Snow again!

It is officially spring but the weather doesn't know it. We had a very, very wet snow last night that brought down the flower-laden branches of our trees and bushes, reducing them to piles of snow on the ground. We are really wondering about whether there is permanent damage. For a 40 foot tree to suddenly look more like a 10-foot white bean bag is alarming, let me tell you!

We had gone to Portland yesterday and came back late, driving through to the foothills where we live just after the worst of a big storm went through the area. Neither Seattle nor its suburbs have much in the way of snow removal equipment, so when a storm comes through, you just have to slog your way home as best you can. Considering the steepness of the hills involved in our particular route, it was hazardous, to say the least. We crept down the big hill in first gear literally an inch at a time, cautiously keeping a respectful distance from the car ahead of us and just hopeful that the folks behind us would do the same. (Just keep breathing deeply, Cathy...) On this hill the trees are already hanging precariously over the road and the weight of the snow was bringing down some pretty big chunks - but happily not on top of us.

When we finally crossed our little valley we breathed a sigh of relief - too soon. The other big hill - the access road to our neighborhood - was blocked by flashing lights, a tow truck and a bunch of stopped traffic. No dice. But we reversed directions, took the back way around (up an even steeper hill) and made it home... where we found our big tree bent completely over.

We each found a pole in the garage right away and started whacking branches to get the snow off until the tree started to straighten up. I know we broke off a few of the branches, but since it wasn't actually below freezing we hoped it would mostly stand up to the impact and shake itself loose from the wet snow. We dropped a lot of water on ourselves!

Bit of a stressful night there.

It makes you wonder though - what was wrong for all the dozen or so cars we saw abandoned along the side of the road at odd angles? Is this a Northwest phenomenon? Why do we always make it when so many do not?

And this morning, we appear to have a much wider, shorter tree in our front yard. I'd say about twice as wide and half as tall. Looks much like a very wilted bouquet. Sad, really.

Happy Easter!

I'd like to be able to say that Easter dawned bright and glorious, but here in the Northwest that is an unlikely happening, and in fact... didn't happen. Yesterday was glorious though. We built a little retaining wall, spread bark dust over the front garden, tilled the soil for two new gardens and generally pottered around outside reveling in it as much as we could.

Today is a dark, wet, and dreary day and I'm going to spend it looking back through my photo albums to reinforce memories that came to mind this week of trips we've taken with Todd and flowers and gardens we've seen. We're going to bake a ham - even if it is just the two of us - because somehow we got a hankering for ham sandwiches - and splurge on calories because Mark needed a chocolate bunny and thought I should have Easter-colored M&M's - my very favorite.

My mother is having Easter dinner for the family at her house this year with 32 people expected (or something like that) since 'family' means in-laws of in-laws and shirttails of the loosest sense. It should be a rollicking good time and I wish them all a very Happy Day.

Falling apart

Ready for a downer? I'm in a bit of a funk here about the economy so I'm rambling on...

It feels, to me, like things are falling apart in our not-very-stable world. Though surely, at my age, I should be less 'reactionary' to bad news - specifically financial downturn and political news - I'm just not. I've lived through a lot, yes. I started my adult life in the middle of a recession and have lived through 6 of them since. Interest rates have fluctuated widely, inflation was rampant in the 70s and fixed mortgage rates during that time were over 18%. The top federal tax rate was once 70% and was only cut to 28% in the early 80s. Even with that retrospective though, I'm not feeling better.

First class postage was $.08 in the early 70's. (Computers don't even have a 'cent' sign on their keyboards now - the penny is so irrelevant!) Compound annual investment returns during the 80s and 90s were 17-18% but since 2000 have been minus 1.1%. We went from a record federal surplus of $236B to a record deficit of $412B in just a few years. (And yes, that is in 'funny money' but still...) The average wage in the 70s was about $10,000 while the average home price was about $27,000. Today the average wage is about $40,000 while home prices average $227,000. We earn 4 times as much, but pay over 8 times as much for our homes? (And I just don't live in a place where you could actually get a home for even that amount of money!) No wonder people asked for loans they had no hope of repaying. But why did they get approved for them?

My standard of living is going down, when I expected it to just keep going up. And I'm not happy about it.

I am close enough to retirement to wonder - no, panic is really the word here - about the future. Things have changed in the financial markets. Changes in the way the government regulates businesses, in the way businesses measure and report their earnings, in the way corporate boards oversee, and corporate management manages those businesses, in the way accounting is done, in the way we invest, in who invests, in what we invest for... all have made The Game different. The "changes" list goes on and on. How could it be 'business as usual?' How could 'trends' still apply as they did years ago? There is nothing organic about financial markets - so in a very real sense there are no laws of 'natural cycles' that actually apply, despite what we are being told by the experts. And guess what - Inverted Laws of Physics don't apply either: What goes down doesn't necessarily have to go back up again. (OK - that really isn't the physics law, but talk to someone trying to convince you to invest money in something and you'd have to conclude that it is.)

I'm not sure which is worse: thinking that the banks didn't really know that the mortgages they were issuing were worthless, or that they knew and decided the trade-off for immediate profits was worth the collapse of the economy later on. I'm sure a bunch of money went into someone's pockets - like the many-many-million-dollar bonuses paid to the top management at Bear Stearns last year - but so much money went back out of many-many-million-people's bank accounts and home equity at the same time. I keep hearing reassurances that the economy is so huge that it will weather big-impact crises like Enron, and even mortgage melt-downs. Really? The big economy might, but what about the little people? There's lots of us down here...

So what I really want to know is this: who is profiting now? Into whose pockets did my retirement savings go?

And somehow the probable answer, that it didn't go anywhere, it just evaporated, is not very comforting. Because at the end of the day the stuff in my grocery cart will still cost me over $200 when just a couple of years ago it cost only $100. And I'll fill my gas tank for twice what it cost me 3 years ago as well. Did our salaries keep up? (Well, by 'our' I didn't mean the CEO of Bear Stearns.)

I'm starting a new Conspiracy Theory: We were foolish to think, when on a large scale we started to save for own retirements, that 'they' would really let us keep it after we saved it. We should have suspected that once that wealth was created by all the little people, it simply HAD to be stolen away from us by the big ones. To think that I, of all people, could come to such a conclusion... well, it defies probability.

I'm angry and irrational. I'm discouraged.

I'm not going to do well as a poor person.

(And I don't even feel better now, having said so.)

More about the class reunion

I've been receiving regular notices about the upcoming 40th class reunion of my gi-normous high school graduating class. The Organizers have started a webpage and invited everyone to post a brief message - generally about what you have been doing for the past 40 years and what great moments you remember about high school. I've been surprised by the whole thing. In the first place, the people who are currently on the email list - those who have been located through common friends - are not the 'popular' crowd, the ones you would have expected to stay in touch with each other and maintain an interest in high school nostalgia. No, the folks on the list are the ones I remember from classes; the ones who signed my yearbook, the people like me. And secondly, most of the people posting their updates - on the website with all of the names, contacted or not - are already retired. Good grief! Finally, few seem to have fond high school memories they are interested in sharing. Thankfully, they've mostly moved on.

Except for the woman (completely unknown to me, though I looked up her picture in the yearbook and she seemed OK...) who gives us this:

"I really didn't get into high school too much really didn't have a lot of friends cause most of you made fun of me and made my life very miserable."

OK - its' been 40 years. Is it just me or did that seem inappropriate?

2 Birthdays

To Carolyn and Lauren, whose birthdays are this week (I think) - Happy Birthday!

We have a big family that got even bigger with marriages and next-generation children. Somehow we started repeating ourselves. We had 2 Carl's from early on, and then along the way we picked up 2 Carolyn's, 2 C/Kathy's, and 2 Mark's. The "Carl's" were the only Senior/Junior pairing in the bunch. It gets very confusing at Christmas gift-giving time. You'd think there would have been enough names to go around so that we didn't have repeats, but you'd be wrong. And the last names are all similar enough that putting a last initial on doesn't help much either - they are pretty much mostly S's. My Mark distinguishes himself by adding 'Dr' to his name, but none of the rest of us are that distinguished. The other Mark sometimes uses 'not-Dr Mark' but I think he should have gone with Mark-the-younger vs Mark-the-older (that will serve Dr. Mark right for rubbing his PhD in, right?) Of course I wouldn't want to start that tradition with the Cathy/Kathy confusion because I'd come out on the wrong end. (And we both have Master's degrees, so that doesn't help either.)

We'll just have to assume we all know who we are talking about.

Happy Birthday!

Lost stuff

I had one of those Swiffer Dusters - the kind with the long handle. I used it a lot. 'Dusting' is one of the more loathsome household chores, in my opinion, and being able to dash through the house with my handy Swiffer was a big improvement in just getting it over with. As I think I've admitted before, my house is presentably neat and clean but probably not up to a white glove inspection of the tops of light bulbs or baseboards or things-on-top-shelves.

And then the Swiffer Duster disappeared. One day it was there. The next it wasn't. Disaster!

I always put things away when I'm done with them. And although Mark doesn't, neither is he inclined to embark on a Home Dusting Campaign at any point by himself, so this was a real mystery. We looked everywhere, to no avail. And in the meantime, dust collected on the coffee table; the TV screen was barely visible under the layer collected by the slight static charge there. I would be damned if I was going to go back to old and time consuming dusting methods. It HAD to be somewhere.

Finally Mark gave up. He stopped at Home Depot on his way home from work one day and bought a new one. But it was the wrong kind - the short-handled kind where the handle falls off easily. Yes, the house got 'dusted' - once, with the new tool - but it just wasn't the same. I fell off the routine again. But this complicated the matter. Not only had we lost a perfectly serviceable tool, but we had spent money to replace it with an inferior product. With all that 'investment' I really didn't want to dump more money down that black hole. (I am very selective in my 'thriftiness' obviously, considering the money I am quite willing to spend on other more frivolous things.)

Dust accumulated again. We started sneezing. The cats started playing in dust bunnies rolling off the tables. On the 'up' side, we were able to economize on notepaper by making notes to each other in the dust on the tabletop in the breakfast nook. I might be exaggerating here a bit with literary license...

OK. We finally broke down and bought a new one. Janet was coming to visit and it would be hard to explain such a narrow interpretation of the rules of cleanliness vs. economy. I may be bizarre but at least I know when I am being bizarre. The house was clean, the visit was wonderful and now I am back to dusting regularly. What a relief. It wasn't so bad to get a new one after all.

And this morning I found the old one. It was underneath the dining room table, with it's dusty head resting on the edge of one of the chair seats and its long handle intermingled with the substantial legs of the table. I only saw it because I had to bend down and look under the table to find Maddie who was squeaking excitedly about something under there and wanted me to look for her.

Now I have another dilemma: You just can't have two of the retched things!

Being tourists again

We had an out-of-town guest for a few days - Janet came to visit. And that allowed us to be tourists in our town again, even enjoying the occasional break in winter weather. And so I have pictures to share:


I think Janet's favorite thing is beachcombing, which we tried to do in abundance - but only once successfully - without getting rained on or driven back to the car by the wind. We walked along Alki Beach in the West Seattle neighborhood of that name, enjoying the sun and picking up a few shell fragments and pleasing rocks. And we found an eagle looking, no doubt, for more edible things.

We also saw this interesting guy, flapping his feathers in the breeze, near the Chittenden Locks that connect Seattle's fresh water Lake Union with salt water Puget Sound. Besides the entertainment he provided, the locks themselves are fascinating - and hard to find!

We found some significant signs of spring - irresistible for the camera!

One of my favorite things was a trip down to Tacoma to the Museum of Glass where we sat in the "Hot Shop" and watched world renowned glass artist Lino Tagliapietra work his magic.

We had a grand time!