Extended Family

One of the things that is odd - and fun - for me when I am in Tucson is the unexpected visiting. My mother lives in a family 'compound' where my brother's and sisters' houses are within shouting distance on, basically, a 6 acre lot. There are paths worn in the desert between the houses, and those paths seem to be constantly in use. Today we had visits from both sisters, 2 nephews, two nieces, 2 of my mother's great grandchildren, my oldest sister's in-laws... and not all at once. And it's only mid-afternoon. Such a flurry of activity for me, a relatively solitary person.

Childhood is fleeting - and tough in a family of 6 - but having an extended family as an adult is worth putting up with sharing a bedroom and never getting a window seat in the car.

It is making me think I didn't do things right. I have only one child. The pressure is really on the poor kid.

Critters

I went out this morning to water a few plants. If I squint a little bit just as I open the door, and don't focus on any one thing, I can see movement radiating away from me - all the critters that just realized someone bigger than them was approaching. There are birds, lizards, bunnies, squirrels - seemingly dozens of them at any given time, scurrying out of the way. The other day a Gila monster was drinking from the pond. And a while back a baby bobcat was in the tree outside my mother's bedroom window. Amazing place, the desert.

I was watering a prickly pear cactus that seems to be on steroids. For every one of the hundreds of 'pads' this large specimen has, there are 10-12 flower buds! On every pad!! I think it is going to collapse from the sheer weight. How could this plant produce all that abundance in this dry winter/spring? I'm hoping this isn't it's last farewell to the world; sort of a 'grand finale.' So I went out and watered it. Oh well. One does what one can.

Another variety of prickly pear is doing a similar stunt with new pads. There are 3-4 new pads coming out on each existing pad. Amazing.

And as I was watering this thing, I got 'charged' by a pack rat. Ugly things - and not so little either! I was standing right by his very large and messy nest and the water was dripping down from the hose and I guess he thought he'd better make his own 'last stand' to protect the ol' homestead.

I won, incidentally. Pack rats better not mess with me.

Daisy

I get such a kick out of Daisy, my mother's Golden Retriever, when I visit. She has her little peculiarities, like all of us. Only hers are more so. Peculiar, that is.

She likes to have a piece of ice when you have the freezer open. But it is her custom, while eating anything, to take a mouthful and then head right back out to where the 'action' is in the house (wouldn't want to miss anything.) So she drops pieces along the way. But she knows what you mean when you tell her to go back and pick it up. She's good at that.

She's also good at decorating the house... with small bits of paper that she's chewed up. Very thorough, actually.

My mother used to have a dog who would pee on command. "Go be good girl" would send her right out to the yard to squat, every time. That's a very useful training when it's chilly out and you want to go to bed. Daisy doesn't get that - probably because she doesn't want to. She enjoys having company outside while she sniffs around. No sense rushing that, I guess. But she has another skill that is worth noting. If you point at something she will 'track' to where you are pointing to look at it. (My cats, on the other hand, invariably look at the end of your finger.)

Daisy's friend Kita, my sister's dog, will occasionally bark outside and Daisy will hear her and bark in answer. What is that about? "I'm here!" "I'm here too!" "Are you there?" "Yes, I'm here!" "Where are you?" "I'm here!" Or something.

Dogs. Endlessly hilarious.

Adjusting

I've always wanted to be one of those people who can step into a situation and "hit the ground running." But somehow that isn't really what happens. I am more the "deer in the headlights" sort. I'd like to think it is because I am a big picture person and very analytical - and that the combination of the two means I need more time to adjust. But I suspect that it is just that I'm an idiot. Oh well. The world needs idiots too.

I am in Arizona to help my mother, who just had surgery on her knee. But I'm not sure how much help I am being. I wish I were more of a natural.

And I am trying to cook in my mother's kitchen. Who knew that there'd be so many ways to get caught up short just trying to cook a pot roast? I don't have the pan I usually use, obviously. Her stove is electric and I cook on gas... The store didn't have the kind of potatoes I like to use. Knives are different, meat forks are kept in a different place, the salt isn't where I keep MY salt. Really. Why would any of that matter?

It shouldn't. And I'm sure dinner will be a success anyway. I'm just amazed at how disoriented I feel in someone else's kitchen.

It's been a 'disorienting' time - for a long time for me. But I'll adjust.

Or at least I hope so.

Another one of those days...

I spent the day trying to check off inventory numbers while 6 movers hauled our 'stuff' out of 3 big trucks and piled it (high) into 2 storage units. Miserable day. I'm still wondering if all 3 piano legs are in there somewhere. Doubtful.

Tomorrow I get to spend the day in an airplane again.

(What was I thinking?)

I am headed for Tucson (finally) but should be able to keep up with blogging there, so hopefully there won't be too much interruption.

A lesson in patience

We have managed to attract a bird. Two, actually.

I just didn't have enough patience, I guess.

This little guy makes a lot of twittering noises while he sits on his perch, nibbling.

The other one is a sparrow of some sort I guess. (I don't know ANYTHING about birds beyond the distinctive quails and roadrunners of the Southwest.)

They both have visited our feeder on just enough of an intermittent reinforcement schedule to keep Maddie's nose pressed to the window all day. She's fascinated.

Ugly Old Van Day (or week?)

While driving down to Portland on Saturday we kept passing these ugly old vans on the road; 60s or 70s vintage, straight up and down boxes with faded out paint jobs and little engines in the front. How could there be so many of them on the road? We wondered if it was a ‘convoy’ or something. ‘Van fans’ getting together in the same way that Corvette owners and Model T clubs do. But they didn’t seem to be traveling together at all. People were simply driving them. As if they thought they would keep running.

What IS keeping these things running?

Then yesterday, while we were walking, a number of them passed us on the road! And today, when I left to run some errands, there was one of them, parked right next to my car, and 4 more on the road just between here and the mail place!!

How could we not have seen this before? When we moved to Northern California we certainly noticed the preponderance of high-end cars on the road. And in Arizona there were obviously more trucks than anywhere else we’d been. For that matter, Kentucky roads are noticeably populated with American cars, far more than their counterparts elsewhere.

So does this mean that the Northwest is where old hippies – and their vans – retire?

It gives one pause to think.

Walking

We had a great idea for the day today – or so it seemed. There is a walking trail nearby that takes you into downtown Redmond, a quiet, laid-back sort of place. It starts about a mile from our apartment, skirts a large community park and runs along Redmond Creek – quite a lovely trail for the most part. It leads right to the new open mall that is so much fun to walk around. (Macy’s, REI, Abercrombie & Fitch, Chico’s, Eddie Bauer, Cold Stone, and a Claim Jumper restaurant among others… Very nice. I am a mall junkie, you may have noticed.)

A good idea, right? A great walk in the sunshine, a little shopping, lunch, great views…

(I feel a rant coming on here… Yep, and it’s a doozy…)

Why is it that everyone who gets on a bike loses 100 IQ points – just by ‘mounting’ one? Why would bicyclists try to buzz by within an inch of a pedestrian on an 8’ wide trail when they can’t really keep their balance in the first place? Why can’t they adjust their speed so that they don’t draw abreast of 6 pedestrians just at the instant that they are trying to walk by each other? What would possess someone to try to push through a crowd just so they don’t have to stop? Why can’t they draw behind each other instead of sticking to a side-by-side formation when they come to others on the path? How could they not realize there could be a problem when they come up from behind someone, silently, at 20 mph and then pass within a foot? Why can’t they anticipate ANYTHING that might happen on the trail in front of them and JUST SLOW DOWN?

I am tired of being terrorized by bicyclists. I HATE bicyclists. Whole families of bicyclists with not 20 IQ points shared between them.

Ruined my day, they did.

A Perfect Day

We made a last minute decision to drive to Oregon today - too 'last minute' to connect with the friends we were hoping to see at some point, but because it was clear and sunny (and spring besides) we decided to just do it. And were really glad we did.

Vista House on Crown Point, Columbia River Gorge

Multnoma Falls

Mt Hood in the background, miles of apple blossoms in the fore.

Something beyond the basics

Here I go again...

I’m always interested in magazine or internet articles that promise to give new and can’t-live-without information about everyday living topics – maximizing your credit rating, protecting yourself from identity theft, losing weight, eating less fat, planning for retirement… I’m an information junkie and can’t resist looking for the ‘latest and best.’

And I’m always disappointed. You’d have to be brain dead or living in a cave to not know, at this point, that you need to pay your bills on time in order to have good credit. Can’t they come up with better advice than that? Anyone who doesn’t yet understand what happens when you max out a credit card and only pay the minimum payment deserves what they get (and probably isn’t reading an article about it anyway.) I’m tired of reading the same generic ‘retirement’ article about how it’s never too late to start saving and you’ll probably need more than you think. Good grief! I don’t need that – I need to know where to save it, and how much is enough. More specifics please! Eat less, exercise more? How helpful is that, actually? Guard your passwords and PINs. Don’t give out your SS#. Don’t eat fast food all the time. Is there nothing new under this sun?

I do realize that the kind of information I’m hoping for can’t be found in our “dummy down to the masses” media sources who seem to honestly think those masses are stupid. But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a ‘delve deeper’ source in there somewhere? Wouldn’t it be lovely to see a ‘level II, III, IV and V’ attached to those articles? Couldn’t they just understand that we aren’t ALL stupid? (Or at least, that we don’t want to be.)

Instead of giving us an opportunity to ‘vote’ for the next person to get kicked off ‘Survivor’ or express our opinion on a poll about ‘should Katie Couric get a new hairdo for her new job?’ maybe they’d get more of us interested in the news if there was actually some ‘news’ involved.

Irony

Did you see in the news that the CIA fired someone for giving classified information to a reporter? This was from a source who “spoke on condition of anonymity” because, evidently, the information about the firing was classified. Hmmmm. If I were a late-night-TV-show watcher, I bet I’d find this included in a monologue somewhere. Who could resist?

Feeding birds

About a week ago I went to the Wild Bird Store to look for a feeder to hang on my balcony. We are on the 3rd floor and there isn’t much to look at outside (from inside) except the building next door and one tree top. I thought the cats would enjoy looking at birds at the feeder – and maybe, considering Maddie’s evidently low IQ, just looking at the feeder hanging there swaying gently in the breeze.

So they fixed me right up. (Who knew THAT wouldn’t happen?) I got a feeder and perches and a bottom tray, and food-without-seeds-so-it-doesn’t-make-a-mess-on-the-floor stuff. I assembled it, filled it, hung it… and waited.

I’m still waiting.

It’s still full.

“Don’t worry,” they said. “They will come.”

All I am doing with my life just now is waiting. And I’m trying not to worry, but just waiting for something to happen that isn’t under my control is just not my forte. It’s a perfectly lovely feeder with quite tasty food, just no birds. It’s a perfectly lovely house in Kentucky too, and with interest rates going up, you’d think someone would just buy it and get on with things but no one even seems to be looking at houses in Kentucky. Although the realtors (some 60 of them by now) who have been through the house all seem to agree that the price is set right, there simply haven’t been enough actual people through to test that out.

And so I am waiting.

(I spent the whole day yesterday doing on-line jig-saw puzzles! I now have a repetitive-stress injury to my ‘mouse’ arm! How pathetic is that?)



(OK. I know. Now you're curious to know if the house is a disaster or what. To take a 'virtual tour' of our house on Upper Hines Creek in Richmond, KY, go to: http://www.movingtolexington.com/feature.html )

Apple of my eye

(Getting a bit hung up on Vocabulary here again...)

I was playing ‘string’ with the cats this morning and Maddie was cavorting ‘unusually’ and the expression that came to my mind was “Oh Maddie, you’re just cuter than the dickens.”

Dickens?

Where do these odd expressions come from? Of course, being me, I launched into an investigation. First, how many could I think of? For example:

At loggerheads
Dog eat dog
Dressed to the nines
Chew the fat
Cut the mustard
By the skin of my teeth
Curiosity killed the cat

Dogs seem particularly subject to the creation of idioms: bark up the wrong tree, every dog has his day, dog eat dog world…

But they have nothing over birds, evidently: early bird catches the worm, eat like a bird, cooked goose, cold turkey (during narcotic drug withdrawal, one’s skin becomes sweaty, pale and nodular - like the skin of a plucked turkey), chickens come home to roost, chicken out, duck soup, as the crow flies, bird brain, sitting duck, lame duck (originally an old London stock exchange term for a member unable to meet their obligations on settlement day, since they 'waddled' out of the exchange.)

“Eat crow” has a colorful story behind it from the War of 1812 in which an American soldier broke a ceasefire when he shot a crow. A British officer came over, complimented the soldier on his shooting, asked to see the gun, and then turned it on the soldier, accusing him of trespassing, and forcing him to eat some of the dead crow. When the American got the gun back, he pulled it on the officer in turn and made him eat the rest of it.

Incidentally, “Dressed to the nines” is one of many references to the number nine as a symbol of perfection, originating from ancient Greek, Pythagorean theory: “man is a full chord (eight) and deity (Godliness) comes next. Or, three represents the Trinity, twice three is the perfect dual, and ‘thrice three’ (nine) is the 'perfect plural'.”

And ‘red herring’ (a distraction initially appearing significant) comes from the metaphor of dragging a red (smoked) herring across the trail of a fox to throw the hounds off the fox's scent. I’m familiar with herring. This should work.

According to my research, the ‘apple of his eye' expression first appeared in Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 10, in which Moses speaks of God's caring for Jacob: "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye". (In ancient times the pupil of the eye was thought to be a small hard ball, for which an apple was a natural symbol.)

And so, finally, back to ‘dickens.’ It is, evidently, another word for devil and came from the word ‘nick’ which goes back as far as Scandinavian folklore as a mythological water-wraith or kelpie that delighted when travelers drowned. The ‘Nick’ reference was further emphasized by association with Niccolo Machiavelli. Shakespeare has Mistress Page using the 'what the dickens' expression in the Merry Wives of Windsor.

I guess Maddie is more the ‘apple of my eye’ than ‘cuter than the dickens?’ Maybe.

(Thanks to http://www.businessballs.com/clichesorigins.htm for some of this information.)

Learning about something new

I was cruising the internet this morning and ran across an article about ‘naked mole rats.’ Really. They have just ‘opened’ at the Knoxville Zoo and are making quite a hit, in part, evidently, because they are very active in their little underground tubes and boxes and therefore fun to watch. Not to mention ugly. (And also because a naked mole rat is a character on ‘Kim Possible’ – a Disney cartoon – appearing as nacho-eating rapper, “Rufus.” Who knew?)

Anyway, the interesting thing about them is that they are the only ‘eusocial’ mammals – they live in a colony and have a queen, who handles all the colony’s reproductive functions. Well, the female part of them anyway. Odd behavior for mammals. And a good new word: eusocial.

So that’s all I have today.

Sad, really.

Surgeries and Worries

My mother is having surgery – knee-replacement surgery – today and I am here, she (with all my siblings) is there and I am worried. And out-of-sorts. I know that my being there wouldn’t make any difference and that I will go next week when I will be needed to help her at home. Somehow that doesn’t help today though.

I guess I am just a worrier. Somehow, to me, that is the thing that needs to be done in these situations. Worry. And so I do it – on a grand scale. Never have I actually been able to articulate to myself how, exactly, that is supposed to help. Since I also believe that we do things – anything – pretty much in order to advance ourselves and our own little plans and purposes along some self-determined continuum, it would seem that I could arrive at a ‘purpose’ or even just a ‘rationale’ for worry. But it seems to happen as an underlying process, independent of planning- and accomplishing-sorts-of-things.

So, having said that, I am going to try to leave it. There must be a better way to spend my day.

Making lists

My husband is a list maker. I am not, especially. I will make the occasional abbreviated shopping list to include things that I wouldn’t normally need at the store (scotch tape, corn starch…) but generally don’t ‘list’ things that I will always need, like bread or milk. I make other lists when forgetting something will be particularly inconvenient (extra camera battery, phone charger etc. for traveling) But Mark makes list for everything.

Mostly, I suspect, so that he can cross things off.

If I DO make a list and then accomplish something that wasn’t actually ON that list, he thinks I should add it and then cross it off. And he is right about the satisfaction of all that, but silly in the actual implementation.

If I have a shopping list started, he will almost always add something to it. Often, though, I can’t read his handwriting. So I spend a lot of time at the store, digging for my reading glasses to decipher something that turns out not to be relevant, a 'telephone doodle' instead, for example. (He's a 'doodler' too, but that's another story.) Anyway, today I thought I was supposed to pick something up for him but I finally realized that it was just his list of exercises to do – push-ups, leg lifts…

Oh well.

Mark’s lists are very lengthy and very complete, and I love to read them. He knows this, of course, and usually has something in them pertaining to me just because he knows I will get a kick out of it. So, right along with ‘trim toenails’ and ‘clean cat box’ there will be, about number 47 or so, a line for ‘kiss Cathy.’

There are so many ways to make life interesting, aren’t there?

More Pictures, More Fun

For our Easter treat, we went to the Seattle Aquarium, currently under a big construction project, but with their exhibits still open. Our favorite, as always, was the otters, who were eating clams - with considerable enthusiasm and action. There were also jellyfish (you can't get a good picture of jellyfish - I really tried!) and seahorses and all manner of oddly colored and shaped fish. And, in a concession to the holiday evidently, the shore birds had colorful plastic Easter Eggs hidden marginally in their exhibit - but they didn’t seem to notice or care.

Anyway, it was a good destination, made all the better by the discovery of Elliot’s Oyster House for lunch and the incredible array of tulips displayed for sale in Pike Place Market. As always, we had a grand time and there are just a few pictures I simply can’t resist sharing…

Happy

Easter!

Air Museum

We found a great activity for this cold rainy day – the Air Museum at Boeing Field. What a treat!

Mark ran around identifying all the planes and then looking at the display information to verify his expertise, or to make disparaging remarks about the exhibit errors when he found them. I, of course, took pictures. We both had a great time. Their collection is impressive, from early aviation to space exploration and everything commercial and military in between. And I have this to say about air travel – we’ve been going backwards. Not only do we not have the Concord anymore (yes, they have one, open for viewing!) but we don’t have all the wonderful luxuries of elaborate menus and para-military uniforms on young, trim ‘stewardesses’ and a focus on ‘service quality’ in our commercial service. Those were the glory days of air travel.

Anyway, they have a new wing devoted to WWI and II and there the displays are really impressive and the stories more elaborate. Of course Mark disputed some of that too…

But my favorite thing was the ‘decoration’ of the military planes – what were they thinking? The rooster is French – doesn’t it just figure?

Seldom in this lifetime…

This is the continuing saga of the missing shelves. If you are bored with the topic – try me again some other time for a different one. But just now my mind is rather occupied with this one…

I didn’t actually TELL the moving company to “bring them on” as I may have suggested in my last posting. It was more of a rhetorical thing. But “bring them on” is exactly what they did. Some bright spark had the idea of loading up ALL the shelves in our shipment and bringing them to the apartment, to just ‘try them out.’ Surely some of them would fit, sort of thing. Someone, (obviously someone who failed math in high school and is, therefore, distrustful of any numbers) was sure that I’d simply lied or made up the dimensions. Or possibly that dimensions didn’t matter as much as, for example, ‘hope.’

So, in come these two lovely ladies with their truckload of shelves. Before starting to schlep them all up the stairs (3rd floor apartment) they want to come in to look at the piece of furniture whose shelves are missing. While the one woman is telling me that the company has had extra crews working overtime all week sorting through each of our storage vaults, and that they had finally decided to load up all the shelves and bring them out, and other murmurings to the effect that this had all been A LOT of trouble… the other woman looks down at the lower cupboard and realizes that the shelves are stacked there, right underneath the TV.

They’ve been right here, all along.

I didn’t know what to say. I was mortified.

They were hysterical. They couldn’t wait to get back to the warehouse and gloat. They wanted to know who had delivered the stuff in the first place and immediately started plotting how to make fun of him. I had to give them each a $20 tip just to get them out.

OK. In my defense, they are each only about ½ inch thick. They just blended in. I didn’t even suspect that they would have been transported like that, unprotected. Oh well. What am I going to say to the ‘move coordinator’ with whom I’ve been having all these phone conversations? Thank goodness we remained pleasant and cordial throughout. Boy would I feel ridiculous if I’d gotten nasty and impatient with them all besides. It really isn’t my fault – they are responsible for delivery and set-up and they are the ones who looked for the shelves in the rest of the shipment and couldn’t find them, which started this whole thing. But still. I’ve been looking at it for two weeks and never saw it.

Seldom in this lifetime does one get so spectacular an opportunity to make an ass of oneself. I am SO glad that I didn’t actually do it. It could have been so much worse. Well, from MY point of view, anyway.

Getting things right

I’m having a little trouble getting the right shelves for my furniture from the moving company. They brought the base unit – an oak étagère with a cupboard on the bottom, a place to put the TV on top of that, and two adjustable shelves in the upper area, which, of course, are missing. I’ve twice given them the dimensions of the shelves – which I can easily do since they have to fit between the 4 upright posts on the piece – and they have twice now come back with other shelves of a different size.

Is this a concept that is hard to understand? They measure 30” by 15”. They are made of oak. They are flat, with no lip or front piece attached. We have many other bookcases, in a variety of widths, all of which also have loose shelves (for indeed, most bookcases have been made in such a way that you can adjust the spacing to accommodate your specific books) but none of which are in a 30” by 15” size. All the other shelves are likely in groupings with their matching set – at least 5 per set. These are the only ones that are just 2 alike. The person who is looking for them is the very same person who came to my apartment with the first ‘wrong’ set and who wrote down the measurements as I gave them to her – while she was looking right at the unit itself.

Sorry for the tedious explanation but I’m trying to explain the recent communication from them: “We’ve found 2 more shelves. They are only 24’ long and have a lip on them, but they should work anyway. Would you like us to bring them out tomorrow?”

I don’t really know how to answer that at this point. Sure! Bring them on!!

Tear Jerkers

Of all things, "Swiss Family Robinson" is on TV. You know - the old movie with terrible acting and an odd configuration of wild animals and pirates. (Mark says that even as a boy he recognized that when they were killing pirates they had such a low budget for pirate extras and costumes that they had to kill the same 2 or 3 of them over and over again.) I only watched a few minutes of it - when the family dogs have to attack the tiger to save the boy who had just caught the elephant. (I told you it was bad!) I couldn't watch the 'resolution' of that part because I was afraid the dogs would get hurt or killed. It's THAT kind of movie.

I can't stand 'tear jerkers.'

What is it about those old Disney movies that just pull at your emotions, totally without your permission? I can't even look at a picture of Bambi without 'tearing up' and don't even get started on Dumbo - just a little snippet of music is enough to get me going. And I don't even like them! That whole "circle of life" business is just awful. Who ever thought that would be appropriate fodder for 'entertainment?' Children losing their mothers, boys losing their dogs, dogs losing their way... what is entertaining about any of that? Nightmares, that's what those scenarios are. Why are they the plot lines of children's movies instead?

I was obviously horribly scarred as a child by this stuff, even though we weren't 'movie' regulars by any stretch of the imagination. I blame "The Wonderful World of Disney" TV show. Can I sue?

Give me a romantic comedy any time. You can keep the tear jerkers.

Life’s Little Mistakes

I bought a candle today to put in a tall glass hurricane shade on my table. (Yes, I finally have a table, but no bookshelves yet, alas.) I needed a green candle, and there was really only one possibility at the store so I bought it. I didn’t realize it was going to smell so strong as to be an environmental hazard. But it does.

I have $8 invested in this thing. So what do I do? I already unwrapped it. Probably can’t take it back, even if I hadn’t thrown the sales slip away. (I never take anything back anyway. It always seems too embarrassing somehow.) I re-wrapped it in Saran wrap, hoping to limit its impact, but that didn’t work. This thing is a real stinker.

I didn’t even look at the scent information at the store, but now at home I see that it is “Cardamin Clove.” And now I know that I REALLY should have known better. (Why wasn’t it “Pine” or something?)

I do this sort of thing all the time. I’m a champion at it. Life’s little mistakes. They drive me nuts.

Oysters

We did some research on oysters after looking at oyster shells at dinner yesterday. How do you ‘farm’ oysters? We knew we saw ‘oyster beds’ in the tidal zones but what, exactly, gets put there? We’d heard that they re-used the shells – but how? Do oysters move into already-made shells? If so, how do they ‘close the door’ after themselves? Is that what accounts for their untidy shells?

It turns out that that last notion is completely wrong. They do grow their own shells around themselves. The old shells are sometime crushed to provide new habitat for new oysters. Or something like that. Frankly, it is hard to know for sure, because...

… Oyster research is full of wonderful sounding new words like ‘veliger larvae,’ ‘bivalve mollusks,’ ‘spat’ (or ‘spatfall,’) ‘cultch’ (the crushed shells) and ‘shell-boring mudworm’ (which is bad news for oysters.) Who wouldn’t be fascinated by a topic with such a creative vocabulary?

Oysters start as larvae and wander around looking for a place to settle for 2-3 weeks – a place that has a hard surface. Since, by then, they are referred to as ‘spat’, the place that oyster farmers provide to encourage them to settle where they can be harvested later is called ‘spat collecting sticks.’ (These are the ‘oyster beds’ we see.) They start out life as male and then ‘may’ change to female. I couldn’t find any reference to their motivation to do so or not – but, I mean, why wouldn’t they? What’s not to like about being a female oyster?

Anyway, then we get into a bunch of stuff about when the gonads are ripe but I sort of skipped over that part. Should only be of interest to another oyster.

Oysters feed through their gills and since they naturally live in tidal zones, some of the time food simply isn’t available to them – like when the tide goes out. But when people ‘farm’ oysters, they put them lower in the water so they can always feed – so they get bigger, faster. (I thought that was much more interesting than gonads.)

Also, pollution greatly affects their quality of life! Poor things.

When out of the water, oysters close their valves hermetically and in cool conditions can survive for up to 2 weeks in prime condition.

Oysters take about 3-4 years to reach marketable size (or 2-3 years, depending on which article you read, and what size you like your oysters, of course) during which time they grow their shells. And quite frankly, they are pretty messy and haphazard about it. (Which just furthers reckless speculation about re-using old ones.)

So there you have it. Oysters 101.



P.S. For everyone's edification, from the comments on this posting, here is the "view from Lauren's window:" (Thank you, Ryan!)

The Tulip Festival

It rained today. We thought it would be a 'wash-out' day too, but then decided to head up to Skagit Valley anyway to see if the tulips had made any progress toward a successful showing. And they had, in a big way! (But I have to say that, for all the admonitions about how tulips like well-drained soil, there was sure a lot of sticky mud to wade through on this rainy day!)

There are several 'showcase' places, one with beautiful demonstration gardens that were amazing - but full of people in spite of the rain. Two other places mostly featured the vast fields of color. The variety is wonderful and there is just nothing like a huge-scale view of flower fields.

We also drove up to one of the Oyster House places we had missed on our trip to Bellingham last week and had a fabulous dinner there - our repertoire of places to take visitors is rapidly increasing! Now if we just had a house...

Home Sweet Home

The boxes are unpacked. The furniture is in place. Closets are arranged and drawers are filled. Even the TV and cable internet (hooray!) are installed. The pictures are hung on the walls and 'decorative accessories' lovingly placed. The cats are purring happily on the bed, OUR bed, which is oh, so comfortable. True, the legs to the table and the shelves to the bookcase are missing, but hopefully the moving company will ultimately locate them. We're trying not to let ourselves be too upset about that part.

When moving companies do the packing for you, the sheer amount of packing paper involved can be overwhelming at the other end, because, of course, you have to unpack yourself. I know from experience that wadding it up will only increase the overall volume, so I carefully folded and straightened each piece and put the stack in a box (saved for when we get to do this again!)

And after all that work, our dear little Maddie decided she had to take on the whole box herself, carefully tearing little pieces of paper off and spitting them out on the floor. (We don't know why she does this, but it is quite a habit with her.) We were going to have confetti. A LOT of confetti. So intent was she on doing the job well, that we didn't have the heart to interrupt. She didn't actually get to all of it though. (One thing about that Maddie - short attention span.)

So the boxes are broken down and stored in the truck. The chewed up paper is cleaned up, and we are comfortably 'at home.' It's about time!

Vocabulary

There was an article on the internet 'news' today entitled "How to handle the office jerk, ninny or schmuck." I read it, expecting to find something along the lines of your basic 5 paragraph essay with the middle three paragraphs dealing with issues and distinctions of a) jerks, b) ninnies and c) schmucks. I was disappointed, of course. There was no distinction, and the entire article dealt with 'jerks' as a whole.

I thought they missed a great opportunity.

Enjoying the Season (again)

I know that I all-too-often wax eloquent about spring, but I just love the season. Spring rains are gentle rains, enhancing the smells of the flowers and other new growth. It isn’t so cold. Every day brings new colors and everywhere you look there is something blooming. Here in the northwest, there are gardens everywhere – and every commercial building (gas station, office complex, mall and grocery store) is landscaped to the max. Right now there are daffodils everywhere, mixed with fresh new blooms of pansies. Eye candy wherever you look.

Bellingham

Yesterday's travels took us up to northern Washington (no, the tulips aren't blooming yet!) to Bellingham via Chuckanut Drive - overlooking the San Juan Islands. We wandered in the charming old Bellingham suburb of Fairhaven where the southern terminus of the Alaska State Ferry system is now. Then we hiked in Watcom State Park, where a waterfall beckoned as surely to me as it would have to my father.

From the Forget-me-nots to the trees to the blue and gold ferry sitting in the dock, it could have been Southeast Alaska. Amazing.

Media Surprises

We picked up a copy of the weekly ‘Entertainment’ magazine for greater Seattle yesterday – one of those newsprint formatted things that you find ‘for free’ next to the real newspaper vending machines – and I spent the evening reading it. Very, um… enlightening. I think.

Seattle is a big place. But the variety of shows, movies, dance, comedy, ‘open mic’ and other entertainment was amazing. Big acts and unknown acts – all are included. Shakespeare is happening, as is opera, orchestra, and ballet. Country music, jazz, combo groups, comedy dinner theater, raves… you name it, it is happening in Seattle, every night. In literally hundreds of places.

And further into the magazine were restaurant reviews. Pages and pages and pages of restaurant reviews. Every possible type of food and atmosphere and price.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised at the ‘variety’ I found in the back pages I guess. But…

There were ‘Personals’ ads, of course. They are there in all such publications. “Back in the day” they were sweet requests for a life partner – usually some widow looking for someone to share her coffee with in the morning or someone new to town looking for a new social group. Now, of course, they are perverts looking for action – and their ads are pretty amazing. We had quite a time just trying to figure out the abbreviations... (I know. We don’t really have enough to do in the evening. Why can’t they have good TV programming on so we don’t have to resort to this sort of thing to keep us amused?) But really, do people actually respond to these things?

And then I turned the page and got to the REAL ads – photos of what could only be hookers with phone numbers and prices listed ($150 seemed to be the going rate.) How can this be? Is this stuff not actually illegal? This is a mainline publication!

So, I’ve officially joined the ranks of my parents – what is this world coming to?

Daylight savings time again

Yes, we knew this would happen. We are losing the hour they so graciously gave us last fall.

I’m tired already.

Losing “G”

I’ve had my laptop computer for a few years now – probably longer than I can expect its useful life to last. I almost replaced it a few months ago, remember? But it recovered and I hung on. I hate to make technology changes. It seems like a huge waste of time.

But a new problem has emerged. The “g” on the keyboard doesn’t want to work without a very pointed touch. Since I am a fairly decent, traditional typist, I am typing along, not looking at what I am doing, and suddenly notice a whole bunch of red lines where my word processor is fairly screaming at me that I’ve misspelled a whole bunch of words – leaving out the ‘g’ every time. Do you know how many words have a “g” in them? I can tell you – a lot of them.

It’s not like I can deal with this by avoiding certain topics – like “Gong Shows” for example. Or googling something, or “Greenpeace.” And at least I’m not inclined to the speech pattern of today’s youth where every comment starts with “I go…” or “he goes…” Still, I use –ing a lot, I’ve noticed.

This could be bad.