Hard to Imagine

It was rather difficult to build up the Christmas spirit when I was swimming just a few days ago. Temperatures were in the 70s and 80s. I know now what it must feel like to live in the Southern Hemisphere and celebrate a holiday so cloaked in the image of snow and celebrated with songs like White Christmas.

The weather way back when Jesus was born may well have been similar to the weather a few days ago here. If you check with the scholars, you will find that Jesus was not born in December, that whole thing being a fabrication by the church at a later time to draw pagans away from their mid-winter rituals, and bring them into their fold. But I digress.

By singing carols and making rum balls and truffles, I managed to get in the spirit of the season. Do you know that every recipe for rum balls I found on the web had corn syrup in it! Since when do rum balls need corn syrup? Read "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and you'll understand how corn has taken over the modern food world. Rum ball recipes with corn syrup only seem to prove his conjecture.

Maybe next year, I'll post my versions of the recipes for rum balls and truffles. In the mean time, I hope you are enjoying your holiday of choice.

Moving right along

Okay, so it's taken me half a year to put up a new post, but it's not like I have anyone out there (other than you, Peter) actually subscribing. So I can safely assume that there isn't a single soul waiting on the edge of their seat for me to write. I really am writing for my own amusement! Maybe some day I might even have something worth reading up here. I look forward to posting future trivia, but don't die waiting.
Mr. B and I finally reached the Atlantic Ocean. Here's a photo with the Atlantic behind us from Sebastian Inlet State Park on the Florida Coast near Vero Beach last week. We couldn't actually go out on the beach together. Mr. B is not allowed. We understand that there are places on the Gulf coast were Mr B can go out on the sand. Next time we'll find a place for Mr B...

Boom or bust, moving right along

A month away 'til the big move from my mountain nest in California to the birding flyway of mid Florida. My move is the sum total of my boomer generation's search for meaning and purpose in life, as well as the current economic crisis.

I was feeling bad about having spent the money I made on the sale of my Marin home back in 2oo2 until recently, but that has changed with the advent of the current economic crisis.

Some might consider me foolish, but I have lived well though frugally, working part time and looking for that meaningful life path that would add another dimension to my spouse-and-child-free life, some things I'd never meant to be but am now. I've written the rough draft of a novel and a screenplay. I've traveled to Alamos, Sonora, Mexico founded in 1682 while still a Spanish colony, and the Discovery Islands of British Columbia where orcas come to feed on disappearing salmon. These are parts of North America I'd never been to before. Modest trips compared to excursions I dream of taking to the Great Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, yet just as satisfying.

I did not lose my money in the downturn.

Well that is not exactly true. My IRA, a little cached cash in that estimable banking institution, Wells Fargo, lost over 60% of it's value in just the past 2 years. So I did not remain untouched.

I am the perfect product of my generation, the ultimate baby boomer: I can whine with the best of them. And I will have to work until I die, so it's good I've found a way to change with the times.

For some others perspectives on boomers and the present see:

Boomers Going Bust from the Washington Post

Civil liberties

We're not free until everyone is free.

Moving to Florida

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as
to have the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

Came in like a lion!

For thirty thousand years, more or less, man has walked with dog. Dog made herself indispensable to man, and hence man became her slave.

I thought I could go dogless after my old companion died. It didn't work. On March 1st I adopted Mr. B(ear). He's some 10 years of age and rather frayed around the edges looks-wise. I don't care. He has a lovely face and is easy going. So I've welcomed Mr. B into my life for whatever is left of his.

He's already proved an indispensable friend.


The day after I adopted Mr. B, I learned that a long time friend, Ulrike Bretschneider, had died from leukemia. It broke my heart to get this news from her husband, Klaus Schmuecker. Though she lived a long ways away in Germany and Australia so that I saw her infrequently, I will miss her greatly. Her loving and creative energy were big.

She wrote her letters on the backs of flyers and collaged pieces of travel brochures, postcards and photographs. A brochure of a Turkish monument, a picture of her and Klaus on a road trip or she and I sitting on rocks off Quadra Island in British Columbia.

Later Klaus wrote that he and their friends in Australia had a wake around Ulrike's painted coffin. I can think of nothing more fitting than this final tribute and memory of her.

Mr. B would do more to help me.

Just after midnight that brought in Friday, March 13th, my friend Pirkle Jones slipped and fell, breaking his hip during my caretaking shift. He died on Sunday March 15th at the age of 95. A fine and gifted photographer, he's left behind scores of friends who will remember his astute criticism and merry laugh. You can view his obituary in the Art section of the New York Times from March 23rd.

The point of storytelling,

as Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from oblivion, and to preserve — to create — some sense of continuity in the hectic ebb and flow of experience. “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past,” she writes in an epilogue, “sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”

A.O.Scott on Alice Munroe, NYTimes December 10, 2006

From the beginning.

Since time immemorial humans have wanted to tell their stories to their clan. They gathered around the fire to that end. The best story tellers were greatly revered. Poetry emerged. It was easier to remember stories that had rhythm and rhyme, like Homer's odes or Shakespeare's sonnets.

Today it's the web that serves as the campfire. All madness comes to our virtual times - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and so on. Like the verbal and written fare in the past, much can be ignored, yet out of it comes those diamonds in the rough that will later be gems.