Making Tamales

'Tis year-end winter. 'Tis the season for making tamales. Mix your masa harina, squash it with savory fillings, then roll and tie your corn husks!

(To fully appreciate, see the Julia Child favorites at YouTube.)

Pet Peeve: Leg Tourniquet Socks

Says the website: "Learn about
the symptoms, causes and treatment of
sock-line hyperpigmentation,
a health issue caused by
tight socks with elastic bands.

I understand there is something chic about being dressed up and crossing your legs to reveal ankle and a little leg under one's trousers, naked skin and hair perfectly covered by smooth gentleman's socks held up against gravity and nature by bands of elastic.

Mind you, most of the year, if I do wear socks, they are the kind that don't reach the ankle bone. These short anklets, something I never had occasion to wear in Lower Alaska, don't provoke my peeve. But then, they really are not a gentleman's sock. They are more a sports sock and are related to the full sized, thick, white cotton crew or gym socks. You can readily get crew socks without overly constrictive elastic.

Summer uniform.

My school in Sydney, St. Aloysius College (may Allah bless the Jesuit priests), had a dress code. We wore uniforms. Grade school students wore shorts. The winter uniform was grey wool shorts and blazer. Summer was khaki cotton. Heaven help the kid who lost track of the seasonal change and showed up dressed in the wrong fabric. Regardless of the season, we had to wear grey shin socks pulled up taught to just below the knee. They had to be smoothly taught. A wrinkled mess of grey sock crumpled around the ankles was likely to earn a couple of hits on the palms with a thick leather strap.

We kept our socks hoisted using rubber bands, like the kind that bind asparagus, only a little thinner and more circumference. Like cuff links and tie clips to a gentleman of the 1960's, the rubber bands were a critical element of school dress.

Socks could not sag. Each morning we pulled a sock on, followed by a rubber band which we artfully hid by folding over the sock top. Kids with higher social status dress had newer socks with elastic collars woven into the fabric. My socks were so worn the original elastic had long since lost its vim and vigor.

The price of such uniform neatness was a deep concave ring around the flesh of one's calves. At my age, I don't really care whether my dark blue or brown socks slump in wrinkles around my ankles. I do care about deep concave rings around the flesh of my legs.

I refuse to wear suspenders.

You would think that at least some manufacturers of gentleman's socks would produce a style that didn't function as a tourniquet, but I defy you to find one. It's just a matter of how ridiculously constrictive they are. Even some athletic socks have lots of sadistically tight elastic woven into their tops. I know. I ended up buying several pairs.

What I do in my frustrated anger is to pull apart the sock tops as hard as I can to stretch and hopefully break the elastic. The elastic is way tougher than my pull, an indication of just how constrictive these gentleman's tourniquets can be. I have taken scissors to socks, making strategic cross-snips designed to sever at least some of the thick elastic tendons. It helps a little. The best solution is chance and wear: chance that a particular sock uses inferior elastic, and wearing and washing it enough that the sock sags. In drawers full of dozens of pairs of dress socks, only two pair have achieved perfection.

My solution, hardly perfect but quite practical, is to fold the top of the sock down to the narrowest part of my ankles.

Why are all dress socks, I do not exaggerate, all dress socks made with elastic so tight you can count the threads by the impressions they leave in your flesh? I don't get it. Thank goodness I work in a home office and a desert environment with not much need or occasion to wear dress socks.

Pet Peeves

Senator William Proxmire announced Golden Fleece Awards to ridicule what he thought was taxpayer waste. Rowan & Martin gave out a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award each episode of Laugh-In. Andy Rooney earned a good living in his dotage complaining for five out of Sixty Minutes about, "You know what bothers me . . ." Today we have Bill Maher and New Rules.

Pet peeves originate from daily lives. Simple things repeated over and over give rise to irritation. Some regular irritations are inherent in living: haircuts, root canals, the common cold, and tsunamis. Others are unavoidable because they are caused by others: pick-up trucks with Confederate flags or NRA stickers, McDonald's corporate food, and Christmas retail.

W. C. Fields had his three peeves: wet toilet paper, young children, and I forget the third. The bandits in Sierra Madre had no use for "stinkin' badges." You must have your pet dislikes.

It is in a spirit of reconstructive frustration, albeit in a much more humble scope, that I offer my own examples of petty complaints.  After years and years of silently enduring silly irritations on a daily basis, Tucson Tom introduces his Pet Peeves.

Do not expect earth-shaking revelations, or even pointed social commentaries. This is the trivial stuff of modern life. This is stuff that is not so much inherent in nature as man-imposed for little social benefit.

I take it back. These are social commentaries on such fundamental matters as socks, underwear, garbage, blister-packaging, and software updates.

To Saunter

A few days ago I read something interesting on Facebook. As we all know, not everything on Facebook is uplifting. Most posts reflect current affairs which are downright depressing. I admit, I add to the depression by angrily posting about the Hair Product-in-Chief and the Republican single party tyranny. But there are also interesting posts, as was this quote from John Muir:

Hiking - I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word "saunter"? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "A la sainte terre," "To the Holy Land." And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."

Sauntering on Rampart Ridge, Cascades.

I found it interesting not just because I delight in etymology, the origin of words, and not just because I have two decades of history hiking in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. It was interesting because I went sauntering with Nazar the Wonder Dog through the wash this past Sunday and I found myself reflecting on a memory triggered by John Muir's quote. It was an aphorism I had made up: The slower you go, the more you see.

It's something I first noticed motorcycling back roads some forty-four years ago. I clung to the back of my brother Géza as he drove his Suzuki motorcycle seven thousand miles from Milwaukee to Florida to Arizona to Utah and back to Milwaukee. It was a new phenomenon, proceeding through space with nothing but a helmet visor between me and the environment. We avoided freeways and stopped at many a scenic place: Smoky Mountains, Big Bend and Organ Pipe Cactus parks, Grand Canyon, the canyon lands of southern Utah, and a drive through Yellowstone.

Sauntering among tame Wyoming "bears".

(I remember the rangers at Yellowstone handing out leaflets warning drivers not to roll down their car windows to see the bears. We got stuck on a traffic jam where drivers and passengers rolled down their windows to see a mother bear and her cubs by the side of the road. Several eagerly encouraged Géza and me to look also, oblivious to the fact they were in their steel cages while we sat in the open, inching past the bears hoping the mother bear was not as irritated as we were.)

Then I took up bicycling as an outdoor activity. One can see a lot more at the pace of a bicycle, and feel more, too — in legs, buttocks and lungs.

Then I took up hiking in the mountains. That was mostly hiking, as in John Muir's definition, with only a little sauntering. Most saunters were after we made camp.

Hummingbird perched on an agave spine.

Now I like to sit and watch the saguaros grow. It takes a bit of effort for me to just sit. I always feel like I should be doing something. But if I do just sit, I see lizards scurrying and doing their push-ups, hummingbirds competing for access to the feeder, hawks soaring, monarch butterflies flapping to caesalpinia flowers, quail and dove pecking at seeds on the ground, even the occasional bobcat or coyote looking for prey. This is all stuff I miss walking, and not just because my attention is distracted. Walking by itself prompts the little critters to retreat into holes or hide behind scrub.

When I walk Nazar, I have to stop because he constantly stops to smell something or another. In those gaps, I stare at trees, the patterns of sand in the wash, the colors and textures of rocks, and the shadows and clouds over the Catalinas. I have my favorite porcupine cactus, two of them. I always stop to see how they are doing. Except for keeping an eye on the dog (he doesn't need a leash except on a road with traffic), it's a bit of a saunter.

Contrast a saunter with flying in an airliner, or driving on a freeway. How much do you see at six hundred or even seventy miles an hour?

Hence my aphorism, the slower you go, the more you see. Or the more present you are. Or the more awareness you have. In meditation terms, when one is completely still, one sees all. In saunter terms, one has attained the sacred land.

The South Point

The avalanche slope on the way to the South Point.

It's about one hundred and sixty steps from the front door of our house to the south point of our little acre of the Sonoran Desert. From that point one can see further south: the properties beneath us, a narrow but impressive view of Tucson and, about fifty miles distant, the Santa Rita Mountains, then seventy-five miles distant, I can see, at least in my mind's eye, Mexico.

It took years to get to that south point. First we had to cross the driveway, which, for the first couple of years, we never did without wearing boots. Then gradually, I began clearing the local varieties and equivalents of mulga (it's an Australian term; look it up) and digging benches into the hillsides to make trails and sitting areas.

The last stop for my improvements was next to a mature palo verde tree on the south edge of the inner portion of our gully. That is about twenty-two steps south of the driveway. There I ended the water and low voltage electricity lines and planted a faucet, garden hose and landscape light.

The last sixty steps to the south point are mostly over two barren avalanches of loose dirt over rocks, scree and rubble. All I did there was plant a few surplus blue agave pups, plants that have grown rather large over the years and provide a little blue-green relief from the otherwise barren brown slopes.

On the other end of those sixty steps is the hillside survey pin that marks the southern point of our little acre. It took several years of slipping and sliding and peering under sagebrush and into rabbit and ground squirrel holes to find that pin.

I dug out a narrow bench so I could reach the point without falling down the slope. Over the years, that narrow bench has eroded because — well, because it traverses the steep slopes of two barren avalanches of loose dirt and rubble.

Did I mention that the slopes were unstable?

Until last weekend, my final possessory act regarding that South Point had been to carve out a triangular platform in the loose slope (triangular to match the property lines), implant an iron rebar by the survey pin and tie some saguaro ribs to the rebar as a sort of visible marker. The rebar served as the human equivalent of what a dog does to a local fire hydrant.

As seen on Facebook: the island
and the east enclosure.

In addition to the view, that platform area is private. It is hidden from the house to the east by the berm of the hill above and that neighbor's own backyard wall. On the other side, a thicket of palo verde trees hides the space from the house to the west which is situated below, on the other side of the gully.

Like a coyote surveying and marking its territory, I would traverse the avalanche slopes to that platform area to sit and enjoy my private view. But the unstable slope eroded the bench, and there was nothing to sit upon. I began imagining concrete blocks.

In the meantime, I worked on the backyard kitchen island and the east wall cum enclosure which were the subjects of my Facebook posts earlier this year.

The saguaro ribs tethered to the rebar is visible towards the right.
It marks the South Point survey pin.

Friday a week ago, the first in October, the weather changed. With cooler weather come inspiration, energy and motivation.

I bought concrete, gravel and concrete blocks, and carried them a few at a time over the eighty traverse steps to the South Point. I dug trenches and sifted dirt to collect rocks large enough to serve as a natural retaining wall. I bought mortar and bricks and carried them a few at a time to the South Point. The ol' back ain't what it used to be.

The blocks got stuccoed and painted this Friday and I topped my oddly shaped (on account of the property line) low walls of concrete blocks with red clay bricks.

All I have to do is re-work the bench that serves as the path that leads to the South Point. For that, I need to scrounge up some one-man boulders to anchor the slopes.

I have my motivation: access to a pleasant sitting area and a great private view.

The view from South Point

It's Happened Before

It's happened before, something you don't expect.

For weeks and weeks of three digit highs (Fahrenheit), we have lived in our underwear like trailer trash. By eight or nine in the morning it's time to take shelter inside the shuttered house. It's time for lizards, ground squirrels and chipmunks to do their thing, and much of that is digging holes in the ground for refuge. It's the time of year when folks dream about going to Hawaii to escape the heat.

The odd thing is shade. It's the direct sunshine that is fierce. Even in three-digit temperature, I can sit in the shade and marvel at all the life in the Sonoran Desert, life that thrives in a bit of shade. I sit in the shade of the house and think to myself, "Gotta make more shade in the yard." We are fortunate to have plenty of trees in the gully whose shelter encourages all sorts of plants to thrive, even in the heat. I could erect pandals, trellises, follies, gazebos and other open covered areas. Meanwhile, I am grateful I work for a living inside the house and we have cooling.

Did anyone catch sight of the full moon, now two weeks ago?

By evening, when the sun loses its power and the bugs and bats come out, it's pool time. We carefully manage the solar blanket to maintain a water temperature in the low nineties. These last few weeks have provided an amazing evening planetary show. I have been floating with my rubber noodle and gazing at the horizon-to-horizon moving arc of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the Moon as they reveal themselves in the twilight, followed by innumerable stars.

Now it's the first week of October and the first week highs are in the eighties. Lows are about sixty. Shucks. Instead of just flopping on top of the bed in my underwear, I have to cover myself with a sheet. It's actually almost cold in the mornings. The swimming pool is loosing heat.

It's a subtle but very definite change of season. It has been only a week since the end of the summer doldrums.

It's happened before. I already miss summer.

Tuareg Relatives

For my birthday, Shari and I mailed some of our saliva to be tested. Not for rabies. DNA.

We got our results earlier this week. They were a bit of a let-down. It turns out we are from Africa and we are related to people all over Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. That's not exactly a mind-numbing revelation.

Tom's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

I was hoping for evidence that I was Magyar and connected to folk in central and eastern Asia. In my Magyar pride, I would claim not to be Indo-European. The Magyar language is unrelated to any Indo-European language. It turns out language has precious little to do with genes. My central Asian connection, at least for the last ten generations or so, is a mere 1.3%.

I have a south Asian connection in India. I can only speculate that a Gypsy slipped somewhere into the bloodline.

My mothers' line (mitochondrial DNA, hapgroup H10h) is most common among the Tuaregs in the south of Libya, then with folks in Galicia, Wales and Spain (presumably Celts?) before we get to 39% of Hungarians. Now Mum is from a rural area in the Great Plains of Hungary, an area that is pretty much homogeneous ethnic Hungarian (whatever that means). I would expect lots of connections with central Asians and Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, plus Turks who, like the Gypsy, slipped into the bloodline. The Turks occupied Hungary for several centuries, so they have a better claim to have mixed in their DNA than the poor Gypsy. But her mitochondrial DNA is prevalent in only about twenty percent of the folks in central Asia and Turkey.

By comparison, Shari's mothers' line is haplogroup H1bm. Lots of Tuaregs in southern Libya are in that group, about sixty-one percent of Tuaregs. The group is also prominent among the Basques (27%), Portuguese (25%), Cantabrians in northern Spain (24%), and Andalucians in southern Spain (19%). That's a major connection with the Iberian peninsula that may account for Shari's ability to tan in the sun. Her mothers' line is prominent among 14% of Volga-Ural-Finno-Ugric folks (compared to my own mothers' line that is shared with 22% of such folks). Go figure. We can each claim Finno-Ugric ancestry.

My fathers' line (Y-DNA, haplogroup E-V13) is most prevalent among Albanians (one-third), then Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. My Dad is turning over in his grave. His family hails from what was northern Hungary, now Slovakia, which historically is a mixture of peoples, languages and ethnicity. He prided himself on being Hungarian (turns out, only a 9% connection) with occasional Slovak (8%), German (only 4%), and Italian (5%) ancestry. The good news for some of Dad's anger arising from Hungarian history, his haplogroup has no connection with anyone in Britain.

Mum's, Dad's and Shari's Mum's lines have representatives in French Guiana in South America, but not Dutch Suriname or British Guyana. I wonder if taking DNA tests is more common in French Guiana than Dutch Suriname or British Guyana.

Shari had to explain to me that she doesn't have a fathers' line, something to do with X and Y chromosomes, and that each person takes only some of the genetic material available from the parents' pools. Therefore, there can be significant variations between siblings of the same parents. So my report is most interesting when it ascribes the origins of my personal genetic material, going back about ten generations, about three hundred years. That's where the Indian gypsy and a sliver of Caucasian show up, as well as — gasp — British. It seems that some 17.6% of my DNA is shared with people who lived in various parts of Britain over the last three centuries. Dad just turned in his grave again.

Shari's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

Shari's relatives would be the envy of an Australian immigrant schoolboy. They are virtually all in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For this son of Hungarian immigrants attending a Jesuit school crammed with English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys, Shari's pedigree matches that dominant culture ethnicity. She would blend right in. Just like "Rees" or even "James" blends in the Anglo world much better than "Palotas."

I wish I had saved some spittle from Mum and Dad to see how much those results would mirror mine. Even more interesting would be to compare DNA results from my niece and nephew born of my Hungarian brother and his Chinese wife. I wonder if that mothers' line has any connection with the Tuaregs, or the fellow in French Guiana who ordered a DNA test.

To cite a trite cliché, the world is getting smaller. What is remarkably odd in these DNA reports is the superimposition of genetic distribution onto a map showing today's political boundaries. It's like Mexican restaurants in Hungary, or the largest community of Japanese (in Brazil) outside of Japan. It's all mixed up. Ethnicity doesn't really correlate with much of anything political or national. We may have our languages, cultures, and political boundaries (and the Hair Product in Chief's wall), but the notion of ethnicity really has no meaning. The notion of nationalism is equally arbitrary. The concept of different modern human races is patently absurd. Folks, we all came out of Africa and adapted. That is the mind-numbing revelation. We are all related.