more snow

Today is travel day.

It snowed 4” here last night, but the road cams show black road most of the way. One lane at least. That is good.

Dea has already left San Francisco heading north. When she gets to where the shorter road cuts across the center of Oregon and the freeway goes on north to Portland (a longer route), she will inquire about the best route.

Portland has a lot of snow and I would guess that the town is pretty well shut down. Grandson David came from north california (which is actually in the center of the state), drove to Portland where his wife’s parents family life, got within a hundred yards of their house and got stuck in the snow.

But when I check around a bit,there is a LOT of snow in a LOT of places this year. Since I am not a snow buff, I will not trudge on, and not complain.

I was listening to Bing Crosby yesterday sing; "There is no place like home for the holiday." Hmm. He might have been onto something

I’ll post again this evening.

snow and travel

We live in a pretty dedicated desert, so there is not a lot of moisture any time.

That is not all bad, we avoid a lot of rainy days, and even when it is cold, we often do not get much if any snow.

But that is not true down the road a bit.

Tomorrow we are driving 250 miles up through the corner of Oregon to Washington State. Our daughter lives about a mile and a half into Washington State, so we won’t drive there a whole lot.

And they have snow big time. She told me they had a foot a few days ago and it has been snowing almost every day since. Even Linda in Portland reports 6 to 12 inches of snow. Portland is a hilly town and snow brings the whole town to it’s knees.

A storm passed through our area over the weekend and another one is not due until Wednesday, giving us a one day window to travel.

I suggested calling the trip off, or at least offered that for thought, but Deanna who lives the furtherest away was not impressed with my idea! Grandson David drove from Sacramento to Portland yesterday and said it was ok, but a little slower. Deanna will drive from San Francisco to Portland on Tuesday.

Linda in portland has a Jeep jeep with nice new snow tires and she is getting around pretty well. We were there once when there was 5 or 6 inches of snow. It was fun to drive along with Linda and watch Mercedes and Jags and more, stuck in the snow.

We have traveled this road between here and Walla Walla literally hundreds of times, and know the road well. What I don’t know is which driver who has never on snow before gets between me and a safe trip.

Once we were traveling along on compact snow base. I bought half a cord of firewood to put in the pickup for ballast, it worked well. We were going along at a fair speed and a SUV passed me going a good bit faster than us. I told Miriam that they were out of control but did not know it.

We had not driven 5 miles and saw them on the side of the road having slapped the guard rail enough to put out a SUV light, but enough to cause serious injury.

Funny I did not see them again that day.

We are taking our ancient (1992) Chevy Cavalier, but it is in good mechanical condition, has new tires that have been sipped. You can look that one up!

To all of us that will be traveling this week: be careful and slow down.

my music

I have been moving music!
For the last long time, most of the music I listened to came over the radio, public radio in this case.

Some years ago my daughter and her computer programer husband put their music collection on their computer, so they could easily listen to music as they choose.

I put “some” of my favorite music on my MacBook, and listen to it via ear buds. OK I had almost 800 “songs” on my “book”.

Then I got an iPod and began putting more play lists together. It was fun and it was not to difficult. When I got a semi ancient Mac desktop computer (in computers a 2 year old machine is old and a 4 year old one is very ancient). It had a smallish HD, but all I wanted it to do was be a backup, and to allow me to organize my music.

We don’t have a large CD collection. But a hundred CD’s is hard to manage on any kind of a big CD player that I could afford. We have a player that has room for 50 CD’s, but the options are listening to everything in order, or jumping from cut to cut, and that has limitations.

Enter the computer. Right now I have about 6 GB of music on desktop and I can pick a tune at a time, or an album at a time and put it on a play list. I can create a bunch of them.

The downside is that it takes a while to transfer a lot of CD’s to the computer, and then back it all up. But with winter and time I am doing it this week. I have a thing about proper use of copyright material, so all of the CD’s I have are ones I have purchased. O, there are a few tunes that granddaughters have sent me, but that is not a significant portion (with luck my jail time should be minimal).

And at will I can copy from that collection to my iPod, allowing me listening wherever I might go.

Tomorrow we are gong to travel 250 miles. I will fill the iPod with music we will enjoy, and then hook up two sets of ear buds, so Miriam and I can both listen as we drive. (My iPod does not allow it to be tied in with the car music system, that one was over budget!)

Along with the books I download from the internet and listen to, this whole thing has added a lot of listening pleasure to my life.

It is cool, as my granddaughers might say.

slowly

If your life needs a bit of slow down time, I have a plan.

My town once was 8,000 when I first remember. Now it is about 30,000. There were maybe 50,000 people in the “valley.” Now that number is ten times more at least.

Some things have changed. I remember going downtown and it was all bustling with business: Wards, Sears, JCPenny’s, Woolworth, Idaho Department Store, Alexanders (named after the first Jewish governor in the United States: Moses Alexander), Safeway, Albertsons, Model Market and so on.

None of those are in the down town any longer, several are no longer any where.

But our post office goes on and on. The building is the same size, and I swear they have the same number of clerks.

Of late, there seems to always be a line 10 or 12 patient patrons deep. Once you step in the sandstone framed doors, time stops. You can use your credit card to buy stamps, and there are posters of the latest stamped hero.

But there is the same number of clerks, I am sure. They are in no hurry. They take their time. Not always friendly time, but slow time. Suddenly one clerk may put an “out to lunch” sign up and disappear.

One has always intrigued me (and not positively). He has worked there for a couple of decades. His answers to everything were remote, like the were uttered by a machine. I have driven 10 miles to a nearby town to another post office to avoid him, but in his middle age he is becoming a bit more human.

Oh well.

This time they had a sheet of Alzheimer’s stamps, at least there was one under the glass. I was going to get one, and I do support any kind of research, obviously, but then I remembered how much Miriam fights the idea that she has the disease.

The only things that have changed is the size of the line, and the cost of postage.

Oh, and postage goes up in May the clerk told me.

I bought "forever" stamps, just in case.

brand

There seems to be a new branding phenomenon in my town.

Maybe it is more than here, I don’t know.

I was in a restaurant a while back and at the table next to us was a largish family. There was a young woman, maybe mid 20’s, there were kids, grandparents and what i took to be her husband.

But what struck me was that when the woman turned I could see that she had a man’s name tattooed on her neck. Not in small letters, but block letters, maybe ¾ of an inch tall. It began right under her ear and went down under her collar.

Does that mean she really belongs to him?

Then yesterday when I was at the post office, a teen girl was looking at pictures of her friends (I guess). She was on the other side of the counter, waiting her turn. Her top was quite low and revealed about an acre of skin.

But what got me was there was a Spanish word with letters a good inch long, running across her chest! It was high enough that she would be dutiful to cover it with clothes, but she did not seem to care, in fact she seemed to be bragging about the whole thing.

And a while ago we were in Target getting food for Leo the dog. The clerk was a young woman who had gotten a tattoo on her breast. It was quite low, actually, and she was determined that we should all appreciate her bit of body art.

I wonder what part of my body would get bruised if I suggested to Miriam that she should have “DAVID” tattooed across some intimate part of her body?

I won’t ask.


Another thought: some one recently was quoted as saying that if you want to invest in a new industry that has a bright future, invest in technology that REMOVES tattoos!

Ben

Ben called this morning.

I have a brother named Ben and a grandson Ben as well, but this was friend Ben. This Ben had a knee replaced a week and a half ago, and he is doing pretty well. He said that his freezer has worn out and they were going to buy a new one.


Would it be possible for me to help his wife get one and get it place. I said he was in luck the pickup was ready to go and was empty, a good combination. I agreed to meet his wife Jan at Home Depot in about an hour.

Modern freezers are pretty light. Part of that is better insulation, and some of us fear it is also because they are poorly made. I am afraid that the first conclusion may easily out weigh the latter.

I bought some straps (I don’t have enough of them) and we loaded the freezer. It says right on the box that it is legal to carry one lying down as long as it lays on its back. Wow that made it pretty easy.

The rest was routine. I moved the old freezer out of the way, offering to take it to the disposal site after Christmas, installed the new freezer, leveled it up and got it all going.

They thanked us and we left. It was one of those things you would do for almost any one, but would be eager to help a good friend.

We drove away about 3 minutes and my cell phone rang. It was Ben. When a customer calls right after I have done a job, I am sure I left a tool, or that something ha gone really wrong, or something equally dark.

It was none of those.

They knew we were planning on going to visit our kids for christmas. Our pickup is quite new, but the trailer is 24 years old, and while it is in pretty good shape, it has not been pulled for a while, and tires wear out faster from not being used than being used. Besides, it needs a few repairs that are off budget, as they say.

They have a newer trailer that they have used to travel a LOT. They work on church building projects as volunteers the trailer is their home away from home. It is a good one, and Ben assured me the furnace works fine. (Ben spent his career as a crack carpenter. We all value his knowledge and expertise).

I told Ben I would have to think about it a bit, but that right now my inclination is to take up his offer.

I have been listening to a book about christian grace. Cathleen Falsani’s “Sin Boldly” which is a quote from Martin Luther that is easy to take out of context. But I thought of grace and how Ben had just offered me a big bucket of the stuff.

Thanks, my friend, not just for the loan of your trailer, but for the lesson in Grace that you and Cathleen have shown me.

up front

A while back I was visiting with my friend Dorothy.

(This story has nothing to do with anything important, but is a cute story and it popped into my head today.)

We were working on church business together.

Some how we got to talking about being up front of the church. I said that even though I am seriously introverted at times, I don’t mind being up front and speaking or doing music.

Dorothy grimaced. She is a quiet person -- big time. Then she said something I will never forget: “I don’t mind being up front, as long as no one is there.”

Bless you, Dorothy.

Jean

I heard the rumor a couple weeks ago.

I was sure the name was wrong. How could it be?

Today I talked with Jean and she confirmed that she has cancer in her lungs and kidneys and another place or two. I sat by her and we visited and I was close to tears.

Jean has been my assistant head deacon for several years. (It sounds crazy, but we had both men and women “deacons”). She would see what needed to be done and do it. If she had a problem it was in doing too much.

Jean is the same age as my daughters, and they went to high school together. Her father was the business manager at the school. Her mother had MS. Jean is an only child. Dad, now retired is a lonely somewhat bitter old man, mom is gone, and now Jean has cancer.

There is nothing more to say right now, but I am so sorry.

Best to you my friend. I hope the chemicals and the therapy all help.

who?

Self portrait into the mirror that is above my in the house work space, the light is from my work light.
I was not feeling quite that grim.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at his crankiest could not top that look!

Sandy

Some years ago I was playing a table game with Miriam and Emily.

I leaned back in my chair, so it balanced on the two back legs (I know, mom said to do that) and I lost my balance and fell backwards.

The proper thing to do is to tuck your head in, fold your arms and fall. The worse thing would be a bump on the head. But I did not think. I stuck out my right arm to catch myself and tore my rotator cuff, a part of my anatomy that until that moment I did know I even owned.

It is one of those injuries that hurts like crazy for a while, but once it is healed a bit, only hurts when I do certain movements, like reach out to the side table and pick up a cup of tea.

So, I was at church one day soon after I fell and about the time it was starting to heal a bit and I mentioned it to Sandy, who is a physical therapist . “Ahh, you will need to have surgery on it, Dave.” I argued that I would not. She grinned and said in a voice of motherly authority: “Yea, you will have surgery.”

I am sure she forgot all about that comment, it has been several years, but it has been in my head every time I re-injure that shoulder, which is quite often.

I don’t like the idea of surgery. I had foot surgery a few years ago, and it was not awful, but I would skip that part if I can. I have two friends who have had knee re placement surgery in the last year. Once they have healed and done a ton of physical therapy, they are quite happy with the results. I should not be afraid of a knife, but I still would skip it if possible.

But when I reach for that cup of tea, I am reminded of Sandy’s words.

happy birthday

Today is the birthday of a special lady.

Brianna May is 14 today.

We have three granddaughters less than a year apart, Bri is the youngest.

We are so glad to have her as our granddaughter. She is growing up to be a wonderful lady, and I for one am very proud of her.


Happy birthday Bri.

the book

One of my brilliant daughters (I have four who could qualify) made up a very nice cook book a while back.

I don’t remember it being verbally described as such, but I think it was an effort to keep dad, now the cook at home, from burning the house down, getting obese from a diet of ice cream and cookies, or getting skinny from not eating decent food.

Any way this daughter made this very fine cookbook. It was full of things I would like and that were reasonably within my skill level. We are vegetarians, daughter and I, so she filled in suitable recipes laced heavy with food items she knew I liked.

But, it got put away. I looked high and I looked low and it (like the part for the grain mill) had disappeared. That was about a year ago. I was sure it would show up some day, and today was some day!

Miriam was looking through a stack of old magazines, and suddenly she said: “Here is a cook book one of our daughters put together.”

Ooh.

I thanked her for finding it and then I put it in among my books.

Now if I can just get that same daughter, who makes to die for “steaks” from the gluten found in wheat flour, to share her recipe! My mom used to make them, and Griffy my next to youngest grandson asked if he could have gluten steaks to go with his turkey for Thanksgiving.


Atta boy Griff!

winter

Did I tell you how much I hate winter?

Ok, it is no secret for sure, but not working has the advantage of not having to fight the weather each day. Construction in the winter does not really slow down much, but gets a lot more complex.

And that opening line is one I have used a lot.

So why don’t I move to Arizona or Spain?

Truth is that like a good american, I like to complain. I complain if it is cold, but cold is a new challenge. I complain if it is warm, but warm is very nice. On the other hand, my complaints are more like comments than real dislike ranging to hate.

I do think that spring is sweeter after a cold winter. Winter gives us a reason to prepare.

The plan is to spend today in my studio. Not doing work so much as organizing it, clearing out unused and unusable items, putting books in another area, and generally getting ready for winter’s cold days.

I figured I could run the heater in the studio for 3 hours a day for about $6 a month. That is acceptable for sure.

In the evening, I have been doing my art/craft work in the house on the kitchen table. It has worked out pretty well. I have to come in and fix dinner about 4 or 4:30 and it is dark by the time we finish, so going back to the studio seems a bit like abandoning my beloved.

But I have so enjoyed the hours I have spent in my various studios. I remember in graduate school, where I had an old dorm room for a private studio. I fondly remember going in that room, locking the door, turning on the music and being absorbed by the process of the work I was doing.

Being an artist can be about the art work produced, or it can be about the process. I think I enjoy them both, but maybe the process the most.

In fact, while in graduate school my professor asked me why i was a sculptor, why not a painter, and I told him I liked working with the materials and tools. He grinned and did not ask again.

Today is Alzheimer's support group day. Once a month I meet with a group of caregivers. It is good to go.

i remember

December 7 reminds me of world war two.

I was born the year that Guernica was bombed in Spain and Picasso produce his huge painting in response to that event.

http://arts.anu.edu.au/polsci/courses/pols1005/2007/Images/Picasso.Guernica2.jpg

Look at the anguish in the people and the animals at that attack.

I remember very little except the fear that some one would be looking in my window from one of those countries. Now we do not even use the words we used to describe them then.

I had two uncles who served in the military. The others were the wrong age. One was a machinist mate on a submarine, the other a medic in the army. I was not told much about either one’s service, though a few pictures survive of the medic uncle.

He was in the Philippines during the heaviest fighting, as I remember the story. As a medic he choose to be unarmed and carried out his life saving work. The pictures show him with some of his buddies near a wrecked airplane. They were smiling, but I am sure it terrible. He never talked about any of it.

Both my father and my step father were born the same year and were “too old” to be drafted. However by 1945, near the end of the war, every one who was remotely able was called up and my step father was drafted.

He went to boot camp and then to cooks and bakers school (Interestingly his family had been bakers and had run a family bakery), but the armistice was signed about the time he finished his training and he was discharged early.

I remember rationing. We did not have a car, and neither did my grandparents who lived in the same town. We walked or hitched rides. I remember mom putting Joyce and I to bed and she sat, in the dark, listening to the radio.

The whole country was superbly paranoid (for good reason, by the way), about attacks from all sides, and there were frequent and total black outs. That is my early memory of the war.

I remember the day it was over and the joy we all felt. Even for a 7 year old, it had been a very traumatic time.

All of this comes into my mind early in December, each year.

december 7

December 7, but a couple days late

My sister Joyce was born in early May.

I turned 4 in late May.

Our father was killed in late August.

Pearl Harbor was December 7.

All in 1941, The events are permanently tied into my head. So when 1941 is mentioned, I think of all 4 events at the same time.

Father (I always called my step-father Dad -- usually) was the important man in my life that I knew so little, and my sister did not know at all. He was 28, in the prime of his early life, and whish he was gone.

Once I was talking to my aunt (my father’s sister, who at 93 is still kicking, though not as hard as she used to). She laughed and said: “David, you did not even know your father and you are just like him..”

I’ll leave it that way.