Developments

 Just because I abandoned this site for awhile doesn't mean that nothing has been happening in our lives.  Miss Jackie was born late Friday under a double rainbow.  She and her mother are doing well.  Many people have asked how they can help and while greatly appreciated, I just can't think of anything at the moment. 

 The day after Jackie's birth, her eldest brother and I ran the 5K in the biggest local foot race.  Doug was significantly faster than me but I measure success in completion.  Doug and I also built a pergola / arbor for grapes along the side of our garage.  It will also enclose a chicken coop and provide support for a hammock.






It was also Doug's 8th grade graduation.  While I usually don't think much about the hoopla society seems to want to attach to every mundane event of life, I am led to reflect that I now have a child in high school.  His Intermediate academic career was productive and he received a departmental award for orchestra in recognition I expect for his dancing skills with the upright bass.  He developed an excellent rapport with the administration and in addition to the expected accolades, he was presented with a group photo of himself and the staff in full star wars cos-play.  He said this was his favorite award of the day.

Zucchini

I should have taken pictures.

I try to accommodate requests in our home garden and this year one such request was to forgo the beets (I'm the only one who eats them) and go for some zucchini.  I thought to myself that we wouldn't need any more than two plants since we really only contemplated using them for zucchini bread.  I have now learned that they should be more properly referred to as the garden thug.  They overshadow everything in a 2 foot radius.  Cutting them back only seems to make them more vigorous and the fruit (botanically its a fruit) is pretty insane.  We went to the mountains of North Carolina to escape the heat for a few days and came back to find a monster almost a meter long and 6-7 inches in diameter.  My daughter and her friend dubbed it Zucchini-Zilla, dressed it in dolls clothes and pushed it around in a stroller.  I had sent some Zucchini to my in-laws with my brother-in-law but this did not go as planned.  He had been visiting and was driving home and I put a few Zs in a bag for him to take to his mother who I knew to enjoy them.  A few weeks later I was talking with my in-laws and I asked how they enjoyed the Zs to which they responded that they had never seen them but that coincidentally my brother-in-law had been recently complaining about a funny smell in the car.  A short investigation turned up the liquified remains of the Zs.  We have had to expand the repertoire of Z recipes beyond bread.  We have now tried Z blueberry muffins, Z breaded fries, Z and carrot bars with cream cheese frosting, and Z in pasta salad.  Looking forward to trying Z pickles and Z chips but would welcome any other ideas.  IF I were to do Zs again next year I'm thinking it will be a stand alone outside my raised beds and only a single plant.

I am the Tortoise

I was close to last in all categories and I was so sweaty my shoes were soaked but I'm glad I didn't give up on it.  Now the goals are to improve my time.

my Carmel Marathon 2012 - Half-marathon results

Why I listen to NPR

I remember thinking that listening to people talk on the radio had to be the most boring thing imaginable.  There were no catchy tunes to invade my head or even pictures to amuse.  As I get older and discover that my music is starting to be classified as 'classic' I also find that my choice in diversions has changed.  Instead of looking to escape into a fantastic story of fiction or flight of fancy in music I enjoy feeling like I have gained knowledge or at least insight.  There is a sense of permanence in information that is non-existent in most fiction.

In years past,  sources of information while few in number where at least easily recognizable.  The daily newspaper, encyclopedia and almanacs where a reference and public broadcasts on tv and radio engaged with the new media of the day.  The encyclopedias and almanacs are no longer printed and the Internet has made access to news nearly real time.  The broadcast media has exploded and hundreds of channels are ready to be watched or recorded for our pleasure.

This multi-faced approach has exposed a lesser known fact of news and information reporting.  Information is interpreted.  We learn from a game of telephone that as information is passed from person to person, that information is changed.  One's viewpoints and beliefs are injected ever so slightly into the story.  We label sources are being 'liberal' or 'conservative' but even this is a biased viewpoint to suggest that every thought can be reduced to a simple one dimensional continuum.  I could describe myself as generally conservative but with some decidedly libertarian beliefs and the occasional hippie bent as I advocate locally sourced food. 

I have heard it said that you can wake up in the morning and someone in the media already agrees with you.  To extend this, there are many in the media that disagree with you in varying levels.  On the way outside end of a spectrum or circle or sphere (choose your own metaphor) are the advocates like Ann the vulture and Rachel the mad cow who are not so much trying to report as trying to reduce recent happenings to support a general thesis that they are propounding.  I usually give them a complete miss as I think at least half of what they discuss falls into the realm of fiction and not information anyway.  Just slightly in of that are the national level media including AP news sources, NPR and even aggregaters like Yahoo news.  They still show a bias in word choice and which news trends to follow but mostly they stick to supportable information.  I'll include that the best source of information is direct observations but in the absence of that possibility, one has to do the best they can with the resources at hand.

I could choose to seek sources that reflected my own thoughts and feelings.  This would certainly make for a comforting existence where the sources of information I look to are mostly in agreement with me but I think this is not good for me.  I listen to NPR (and other main stream media) as a way to challenge my own thoughts.  It stands as a reminder that every story told reveals the desires of the storyteller.  I gain a comfort in knowing that I am not only listening, I am thinking.  If I find myself disagreeing with a news items coverage, I have to take a moment and work out why I disagree.  I sometimes find that I am not in disagreement which thought would perhaps have never occurred had I not risked changing my mind.  I am not an argumentative person by nature but I don't want to become complacent or lazy in my thoughts and beliefs.  Just like going for a run or to the Gym exercises the the body, listening daily to someone you may disagree with is exercise for the mind.

Random Acts

Cheryl and I went running yesterday on a very nice trail the city has built along the river.  To be more precise, Cheryl was running and I was following along sweating and panting heavily enough to be mistaken for a stalking pervert.  We have run this trail a few times in the past and it is rather pleasant with its views and relatively (not quite Disney level) well kept appearance.  This time, as an added feature, someone(s) had written affirmations in sidewalk chalk for at least a mile of the path. 

I don't believe I am the only person who feels disgusted by what I know I look like running and perhaps there are even people who feel disgusted by what they look like while running.  Having a random anonymous stranger tell me that I am loved and I can conquer this mountain had more of an affect on me than I would have anticipated.  I know that I was not the direct target of those sayings and the writer probably had no idea anyone else would derive benefit from them but I still appreciated them very much so, to the random anonymous person, Thanks. 

This reminds me of another topic I have been thinking about.  Sometimes as I walk from where I parked the car to a store entrance (any random store really), I might see some drifting piece of plastic or paper wafting along.  As I see it go by many times I have a brief mini debate on whether to chase after it to throw it into a garbage can at least.  I don't have any hard and fast rules about speed of wind or distance to rubbish but I would like to say that at least half the time I'll grab it.  As I drive along later I might see this same sort of flotsam accumulating in fence lines and I will either feel good about being part of the solution or bad about being part of the problem.  Was it my fault the plastic bag is floating around loss, not really, but it is my fault if I ignore it and my chance to do something about it.

Silver Bullet

I love the cubscout pinewood derby.  When my first born son was put into my arms one of the first things I looked forward to was the derby.  For the last many years, I have taken on running the derby as my own special project and we held our pack's derby this past weekend at church and in coordination with a chili cookoff and had a blast.  A lot of people came out and in addition to the cubs, there was an 'open' class for anyone who wanted to bring a car for separate racing.  The rules for open where more relaxed (i.e. no combustibles) and I also made an effort to keep the event exciting by reducing the time between races.  This seemed to work and the crowd excitement seemed somewhat constant.
I've also helped the boys (and anyone else interested) in making their cars and I really like that one of the lessons of the derby is that there are no shortcuts to making a fast car.  Most folks focus on car shape and design which is one part of the equation but miss out on proper weight and reduction of friction.  These three pieces of the puzzle work together to make a faster car.  The designs this year where great and I wish I had time to take more pictures but I was managing brackets and shuffling cars.
I usually make a car myself each year and this year went with a classic race car design.  It is a model of a 1939 Auto Union Type D And I was really pleased with the results.  I've included pictures of my car and the original below for comparison.

Original

Original

Front View Model

Top View Model

The car also performed well and won the open division but not without some close competition.  I realize of course that I now have a large target on my back for next year but that just makes it more fun.

I'm Dead Chuffed

Since my birthday, I've been working on knitting a Doctor Who scarf (See above).  Tonight I finished it.  It's more than a relief, it's a source of joy and happiness.  I have happy memories of watching Tom Baker's adventures and then Peter Davison.  This project was started on my birthday as a sort of gift to myself.  I got real wool and I'll smile every time I wear it.

Blood

It irritates me that I feel like I have to justify my grief at the loss of my Step-father.  The Grimm brothers and Disney must answer for perpetuating the stereotype that by putting the word 'step' in front of what would otherwise be a close familial relation and it suddenly is turned into a nemesis or at best a passing acquaintance.  I call Owen my Step-father because it was the 'correct' term.  I didn't call him dad because even his own son never called him that but all the grand-kids called him poppy regardless.  My own father is alive and while my parents are estranged I enjoy a good relationship with him as well so what seems confusing to many people makes sense to me that Owen was a surrogate father to me at critical points in my life and I am all the luckier for it.

He was my Bishop
He was my Seminary Teacher
He was my original Home Teaching companion
He ordained me as an Elder and was my guide in the Temple
He taught me to shave and tie a tie
He presided at my Eagle Scout Court of Honor
He was my geocaching buddy (and friendly competitor)
He was my woodworking mentor from pinewood derby to furniture
He was my mother's husband and I never doubted his love for her
He and my father-in-law (another awkward title) witnessed my sealing
They also witnessed the baptism of my three oldest children
He always had a funny story to tell
He introduced me to Tolkien
He is a template for what a father should be

While I was like many teenagers and chafed against house rules, I learned to appreciate him half a world away through letters and memories unclouded by proximity.  There are baptisms and eagle scout courts and weddings which he will not be able to attend in the flesh and they will be the poorer for it.  I have been blessed and I miss him terribly.

In Memorium

Owen Frederick Baynard

March 13, 1952 - February 17, 2012

You can't go home

Heraclitis is attributed to have said that you can not step in the same river twice.  Supposedly this is a comment on the changing nature of the river and even yourself in that time necessitates change.  Going home for the holidays makes me question that logic sometimes.  One of the aspects of growing up in the deep rural south is that you have a very clear idea of what consistency is.  What some call tradition others see as stagnation.  I call it an unsettling feeling of nostalgia.  Can you call it deja vue if you really did do it before?  Strains of Jeff Foxworthy monologues play to my ears as I visit local establishments.  So I collect here some tidbits of info for the outsider that they should know.

Country folks are not dumb.  They may not know what's playing on Broadway or what Facebook is but they are extremely clever and visitors dismiss their intelligence at extreme peril.

You are expected to wave to or at least acknowledge everyone.  Growing up in the sticks you are taught to hold your head up and look others in the eye.  If a man can't do this he is obviously up to no good.  The wave to a stranger is a simple way of saying, 'I see you and I know you see me and I have nothing to hide.'

During introductions it is best to identify local relations.  Who you are is intertwined with who your 'people' are.  When I go to church with my mom, we always sit on one side because another clan sits on the other.  If given the option though, you will want to emphasis the more upstanding members of the family over the black sheep.  In a small town everybody knows that the mayor's brother is a drunk but which one you claim relation to first says something about what you value in a relative.

Expect that everyone will have heard of your visit within a day.  As a visitor, you are exotic and an interesting topic of conversation.  Eventually something else will replace you on the front page but never be surprised that seeming strangers know quite a bit about who you are.

Respect personal property.  Just about anybody you talk to will gladly let you borrow this or that or pass through a pasture but outright trespassing and theft (and also slander of another man's cow) will more often than not get you shot at and these are a people who generally hit what they aim for.

When I visit home I often find myself wondering if I am right to not live in the town that raised me.  It's a kind of sadness that I cannot repay the intangible education of my experiences to a community that needs good smart people.  Eventually I come to the same conclusion that I could not live there.  My career wouldn't exist and I would not have gone and seen the many things I have but that dread sense of responsibility remains.

Gratitude

In the run up to Thanksgiving I, like many others, am inclined to reflect on the things I am grateful for.  I'm not so full of sunbeams that I can do a grateful thing each day set but I can at least give voice to what I find meaningful.  I am grateful that I have the luxury of being able to write what I think in an online forum.  It doesn't cost me anything, I have the time to do it and I don't have to worry about the police at my door if I say something controversial.  This ability has become so mainstream to the American way of thinking that it is hard to imagine places that this freedom doesn't exist.  We have heard of these places but really I think it is hard to truly picture it.  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to live in a developing country for a period of time and be able to get a brief taste of what true poverty is.  A place where keys are worn as a status symbol because they indicate that you have something worth enough to go to the trouble of locking it away.  A place where dissident groups are known more for their murderous raids than pithy signs and slogans.  The luxury of having a pantry is hard to comprehend for much of the world.  By luck of birth I get to live in a great place.
I am also lucky to have a great family.  Both the what  I was born into and what has been born to me.  While my childhood was not devoid of drama, it was of a far less sinister quality than many friends.  I am not sorry to have any of my relatives.  Further, where so many people I know  have to struggle with special needs children or infertility, I have been blessed here as well with bright capable children.  I know that they love each other to which sadly seems to be becoming more the exception than the rule in or not so civil society.
I am also grateful to have been employed in one of the more stable professions in this volatile time.  Even our company had to deal with certain new austerities but through it all, I was confident in a job.  How uncommon is that today? 
I look forward to Thanksgiving for many reasons but for the reasons listed here I get to look forward to each and every day.

Confessions of an Anglophile

I must admit to a weird little predilection of mine. There is something absolutely fascinating to me about the Brits. Their culture is so alien to our own yet the shared language and many common values give a sense of Deja Vu. (on a side note, I find it very entertaining that I use a French term to describe my feelings about the English) I love the feel of received pronunciation on my ears but even a strong cockney accent or thick brogue makes me smile.

It probably started in my formative years early morning Saturdays. I usually would wake up too late to catch the normal cartoon fare. I would typically watch what would become my favorite three shows; This Old House, Victory Garden and Doctor Who. The first two fueled other interests of mine but watching the Doctor was great entertainment. I came to identify with the Intrepid Doctor's sidekicks as they saved the day on whatever planet, battled various forms of evil in the galaxy and then whisked off to some other place and time. When I would visit my Dad, who had cable TV (oh what a wondrous joy that was), I would also enjoy the Cosgrove Hall masterpiece, Danger Mouse. I can't tell you how happy I am that I am able to share Danger Mouse and Doctor Who with my own kids in DVD form as well as the beautifully done ongoing Doctor Who series. Other early Anglo TV influences include the BBC comedies Fawlty Towers, Monty Python Flying Circus, Good Neighbors and To the Manor Born whenever they appeared on local broadcast PBS. It was more than just TV. I also remember following the royal wedding of Charles and Diana sitting in a hotel room with my family and learning about Lord Baden Powell, founder of scouting, at our scout camp which was named after him.

I've come to love other current BBC shows like, As Time Goes By, starring Dame Judi Dench and Geoffery Palmer. My love of cars led me to the great show, Top Gear and a friend turned me on to watching Quite Interesting with Stephen Fry. The Sherlock series was peerless and makes me excited to see Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in the new Hobbit movie.  Other more recent loves include BBC4 radio podcasts like In Our Time, Thinking Allowed, Material World and Gardeners Question Time which I use to entertain me on long drives or plane rides.

So as you may have noticed, I have gone to the trouble of dropping a bunch of links.  This is all part of my nefarious plot to create new Anglophiles.  Click on the links at your peril.

Many to One (/Rant on mobs)

 A lot of oxygen has been expended recently related to the self-proclaimed Occupy Movement.   I am particularly fascinated to hear that many people identify with this modern Woodstock and may believe it to be the great hope for civilization.  I don’t.  Even the most sympathetic news coverage depicts a chaotic band of hollow rebels whose unifying complaint is a nebulous idea that they have been unfairly deprived of something.  Claims of being Anti-greed are laughable since they are the embodiment of covetousness, who lives in the same apartments as greed.  It seems more of a, “I want you to not be greedy and give your stuff to me,” argument.  I am inclined to think that this is a result of societal changes in the way that we no longer reward the truly deserving.  Instead, we are led to believe that we should value everyone the same; no losers; everyone is a winner.  This generation has grown up being told constantly that they are to be valued the same as everyone else and are shocked to discover that the workplace reality is that buskers, baristas and barnacle scrappers can not lease a new Mercedes every 60 days just like the late head of a particularly popular technology company.  Further, the Lord of the Flies culture in these encampments is not the enlightened ideal I would want to see raised to the national or international norm.

I despair that anyone would think that the road to a better future is beaten down by the feet of a mob.  I believe that as a general rule the combined intellect of a group is inverse to the number in that group.  Said another way, I believe in individuals and fear collectives.  This I know to be an unpopular idea.  We like to imagine that humanity must work together to achieve greatness.  While it is true that no man can move a mountain alone, it does take an exceptional person to conceive, organize and achieve such a goal.  The result of broader representation in governing bodies has been increased deadlock and stagnation.  Our leaders no longer lead because they aren’t sure who they are leading from day to day.  They have to poll their constituents to get the pulse of the community and maximize their chances for re-election. 

I don’t know if this system can be repaired or not but one idea may be to lengthen terms but limit all elected officials to one consecutive term.  These have to be done together since the length of the interim term has an affect on the nullifying power of the single consecutive term.  There would still be powerful people who would shift positions around government but I would rather that than the zombification of the legislature.

I suppose I feel about the current movement (which makes me think of other less glamorous movements) much like the never ending calls in social media for this or that cause.  I do not believe that clicking ‘like’ on a webpage or copying a ‘status’ or standing in a fetid park barking received diatribe at passersby will make any impact on the world except to add to the clutter.

Therapeutic

I had meant to update the blog much earlier this month.  It was going to be something along the lines of a retrospective at or around my birthday.  Well that came and went and I find myself here wondering what could possibly be interesting enough to string a few sentences together. 
As for my birthday, it was nice.  That evening I went with Doug on a scout camp-out that has become a sort of tradition in which we launch pumpkins with various mechanical devices.  None of those participating made many changes to their entries other than simple bulking up in some key areas and such.  My floating arm trebuchet had the best launches and we got some smaller pumpkins lofted about 60 - 70 yards.  The next night we had a combined party with some friends, one family of which has a one year old baby with the same birthday as me.  My much appreciated birthday gift was a large cutting board which is great for mu growing interest in developing good cooking skills. 
Something else I had been pondering writing about was a phase of my life that in retrospect has had more of an affect on me than I had given credit for.  After my parents second divorce, my mother was convinced by school personnel that I would benefit from therapeutic counseling sessions.  Apparently this was based on some writing assignments I had completed which seemed overly depressed or focused on the current status of my home environment.  I honestly do not recall these at all but it did seem to concern mom enough to go ahead with the counseling.  This may not seem all that out of character so I have to explain that being from a rural background in the 80s, this seemed to me at least to be a really big deal.  In looking back on it I think I may have been more emotionally traumatized by the thought of being considered 'abnormal' or 'crazy' than by the divorce itself.  I immediately did not trust the counselor and endeavored to prove that I didn't need to be there.  I don't even remember her name but I do recall carefully considering my every word in those sessions.  I don't know if I was especially difficult compared to others but I wish I could apologize to the counselor for who I was then.  That said, I do recall the one thing that stuck with me from those otherwise fruitless meetings.  She would invariably start our conversations each time with the question, "How do you feel today?"  My response would always be, "Normal," to which she would follow-up up with, "What is normal?"  This happened every time.  At first I had to pick and choose how to respond to that follow-up but very soon came to expect the question of what is normal and would be prepared for it.  She was probably never aware of the impact that repetitive set of questions would have on me.  Even after I no longer went to see her, I would find myself wondering what was normal and found that this would lead me to question why something was normal and to realize that normal could be defined very differently for different people and finally, that I could define normal for myself. 

Garden Update

We pulled out first harvest this week and as you can see the carrots are pretty impressive.

The Garden of Eating

This is my second year for a vegetable garden and I am overall pleased with the progress so far from our first attempt last year. Last year we planted what we called a ‘Salsa Garden’ which consisted of Roma tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers and Cilantro. These were planted in a semi-traditional row pattern along a fence line that got a lot of sun. We had a lot of tomatoes and hot peppers come out but the sweet peppers, cilantro and some onions we attempted in some patio containers didn’t amount to much.

This year I built four shallow raised beds of the square foot garden style. They are cheap treated plywood 4’ X 4’ with 6 inches of depth. I filled these with the free compost I got from the City organic waste department and set down a grid pattern with twine to make 1’ squares. Having had the winter to consider it at length, I had a more complex plan for veggies and planting schedule that we kept to fairly closely. I also put in potatoes in some spare bins and a sweet potato in the ground that had sprouted on its own, 10 blueberry seedlings along the back fence line and also two apple and a peach tree. Further discussions with my wife had me plant some sugar snap peas later than I typically would have and also allowing some garden volunteers of tomatoes and cilantro to grow where they were as the ground was not planned for other things.

In the actual beds I again had the tomatoes, peppers and onions but added beets, carrots, chard, garlic, basil, eggplant and acorn squash. I also allocated a square in each bed to marigolds because I had heard they served as a natural insect repellant. Significant April and May showers followed by some real heat in June have turned out some really crowded beds. The squash in the beds were threatening to take over so I had to put in some trellising. I also used trellising for the tomatoes which were overshadowing the peppers. I also pruned about half of the tomatoes to see if that had a good or bad affect. The chard and carrots are much taller than I anticipated so I am wondering if having it all so close together will cause more problems than it solves.

I am pleased though that some early damage from rabbits did not seem to have a lasting impact. The worst of it was that they were attacking the apple trees which looked like someone had hacked them with scissors. The nibbling out of the garden corners was annoying but doesn’t seem to have had too much of an effect on the final outcome. I ended up putting netting over tomato cages to protect the apple trees (for some reason they aren’t interested in the peach). This seems to have worked but I am disappointed it took me so long to figure it out. I think next year I will build much taller boxes (around 2’ tall) for the veggies that will keep them further away from the rabbits and also not require so much kneeling down.

Attached below are some pictures of the garden. See if you can identify the plants.