There is a stack of used salsa containers that continues to grow on our counter in the kitchen. As they have been thoroughly washed and air dried, they are not growing anything from any former food residue that might have been left behind after the contents were consumed. In fact, the only extra on them besides the color imprint telling of their former contents, nutritional value and place of origin, are sometimes bits of the second, redundant seal and cap that refused to let go of the rim of the vessel part of the container when it was first opened. That thin sheet of fossil fuel based plastic has long since passed into the waste chain.
Last February, we mourned the loss of Ruffles (J1), the eldest Southern Resident male orca. This February we mourn for departed youngsters. Precious little female Sooke (L112), 2009 – 2012, stranded at Long Beach, WA on February 11 and the new calf in J Pod, J48, is missing and probably dead.
But Tuesday’s just as bad. The only thing I’ve ever had against Sunday is that it’s followed by Monday, and nothing good has ever happened on Monday, throughout recorded history. I’ve confirmed this through personal research, decades of devout drinking. But eventually the research went into the ditch, like it often does; I was compelled to abandon it entirely.
Living in an unincorporated area, especially with 3 miles of water between us and the governing body, can be seen as both good and bad, depending on the government activity your talking about and who you are talking to. Generally speaking, if it has to do with regulation or oversight of your activities, distance makes for good relations. If it is about getting services or making complaints about things, getting overlooked is a bad thing. I’d like to put forth the premise that we do a lot better when we do for ourselves. Doing for ourselves, though, is not as easy as it seems, so we have been willing to put up with "one size fits all" rules and regulations from the county, even though more elegant solutions might be had if we applied some creative effort to it.
We needed one didn’t we? We needed that old man who was lost for days in the cold to find himself into an abandoned million dollar home and fix himself some food and go to sleep in a comfy bed after he’d changed into warm, dry clothes. After so many cancer deaths and tragic accidents have taken people who were way too young to die, we just needed one friggin’ miracle.
But Tuesday’s just as bad. The only thing I’ve ever had against Sunday is that it’s followed by Monday, and nothing good has ever happened on Monday, throughout recorded history. I’ve confirmed this through personal research, decades of devout drinking. But eventually the research went into the ditch, like it often does; I was compelled to abandon it entirely.
It occurred to me the other day that there are similarities between being a farmer and being an artist.
My father was a farmer, as his father was before him. He raised apples out in Green Valley, just west and north of the Pajaro Valley, near the Monterey Bay. My mother raised my brother and me, kept the house up, and did the book keeping for the farm, and occasionally played the piano.
Traditional winter menus of Rumania rely on root vegetables and such meats as pork and goat. Trust me, goat meat is very good. It can resemble venison or lamb, depending on what the goat has been eating. But today’s main dish recipe features beef, more readily available in our meat departments than goat and less expensive than lamb.
There is some comfort in residing somewhere between jaded cynicism and wonderment- it allows one lots of options. Take, for example, my lack of surprise the other day when I turned to The Current Cinema pages in the New Yorker and read the line: "…all the women have the same body- tall, with small, high breasts, long waists, long legs, and full, rounded rumps." It was a description of a scene from documentary filmmaker Robert Wiseman’s latest offering, Crazy Horse, about a sixty year old strip club in Paris.
I cut my fingernails last night. Every once in a while I rebel against the fact that as a pianist and a writer I have had to keep my nails short since I started playing the piano when I was three. Mostly I like it, but sometimes I just wish I could have those really clicky kind of nails that have beautiful manicures in vibrant colors that women can use as an extension of their power and confidence. The best I can do is, if I get some gift money, get a French manicure where they paint on fake fingernail edges . I really love that.
In your ideal life, you may picture yourself as a miller or a cobbler, selling your products for Vashon currency that you can exchange for all your needs. The fact is, though, we don’t have much of a market for those occupations just yet, and you won’t be able to pay your mortgage or other debts with Vashon currency. Since we produce very little out here, most of our income comes via those of you that commute to the mainland everyday. So how do we get from this "business as usual" world to a saner one we would like to live in?
Winter doldrums can numb your brain, make it perform as if chained. Buds opening into new, oxygen-producing leaves help to unchain it. It’s invigorating to get outdoors and breathe early-spring air, especially when the sun shines. So does giving your brain the fuel it needs. Choline is a prime nourisher of neurotransmitters.
Last week our big projection television lost its electronic mind and began showing pictures in strange colors, and also breaking the images into streaks and blotches, while making a noise like something inside was whirling around furiously losing pieces, and getting ready to explode. We turned it off and moved a back-up television from my office into the living room. We seldom leave the house and television is our main form of entertainment, and I didn’t really need to watch TV while working on the computer, did I?
This issue, I’d like to talk about an element of personal resilience that, happily, we can all put in place. You will probably recall a few times in the last two winters when the roads were covered by a sheet of ice. If you didn’t have a fire-breathing, snow-eating four wheeler, you may have been a bit wary about venturing out into what could end up being an all day harrowing experience or worse. Your vehicle could end up joining the lost souls in the roadside snowdrifts at the bottom of one of our hills. We would have stayed home if there were nothing we needed to get. It may have been batteries or candles if the power was out, but, most likely, it had to do with food and water.
First, an apology & correction: In a classic slip of the mind in my last essay, I said that my friend Becky grew up in the Madrona neighborhood of Seattle. This prompted a LARGE FONT email from her saying that she grew up in MAGNOLIA, not Madrona, and she was proud of her neighborhood.
Keep moving, then. Our bodies were made for motion, not for sitting in front of a computer or TV screen for hours at a time. What you eat matters a lot, too. Choose raw or lightly cooked vegetables, and fresh or frozen vegetables and fruits instead of canned. Choose fruits for your desserts. Consider red berries and blueberries. They’re anti-cancer food, as well as anti-inflammatory.
I rose from my chair and said to the group at the table, "I’m really sorry. I have to leave this conference right now or I’m going to wreck it." and embarrass myself horribly at the same time I thought to myself.
I had white knuckled my way through the opening night. At first I thought maybe it was just because it was a Seattle event. Close to twenty years on the Island has given me the softness that comes with not having to bang the drum very loudly to be heard. For us transplants it’s a process.
Chez VHP is recovering from a New Year’s Day medical emergency, so I am revisiting an earlier column that proved popular with my dear readers.
"Killer whales are the canoes of spirits, and if shamans are lucky, they get these spirit canoes." A Sitka villager uttered these profound words a century ago to the ethnographer James Swanton. To us (Odin and Orca Annie), killer whales are sacred. Life with orcas rejuvenates our bond with the Divine.
The world climate summit, recently held in Durban, South Africa, illustrated once again how difficult it is to get the biggest carbon emitters in the world to take serious measures to curb their output even in the face of threats to their very existence. The summit was saved, sort of, from abject failure by a last minute agreement to meet in 2015 to discuss binding limits by 2020. What made it happen was the agreement of China and India to sign on, which made it safe for the US to sign on.
Perhaps like you, I have been having various levels of internally roiling turmoil surge through my assorted thought channels and portals as to how I might contribute to the Occupy movement, as well as personal queries as to whether such an endeavor was even a valid use of my time, even though my time these days seems to be of mostly no value to anyone but me. Having received a blanket request to participate in a street action by the folks at our Backbone Campaign, with the option of using my video skills in the process, the thought came to me almost instantaneously- "Why Not?" So, on a crisp and sunny day after Solstice I packed what I deemed to be the maximum of the minimalist essentials
Three mighty warriors gathered to go hunting. These were their names: She Who Argues; Makes Many Plans; and Straight Arrow, so called by the other two because she tended to drive the car straight through curves instead of around them.
They wanted to begin early in the morning, so they caught a ferry to Southworth a few minutes after noon and headed for the fabled hunting grounds of East Bremerton,
Do you hope for smooth, clear, wrinkle-free skin all your life, or at least past middle age? Forget costly face creams. Save the money you might have spent on Botox. Although a lot of time in the sun will weather our skins, what we eat and drink matter, too. Some foods foster skin wrinkles. Some slow it down. The two lists below come via Dr. Jonathan V. Wright’s newsletter, Nutrition and Healing. He got them from a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Wow… one more holiday to go: Eastern Orthodox Christmas. For us multiple faith families it a long season of gratitude and joy… and partying. With close friends and fmaily who are Jewish and then the Western/Eastern Christmas seasons which only coordinate once in w awhile, it’s just about from Thanksgiving through the first week in January that is a festival of one kind and another. I welcome it every year.
Our family is like a full-sized symphony orchestra, made of only trumpets.
Around the supper table our four kids compete with one another for air space, attention and the seats closest to Mom. While they joust in the same spectrum
As a harbinger of hard times to come, writing a hopeful message of “good tidings” as is appropriate to the season is a real challenge for me. In fact, I already wrote a first draft and am back to square one because it was too preachy. So, giving the Grinch a vacation, I’m going to try to talk about what is hopeful for me and what I try to do to be the change that I think will help us survive in the future.
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