HOT COFFEE & COOL JAZZ

I'M JUST SAYIN'........

2012-02-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

Douglas Laycock, Professor of Constitutional Law at the U of Virginia, said it: January 11th's Supreme Court decision holding that ministers cannot sue their churches for employment discrimination was a huge win for religious liberty. It was unanimous, it was sweeping and it was unqualified. This decision was about separation of church and state in its most fundamental sense. Churches do not run the government, select government leaders, or set criteria for choosing government leaders. And government does not run the churches, select religious leaders, or set criteria for choosing religious leaders. The Court unanimously reaffirmed that principle on January 11.

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From “Buzzle.com – Intelligent Life on the Web” comes this helpful hint: "One of the simplest and effective ways to whiten teeth with baking soda is to mix with a small amount of salt. Mix about 3 teaspoons of baking soda with one teaspoon of table salt and then gently apply the mixture on your teeth. This homemade tooth powder can help you to get rid of stains from your teeth.” The article doesn’t say that after brushing your teeth with this powder, rinse your mouth properly with clean water and don’t swallow it!

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A doctor says: “ Even though families witness their loved one growing increasing ill, few physicians feel comfortable confirming the unthinkable: that Mom will not walk again, Dad will not wake-up again, Jimmy will never fish, laugh or say “I love you” again. In many ways, doctors skirt around the big picture, preferring to emphasize issues that can be controlled. This translates into physicians sharing only small pieces of information, such as “We have corrected her magnesium level” or “the tumor has shrunk by 14%.”

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In an article entitled “Are Mormon’s Christian? It’s complicated” writer Daniel Burke offers this: According to “The Atlas of Global Christianity,” there are 41,000 Christian denominations. No definition of Christianity could encompass their doctrinal diversity, said Martin Marty, an emeritus professor at the U of Chicago Divinity School. “I wish there was some official place where you could determine who’s in and who’s out, but there’s not. No one can speak for all of Christianity in all its nuances." The atlas lists Mormonism as a “marginal” Christian group, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, primarily because it deviates from traditional Christian teachings on Jesus and claims sources of revelation beyond the Bible.

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A brochure from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) suggests prior to an emergency, which in our area might be either an earthquake or a wildfire, plan how your family will stay in contact if separated by disaster:

A. Pick two meeting places:
1) a location a safe distance from your home in case of fire, and 2) a place outside your neighborhood in case you can’t return home.
B. Choose an out-of-state friend as a “check-in-contact” for everyone to call.

Even if you haven’t make yourself a Emergency Disaster kit, you can easily do this. It’s important.
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Jack Wafer Appetizers: Arrange ½-inch squares of
¼-inch-thick jack cheese well apart on a baking sheet generously treated witih nonstick spray. Bake in a 350 degree oven until bubbly, 5 to 7 minutes. Cool just until set, then lift off.

I'm just sayin'............

'TAINT FUNNY, McGEE!

2012-02-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

Our genealogy society usually has a "Show and Tell" program in December and it's always a challenge to think of something that will be of interest to the members and at the same time be helpful in their own research. Last December I was able to come up with both. The picture above was taken as I showed the blanket I was wrapped in when I was brought home from the hospital after being born on June 26, 1935. I also am holding my first pair of baby shoes.

What came next in my "Show and Tell" presentation was from a tiny little book given to my mother. That book was to be her guide for the next few years. In 1935 my family was still suffering from the Great Depression, and my post-natal care was provided by the "Parents Educational Center of Long Beach Social Welfare League." Inside this little book produced by the Welfare League was a monthly handwritten record of who brought me in to see the doctor and what was to be added to my diet.

On the page for September 27 (my 3-month checkup) I was given these feeding instructions: 2 oz evaporated milk mixed with 3 oz of water and 1/2 teaspoon of Karo Syrup. My mother was to continue nursing me. I was to drink water from cooked carrots, peas and spinach - 1 teaspoon to about 2 tablespoons at 2 p.m., Fruit juice and cod liver oil. I continued being taken to these monthly sessions through February and dietary additions are noted. The entries quit after I turned 7 months old.

However, it is not these items that made the most interesting reading. Here’s a photo of a page from the book. I show it in this form because if I didn’t, you might think I had made it up.

First of all, please notice what the expectations are for a child at 1 year and again at 15 months. Now I gave birth to smart kids, but not a one of them could carry glasses of water to and from the table at that age! I don't think I could do it either but I'll betcha' my mom checked to see if I could. She DID think I was pretty smart, if I'm to believe her entries in the actual baby book she kept on me.

On the next page, which covers ages 18 months through 36 months it states that at 18 months the baby should be setting and clearing off the table, wiping dishes, using a handkerchief and replacing it in his pocket and unpinning safety pins in clothes. At 24 months baby should be able to sew buttons on his clothes. Can you believe this?

When I read these pages to the "Show and Tell" audience, they began to laugh (which of course is what I wanted them to do!)

But the best was yet to come: Back in the 3-month category it says, “He should…use the vessel.” That "vessel" meant an old-fashioned chamber pot, baby-sized, of course.

I reminded my "Show and Tell" listeners that my mother kept a baby book on me, and she faithfully recorded everything I did. So I read to them this entry: “When Barbara was three months and 22 days old we began training her to ‘to-to.’” (For you uninitiated in the Dobbins euphemisms, “to-to” was my family’s word for urinating.) Yep, my mother began my toilet training when I was just a little over three months old. She took off my cloth diaper, slipped a little white tin “potty” under my tiny behind and waited to hear the magic tinkle.

She was doing exactly what the book said to do. She does not record when I finally obliged. It suspect she had a long wait but I know for sure is that I didn't show up in kindergarten in diapers!

Those were awfully preposterous guidelines, it seems to me. But I reminded the genealogy group, now composed of men and women considerably younger than I am, that when they see my generation having unusual expectations or being somewhat obstinate in a Board Meeting, consider that we were brought up with very strange goals, very different from the loosey-goosey guidelines of more contemporary child-raising.

Being placed on a cold chamber pot at three months of age has to have left some kind of residual but excusable bumps! So I begged the "Show and Tell" group to please make allowances for us.

I got a good laugh!

LOOKING BACK

2012-02-04T12:48:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was traveling through Long Beach, the town I grew up in, and decided to detour past 1620 Gardenia Avenue to once again take a peek at the house I grew up in. We moved into that house in August of 1945, just before I started 5th grade, and I called that place “home” until I married in 1955. The husband and I then moved into an adjacent triplex, and later a duplex, that my father built on lots that he purchased on that same street, so being that close to my folks seemed like I still belonged to their house. Every important event, and even the unimportant events, of that time period is imprinted with the image of that house. It was 1959, when our third child was on the way, that needing larger accommodations sent my kids’ dad and me to nearby Orange County where we bought our first house.

My father continued to live in Long Beach until about 1996, and often when I came to visit him he’d suggest we drive by the old neighborhood, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen 1620 Gardenia off and on through the years. Early on I was surprised that the front lawn seemed so much smaller than I remembered it, but of course I was just a little kid when we used to play “jump the hedge” off the front porch, sailing over the smallish Eugenia bushes that dad planted along the porch. In fact, even the side yard where we used to put up our badminton set seemed way too small for the game, but when I lived there my dad had not yet built the duplex next door, so we could extend our games out into the vacant lot. In that lot beside the badminton court my dad and uncles drove horseshoe stakes into the ground for their Sunday horseshoe games. The large back yard was reserved for the croquet games that both children and adults played.

A couple of years ago at a high school reunion one of my friends made a remark about how lucky I was to live in such a big house. I was shocked to hear that, because I never considered it a big house…not then, and not now. But in actuality, many of those kids who were my 5th grade friends were from families that had come to California from Oklahoma just before the war and they were basically starting life over again. I remember being in my friend Dokey’s house and it was hardly more than a shack, so I can understand why they thought my house was big. It actually was an 1800 square foot bungalow, only 2 rooms wide but on a deep lot. We had a living room, a dining room, a den, 2 bedrooms, 1 large sewing room with its own outside door used as a bedroom, and 1 narrow added-on room also used as a bedroom and which opened onto the inside back porch. There was 1 bathroom inside the house and 1 fairly rudimentary bathroom (commode and shower only) attached to the outside back porch.

For as long as I lived in that house on Gardenia Avenue, we always had at least one member of our extended family living with us in one of the back bedrooms. For a while it was my mother’s youngest sister after she graduated from high school. Once she left, my father’s maiden cousin lived with us until one of the duplex apartments became available. And from 1946 on, my Uncle Bill lived with us. The house accommodated 6 people nicely.

I loved that old house. I think it was built about 1916 or so. It had a warmth and character that tract housing – the typical cookie-cutter housing that came into prominence after the Second World War – will never have. We had a single telephone, no extensions. In the living room we had a large wooden console containing a radio and a record player; later models came with a small TV. We had a floor furnace that depending on which way you aimed the vent heated either the hallway and bedrooms or the dining room/living room area. In the morning dad, always the first one up, would turn on the heat; my sis and I would get dressed for school standing over the floor furnace.

A gas stove with the oven lit provided warmth for the kitchen. Dishes were washed and dried by hand. Clothes were washed in the machine on the inside back porch and hung out on the clothes line to dry. The inside bathroom only had a tub, so when we came home from the beach in the summer we had to shower in the outside bathroom. Mother didn’t want sand tracked through the house.

Pal, the indoor dog was shut up at night in the large storage closet where the water heater was, and Susie, the outdoor dog who was somewhat handicapped, lived in her dog house in a large pen behind the garage. She had lots of running room, though she ran sideways.

Later dad built an outdoor “rumpus room” in the corner of the backyard, which we girls were to use for entertaining our friends. My parents used it on the weekends for family gatherings. We were lucky to have lots of aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby, and our home was the gathering place for all.

When I drove by that house a few months ago, it seemed that somehow the whole neighborhood had been squashed together. The street seemed narrower, the houses closer together, the yards more compacted and definitely the houses seemed much, much smaller. In thinking about this later, I decided it was because many of the houses had been converted into two dwellings; more people meant cars were parked and packed along both sides of the street, and all the shrubs and trees were old and oversized, dwarfing everything around them. Yes, it was the same house -- a bit modernized, fenced and painted, and it's borne the years well. The neighborhood? Well, a neighborhood is really for those living there now to say how it is.

However, I believe that I couldn’t have grown up at a better time and in a better place than in Long Beach at 1620 Gardenia in the late 1940s and 1950s.

THIS 'N' THAT

2012-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

You will have noticed that I haven’t been carrying on about “The Rock” lately. That's because it is still sitting patiently, waiting for the stars to align so it can begin its 100+ mile journey from here (Glen Avon quarry) to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Blvd. Now the scuttlebutt we hear is that CalTrans has changed their mind and now says the Country Village overpass above the 60 Freeway cannot support that weight (a 370 ton rock and a 200 foot long transporter equipped with almost 200 tires). Its first scheduled date for making the trek to Los Angeles was August of 2010. Its most recent date is set for sometime the first week in February 2012; whether it will ever make it to LA is anybody’s guess.

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In yesterday’s newspaper a small article noted that Pepperdine University in Malibu once again has blocked a request for the formation of a GLBT group on campus, saying that GLBT’s mission is not compatible with the stated Christian values of the private university. A petition signed by some 4,000 students – more than half of the student body – was turned down for the fourth time. Now I attended the first iteration of that college back in the early ‘50s, then called George Pepperdine College. It only had 900 students. The founder was still living and was often a visitor on the campus. Students all understood it was a Christian college and were familiar with the religious emphasis placed on our activities, but even at that time there was tacit approval by many of the teaching staff to get around some of the “shall nots” that the religious denomination required. And there were plenty of gays and lesbians at the college then. It was no secret, but they were our friends and we didn’t give it another thought.

That was then, and these students are now, a braver and more open now. I am watching with interest to see this play out, but recognizing that if the university is truly privately owned and run by a religious denomination, the rules and regulations are set by that denomination and not by law, according to the latest ruling of the Supreme Court.

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The large apartment complex where Jer and I live has lots of acreage and an abundance of trees. As novice birders, we wonder how it is that we don’t see more birds than the hummingbirds at our feeder, our resident phoebe, the sparrows and house finch in the spring and of course, Archie Grosbeak who comes yearly to produce his offspring and stay until they’ve fledged. Everybody here sees those birds; where are all the other birds I should be seeing?

Oh, there are crows, too. Mighty hordes of large, noisy crows making a nuisance of themselves by sitting 50 or so to a tree and cawing at each other all day long. I hate crows, because they eat other birds’ babies. (So do cowbirds and I hate them too.) However, a friend of mine suggested that perhaps they weren’t crows but ravens, since I described them as being huge birds. I looked in my bird book specific to this area (Backyard Birds of the Inland Empire) and it showed me the difference between crows and ravens. But discerning that difference depends on several things that are hard to see from a distance: their size, the shape of their tail, and how much they soar when they are in the air (ravens soar more than crows.) However, I think there is only one definitive identification: mine are crows because none say “NEVERMORE,” only “caw.”

THE BATTLE OF THE BRAIN

2012-01-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

I am always surprised (and sometimes shocked) by things my brain can remember.

Jerry and I were in the local library picking up a book I had on reserve. I quickly thumbed through it to make sure it was what I wanted, when my eyes landed on the name of a doctor: Dr. Dupuytren. When I read that name, I stopped dead in my tracks, turned to my husband and pointing to the book page said, “Ah, this guy had something to do with either a finger or a penis.”

That caused Jerry to stop in his tracks. But as if to clarify matters I said, “The other one’s name was Dr. Peyronie.” Jerry looked at me like I was crazy, but then it happens so often that he’s just not surprised by anything anymore. What rumbles around in my head may be useless nonsense, but it had to get there somehow.

The only time I heard of these names was back in the late ‘80s when I was on a temporary secretarial assignment working for a firm that handled medical malpractice claims. I was typing from a Dictaphone tape and I needed to look up these two medical conditions in the course of transcribing the tapes onto the computer. I had not heard of them before, nor did I ever hear of them again.

Both doctors were French; both conditions deal with fibrous tissue that shouldn’t be where it is. And a quick check through Google connected Dr. Peyronie to the penile problem, now known as Peyronie’s disease, and Dr. Dupuytren to the finger problem, also known as Dupuytren’s contracture.

What I’d like to know is how, in late 2011 did my brain, unbidden, offer up this information when I glanced at the reference to Dr. Dupuytren in a novel I intended to read (I think it was a novel about Sherlock Homes)? My brain doesn’t tell me something simple like where I set my car keys, or where I kicked off my shoes, or worse yet, give me the name of an old friend I run into. Why then will it bring up Dupuytren and Peyronie?

I’ve experienced the same kind of thing in other ways too. While living Turkey and taking lessons to learn the language, quite often my brain offered the Spanish version of the Turkish word I was looking for. Yes, I had two years of Spanish in the 1950s, but we spent those two years translating novels, not learning how to converse in the language. Did my brain really retain all those Spanish words I learned?

But again, this all makes me wonder why I can’t remember where I put things in my house. Well, that’s not quite right, Jerry says, because if I would put them where they belong instead of just dropping them somewhere I wouldn’t have to wrack my brain trying to remember. And I also do know that as we age it is the short term memory that goes first, which explains a lot of what I can’t remember. But I’ve read that EVERYTHING we’ve ever known rattles around in our brain forever and is there for recall if the stars are all aligned or for some other reason.

I think I’ve mentioned before the writer Mary Roach who in her fine book “Stiff” told about Thomas Edison, who believed that there were little things he called “life units” in our brain that existed in every cell and operated in shifts. He wrote in his diary “We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca.’...There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory….Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.”

I don’t particularly follow Edison’s beliefs in this matter, but I do know Jerry and I often poke fun at each other’s lapses and admonish the other to wait for the next shift to come on. Since I most always find what I have lost, I trust it more to luck than life-units.

Nevertheless. what I still don’t understand is how come if I can pull up Dupuytren and Peyronie so easily, why can’t I do it with the easy stuff?

WHO? ME? AFRAID? NO, JUST SMART!

2012-01-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

I am not a particularly fearful person, although I admit to sometimes considering the worst possible outcome when I’m confronted with certain possibilities. That little quirk has been with me since I was a small child, not even old enough to understand “outcomes.” The earliest I remember is being afraid of fire….or more specifically, fire engine sirens. When I heard a siren, I’d go hide in the closet, or if I was outside, I’d go stand with my back to a wall. I’d somehow feel protected that way. I don’t know when it started but by first grade this fear had pretty much abated.

The second fear I acquired was of water, but not just of any water. It was of falling into water. I was brought up in Long Beach, California, where my folks often took us for a drive around Rainbow Pier, a horseshoe shaped pier that jutted out in the ocean as shown in the postcard above. There was water on each side of the pier – a lagoon on one side and the ocean on the other. The pier was plenty wide for the one-way auto traffic and there was never the possibility of a car plunging into the water, but I think that was the time and place when I first thought about “certain possibilities” – that of ending up inside our car in the drink! Eventually I outgrew that particular fear, but the residual to that is that as an adult I don’t do causeways, anywhere, anyhow! I will walk around Lake Ponchartrain before I would drive a causeway across it.

The whole reason I am writing about this is that this past weekend a car full of Taiwan tourists on the little three-car Balboa Island ferry that takes people across the narrowish Newport Harbor found themselves in that very predicament, having had their rented SUV pushed off the end of the Ferryboat by an errant Mercedes that was being parked on the boat behind them. The TV showed the SUV bobbing around in the bay – and my insides reacted as if I, not the Taiwan family, were the one who was in that SUV.

Taking a ride on the Balboa ferry was, in my growing up years, second only to taking a drive around rainbow pier. In the evenings we did the pier; on the weekends, because it wa a little further down the coast from Long Beach, my folks did the Balboa Ferry. To my recollection, I never once stayed in the car while it was on the ferry. We always got out of the car and sat on benches along the gunwales. If the car was going in the water, I was for sure not going with it. So when I saw the TV news of that very thing happening, it was as if prophecy was fulfilled. I could honestly say, “I KNEW IT!” and my latent fear was finally justified

I did not bring these fears (very much) with me into my adult years. I rode on the “feribot” (Turkish spelling) a lot in Istanbul, but usually it was just the people ferry, not one that carried cars. However, to hedge my bets, I always found a seat right near the big opening on the sides, which you will be able to recognize from the picture. Especially while traveling across the Bosphorus, where the feribots were going across the water and the big supertankers were going up and down the water, sharing the same space, I was always a bit leery of – again – the worst possible outcome. That would be a collision between my boat and the tanker, especially since while we were there one of those tankers collided with a freighter carrying 25,000 sheep; the little tanker split in two and 25,000 sheep were accidentally drowned right in the middle of Istanbul’s Bosphorus. So although I rode on the feribots, I was not a comfortable passenger and even in the winter with the bitter wind blowing in those side openings, you could see me easily hedging my bets, wrapped like a mummy in warm clothing!

So here I am at 76, having survived all kinds of remote possibilities. I was a worrier as a kid, my mom told me, and I understand. I still tend to verbalize these remote and unlikely possibilities, according to Jerry. But I say, having taken to heart the old adage “Forewarned is forearmed,” that one might as well be ready to choose your own poison, and should I find myself in that spot, it fer shure won’t be from a ferry boat accident.

THE BENEFIT OF RESOLUTIONS

2012-01-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

While I was recuperating from my Christmas Eve surgery, I had a lot of time to think about New Year's Resolutions. Actually, I don't make what I'd call "resolutions" but I always try to identify anywhere between one and five projects that I can take on for the new year. So my thinking this year went something like this:

1) I need some housecleaning help.
2) I need to thin out all the junk that sits on the floor in this tiny apartment before this can happen.
3) Make a plan to do this, and then do it!

At first I thought I'll move out one item per day. Then I decided no, I'd do one item a week. Then I decided to get real; I decided that one room per month would be the smartest way to get the job done.

January's room is my office. I also allotted two months for this; my office is the repository for my computer, my books, and my knitting, in addition to storage for our gardening supplies, bird feeders and food, old camera equipment, luggage and sewing machine. I would show you a picture of this room, but it is too embarassing to contemplate. Trust me when I say many things need to go. The issue of cleaning comes down to the fact that there is no place to move anything when trying to clean the room. I cannot yet ask someone to come in and clean this room in this condition. But perhaps by the end of February I can.

So, given this explanation, what do all these pictures in the blog mean?

In my closet, pushed way deep in an inaccessible area, was a tall trash basket in which I stored rolls of gift and mailing wrapping paper, large genealogical maps rolled up in tubes, and other items that were there for lack of a better place for them. We moved into his apartment 6 years ago and I rarely had occasion to get anything out of this basket.

Ditching the basket and contents became my first project. In nosing around I found all kinds of things in there that I had completely forgotten about. Some I could toss, some could be put in my genealogy files now, and some given to a thrift store. Within 1/2 hour the basket and at least 3/4 of the material in it was on the way to the dumpster across the street.

But the big surprise was finding in it a cardboard envelope containing some photos that I hadn't seen in years. These were the photos of the bands and the bandsman shown in this post.

In the photo shown at the top of the blog you'll see my paternal grandfather, Scott W. Dobbins Sr. He came from a musical family, and from his early teens he played cornet.

The first picture below is of the West Las Animas (Colorado) band, sitting on the Bent County courthouse steps. Scott, with the cornet at top right, was probably 16 years old then, which would put the date somewhere around 1890.

During the summers both he and his older brother Gaston, a trombone player, played with the Colorado Springs Midland Railway band and participated in many huge band festivals and competitions held in that part of the country. The band had at least two uniforms that I am aware of: one was the traditional "railway" band such as my grandfather is dressed in above and the other was called the "Buckskin" uniform, in which they dressed in Indian regalia. It is this picture that was the big surprise for me. I remember seeing the picture in a newspaper article but I have no recollection at all of getting a decent photograph of it. But there it was, carefully protected in the bottom of the basket I was cleaning out.

The final picture is a 1902 photo of the little Las Animas band again. Scott and his brother Gaston are in it, and the little guy in front is my dad's cousin Percy (Gaston's son) who was the mascot.

Finding the picture of the Buckskin band was an added plus to my first foray into thinning out my "junk." My grandfather Scott died in 1917, long before I was born, and it is a good feeling to have him so well documented visually. Morever, this makes me wonder what else I'm going to turn up as I continue on this year's resolution.

RESOLUTION FOR READERS

2011-12-30T16:57:00.000-08:00

A decade ago I found this list and have enjoyed using it so much that I'd like to share it with you for 2012.

1. I will reread a book that I loved as a child.

2. I will finally read that classic from high school that I’ve been avoiding.

3. I will find a book of poetry and read some aloud.

4. I will spend an hour in aimless browsing at a library.

5. I will read a book written in the year I was born

6. I will create a journal and keep notes about the books and magazines read.

7. I will assemble a list of my favorite people and send them my ideas about
books (favorites, recent reads, and the like)

8. I will read a book to a child.

9. I will gather a few friends and read a play out loud

10. I will read a book on the history of my town.

11. I will read a book written from a political point of view totally opposite my own.

12. I will read a book about a place I’ve never been.

13. I will reread a book that I just didn’t “get” when I was eighteen.

14. I will read a book written by a non-American.

Adapted from a list created by Camille DelVecchio, Penfield (NY) Public Library

DEC 28 - GOOD RIDDANCE DAY!

2011-12-28T16:36:00.000-08:00

I just saw an interesting story on TV a few minutes ago about today being "Good Riddance Day" -- and while the reason for my interest took place a few days ago (December 23, to be exact) I'm celebrating it today!

I crawled off my bed of healing and managed to get here for a short notification that I have said good riddance to my crappy gall bladder in an emergency surgery on December 23, and then a second procedure on December 24 where the doc went down through my mouth to search and destroy a gallstone that was stuck in the bile duct. As if that weren't enough, while still in the recovery room I suffered a bout of atrial fib and because it was a holiday no doctor could be found to tend to me.

Finally a kind-hearted young female doctor arrived and I was shepherded through the return to a normal beat and finally arrived in my room. I came home on Monday evening, and all I can say is that one doesn't bounce back as quickly at 76 as one does at 36 (hysterectomy) or at 46 (appendectomy.) But here I am, sore and shakey but on the road to recovery. Some Christmas, huh? Thank god for husband and children and doctors and nurses and morphine.

I'm not crazy about the pix of the Gall bladder above, but it is to show you what I said "Good Riddance" to for 2011.

TEMPUS FUGIT FOR SURE!

2011-12-22T17:44:00.000-08:00

Imagine walking into your favorite supermarket on December 22, shortly before Christmas, rounding a corner and coming face to face with a wall of candy such as the one above. Believe me, it is a jaw-dropping experience.

I knew where the candy canes were last week, but they sure weren't there this week. I had noticed as we walked in the door this morning that there was a huge display of ingredients for making Christmas edibles - Karo syrup, sugar, boxed cookie mixes, spanish peanuts and mixed nuts, along with every kind of pot, pan, bowl, and storage container one could possibly use for making these goodies, and I figured right at the front door was a marketing ploy to make sure that Christmas stuff would sell.

I figured there were a lot more Christmas items left in the usual spot. But was I wrong. It was February 14 in that aisle, for sure!

As if that wasn't startling enough, I turned around and found behind me a forerunner of this year's Easter items.

Jer and I were puzzling over this whole thing when a lady in a red Ralph's jacket walked up to us and explained:

Our Ralphs store is the guinea pig (her word, not ours) for all the items Ralphs wants to track for customer use and approval. Yes, people do buy Valentine's day candy before Christmas. If it is eye-catching, they figure they'll see just how good it tastes. Items that sit on those shelves week after week without moving are not ordered for the other Ralphs stores. It's all about Marketing, she said. We are the guinea pig store.

And now it makes sense that so many things appear and disappear in that store during the year. I hate to seem like I'm being paranoid (or worse yet, weird) but it seems that everything I find and like will ultimately disappear, because I am the only person who buys and likes it. Jer and I have laughed at how many things we have started using on a weekly basis disappear -- sometimes with a notice (close-out sale) or just never restocked after I buy the last one on the shelf. I do believe that when we check out, ringing up our items is like putting the kiss of death on them.

It was reassuring in a funny way to know just why we have always laughed at how far ahead the seasonal items are put on display -- Valentine's day and Easter before Christmas, Halloween items before Fourth of July, and Christmas items before Thanksgiving. Now we know. Not all Ralphs do this; just ours and for a good reason, whether we like it or not!

After the Ralphs lady left, I happened to notice down at the far end of the aisle, in the same location as the Christmas cooking items at the other set of doors, were the remnants of this year's Christmas goodies that should have been where the Valentine's candy now sat. They were there, catching the eye of people who came in through that set of doors, reminding them that Christmas is still ahead of us.

So all is well at our Ralphs. They are not crazy, as we were beginning to believe.

SEE WHAT MOBY DICK HATH WROUGHT!

2011-12-21T07:39:00.000-08:00

For some reason I have always been fascinated by tedious things.... although I'm not sure it is the thing itself that interests me or the fact that someone can actually choose to do something tedious. I tend to think it is the latter.

My first foray into tedious things was a try at needlepoint. Granted, I didn't know what I was doing when I started out, but it didn't take long for me to decide that doing needlepoint was like doing penance for all the sins I had committed in my life and doing it in advance for all the ones that I might commit in the future. I hated it. I did one small 5x9 picture, hated every stitch of it, and threw it away when I finished. For many years I avoided any such similar endeavor, until in 1977 or thereabouts the counted cross-stitch craze from North Caroline made it out to California. I took one look at it, said to myself, "I can do that" and started working a 22-to-the-inch counted cross stitch picture. I loved it, and in fact over the years I've done more than I can count.

I don't understand why I liked the one and not the other, but what it showed me is that there is something in me that says tedious things are pleasant and good for my soul!

A second time when I got interested in doing something tedious - and I surely don't understand this one - is that sometime in the 1969-70 period I decided to copy the New Testament by handwriting it into a notebook. With my whole family active in Christian circles it seemed like an unusual, devotional-type thing to do and I found great satisfaction in doing this. The product wasn't what was important, the discipline was. However, that ended when my marriage ended; it seemed that everything I had understood had fallen away and any semblance of discipline was no longer operative. The notebook went into the trash along with my marriage.

Now what does all this have to do with a blog today?

I have had it in my mind to re-read Moby Dick. The first time I saw those words was in my 10th grade English class when Miss Weiherman passed out copies of the book for us to read. I didn't understand one word of it. Through the years I've seen them mostly in cross-word puzzles, and each time they do I think I should re-read the book in my old age; perhaps I would understand it now!

This morning while investigating the entries I've placed on Google-Reader I came up with this:

This looked a whole lot more interesting to me that re-reading the book itself. Whatever it is in me that responds to this kind of discipline really took over, and I went to the book publisher's website to see what it was all about. I was fascinated by what I read.

Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page

Inspired by one of the world’s greatest novels, Ohio artist Matt Kish set out on an epic voyage of his own one day in August 2009. More than one hundred and fifty years following the original publication of Moby-Dick, Kish began illustrating Herman Melville’s classic, creating images based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition. Completely self-taught, Kish refused to set any boundaries for the artwork and employed a deliberately low-tech approach in response to the increasing popularity of born-digital art and literature. He used found pages torn from old, discarded books, as well as a variety of mediums, including ballpoint pen, marker, paint, crayon, ink, and watercolor. By layering images on top of existing words and images, Kish has crafted a visual masterpiece that echoes the layers of meaning in Melville’s narrative. In retrospect, Kish says he feels as foolhardy as Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, and as obsessed as Captain Ahab in his quest for the great white whale. “I see now that the project was an attempt to fully understand this magnificent novel, to walk through every sun-drenched word, to lift up all the hatches and open all the barrels, to smell, taste, hear, and see every seabird, every shark, every sailor, every harpooner, and every whale,” he says. “It was a hard thing, a very painful thing, but the novel now lives inside me in a away it never could have before.” Kish spent nearly every day for eighteen months toiling away in a small closet he converted into an art studio. In order to share the work with family and friends, he started the blog “One Drawing for Every page of Moby-Dick,” where he posted art and brief description about his process on a daily basis.

So now the issue becomes: shall I trust that I can find this book in my local library? or by interlibrary loan? or WorldCat? Or shall I trust Santa to put it in my stocking? Or should I just go back to my original idea and check a well-worn Moby Dick out of my library?

I'm not even sure what I want to do. At this point in my life I'm not only trying to stay with short term projects but am trying not to start new ones, so any of these selections may be off the table, period. However, I did want to share this wonderful "find" with any of you who like literature, art, discipline, and odd things!

And below is the art work for just one of the 500+ pages.

MEETING A PARSNIP

2011-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

It is a given: if the cashier at the supermarket is not close to retirement age when I unload my groceries for him or her to ring up, I will be asked, "What are these?" when my choice of parsnips come down the little conveyor belt. Only us old folk know what a parsnip is.

I had a young female cashier say to me one time, "I thought parsnips were something just made up for a fairy-tale." Another one said, "Oh, they must be something only old people know about." That one made me laugh, because to be truthful, I don't think I ever cooked them while my children were at home. But my mom used them a lot, always in stew but also she braised them, which was my favorite way of eating them.

She'd use the vegetable peeler on them to get the outer skin off. She'd halve them once crosswise and then again lengthwise. She would melt some butter, lots of it actually, in a skillet, put the pieces of the parsnip cut side down in it, add a little water, and then cook them very slowly until they were tender. Parsnips are sweet. It's rare to find a sweet vegetable, but parsnips are one of them. Braised, they are so succulent they just melted in one's mouth.

In the picture above there are some turnips next to the parsnips. My mother always used turnips in her stews too, and potatoes as well. But when the stew is done I can hardly tell the difference in taste between the turnip and potato pieces (actually the difference is more in texture) so I think potatoes and parsnips complement each other better in a stew. Oh, the parsnips are so flavorable!

I read in this week's LA Times an article on latkes for Hanukkah, and the lady writer, a cook, said she always grates some parships to add to her latkes. For her recipe she always uses 1 parsnip for every 2 potatoes. Now this lady wasn't using the already-prepared dry latke mix from Manischevitz or one of the other prepared potato-pancake mixes. She did it the old fashioned way, hand-grating the potatoes and parsnips. I haven't done them that way for a long, long time. Jerry is quite happy with me using the Manischevitz mix, so why do it the hard way? But I think I'm going to give it a try this year. I can just imagine how good those newly-designed home-made latkes will taste with a slight tinch of parsnips.

But then to top off my incursion into all things parsnip, I read this receipe below and thought I needed to try it too. MMmmmmmmm! Does it sound good -- a wonderful thick soup for the winter.

SWEET CORN AND PARSNIP SOUP

Total time: 1 hour and 10 minutes
Servings: 6 to 8
Note: Adapted from the Organic Panificio Cafe.

2 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 cup diced onion
1 stalk celery, chopped
5 cloves garlic, smashed
3 sprigs parsley, plus chopped parsley for garnish, divided
4 sprigs thyme
1/2 bay leaf

3 cups (1 pound) fresh, sweet yellow corn kernels (from 5 to 6 ears)
1/3 pound peeled and trimmed parsnips, coarsely chopped

2 1/2 teaspoons sea salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon cracked white pepper, plus more to taste
6 to 7 cups milk, more as desired

Raw sugar, to taste if desired
Mascarpone, for garnish

1. In a 4-quart, heavy-bottom soup pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Saute the onions, celery and garlic along with the parsley sprigs, thyme and bay leaf until the onions are soft, about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

2. Stir in the corn, parsnips, 2 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper and continue to saute until the parsnips are tender, 20 minutes, stirring frequently.

3. Stir in the milk and bring the mixture to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes.

4. Purée the soup using an immersion blender, or in stages using a standing blender, then strain.

5. Adjust the seasoning to taste and sweeten if desired with raw sugar. This makes about 7 cups soup.

6. Serve warm, with a small dollop of mascarpone and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.

Each of 8 servings: 226 calories; 9 grams protein; 26 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 11 grams fat; 6 grams saturated fat; 29 mg. cholesterol; 822 mg. sodium.

Three cheers for good vegetables and good recipes. And for parsnips.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

2011-12-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

If you watched the news last week you probably saw that poor old Pasadena, north and a bit east of Los Angeles, was hit by hurricane-strength winds that took down more that 100 huge trees, took roofs off houses, and made spaghetti out of electrical lines. Although a wind had been expected - our usual fall/winter "Santa Ana" winds - no weatherperson predicted the strength of the winds that we got. It took a week to get the streets drivable again and to get everyone back with power.

We had a surprise rainstorm on Tuesday of this week and it was so cold we actually had snow down to the 3,500 foot level on Wednesday of this week. Here's what our mountains looked like from Mimi's Cafe in Rancho Cucamonga. Usually we don't get this kind of snow until January.

Then Wednesday we had a tanker truck catch on fire and stop directly under a bridge on one of our freeways. The fire was so hot it cracked the cement on the overpass and the freeway is now in its third day of being completely shut down while the overpass is demolished.

The freeway, of course, is a major east-west road for people working in the LA area, and what has normally been a 45-minute commute has turned into a 2 hour drive.

The weathermen predicted another Santa Ana for today, so we prepared for the ordinary winds but after what happened earlier we all held our breath while we watched the wind get stronger and stronger.

Here's what our TV is showing:

And now our TV is reporting that a gunman has taken over a commercial building in the San Gabriel Valley and so far three people are reported dead.

Each of these events is bad enough on its own; when they hit one after another you just have to wonder when the next shoe is going to fall.

And we just have to keep pushing the "e" word out of our mind, because we are overdue. A little scary, I say.

MY BOOK PICKS FOR 2011

2011-12-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

If everyone else gets to pick their 10 best something, then I'll do it too. Except since it is 2011, I'm picking 11.

However, my book list is a bit different, as I'm picking the 11 best books I read this year, not my favorites of those published this year. If you've followed my blog, you'll have read about many but not all of these. And just so you'll know, I've put an asterisk behind all the non-fiction books.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here are my 11.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – by Aimee Bender
The Forgotten Founding Father – Noah Webster* by Joshua Kendall
Chang and Eng by Darin Straus
Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons
Twilight at the World of Tomorrow*by James Mauro
The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell
In the Garden of Beasts* by Erik Larsen
The Elephant's Journey by Jose Saramago
Just My Type: A Book about Fonts* by Simon Garfield
Lost in Shangri-La* by Mitchell Zuckoff
The Greater Journey – Americans in Paris* by David McCullough

CONFESSION TIME

2011-12-11T19:24:00.000-08:00

The picture above makes me laugh. Oh, not at the Laker players; what's to laugh at there? It's their pants that make me laugh!

These are the kind of pants - baggies, I call them - that I see on teenagers who appear to be taking a great chance on having their drawers part company with their bodies right out in public. My grandsons, who are all now fine men, were born too early to dress like this, but I have a very handsome great-grandson who at 16 walks around with the crotch of his pants knocking against his knees and the top of his pants barely hanging onto his behind. It is not at all attractive, although he thinks so.

The other day Jer had a college basketball game on TV and all the fellows were wearing uniforms similar to what appears above on the Lakers -- specifically the baggies. Now that's the sorriest look for a team uniform I've seen in a long time. I started to ask Jerry if those guys who wore those baggies didn't find it hard to run and jump in them...but before I got that stupid sentence out I realized that of course they didn't find it hard to wear. They had grown up with them feeling that way, and anyway they wouldn't have worn them if they weren't comfortable!

So I stopped my comment mid-word and told Jer to erase what I said, which is my way of acknowledging that I'm wrong. I then said to him, "Well, the guys at college when I went sure wore uniforms that looked a whole lot better than that."

Later I dug out my old 1953-54 George Pepperdine College yearbook to look at that year's basketball team. These guys were my friends. I had dated a couple of them but mostly was friends with the bunch, as Pepperdine was then a very small school near downtown LA and we all knew each other.

I thumbed through the pages as I walked back to show Jerry how spiffy all my friends looked in their basketball uniforms -- and before I could show Jerry I burst out laughing: those guys wore shorts so small that they barely exceeded speedos!

I was shocked and surprised. I had not seen that picture in a long time and I guess I'd gotten more used to baggies than I thought! Man, I'm gettin' old, starting to think the old way is best!

And I told Jerry to erase that too.

A LESSON FROM RATS

2011-12-09T11:47:00.000-08:00

Rats are more like people than you thought! At least that is what the Chicago Tribune article on some helpful rats would lead a person to believe.

Seems an experiment was designed to see if rats could show empathy for each other. We tend to think that kindness and caring are human traits, and we have no problem thinking of kindness and caring when it comes to the actions of dogs, and for cat people we'll even allow that cats can show a bit of those human emotions. But rats?

Well, the experiment showed something of the sort. Sets of same-sex rats were socialized with each other in pairs until it appeared they were "friends." In a common cage, two smaller cages were placed. In one of the smaller cages, left open, the experimenters placed 5 chocolate chips. In the other cage, the rat's friend was placed, with the door shut. It wasn't possible to open the door from the inside, but that cage COULD be opened from the outside by friend rat if that rat cared enough for its friend to figure out how to do it. Complicating the problem was that chocolate is a rat's favorite food, and the question to be answered was: did the rat care more for its friend or for the chocolate chips.

This experiment was repeated over and over so that the answer was a statistical certainty. And here's what the results showed:

All rats appeared concerned enough about its friend to eventually get the door opened and let its compadre out. None of the rats ate all 5 of the chocolate chips first, but some did eat as many as three and a half of them, apparently saving the rest for their buddy.

This told the researchers that rats have at least evolved to the extent that what they did "looked" like compassion. However, there was another interesting result: the female rats appeared more "compassionate" than the males. Each worked harder and faster to get its friend out of the predicament, and they saved, on average, more of the chocolate chips than the male rats did!

So much for rats. I found this an interesting study, and I admit to finding the weirdest things interesting. But I do think there is a lesson for us female humans in this.

If we want the male in our family to do a chore for us, we need to make sure there are no chocolate chips in the house!

MY FAVORITE CHRISTMAS PICTURE - #1

2011-12-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

How can I NOT choose this picture for my favorite? These are my kiddies in December of 1961. Little Kerry is 11 months old. Bryn is 2-1/2, Erin is 4-1/2 and Sean is 5-1/2.

We lived on Shirley Street in Westminster, California. It was our first house, bought right after Bryn was born, when we just outgrew our rented apartment. We were able to get a GI loan to purchase it; requirements for the loan were that the wager-earner's income had to be at least $345 a month. We barely qualified. The house had three bedrooms and was 1140 square feet in size. After living in an apartment that seemed HUGE! The floors were all asphalt tile, and in the five years we lived there we never were able to save enough money to put a rug down. We lived frugally, but at Christmas we always made sure that the kids were abundantly provided with toys galore.

My kids will be able to remind me of what they got that Christmas -- if I say Erin's big doll was a Chatty Cathy, she'll probably suggest it was the Patty Play Pal. And Bryn will know for sure if she was holding a cash register or a toy accordian. My memory for their toys fail me, but I know they all remember! Sean, of course, got his Marine Uniform; he knew from pictures that his dad had been a Marine in Korea and he wanted to look like his dad! And Kerry as yet really didn't care what it was that she unwrapped. She wasn't quite old enough to know what Christmas was all about. But you can tell by their faces that everyone was happy.

I look at that picture and remember all those good times. I loved these little tykes, and raising them was a joy. (Well, sometimes through the teenage years I wasn't sure if it was or not, but we came out at the other end ok!) Now they are all grown up, raising their own kids with some of those kids now producing grandchildren! And the joy goes on.

How lucky I am to have had such a wonderful houseful of kids!

MOTHER, MUSIC & ME

2011-12-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

It certainly wasn’t my mother’s fault that I ended up playing the ukulele and the radio, rather than a real musical instrument (apologies to all ukulele players.) She tried her best, and I simply was a recalcitrant child.

Between the ages of 5 and 8, when I guess I was more pliable and more amenable to doing what my mother suggested, I was given violin lessons. Mother always told us kids (myself and my younger sister who also got the violin lessons a couple years after I did and who persevered a whole lot longer than I did) that violin music was the music of angels. So of course wanting to appear as close to angelic as possible, we both did what mother wanted us to do.

I do not recall practicing, so apparently it was not a big issue at our house. I have one old recording (now made into a mp3 file) of me playing Hungarian Airs – and for an 8 year old, at least I can say although I was not a prodigy at least I acquitted myself well. I hit my notes right-on! But alas, by age 8 my violin playing was over. Although I don’t remember why I quit, it probably was my idea, not my mother's.

I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that in seventh grade we were given the option of taking music lessons through school. I guess I was among the last to sign up, because by the time I got to the head of the line there were only bassoons left. I could barely lift a bassoon off the floor, and I could barely get a single puff of air through the reed. In just looking at me, a smallish definitely skinny wimp, whoever was in charge of assigning instruments should have known right away that we were not a good match. I have no recollection of ever learning to make more than a toot or two, but many years later a childhood friend told me that we used to practice together at my house, she on her saxophone and me on the bassoon. “You looked so earnest,” she shared, “and I remember the pitiful sounds that you produced.” So apparently I gave it a good try, but I would guess my bassoon playing lasted more on the order of weeks than months, before it too became history just as the violin had.

Next was a go on the piano. All I wanted was to be able to accompany people while they sang. I wanted immediate results without practice. My piano teacher, a Mrs. Stretz, was determined that along with my fingers tinkling through some simple etudes I was going to learn music theory. I know I got past “Swans on the Lake” in the first book – I definitely remember a rondo among the pieces I learned. But I wanted only chords to accompany a song. I envisioned myself sitting at the piano with a group of friends around me singing away. I didn’t want etudes, rondos, or especially triads and the like. Mrs. Stretz wouldn’t budge in her teaching methods and I convinced mother that I was grossly unhappy with my piano lessons, so they went by the wayside too.

My last foray into music lessons was in high school when I thought if only I could learn the guitar I could be happy and need nothing more out of life. Again, I thought in terms of accompanying people on the guitar; I now suspect it was recognition I was after, not music. My guitar teacher held up classical guitarist Andres Segovia as a model in the same way that my piano teacher held up pianist Jose Iturbi. This is what they both saw ahead for me, and I can’t fault them for that. However, I didn’t want it and in spite of my mother’s pleadings, I quit music lessons for good!

To this day, I still can only play the radio (although now it is more like CDs on my computer) and the ukulele, although I don’t have one anymore. But what was left after these four bouts of music lessons was a love of music, a good ear, and an ability to sight-read music. These found expression in my adult life by singing in choirs and leading children’s choirs. Some things just satisfy a person’s soul and these did it for me. I have a happy and a satisfied feeling when I think back on those times.

But oh, I can’t forget playing the uke. That was as near as I ever got to making music on instruments. Playing and teaching the uke was another one of the few things I ever did that was just pure and simple fun! So I suspect all those music lessons weren’t for naught. I have my mother to thank for them!

LOST IN SHANGRI-LA

2011-11-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

Before I go one line further I will let Publishers Weekly tell you about the story.

Mitchell Zuckoff skillfully narrates the story of a plane crash and rescue mission in an uncharted region of New Guinea near the end of WWII. Of the 24 American soldiers who flew from their base on a sightseeing tour to a remote valley, only three survived the disaster, including one WAC. As the three waited for help, they faced death from untreated injuries and warlike local tribesmen who had never seen white people before and believed them to be dangerous spirits. Even after a company of paratroopers arrived, the survivors still faced a dangerous escape from the valley via "glider snatch."

Jerry was sitting beside me doing crossword puzzles while I read this book, and he doesn't have to bother to read it now because it was SO good I just had to keep reading parts of it to him, interrupting his train of thought. To say this is a fascinating story is a real understatement. I could not put the book down. And women will like it as much as men will.

It is not a book of war stories, but rather the setting is in wartime (WWII, that is) and the people in this story are in the military service -- well, except for the tribesmen in "Shangri-La" who are native warriors and thought to be cannibals and head-hunters! In spite of the terrible disaster that befell these Americans, the author has the reader laughing over and over, sometimes about native customs and costumes, sometimes about miscommunications and once about requesting an air-drop of Kotex sanitary napkins for use in padding the backpack straps on the final long trek out of the jungle to freedom.

The story also leaves the reader proud of the men and women in our military service, especially the Philippino-American Paratroopers, who offered themselves up for this rescue operation.

Zuckoff has a short video of footage from the rescue itself on his website at www.mitchellzuckoff.com. Watch it, but don't stop there. The book is well worth your time to read.

I had it on reserve at the library for a long time, due to its popularity. But it certainly was worth the wait. It also will make a good holiday gift for any reader in your family.

ANNUAL THANKSGIVING MESSAGE

2011-11-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Back in the late 1990s I read one of Joan Beck's annual Thanksgiving columns and was stunned by its beauty and simplicity. I wanted every one of my friends to read it, so I wrote her at the Chicago Tribune asking her permission to put it in my Christmas letter to family and friends. The season wasn't the issue; its meaning for anytime of the year was what I was looking for. She wrote me back a lovely letter giving me that permission. She died a year later.

I think she would be pleased to extend that permission to me now, as I pass on this slightly dated but still as stunning as ever column that was a bountiful gift from her to all of us.

Thursday, November 27, 1997
For these things, we are thankful ...
By Joan Beck

As we gather together to count the Lord's blessings, 376 years after the first Thanksgiving Day, we are grateful, Dear God, for Mir if it's safe and the Mars Pathfinder when it worked and the bull market while it lasts, for browsers and brownies and brothers, for cells and cell phones and cedars, for planes and plumbing and e pluribus unum, for tea and T-shirts and a T-rex named Sue.

God of grace and God of glory, we thank you this November day for stock prices that go up and a budget deficit that went down, for the fragile peace in Bosnia and for Wei Jingsheng who is now free, for dividends and diversity and one nation indivisible, for e-mail and eagles and Edison and Easter, for salsa and cilantro and cinnamon.

For new drugs that fight cancer and new techniques for heart surgery and new progress on a vaccine for AIDS, we are grateful, O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, and for newspapers and newborns and new jobs and new years, for cats and catalogs and catfish and CT scans, for caterpillars and calculus and cathedrals and catsup.

O Lord, our God, when we in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made, we offer praise today for modems and mothers and grandmothers and Mother Teresa, for the infinitesimal mysteries of the genome and infinite stretch of the heavens, for bonding and books and brooks and bootstraps, for carryouts and carryons and carryovers.

For teachers and preachers and all creatures great and small, we thank you, Lord God who made them all, and for vacations and cash stations and gustations and dalmatians, for faxes and fairies and fathers and farms, for fireworks and fireflies and frequent-flyer miles, for health and hearths and hearing and healing.

O God who is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, we are grateful this day for the World Wide Web and weddings and weekends for galaxies and galas and gardens, for hymns and hugs and heffalumps, for cars and caramel and carnivals, for carols and carillons and cancan, for www.travelocity.com and www.lonelyplanet.com and hhtp://whyfiles.news.wisc.edu/.

Septuplets when they are all healthy and normal we count as blessings this Thanksgiving Day, our Father who art in heaven. We thank you, too, for nests and nest eggs and neonatal intensive care, for mentors and Mendel and Mendelssohn and positive mental attitude, for Disney and Dilbert and dill, for caregivers and carpools and "I now pronounce you husband and wife."

Lord of all to thee we raise our grateful praise for 911 and 1-800, for 98.6 and 20/20, for 401Ks and 403Bs, for I Corinthians 13 and John 3:16, for Beethoven's 6th and Brahms' 4th, for 12-step programs and three-ring circuses and second-day mail, for Title IX and a half point over prime and 8 gigabytes of hard drive space.

Daughters and daisies and daydreams we count among thy blessings this day, O God, who moves in mysterious ways thy wonders to perform. So, too, sons and soul and soup and soap, comforters and comfort food and common stock, flextime and flu shots and flags and flamingos and "Yea, through I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

Our Father who art in heaven, we thank you for general assemblies and general practitioners and generics and Genesis, for Gen X and geniuses and the Geneva convention, for solitude and solitaire and serendipity, for sequels and soccer and Sesame Street, for "It's benign" and "You're covered" and "I lift my lamp beside the golden door" and "When in the course of human events" and "They all lived happily ever after."

For sisters and salads and salmon and saints, for Seuss and Sousa and Santa and Strauss, we give thee thanks this special day, O God from whom all blessings flow. And for docks and doctors and doctoral dissertations, for Meals on Wheels and blood banks and food banks and shelters, for psalms and samaritans and salt and salvation and that "surely the presence of the Lord is in this place."

Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices for angels and auctions and anesthesia, for potatoes and poems and Poe and Paine, and for Lincoln and liberty and libraries, for licorice and luminaria and light at the end of the tunnel, for overtures and overalls and outlets and ova and "I have a dream" and "We shall overcome."

The mysteries of egg and electricity and eternity, of prenatal development and prairies and prayer fill our minds with wonder this Thanksgiving Day, immortal, invisible, God only wise. Our thanks abound, as well, for preludes and pralines and paramedics and pacifiers, for physicists and pharmacists and pianists and pragmatists, for gadgets and goslings and gorillas and godparents and "until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand."

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, we thank you once again for dawn after dark, for rest after work, for healing after hurt and for life after life, for a bridge over trouble and a shelter from the storm, for love that will not let us go and an eternal home and always, that "neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God."
Chicago Tribune

THIS 'N' THAT

2011-11-23T13:08:00.000-08:00

Last year about this time I was not feeling well at all. It turned out to be nothing more than bad side effects of new blood pressure medicines I had been prescribed. A trip to the ER identified no reason for my problems. A second trip a few days later to Urgent Care merely caused a second medicine to be added that promptly made me sleep all day for three days in a row.

Finally I woke up and had the presence of mind to Google the medicines I’d been prescribed and discovered I had classic signs of known side effects of both of these medications. I took myself off them, then took myself back to the doctor and told him I’d cured myself but I still needed to try another blood pressure medicine. I do like my doctor, but I’m afraid he just doesn’t have time for me. He does well by Jerry, because Jerry has a case that needs monitoring (diabetes). But until I can show him some real breathing issues, his parting answer to me is “prn.” (As necessary). I guess I should be thankful, not irked.

************

I read in the business section of last Sunday’s LA Times that the CD is on its way to the same graveyard where old floppy disks are and that shortly we will be ordering all our music in the mp3 format via our electronic devices.

I’ll be seeing my son Sean this Thanksgiving weekend and I’m going to ask him to translate that for me. I mean, I know what it means but I don’t know how I will make it happen. I do not have any kind of equipment having an “ i” in front of it and in or on which I am to download it. The only mp3 files I have (that I know about) are ones my son made for me of some old music – me on the violin and some Raunch Hands Against the World songs. If I could remember how it was that I listened to them using my computer a year ago, I might be able to do it again. But for sure I don’t know things like how I’ll be able acquire a CD’s worth of, say, Brahm’s Requiem by way of mp3. So I’ll wait for my guru to tell me how to do it, like he does all the other technical things I don’t know. I KNOW I’m lucky to have him, and if he’s not available he has produced a son who is equally knowledgeable and who would help me if Sean wasn’t available, but I do hate to let Brendan know just how backward his old grandma is. Pitiful, I say.

And as a matter of fact, today I went to Barnes and Noble to purchase a CD for a little Christmas gift for a good friend and oops, they don’t carry CD’s anymore.

************

I have never been a person who particularly enjoyed athletic activities for the “athletic” or “exercise” part of them. There was a time in my life when I really enjoyed bowling, and that included a fair bunch of what I would call exercise. And then later I took up square dancing, and believe me, that was a whole lot more strenuous than bowling. I never jogged, or swam, or played tennis, or even golfed. It wasn’t my thing. (I always said my idea of the perfect exercise is making my eyes go back and forth across the pages of a good book, and that has never changed.)

But I was active to this extent: I could spend an eight-hour day at work, which often entailed a whole lot of running from one end of a warehouse to another, come home and put a dinner on the table, and then head out to a library where I would work on my genealogical research until the library closed at 9 or 9:30. I’d be up at 5 the next morning, getting ready to repeat the process. This was not work at all! This was fun, and I continued doing it right up until 2000, when I retired.

As I get close to entering my 12th year of retirement, I have to be very thankful that I seem to be aging gracefully, although when I look in the mirror “gracefully” is too kind a word to describe the wrinkles on my face. But I know I am slowing down. I recently made a 5-hour drive from home to Fresno, and the next day turned around and drove back home. Not everyone my age can do that, I know. But it’s really not all that much fun anymore, fun like when we were young and would drive up and back from Long Beach to San Francisco just for a “fun” weekend. That’s not fun anymore. And I have to confess, at this stage in my life I wouldn’t want to work all day, cook a meal and go research for three hours all in one day either. I suppose I could do it if I had to, but you know, I don’t even want to do that anymore.

************
And just in case you have missed it, this is making the rounds online right now:

INNER PEACE

If you can start the day without caffeine,
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without alcohol,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
...Then you are probably...
The Family Dog!

LEARNING TO READ IN OLD AGE

2011-11-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

I am always happiest when I am learning about new things. Well, I am now tempted to backtrack and say I'm really happiest when I'm reading, but in today's particular case both statements are true and really about the same thing.

Back in mid-October I posted on the blog about my delight in reading Jose Saramago's book "The Elephant's Journey." Today I discovered a book discussion group on Seniorlearning.com that has set aside November for discussing this book, and of course I immediately joined the group.

Here's a disclaimer: I am always just a reader and a watcher in any book discussion groups. I am a real "dodo" when it comes to understanding all the ins and outs of novels. I am always shocked and surprised that there is so much more to the book than what I read, and rather than humiliate myself by being outed as such a shallow reader, I simply read or listen to others as they discuss the book. I learn a whole lot that way.

Anyway, already the discussion in this online group has been SO eye-opening for me that I can hardly contain myself. So I want to share some of it with you, in case you decide to read this book too.

First as to "white elephant." The elephant in this book is not white. But have you ever wondered where the term "white elephant" came from?

Wikipedia said this about white elephants: A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth. The term derives from the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance

One of the participants in this discussion had this to say:

"Elephants disappeared from Europe after the Roman Empire. As exotic and expensive animals, they were exchanged as presents between European rulers, who exhibited them as luxury pets, beginning with Harun ar-Rashid's gift of an elephant to Charlemagne."

She noted this came from The History of Elephants in Europe.

In The Elephant's Journey, King Joao is giving this elephant to his relative Archduke Maximilian of Austria - and I learned that this giving of an elephant, white or otherwise, was not unusual.

But I learned more than that. The King's wife is not happy about giving the elephant away, although the writer lets us know that she had not been very concerned previously about the elephant. In fact, she tries to convince the King that he might consider giving a monstrance as a gift.

I read this and never batted my eye at this word that I didn't know the meaning of. Did I stop and look it up? No, like a dodo I read right over and past it. What did I miss? This, according to one of the participants.

...monstrance comes from the latin - "monstrare" - meaning "to show." Monstrances were often used to carry the host in processions.

While we were in Toledo, Spain, we saw a real monster of a monstrance! Toledo was the capital city of Spain until the 16th century, when the capitol was moved to Madrid, but Toledo remains the seat of the Catholic church in Spain - what is called the archdiocese.

Here we saw so much of the "treasure" from the 13th to the 16th century, by the time we saw the monstrance we had reached that state where we were no longer overwhelmed or over-impressed with what we were looking at. Like looking at the treasures of the Louvre for too many hours.

But the Great Monstrance of Arfe! This thing is 9 feet tall! Enrique Arfe sculpted it in the early 16th c. - originally in silver and then plated in gold! I have to believe that Saramago was aware of this Spanish treasure...it would have been a splendid gift to any monarch, don't you think?

The author probably was not imagining this very gift, but it was obvious that he intended his queenly character to be thinking of something more than a little bit ordinary.

So today, in addition to being reminded once again of my terrible inadequacity in understanding what I read, I've already learned enough to have my tongue hanging out and panting for more, more, more.

Unfortunately I do not still have the book in my hands, so I can't follow along in the reading. But that's not going to stop me from learning.

And the funniest thing is that since reading all this today, I've wandered about my house looking for white elephants. Mine, probably like yours, are the kinds of things shown in the picture at the top of the blog. No hay, no special food and no cleanup necessary.

DONALD ORVILLE SMITH - 1938-2011

2011-11-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

Don, the husband of my late sister, lost his battle with pancreatic cancer yesterday. Anyone who knew him will understand when I say it is a huge and a very sad loss. There is nothing good to say about this except it was quick and he was kept from much of the physical suffering.

He had not so long ago met and married a warm and kind woman who matched him in grace and they shared a time together, but with his terrible illness, growing old together was not to be. The family's only consolation is their faith in a better world.

He loved children, he loved animals and he had a unmeasurable amount of kindness and goodness in his heart. Don made being around him fun. In the 53 years I knew him I saw a man who truly loved his family, including all the animals that also inhabited his life - dogs, cats, birds, iguanas, snakes and frogs. (Surely I have missed some that his kids - or just as likely, my sister - brought home through the years). And then there were his grandkids... shown below before darling Makayla made her appearance; he was truly a proud and adoring grandpa.

Jerry and I, along with Sean, Erin, Bryn and Kerry - his nieces and nephew - will miss him a lot. Rest in peace, Don.

...AND TWO IN A BUSH?

2011-11-11T06:45:00.000-08:00

I'd like to say that getting excited over a bird is a good thing, but actually I think it more accurately indicates that Jerry and I are old codgers who birdwatch and that it doesn't take much to excite us any more. Nevertheless, today I report on a new "happening." Jer actually missed out on it because he has an uncanny ability to fall asleep while his head is moving toward his pillow, and he didn't take the second look out the window that I did, right after lights out.

Every year about this time a lone black-crowned night heron shows up on our front lawn. We do not live anywhere near water. There is a river bed about 6 miles to the south of us but certainly nothing like a lake or a pond or a stream that one would ordinarily think of as a place where water birds might hang out. We have tried to figure out just what it is that draws "our" night heron back to the lawn year after year and we really don't know. Worms? Slugs? Dog poop? (the later being in abundance from all the jerks who walk their dogs across the lawn and don't clean up after them.

This heron shows up any time between 8 and 9 p.m. There are still people out walking their dogs at that time and the heron will fly off as they come near, but he (or she) returns once the danger is past and continues feeding. Before we turn the lights out at bedtime we always check at the window to make sure he is there. He almost always is.

I've tried to take his picture before with my little digital camera but lacking a long lens and infra-red shooting capabilities, all I've ever managed to capture is two glinty eyes in the distance. That makes for a funny picture but it sure doesn't show him off.

Although the night heron is what I think of as a "harumph" bird, sitting all hunched over with no visible neck and looking really bored with it all, this bird actually has quite a decent neck which sometimes we can see if a car's headlights happen to catch him in the process of snagging a morsel a few feet from where he is standing. He also has a huge wing span for his size and certainly looks much bigger in the air than he does on the ground. The bird book says (yes, we have one of those too) he roosts in trees during the day.

But here is why last night was so exciting: there were TWO of them on the lawn! And they either were having an argument or were twitterpating (or trying to twitterpate.) In the five winters we've lived here, there has never been more than one on our lawn. Whether it is the same bird night after night I can't say, because one dark blob on the lawn looks like another. But for sure now we know that there are at least two that hang around.

After seeing the TWO last night it was hard for me to drop off to sleep. It was exciting, but I had no one to share it with. Jer's snoring indicated that he was beyond getting excited over anything. So you lucky readers are the ones who get to hear my exciting news.

WE HAVE TWO HERONS! (and maybe will have more if they were, in fact, twitterpating!)

NO, NOT NOSY!

2011-11-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

As most of you know, I am a very inquisitive sort of person…not “nosy” inquisitive, but just interested in knowing lots of little obscure things. That probably accounts for my abiding interest in genealogy, where there are just -- oh, so many things to be discovered.

I do not need to know a fact about every leaf on my family tree, but I admit I try. The strange thing is that I even enjoy knowing things about other people’s leaves, and when I find out something interesting, I want to make sure that distant family members have a shot at knowing it too.

Here’s an example:

When I was in Istanbul I learned about an old Protestant cemetery where burials had started in the late 1850s. Seven protestant powers, as determined by Sultan Abdul Medjid (Prussia, Great Britain, the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Hanseatic Cities), each had their own section in that cemetery. As a good genealogist, I did a tombstone transcription of all the existing tombstones in the American section, with the goal of eventually putting them into some kind of a record and dispersing that record to major genealogical repositories. It was hard work, but was a chore of love.

One day I was walking through the Grand Bazaar and in glancing into one of the shops I saw a tombstone embedded into a side wall. I can’t remember for sure but it probably was a carpet shop. I braved the salesman’s pitch and stood at the tombstone, simply copying the information for my records. It said:

George Cushing Knapp
Born Lyndon, VT USA Oct 30, 1823
Died Bitlis,Turkey, March 12, 1875
For 40 years a missionary in Turkey

My first thought was that I needed to get this information into my book, but because I was so interested in everything, to keep from producing a huge tome I’d had to set pretty rigid parameters for inclusion in this book. My criteria was to be limited to 1) Americans 2) buried 3) Protestant Cemetery. The man whose tombstone I saw did not fit that criteria. Oh dear, what to do?

Five years after I returned from Turkey, I readied the book for publication and mulled over poor George Knapp. Was he to be in? or out? I finally decided that if I had to err, I would prefer to err on the side of inclusiveness. And besides, it was MY book and I was paying to have it printed and I could break any rule I chose. So in 1998 the book was printed and George Knapp was there for posterity.

Within a year I found a place on the web to post the basic “vital stat” information from these burials, leaving my e-mail address so I could personally deliver information I had beyond what I had posted.

In March of 2001 I received an e-mail from a woman in New York. It said:

I recently happened across the website you posted with information about cemeteries in Istanbul and saw that my great-great grandfather, George Knapp, was one of the people in it. I was fascinated to find him on your site. I had known he was a missionary in Turkey, but very little else and had no idea that he lived out his life there.

I would be grateful for any additional information you might have regarding him or the cemetery where he is buried....

I had the fun of telling her that he was not buried in “my” cemetery; he had been buried in Bitlis, which is so far east in Turkey that it is actually closer to Iran than it is to Istanbul. And that his tombstone managed to escape resting in that cemetery to mark his grave but instead made it to a final resting place embedded in a shop wall in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. I told her that this embedding often happened to smallish pieces of stones in Turkey. As we traveled around the country we would see very old pieces of stones used as part of a much newer building, such as this one below.

Now, these kinds of wonderful discoveries are what keep me posting information on the internet – on this blog and elsewhere. I try to match something I know for sure with a similarly shaped blank in someone else’s knowledge. I’ve got so many stories begging to be told, and oh, how I love telling them. I’m sharing the story of the Protestant cemetery with a local genealogy society this weekend; it's my favorite subject to talk about.

But am I nosy? Nope. I just think this is darn interesting, don’t you?

FUN WITH FONTS

2011-11-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

This is a book about fonts, not about personalities. I hope there MAY be one of my readers who thinks this is an interesting subject just like I do, but probably not. Nevertheless, fonts are what I am serving up today.

It seems like I have always been aware of fonts – or type styles – but I suspect it was really because in school I started typing early and focused my extracurricular efforts in working on school newspapers, where it was important to match size and style of letters to the needs of attractive and readable newspapers.

I think the average computer user, if they use a word-processing application at all, understands what fonts are. But there are lots of stories to tell about them – and Simon Garfield in this most interesting book has a knack in telling them, stories about

• Losing your job because of using the wrong font
• When to use a font with a sexual stereotype
• Dotting your “i” with a square
• The Third Reich outlawing Gothic script
• What your choice of font can say about you

And it goes on.

Some of his stories are instructional. I’ll quote one of them here:

“Upper and lower case?” The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor’s hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn. (Did you have any idea that is why we call letters either upper case or lower case?) Even with this distinction, the compositor would still have to ‘mind their ps and qs’, so alike were they when each letter was dismantled from a block of type and then tossed back into the compartments of a tray. (And who even suspected this?)

Some of his stories are just plain funny:

He tells of Lexmark, the printing manufacturer, having some fun with a promotional exercise designed to get the company name in the paper. It was more or less an analysis of emotional connotations of those who used fonts in writing gleaned by the recipients of those writings. As an example, those who used the Courier font might be thought to be nerdy, and be a librarian or work in data entry. Those using the soft and curvy Shelley font might see themselves as a sex kitten and project that image via type style. Those using San Serif fonts seemed to like safety and anonymity, while the Comic Sans users tend to be self-confessed attention seekers.

Garfield reports that this was not scientific research but simply a PR tool to get some newpaper space! That made me feel good, because I LOVE the Comic Sans font!

This book is interesting, readable, instructive, funny, surprising, and worth reading at least twice, which I will do. The chapters are short and sweet. The book is one that can be picked up and put down, which is good for busy people.

All in all, this book is just my type! Let me know if it’s yours, too.

A TEEN & A FIRST JOB

2011-11-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

When I turned 15-1/2 in 1951 I was eligible for a work permit and I knew just where I wanted to work: Horgan’s Pharmacy on Cherry Avenue in Long Beach. Horgan’s was a corner drug store, small by today’s standards but fairly large by 1950 standards. There were three separate parts of the store: across the back was the pharmacy itself, along the north wall was the soda fountain and the rest of the store was where the sundries were. I wanted to work the soda fountain for a start.

Pat Horgan, the owner, hired me. We had lived in the area for 6 years and my folks were his regular customers, so the minute I approached him about a job he put me on the payroll. My hourly pay was fifty cents, which at that time was minimum wage.

I had to be trained to make malts, milkshakes, cokes, phosphates, root beer floats and ice cream sundaes, in addition to making coffee, heating up cans of soup, slicing up pies and cakes, and serving donuts and Danish, most of which needed to be heated before being served. The fountain seated about 10 people, and it became my domain once I was finished with my training. My other duty was to be waiting at the door when the boss opened up on Sunday morning so I could lug inside the morning newspapers that had been dropped off by the distributor at the locked door by the soda fountain. Those papers sold like hotcakes as the “regulars” came for their Sunday morning coffee and donuts.

I was a quick learner and loved what I was doing!

My dad had his own small business – a sales and repair shop of both big and little appliances like stoves, refrigerators, washers, dryers, TVs – and radios, waffle irons and coffee pots. He built it into a good business and because he was good to his employees, there was very little employee turnover. I’d grown up hearing what he expected from his employees: a full day’s work, in place and ready to go when the doors opened, clean and neat, and a smile on their face. Those were the values I took with me when I started behind the soda fountain that first day.

Before long, Mr. Horgan asked me if I would like to work in the sundries. I didn’t think it would be nearly as much fun as working the soda fountain, but I wanted to have as many sellable skills as I could acquire and I accepted his offer. My pay didn’t increase but my knowledge of what retail selling involved did. My first chores were learning to restock the shelves, and if I was able to finish the restocking, then I spent the rest of the time making sure the merchandise on each aisle was neat and in the right place. I never just stood and talked to other employees; we were expected to stay busy, and to ask what we could do if we couldn’t figure out for ourselves.

About the same time, Mr. Horgan hired a young kid to work in the stockroom, a fellow a year behind me in school but whom I knew quite well. I was glad to have Miles working there with me; up until that time I was the only teenaged employee. I might not have remembered this job as clearly as I do because of one of the very embarrassing things the job required. In those days, boxes of women’s sanitary napkins were not just set out on shelves like they are now. There were two brands: Kotex and Modess, and there were also different sizes – small, medium and large. Every week Miles and I had to schedule a time in the back room where we wrapped the boxes of sanitary napkins in plain paper – dark green for Kotex and dark blue for Modess. And on the end we had to use a black marker to place letters to indicate the brand and the size: K-S, K-M and K-L; and M-S, M-M and M-L. Only then would we take them out onto the shelves where they could be purchased.

The subject of sex and bodily functions were not commonly discussed among youngish teenagers of the opposite sex during those days. Of course both Miles and I knew exactly what these were used for, but in the year I worked at Horgan’s and wrapped these boxes each week, Miles and I never said anything more about them than, “It’s time to wrap the boxes.” Oh gosh, we were such a naïve bunch of kids – or maybe we were just polite, and probably a bit prudish. The only other embarrassing thing I ever had to handle was to be shown where the men’s Trojans were kept (in a drawer behind the counter). No one ever asked me for one; I’m sure any man who came in went to one of the “old” ladies who normally worked the sundry side for his purchase. He had to ask someone, because they weren’t in public view.

I worked at the drug store – sometimes filling in on the soda fountain but mostly on the sundries side for the two summers on either side of my junior year of High School – and then on weekends and holidays during that school year. I really didn’t want to work during my senior year; I had been elected Editor of the weekly newspaper that year, and with that and the extracurricular activities that seniors were involved with, I knew it would certainly be easier for me if I didn’t have to make a choice between obligations I felt to Mr. Horgan at work and what I wanted to experience at school.

I went to my dad to ask him how I should let Mr. Horgan know that I would be quitting the job. I wanted a good reference from him for future work, so I knew my dad would know the right way to handle it. I’d guess, since my mom and dad were good friends with Pat and his wife, that dad clued him that I’d be leaving. However, I followed the guidelines my dad gave me and I referred a younger friend to replace me who I knew would be a good match with the store. Pat and I separated on good terms, and he did, in fact, provide a good reference for me later on.

Although Horgan’s Pharmacy was a larger store than usual for a corner drug store in a residential area, we just don’t have drug stores like that anymore, at least in the big cities, stores where the owners are there and willing to train young kids.. I was lucky to have a father who set a model for me to follow as I put my teenage toe in the water of retail sales. I was lucky to have a boss who set standards for his employees and expected them to perform up to them. And between you and me, I was lucky to live in a time when life was a bit slower, a bit more simple, and when society was a bit more polite.

When did that all end?

BOO!

2011-10-31T08:19:00.000-07:00

A long time ago – close to 60 years, I’d guess – someone at the ConocoPhillips oil refinery in Wilmington, California, (a small neighbor of my home town of Long Beach) looked at its squat 3-million gallon storage tank and saw the possibility of turning it into the world’s biggest Jack-O-Lantern. The idea was embraced by management and after being touched by more than 100 gallons of paint the change was completed. From a nondescript tank to a giant pumpkin --- voila!

There is no online record of who deserves the honor of having had this wonderful vision- but from that time on, every Halloween the storage tank has been turned into this wonderful display. Especially nice is the happy face, which means that every little kid in the area can be driven by this refinery and not scared half out of their wits by a fierce face! My own kids, all born in Long Beach, couldn’t wait for each Halloween to come, not only because of Trick-or-Treating (which was totally safe in those days) but also because they knew there was a giant pumpkin just waiting to smile on them when their dad and I made our annual trek over to Wilmington.

The Jack-O-Lantern is still there, smiling, all these many years later. I don’t know if ConocoPhillips still owns the refinery, but it sure pleases me that this tradition is still being carried on and that new generations of kiddies can have the kind of pleasure that my own did.

Have fun, my friends, and make it a safe day.

WHAT'S BETTER? THEN OR NOW!

2011-10-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Those of you who grew up in the LA area should recognize the statues above as old residents of the La Brea tar pits – old in that the statues have resided at the La Brea tar pits for many years, and old as they represent REALLY old animals that roamed around the area eons ago. The lion statues were sculpted by Herman Beck in 1935 and have been at the tar pits since then.

However, they didn’t always sit in such a lovely setting.
I think I was probably 10 when I saw them for the first time. My folks took my sister Ginnie Lou and I up to Los Angeles for the day and the La Brea tar pits were on our agenda. This would have been about 1945.

There was no fancy museum there then. It was like a big park, with fences around the actual tar pits themselves and statues placed strategically around them, representing various types of prehistoric animals, not all of which were found in the tar pits. I took lots of pictures, but only one ended up in my scrapbook – one of my mother and sister at one of the statues

Then in 1948 when I was in 7th grade our Girl Scout leader took us on the first of many trips we made into Los Angeles from our home town of Long Beach. We girls were fascinated by the tar pits; it was a teeny bit scary to us, wondering if we were going to be consumed by tar like the prehistoric animals were, even though they were fenced off. The tar was still bubbling and warm, and it smelled just like the tar we had seen in Long Beach wherever a new roof was being put on a house. And again, I was the one who was running around taking pictures of all my friends as we clambered up and down on the statues.

This first picture below is my friend Dokey nestled in the arms of a huge bear. And the picture below that is taken with the whole troop, excluding me of course, and our scout leader, Frances Allen, on those very same Herman Beck lions that today still are an integral part of the tar pits…the same lions that are shown at the beginning of this blog.

I’d guess the last time our scout troop went to the tar pits was around 1950. Junior and Senior High School, college or work, marriages, babies and adult life probably kept most of us from even giving a passing thought to those tar pits. In my adult years I went to Los Angeles a lot, but never returned to them. Actually, I was even unaware that a museum had been built on the premises until about 1995 when I had occasion to be in the area and decided to take a quick peek at my old stomping ground.

Imagine my surprise to find the tar pits of my memory gone! In its place (after some 50 years) was a spiffy new museum, a tiny display of actual tar pits, and most of the statues that I remembered not even visible from where I stood. I did not make a tour of the area, so I am sure there was more than I saw at that quick peek, but as with many other remembered things, how things change!

The LA Times this morning had a nice article and photo about the La Brea tar pits. I found it interesting but there was no emotional attachment to it….until I saw the picture of the lions, which drove me back to my old scrapbook and from that came a desire to show you the “then” and “now.” And like all old people would say, “Well, it was better then!”

RIGHT & WRONG

2011-10-26T18:59:00.000-07:00

Although I don’t specifically remember, I am sure it was my mother who taught me to tie my shoelaces. And furthermore, I can’t say for sure that the way I ended up doing it is exactly the way she taught me, but so be it. However, I recently learned I was doing it wrong!

You ladies know that in our childhood once we got to the point where we stopped wearing sturdy shoes, except maybe for tennies and later for Nikes, we didn’t wear shoes that tied. At least that was my experience, so all these many years I have been tying them wrong. It just never occurred to me that there could be a right and a wrong way to tie shoes. The fact that the bow on my shoelaces never laid neatly across my instep was not even in my awareness, until recently.

I saw a video online where a man was demonstrating the right way to tie shoe laces. First he showed the wrong way: the loop was made with the right lace, the left lace was brought over on top and around the loop, tucked under and pulled through to the left and tightened. That was the way my mother taught me (I supposed) and the way I had always done it. This man in no uncertain terms said that was wrong, that the left lace was to be brought UNDER the loop, tucked under and pulled through and tightened. He tied them both ways on the video and in that moment I saw what I had been doing wrong. I tried it on my own shoes – and sure enuf! The man's was right. His way produced bows that went across the instep; my way produced "up and down" bows. WRONG!!!!

Since then, I’ve been tying my shoes correctly except when I forget – which is what happened this morning and which is why I took a picture of my own shoes to show the difference. I put my right shoe on first and forgot to tie it the right way. The second shoe was tied the correct way – and there you are. The difference is clear and is proof positive.

I tell you this so you will at least know as much as I know. I HATE being wrong.

Having said that, I must add that just this week I told Jerry that these shoes, which are relatively new, are not at all comfortable. When I bought them the price was SO right that I couldn’t pass them up. But that was the last time I was pleased with them. They really never felt good on my feet. He thought I meant they were too small, but although they carried a "9" on them, my normal size, it felt like I was wearing two sizes too big. My mother would have called them “gunboats” – her word for oversized shoes. Looking at this picture, I can see for sure they don’t fit right. Not only have I been tying my shoes wrong but I’m also wearing the wrong size.

So that calls for immediate action. As I said, I HATE to be wrong. I must rectify that wrong and go shoe-shopping ASAP.

Now as for the dramatically colored shoe laces, I say, why not? They bring a smile to my face!

RIGHT AND WRONG

2011-10-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

Although I don’t specifically remember, I am sure it was my mother who taught me to tie my shoelaces. And furthermore, I can’t say for sure that the way I ended up doing it is exactly the way she taught me, but so be it. However, I recently learned I was doing it wrong!

You ladies know that in our childhood once we got to the point where we stopped wearing sturdy shoes, except maybe for tennies and later for Nikes, we didn’t wear shoes that tied. At least that was my experience, so all these many years I have been tying them wrong. It just never occurred to me that there could be a right and a wrong way to tie shoes. The fact that the bow on my shoelaces never laid neatly across my instep was not even in my awareness, until recently.

I saw a video online where a man was demonstrating the right way to tie shoe laces. First he showed the wrong way: the loop was made with the right lace, the left lace was brought over on top and around the loop, tucked under and pulled through to the left and tightened. That was the way my mother taught me (I supposed) and the way I had always done it. This man in no uncertain terms said that was wrong, that the left lace was to be brought UNDER the loop, tucked under and pulled through and tightened. He tied them both ways on the video and in that moment I saw what I had been doing wrong. I tried it on my own shoes – and sure enuf! The man's was right. His way produced bows that went across the instep; my way produced "up and down" bows. WRONG!!!!

Since then, I’ve been tying my shoes correctly except when I forget – which is what happened this morning and which is why I took a picture of my own shoes to show the difference. I put my right shoe on first and forgot to tie it the right way. The second shoe was tied the correct way – and there you are. The difference is clear and is proof positive.

I tell you this so you will at least know as much as I know. I HATE being wrong.

Having said that, I must add that just this week I told Jerry that these shoes, which are relatively new, are not at all comfortable. When I bought them the price was SO right that I couldn’t pass them up. But that was the last time I was pleased with them. They really ever felt good on my feet. He thought I meant they were too small, but although they carried a "9" on them, my normal size, it felt like I was wearing two sizes too big. My mother would have called them “gunboats” – her word for oversized shoes. Looking at this picture, I can see for sure they don’t fit right. Not only have I been tying my shoes wrong but I’m also wearing the wrong size.

So that calls for immediate action. As I said, I HATE to be wrong. I must rectify that wrong and go shoe-shopping ASAP.

Now as for the dramatically colored shoe laces, I say, why not? They bring a smile to my face!

MORE ART OR JUST GRAFFITI?

2011-10-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

Those of you who are regular readers will remember that back in July the city of LA decided the art work on this fence was a mural and had to disappear post haste. The lady who commissioned this piece of art for her own fence from some local young high school artists was fined for utting up a mural and had the possibility of a more hefty fine being levied if it wasn't removed immediately. In Los Angeles, an ordinance says that murals on the vast majority of private properties is illegal. And in this case, there were people who saw this art not as a mural but as "graffiti" - and furthermore, it was on an outside wall where the public would have to see it day and night. It had to come down, LA said.

Many people weighed in on both sides of the issue, aside from the legal ramifications -- you know, it was kind of an "art is in the eye of the beholder" issue. And there are almost as many issues as there are artists -- and who decides when graffiti leaves the category of "tagging" and moves over into "art?" Can street art or street murals avoid the association with "graffiti? Is just any flat place suitable for someone's mural? Who decides? What if the property owner approves of a mural being painted on his building? And just what is the difference between the art on billboards and the art on building walls? There are lots of issues to be thought about.

Los Angeles has take its mural ban under review. But what if a building owner ok's a mural on his wall? Los Angeles has always had murals, some really beautiful, some darn interesting, and most illicit. Can we now allow them, even if people don't see eye to eye on their beauty (or lack thereof?)

I think we are blessed with art like Shepard Fairey's, and I wish I didn't have to drive all the way in to LA to see it. Just feast your eyes on his "Peace Goddess" artwork:

But there also is some that I just think is awful and amateurish.

So the City of LA is now going to re-think this art form. In this morning's LA Times City Councilman Bill Rosendahl is quoted as saying:

"We want to define murals as something other than signs and create a process for permitting murals. There is a difference between a sign and a mural. One is marketing and one is art."

It is unspecified if they are going to tackle finding the dividing line between graffiti and murals. One has to wonder where this is all going to end.

SHAGGY DOGS & OTHER NONSENSE

2011-10-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

A duck walked up to the bar and said, "I'll have a beer!" The bartender replied "Do you want it on your bill?"

YUK, YUK, YUK

A termite walked up to the bar and said, "Where's the bartender?"

ANOTHER COUPLE OF YUKS!

Would'ja believe that the good fairy kept a tooth belonging to John Lennon and is auctioning it off in England this coming November? It's expected to bring about $16,000. This is according to online Rolling Stone.

AND FINALLY...

The new date for movement is this: from Quarry to staging area at Granite Hill and Pyrite - Monday, Oct 24; on the road - Tuesday, Oct. 25.

Do you believe it? I'm not holding my breath.

TOYS FOR BIG PEOPLE!

2011-10-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm sure we've all read about how residents of some nursing homes enjoy having therapy dogs come for visits; other homes have a friendly resident cat who often takes naps on the patient's bed. The little fellow pictured above is a Japanese-developed robotic "baby harp seal," designed to interact with humans at an emotional level. Who could pass up such a cute face?

The elderly have serious needs that often go unmet, says Maja Mataric, co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab. "Robots aren't a panacea, but if they help people, if they can make their lives better, then what's wrong with that?" according to a recent article in the LA Times.

I'm all for this. I remember my own mother who had to give up her toy poodle when she moved into an apartment. One day she saw a little stuffed toy poodle that looked like her "Cheri" and promptly bought it for herself. It lived with her the rest of her life.

Now first of all I want you to understand that I don't consider myself "elderly." I may be 76, yet I don't think of myself as elderly. I may be getting old, but elderly will always be about 10 years older than my present age.

But I have a confession to make. I do have a few stuffed animals!

The first is my computer pig. I don't have any clue as to where this pig came from. It's been around for at least 11 years, so I'd guess at some point one of my grandkids dropped it off here when the mom brought him or her for a visit.

For a long time I had it sitting up on top my old computer monitor, thinking its owner would claim it, but no one did. I thought it was a cute pig, so it stayed with me. No, I don't play with it.

In 2004 I was making arrangements for the final disposition of my body when I died and the company I was dealing with had a couple of these Monkeys sitting around their office. I figured it was a PR tool and I asked if I could have one. It was the wording on the tee-shirt that caught my eye - "Aaron Cremation and Burial Services." NO ONE has a monkey with such a tee-shirt, I figured! And I was so pleased when the owner took my money and put a monkey in my hand!

Many years ago my mother bought my sister Ginnie Lou and me the book "Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees." Oh how we loved that book, but like most other of our toys we eventually outgrew it. A few years ago I found two copies of that book and bought one for each of us. Ginnie Lou returned the favor by finding and sending me a wrinkled-kneed Camel, so I added that to my now-obvious "collection" of stuffed animals.

The Serta sheep and I have a long partnership. I have watched them jump over the fence more nights than I'd like to remember, and when I saw this fellow in line with my birth year on his back, I knew he had to be added to the rest of my animals.

One of my dreams had always been to go to North Carolina and walk on the Outer Banks. Jerry and I have been many places, including quite a few foreign countries, but North Carolina somehow never made it to the top of the list. So when my cousin Shirlee moved there and invited me for a visit, I couldn't pass the trip up. The red cardinals are ubiquitous around her house, and my purchase of this reminder of that wonderful time and place still gives me pleasure each time I look at it. The cost of the bird was a donation to the Audubon society.

I never intended to have a collection of stuffed animals. And I certainly don't want any more (although the minute I started to write that I thought of how a cute baby harp seal - non-robotic, of course - would look up on the shelf with the others!) Ah well, I don't need any more stuffed animals. Those I have sit happily on the shelf above my computer, along with a stuffed cat that I made some years ago -- I didn't like the way it turned out, but I thought its face was so cute I just had to keep it myself.

So now you know my secret. I DO have a few stuffed animals of my own. But PLEASE don't tell anyone. I wouldn't want anyone to think I truly was getting elderly and needed stuffed animals to caress.

BIG NEWS! BIG NEWS!

2011-10-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

Our local newspaper has a bit of trouble figuring out what is local news. Sometimes it's a report on a poll taken in our State Capitol. Local news might be city politics from the county seat of an adjacent county. Sometimes it's a new report from the Office on Aging. Our newspaper under its Local News section uses a different page for each of five areas of our county, but for some reason none of the pages seem very interesting to me.

That's a lot of space to fill and if the newspaper doesn't have enough ads or enough items to fill every page, they simply replicate what the TV talking heads do -- just blather away with extraneous words that may or may not be of some import.

Now I myself keep waiting for our local newspaper to talk about "The ROCK" - but I'm thinking that perhaps they see that story as being of interest only after the rock's move is over and done with. But it's their newspaper and their decision, so I let it be.

But I did have to laugh at one of the "In Brief" articles in our local section this week. Seems that there is a solar energy project going on in the desert of northeastern San Bernardino County (hundreds of miles from our local area) and this project ran into a snag because the area is the home of a whole lot of desert tortoises. And these tortoises were in danger of being accidentally killed, or if not killed at least accidentally harassed if they remained in the area. The solution was to remove them and relocate them to a safer area.

Federal biologists recently captured several hundred tortoises and have been keeping them in captivity until they can be resettled into another area. I like tortoises and I thought this was a nice thing to do, since I also like Solar energy projects.

But here's what our local news section reported this week: One lady tortoise had to be released into the wild early "because it kept trying to escape captivity and appeared to be under stress. She has since explored the release area...and spent her nights in an underground burrow."

Look at that picture above. Do you see the smile on the face of the lady turtle? And then, can you see the smile on my face for reading such interesting and exciting local news?

REPLACEMENT PARTS

2011-10-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

One of the things that has surprised me about retirement is how many things have needed replacing during this period in our life. I’m not talking about my body here, because it’s understood it will gradually wither, but we thought we went into retirement pretty well set up as far as decent and suitable furniture, clothing, autos, electronics and so forth. In fact, in 1998 when some of the furniture we bought for our house in Orange many years earlier needed replacing, I looked at Jerry and said, “Jer, if you want to go into retirement with a good recliner, now’s the time to get it…the recliner of your dreams.”

He did, and that particular recliner started getting heavy use when we retired for good in 2000. Luckily it had been Lazy Boy’s best, and it served him well. He got a good 13 years of use out of it, but when springs began breaking recently and caused him to sit in a sump and left him with a backache, it was time to get a new one.

The need to replace his chair was very surprising to Jerry. Lazy Boy’s best was going to last him the rest of his life, he thought. And when he found his favorite old recliner heading for the dump, he got mighty discouraged.

Jer really thought he wasn’t going to live much beyond the age of 70 or 72. He thought our cars would outlast him (a 1989 Olds and a 1988 Mazda). I had my doubts if they would last for 25 years, but Jerry’s folks always got 25 years out of their cars, and Jer planned on same. So when those two cars fell apart 2 years after we retired (and when I say “fell apart” I mean stopped in the middle of the freeway and never ran another day!) he realized our retirement budget just wasn’t set with the idea of replacement cars in mind. And the furniture was the same way.

Periodically in these last few years we’ve had to replace things that shouldn’t have come to the end of their life cycle so soon. Other than the cars and the recliner, most of the other stuff has been –- on the major side, computers, printers, scanners, cell phones and a digital camera -- and on the minor side it has been things like toasters, coffee pots, room fans, and telephones. All of these come with a built-in obsolescence, so we are just at the mercy of the manufacturers. You’d expect a coffeepot to last longer than 18 months, and we’d like to think we could get one repaired, but repair costs more than a replacement, so there you are.

Now I admit to choosing to replace some of my cooking equipment. I probably could have finished out my life with what I had, but when we were living in our house doing lots of entertaining I had good kitchen stuff, and it has lasted as only a set of Le Creuset pots and pans could. The catch is I most often cooked for 8 or 10 people and I had BIG pots and pans. Now I’m cooking on a tiny 4 burner apartment-sized range, and one frying pan takes up the whole top of the stove. I finally have started replacing the good stuff with some off-the-rack pots and pans that suit a meal for 2.

I haven’t yet given away the food processor or the blender, but to be honest with you I can’t use them because there is no counter space to speak of. At any rate, I think it's about time for them to give up the ghost, too. and replacement would be foolish.

The big surprise in retirement is that so many things would need replacing. But we are truly lucky nothing but “house things” have had to be replaced; and like the reclining chair, everything has been “do-able.” And I must say our children have often surprised us with things they themselves sensed we should have. We’ve had wonderful gifts at birthdays and holidays that have helped us along.

Jerry and I still have most of our own body parts, though our eyes, ears and teeth seem a bit rickety. But so far all replacements have been for house “things” - no knees, heart valves, lungs, etc. For that we are most grateful.

I’m sure other things will bite the dust before long, although we do have one replacement scheduled for the near future. It’s a Security screen door. We have what I call an “el cheepo” on there now, and it is good enough to keep out the flies but not to provide the kind of security we’d feel more comfortable with – a screen door you couldn’t tear off the hinges with a swift kick!

Assuming the new coffee pot doesn’t fall apart in the next month or so, I think we’ll pop for a new screen door and call it our Christmas present to ourselves. Isn’t that the way we often justify an outlay of our hard-earned money? Works for me!

HA HA HA - A BOOK FULL OF LAUGHS

2011-10-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

This has to be the funniest book I've ever read.

But having said that, I didn't laugh out loud at all, nor did I even smile. What I did do was to keep saying to myself, "Oh No!" or "This is SO funny" or "Hysterical!"

The Elephant's Journey was written by Jose Saramago and first published in Portugal in 2008. It was translated from Portuguese into English by Margaret Jull Costa and published in 2010. I didn't learn about it until about a week ago and I knew after reading a short review that I would like the book.

It's a novel based on a true story about an elephant who was given as a wedding present to Archduke Maximilian of Austria by his cousin, Portugal King Joao III in 1551. Setting out from Portugal is an entourage of dignitaries, cavalry troops, quartermaster and his wagon, oxen pulling a cart that contained the elephant's food and his water trough, and an assortment of helpers of one sort or another. They make their way through Spain, cities of northern Italy: Genoa, Piacenza, Mantua, Verona, Venice, and Trento, where the Council of Trent is in session. They brave the Alps and the terrifying Isarco and Brenner Passes; they sail across the Mediterranean Sea and up the Inn River (elephants, it turns out, are natural sailors). At last they make their grand entry into the imperial city. There's a laugh on every page.

As if a funny story wasn't enough, the author tells the story almost without using punctuation marks, which although at first it is a bit difficult to read, ends up as what storytelling is all about - the flow of words, ideas, language, happenings and heart.

I am not sure which of the characters is the funniest - the King, the Archduke, the elephant, the mahout, the secretaries, translators, soldiers, or the commanding officers. Even the Priest and the village Mayor are in the running, as are the oxen! This is storytelling at its best. The scenes are marvelous, full of wit and wisdom, hilarity and humility. The elephant, who starts out his trip with the name "Solomon" becomes "Suleiman" and his keeper, an Indian named Subhro is ordered to become "Fritz" - better names, according to the Archduke.

I nosed around the Internet to learn a little more about Saramago, and in several places it seemed that because he was a Communist, some reviewers were hard-pressed to grant this story a super-good review. However, in Saramago's lifetime (he died in 2010) he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so he must have something good in his pencil.

I think this probably is one of those books that some people just aren't crazy about. But for me, any book that can make me laugh from beginning to end is right up there with the best.

MACHINES & MESSES

2011-10-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago all the residents in our apartment complex were notified that a new Cable company would be taking over providing our large complex with Cable TV. We also learned that this would require replacing the underground wires. At the risk of sounding somewhat jaded, our reaction was pretty much "I'll believe it when I see it."

So imagine our surprise when one morning last week we began hearing trucks and other equipment parking in front of our unit. It wasn't just one truck, it was LOTS of trucks - some with equipment, some with rolls of wire, and some full of workers carrying shovels who were going to do the grunt work.

In the picture above, if you look carefully you can see the carport on the other side of the street where we park our cars. The notice we received didn't say we would need to move our cars elsewhere if we intended to use them, but as truck after truck arrived, it sure seemed that our cars might actually be blocked in.

If there was one good thing about what was going on, aside from the fact that it appeared this was a "for real" event, we had a beautiful day that day. The sky was the color of a swimming pool, there were some white puffy clouds above and not a trace of smog, haze or coastal eddy, the latter being a familiar happening in our area. It was a perfect California day.

The best part of the day came when a "DitchWitch" was moved to the end of our building. For the world it looks like its design was based on some kind of a live critter. Jerry was far less captivated than I was; his working career was around the construction of buildings, so he headed over to the DitchWitch to renew his acquaintance. I grabbed the camera, because I DO like machines, and this one was so interesting.

On the front of this DitchWitch was a boring tool that for the world made it look like some kind of bug with a proboscis probing around. Whatever the workers needed to do, they did in good time and the machine moved on to the next building.

In our complex there are 98 buildings, each containing 13 or 14 individual apartments. There are a number of crews working on this project, but even so I'm sure it's going to be a while before it is finished. I also am sure that when the job is done and the cable company sends around its brochure announcing the new lineup and the various options we will have, mark my words the costs will have gone up considerably from what we are paying now.

Luckily we are not big TV watchers, so we always sign up for just the basic plan. Our last basic plan was fairly reasonable, but I think to punish those who didn't want to sink all their entertainment budget in cable TV, they removed CNN from the lineup. Well, there's not much left the new cable company can remove, so I suspect we'll just be charged an arm and a leg to get the broadcast channels through cable. Next step down is rabbit ears!

Anyway, the streets are back to normal now, the machines are elsewhere and we can get in and out of the carport without fear. So goes life in retirement. Sometimes even a machine is an occasion!

THIS ROCK'S NOT ROLLIN'

2011-10-08T08:34:00.001-07:00

You might have missed seeing the picture above in a previous blog; this 340 ton boulder presently is in a quarry close to our house, and it's waiting to make a long-awaited trip to Los Angeles, where it will become the centerpiece of a new artistic installation at the LA County Museum of Art where the old La Brea tar pits used to be.

Now it was originally scheduled to arrive at the Museum in August, but lo, it still sits awaiting at the quarry. One of the latest reports gives an overview of what is to happen:

To make it happen, Emmert International, "a company that specializes in moving 'extreme objects' like nuclear generators and missiles," is building this transporter (in Renzo Piano red!) around the boulder. A road will be carved out of the quarry, and the transporter will move at night, on closed roads, with a police escort, at under 10 mph. Some utility lines and stop lights will have to come down for a short time as the boulder passes by. As you can probably imagine, the permitting for this has been a nightmare, involving the state, three counties, and all the local municipalities.

If you do a search on the internet, you can see that things are not going smoothly or quickly. The latest posting I could find is that the rock was scheduled to leave on October 3, but more difficulties have popped up and it is still sitting at rest.

According to one of the earlier reports that was a little more specific about its travel route, it appeared that it was going to be taken out of the quarry and hauled on a road that parallels the 60 freeway. Jerry and I have been guessing as to where that road might be. There is a road that parallels the freeway on the north side from the quarry to Country Village Road. That road is called Granite Hill. There also is a road that parallels it on the south side called Ben Nevis, and at Country Village Road another one continues, with a little jog, as San Sevaine. Or there is always old Mission Boulevard that used to take people from Riverside in to Pomona, and it loosely parallels the 60 freeway. Jer and I took a drive up to the quarry on October 3 to see what, if anything, was going on, and we shook our heads. That rock, which will stand 2 stories high on its transporter, which is 200 feet long, has to somehow get under or over the 60 freeway, then over or under the 15 Freeway. The engineers know which of the overpasses can hold something of that weight, and which of the underpasses can take something 2 stories high. We can't figure out where that could possibly be.

I am bound and determined to be watching when that huge boulder travels past Country Village Road, for we live very, very close to there. I will be there, even if it is the middle of the night, camera at the ready!

The entire operation will be done at night, because roads have to be closed, utility wires have to be removed and replaced, cars rerouted, etc. It's going to take an army of people to accomplish this, and the movers estimate they can make 7 miles per night, which means a trip of about 10 nights.

No one locally is very excited about this big happening, or at least not excited enough to write newspaper articles about the big move. We have feelers out to personally keep us up to date on the REAL moving date. Right now the word is, "We don't know yet!"

Will the underpasses be high enough? Will the bridges be strong enough? Is it possible the transporter might have a flat tire (there are to be 200 of them) somewhere along the road. Will any corner be cut short and take out a stop light? And during the days, who all are going to stand guard over that baby?

There's lots to think about, but I'm not going to get grey hair over worrying about it. At 7 miles per night, once it gets on the road we'll find it, 'cause it's not going anywhere fast.

Can you imagine how much money this is costing? It just boggles my mind.

SCHOOLS-AT-WAR SCRAPBOOKS

2011-10-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

In moving some files around, trying to make room for more files, I came upon some of my school papers dating from 1943. Our school, Willard Elementary in Long Beach, California, periodically produced a mimeographed newspaper called "Junior Press." Articles were written in each classroom by individual kids, and some were chosen to appear in the newspaper. My mother saved many of these "newspapers" because quite often one of my little stories was in it. Mother had pasted the pages in her scrapbook -- and by the time I inherited her files these pages were really in poor condition. To keep them for "posterity" I made photocopies of the pages, from which the two pages below were scanned. (They will appear in larger format if you double-click on them.)

You can see that this first page has the newspaper banner on it: JUNIOR PRESS, Volume 4, No. 2 - Willard School, January 29, 1943. I was in second grade that year. I did have a story - 4 short sentences - in this volume about an airport our class created in the classroom. What I remember specifically about this course of study was that each student had to make an airplane out of a block of balsa wood. I remember the sanding, affixing the wings, and the silver painting. I had a little boyfriend named Jerry Lapposa and he helped me with my plane (a bomber, I think it was), while my little heart went "Pitty-pat!" I was in the 2B class.

A later issue of the newspaper dated April 6, 1943 and called "The Willard Press" had a page devoted to the school's war efforts. Again, mother saved it because of the story I wrote on the USO - but somewhat longer this time - 5 lines! But when I read this today I saw the first entry, the one at the top left, that indicated these articles went into a "Schools-at-War scrap book" which ultimately landed in Washington DC for an exhibit.

During those war years our school, like probably every other school in the county, had a victory garden, sold war bonds -- actually, sold the stamps to paste in a book until we accumulated $18.75 worth of stamps, which then was converted into a War Bond, collected scrap metal and learned about V-mail, the USO, and other things we needed to know for living in a country at war.

I've often thought of all the ways our education was impacted by WWII. Reading these old pages reminds me. But to be honest with you, reading that one little paragraph about the "Schools at War" scrapbook has certainly piqued my interesting. A cursory snoop with Google only turned up one reference to it. Since I have a hard time letting sleeping dogs lie (and sometimes think I am compelled to learn every single thing in the whole world before I die) I guess I've got another project to research! And I call that FUN!

THE END OF SINS

2011-09-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day to experience my second Tashlich. Although last year my bread crumbs turned out to be superfluous, I went armed again this year, just in case I was lucky enough to be able to actually cast them in some water.

And I learned a couple of things, too. The rabbi said Tashlich is more a custom than a proscribed ritual. It's use has always been to help Jews focus on identifying those areas of their life where they might need (or want) some changes - sins, so to speak. The period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is set aside for this reflection. I also learned that observances can be very different, and in yesterday's case, the fact that there were dozens of people participating gives a very different perspective than when hundreds are participating. Either way, however, it is up to the individual to make the event personal or impersonal.

The rabbi passed out a paper with a simple responsive reading on it. At temple on Yom Kippur there is a congregational confession of sins, read from the Prayer Book that gives a list of sins from A to Z, literally. But in the paper Rabbi passed out yesterday there was a simple rendering of types of sin, simple but still broad enough to get one to thinking how that applies to them. One in particular that struck me (a sure sign of needing some breadcrumb- throwing) was of holding on to envy of things you don't have, while forgetting to count the blessings you do have.

Along with the short readings, the cantor and his guitar led our small group in some songs, all familiar to the regular attendees but of course totally unfamiliar to me, although even if I had known them my vocal cords no longer are amenable to musical sounds, much to my sorrow. At the conclusion of the short service, Rabbi suggested we take our bread crumbs (most everybody had brought their own) and walk to the water, keeping in mind that as the bible verse from Ezekiel shown on the paper says we are to cast away the transgressions and create in ourselves a new spirit.

The nice thing about this service is that except for the kids, who were very intent on feeding bread to the ducks, (which of course you would expect), we all did stake out a little spot near the pond and symbolically deal with our sins.

And before we left the little Tashlich service, we enjoyed a few more songs, again in Hebrew, and then the Rabbi asked the Cantor to play Pete Seeger's very uplifting song, "I've Got A Hammer" and we all joined in. Tashlich observance was closed on this note. The Rabbi was happy, those sitting in a beautiful park in a mini-congregation were happy, the little kids were happy, and I think the ducks were especially happy.

DEALING WITH SINS WITH BREAD & RUNNING WATER

2011-09-29T13:20:00.000-07:00

Ever since I learned about Tashlik back in 2002 or 2003 - by reading about this particular Jewish Ritual in the newspaper - I've been very curious. It is observed in the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and apparently is part of the business of dealing with one's sins during the interval between the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. The idea is to take some bread crumbs, which represent one's sins, to some flowing water where fish are and after the appropriate prayers are recited, toss the crumbs into the water to be carried away by the water's flow. The symbolism is obvious. Although it is just my opinion, there are some participants who like to make the symbolic stand for the real thing -- and there are others who see the occasion as just another social event.

Now I was at my first Tashlich service last year, and because we were at the ocean and the city didn't allow bread (or any food) to be put in the water, the ritual was done with "symbolic" bread. Since I had taken bread crumb with me to toss, I instead ate them myself and then washed them down with a glass of nice white wine which my daughter had brought along with her family. (I don't think the wine was allowable on the beach either, but...)

So today we are going to a different Temple's observance. I am hoping it will be a little more serious. I'll report tomorrow on what we find there.

Now I have to tell you I have read a lot about Tashlik, and in many quarters it just isn't taken very seriously. In fact, below is a reproduction of a hilarious article written sometime back suggesting correlating one's sins with a particular type of bread. I laughed all the way through it and trust you will too. I will go this afternoon with some white crumbs from La Brea Bakery's Petit Baguette in a baggie. I am sure they represent something, but certainly not "Exotic" sins. More just general sins, I think.

Here is the definitive Tashlich Guide for the Complicated Modern Jew

For ordinary sins - White Bread
For exotic sins - French Bread
For particularly dark - Pumpernickel
For complex sins - Multi-Grain
For twisted sins - Pretzels
For tasteless sins - Rice Cakes
For sins of indecision - Waffles
For sins committed in haste - Matzo
For sins of chutzpah - Fresh Bread
For the sin of substance abuse/marijuana - Stoned Wheat
For the sin of substance abuse/heavy drugs - Poppy Seed
For the sin of committing auto theft - Caraway
For the sin of committing arson - Toast
For the sin of passiveness when action is warranted - Milk Toast
For the sin of being ill-tempered/sulky - Sourdough
For the sin of cheating customers - Shortbread
For the sin of risking one's life unnecessarily - Hero Bread
For the sin of excessive use of irony - Rye Bread
For the sin of telling bad jokes - Corn Bread
For the sin of being money hungry - Raw Dough
For the sin of war-mongering - Kaiser Rolls
For the sin of immodest dressing - Tarts
For the sin of causing injury or damage to others - Tortes
For the sin of promiscuity - Hot Buns
For the sin of promiscuity with gentiles - Hot Cross Buns
For the sin of davening (praying) off tune - FlatbreadsFor the sin of being holier than thou - Bagels
For the sin of indecent photography - Cheese Cake
For the sin of over-eating - Stuffing Bread
For the sin of gambling - Fortune Cookies
For sin of abrasiveness - Grits
For sins of pride - Puff Pastry
For the sin of cheating - Baked Goods with NutraSweet and Olestra
For sin of impetuousness - Quick Bread
For negligent slip-ups - Banana Bread
For the sin of dropping in without warning - Popovers
For the sin of perfectionism - Angel Food Cake
For the sin of being up-tight and irritable - High Fiber Bran Muffins

CONSIDERING BLESSINGS

2011-09-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was in the front yard trimming the beautifully colored (but very messy) plumbago bushes and this most interesting fellow buzzed past my shoulder and lit on the bush. It startled me, to say the least, and once I composed myself again I ran for the camera. There should be some kind of blessing recited for digital cameras, because if I'd had to go get my old Canon T90 SLR out of the closet and afix the macro lens on it, I would have missed capturing this delightful bug photo.

I didn't know what kind of a bug it was. It was about as big as a bumble bee, had a somewhat furry body and most interestingly had a "cat-face" head (can you see it?), with amazingly decorated wings. I e-mailed a picture of it to my cousin in North Carolina, who is the family bug-identifier and then phoned her. After consulting her bug book she pronounced it a Tiger Bee Fly. We then Googled "Tiger Bee Fly" and sure enough, she was spot on.

I am delighted, of course, that I was able to capture a photo of it and share with you all today. The Plumbago bush flower on which it landed is what I'd call beautiful. But the Tiger Bee Fly is beautiful too in an ugly sort of way, don't you think?

I am reminded of a prayer in the Hebrew prayer book that Jerry keeps on his shelf. There is a section called "Blessings on Various Occasions" and one blessing reads thusly:

When seeing good trees and beautiful creatures:
Blessed art Thou, O Lord, or God, King of the universe who possesseth such in His world.

I see this as a very appropriate blessing to remember when seeing something as amazing as a Tiger Bee Fly, which I also learned is just one of a myriad of bee flies. Who every heard of such a thing before!

Because my cousin has a sharp eye for bugs and critters and has in the past few years, since she left Southern California and moved to North Carolina, sent me various photos of flora and fauna, I'll share a few more below that certainly fall under the banner of the blessing too.

A remarkable katydid.

The frog who came to a coffee-break.
Newly-born mantis babies.
A hiding, white legged "Goldenrod Spider"

A possum taking shelter on a cold winter night.

Neat, huh?

DO YOU EAT BUCKWHEAT?

2011-09-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

It's hard to imagine something from a delicate plant like this could cook up into something like this:

But it does. The top photo is a buckwheat plant and the next photo is a buckwheat pancake, which looks like a very dirty pancake. Very strange, I say, but as for the latter I also say "very delicious."

I've eaten buckwheat pancakes all my life. My mother and I were particularly fond of them. I always assumed buckwheat was some kind of grain but that isn't so, Google says. Buckwheat is a broad-leafed plant native to northern Asia. The flowers may be white but the seeds, about the size of a soybean and from which buckwheat flour is made, are brown. The hulls are removed and what is left, called a "groat," is ground into flour.

Because I read that Aunt Jemima had discontinued their buckwheat pancake mix I decided I'd better snoop around a little to find out how I could make such pancakes if I got an overwhelming yen for them. Aunt Jemima did say that I could mix some buckwheat flour with their regular pancake mix and get the same effect. So it was in the hunting for this that I discovered a lot I didn't know.

Besides learning about the plant, I also came across another product that I'd never noticed (or even seen) before. It's a breakfast cereal called "Cream of Buckwheat." Thinking maybe I could use that for pancakes, I bought a box.

In reading the instructions, I noticed several ways to prepare it -- and one way used the word "GRITS." Now that particular word to me is like hearing "Ambrosia." I happen to think grits are a gift of the gods, so I knew that if I couldn't use it for pancakes, at least I could use it in place of grits.

Oh, gosh, did this turn out good! Beats Cream of Wheat by a longshot! Unfortunately, my local market was closing out the Cream of Buckwheat, so what to do? Now I needed a source for both Buckwheat flour and for the breakfast cereal.

I had an idea. Last Saturday we went to the little town of Loma Linda near San Bernardino -- the healthiest town in the US, I think. Clark's Nutritional Center has a large store there, and it's not an overstatement to say that they have EVERYTHING! We walked in the door, sashayed over to the "cereal aisle" and there not only did we find the Pocono Cream of Grits but also a new (to me) buckwheat pancake mix, which is how I was able to make that delicious pancake featured above. My lucky day for sure.

It's really good eatin' when things all come together.

JUST DOING A JOB, THEY SAY

2011-09-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

I am a real pantywaist when it comes to seeing animals killed. Well, actually I don’t even like thinking about it, or moreover, reading about it happening. And the older I get the less I like it. Just this week I had to skip a whole chapter in one of Barbara Kingsolver’s old books because that chapter was about cock-fighting. It may have literary qualities and be very integral part to the plot, but I don’t want to read about cockfighting.

So when I read this most interesting story in the LA Times about birds of prey -- with nary a drop of blood in the telling -- I wanted to share it with everyone.

There is a 17-acre office complex in Santa Monica with a large Water Garden (like a pond) in its midst, and it wasn’t unusual for the first people at work each day to find as many as 100 gulls and pigeons wandering around the area and doing what gulls and pigeons usually do – mostly eating and pooping. What was supposed to be beautiful and serene had become truly gross. However, instead of using some diabolical means of keeping the gulls away (like with bb-guns), the complex management hired “Airstrike Bird Control,” a company out of Cambria, California, to bring in some falcons and hawks to do the job instead.

Now that sounds ominous, but here’s how it works: At night the birds are put in large perch boxes in the complex’s garage, and each morning they are taken out near the water garden and carefully tethered to outdoor perches. Gulls and pigeons have excellent eyesight, and since the birds of prey are their natural enemies the gulls and pigeons get the picture very quickly and move on to safer climes. Every day they look to see if the falcons and hawks are still there. One quick look is all it takes for them to leave post haste. The good news is that no blood is shed. Airstrike Bird Control thinks that a two-month indoctrination course should be enough for the unwanted birds to get the picture and permanently relocate elsewhere.

It’s interesting that the owner and trainer of the falcons and hawks has given each of his birds a name – Mia Farrow, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, and Johnny Depp. The older birds are allowed to have a time of free flying each morning and evening, and for their safety they are equipped with little transmitters that the owner can use to find them just in case they get confused about where “home” is. But even at that, they all know their names and respond to a vocal call.

There is another plus in not having the complex turned into a bloody battleground. These birds really are strikingly beautiful in their watchful poses, and sometimes it is hard for employees to keep their eyes on their own work. They often are seen gazing out a window, marveling at the beauty of birds they don’t see very often.

This is a happy bird story, and I wouldn’t mind seeing these birds myself, though unfortunately my window is not nearly close enough.

HEY, WHAT'S GOIN' ON?

2011-09-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

The best thing about living in a senior complex is that it is relatively free of the detritus that accompanies small children and teenagers. The worst thing about it is that there is a constant coming and going of paramedics and fire trucks. The latter can be disconcerning, to say the least.

But I admit to having a good laugh last night as for the second time this week we had the entire fire department pull up in front of our building. The station nearest us is just across the freeway, and we always can hear the sirens when the trucks pull out of the station. The paramedic unit follows. We can hear them come up and over the freeway - and we know they are coming into our complex if the sirens shut off at that point. Yep, we say, here they come again.

What has surprised us the most is that once they stop, the whole rhythm of the emergency changes. There seems to be no rush whatsoever. No one scurries. I think “mosey” would be a good descriptive word for the speed of their activities. Neither the firemen/women nor the paramedics from the ambulance appear to be in any hurry at all. A gurney comes slowly out of the ambulance, the equipment is carefully placed on it, and the attendants mosey off toward wherever it is that they have been called. I have often mentioned to Jerry that if he ever needs me to call the paramedics for him, I’m going to run out towards the truck and yell “Faster, Faster!” (Well, since you know I’m not crazy about making a scene you’ll know that I’d never do that, but it sure seems to me that at the somewhat casual speed attending this emergency a lot of sick people could get sicker before they got better.)

But what has happened these last two times, both of which occurred after we had crawled into bed for the night, is that upon their arrival these firemen ran as if there was a house afire! Except for the fact that it was all carefully orchestrated, it looked from our bedroom window like a Chinese fire drill! Here’s the kicker! Both times a white Fire Department van pulled up behind the fire truck (the battalion chief’s vehicle, Jerry speculated) and out jumped a fire person AND a fellow with a big video camera. Everywhere the paramedics went the man with the camera went too, his camera taping away as he ran.

Since both times the call for help was from a unit out of our view we don’t know for sure what happened, but both times the gurney came back occupied and was hastily shelved into the ambulance and taken away. The cameraman captured the whole thing and afterwards spent some time interviewing the firemen and paramedics. Soon, everyone dispersed to their vehicles and drove away.

With the introduction of this video camera, it has become maddening not to know what is going on. Because the paramedics come so often, and because we know so few people in this complex – we know our neighbors, of course, but the complex itself is so large that we know relatively few people who don’t live close to us – we are less concerned with the reason someone is hauled off in an ambulance than what on earth the filming is about. We wonder if the videocam operator is aware that what he is filming is NOT the way things usually happen. Does the battalion chief, if that is who he is, know he is seeing something way out of the norm.

Last night after the last of the trucks pulled away, Jerry and I laughed to think of that sick person’s speedy care and how lucky he was. We also made a bet that when the videotaping project is finished we’ll see a return to the slow-motion method of operation.

But we’re still curious as to what all that taping is about.

MMMMMMmmm. PANCAKES!

2011-09-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

There aren't very many people still alive who remember my dad and his pancakes, but I've got one remaining aunt alive who does. In the next generation there are a few cousins near my age who do - Shirlee, Nancy and maybe Sharon, and then my brother and me. Everyone else is gone.

My dad did a lot of cooking around our house. As I've noted in other blogs, mom wasn't a very good cook, and although she was the primary cooker of the regular family meals, my dad took over for all the specialty meals.

And while he was especially good on the meats to be served, his real specialty was pancakes. For us, pancakes weren't so much a breakfast item as they were for a Sunday night dinner. Back in the days when I grew up, there weren't many prepared "mixes," so daddy made his pancakes from scratch. At that time our family was composed of my mom, dad, my sister and me, and our Uncle Bill. My brother wouldn't come along until I was 14. Daddy would whip up a bunch of pancakes, mother would fry some bacon, "Unc" would tend the percolating coffee and that would be our Sunday evening dinner. We little kids and mother, not being big eaters, usually ate a single pancake, and the men usually had two and on occasion three. That was just about how many daddy's batch made.

My dad had only one sibling, a sister who lived with her family in Pueblo, Colorado. One year Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Chuck and my cousins Nancy and Kenny, who at that time were young teenagers, came to visit us and Daddy fixed a pancake dinner for them. This meal turned out to be one that set a record for pancake eating: Kenny, a growing young boy probably 12 years old, ate 13 pancakes! My sister and I were stunned. Never had we seen anyone eat like that, and even well into our old age my sister and I would refer to the time that Cousin Kenny ate 13 pancakes! It surely made history in the Dobbins family.

When my sis and I were little kids, our dad always made Mickey-Mouse shaped pancakes for us. He knew just how to do it, complete with eyes and a mouth - little squiggles of batter dropped in exactly the right places before the larger pancake batter "head" and "ears" were put on top of them. When I was doing some babysitting for my two youngest grandchildren, Olivia and Justine, I always made them Mickey Mouse pancakes for one of the breakfasts we had - but I certainly didn't inherit my dad's batter artistry. Mine were identifiable as mice -- but barely!

My mother had lots of brothers and sisters who lived not too far from us in Long Beach and daddy would often suggest that they all come over for a pancake dinner. He was good that way; he was the oldest of all of them and after he and mother married they shepherded her younger brothers and sisters through the tail end of the depression, often loaned them money when there was a need, and in general just made sure that they were all okay. Having them over for a Saturday night pancake dinner was his pleasure too. Around the table would be Uncle Sam and Aunt Marie with daughters Shirlee and Nancy, Uncle Bert and Aunt Betty with kids Karen and Steve, Uncle Hugh and Aunt Betty with Sandy and Susan, Aunt Margie and of course our own family of dad, mother, Ginnie Lou, brother Steve and me. After everyone was sated with yummy pancakes, the women cleaned up the kitchen and the men set up the dining room table for poker, using wooden matches for chips. Those with smallish children might head for home, and the older cousins might sit on the floor playing their own types of card games - Fish, War, and Old Maid.

Dad and his pancakes became a legend in our family history. Dad's own father died when daddy was 8, leaving his mother and older sister Dorothy, both of whom had to go to work to support the family. There were no social programs in place then to provide support for widows. Dad did a lot of the cooking while he was young; as he got older he started doing some surveying with companies looking to locate mining operations and he did some cooking out in the field then. So it was natural that later, being the breadwinner in a household of females, he, and Unc to a lesser extent, would pick up some of the cooking. (Unc was the "coffee man.")

There are lots of things we all remember about our childhood. I'm guessing that made-from-scratch pancakes for dinner is one of the more unusual memories a person can have. To this day I think of my dad when I see a stack of pancakes. He died in 2001 at the age of 93.

CLOSE YOUR EYES & EAT

2011-09-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

Several months ago I blogged about my pharmacist filling a prescription using product from a company I had not heard of before – and when I googled that company to see where they were located (they were in India) I found that the FDA had been after them to get their act together for several years. It seems many of the issues involved unsanitary conditions in the plant and wrong ingredients in the formulas. At that time I decided to put myself on an FDA list to receive e-mail notification of products being recalled.

Since then, I am surprised to learn that we earthlings are mostly still alive. I cannot in my wildest dreams believe what all is recalled. In one case there were thousands and thousands of lots of plasma recalled because the donor was later learned to have Hepatitis B. It is good, of course, that we have the FDA watching out for our safety, but sometimes I wonder if it is better to NOT know what is being recalled.

Today I got an FDA recall notice for a company in the Bronx: September 21, 2011 - XXXXXXXXXX Fish Products, Inc. located in Bronx, NY is recalling Smoked Split Herring because the product was found to be uneviscerated. (In case you don’t understand big words, this means the fish guts were not removed!) Oops! This one made me laugh, because I’m not likely ever to eat Split Herring.

I recall many years ago I read in Consumer Reports that there was a certain volume of maggots allowed in canned mushrooms – and I said to myself then that I would never, ever again eat canned mushrooms. I’d guess that was at least 45 years ago I read that, and I’ve been a consumer of fresh mushrooms ever since – and you can believe me when I say I inspect those fresh ones probably better than the FDA would. I’m definitely not that into maggots.

I also check labels to make sure the dye that colors food in cans and containers does not come from a cochineal which, when mashed, turns into carmine red. The labels will say cochineal if this bug is in it, but it will not add “insect.” Sometimes I find the word “carrageenan” there, but that is not a bug but a product from red seaweed.

I am not sure I’m doing myself a favor by reading all these recall notices. My original intent was just to not shorten my life by inadvertently taking adulterated medicine in the cause of furthering the global economy. But heck, you can find stuff that you really didn’t want to know elsewhere, too. The New York Times in its February 9, 2009 issue helpfully wrote the following:

In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.

Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).

Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

Can I ever look a glass of tomato juice in the face again? Probably not.

And as my mother always said, “Don’t let flies walk on your food. Think of where their feet have walked previously!” And as my sister and I understood, she was always alluding to dog poop, maybe our own Pal’s dog poop in the back yard. I sometimes wonder if her admonition was the genesis of my concern about foreign and gross things in food.

But as Jerry always says, “Just close your eyes and eat. Most of it is just protein anyway.” Small consolation, I say, small consolation.

RUMINATING ABOUT SPACE JUNK

2011-09-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

I've never been crazy about having anything whizzing around in the dark - starting with june bugs, progressing to bats and then taking a big jump to little asteroids, big meteorites and now......space junk the size of a bus.

Now I admit I started out my life as a somewhat fearful child...and lots of things scared me, but I can't say I've become either a worry-wort or a hysteric personality in my dotage. But yesterday Jer and I were watching the mid-day news on Channel 4, and when the female talking head announced that the chances of being hit tomorrow by a piece of space junk from the bus-sized satellite due to enter our atmosphere were 1 in 3,200 I truly was taken aback! I waited for her to correct what she said -- that just couldn't be possible, I thought . But it didn't happen. I supposed she'd eventually announce that she meant something like "1 in 32,000," or "1 in 32,000,000." Jer and I looked at each other and said, "Someone made a mistake."

I told Jerry that those kind of odds are better than the odds of winning the BIG BANG lottery. If I could get odds like that I'd be willing to fork over some of my retirement savings to take a chance.

Since yesterday I've waited to see what kind of odds the scientists were really going to give. Nothing more was said on any of the newscasts we've been listening to, so a little researching online today produced the following:

The 1-in-3,200 odds of being hit pertain to any of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. But any one individual's odds of being struck are about 1 in 21 trillion.

The quote goes on to say that the debris will only effect a 500 mile wide area - so perhaps that is why the odds differ. There was no further information given.

Now in addition to not being a particular fearful person, I also am not a very scientifically or mathematically oriented person, and I just have to admit that I don't understand what all this means.

If I am in this 500 mile wide window, I may react just as Chicken Little did -- THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING! But I think NASA is pretty sure that Mira Loma/Jurupa Valley is not in that window and I will be spared having to see a bus-sized satellite hurtling at me.

So I'll go to bed tonight expecting full well to get up hale and hearty tomorrow morning and spend the day having my usual Friday fun without worry. I'm counting on the 21 trillion to 1 odds to be operational for me.

A BIT OF CHAZERI

2011-09-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Dictionary of Jewish words defines the Yiddish word "Chazeri" (pronunced kah-zeh RYE) as "worthless junk." Although Jerry doesn't speak much Yiddish, he has a few words that he uses regularly, and Chazeri is one he has often used for a pile of my junk that he knows he doesn't dare touch. It's junk to him, but for me it generally is there for a good reason and every so often I thin it out, using what I saved it for, and either filing or tossing the rest. Today's blog is because it was time to tackle the chazeri I'd accumulated on the end of the davenport: several loose newspaper pages and a few torn magazine articles for a someday blog.

The first item I'd like to mention falls in the "Now I've Seen Everthing" category. Above is shown a new touch screen tablet now on the market; it was designed for children from 1 week of age to 4 years.

The designer, a mother of two and a networking entrepreneur, says, "Children are curious about touch screens. We are just leveraging their curiosity." It's called a "Vinci," as in you know who "Vinci". The specs say it is smaller than an iPad, it is suspended in a rubbery red frame to protect it, and it comes loaded with a few stories and games that encourage children to think about feelings, numbers, letters... "and more apps are in development."

It is priced to sell from $389 to $479. But alas, no Wi-Fi.

~~~~~

The next item set aside in my chazeri was this photo:

I spent a long time looking at this simple picture. Obviously it is Obama going up an airplane ramp in the rain. But here's what I thought:

Is it really raining?
Who is than man following Obama? Does Obama have an aide whose job is to carry his umbrella?
Is this man doing a good job?
Who is getting wet, Obama? This fellow? Both?
Does this man know his umbrella is in the wrong place?
Doesn't Obama care?
Perhaps it stopped raining and neither of them are aware of it.

My newspaper comes very early in the morning and I don't think all that clearly right out of bed. Maybe an hour later I wouldn't have wasted my time speculating on all this, but still I find it an exceptionally interesting photo. Thanks to Jim Watson AFP/Getty images.

~~~~~
Now I know I have a strange "area of interest" for my reading material. Probably none of you who read this blog, with the exception of my son whose reading choices are and always have been as eclectic as mine, will find this newish book interesting:

When I started taking Journalism in high school, one of the things we did was to publish a weekly newspapaer. As I worked through the flunkie jobs on the way to becoming editor, one of the things I most liked to do was to write headlines. To start with, I was given a certain number of inches to play with, and a certain number of Font styles to choose from. I had to come up with a headline that was acceptable to my "boss" (the page editor) and to figure out what font and what pitch I thought was best with it, taking into consideration our newspaper's style (and of course our school printshop's stash of fonts.) Each letter of each font had a "count" -- that is, how much space it would take up in an inch, so I had to quickly learn how to count by ems and ens to make up my good headline. Sometimes it took awfully creative wording to get a satisfactory headline of the right font and pitch!

I suspect that is one of the reasons why this book appealed to me - and it reminds me of my past. The book review in our newspaper written by Wesley Bausmith let me know that a whole lot more is in this book too:

Flying in the face of the digital-age mantra that "Print is dead," Simon Garfield's "Just My Type" takes an engaging look at the world of fonts, the building blocks of everything we read. With wit and insight, he enlivens a topic that few outside the graphic trades might ponder. He wants to change that!

Anyway, "Just My Type" is now on order through my friend Abe of Abebooks. And my couch is a bit less messy!

~~~~
There is one additional thing that is going on here in Southern California that is quite startling. The employees of the major grocery store chains (Vons, Ralphs, and Albertsons) have through their union been negotiating for several months on a new union contract. They are still very far apart in their offers, which mainly at this point center around medical benefits. The last strike to hit these three major stores happened in 2004 and lasted for four months. At the conclusion of that strike, there was still not a lot of satisfaction, and it was felt that both stores and employees suffered financially.

At this point in time, our economy being what it is, there is a lot of fear around. Finally the employees decided if no acceptable bargaining agreement was reached, they would go out on strike again tomorrow (Sunday, 9/18). In response, Ralphs announced that if a strike was called, it was going to shut down all their stores for the duration of the strike and at that time would re-evaluate each individual store to see if they wanted to put it back in business when the strike was over or if they would close it permanently!

I guess what makes this so shocking is that we have been Ralph's customers since 1994, when we returned from Istanbul. We know them and their products and their people like the back of our hand. At the end of July the nearest Ralphs store to us (but not the one we shopped at) closed down. To think that all of the stores might do so tomorrow, whether on a temporary or permanent basis, is just a shocking thought. And of course we can't help but think that all those employees who have become our friends through the years will have to juggle their finances which, if they are like many of the people we know, is a very scary proposition that we wouldn't want to be in.

So we are kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or waiting to see who is going to call "Uncle" first.

FINDING A HAPPY MOMENT

2011-09-14T15:15:00.001-07:00

I have recently been looking for beauty in my neighborhood and to my dismay I have found nothing. I have been looking for the kind of beauty that blogger Friko has in her neighborhood. And if you've ever taken a look at her blog you'll know what I mean.

Now I suppose if I had a macro lens for my camera I might focus in on the very heart of a neighbor's flower and find something of beauty way down inside, but honestly, the apartment complex where I live is definitely not beautiful. In my better moments I compare it to a bunch of army barracks, and the environs are a place where a good Dorothy Lange photograph might have been taken. It's an interesting area -- lots of goats, a few dairies, lots of discarded tires and davenports along the county roads and high-power lines running aside the property but definitely not beautiful.

But recently, while trying to move my own pictures around on the new computer and putting them in folders where they will be easier to find, I kept coming across certain photos that made me really happy. So that's what i'm going to share with you today, along with a little description of them and why they make me happy. They are best when they are big, so if you double-click on the images maybe you'll see their specialness.

My youngest granddaughter, Justine, now 8, has always been a dramatic child. She was born laughing, but you'd never know it from this photo. Look at those eyes.

Our cat, Tigger, spent the last years of his life happily taking naps on the end of our couch. He died in September of 2008 and not a day has gone by that we haven't missed him. He gave us 18 years of happiness.

In a tiny village in Turkey called Kumbetkoy we stumbled upon this woman up on the side of a rocky hill tending to her grain. Her job was to keep turning it so the sun could draw all the moisture out. She was young, and this was her life.

Of course this picture makes me laugh. It is a "photoshopped" image of me, one I did when I was taking a Photoshop class and was learning how to use the various tools. I use it at Halloween for my Facebook account. (It's really what I look like when I'm not feeling well!)

I call pictures like this "Magazine Babies" as it seems to me that certain baby pictures are simply iconic and could be anyone's baby. But this is newborn Olivia, my youngest daughter's first child and my next-to-the youngest granddaughter.

One of my dreams had always been to go to North Carolina's outer banks, and when my cousin moved within spitting distance of Okracoke, my dream came true. We were shell-hunting the day I took this picture. I'm not even sure the house was occupied, but it was such a serene setting that as far as I was concerned it was just my cousin and me and the elements. Seeing this photo reminds me of a dream fulfilled.

Grandson Christopher is now 29. He will always look like this to me.

These photos make me happy.

THE PIG DID IT!

2011-09-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

Usually I choose a book because I’ve read a good review, or I am familiar with the author’s other books, or it has come to me recommended by a good friend. I am not very good at picking books off a library shelf to read. Rarely am I satisfied, so I mostly don’t select my books this way – except when I’m desperate. Last Wednesday was one of those days.

But I couldn’t have made a better choice. Well, how can one NOT think a book entitled “The Pig Did It” would be worth reading. What on earth could the pig have done? I had to know.

So this book, a novel by Joseph Caldwell written in 2008 and the first in a planned pig trilogy, started me laughing on the first page and I laughed my way through it. Listen to what Ron Charles, The Washington Post’s reviewer, says about it:

The macabre comedy plays out in sparkling dialogue, including some hilarious speeches that are both incantations of Irish mythology and masterful bits of parody. Caldwell is a successful playwright, too, and his perfect ear for the non sequiturs of real conversation is a constant delight. If you love the Irish, if you've ever fallen in love or been spurned in love—heck, if you love bacon—you must read this irresistible novel.

It was my lucky day when none of the books I had on reserve at the library came in. It forced me to take pot luck on the shelves – and reading this pig romp has simply turned into having a feast of words and a belly-full of mirth.

I can’t wait for the next helping!

OH, GROSS!

2011-09-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Found on the Longmont, Colorado Library website today:

Public Notice: Bedbugs
August 19, 2011: Please be aware that an exterminator has confirmed bedbugs in 5 upholstered chairs at the Library. The chairs have been treated. Bedbugs are not a public health hazard and do not carry disease. This information is shared with you so that you may make an informed decision in visiting the library. Visit the CDC website on Bed Bugs FAQs and read more about this notice in the recent Press Release.

Now how awful is that?! Ain’t no place sacred anymore. Yep, the bedbugs’ll getcha if you don’t watch out.

I hate bedbugs, and I hate the idea of bedbugs. Actually, I hate the idea of bed mites even worse, but there doesn’t seem to be anything one can do about the mites. The bedbugs? Yes, you can call an exterminator who will make a valiant attempt to rid your house of them, but they are apparently just as hard to get rid of as lice in a kindergarten classroom. And if you’ve ever gone through that process, you’ll understand what I mean.

Bedbugs and cockroaches always seem to mean that one is not keeping a very sanitary house, but that isn’t the case, at least with bedbugs. Bedbugs don’t need a dirty house. All they need is a mode of transportation to get to new feeding grounds, and that can be a matter of hitchhiking on anything going anywhere. Hence the critters on a library chair. Did you ever in a million years think that plopping your behind down on a library chair might mean that you unknowingly deposit a bedbug or two in your own house and unwittingly start an infestation. (Methinks it probably takes two bedbugs to start a single infestation, unless the lone hitchhiker is pregnant.)

I do not ever want to see a bedbug in my house. If I do, I will first call an exterminator, but from my readings I will have little faith that every last bug will be found. So then I will buy an air mattress, which at night will be blown up and placed on my kitchen’s linoleum floor. There I will sleep. Or maybe I’ll sleep on the back seat of my car. I’ll certainly not sleep in my bed any more, that’s for sure. Or I might choose to move to a new apartment complex. I’ll decide which, if and when the time comes.

Now this may be an over-reaction, but I have a very hard time sleeping anyway, and if I thought there might be a bedbug or two waiting in my bed, I NEVER would fall asleep.

And now that I think of it, since Thursday will be wash day this week, I think I’ll turn my mattress over when I strip the bedding and give it a good inspection. I have some suspicious red bumps on my forearm, and I just wonder…….

STRANGE & STARTLING

2011-09-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

I find it delightful to pick up a newspaper and read something other than depressing or discouraging political and economic news. So when I read in the LA Times yesterday about San Francisco’s “Parkmobiles” – bright red dumpsters filled with greenery that aim to bring postage-stamp-sized parks into the cement heart of the city – I had to laugh.

Although the city means well, some think the movable parks mostly provide a place for homeless hankie-pankie and a source of irritation for those who can’t find a parking place anywhere. Both complaints have been lodged.

On the other side of the argument, they also have provided an al fresco setting for fast food lunchers, a venue for little songbirds not usually found in the cement city, and a place for tired walkers to rest their aching feet. Two red dumpsters of greenery are already out working and four more are being prepared. On balance, even though I laughed when I saw the picture, I think the creator of those parkmobiles probably had a good idea.

Now we out here in the Riverside County boonies also have a piece of news that is every bit as unusual – and maybe more – than San Francisco’s. We have THIS! It’s a rock that’s going to become a famous piece of art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard.

It was blasted out of the face of a Glen Avon quarry in the nearby Jurupa Hills in 2005, weighs 340 tons, is two stories tall and 21 feet wide. Furthermore, sometime soon it is going to be loaded onto a truck – a heavy-haul “transporter” with 208 wheels owned by a Portland-based company – and driven 72 miles into downtown Los Angeles, driven, that is, at the speed of a snail and only at night. Going ahead of it will be a crew of 15, various LACMA officials and police escorts. It’s estimated to take seven nights to get from quarry to museum.

There has been some talk about building a protective crate around it. The artist, of course, wants a pristine rock without scars, scrapes and pitting on its sides, but until we hear otherwise, we’ll assume it will go through the countryside as naked as it came out of that hillside.

I can hear you asking, “Well, for crying out loud, what kind of artwork is this?” I understand the artist is Michael Heizer; the name of the work is “Levitated/Slot Mass.” Eventually the rock will be poised over a 456-foot long, 15 foot deep concrete trench. Once in place, visitors will be able to walk underneath the massive granite formation and down a slope that will create the illusion that the boulder is levitating.

I admit to not understanding this type of art. And thinking of walking under any suspended 340 ton rock would gives me the same kind of heebie-jeebies that walking out over the Grand Canyon in a cantilevered walkway does – neither are anything I would choose to do.

But what I AM going to do is find out which night this big boulder will pass my apartment complex – and believe me, it will pass by, as we live next door to Glen Avon and that boulder has to come by if it intends to go to Los Angeles – and stake out my spot. If I want to see a moving boulder I’ll have to give up part of a night’s sleep. Actually, I think we won’t be the only residents of Country Village who will be attending the big boulder move; there may be an actual Boulder-Moving party, if enough people decide to attend.

But should I miss it, I will still have the option of seeing the boulder resting in the daylight, but that sure doesn’t sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US

2011-08-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

I have always acknowledged my husband’s engineering acumen and praised those traits that go along with it – exactness, tidiness, abilities in math and sciences, logic, and concentration. Moreover, the top of this man’s desk is a work of perfection: a place for everything and everything in its place. I have tried to take lessons from him, but I cannot live that way. I must have a little chaos around me.

To understand how it is we have been able to stay married for so many years, I have always maintained that I need him for his order, and he needs me for my creativity. The balance seems to have worked, though I suspect my creativity was the cause of his ulcer many years ago.

However, just this week I have had a glimpse into Jerry’s dark – or better to call it his “other” side. He has a desk drawer that I open whenever I need a postage stamp. I never paid much attention to what else was in it but I knew that there was at least a tiny screwdriver, a pair of old beat-up scissors, and a magnifying glass. I don’t go into his desk drawer much, but this week I needed a flashlight and while he was standing close at hand, I delved into the drawer and brought one out. “Oh, that’s not a good one,” he said. “There’s a better one in here.” He rummaged around and came out with a flashlight I’d never seen before.

I remarked on his need for two flashlights, and while pulling the drawer fully out I laughingly asked him what else he was hiding in there. I was astounded. I won’t say his drawer was as full as mine is, but considering his tidy engineering traits I was shocked.

It was the multiples that amazed me. I know he owns three magnifying glasses because I took one for use in my office. But who needs five measuring tapes? “Ah,” he explained, “one is metric.” The last time he measured anything in metric was in early 1993 when we returned from living in Istanbul. Maybe he is emotionally attached to it, although engineers aren’t noted for their emotionality over things.

His earliest ruler, showing a business name and address, says “Los Angeles 1” for a zip code and Lucas 0189 for a phone number. We decided it pre-dates 1955. He keeps it for sentimental reasons, he says. But he has 5 rulers in his desk drawer – just in case.

How many screwdrivers does one need in a desk drawer? 6? That number must be added to the number in the tool chest he keeps beside his desk. What about 3 flashlights, 3 tubes of pencil lead (for the pencil he no longer has.) He keeps a tiny bottle of ink for his long-gone ink pad. He has an old bi-color school eraser and half of an art-gum eraser. He doesn’t use those, either. And just in case you are wondering about the item that goes across the bottom of the picture: it is a telescoping back scratcher. It’s cute, but not as cute as the person who gives him a back scratch every time he asks.

Finally, he also has the world’s longest eye-brow pluckers, which he advises me are really for stamp collectors. He stopped collecting stamps a long, long time ago. Apparently he thinks he might take on that hobby again and wants to be prepared. What isn’t shown in this picture are the postage stamps that are most often my reason for getting into the drawer – those and the old beat-up scissors, which I declined to put in the photo, since I didn’t want anyone to think that we used such decrepit things!

Now just remember that this is his DESK drawer. I find it full of amazing, yet very undesk-like implements. It has made me revise my thinking about the secret life of engineers. I think my own engineer has unneeded multiples of odd things in his desk drawer. The contents of mine are much more mundane.

But before I show you mine, I have to explain that my desk does not have drawers. It has shelves on one end and a file cabinet tucked under the other end. There is a space between the top of the file cabinet and the underside of the desk, so that is where I keep my makeshift “desk drawer,” which actually is an old metal baking pan that my mother used, but which has long been repurposed into a desk drawer! And before you take a good look at it, I want to explain that it is also a multi-use drawer, a “Fibber McGee’s drawer par excellence.”

My secretarial treasures are in there, all willy-nilly for sure, but close at hand when I need them. So please don’t laugh. Just remember, I don’t have 5 rulers, 3 flashlights, 6 tape measures, etc. etc. etc. I have creative things!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SIS

2011-08-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

I am not the most sentimental person in the world, and I always have to laugh when I see "Memorials" on the obituary page where the living address the dead as if they were sitting somewhere in the big yon reading that day's newspaper.

But in August, the month of Ginnie Lou's birthday, I always think of her in a very sentimental way ... not of addressing her in the newspaper but just making sure that in my own way I can make known the fact that I once had a sister and she died too young and that I sure miss talking to her.

This year is the year that I found some old friends - sisters, themselves - who were good friends of Ginnie Lou and me when we were teens. These friends, Audrey and Ruth, spent a year living in our neighborhood while their father's job brought him to Long Beach. Ginnie Lou and Audrey Maynard were very close friends, being the same age. Ruth and I had the same kind of friendship.

When I located Audrey early this year she was saddened to learn that Ginnie Lou had died in 2004. She forwarded to me a whole bunch of snapshots that had been taken of them during that year in Long Beach ... pictures I'd never seen before. And then when I was lucky enough to have lunch with three of the Maynard kids in Bakersfield this summer, Audrey gave me the picture above that Ginnie Lou had given her.

It was a school picture taken in 1951, when my sis was in 8th grade. And in looking at it, I had just forgotten what my sister looked like at that time in her life. That picture reminds me that during that period of time it was fashionable to wear a "collar" at the neck of our sweaters. There was a flap that went around our necks under the sweater, and a button or snap that held it in place. In looking at an old junior high school yearbook, almost every single girl in each class is wearing a sweater and a collar. And each girl had many of them, so we could look different each day.

It also reminds me that the time of hair-rollers had not yet come, and the best we could do to make our hair curly was either to use rags, if we had long hair, or set our hair with bobby-pins if it was short.

The picture also reminds me that she had her braces off before she was in 8th grade. Ginnie Lou had fallen off a bicycle when she was 7 or 8 and had broken off her two front teeth. Temporary caps had been put on them (caps made of celluloid, which yellowed with age.) Because she needed braces on her teeth, the dentist put the braces on over her temporary caps -- and as they aged she became terribly self-conscious about her yellowing front teeth. She began pulling her upper lip down when she smiled so they wouldn't be so obvious. And they were awful looking, but she just had to bear with it until they came off and permanent caps were put on. So here she is with perfectly suitable white front teeth. But to the end of her life she still had a tendency to smile very carefully.

I am so grateful that Audrey passed this picture on to me. It was kind of her to do so, and I decided to pass on some photos I have to people who likewise would enjoy having them.

I do miss Ginnie Lou; we had our difficult times, as most sisters do now and then, but I think of her daily and remember all the good times we had. I know some of you readers remember her too with love and affection, and I'm sure you'll join me in a sentimental "Happy Birthday" to her.

JUST A FEW THINGS ....

2011-08-24T11:08:00.001-07:00

1 Thing I wish I had done
--> Graduate from College

2 Colors I don’t wear
--> Fuschia
--> Mustard

3 Things that make me sad
--> Dog Pounds (animal shelters)
--> Parents who yell at their little children
--> Caught fish

4 Things that make me mad
--> Tailgating drivers
--> People who don’t clean up after their dogs
--> George Dubya
--> Tea Party Philosophy

5 things I must have on my desk
--> Cupful of pens
--> Sticky notes
--> A box for Squeaky to lie in
--> An art gum eraser
--> Box of Kleenex

6 good books I’ve read this year
--> Richard Stewart’s The Father Damien Story
--> Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
--> Joshua Kendall’s The Forgotten Founding Father – Noah Webster
--> Darin Strauss’ Chang and Eng
--> Natasha Solomon’s Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English
--> James Mauro’s Twilight in the World of Tomorrow

7 Places I’d like to go
--> England (always!)
--> Holland (but in the summer this time)
--> Jamestown, CA
--> Chicago
--> North Shore of Lake Tahoe
--> Anywhere in Turkey
--> Isle of Bute in Scotland

8 Hobbies I’ve had
--> Canoeing
--> Archery
--> Square dancing
--> Chinese Cooking
--> Photography
--> Genealogy
--> Collecting cups
--> Counted Cross-stitching

9 People I’d like to see again (living & dead)
--> Jerry Russom
--> Fifi
--> My sister
--> Leonard Myers
--> Cousin Shirlee
--> Ahmet Akaylar
--> Dokey
--> Susan Ryland
--> Hannie Nicolai

10 Thing that make me happy
--> Music (except country western)
--> My camera
--> My computer
--> Eyedrops for glaucoma
--> My family
--> Knitting hats
--> Reading
--> Finding the Maynards via F B
--> Watching Dudamel conduct
--> Nanette, our Mazda Tribute

BEING OUT OF SORTS, SORT OF

2011-08-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am sort of out of sorts. I should be happy that I have a new computer with Windows 7. With Microsoft Office 2010. A new laserjet making a trip through the mails from my son Sean in Sonoma. A new scanner on the way from Dell. But starting on August 11 when my old computer died a sudden death, nothing in my life has been easy. I’m sure down the road I’ll be back to my normal sunny self; in the meantime I am a bit out of sorts about not exactly knowing what I’m doing on the computer.

But it’s not just me. I’m seeing a lot of confusion everywhere. I see the grammar police are after our Governor Brown for saying, “He should have went…” Fie, Governor Brown! You should have known better than that. But now there’s a big deal in my favorite newspaper about whether or not the writer (or the editors) should have put a (sic) after the quote. And there is no consensus. Are we going to be polite and not correct our Governor’s boo-boo in front of God and everybody by using sic? The newspaper says let his words stand there, glaringly wrong. So a big grammar brouhaha is fomenting.

But there is more: A lovely young oriental pianist appeared this month in a most untraditional dress at a Hollywood Bowl concert. As she walked out on stage, the audience’s collective mouths dropped open. I suspect the male patrons were exceedingly delighted at her visage, but their wives/girlfriends may have delivered jabs into their companions’ ribcage to encourage them to get their eyeballs back in their heads. Apparently orchestra members are told what they are to wear, but the featured soloists can wear whatever they feel like – no holds barred. I hear lots of disgruntling is going on among concert goers.
Now there is a stunning young organ player on the music circuit and he sometimes appears as flamboyant, in his own way, as Liberace did in his heyday. His name is Cameron Carpenter, but once he puts his fingers on the organ keys it is impossible to think about what he is, or isn’t, wearing. Again, the rule is that he can wear what he wants. More tsk-tsk-tsking.

You won't be surprised that there are a group of people – traditionalists, mostly – who are out of sorts by the lack of more formal attire. And the newpaper articles and letters to the editor fly back and forth. They make me laugh, because my minor little concerns can at least be eased when I get my hands on a “Windows 7 for Dummies” book.

You may remember a month or so ago I wrote a blog about whether graffiti, some or all, can be considered “street art” and whether such “street art” can really be considered “art” at all. Some say yes, some say no. Everyone digs in and no one is really very happy about it. The discussion is still going on.

Here's a new idea to get people's gruntles going:

Seems an Orange County orchestra is trying to entice the younger adults to come to more classical concerts. The average age has of attendees has risen to, well, lets say “senior citizen age.” And this orchestra doesn’t like that trend. So they are considering how to use electronic gadgets to make the younger group of patrons feel comfortable in a concert hall and come back. They did a test with a young mid-twenties professional woman in OC and offered tweets that corresponded to what was going on musically. She could read thing like the following:

The tweets popped up as real-time program notes. During Saint-Saens' ‘Carnival of the Animals,’: "The 'kangaroo-hopping' effect you hear is accomplished musically via the use of grace notes: small quick notes added just before each beat."

The idea of a little music education in real time can certainly makes it easier to get more out of the concert itself – and the test was to see how a real live twenty something liked it (she did). But if I am to believe the letters to the editor that poured in after this article appeared, a whole lot of concert subscribers with grey hair didn’t like the idea of having brightly-lit electronic media assaulting their eyes in the darkened concert hall. Put the younguns and their gadgets in the balcony was one suggestion. More than one were a little out of sorts about the whole thing -- “If ears have been good enough for listening to Saint-Saens all these years, then they should be good enough now! Oh my, I do tend to agree with them.

On the political front there are all kinds of grumpy people too; the grammar police are vigilant, the religious police are going at it tooth and nail – and as a nation we just seem to be at a point where nothing seems to be working very good. It’s not just me that gets out of sorts on occasion.

Although I admit to being a tinch out of sorts now, I must add this in my own defense: It doesn’t happen often and it doesn’t last long. I do have a lot of new goodies to play with. All my kids are exceptionally solicitious of me, giving me every kind of help, encouragement, and advice I could ask for. My husband right now is down at the Laundromat doing a wash. And most wonderful of all is that I have a brand new tiny great-grandaughter in Florida with the amazing name of NaomiHope. So what if I have an out-of-sorts kind of a day? Look what is “in-sorts!” And there’s just no comparison!

I LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY!

2011-08-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have never been too knowledgeable about the first world war, not having any ancestors who fought in it or anyone in my family talk about it. And having grown up in California, our world history classes never went very deeply into the latter wars. So when I read the following in a most interesting book, I just had to share it with you, in case you also need to be enlightened.

The army would require as well at least one hundred thousand officers. The Student Army Training Corps was to provide many of that number: it would admit “men by voluntary induction…placing them on active duty immediately”

In May 1981 Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote the presidents of all institutions “of Collegiate Grade,” from Harvard…to North Pacific College of Dentistry in Portland, Oregon. He stated Military instructions under offices and NCO’s of the Army will be provided in every institution of college grade which enroll 100 or more male students…All students over the age of 18 will be encouraged to enlist….

In August 1918 an underling followed Baker’s letter with a memo to college administrators, stating that the war would likely necessitate “the mobilization of all physically-fit registrants unde 21, within 10 months from this date. The student, by voluntary induction, becomes a soldier in the United States Army, uniformed, subject to military discipline and with the pay of a private on full active duty.” Moreover, “In view of the comparatively short time during which most of the student-soldiers will remain in college and the exacting military duties awaiting them, academic instruction must necessarily be modified along the lines of direct military value.”

“Therefore, the teaching of academic courses was to end, to be replaced by military training. Military officers were to take virtual command of each college in the country. High schools were ‘urged to intensify their instruction so that young men 17 and 18 years old may be qualified to enter college as quickly as possible’!

How's that for government control!

The well-researched and well-documented book is "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" written by John M Barry. It's very, very interesting, and I haven't even gotten to the "flu" yet!

ARE THERE SUCH A THING AS FEET COOTIES?

2011-08-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

My feet do not have cooties. They may not be the prettiest feet in the world, but at least they are honest 76 year old feet. They've served me well, bunions and all, and I'm hoping for a few more years without additional hammertoes. They'll never win a "Foot-Beautiful" contest, for sure, but I'm here to tell you that at least they don't have cooties. Visible ones, anyway.

I have always gone around barefoot. In my youth, from the end of the school year to the end of summer I rarely put a shoe on. Young people's shoes were sturdy and mostly ugly. When we walked a mile to the beach each day, we went barefooted. There were no things like flip-flops. Our feet just adapted to hot pavement and sidewalks and sand (and I suppose cooties, but I didn't know about those things then). As I grew up, the first thing I did when I got home from anywhere was to kick my shoes off. And I still am mostly barefoot in the summer by choice. But the shoes on my feet, above, are what summer shoes I wear when I HAVE to. They are old and comfy and kind of beat-up, but I use them instead of Flip-Flops to hide a multitude of those old-age ugly-foot occurrences when I can't go barefoot.

And now someone is telling me that I shouldn't wear even my old faithfuls because foot cooties can breech the gap between the sidewalk and the sole of my shoe and give me horrible things -- germs that are being called "cooties" in a spate of cleverness by the author of an article on foot care.

Here's his quote: "When walking on the street in something like a flip-flop, you are exposing your foot to vomitus, human waste, some of which may have microbacteria -- and a wide variety of other things..." He adds that if your feet have cuts or open blisters, you may unknowingly be laying out a welcome mat to "norovirus, resistent superbugs like Pseudomonas, Klebsiella Pneumonia and MRSA." Apparently the summer heat causes massive breeding of these cooties (his word) on the street and they particularly like to jump up onto the soles of your feet and lay you low."

The author of the article says our skin is the first line of defense against cooties so it behooves us to keep an eye on foot blisters or cuts to keep the skin on our feet healthy. And keep strappy sandals and Flip Flops off our feet. To be safe, I suggest, wear hip waders.

I really don't think I'm going to change my foot habits all that much. The article gives a few things that might help foot health maintenance at the end of the day, such as soaking feet in a blend of water and grapefruit juice, or making a foot scrub using a blend of granulated sugar, olive oil and some kind of smell-sweet essential oil. And when all that's completed, it's recommended to rub Petroleum jelly on both feet, put white socks on, and jump in bed.

If someone offered to do a soak or a scrub on my poor aging feet at night, I'd probably let him (hint, hint), but I know it's not going to happen. Nor is the vaseline and sock bit. Nor is throwing away my beat-up old summer shoes for Doc Martins. I've started using antibacterial hand wipes when I push a grocery cart around, and that's my one concession to cooties of the hand. I guess cooties of the feet are just going to have to stay there.

TALK ABOUT EXCITEMENT! LOOKY THIS!

2011-08-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

I am a fairly composed person. Actually, I think that's an understatement; it really takes a lot to make me laugh, or cry, or even get excited over something. But I have to tell you that this morning I really got excited over something I found in the LA Times.

Just look at the picture above. It is one of the shadow-box scenes of African American history crafted by a Compton woman over the past 15 years. Presently displayed in her house, these boxes previously have been taken periodically to various classrooms in Compton, Inglewood and South LA for students to see. But beginning on August 28, they will be placed in The Sisters Market Place in Leimert Park Village. There you'll see representations of Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Florence Joyner -- as well as of just ordinary black families going about their daily lives.

The Times online article has a gaggle of pictures that leave me drooling, and convince me that I will need to satisfy my hunger for experiencing this wonderful folk art by making yet another trip to LA.

The story of why artist Karen Collins started making the shadow boxes in the first place is a sad one, and because of that she took what had been a little hobby and turned it into something of great interest and education. You need to let her tell her own story.

And be sure to look at the pictures that accompany this article. The whole thing made me lose my ordinary placid self and get really jazzed about this! Such a talent she has! I can't wait for August 28th!

REWALKING THE PAST

2011-08-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Jerry and I celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. We married on August 1, 1975 in Orange County, California and lived there, except for 22 months in Turkey, until we retired in June of 2000, at which time we relocated to the "Inland Empire." We decided that a fitting celebration this year would be repeating one of our favorite things to do on a summer evening in the OC. This included eating our dinner at our favorite local deli in Santa Ana, driving down to Newport and walking out on the Balboa Pier, eating a frozen banana, looking at the lovely views, and then heading home, happy and content.

We started off at Benjies, the best Jewish deli in Orange County. Our repast included matzoh ball soup, potato latkes, and a plate of chopped liver, egg salad and potato salad, accompanied by genuine Jewish Rye bread! There are no comparable delis within driving range of where we live, so when we dine at Benjies it is like being in heaven.

Next we drove down to Balboa, parked the car at the foot of the pier, and headed out to see if the fish were biting. The air was fresh and clear as a bell, the evening warm with a slight breeze. Jerry led the way.

The fish were, in fact, biting. Since we aren't fishermen, we can't tell you what was being caught, but all up and down the pier I, being a tinch squeamish when it comes to caught-fish and cut up bait, simply had to keep my eyes focused straight ahead, because there was a lot of flopping going on around the pier edges!

There's a cute little restaurant called Ruby's at the end of the pier, and if we hadn't just had our Benjies meal, we wouldn't have been able to resist the wonderful smell of fried fish and chips!

The frozen bananas used to cost $1.25 but now were up to $3.25. Nevertheless, we didn't let price stop us. The bananas were huge, covered with chocolate and nuts, and totally wonderful. I took my own picture while I was eating mine, and while it isn't all that flattering, it will certainly show you what we have been missing all these retirement years!

After finishing our special treat, we took a walk along the Balboa bay. I grew up going to the beach at Balboa, lying on the sand at this very location. But now, it is a private beach, set aside for owners (or renters) of houses that line the bay side of Balboa. But what a view those people have.

We finished off the evening by walking back to the pier, retrieving our car, and taking a picture of the sunset as we called it a day.

The "going home from work" traffic was off the freeway by the time we got on it, and in an hour we were pulling up to our snug little apartment in the IE. It was a wonderful celebration!

NOT BEING BILINGUAL

2011-07-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

In a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine David Sedaris wrote an article about learning a foreign language. While I normally don’t read his stuff (a bit too raunchy for my taste), I did enjoy reading of the trials and tribulations he experienced in making the jump from English to whatever it was he was at the moment trying to learn – Chinese, French, German, et al.

I have finally reached the point in my life where I don’t think I’m going to make any further effort to transform my two years of Spanish in High School into a passable understanding of that language. In those two years – we’re talking about 1951 to 1953 – we studied vocabulary, we conjugated verbs and we translated Spanish novels. We spoke words with the Castilian “th” sound. The first few sentences we learned to speak were these: “Que es el burro? El burro es un animal. El burro es un animal importante.” I don’t remember where the story went from there, but wherever it went, I ended up those two years with “B”s on my report card and a total inability to either speak or understand Spanish.

From time to time I can pull out from the tiny little part of my brain that stores foreign words an appropriate word of Spanish. Once I even helped a little Hispanic lady at the local Post Office who needed to fill out a form that was written in English. The postal clerk was so rude to her about her inability to speak and read English that I decided I should show her that all Anglos aren’t so mean. I remembered the Spanish words for Name, Address, City, etc. and between the two of us we got the card filled out properly and returned to the clerk. I told the clerk he should be ashamed of himself, and I walked out behind la senora, as if protecting her backside from any more rude comments. But that’s about the maximum good that my two years of Spanish have ever done.
When we moved to Turkey I was determined to learn enough of that language to make myself understood. I sent for a small tape offered by Tom Brosnahan, writer of The Lonely Planet’s “Turkey - Travel Survival Kit” and before I set foot in Istanbul I could already count and say a few pleasantries, name the colors, a few fruits and vegetables, and a modicum of verbs, all in the present tense, of course.

Once we got established, I hired a young bilingual (Turkish-English) woman to help me learn the language. The first lesson was promising: Good day, Yucel Bey. Good day, Cetin Bey. How are you? I am fine, thank you. And you? I’m fine, too. Thanks. Good bye. Ah, I thought, I can do this. But in tackling the second lesson a red flag went up. I was going to learn about school children, clocks, teachers, books, pens and pencils, playgrounds, tests, school athletic events and so forth. It seemed to me that I would be spending a lot of time learning about things that I really didn’t need to bother with.

Before long I set aside my lessons, and although I never stopped studying, I made use of our driver in correcting my pronunciation, in finding an easier way to say something, and ultimately in making sure what I said could be understood by a run-of-the mill Turk. Ahmet Bey was a great help, and it was to his credit that I finally got to the point where I could, within the limits of my Turkish vocabulary, make myself understood. I never got to the point where I could converse with anyone in Turkish. But I could tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go, which corners he should turn at, if he should go faster or slower, and where to let me out. On trips I could tell a hotel clerk that Jerry and I wanted a room with a bathroom, and we wanted it to be clean and have a window. I could ask where we could find a meat, fish, or chicken restaurant. I could check us in and out of the hotel, the restaurant, and the tourist site. I could nicely tell the rug merchant that we did not want to see his rugs. I could tell anyone who wanted to know that we were Americans, that we thought Turkey was a beautiful country, that we lived in Istanbul right now, and that in America we had six children and a bunch of grandchildren.

What I never was able to do was to understand a word that a Turk said to me – if it was more than one syllable long. Their language has a root word that I may have known the meaning of, but then a whole lot of suffixes were attached to it so that I never had a clue as to what was being said or meant. I just couldn’t think fast enough, and wasn’t familiar enough with the language to just “get it.” So I learned to say in Turkish “I speak a little Turkish but I don’t understand it yet.” That always got me out of the jams.

Reading David Sedaris’ funny account of his own verbal trial and tribulations reminded me again of what I went through. I have no compelling desire to be bilingual at this stage in my life. I just don’t think I have the energy left to tackle such a big job. But I know I’m inadvertently picking up a few new Spanish words because of all the billboards in Spanish that abound in this part of Southern California. You too probably know the words – Tecate, Corona, Dos Equis, etc.

OOPS!

2011-07-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

I've told you before how small our apartment is. The photo above is of our bathroom, taken by yours truly. With so much crammed into such a small place, occasionally you pick up the wrong thing.

Two boxes of necessary wipes. One contains Neutrogena Makeup Remover wipes, and the other Preparation H wipes. Below is what happens when you grab the wrong thing!

1620 GARDENIA

2011-07-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

For the first 10 years of my life my family lived in rented housing, first in apartments until I was about 6 years old, then in a rented house. Finally at age 10 our family bought the house above in Long Beach.

It originally sat on property three blocks south of where it ultimately landed. The Long Beach "bus barn" on Anaheim near Cherry Avenue needed to expand, and this house had to be moved. My father purchased it and had it moved to some empty property he owned. His intention was to fix it up and sell it, but when my mother saw it she insisted that it was the house of her dreams. Daddy acquiesced. It became "the house I grew up in" and will forever be what I think of when I reflect back on those days.

It was not a big house, but it did have a lot of rooms. It was two rooms wide. Across the front on the left side was a living room, behind that a dining room, and behind that a kitchen. On the back of the house abutting the kitchen was a room full of windows that we called a "sewing room" but which usually functioned as a bedroom. That room also had a door to the outside. On the right side of the house was a den, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom and on the back of that side was a tiny extra room that also was used for a bedroom. That room was just wide enough for a single bed and a walkway. I'd guess the house had about 1800 square feet to it. I always thought of it as a big house, but as I grew older and as time passed, I decided it really wasn't all that big. The rooms were not big, but I admit there were more of them than most houses had.

Years later after I moved away, I had occasion to drive by the old house, and I couldn't believe how much smaller the front yard was from what I remembered. But of course all my memories are from the time I was a young person, and everything seemed bigger then because I was smaller.

In talking this over with my sister a few years ago, we also agreed that the pots and pans mother had in the kitchen were all much smaller than we remembered them. The pot she used when she made stew was huge -- but somehow, like her cookie sheet, it grew much smaller over the years.

In reconnecting with old friends at our High School Reunion back in 2003, I learned that they all thought we lived in a huge house and that we were very rich. I was so suprised to hear that. I didn't think of our family in that way. But what I learned from them was this: many of them had come to California during the depression in search of work. They truly were poor. Although I had been in their houses when we were all in elementary school, I have no recollection of thinking they were poor, but in retrospect I can now see that compared to what they were still living in, our house would have seemed like a mansion.

As for my family being rich, we had a strange situation. My father was, as best as I can describe it, a promoter. He cultivated friends at the bank and in real estate, got loans and bought property, developed the property and sold it. He reinvested the money in other property, etc. He was always having mother sign on the next loan application. He needed an "image" as a successful businessman, so he drove a nice car and entertained at nice restaurants.

My mother, on the other hand, never was able to emotionally move out of the depression. All she ever wanted was for Daddy to get a job with a regular paycheck. She lived as if another depression was right around the corner. Dad would buy her a beautiful dress, and she would return it to the store and buy two house dresses. She never allowed my sister and me to buy any "name" apparel. We had to buy the cheaper "knock-offs" (although we didn't call them that in those days.) Mother was frugal and worried; Dad was generous in his spending and spent hours at the table "figuring" -- which was, according to our mother, him trying to figure out what he was going to use for money the next week! He always owed money but always made money, too. Mother always felt there was NO money.

After my sister and I married and went out on our own, the folks upgraded to a different house, but they didn't do it deliberately. One day one of dad's co-horts called to say there was a nice house for sale in Belmont Heights that he thought would be a good investment for dad. Dad bought it sight unseen. That was a good part of town and Dad figured he could make money on that house. Again, when my mother saw it, she said she'd updated her dream and THIS was now the house of her dreams. Again, Dad acquiesced. Dad had no idea that all the furniture in the house came with the sale, so my folks ended up with a lovely house, beautifully furnished.

That is the house my children remember as "Maa-Maa's (Grandma's) house. I have no emotional investment in that house whatsoever. It was nice, but in my heart nothing could be as good as the Gardenia avenue house.

I had always hoped to be able to go back to that old house and take a look through it. As it happened, it was for sale a year or two ago, and online there were photographs of all the rooms. I looked at them, but was horrified to see that not one of them looked like the room I grew up in. Each room had been modified to some extent. I decided it was just as well that I let sleeping dogs lie. The real rooms in that house only exist in my memory, along with all the fun and the warmth and the good times.

So I occasionally look at the photo above and re-affirm that it was surely the best house in the whole world for a girl to grow up in, size and value notwithstanding!

I AM SADDENED

2011-07-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the news carefully, you will have read that Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB48 into law yesterday.

The State of California has changed its Education Code to insure that the contributions to our society of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are specifically called to the attention of students in the K-12 social studies curriculum.

I am politically a liberal Democrat; I am pro same-sex marriages. I do not like any kind of discrimination. I thought the movie MILK was absolutely necessary and very inspiring. However, I draw the line at making one's sexual orientation a part of the public arena. Especially a part of our school curriculum. It makes me sad that the Governor I voted for saw fit to make SB48 law.

Below is the wording from the new law, along with the Legislative Counsel's words to help citizens understand what it all means.

SB 48, Leno. Pupil instruction: prohibition of discriminatory content.

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

Existing law requires instruction in social sciences to include a study of the role and contributions of both men and women and specified categories of persons to the development of California and the United States.

This bill would update references to certain categories of persons and additionally would require instruction in social sciences to include a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other cultural groups, to the develop-ment of California and the United States.

Existing law prohibits instruction or school sponsored activities that promote a discriminatory bias because of race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry. Existing law prohibits the State Board of Education and the governing board of any school district from adopting textbooks or other instructional materials that contain any matter that reflects adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry.

This bill would revise the list of characteristics included in these provisions by referring to race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, and sexual orientation, or other character-istic listed as specified.

Existing law prohibits a governing board of a school district from adopting instructional materials that contain any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, handicap, or occupation, or that contain any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda contrary to law.

This bill would revise the list of characteristics included in this provision to include race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation, and occupation, or other characteristic listed as specified.

Existing law requires that when adopting instructional materials for use in the schools, governing boards of school districts shall include materials that accurately portray the role and contributions of culturally and racially diverse groups including Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups to the total development of California and the United States.

This bill would revise the list of culturally and racially diverse groups to also include Pacific Islanders, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, and persons with disabilities.

Existing law provides that there shall be no discrimination on the basis of specified characteristics in any operation of alternative schools or charter schools.

This bill would state the intent of the Legislature that alternative and charter schools take notice of the provisions of this bill in light of provisions of existing law that prohibit discrimination in any aspect of their operation.

This bill also would make other technical, nonsubstantive changes

IN SEARCH OF THE OLD CITY

2011-07-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

I have always loved the city of Los Angeles. I was born and raised about 30 miles south of LA, in the city of Long Beach. My mother and dad were married in LA, my grandma used to take me on day-long "binges" (her word) to LA, where we would eat lunch at Clifton's Cafeteria and then ride the escalator at one of the large department stores downtown. When I spent two summers in El Paso with an aunt and uncle, my folks drove me to the big train station in LA and picked me up there when I returned. The La Brea tar pits in those days were just what their name said: tar pits. Bones of prehistoric animals were recovered from the tar and displayed inside the museum. There were large statues around the park showing what the animals looked like.

Everything changes from what we remember as kids, and Los Angeles is no exception. The Church of the Open Door is one of my early memories, as it was close to the Central Library and one couldn't help but see the big signs on the top that said "Jesus Saves." For years if you were in the downtown area at night you would see those big neon signs offering their message to anyone who saw them. As I understand it, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, known as BIOLA, started in this building, and although BIOLA and the church ultimately moved out to the San Gabriel Valley, the signs even now are still shining brightly in LA at night. I think it is quite amazing that they have been allowed to stay up.

In high school my friend Ro and I often took the Red Car (electric train) into downtown LA to do research at the Central Library. So it wasn't surprising that I chose to attend George Pepperdine College at 79th and Vermont in LA when it was time for college.

Another place that isn't there anymore is the old Turner's Inn, a Hofbrau near 15th and Figueroa where a bunch of us kids from Pepperdine used to go on a Saturday night to do some folk dancing.

At that time Pepperdine was a strict Church of Christ college, and there was no dancing whatsoever allowed at any of the college functions. But there was a PE course in folkdancing (in case you have never done the schottische or the polka, believe me it qualified for physical education!). We would take the bus over Manchester to Figueroa and then transfer to the bus that let us out right at the door. We're talking about 1953-54 now, and it was safe then to have a bunch of 18 and 19 year old girls (I don't remember the guys coming with us) running around in that neighborhood after dark. What a blast we had.

And the last of today's rememberances is a funny one and it really had nothing to do with cars, although the famous Harry Mann's Chevrolet store was involved. I was out on a date one evening and we were headed to a restaurant for a piece of pie after going to a movie. We had stopped for a red light and I glanced over at the building. I saw two doors with a sign over each. One said "Harry Mann - Service" and the other said "Harry Mann - Parts." The latter sign struck me absurdedly funny and I burst out laughing. I wasn't comfortable enough with my date to point out what it seemed to say, and he couldn't figure out why I was laughing so hard. I kept saying to him "Never mind, never mind. It's not important!" And then I'd laugh again.

To be honest with you, after these many years I don't remember who I was with, but I do remember that it was the first and only date I had with him. He probably thought I was a nut case. And I wouldn't have blamed him a bit. Harry Mann's Chevrolet isn't there any more either, so I can't go back and check it out. And anyway, today no one would think it was funny. But I sure did then!

And of course Pepperdine isn't there anymore either, having moved out to Malibu. But whenever I go into the city, I can sense a change in atmosphere - the air is heavier and there is a bit of an ocean smell in the afternoons when the wind blows in from the west. It's then I have the feeling that I am forever linked to Los Angeles, with my special years at Pepperdine lurking right behind my actual awareness. Memories come so easily in LA.

I often wish that I lived in LA. I have 2 cousins and a daughter and her family that do and I envy them so much. Thank goodness I still have reason...and health...to drive in every so often. It's just my favorite place!

MR. ROSENBLUM DREAMS IN ENGLISH by Natasha Solomons

2011-07-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

Captivating. Whimsical. Funny. Poignant. Utterly Charming. Delightful.

How could you not want to read a book that has been depicted by these words? It’s the story of a small Jewish family coming to England pre-WWII and the methods of coping with the past and tackling the future that each member devises. The father, a businessman, ultimately decides to design and build a golf course, hoping to interest American golfer Bobby Jones in his quest. The mother, the keeper of the past, brings that past into her life by baking all kinds of German desserts. The only child, a daughter who was a baby when she came to England, draws away from the family as she goes off to Cambridge and changes her surname from Rosenblum to Rose.

The rural community where the Rosenblums finally settle make it hard on the new immigrants, but ultimately a few good-hearted people intercede and the golf course is started. And the fun begins.

A few reviews have noted that it is a slow paced book. It is, but that doesn’t stop the surprises, the hilarity and the magic. There is a shock at the ending that will put a smile on your face, and a poignancy that will put a tear in your eye (and that maybe will join others rolling down your cheek.) The author herself had grandparents who came to England in this manner and it is their life that is the foundation for this wonderful tale, or fable, or whatever genre you want to put it in. Do not let the pace of the book stop you from soldiering on. At some point you’ll be gripped by Mr. Rosenblum’s adventure and you won’t be able to put the book down.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS!

2011-07-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

This photo above is of the "famous" (or infamous) Surfing Madonna mosaic that had a short life span under a bridge in the lovely little coast town of Encinitas north of San Diego. "Short" in that it went up about Easter and came down mid-June. In a nutshell, it is grafitti, and Californians are having an evolving relationship between grafitti and art, as well as between artists and taggers. You know the old religious saw, "Hate the sin but love the sinners?" Well, that's kind of where some of us are. We don't like laws broken and we don't like grafitti, but we do like art and we do like artists. (We haven't come to like taggers very much yet, nor can we sometimes tell the difference between good art and bad art.) Oh well, I think we are probably not alone in our puzzlement.

There is no way I can describe for you the most interesting backstory of this mosaic. The artist was smart enough to make the mosaic on a board of some type and then bolt it to the bridge so, as I understand it, when the mosaic was forced to be taken down at least it was intact. Hopefully it can find a more welcoming home. I have no trouble with the picture either artistically or religiously, though some have. If it were a roller-derby Madonna, I might think otherwise. But I just can't work myself up against something that is so eyecatching and vibrant.

Fox News has a most readable post about it online. Since I'm not able to reproduce a link on my blog yet (except sometimes when I've got my back turned one appears), you can cut and paste this URL and get a good idea of what this little part of Southern California, far from LA LA land, is talking about. NOTE: Actually, my brilliant son snuck into this blog and made "Fox News" into a link for me, so now with just one click above you can read the story.

It is good to have such a smart, helpful son! Thanks, Sean.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/06/08/surfing-madonna-drawing-tourists-to-encinitas-calif/

MANY WAYS TO CELEBRATE

2011-07-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

Most of you by now know that we live in Country Village, a senior apartment complex. It is not an assisted living unit but rather we rent our own apartment in this very large complex that encompasses about 20 acres. There are lots of people who find their social life within this complex, and there are others, of which we are a part, who rarely participate in things scheduled by various groups and clubs within the framework of the complex.

So the yearly 4th of July Parade here fluctuates in both participants and observers -- some years it is, by numbers, a success and other years could barely be called a parade. Outside groups are invited to participate, and many of the people who use golf carts to get around these large grounds decorate their carts and join the parade as well.

This year's parade was bigger than last year's, but still, you can tell by the pictures below it could be better. But I guess it's the spirit of the thing that counts.

We live in a rural area, so we are fortunate to get various contingents of horseback riders.

Burrtec Waste Management company handles the trash pickup in Country Village, and they know how to make a dumpster look patriotic!

We have a wonderful car club in the neighborhood that always gives us a good show. Their cars shine like the sun, make fantastic noises and are so clean you could eat your dinner off of them, if they would stop moving around with all the hydrolic equipment that make the cars do all kinds of weird things. It's these old cars that are my favorite of all the entries.

The Marching Band of Patriot High School, with flags and drums, put on heavy black and red uniforms and shakos and marched along the route in the 95 degree heat, playing very patriotic music to get us in the spirit. They get an "A" for effort and for appreciation!

The Veterans Club, 65 members strong, commandeered a flatbed truck and came around tossing hard candies to all the kids lining Lynn Circle - the mile-long route inside Country Village that becomes the parade route on July 4th. The vets represent all the wars and military action that men 55 and older would have participated in. For Jerry, he's a Korean War vet, and if you know what he looks like, you can pick him out on this "float."

The parade, scheduled for 10 a.m. is the "middle part" of the day's festivities. A Helicopter lands near the front office at 9 and some old airplanes from the Chino airport do some flyovers beforehand; afterwards there are festivities down near the office that includes hot dogs, hamburgers, watermelon, beer, water, soda, kids' games, bouncers and slides, and a raffle for a 42" TV sponsored by the Vet's club. All in all, if one can take the July heat, there was plenty to do today to celebrate County Village's 4th of July festivities. For me, I took a few snapshots, chatted with a neighbor for a while, fixed a cool lunch and then took a little nap. It was a good celebration all around, smallish parade notwithstanding.

IS THIS REALLY US?

2011-07-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

It is always a surprise when someone in the family comes forth with a photograph that you have never seen before. The photo above is one that fits in this category. My cousin Shirlee uncovered it somewhere in her ephemera collection and sent me a copy of it.

The most interesting thing is that even though we know it is our family, both of us were hard put to identify everyone.

The children, from left to right (and with approximate ages) are me, my sister Ginnie Lou and my cousin Shirlee, who was Shirley then, just as I was Barbara. That being the case, I'd date it from 1941; I would have been 6 and the other two approximately 4. The location is Long Beach, California, where we kids grew up.

Shirlee wondered who the man was at the right; she thought it was Uncle Marvin. I had to break the news to her that it was her father, my Uncle Sam. I recognized him, but she didn't. We got a laugh out of that.

The three women in the photo are sisters. They are my mom, who is behind Ginnie Lou, my Aunt Marie, who is behind her daughter Shirley, and my Aunt Florence. The fact that Uncle Marvin is not in the picture makes me suppose that it was he who was the photographer. They lived in Kansas and obviously were out in California on vacation. They had no children until December of 1943, when my cousin Sharon was born.

Except for the fact that I knew my mother had to be in the picture, I would not have recognized her. I have several pictures of myself as a teenager that could have been a replication of her. When I was in college my mother and I won a contest for the mother and daughter who most looked alike. However, for the most part I was always thought to look like my dad, so go figure. Anyway, that lady was my mother, for sure! The two men on the left were my dad, who is behind me, and his best friend who always was in our lives and was called "Uncle Bill." His real name was Wilmer Augustus Funk, formerly Funck.

It took my cousin and me a few minutes to decide on who the remaining man was. We settled on Uncle Hugh, youngest brother of the three sisters. In 1941 he would have been 19 -- and he always had kind of a baby face, so we are quite sure our identification is correct.

Shirlee and I spent a lot of time discussing this picture. She said the ladies were wearing "swimming pajamas." I, being the older of the two of us, had never heard of swimming pajamas and couldn't find anything using Google that spoke of them...but I don't know everything. Maybe there were such things. And since Aunt Florence has a swimming cap on her head -- well, who knows.

And to make a story out of what you see, here's my try. Aunt Florence and Uncle Marvin came to California on vacation, and the family decided to go to the beach. It was much colder down at the beach than what they expected (accounting for why no other people are on the strand) but neither Uncle Sam, Uncle Hughie or Aunt Florence let that stop them from going in the water. After taking the obligatory picture to show the folks back in Wichita when they got home, Uncle Marvin put his camera away, told the family they'd send a copy of the picture when they got it developed, and everyone left the beach.

Within the year WWII would break out. Uncle Bill would go to the island of Peleliu, Uncle Marvin, a pharmacist by profession, would become a medic and go wherever he was needed, Uncle Hugh would fight in Sicily, and Uncle Sam would be in the Merchant Marines. My father was 4A, which was because of his age and the number of people depending on him for their survival (wife, two kids and a mother-in-law). But at the time of this picture, undoubtedly the summer of 1941, life was good.

STARTING YEAR 76

2011-07-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

WHAT DO I LIKE:
1. Mimi’s Yogurt, Berry & Granola Breakfast Parfait
2. My computer
3. The Mazda Tribute, known as Nannette
4. The cat sleeping on my bed
5. Taking a nap on the davenport
6. Finding old friends on the Internet
7. My letter “B” necklace given to me by my mother-in-law
8. The New Yorker Magazine
9. Especially the L.A. Times
10. Bracelets
11. Hot Coffee
12. Cool Jazz

WHAT DON’T I LIKE:
1. People who let their dogs poop on my lawn
2. Root canals
3. Grocery shopping
4. Going to the Laundromat
5. Loudmouths
6. Country Western Music
7. Crows
8. Wieners, except in hot dogs
9. Slow computers
10. Reality TV
11. Cigarette smoke
12. Large pills or capsules – “horse pills” my folks called them.

Now you know!

LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER?

2011-06-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

As I watched my kids grow up I had some idea of what to expect. First of all, since the nut doesn’t usually fall far from the tree I doubted that my kids would be sports fans. Their dad and I did not follow baseball, basketball, football, wrestling, tennis etc. on TV nor were we active in sports. Our four kids had forays into some extracurricular sporting type activities but that was mostly gone by the time they were grown up. One of the four was a reader from an early age and I figured he’d be a reader like me. He is. Our family was not into any kind of camping; we’d rather have the comforts of an exceptionally cheap motel than the discomfort of sleeping on the ground in a tent. Only of my four kids camps. And except for the usual games of “Fish” and “War” that every parent plays with their kids, we also were not a card-playing family, and I think overall the kids have grown up doing the same thing with their own kids but not turning into those people who can’t wait for the next poker party.

So if any of my kids moved to Hawaii, I would not particularly expect them to take up hula dancing with a passion. Similarly if one moved to Texas, I would really expect (and hope) that he or she would not turn into a gun-slinging cowboy. I thought I knew my children pretty well, and for better or worse they have turned into chips off the old block.

Except for Bryn.

She was born dainty, a cute little wisp of a thing with curly blond hair. She grew up with her beloved Marcy doll, “Peli”- the pelican pajama bag, a collection of glass mice, always singing in girls glee clubs; her room was lavender with wallpaper covered with old-fashioned dolls. This was a most feminine child, with sparkling eyes and a friend of everyone. And in her teens she had a terrific crush on Chris Knight.

So how could I have been prepared for what happened when she married and moved to Alaska? She came down for my birthday party yesterday and brought a bunch of photos to share. She works full time, but apparently has plenty of time left over for play. And it is her playing that has me simply shaking my head. Never would I have thought….

She is happy as a clam, and for that I am grateful. But it still has me wondering, how did this happen?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

2011-06-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one gets something put over on them, and walking into a restaurant expecting to meet your daughter for a quick birthday lunch and discovering instead a huge surprise birthday party with you as honoree is one of those times.

The agony of turning 76 is certainly mitigated by the ecstasy of finding your whole family waiting to share in that event! I had no inkling whatsoever that all this was going to happen right under my nose. And considering that plans had been underway for over a month, it was an absolute marvel that not one slip-up was made, although in retrospect I see where one or the other came close at certain times.

When I saw a Facebook posting from one grandchild to another that said, “Andrew, what are you doing in town?” it might have raised suspicion, but since grandson Andrew’s brother lives “in town” I didn’t give it a second thought. There were a couple of other little close calls, but at the time nothing came close to giving me a hint at what was going on behind my back.

So as if it wasn’t enough that 25 of my children, grandchildren, my brother, my sister in law and two nieces came to fete and greet me, my daughter from Alaska flew down to join the party. A few were missing – but my son, his wife and my granddaughter from Sonoma had just spent the previous Sunday with me in the Bay area and it would have been superfluous for them to make that long trek again. And the youngest of all my grandchildren, little Justine, was at her first two-week sleepover camp and I wouldn’t have wanted her to miss that for anything in the world. But still when I finally walked into the room of the restaurant where they were all waiting, all I could do was to say, “Oh, my family!” and hug each and every one of them. Needless to say, it was a wonderful birthday present and I am grateful for each of them who made it so special.

My daughter Erin spearheaded the event and did a superb job. As you know, if you want anything done ask a busy person to do it. She surely pulled off a surprise, a perfect surprise, and I couldn’t be more pleased!

JUNE'S THIS 'N' THAT

2011-06-25T06:14:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing happened at the dentist’s office, which I have been frequenting lately for tooth repairs. This dentist is doing a strange thing in this day of dour economics: first, she adds a three-percent surcharge if you pay her bill by credit card. Second, she charges $5 to write a prescription. The first charge I can understand. She is deflecting Visa’s 3 percent handling charge to the customer. The second charge for writing an antibiotic prescription is, as far as I am concerned, a bit much. I judge this is a new thing for her, because the last time she wrote one for me, when I had the first root canal done in March, there was no such charge.

To be honest with you, though, I don’t have any strong negative feelings about doing this. Paying a little extra money to the dentist is much less onerous than paying the egregious price jumps that appear on the grocery shelves week after week after week. The dentist in private practice is limited as to what she can charge if she takes patients with dental insurance. To be candid, what I am paying as my co-pay on this most recent root-canal is exactly the same as I paid for my first root canal in 1985 when I didn’t have dental insurance. So I can’t be too miffed at helping out my dentist by being charged a few extraneous bucks now and then.

I just can’t help but wait and wonder where the next bite will come from.

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Next observation, and related to the dentist.

I dropped my antibiotic prescription off at the local pharmacy and Jerry picked it up for me later in the day. I was given 28 pills – and instructed to take one four times a day. When I opened the bottle I was startled to see neon pink and black capsules, very different from the Amoxicillin I’ve had before. I understand about generic drugs and don’t usually quibble about them, though I would really prefer NOT having a generic. But if I want my insurance to pay (and I do) I acquiesce.

However, after downing the funny-colored capsule, I noted on the label that the drug manufacturer was AUROBINDO. I’ve been hit by globalization, I thought. And I ran to the computer to see what Google could turn up about Aurobindo. Sure enough, it is manufactured in Hyderabad, India. What caught my eye immediately is a that the US FDA has sent a warning letter dated 5/20/11 to the director of Aurobindo in which two items are discussed: One is about the “specific violations observed during the inspection in September of 2010 of mold growing on a plate” and ends with this statement: “We are concerned that similar situations were observed by other FDA investigators during previous inspections....The inspection uncovered additional deficiencies that increase our concerns regarding the validity of the data generated in the microbiology laboratory and the quality of the sterile API and finished drug products manufactured at your facility.”

The second problem identified by the FDA was inaccurate packaging and labeling of products and a seeming inability to correct the problem. Apparently the first problem arose in April of 2010 and as of the date of the letter (over one year later) has not yet been corrected.

My main concern about globalization with medicines is the inability to control lax safety standards. In living abroad I have seen that standards in some foreign countries are vastly lower than we have come to expect. As an example, we quickly learned in the middle east if you didn't find a mustache hair on your plate of food it meant you had already inadvertantly eaten it. If I have any control over it, I do not want to take any pills made outside North America. I intend to talk to my pharmacist on Monday when he is back in the shop and show him this letter. I will ask him not to provide me with any further medications from this company. I realize doing this will simply be a drop in the bucket, but at least I can do this for my own piece of mind. Globalization is here and unfortunately we mostly do not have any way to circumvent being affected by it.

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And finally, this morning Jer and I went to Mimi’s for breakfast. While he was eating a crab-cake omelet with roasted red potatoes and I was eating a vanilla yogurt and fresh berry parfait with granola sprinkles we were discussing ourselves and the state of electronic devices. Jerry and I can use our cell phone to make and receive calls. Period. We do not text, we do not send pictures, and we do not leave or receive messages. Like my new Canon camera, there are at least 168 pages of instructions for those little Motorola Trac-phones and we’re just not up to processing so much in our shrinking brains. In fact, we understand we are actually going backwards by just standing in place. Soon we will be as innocent babes, learning to crawl around on the floor and maybe pull ourselves up on the furniture if we’re lucky.

In the meantime, I told Jerry my belief is if the 2014 Asteroid 2003 QQ47 doesn’t get us, the internet et al is going to be the means of our earth’s demise. I see it as the logical 21st century story just as the Little Black Sambo story belonged to the 20th century. In case you don’t remember Little Black Sambo (it became politically incorrect sometime in the mid 1950s) here’s the scoop as told by Wikipedia: Sambo is a South Indian boy who encounters four hungry tigers, and surrenders his colorful new clothes, shoes, and umbrella so they will not eat him. The tigers chase each other around a tree until they are reduced to a pool of melted butter; Sambo then recovers his clothes and his mother makes pancakes of the butter.

Noah faced the destruction of civilization by water; later he was told by the creator water would never be used again, but the next time destruction would be by fire. As much as I love the computer and the internet, I have this feeling that instead we will have another “Little Black Sambo” event. The electronic/internet revolution is going to go faster and faster and faster and eventually what will be left of us will be a pool of melted butter – nothing more or nothing less. I don’t think we have to wait for a natural event. I think we will do it to ourselves. And I wonder who will make the pancakes then?

Am I downcast by all this? No. Que sera, sera, as the song says. In the meantime, I continue to peck away at my trusty computer, share my views on globalization and on the sad state of the economy – and wait for a minor reason to use my cell phone. As long as I can think, ruminate, type (excuse me, keyboard) and blog a bit I feel pretty darn good for my age, both mentally and physically (except for my poor old teeth!)

WHO CONTROLS A MEETING?

2011-06-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t know which irks me more: meeting attendees who turn a scheduled program into a gripe session, or the program leaders who allow it to happen. I’ve seen it happen in seminars I’ve attended at work, and I’ve seen it at genealogy meetings. But the worst has been what we’ve experienced here in our own apartment complex.

Jerry and I live in a fairly unusual complex:

a) It is not a gated, secure community, although a security company is hired by management to man an entry shack 24 hours a day, making it appear as if a security system is in place;
b) It has a small retail complex just inside the premises that is open to the public – a Laundromat, café, market, thrift shop, pharmacy, beauty and barber shop.
c) It rents out various buildings for both public and private affairs such as weddings, service clubs, etc.

There are no garages, only open carports, and no storage facilities of any type. Many of the residents use battery operated golf carts to get around and which must be parked outdoors in front of their apartment.

This complex has been owned for many years by a group on the East Coast but is managed by a local property management company. The rent we are charged, the lowest by far in this area, is what brings people here. There are 1240 individual apartments, 12 to a building and all on the ground floor. It sits on several acres of land with a 3-par golf course in it.

Periodically some kind of organized burglary gets a foothold in the complex. Thugs cut through the chain link fence at night from outside the complex and steal batteries from golf carts, and occasionally steal the entire cart. Sometimes cars parked in the carports or on the streets are broken into. Interestingly, every apartment has at least one bedroom with a window in it that overlooks the property. One would think that someone would hear something going on when one of these burglaries are in process, but old people are hard of hearing, or sleep soundly, or are afraid to have a window open, so rarely are the police called except after the fact.

The County Department of Aging sponsored a meeting at our complex last night presented by the local Sheriff’s Department on the topic "Personal Safety and Security." The head of the Aging Department, a woman, welcomed the attendees – probably 200 or so of us – and introduced first the Sheriff Department’s K-9 handler and dog. The handler barely got started before hands began being waved at him and people began shouting questions: What is the dog’s name? How old is he? Does he play with your kids? The handler answered them, as well as other inane and inappropriate questions -- and basically had his talk taken away from him. The next person to speak was a Lieutenant with the Sheriff’s Department who said he was there to talk about how to make good policing a matter of cooperation between the public and law officers.

He had barely started his talk when a man in the audience shouted out “You are a damn fool.” The audience roundly booed him, but then, before the Lieutenant could even started his talk again, residents jumped up and began their litany of grievances, one going so far as to walk up to the front, take the microphone out of the speaker's hand and launch a diatribe about something that happened 8 years ago. And it just went from bad to worse. No one, not apartment management nor the Department of Aging representative, stopped the audience to tell them that the Lieutenant had a presentation and would take questions afterwards. It became a resident-directed meeting with no leadership anywhere.

This did not surprise either Jerry or me, because we knew that just as at every other “house meeting” we’ve ever attended, the program would end up being nothing but a viscious gripe session about how bad “management” was.

Disgusted, we got up and left.

I don’t like to disparage my neighbors, but during the 6 years we have been here I have seen this same rude and ignorant attitude exhibited by the residents at every meeting. But to be honest with you, I also have never seen the person in charge of the meeting actually take charge of it. The meeting is allowed to get out of hand almost before it has begun. The idea of someone having “control” of a meeting apparently doesn’t have much cachet around here, and thus the bedlam happens over and over.

Frankly, I do not belong at those meetings because I know ahead of time I am going to get irked enough to leave shortly after it starts. And that is why I don’t know which bothers me more, the crowd or the program leaders. Maybe the leaders, because they should know better.

I don’t like being irked, so I mind my own business, find my social life outside the apartment complex, be kind and helpful to my neighbors and hope my car doesn’t get broken into. Other than that, I pretty much disassociate myself from this place.

I remember my mother once telling me that you don’t get yourself in trouble if you keep your big eyes open and your big mouth shut. I think maybe that is what I do here. I try not to be “standoffish” – and I truly am working on that, but oh, it is so hard on evenings like this on.

SHAVE ICE - PERFECT FOR A HOT DAY

2011-06-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

The nearest thing to it here in the states is a snow cone, but frankly it is a poor excuse as a replacement for "shave ice" - the real kind one gets in Hawaii. And of course snow cones are not all that easy to find anyway, and the desperate man's replacement for a snow cone is a Slurpee.

Neither a Slurpee nor a snow cone satisfies me. I have been known to buy a snow cone at an AYSO soccer match, when my daughter hauled her snow-cone maker to the match each Saturday during the season. It is really hot in the summers where we live, and snow cones satisfy the need for something cold. But anyone who has had an authentic shave ice on the islands will know that one is not a very good replication for the other!

At one time - I'll guess in the mid 1980s - a Hawaiian Shave Ice store opened up in a strip mall in the little town of Orange where we were living then. It obviously didn't generate the quantity of customers necessary to stay open, and after that first summer it went out of business, much to our family's chagrin. It was the real stuff and we missed it when it left.

We lived in Orange for close to 20 years, relocating to the inland empire (first to Loma Linda and then to Mira Loma) when I retired. A month or so ago my son and grandson were in the area and we decided to drive down to Orange for lunch at another great place there that luckily had been in business for a long time.

Our arrival in Orange in 1975 happened just a year or so before Hassan's Lebanese restaurant opened on Glassell adjacent to Chapman College. It was owned by the Hassan family, which included Papa Hassan and his sons Hassan, Mahmoud and Mustafa. We became one of their regulars during our years in that city, and even after we moved we often drove down because we absolutely could not find any local middle-eastern food that satisfied us the way the Hassan family made it.

Originally named simply "Hassan's," it later was re-christened "Papa Hassan's," after the patriarch was hit by a car and killed as he was making his usual daily walk to the restaurant. The older Hassan son started a restaurant in Newport Beach and the two younger brothers kept the Orange location.

So imagine our dismay recently when the four of us arrived at the restaurant to find it out of business, shuttered up tightly and painted the same color as the college buildings. According to what we later learned, a fairly serious kitchen fire occurred and the family decided to get out of the business entirely instead of starting over somewhere else.

About four blocks away from Papa Hassan's there was a Cuban Restaurant, Felix's Cafe, where we also used to eat on occasion. It was "on the circle" in the center of town and was one of the few sidewalk cafes in town. They had a Cuban sandwich to die for -- Cuban bread, roast pork, ham and a dill pickle, with a plaintain on the side. So the four of us decided if we couldn't eat at Hassans we'd head to Felix's.

You know the expression, "You can't go home again?" Well, I would guess that Felix's has had a change in ownership since we left town some 10 years ago, and the Cuban Sandwich was no longer the sandwich of our dreams. I could tell by looking at it when it was served that a change had happened. So driving to our old stomping grounds is no longer a necessity.

In our more rural part of Southern California we have a nice selection of ubiquitous chain restaurants to choose from but we are bereft of anything authentic in Middle-eastern food, Chinese food, Cuban food, Jewish deli food -- and Hawaiian shave ice. Los Angeles has it all, of course, and sometimes we just have to make the trek into the city (some 60 miles to the downtown area) if we want the real stuff.

The city of Orange was much nearer to us in distance -- but sad to say, there is nothing much of our past there anymore. It's probably a combination not only of societal changes (all the old familiar things being gone) and our aging (all the old familiar things going!) Businesses are changing and we are becoming redundant. All this is, I think, a sad state of affairs.

I've got dental appointment this morning, after which my mouth may be so sore I'd wish for a shave-ice to dull the pain, but I just might have to settle for a Slurpee.

THE JOHNSON BABY OIL BABY

2011-06-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

My mother was crazy about babies. Little ones. Ones that smelled of Johnson's baby oil on their heads and their bums -- and Johnson's baby powder on their bodies. I wouldn't call it a fetish, but she certainly made it known that there was nothing in the world as sweet smelling as a tiny baby.

Now don't laugh when I say that the picture above is one she took of me when I was just a tiny thing. It came from the baby-book she kept of me, and under it she had printed "Little Babs' cute neck. She smelled so good there." As an aside, wouldn't you think there would be a picture of my face instead of my neck?

I imagine mother kept me powdered and oiled up until I was twenty-six months old and my sister arrived on the scene to get the oiling and powdering.

Although at some point my sister and I outgrew my mother's ministrations (as I'm sure a much-later born brother also did), when we got older and went with our family to the beach mother always slathered Johnson's baby oil on our back -- ostensibly for sunburn protection but probably still because the smell of it took her memories back to our baby days.

I have always been surprised to experience what an impact a smell can have. I wonder if other people automatically conjure up old images when they smell certain things. I know a whiff of White Shoulders can bring back my college years instantly. It's almost like seeing my life at that time play out before my eyeballs! A smell of Vicks brings back those times as a child when I got a cold and mother put a mustard plaster on my chest and Vicks in my nostrils.

When I drive down toward Long Beach there is a certain point on the freeway where I can get a whiff of the ocean smell -- and there again I relive my teenage years that I spent on the beach or in the water canoeing -- or out on the piers watching people fish. The ocean was a large part of my growing up and its smell is still down in my soul somewhere. (Of interest is that it mainly needs to be the ocean near Long Beach. The ocean at San Diego does not do that to me.)

I have not smoked for many years. I quit in 1963, and even so, at that time I had only smoked for a couple of years. During the time I was single between marriages I did have a few cigarettes now and then, mostly when I was nervously out on a date, but luckily I never considered taking it up again. For the most part I absolutely hate the smell of cigarette smoke. But every once in a while that smell will bring back not only the remembered pleasures that the cigarette brought but also a panorama of my life during that period - not specific images but just of time and place and good things.

Maybe it was because my mother often told me about how good I smelled when I was a baby, as exemplified in that picture of my little fat neck and her comments about it, that makes me more conscious of the connections between memories and smells. Maybe everyone has smells that they respond to in that way. Do you?