that Andrew Meyer should not have been tazered, but I can say for myself that: a) the kid strikes me as an egotistical blowhard chump (sorry kid); b) tazers are an essential piece of police equipment and must be used with skill and good judgement just like guns, nightsticks, handcuffs, sirens, dogs, citation books, etc.; and c) I am very, very grateful to anyone courageous and generous enough to work to protect and serve their community often while risking their own lives and not earning adequate respect or pay -- especially if they can do it with skill and good judgement. None of those,'a,' 'b,'or 'c,' are incompatible with my belief that the police at the university in Florida blew it and should not have tazered the blowhard chump. Just wanted to be extra clear there."

And I didn't add this to the comments I posted, but I thought of it also.....the original article says that it's us "aging baby-boomers" who don't see the humor in obnoxious people being electrocuted. If it's just a question of age, oh, I can't even say it. It's too sickening. I mean, on the one hand, what I was going to say is, thank Cod I'll be dead. On the other hand, not everyone will be. At least half of the people who outlive me have to be obnoxious so they can be punished so the others can be amused. But, wait, isn't being amused by punishment obnoxious? Yes. Shouldn't they be punished? Yeah, thank Cod I'll be dead. But if anyone survives, and they have this society to live with, it's a hollow victory.

Lack of Common Sense, But No Shortage of Volume

2007-09-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

The world is a different place than it was when your parents raised you. Maybe life is more boring and uniform now that people are more likely to reach adulthood with all ten fingers intact, no limps, no disfiguring scars, but I'm all for it.

It's sad that this columnist doesn't have something better to do than pitch mud on parents -- to defend a "reality" TV show? Those are some mixed up priorities. Maybe she does have better things to do -- but what could be easier than to put down parents? There isn't a one of us who hasn't made hundreds of mistakes in the course of our children's lives, or maybe even in the course of our children's week. We might as well paint targets on our foreheads as soon as we take on the job of Mom or Dad -- I only mention dads to be fair; everyone knows it's really all the mother's fault. Wicked, wicked mothers!

Your Visit to the Jensen Botanical Garden

2007-09-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

The parking lot is shady, accessible, tidy, and empty. Once out of the car, the noise from Fair Oaks Blvd. dominates all other observations. It's loud. And, at 8:30 in the morning, incessant. Walking around alone, the street noise emphasizes the quiet of the garden. But if a person wanted to be heard, it wouldn't be easy.

The garden isn't entirely quiet. Fwap. Pause.....fwap....pause....fwap again. Things are falling out of the trees. Acorns, one would imagine. For a few minutes it seems as if an acorn falls on the spot you just stepped out of again and again. (One just hit the car I'm sitting in to type. Oh, and another.) So you stop and look up into the treetops. A tell-tale ruffling of the leaves several stories up gives away a squirrel's presence. Leaves flutter down from the spot. Thunk. An acorn hits the roof of the covered bridge behind you.

Before you'd gotten distracted with all this fwapping and thunking, you'd crossed that little bridge to enter the garden from the parking lot. The parking lot is bordered on three sides by a creek, or two creeks. Fair Oaks Blvd. and a drainage ditch line the fourth side. Only one bridge joins the park to the parking lot: a simple, old wooden footbridge with a little roof over it.

(A black phoebe settled on a post beside my car to watch me typing. The post is on the high bank of the little creek. Maybe he is also watching for bugs on the water. Maybe it's not all about me.)

Before you'd crossed the little bridge, you'd read the sign revealing the park's name, hours, and rules. "Photographers must get permit" is the most curious of them. None of them require you to enjoy yourself. Don't play; Don't bring a dog. You may volunteer and you may donate to help the park.

Bearing all this in mind, you leave the parking lot, cross the little bridge, and enter the garden. Over the sound of the cars, a bird chirps brightly. Now you recognize it as the chirp of the black phoebe, but until you saw him, you didn't. You only wondered when the sound of traffic would fade into the background. Maybe when you're wondering that, it stays in the foreground. It dominates your experience of the garden.

The paths are not distinct. This way and that a line of rocks and worn portions of earth indicate that here is probably where one is intended to walk. By contrast, directly across the creek from the parked car, outside the garden boundaries, a clearly worn path leads over a little ridge. Paper napkins, a coffee cup, and other litter in the leaves mark the sides of this path. You can't see over the ridge to know where it leads.

Choosing a path that seems to lead to the back of the garden, in an effort to get farther away from the road, isn't rewarding. It arcs around and leads quickly to a split rail fence, beyond which is a dense maze of tall weeds. Beyond which seem to be some lush backyards. The path curves up and leads to a house. On the house are five or six signs advising you "this is a private residence; do not disturb occupants." A black kitten hides when it sees you. The house is also adorned with a well-developed layer of cobwebs, decorated with dried leaves and dead bugs.

Now you've circumnavigated the garden. It's small. Even with long pauses to look at the treetops and ascertain if you are being intentionally targeted with acorns, it hasn't taken more than 15 minutes. The path you're on turns into a driveway that runs from the kitten's house back to Fair Oaks Blvd. So you retrace your steps and then turn off on a side trail. Here a drinking fountain stands at the top of a pipe. You test the foot-pedal to see what will happen. Gurgling, groaning, then silver water streams forth. You're not thirsty. But you're glad to see it actually works.

Planting beds are set off from areas of lawn by borders of river rocks. The lawns are green and mowed. The garden is very shady. The dappled pattern of shade on the grass and beds is very pretty. The plants in the beds are not labeled. Except the rhodedendrons. And one stately, undated plaque memorializes a Doris Bish. Among the plants, you recognize columbine, hydrangea, a California rose, young redwood trees, several varieties of oak. A number of redwood trees seem to have been planted recently, perhaps anticipating the demise of some of the other trees. Many of the trees in the garden are leaning, or even curved. Although they are mature and have surely been here for many years, you are not inspired with confidence in their likelihood to remain standing indefinitely. It is eerie to see so many trees seeming to be so attracted to the ground that they can't straighten up.

Looping back to where you began your tour of the garden, you notice now the dominant tree in the garden. It's a very large -- tall with many thick, reaching branches -- valley oak. Having always felt a particular fondness for the solid, trustworthy valley oak, you are surprised to feel a sense of menace as you gaze at this one. Its trunk is large, but certainly not the largest you've seen. What makes its branches seem so threatening? Its branches are enormous, as big as trees themselves, and they curve and bend in the usual way of valley oaks. But usually valley oaks seem unassuming. Like protective, generous, gracious hosts to the families of birds, rodents, and insects that thrive in them. This tree, however, seems to have an intention, a purpose that you'd be best off not to pry into.

Benches are placed throughout the park in spots that afford peaceful views of the trees and planting beds. You elect not to sit today.

This Guy's Blog

2007-09-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Got me to thinkin'...

When no one knew that the earth revolved around the sun, when no one had any evidence to support the theory, and everyone could clearly see the sun moving across the sky every day, did that mean that it was not the truth? My answer would be no. Even though there was no scientific proof of it, and no one could explain it, in my view it was still true that the earth was going around the sun.

We live in a three-dimensional world. Seems like three oughta be plenty, but recently I read that mathematicians have proven the existence, mathematically, of at least 6 other dimensions. They are mathematically proven to exist, and yet we can't yet experience them in any way.

In order to not believe in a god, do you have to not believe in anything that isn't scientifically proven? Does it undermine your belief system (I'm tempted to call it a religion....) if you allow in anything that can't be explained by a peer-reviewed journal?

In my case, I can't look around me and experience life and still believe that reality is limited to that which I can see and understand or even to that which can be seen and understood by the most learned people and institutions. How can we, knowing how much about our world has been discovered and comprehended gradually over hundreds of years, imagine that now we know all there is to know? That what we don't know now can't be known?

Does believing that when you blow the seeds off a dandelion and make a wish, it might come true, preclude one from being an atheist in good standing?

Driving to School

2007-09-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

On Main Street, heading due east early this morning, I pointed out to the girls that once we got up onto the freeway, we'd likely have a lovely view of the way the rays of the sun were shining through the clouds that morning. Looking under the overpass, what I could see of the eastern sky looked like the gods had just put up one of those clear plastic shower curtains.

Larissa asked if the little hill that raised I-5 so that Main Street runs under it had always been there, or was it made. I said it was made. She imagined that it must take a long time to make a hill. I said yes, the dirt has to be piled and pounded and packed and piled and packed and pounded till it was all very solid. She asked how was it pounded. I said with big heavy tractors. Some mornings my knowledge is limitless.

Sure enough, as we rose up the ramp onto the freeway, we were greeted by a splendid vista of sunbeams and silver and gray clouds. A dark mass of clouds stretched from over our heads to not quite the eastern horizon. At the horizon silver streaks of clouds stretched across the sky. And through the gap between these two cloud banks streamed the sunbeams, like an impossibly large curtain hung behind the distant city of Sacramento.

Larissa asked if we'd go all the way to where those beams were. I wondered too. It's hard to tell by looking how far away the edges of the clouds are. Our route takes us almost due east. It would be due east, but we drift a little south the whole time we're headed east.

We were going up another piled, packed, and pounded hill, where the freeway arches up and over Sacramento River, when we saw two men on the side of the road. One of them clutched a white plastic garbage bag. The bag struggled mightily to be free and fly in the wind of the hundreds of vehicles roaring past at 70mph. But the man kept a firm grip. My first concern was that the bag would escape and become a potentially deadly hazard on someone's windshield. That concern gave way to the two men, so close to the cars, hurrying along the freeway with their heads down, picking things up off the side of the road. They weren't wearing neon vests or carrying the familiar orange bags of a roadside clean-up crew. Why would someone decide to be a freelance garbage patrol on this freeway, at this time, in this spot? As we passed them, I could see they were frantically, desperately, hopelessly scrambling to pick up plastic bottles and thrust them into their billowing bag. Whoosh, they were behind us. As we climbed up the freeway's bridge, we saw hundreds and hundreds of empty plastic containers huddled against the guardrails on the sides of the bridge. They'd lost their load of recyclables and they wanted to clean it up. Oh those poor men. Plastic containers crowded the edge of the freeway all the way to the peak of the bridge.

We passed the airport and then we came to one of the southern drifts on our trip. I-5 is a north/south freeway, running through California from Mexico and on up the west coast through the US to Canada. Our journey on it happens to begin just as it makes a little east/west bend to cross the wetlands west of Sacramento that lie on either side of the Sacramento River and eventually become the Delta.

As we round the bend, traffic generally slows to accommodate the influx of cars from Yuba City and other points on Highway 99 and today was no exception. We slowed to a crawl and Larissa went into high alert to watch for the chicken. Their dad had mentioned to us long ago that more than once, on the occasions when he'd driven to Sacramento, he'd seen chickens pecking along the median, heedless of the the cars and trucks whooshing past them. So we've been keeping our eyes peeled ever since we began commuting along the same route. And we did see one once, but it's so hard to believe that a chicken could live there, we'd begun to doubt ourselves.

About half a mile ahead, I saw a small bird-like figure with a stately tail on the left-hand side of the road. It wasn't a pigeon, not a crow...could it be? "Is that a chicken?" I posed the question to the car-at-large. Lana was completely absorbed in her book, but Larissa craned her neck around my seat to get a better look.

"Yes! There she is!" It was indeed a chicken. Busily pecking at the dirt and pebbles close to the roadway with two little finchy-sparrowy looking characters following but not following behind. Lana even pulled her nose out of her book. It looked to me like the same bird we'd seen, and then only imagined we'd seen, a few weeks before. Chris, the girls' dad, had said he'd seen more than one when he originally mentioned spotting the fowl sometime last year. Questions were raised. Larissa felt certain that, based on the minimal comb on this chicken's head, it was a hen. Lana said rooster, citing the proud tail. Lana also repeated what she'd repeated at our last sighting: a chicken will die without another chicken. Is that chicken out there alone? We just didn't know.

Meanwhile, our minivan, carried along in the traffic, picked up speed and headed for the ramp to I-80 East. Still heading south on I-5, Larissa looked to the eastern sky and marveled at how close we now were to the sunbeams. The dark cloud's edge was overhead now. As we merged onto I-80, the sky ahead of us was blue. "Look back," I said, checking my review mirror.

"Ooooooooh!" Both girls looked out the back window. Behind us the sky was deep, steely grey. The cars and trees and roads were all illuminated by the eastern brightness, in sharp contrast to the dark cloud arching over the route we'd traveled. Larissa speculated that we must be in a sunbeam now.

In the afternoon I drove the same route again to pick the girls up from school. On I-5 going over the river, the bridge was scraped clean.

What If It Were Okay To Be Fat?

2007-09-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

I guess we're not going to get to that. Same as we won't get to "it's okay to be poor." It's not really okay, but many many people are that way.

What if we could get to "you're okay even if you're fat (or poor)"? What if we -- we being all us humans, fat ones, skinny ones, even ones with chicken pox -- could accept that although it might be a big drag to be fat, it's not a sign of your flawed character.

Every overweight person wants to lose weight. That seems like a safe generalization. Some don't even try, but many, many do. Many try desperately their whole lives. And if (or perhaps it's more accurate to say when) they fail, they hate themselves. It's painful enough to live with obesity; to live with self-loathing and an endless sense of failure too, it's too much!

Of course, the overweight person isn't her only harsh critic. She has the rest of the world chiming in. A celestial choir providing an endless soundtrack of blame and condemnation: you're greedy; you have no self-control; you're a slob; you're lazy; you're weak.

Being fat sucks. Same as having asthma sucks. Or food allergies. Or a weak heart. Or thinning hair. Or gray hair. Or diabetes. But at least sensible people aren't going to look at a your wispy tresses and think what a greedy, lazy, pig you must be.

Although it's not universally true, it is possible in educated communities today to suffer from depression and not be harshly judged for it. It's possible for people to understand that depression is a physical condition that generally won't just go away because you want it to. Not everyone understands that, but at least some people do. Even in my lifetime, I think I've witnessed this transition. Maybe because of the advent of anti-depressants, it's easier to recognize and accept the physical, or chemical, elements of a mental or emotional state.

Maybe if a pharmaceutical method of dealing with obesity is developed, that consciousness can come to our cultural response to fat people too. Think of all the deeply held convictions we've given up as we've learned more about how humans work. There's the mental health one. The color of your skin doesn't make you inherently better or worse. We don't have to convert all cultures to mimic our own. Children can be heard and seen. It's good to bathe.

But we've got a long way to go. We can't even accept that this person's view of the afterlife isn't a good enough reason not to wipe out their whole society. I fear that fat people will be out in the cold for a few more generations.

Comparing Myself to My Kids

2007-08-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

I get annoyed with my kids, who have so much in terms of opportunities and comforts, not to mention things, when they gripe about having to do without something they want, or having to do something they don't want to do.

Compared to my childhood, they're living like royalty! I got two pairs of shoes a year -- sandals for summer and saddle shoes for winter. One coat. Toys at Christmas and birthdays, not just whenever the hell we felt like it. I had it better than many many kids, of course, but we had no margins. Often, truly, we couldn't buy groceries till payday; sometimes that'd start four of five days before payday. We couldn't use a band-aid unless we were bleeding.

So when they complain, I think "how can they complain when they've got it so good?"

But oh yeah, I just remembered. I complained about every single thing I had to do without too. It seemed natural to me that we didn't have all the stuff other kids had, but still, I griped! I'd forgotten that. And my parents used to tell me how little they'd had too. I wonder if they remember that they used to gripe too?

The Writer's Almanac from NPR

2007-08-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

Is it just me? Am I just hormonal today? Or are not "Country Story" by Kenneth Fields and the little bio of William Maxwell just heartwrenching?

I get the Writer's Almanac in email everyday. Many mornings that and my calendar agenda ("You have no appointments today") are my only messages. Even if I don't have time and have to save up till I've got 4 or 5 in a queue, I read every Writer's Almanac. It's always interesting or funny or moving. It's the only time I read poetry. And it always mentions how old the author was when they published their first book. That's important to me, of course.

Another good thing about the Internet.

Keeping Without Keeping

2007-08-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

It sometimes seems like all that is new is bad and all that is old is good. Was good? Back in the good old days, everything was better. All these newfangled contraptions isolate us from each other and separate us from the earth...like ski-doos and cars that we ride around in by ourselves and call-waiting and big color TVs.

Actually, I don't feel that way. As you can perhaps tell from the weak examples, I find a lot of modern technology to be life-enhancing and often greatly improved over whatever the less-modern technology was. Like caller-ID. So many people were outraged by the idea of their identity being revealed to the person who's life they are intruding upon when they call (because, hello, that's what it is). When someone knocks on your door, you have a right to peek through your door and see if it is someone you want to receive or not. You don't have to accept a communication from someone who won't identify themselves. Adding caller-ID to the technology of the telephone corrects a long-standing deficiency in phone service. Being anonymous has its place, but not in person-to-person communication.

Answering machines and voice mail too, I've got a jolly spiel about the advantages of those. And yes, there are disadvantages. This is an important concept. I'm not sure if it's simply physics, or metaphysics, but "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" is one of the few things in life to which the word "always" really does apply. For every positive, there is a negative. For every negative, vice versa. This, if we went into it, would be a mighty big topic. In some ways, we're never not on this topic, no matter what we think we're talking about. And for now we'll go on thinking we're talking about something else.

I think I'm talking about bits and bytes vs. atoms and molecules. Instead of real physical books (let's use books as the example, because it suits me) I have a digital record of books. Years ago, my husband and I realized that a good portion of our salaries was going toward housing our overflowing bookshelves. We love our books, and they make fine insulation, lining the walls of our house as they did, but did we really want to spend thousands of dollars so that we could afford a large enough house to live with them? No. Another of the great joys of having books is sharing books. We decided to make the joy of sharing books our priority instead of the joy of having them on our shelves (collecting dust and housing bugs -- let's face it, with hundreds of books, you just don't take them down and fondle them that often.)

The downside of sharing is that once they are gone, they are gone. Unless you are keeping records of your reading you have to count on your memory of your books. And unless a topic comes up between you and a friend that relates to a book you've read and remember, that you've read a book in common may never be known. With shelves physically full of books, a visitor can be idly glancing around, awkwardly trying to think of something to say, spot a familiar book, and voila, a worthy conversation launches.

But now, we can give away our books, and still have them conveniently displayed for visitors. Not to our home, but to our Shelfari web pages. Which means folks don't even need to waste the gas to drive to your house. They can just browse to www.shelfari.com and search for your name, and then peruse your books. Depending on your attention to detail and your patience (and perhaps the speed of your Internet connection) you can have your books clearly and cleanly on your shelves, make notes about your likes and dislikes, and sort them according to what's to be read, what's a favorite, and so on. You can also readily see who else has the same books you have, and what they think of those books. Then you can see what other books they have and, hmm, you might like those too, and you're making review comments and adding books to your to-be-read list before you know it.

It's fun. And bytes don't get dusty.

Hindsight

2007-08-08T20:26:00.001-07:00

I read a book review, by Jeffrey Frank, in last week's New Yorker, of Christian Jungerson's book "Body Count." Frank pulls out this quote from a character named Gunnar:

“I very much hope that the world will become a better place. And if it does, our grandchildren may look at us the way young people today regard the generation who collaborated with the Nazis. They’ll say, ‘I do not understand you.’ We will explain that life simply was the way it was. ‘Famines came and went and no one did anything about it. People died of hunger to provide us with cheaper coffee.’ We’ll have to admit that we knew but chose to do nothing about it.”

This captures succinctly something I think about all the time too. It just seems normal to us to drive big smelly cars as fast as we can (even if we are driving small economy cars law-abidingly, it will still probably seem excessive to future generations, if any), and use products that you throw away after one or two uses, and use bleach and detergents, and eat meats (these are all things I do -- don't think I'm passing judgement on you).

But our kids's kids are going to wonder how could we have been so selfish and shortsighted. We were just being regular folks, trying to get through the day after day after day. I'm sure they'll have routines of life that later generations will scorn them for. Okay, maybe I'm not sure. I'd wager, though (since I won't be here to pay off).

Laurie David will look good to posterity. Oh, and my dad. He's got a big I TOLD YOU SO for everyone and it's not even the end of the world yet. But soon enough. Soon enough, it will come. Naw, not the end. But some things'll be different, seems pretty certain. And we'll have to admit that we knew, and chose to do very little about it.

help help I can't get dressed

2007-08-08T11:00:00.002-07:00

I just sit down at the computer in the morning to read the news and catch up on email while I drink my coffee. Next thing I know it's four hours (4 hours!) later and I'm still in my pjs and I've got 6 different windows going with 6 different things I intend to wrap up before I get up and get going. It's like trying to get myself outta bed used to be. At least now I can get up. I guess.

One can do so many many useful things on a computer. Like make a list of all your books and how you rate them, and then you can see which of your friends has similar books. Isn't that useful? And you can post all of your dad's rants about the world condition, if you are lucky enough to have same, in case some day you want to make it clear to someone just what kinduvan upbringing you've had. And you can keep track of your calendar and your invitations and look for groups who meet near you about random topics -- I was looking for a simple living meeting, but it's good to know about the dungeons and dragons groups and greyhound rescue too -- even if you don't find your own topic. And you can find things to buy, even things to buy to help you with your problem of buying too many things!

A clarification is in order, however. Do these useful things still qualify as useful if they are done instead of the dishes, the laundry, the writing, the exercising, the shopping, the knitting.....Hmmm? Answers please? I'm waiting........

Do You Keep a Journal?

2007-05-21T20:52:00.001-07:00

And then do you write about things that turn up in your journal? Like, just now, while writing in my journal, I noted that telling other people what's bothering you, as if you're going to work it out or something, is just a lot of New Age crap. It is good to do that, sometimes. But you've got to save it for stuff that you really really can't just let go of or get past. The first impulse has gotta be to let go or get past it. Otherwise you just spin your wheels generating enthusiasm for your petty little issues. The more you talk about this shit, the more energy you put into it, the more fond of it you become, the more mental energy you've invested in having the problem, the more attached to it you are. The harder it is to ever get away from it.

And when we can't get past it, over it, let go of it, and we do hit it head on, however gently, there're always scars. Let's just admit it.

Be The Change You Want To See In The World

2007-05-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Here's an easy way: drive slower.

I know, I've said this before. But now that I'm a working mom again, I'm having a harder time taking my own advice. I do the damn dumb thing that I think no one should ever do: I try to make up for my lateness by driving faster. No, fool! Rush at home! Time in the car is not expandable and shrinkable with pressure on the gas pedal. Okay, so, now that we're over that rushing thing, we're driving slower.

Now we're using less gas.

We're polluting less.

We're being less dangerous.

We're not stressing as much (once we get the hang of it. At first the effort to not speed can be somewhat stressful itself.)

We're less warming the globe.

Everything is butterflies and kittens! Yay!

So Many Brilliant Thoughts

2007-05-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

...too bad I never have any when I'm writing. Even in my blog.

I haven't hated my job too too much this week. Even tho the exact things that I fretted about last time I blogged on the sujet are still hot buttons. But I've felt okay. I had a success somewhere, I guess. Interestingly, people have been mentioning to me when I take a phone message for them or when the come into the office to drop off a check, how much they appreciate me and how glad they are that I'm there. Sometimes that makes me feel great. Sometimes it makes me feel worse -- like if only they knew what a shitty job I'm doing, they wouldn't feel so appreciative. Like I'm tricking them or something. Especially about things like school records or even class photos. I have fits!

The whole idea of a "permanent record" is terrifying. It's a myth that it's a myth. There really is one. And what if I lose someone's? Will they cease to exist? How will they get along in the world without it? Accccck!

My Crackpot Theories

2007-04-29T09:22:00.001-07:00

One of them is that the modern western woman -- modern western society? -- doesn't get it about pregnancy. You really have to take care of yourself in a different way. In the 60s/70s, in a well-meaning effort to free women from domestic limitations, the naturalness and healthiness of pregnancy were emphasized. It's not a disease, it's part of life, etc. That's true. But working for a boss or a buck, you know, is not natural. It's not naturally compatible with the natural process of child-bearing. It can be compatible. But you have to make compensations for it. Do less in other areas, maybe less gym, less housework, less taking care of sick grannies... somewhere, something's gotta give. Creating a person is not effortless, even if your brain is not involved. Your body, if you let it, can do really important things very well. But you have to respect the process. Anything to back up my theory? Has there been any falling off in maternal health, infant health, infant mortality since this trend of doing-it-all began 30 or 40 years ago? Probably not. But with the advances in medical care we've come up in the same time frame, has there been that much improvement in those areas? Not as much as one would expect. The US's infant mortality rate is not what it should be. So there. That's my theory.

2. This one's also about medicine. Was the first one about medicine? Sorta. Take me for instance. If I'd been born before antibiotics, odds are high that I would not have survived to reach child-bearing age. And if we hadn't had the medical care available to us while I was pregnant, odds are high I would not have born live children. (Although, likely if I had born children younger, this wouldn't have been an issue? Although if I'd survived long enough to bear children when was younger, odds are still high that I wouldn't have survived long enough to get them to self-sufficiency....Okay, it's a lotta speculation, work with me.) So I did bear children, thanks be to all merciful and good forces in the universe to which my gratitude extends beyond knowable space, and so did many many many many others like me. As well as many less like me -- ones whose survival was less dependent on modern medicine. But each generation, the ones like me mate with the ones less like me. Let's do the math (Okay! I know it's not math, per se, would you relax?) Two high-survivability people mate, and you get highly surviving offspring (Yes. I know "highly surviving" is not a particularly technical term. Why don't you just go away?) Mate one high-survivor with one low-survivor, you get either a high, a low, or a medium. Mate two lowly surviving people, and you get even lowerly surviving offspring. Even lowerly because the parents probably don't have identical factors contributing to the lowliness of their survival likelihood -- the offspring could inherit all the factors. Sheesh. So each succesive generation there are more low survivors diluting the gene pool. Of course each generation, medical advances, again keep us alive longer and make us healthier and more functional while we're alive. That is a good thing. But it does come with the cost of making us weaker beings overall. And so many of us! Oy oy oy, as my great-aunt said yesterday from her hospital bed.