Eleven Nights, Ten Beds

We are on vacation!

For me, it's a busman's holiday because I'm set up with mobile telephone (a clamshell), briefcase, laptop, and USB wireless connection. But what the heck - enjoy what you have, eh?

We drove from Tucson to Bakersfield in one stretch, then up I-5 to Sacramento, then the Coast Range in northern California, Ashland and Portland in Oregon, then Bellevue and beautiful Whidbey Island in the Salish Sea. We were loaded with suitcases big and small, and dog food for our two furry kids; enough baggage to spill over into our Thule roof container

Santa Bella, I-5, home of
Anderson's Pea Soup and Motel.

Nine different beds in ten nights.

It becomes a habit. After only one night on the Island, I was restless and anxious to press on. I returned to Seattle and stayed with my downtown sister. Ten beds in eleven nights. I was running out of new places where I could sleep.

We had to spend two nights in this bed.

The only place where we slept a second night was with dear friends whose house was on the market. Sure enough, they had a showing the day we were there so we had to pack and clean up our DNA.

Actually, we were delighted about the showing and only regretted that the show-ees made no offer. Without doubt, that was our nicest bed of all!

Venues for our sleep included a La Quinta on Buck Owens Boulevard in Bakersfield. We'd stayed there before and enjoyed it, but the owners hadn't done any refurbishing over the years and it won our award for least desirable. Even Jasmine the wonder dog was anxious to leave the industrial cleaner infused room.

The most colorful was our good friends' houseboat on the Willamette River. Supremely peaceful and quiet, our hosts did warn us not to fret about the thumping noises we were certain to hear. No, not ghosts. Beavers. No, not Oregon State alumni. The kind that like to eat willow branches.

The fog of Lower Alaska.

The house floats on logs and the little critters had at least three caches of food under the house. They were particularly active in the wee hours of the morning. Sure enough, we heard loud thumping as the beavers did whatever they do under houseboats.

We are very grateful of the good weather we've enjoyed here in Lower Alaska. There has been no rain. There's been little sun, either. The morning fog is so thick it doesn't burn off. Last time I saw sunshine was a couple of days ago. We are reminded why we moved to the Sonoran Desert.

Happy Century

It's been a century, one hundred years today, on August 21 of 1913, since Jozsa Irén was born in the small Hungarian town with a long name, Kiskunfélegyháza.

A year later, the First World War broke out and an uncle Stephen was among the first to fall in action near Belgrade.

She left her home in Szentes to attend university in Szeged, taught school, married, and became a high school principal. She survived the Soviet siege of Budapest in the Second World War, then with three children she fled Hungary to join her husband, then emigrated to Australia where she raised five children.

At age 53, she moved to the United States, to Seattle, where she was prepared to send her son Géza to Canada to avoid having him drafted for Vietnam. She had seen enough war. She had sacrificed much for her five children, and when they became adults, she had left little for herself.

August 21 is a busy day. Irén's 28th birthday was also her wedding day. Born and wed on the same day of the year.

Irén's granddaughter, Emese, was also born on August 21. I think both Irén and young Emese were a little jealous of that birthday date.

[Oddly enough, August 21 is also the birthday of a mother-in-law and her wedding day, and it's also the birthday of a dear guru-brother.]

My mother was 93 when she passed away in 2007. She had a long life full of accomplishments, hard work, simple pleasures, hardships, and more than her share of disappointments. There are many who owe her a great deal, the kind of debt that can only be repaid with gratitude, love and kindness.

Happy birthday, Anyu.

Evergreen Forest, Sky Islands

The Sonoran Desert has lots of sky islands; about forty of them. They are isolated mountain ranges that protrude from the desert floor at one or two thousand feet to heights of over five or even nine thousand feet.

Tucson itself is nestled next to several. We live in the foothills of a large one, the Santa Catalina Mountains. The Tohono O'Odham called them Babad Do'ag, Frog Mountain. Father Kino christened them after St. Catherine.

There's a road that goes to the top, Mount Lemmon, which is over nine thousand feet elevation. As you ascend, the road passes through saguaro forest dotted with agaves and ocotillo, then open areas with grass and oak trees, then spectacular granite rock with hoodoo formations and ponderosa pines, until the highest elevations where there are flowing creeks and slopes with ferns and fungus, and dense stands of pine, aspen, and douglas fir.

Doug fir? Yep. And all the sights, smells and chills of an evergreen forest by the Salish Sea -- except hemlocks and cedars.

The sky islands are part of the diversity of the Sonoran Desert. Where in Seattle can you drive an hour and see giant cactus forests? Yet we can drive an hour and see large stands of Douglas fir. Granted, there are no glaciers here, and snow fields last only part of the year.

Hiking on the top of Mt. Lemmon, about an hour drive from home, is being in a different world. Deer graze in the meadows, and warning signs suggest the presence of bears. It's a soothing respite from the humid heat of the Sonoran monsoon season.

No wonder people think of mountains as the home of the gods. They are.

The sacred heights of the Santa Catalinas are blessed with about three telephone or some other communications towers and auxiliary buildings, each compound surrounded by barbed wire fencing that forces hikers to the rocky edges of precipitous slopes.

There's a university telescope observatory with bunk buildings, also protected by barbed wire.

We also have a chairlift that serves the ski area, little ski and tourist shops, and a restaurant across the parking lot.

Then there is the small community of Summerhaven on top of the mountains, regular population of about forty.

Not an altar in sight.

It would be a place to express some silent gratitude and awe before such beautiful, unexpected creation.

Sometimes fire is a medium of offering thanks.

The Aspen Fire burned for a month in summer of 2003 and scorched about 134 square miles. It destroyed 340 homes and business. The evidence is still there in the meadows, but Summerhaven is rebuilt.

I suppose the mountains are their own altars. The effect they have on people can be that profound. You see it as you exchange "Good morning" with fellow hikers, and perhaps engage in light conversation about the invigorating mountain air.

After a few morning hours in the forest, the return to the Tucson basin is a bit shocking. But the soul has been inspired.

From our backyard, we can see the Santa Catalinas, this time of year usually decorated with stunning displays of dark and fluffy white clouds, all framed in an enormously huge sky. Nice.

Oh Oh, Six Oh

Tucson Tom turned the big six-oh a few weeks ago. It didn't hurt very much.

My surprise gift was a "This Is Your Life" (remember that TV show?) appearance by Jeff Day. Shari disappeared one day mumbling something about doing errands, and when she returned (from the airport), there was Jeff -- fresh from his year in Nanjing, China.

To help celebrate, Shari organized a small party. The themes were good friends, good food (I think we are all foodies), and come as you are. This time of year people in Tucson live in their underwear, so shorts or a dhotie actually meant we were dressed up.

Shari danced for us. She made a new costume for the occasion, and put together music for a solo followed by another lively song for others to join in.

The dancing was a big hit and a few of us did join in for the second song. Of course, I had to, but then I like dancing.

I think we all had fun -- I know I did. Thanks, Shari and friends.

------

A couple of weeks later, reality crept in. I got a 60th birthday present from our health insurance company. A $520+ increase in our monthly insurance premiums.  Yes, monthly. And $520 is only the increase. The reason? I turned 60.

I didn't intend to get political, but I will. We pay over $27,000 a year in health insurance premiums. No wonder we can't afford travel. God bless America and the the right to make a business out of anything and everything. Nutters, fed by crazies who make a good living indoctrinating nutters, elect politicians with an agenda to preserve business interests, an agenda that's disguised as patriotic, God-fearing flag-waving.

We forbid the government from competing with insurance companies. People argue about the actual percentages, but studies regularly show that Medicare overhead is far less than that of private insurers. We also make it illegal to buy prescription drugs from Canada. Why? "It's unsafe," say the drug companies who sell their wares in Canada.

Google it. Amidst our economic downturn, banks,
brokers, insurers and Wall Street have been making a fortune.

It's the government's job to protect the people who suck a fortune out of the economy, especially the really wealthy on top who buy politicians and media like you and I buy groceries. We have government by the wealthy for the wealthy.

What next? Give tax cuts to the wealthy? Wage endless wars overseas and privatize war support services? Wage endless wars on drugs and immigrants and privatize the prisons? Force college students to borrow money from banks so when they graduate, they become an indentured class that turns over its income to banks that had borrowed their money from the government for nothing? Make it so student debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy?

Oh, we've already done all this.

Well, how about privatizing Social Security, or just plain eliminating Medicare? Let's protect the right of entrepreneurs to exploit. Let's outlaw unions. Let's streamline efficiency and eliminate costly workplace safety regulations. Hey, a building collapses in Dacca killing hundreds of workers. No biggie. The free market will take care of it. Let's bring back the glory days of free enterprise: debtor prisons, child labor and the six-and-a-half day work week.

I can hardly wait to see if there is any Medicare when I turn sixty-five. God bless America.

You Know You're Getting Old When . . .

. . . it's heaven having reading glasses scattered in all rooms of the house.

Like the Cyclops sharing their single eye, Shari and I share reading glasses. I had two and she had a couple. We often forget our age and have to share a pair in order to read restaurant menus. It's less obvious than one of us reading the menu out loud.  ("Huh? Can you repeat that again, louder?")

Any more, I need glasses to peel hard boiled eggs and to play solitaire on my mini-tablet. It has become safer for me to wear glasses wielding a French knife doing food prep. I can't tell a phillips from a straight slot screw, so I need glasses for most fix-it jobs. And I can't search for songs on my ittie-bittie MP3 music device without glasses.

Fortunately, I can still bathe, brush my teeth, and drive motor cars (but not read maps) without wearing glasses.

The worst part is reading tiny 10 or even 8 point fonts in legal documents. That's when I pull the document to my sunny office window and use my trusty Oxford Dictionary magnifying glass to distinguish a 6 from an 8.

Heck. I can't even read my own tiny handwriting from years ago.

For a while I was thinking of croakies -- the elasticky thingie that clasps onto eyeglasses so you can wear them around your neck -- like jewelry or a spinster librarian. But that didn't work out.

I like to wear T-Shirts with a pocket. Some people use the pocket to store a pack of cigarettes (instead of rolling the pack in the shirt sleeve). If you are in India, that shirt pocket is used for an assortment of pens, scraps of paper, notebooks, and money. Like high school geeks, engineers and pocket-protectors, prestige is measured by the number of items bulging from the pocket. I like the pocket for my reading glasses.

Admittedly, they fall out when leaning over, and I've had to fish my glasses from the bottom of the swimming pool, but it's better than shoving glasses in a back pocket and having that sickening, crunch feeling and noise when you sit on them.

What did work out was Shari buying some reading glasses in bulk. We just leave them strategically scattered about the house in places where we might need them.

So heaven is being able to flop down in an armchair, or pick up a kitchen knife, or reach for the iSong iPlayer knowing that reading glasses are somewhere nearby.

Swimming with Critters

Swimming, sort of

Scorpions and flies do not swim very well. Either that, or they can't climb out of a swimming pool very well. Or maybe the ones around the desert never learned how to swim. In any case, this scorpion drowned and it's the time of year when flies get stuck in the pool.

We've been keeping the pool covered, especially overnight when the temperatures drop. Sometimes there's a little surprise when we uncover.

Usually it's a horde of flies. The silly critters like to drink; odd, eh? Trouble is, once they dip, they're stuck. I wonder if they ever figure out about surface tension.

Oh well. No need to mourn too many of them. Once they are skimmed out with my trusty swimming pool skimmer-net, they revive in a few tens of minutes. Happy, but none the smarter.

Drying out, sort of

Couple of mornings ago, we had a nice surprise. Well, it was a lot less nice for the scorpion on the bottom of the pool. Looks like it gave up the ghost while in a ready-to-sting posture. Dead. Defunct.

So far I've seen two kinds of scorpions around here. This is the big, kinda orange colored. The other kind is small and dark. They say it's the sting of the small ones that are more nasty. I don't have the experiences to compare, but the sting I got from one of the small guys was only a nuisance.

This guy was about three inches long. I can't be sure because it was stuck in the ready-to-sting position. It may have been defunct, but I didn't want to unwind its tail.

Good thing we shocked the pool a couple three weeks ago. ("Shock" in the world of swimming pool maintenance means overdosing on chlorine.) Our water is nice and clear. I can spot a small pebble on the deep bottom. So it's not like there is any risk of swimming with critters.

When monsoon season comes, we'll be fishing frogs out of the pool. Meanwhile, Shari has taken to swimming in the cool mornings when the water is only 92 degrees.

.

Sewing Projects

The shade cover over the garden is nicely tailored, thanks to Shari's hard work. And the plastic sheet that came with the gazebo has been replaced with sun-shade cloth, again thanks to Shari's skill with her sewing machine.

Meanwhile, through the use of a solar blanket, cut to shape by seamstress Shari so that it fits within the pool perfectly, the water in the cement pond is about 90 degrees. Nice.

Twenty laps; that's twenty times back and forth, forty times the forty-five foot length of the pool.

It's not the English Channel, but it would drown me. That's what Shari will swim, given some warm water, a sunny afternoon, and only a little wind.

I just dip, maybe do a couple of laps, float with the styrofoam noodles, maybe do a couple of laps, then get out and water some plants.