Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Price of Silence Is Up

2008-03-03T22:04:00.004-07:00

Hey, I forgot to do this for a few weeks, but I've started a new blog called Price of Silence.

It features the stories from my linked collection, called (wait for it) Price of Silence. How did you know?

Check it out here

Hiatus

2007-09-18T11:33:00.000-06:00

I won't be posting on Inland for the foreseeable future. I have, however, just finished a long writing project on my April trip. Please check the April 2007 archives for those entries.

Soon I will be starting another writing blog. I'll announce it here when I get it set up.

Joy

2007-06-08T21:53:00.000-06:00

Today I was in Borders at the mall and was suddenly struck by all the paper there.

Not in a "oh-my-god-the-dead-trees" way. I wasn't having a recycling fit.

No, I was filled with happiness at how much there was that was written, both books and magazines. And how what was in Borders was only a fraction of what was published in the United States, let alone the world.

And I was happy that I was a writer, even thought I haven't yet had the success I plan on.

Ragtime

2007-05-27T08:04:00.001-06:00

On May 23rd I saw the Boulder Dinner Theater's production of Ragtime, from the E. L. Doctorow novel. I wasn't expecting much, quite frankly. I had just seen a production of Romeo and Juliet by the Upstart Crow, and the quality of the acting in their productions is always uneven. (Though Mercutio was great, and Romeo's ass...was he wearing a thong underneath those tights? Well, I'm getting off topic, aren't I?) I was expecting the same from Ragtime.

But I was blown away by the show! All the acting was good, and the ensemble singing was wonderful. The main character, Coalhouse Walker Jr., had a lovely deep voice, and several of the women singers were also very good.

In fairness to the Upstart Crow, I suppose it's possible for a less-than-stellar actor to "hide" behind a wonderful voice in a musical. But there's no hiding in Shakespeare.

Shave and wig

2007-05-07T22:27:00.000-06:00

I actually paid money to see a tough-love dermatologist today.

No, I don't have skin cancer. I'm losing my hair.

Slowly.

So I go to see Dr. Sheila Boyle in Westminster, who has very thick dyed blonde hair. Oh, no, I'm not bitter.

And I tell her that I think the diagnosis of telogen effluvium that I received from my GP is wrong. It's usually caused by an illness, or childbirth, or great stress. I haven't had any of those in the last five years.

So she agrees that I probably have genetic hair loss and tells me there's nothing to be done. For women, that is.

"You're healthy," she says, hiding behind her hair (wisely).

"Buy a wig."

I wonder how much this little 10-minute pick-me-up visit cost.

Today was the second time I've gone to a "cosmetic" doctor and really not enjoyed it. I once went to see a plastic surgeon about laser surgery to remove some acne scars. I just wanted to see what the options were; I knew insurance would never pay for it. He told me all about the risks of having laser, but none of the benefits. What is wrong with these people, anyway? Are they desperate to be taken seriously by their colleagues, you know, "real" doctors who don't do cosmetic procedures?

I just read a book titled "Hair Savers" that has dozens of options for treating women's hair loss. I get the distinct feeling that Boyle doesn't know what she's talking about.

And I'm also annoyed because I quizzed her assistant on the phone. "Well, does she regularly treat WOMEN with hair loss?"

"Oh yes. There are injections and things."

Buoyed by visions of needles being stuck into my scalp, I sallied bravely into the office today.

To be told: Buy a wig.

Aaaargh.

And she's off!

2007-04-29T21:41:00.000-06:00

Sunday, April 15, 2007

One of my goals on this trip was to seem some of the tiny museums in Kansas, but I managed only one: the Prairie Museum of Arts and Culture in Colby, Kansas.

I tried to see the High Plains Museum in Goodland, but it was closed, because it was Sunday, or permanently, I couldn't tell. I did go see the giant copy of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings, though. Here it is.

I also took pictures of some of the farming buildings in Goodland. I like their looks.

The Prairie Museum, I discovered, was both inside and outside. I also remembered, upon entering it, that I had been there before, though I couldn't remember when.

First I paid, then I toured the outside buildings, and then I sped through the collection in the main building. My favorite building was the schoolhouse. The desk could hold two people; so you couldn't sit alone. There was a large wood-burning stove. I wished it had been my schoolhouse. I also liked the house—it was nicely decorated. It had a display about rabbit drives. In the mid-1930s Kansas was plagued by hordes of black-tailed jackrabbits, so the town would hold hunting drives to keep the population down.

The 1930s were also the decade of the Dust Bowl and the beginning of the golden age of comics. Hey, maybe Superman would put the soil back together, eh?

The most impressive building was the Cooper Barn. I walked up to it and pulled the door out sharply, expecting it to open, but it didn't. Finally, after a lot of banging around, it occurred to me that the doors might slide, but when I tried to slide them, they didn't budge. I had to drag a staff member out with me to get them to open the doors, and she commented that it looked like part of the door had been broken. I wondered if I had broken it when I was trying to open it like a regular door. That would be so typically Beth.

It was very windy.

It was a Sunday, so the museum closed at 5. After I had my fill of the outside, I went into the Kuska Gallery, pausing to enjoy the way the building had been built into the land, almost like the sod house on the property, and to pet the hungry cat that I was not allowed to let in.

The gallery had all kinds of crap, or treasures, depending on your point of view. The woman who had collected most of it, Nellie McVey Kuska, was a local monument, and apparently pushy and a bit of a klepto. She had the most amazing collection of dolls. More black Barbies than I've ever seen, a few Japanese dolls, dolls with porcelain faces. It was overwhelming the 30 or so minutes I spent on it. It was also amazing.

Past Colby, I listened to KHAZ radio (The Haze) for a while and enjoyed the country sound. I meant to go to the Oil Patch Museum in Russell, and maybe another one, but didn't have time.

South of Russell, on my way to Cheyenne Bottoms and my campground, I passed tons and tons of similar oil rigs: blue with red heads. They were as beautiful as an oil rig can be, but I kept whizzing by them, thinking, "Should I take a picture?" Highway 281 is a really nice drive. I recommend it.

Now I'm sitting in an unimproved campground on NE 60 Road, north of Great Bend, KS. I wanted to get here before dark and bird at Cheyenne Bottoms, but I got here just as the sun was going down and set up my sleeping bag in the back of my truck. It wasn't cold when I arrived, but it's getting colder and slightly breezier by the minute. There are strange noises from the trees and bushes near the creek, or whatever it is. I feel a little bit like I'm in the Blair Witch Project. Some strange bird—perhaps an owl? I hope so—is calling now.

Now that call was loud.

I can't see much beyond my feet because the combination of my computer and the lantern lights only the inside of the truck back. But I'm going to keep working because I don't think I can go to sleep.

I'm looking forward to birding Cheyenne Bottoms in the morning.

Now back to Women and Peace.

OK, now there's something that sounds like a cat. And probably it is just a cat, a house cat. But I'm going to shut myself in the back of the truck just the same. Are there bobcats in Kansas? I'm quite sure there aren't any mountain lions.

I'm a wuss. Just think if I were backpacking somewhere and had nothing between me and nature but a tent. Or worse yet, had to sleep on the ground. Though that seems like a bad idea in a place like Colorado, where there are lions and bears around.

It's 10:30 and time for bed. The wind is getting quite strong.

Birding and Driving. Yes, that will be the story for two weeks

2007-04-28T22:06:00.000-06:00

Monday, April 16, 2007

Ate pineapple for breakfast. Saw a cardinal and a downy woodpecker.

Noted the mileage: 85104

Birded Cheyenne Bottoms this morning. Saw about 30 birds, including American coots displaying their white butt sacs. Didn't go all the way around the auto tour but enjoyed watching the shovelers and redheads and ruddy ducks and yellow-headed blackbirds especially.

Great Bend and McPherson, KS, remind me of Grand Junction—the buildings in the downtown look similar. Great Bend had “Please Go Away” tours company. Later I saw Marmie's Ford and Kiowa Kitchen, a Mexican restaurant, and Rickabaugh's Auto Market. Many of the towns in KS have a list of churches on the entrance to the town. I wonder if that's some kind of code. A lot of them also seem to have automotive businesses along the main highway—no surprise there.

On the way east on 56 (parts are on the Santa Fe Trail), saw lots and lots of turkey vultures but very few hawks. There were even three turkey vultures circling over what looked like an abandoned barn at the intersection of 2 highways. I wasn't fast enough to get a picture. I wish I had gone and looked in the barn to see what birds were in it—the place looked like no one lived there.

In McPherson, I went to Java John's and got a latte and biscotti. I talked quite a bit to the woman who made my coffee and the man there. He said the town had about 13,000 people. She said she was from a really really small town in Indiana. I was reading an article in a magazine that mentioned Lake of Fire, an abortion documentary by Tony Kaye.

There are a number of signs like this one throughout Kansas (I later saw one in New Mexico too.) Central Kansas is as flat as the San Luis Valley in parts—much of it used to be wetlands. Then you get into the Flint Hills. There were cuts in the road where swallows were nesting, but I didn't stop. At one point I stopped to take pictures of a fire some farmer had lit in a field. I crossed the highway, but I don't think the shot was any better from that side than from the other side.

It took about 5 or 6 hours to get to KC, and I didn't arrive until 4. Russ was at Dor's house repairing a towel rack for Dorothy.

Dor and Dad and Don and Matt and Russ and I went to Jack Stack's BBQ. I had burnt ends but they weren't burnt enough. I was expecting something like french fries, really crunchy and carcinogenic on the outside and soft and squishy with fat on the inside. I don't really like BBQ all that much, I guess.

I asked Matt where I could find information about Shannon and other 1930s political bosses in KC, and he suggested some unusual sources—which I guess he must have read himself—the Payne papers in the Black Archives at the Main Library on 18^th street; a dissertation on Shannon at Downtown Public Library—5^th floor, mostly letters; and stuff on Pendergast at the Truman Library. Matt said a book writen by a KC Star editor was biased because it was written to make Truman lose the election (in 1948?).

Then we went home and hung out as we always do, talking about the past. Russ looked at a road atlas. I asked him how many states he had been to, and he said “Ten.” I showed Dad where I was going to go on the road atlases. Matt walked around and outside the house. Donald told stories about all the people he knew. He met someone he knew at Jack Stacks and said, “Hi, Grandpa.” Apparently the man's son knew Matt in college or sometime.

At the end of the night, I showed Dad the information I had on my grandfather Marvin's service in WWI and suggested I could write to the Defense Department and get papers, if there were any. I told Dad I thought part of Marvin's life would make a good story. He got a funny look on his face and said all the kids thought Marvin was a "blowhard." He said he'd never taken him seriously, but as he got older, people would tell him about all the things Marvin had done for them. As a minor political boss, Marvin could hand out favors or food or coal and get people to support the Southside Democrats.

Dad said he never wanted to be like his father. And I think he succeeded in that.

OK!

2007-04-27T22:41:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Written from Keystone State Park, west of Tulsa on the Arkansas River, Oklahoma

I have a campsite with a view of the river/Keystone Lake. It's very cool. There are showers here—for the RV crowd, I imagine, but us campers can enjoy them too.

It was raining when I put up the tent. I didn't feel like sleeping in the truck, though. It's been nice to sit here in my tent and work, though my hamstrings are really cramping from all the driving and then this extended sitting in a rather awkward position (in my blue camp chair, holding a laptop).

Last night I stayed at Dorothy’s house. She had bought me two bouquets of roses, shrimp cocktail, strawberries, and I don’t know what else. Dor said she wanted to put a chocolate on my pillow, but she wasn’t able to get one.

Her roommate had done some work on the house and rearranged the living room. I liked the new arrangement and the wood floors. The schnauzer was as hyper as ever, but he is really a nice dog. I like the way all her neighbors have chain link fences. You can see into everyone’s yard (and kitchen, if you really want to. Of course, I would never use my birding binoculars for such nefarious purposes).

After I got all packed, which takes a while, what with binoculars, scope, tripod, dry food, cooler food, road atlases, piles of papers I picked up along the way or will need, clothes, and any camping gear I brought in the house, I drove to my friend Cathy’s house. She is the person I’ve been friends with longest, since middle school sometime.

She made me coffee and an English muffin and we sat in her house and talked about mutual friends and family and her kids. Cathy was babysitting three children until the end of the school year to pay for new blinds for her kitchen (it has a lot of windows). Her oldest daughter took them to the park so we could be alone for a while. While they were at the park, they collected things in white paper bags and then came back and drew them. Then we played Mr. Potato Head while sitting on child-sized chairs in Cathy’s basement. Another friend of hers came over.

I learned something about myself today and about Cathy. Cathy takes care of everyone and seems to like it. She doesn't seem to be oppressed by it—I guess she's willing to say no when she has to. I felt so happy being around her and being gently mocked by her. Especially when she said, “I hate people,” when I was complaining about all the unmannerly river rafters on the Colorado River last Labor Day. I wonder if I swore in front of her three “little people” or was being too vehement for them. When I was leaving I felt sad and wanted to spend more time with her.

Cathy told me to go to the Arboretum, but when I was trying to find Highway 69, I couldn't get to it, so I just took 169 instead. It was amusing driving past one closed entrance ramp and taking a detour that led me to 169. I decided that meant I wasn't supposed to go to the Arboretum, so I just went straight down the highway.

There seem to be a lot of memorial highways in this part of the world: Martin Luther King Highway and Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway.

On the way to Oklahoma I saw “Miss Molly’s Cottage,” which I took a picture of for Cathy, and a sign for Greeley, Kansas (there’s a Greeley in Colorado northeast of Boulder). At Big Hill Creek, as I sped toward the bridge, a great blue heron soared over the road and down the creek. It was so graceful.

In Coffeyville, KS, I stopped at the Brown Mansion, which was supposed to be a tourist information center, but it was closed.

Finally I saw a sign that says, “Leaving Kansas” and then another that says “Entering Cherokee Nation.” I had always wondered why I couldn’t find any Indian reservations on the Oklahoma map, when it used to be Indian Territory. Thanks to this postcard, I know: it’s all Indian reservation, Except for a few areas, apparently.

And what is a Cherokee Outlet, anyway?

I couldn’t find the private campground I was looking for at the intersection of Highways 169 and 412, so I pulled over and looked at the atlas. That’s how I found this campground, and I’m really glad I did. I am just about the only camper, but there are lots of RVs. A man came around and collected my $8 fee.

The roads in Oklahoma, and especially Tulsa, seemed quite neglected. Big cracks and potholes. I don’t know if it’s the weather or the budget, but they need to do some major road repair.

A little culture

2007-04-26T22:08:00.000-06:00

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Today I decided to see a little of Tulsa before I set out for Dallas. I chose to visit the Gilcrease Museum of the Americas, which I found after driving around a bit near downtown. It had a stunning sculpture by Allan Houser at the entrance (Sacred Rain Arrow) and rows of blooming shrubs. Once inside, I got the talk of the museum from Beverly Drymon, who was very hospitable and yet seemed rather formidable as well. When I told her that I’d like to go to the Riverwalk after the museum, she got someone to give me directions.

Then I toured two collections: Enduring Spirit: Native American Artistic Traditions and the American West. At the beginning of the Indian art section, a placard stated that 12,000 Indians served in World War I, hence Congress’s passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. (I’ll bet it wasn’t until the 1960s that they got to vote much.) American Indians have the highest rate of war service of any group in the United States.

I saw ledger paintings on buffalo hide (one by Virginia Stroud), beadwork, and a collection of masks from Central America in a hallway. I wrote that a painting titled Mother and Daughter by Solomon McCombs (Creek) was “just beautiful.” But I can’t see it in my head anymore. I’m going to try to find a reproduction of it in a book. Those are the pieces I remember, though I know there were lots of sculptures and paintings.

Then I followed Beverly Drymon’s recommendation to tour the Vista Room (“It’s the most beautiful view in Oklahoma”). It is indeed an impressive view, though my camera couldn’t do it justice. While there, I looked at prints from Mark Catesby’s collection, A Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. I believe one of the paintings was of a passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914. It’s not bad-looking for a pigeon.

I remember more of the paintings from the American West collection, which bothers me a little. Perhaps I’ve seen paintings by those artists in the past. For example, The Hungry Moon by Frederic Remington had a greenish tone I liked. Another one I noted was Midnight Scouting Party. He was famous for his paintings of night scenes. In addition, Remington did illustrations for magazines, which he painted in black and white oils. I’d never heard of that before.

The paintings by Thomas Moran seemed awfully familiar, until I read the description of his development as an artist—he studied Turner’s works in England. So it was his use of light that reminded me of Turner. I liked Shoshone Falls.

Gilcrease boasts an impressive collection of George Catlin’s paintings of Indians and the West. I thought his style rather primitive, but I liked it. In his lifetime, Catlin had great trouble interesting anyone in his paintings—I think nineteenth-century Americans wished that Indians would disappear. He toured with his paintings in Europe, but ultimately he died in debt. Now, his paintings constitute a valuable record.

I came across one painting that made me wish I could teleport my father-in-law to the museum. Titled Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, it showed a frustrated hunter gazing down a cliff to the bighorn sheep that fell just out of his reach on a ledge: http://www.earthstores.com/gilcreasemuseumshop/. (You’ll have to click on “Prints” and and then "Poster Prints" and then scroll down to find the title. There’s a Remington print on the same page.)

After leaving the museum, I followed Beverly’s directions (mostly—I took the wrong road once and had to double back) to the “Riverwalk.” It disappointed me; it was nothing more nor less than strip malls along a parkway along a park along the Arkansas River. I was expecting lots of funky shops and maybe some areas planted with native species, as they did along the Platte River in Denver. Along the road, in the median, stood signs saying, “Up with Trees: In memory of …” Finally I figured out that Up with Trees was a cancer center and the signs celebrated survivors. I did some copyediting at Starbucks and then went to the park, which was nice. And the Arkansas River seems like a proper river to me, not these narrow, shallow things we have in Colorado. All in all, I like Tulsa. Someday I'll spend more time here.

Then I headed south on Highway 75 to Dallas. When it branched off to the left, I didn’t notice and ended up on the Indian Nation Turnpike. There signs warned, “Do Not Drive into Smoke.” At 4:19 pm, I smelled smoke; it was 666 miles since I’d left Cheyenne Bottoms in central Kansas. I crossed Muddy Boggy River near Atoka and Clear Boggy Creek. I called Aunt Pat and told her I’d be late. Later I stopped in Durant to pee at a gas station, which included a Burger King, gas, convenience store, and Choctaw Casino.

In Texas, the roadsides were blooming with Indian paintbrush and a purple flower. These flowers look like Mexican evening primrose. Some of the medians and roadsides were a riot of colors.

I didn’t get to my aunt’s house until about 7, and she had a nice dinner waiting for me, Cornish hens and stuffing and rice. It was very thoughtful of her.

Coming to an Understanding

2007-04-25T11:54:00.000-06:00

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Aunt Pat has a nice house in, I guess, northern Dallas. Her house is fairly near the Dallas–Fort Worth airport, as far as I can tell from Google Maps. I remember thinking that her house seemed like the perfect size. It has a garage in back, which I also liked. She has decorated it in greens and purples, though she says she’d like to redecorate.

The room she gave me had a treadmill on it, upturned on one end. Pat had been using it to exercise, but her foot has been bothering her lately because of a congenital problem her doctors just discovered—an extra bone and extra tendon in her foot. It makes it difficult for her to walk. She was worried that I might stumble into the treadmill in the middle of the night, but I didn’t.

In the morning we decided to visit the Dallas World Aquarium in downtown Dallas. It was a bit of a challenge getting there, since I’d never been to Dallas before. We had a close call merging onto one highway—we had to sit in the white-striped triangle between highways until the traffic opened enough to let us in.

But then we moseyed into downtown, parked behind the museum, and walked almost all the way around to find the entrance. So my impression of downtown Dallas comes from parking at the aquarium and looking at the buildings around it.

The DWA is actually many things to all its visitors. It’s not just a bunch of bored fish pacing water in a tank. To start with, you go up to the third floor and descend through the rainforest, walking slowly down and around a waterfall. We saw monkeys and toucans, vampire bats and spotted stingrays along the way. I think there were also some (black?) swans. There were many, many schoolchildren who shrieked a lot. By the time we got down by the River (shades of Chris Farley; actually it was supposed to represent the Orinoco River in the Amazon), we were happy to sit down and watch the female diver feeding lettuce to the Antillean manatees and little cubes to the turtles and catfish.

When we had finished with the rainforest, we viewed the small exhibits in the Aquarium section. There were a number of wall tanks with amazing varieties and colors of coral, jellyfish, leafy seadragons, angelfish, grouper, morays, you name it. It made me want to go diving again. We were tired by then, and I’ll bet Aunt Pat’s foot was hurting, though she didn’t admit it, so we had lunch at the café. By this time we had meandered through the museum back to the parking lot side, but we weren’t ready to leave.

There were still two tunnels to walk through. I don’t remember the Continental Shelf tunnel all that well, but there were some beautiful spotted blue rays. Lots of fish. We visited the black-footed penguins briefly, but they weren’t doing much.

Then it was on to Mundo Maya. It began with snakes—I wish they’d had a snake-handling station—and led us into a tunnel through a cenote. That was amazing. (A cenote is a deep sinkhole filled mostly with freshwater and found in the Yucatan. Some of them feature intricate cave systems, and many of them flow out to the sea. They were the only source of freshwater for the Mayans, other than rainwater. The Mayan word was dzonot; cenote is the Spanish version of it. The Mayans thought of them also as passages to the underworld.) I’m not sure how DWA managed to get three different tanks in one building. Think of the structural support! We sat on the benches, along with millions of teenagers (don’t know where all the elementary students went; maybe they all grew up too fast and decided to hang out in that tunnel until they found true love), and watched sharks and rays float over us. I took some pictures of Aunt Pat that I really liked.

Much of the rest of Mundo Maya was similar to the Rainforest section. But at the end is a temple with stone jaguars and real ones (unfortunately, they didn’t come out that day). I always have mixed feelings about cats in zoos. When I see them, I yearn for them, but I also want them to be in a much larger space—or free. Someday, I hope, zoos will be an artifact of our past. But I fear that with global warming, we’ll actually end up with biospheres as the only places some species can survive.

I took many pictures of the flamingos in this exhibit, as well as the cenote from above. At the beginning of this section we sat, surrounded by the tunnel/cenote and the creatures that lived in it. Now we looked down into it, watching them from above.

We found it somewhat easier to get out of downtown than into it. Then we went back to Aunt Pat’s and she fixed me dinner again.

Later that night, her son and my cousin Chris came over. He’s younger than I am, and I can’t remember ever meeting him before, though I assume I did. I didn’t get to see Kim, Pat’s daughter—she’s getting married again and was spending time with her in-laws. Chris does landscaping work and is in great shape from all the work he does. Like me, he’s not much of a talker, so sometimes the conversation lapsed.

That night, I had only the second flying dream I ever remember. I don’t know who was carrying me. I also dreamed about my cat, Rufus.

The next day, I did a little copyediting at Pat’s house. As I was working, I was struck by this question: What story about myself do I want known? And I realized that what I want known about myself was that I became a writer, it wasn’t what I expected, and I came to terms with it. Now I’m ready to take another shot at it, from a different angle.

What story about yourself do you want known?

Another thing I realized at Aunt Pat’s: I was reading Jonathan Alter’s article on having cancer (in Time or Newsweek), and I recognized the anxiety he described. I had a much milder form of it when I had my repetitive motion injury. And it got me the label hysterical patient from the surgeon I was seeing at the time.

Around noon, I headed down I-35 to Austin. That was the most hellatious driving of the trip—four hours of two lanes, bounded closely on either side by concrete walls, and everybody going 55 or 60 miles an hour.

A third thing I’ve learned on this trip: My favorite part of traveling is leaving. Not leaving people per se, just the leaving, with all the possibilities of a new journey in front of you.

Driving me batty

2007-04-24T21:34:00.000-06:00

Friday, April 20, 2007

When I contacted Matt and Rachel about visiting them on this trip, the only thing I asked for was to go see the bats in Austin, the ones that fly out of the famous bridge at dusk. I was supposed to arrive by 4 in the afternoon,, but I was late. Every day so far on this trip, getting where I want to go has taken me longer than I have anticipated. I think it’s because I’m optimistic—“Oh, sure, that drive will only take 4 hours!” So as soon as I arrived at their house in some impenetrable suburb of Austin (thank God for Mapquest), we had to pile into Rachel’s car and drive off to meet Matt for dinner. I had just enough time to bring my stuff in and dump it in their living room. Then it was off to a restaurant, where I had catfish toes, Elliott had a corn dog, and I don’t remember what anyone else had.

I think it was at the restaurant that Lorien began to warm up to me. She has a very serious demeanor, and that can be a little intimidating in an 18-month-old—the way they stare at you without any pretence. I can’t remember what I was doing—throwing up my arms or something stupid. But she seemed to like it.

Then we rearranged ourselves, with Kristina going in Matt’s car and Elliott, rather unhappily, staying with us. But he made up for it by shouting “Daddy’s car!” every time he saw it ahead of us. When we got so far behind that we couldn’t see Matt’s car, Elliott became worried. We drove up over some mountain that had really nice houses on it on the way to downtown Austin and the Colorado River (another Colorado River—what is it doing in Texas anyway?).

I think it was on this drive that Rachel and I got into a conversation about the Virginia Tech shooter and all the things I had read about him. According to one article, he was mocked in some of his grade school classes and told to go back to where he came from. I mentioned that to Rachel and she said something like, “So does that justify his shooting 30 people?” I was startled by the vehemence of her reply and said that I thought a teacher should not have allowed, let alone encouraged, his classmates to talk to him that way. But if I’d been thinking deeply about the subject, I would have said that this latest shooting is just another example of how we seem to have lost the ability to care for each other. There were people who were worried about that boy and trying to intervene, but no one went quite far enough.

I’m not trying to blame the professors and administrators at Virginia Tech—but have you noticed how many people like him slip through the cracks lately and hurt someone? Like the man in Colorado a few years back who kidnapped his children. His wife had a restraining order against him, but when she went to the police, they didn’t take her seriously, and her husband had enough time to kill his children and himself. Years later the Supreme Court ruled that the police were not liable for the deaths, despite the restraining order. At times I think, “Why can’t these people just kill themselves and leave the rest of us out of it?” But it would be so much better if we could reach them first.

All this makes me feel that there is something seriously wrong with my country. I felt the same way when I saw the bodies floating in the streets after Katrina. We all seem to know something is wrong, but we don’t seem to be trying, in any serious way, to fix these problems.

So that was my train of thought when we drove into downtown Austin and parked at the Hyatt. There was construction at the hotel, so we took a circuitous route, down a steep incline, to get to the path by the river. Rachel was pushing the stroller, and I was supposed to be holding Elliott’s hand as we went down the hill. His little legs could deal with the slope, however, and he started running down the hill. I lost my grip on his hand and before I could regain it, he had done a somersault onto the sidewalk, somehow (miraculously) not splitting open his head on the stone wall that edged it. He even popped up and said, “I’m OK!” as if he didn’t want us to worry.

So I’m not sure if it was a sweet craving on my part or guilt that made me buy everyone ice cream when we arrived at Capital Cruises. I had a chocolate inside crunch, Rachel had something else crunchy, Elliott had a red-and yellow popsicle, and Kristina had the bubblegum one. Then Matt paid everybody’s fare and we got onto the boat.

It was an open boat with about 20 to 30 black plastic chairs arranged in rows. At the back there was a metal bat canopy. It was breezy, so I was glad I had brought a jacket. We cruised up and down the river until it got dark, and then we passed under the bridge and waited, along with several other boats of various sizes.

When the bats came out, they looked like streams of pepper, except that they were spiraling up instead of drifting down. They just kept going and going. I kept trying to get a picture of them with Todd’s camera, but I didn’t really succeed. (Here are the bats coming out of their roosting spots in the bridge.)

Finally, frustrated, I stopped because I felt I was missing the show by looking at it through a tiny lens. I watched the bats as we moved slowly back to the dock. We found a much easier way to get back to the car and went back to Matt and Rachel’s house, where we had snacks before bed. Then I spent time on the Internet, looking up other places in Texas to visit. I couldn’t get to sleep right away because some people across the street were talking loudly.

When Todd and I volunteered to watch bats for Boulder County Open Space, we were told that the first thing they do when they come out at night is get a drink. Here they are heading down the Colorado River.

Am I really that way?

2007-04-23T21:49:00.000-06:00

Saturday, April 21, 2007

If my mother were still alive, today would be her eighty-first birthday. She's been dead now since December 21, 1992.

I had planned to work some this morning, but I wasn’t interested, so finally I went downstairs. Rachel was cleaning up after breakfast. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t come down earlier, but I sat down and ate the breakfast burrito fixings she had saved for me. Then I played with the kids a little while, which was fun. With some help from Rachel and Kristina, I relearned how to play hide and seek. They had to coach me to say “Ready or not, here I come.”

Afterward I wondered if I had ever played that game as a child. I remember playing with Ellen and Kathy, two girls who lived down 70th Street, and a Christina or Kristin, whose family’s dog was stolen. I remember going to Friedson’s and Nuway’s for chocolate cokes. I remember hanging out with my brothers and going to the Jewish Community Center to swim and going to Lake Tapawingo on summer holidays. I remember walking down the street to Holmes Park by myself and going on the teeter-totter with my siblings. When I was 5 or 6 I got a big bump on my head from falling off one of those. I remember pulling a piece of grass out of a robin’s throat. But I don’t remember playing hide and seek.

While we were playing hide and seek and Kristina was drawing on the step and showing me her computer games, Matt was working on the shed that Ernie and Betty helped him put up earlier in the year. He was walking around on the roof with a power drill, as calm as you please. I would have been scared by the height. After a while I went inside and loaded up the truck. All the things—food, suitcase, scope, binoculars—that I had hauled in the night before, I hauled outside now, with help from the kids.

I let Kristina and Elliott stand on the back door of the truck for a little while, but then I made them get down. I had visions of them falling off. I said goodbye to everyone and headed down Highway 71 to La Grange and Columbus, where I stopped to photograph some gnarly trees and cattle egrets. I tried to get a picture of a bunch of swallows drinking from a pool in the dirt road, but as I approached, they flew away and wouldn’t come back to the watering hole while my truck was still near it. I got a little lost in Columbus and ended up circling the city a couple of times, but finally I meandered down the Eagle Lake and 3013 road, which led to my second birding destination on the trip, Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge. On the way in, I saw a crested caracara.

Attwater’s Prairie Chicken is the rarest PC in the country. It is a Texas variant of the Great Prairie Chicken. There is also a Lesser Prairie Chicken. The Heath Hen, an Eastern species, went extinct in the 1800s, I believe.

I had no illusions I would see it. (But I did see these tracks. Can anyone identify them for me?) For one, I was going birding at 2 in the afternoon in central Texas. Only a tourist would go outside in that and walk around, wearing jeans and carrying a 12-pound scope. Birds, which have more sense, are hunkering down the grass, where it’s cooler. For another, wildlife refuge auto tour roads are often not the best places to see birds, especially secretive ones. If I had really wanted to see the bird, I would have had to go with an experienced local birder.

But I had a great time walking on the trail near the headquarters, although I did wonder at times if I had gotten lost. I took a picture of my scope while walking this trail. I’ve had it for only a few months, and I still fear that I’m going to leave it somewhere—say, out in the field in the middle of Texas. And then what would my husband do?

After I finished the trail, I did the auto tour route. It had lots of lovely wetlands with all sorts of wading birds, including the American bittern that I flushed from a few feet away. That really made my day, since I hadn't seen one for years. It also made me feed a little guilty and incompetent--I was sure a better birder would have noticed the bird before it flew. I also saw a fulvous whistling duck, still at the back of a pond.

Finally, I tore myself away from the refuge and headed back up to Highway 10. Somewhere along the way, I stopped to photograph the flowers along the highway. I was wearing slip-ons, and I did wonder what lurked beneath all that matted grass, but I urged myself on. Just as I'd clicked one picture of the white poppy, I felt a series of sharp pains on my foot. Yes, you guessed it--ant attack! I really should have more sense.

After I limped back to the truck, I found my way around Houston and arrived in Winnie, Texas, about 9 o’clock. I was so tired. I hadn’t counted on getting there that late, but that’s what hours of birding will do to you. I hauled all my stuff up to the Quality Inn and decompressed, too tired to work or do just about anything.

Have you ever noticed that cheap hotels have names that express the opposite of what they are? The hotel room was serviceable, but not what I would call “quality.” And Econo Lodge is hardly the cheapest hotel around. Oh, well, what else could I expect in that neck of the woods? If I’d wanted a nice hotel, I’d have had to stay somewhere closer to Houston.

Here is a magical place on the walking trail at Attwater.

Let the serious birding begin

2007-04-22T11:09:00.000-06:00

Sunday, April 22, 2007

I’m writing this on June 18, 2007, six weeks after I returned from my trip. This trip log is taking forever to complete.

Now is when the serious birding begins on this trip. All the family visits are over, until I see my husband on Friday. It’s nothing but birds, birds, birds, from here on out.

And driving. And not much work, given how little I’ve managed so far.

I slept in a little this morning, ate the continental breakfast, and went to the Market Basket in Winnie to stock up on some food. I took my own grocery bags into the store, as I do in Broomfield, and when I handed them to the checker, he looked at me as if I had five heads. I guess people don’t bring their own bags in Texas. And then they put the milk next to Dorothy’s birthday card, which got it damp.

I headed south on Highway 124 from Winnie and drove tentatively around High Island until I found the entrance to Boy Scout Woods. I took my scope in but soon enough decided that I didn’t need it there. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the place—but more on that later.

Boy Scout Woods is located about a mile from the Gulf of Mexico on the Upper Texas Coast. It’s not too far from Beaumont, where my husband was born, or from Louisiana. I had originally planned to go to New Orleans on this trip and then west along the coast to High Island, but I decided to concentrate on the Texas Coast instead and go to New Orleans some other time.

This tree was planted in a yard across the street from Boy Scout Woods. It’s an Audubon sanctuary in the middle of an old subdivision. There were indigo buntings in the tree, dark blue against red, and lots of Inca doves flying around.

When I walked in the gate to Boy Scout Woods, I passed a hummingbird garden on my right and a trail on my left. Straight ahead was a kiosk and the viewing stands. I paid $5 to get a day pass for High Island bird sanctuaries and bought “A Birder’s Checklist of the Upper Texas Coast.” Then I sat down on the first level of the viewing stands. A helpful volunteer gave me a mat to sit on, observing that I probably didn’t want to get purple mulberry stains on my pants (the dreaded mulberry butt). I stared hard at the trees, hoping a bird would appear, but none did. A man and woman sitting behind me, higher up in the stands, whispered to each other about the birds they saw. “That’s a white-eyed vireo,” the woman said smugly. I surreptitiously whipped out my bird book and looked up white-eyed vireo, which I had never seen before. I even more subtly looked for the bird, moving only my eyes and tensing every muscle in my neck to keep my head still—but the stands fronted on a meadow surrounded by trees. Too many branches to scan for tiny, fast-moving birds. Still no bird in sight.

I could feel a birder’s inferiority complex coming on, so I got up and began migrating myself. For a moment I thought I might have been transported to Lothlorien as imagined by Peter Jackson and John Howe: Every path I walked on took me past a tall, skinny birder wearing a solemn, beatific expression. “A purple martin,” murmured one with a British accent, nodding toward a dark streak across the sky. “A ruby-throated hummingbird,” said another sotto voce. And all the while I kept hearing loud birdsong that everyone else seemed to be ignoring. Later I figured out that very loud bird was a northern cardinal—and I was so relieved that I hadn’t inquired about the song. How embarrassing it would have been to admit not knowing the song of a common eastern bird!

But, wait. I’m a westerner. Why do I have to recognize the song of a cardinal? Even if I do love them. Even if my mother used to feed them raisins on our patio in Kansas City. I’m always happy to see them on the rare occasions that I do, but apparently I don’t remember their song.

In between swatting at mosquitoes, which my natural bug repellant from Hawaii seemed to be attracting (it must be the kukui nut oil), and trying to figure out which path I was following on the rather cryptic map, I managed to find my way along the boardwalk to the Cathedral and sit down. Finally I was rewarded with a sighting of a scarlet tanager, another bright red bird, thanks to a woman with a very long lens who was looking for less common birds to photograph. “I’ve got hundreds [of scarlet tanagers],” she said, explaining why she wasn't bothering to take a picture. I tried to imagine being that good with a camera and an 18-inch lens. It sounded like a fine project for my retirement, but this woman was my age, if not younger.

In time, I wandered out to the slough, where there was a shaded area. I leaned against the railing and eavesdropped on conversations. There was plenty of activity there, both bird (purple gallinule and common moorhen, one chasing the other) and human (photographers, couples, friends). I dared to ask and volunteered to tell others where the birds were. I was beginning to loosen up. As I walked back I spotted a brown thrasher in a tree. It’s funny, when you bird in a new place, how you discover birds display all kinds of different behaviors. I had always thought of brown thrashers as ground birds because that’s where I’d seen them in Colorado. I guess it’s like the title of that book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. I kept bumping up against my assumptions everywhere I went.

As I was watching the thrasher, a couple came up behind me and joined in. I started talking to them and asked them about something—some bird, probably. The man laughed and said he usually birded with his brother, who knew everything, and he was just waiting for his brother to get here so he could identify all the birds for him.

For some time now, I had been trying to find Prothonotary Pond. I wandered around in the woods until I came to a turnstile, which at least was easy to find on the map but was pretty much the opposite of where I wanted to go. I found the mosquito center of the universe (a common occurrence on this trip) and finally stumbled upon the pond and sat down on a log. It was another case of birders sitting around reverently, whispering to each other (so different from Boulder Bird Club trips at Walden Ponds, where very few people bother to be quiet), and an occasional photographer standing and maneuvering gear. I saw a yellow warbler and a green heron, but no namesake warbler. I moseyed back to the kiosk, bought a T-shirt and some postcards, and rested in the Hummingbird Garden, where I watched a ladder-backed woodpecker probe the trees. And then it was on to Smith Oaks Sanctuary.

To be honest, Smith Oaks felt like a breeze, or a least a relief, after the last few hours. I parked and immediately fell in with a group of birders and photographers staring intently at an island of shrubs in the parking loop. They gossiped about sightings of painted buntings, but meanwhile they were occupied with indigo buntings, scarlet and summer tanagers, red-eyed vireos, and rose-breasted grosbeaks, three of which were new life birds for me.

But the real fun began when I reached Clay Bottom Pond. I got some good use out of my new scope at the Rookery there. The great egrets’ young had fledged, so they were fun to watch at close range, especially the ones teetering around just above the alligators. I saw anhinga for the first time, which are large black birds with white streaks on the wings, as well as neotropic cormorants. But it was the tricolored herons who put on the best show, flying in and out of their nests and displaying their white bellies, blue backs, and yellow tails. There were boat-tailed grackles there as well, and luckily for me, the Gulf Coast birds have dark eyes. I’m not sure I could have distinguished them from great-tailed grackles otherwise.

I think the riggings on Noah’s Ark must have looked like the trees on the islands on Clay Bottom Pond—covered with winged life forms.

Finally I tore myself away from Heron Island and followed the path toward the least tern colony. After walking a while on what looked like a deer trail through the woods—and wondering if alligators could make it up the bank—I gave up on the least terns and walked along Smith Pond and toward the Oak Motte. (A motte, for those who don’t know, like me, is a mound or hill. I can’t say I remember the oaks here being on a hill. Hmm.) That British birder I had seen earlier passed me, probably still seeing five times as many birds as I was, and I felt intimidated anew.

But such feelings passed as soon as I entered the woods—I had mosquitoes to occupy me. Despite the fact that I was covered from head to toe in both synthetic and natural fabrics, with only hands and face exposed, they still found a way to torture me. I discovered that my birding pants and shirt were thin enough for mosquitoes to penetrate, and they did, so often that as I stood on the path, trying to deal with three warblers flitting through the woods surrounding me, I was twitching from being bitten so often. It’d hard to focus one’s binoculars while twitching. But I was happy to see a black-and-white warbler and a female chestnut-sided warbler. The third got away too quickly, but I remember it had lots of gray on it. So write me and identify it for me, OK? The time of year and location should make it a snap.

Later on I saw a worm-eating warbler, but not the ovenbird (also having a striped head) I was hoping for. Last year there were reports of an ovenbird in Gregory Canyon, but I haven’t seen any on CO-Birds this year. So I still haven’t seen any of those striped skulkers. And there was one last birding puzzle in these woods, a thrush I finally decided must be a hermit thrush, even though I tried hard to make it into a wood thrush. The spotting on its sides seemed to belong to a wood thrush, but I just didn’t see the facial markings of the wood thrush. I guess I’m enough of a perfectionist to need more than one marking to be satisfied—though I’m sure I’ve misidentified many a bird, some of which are probably on my life list.

I was resting on a bench in the woods when a cardinal flew by. It reminded me, again, of how my mother loved them. I could imagine her being a birder—she was methodical enough. In fact, that side of her personality used to drive me crazy at times. So as I sat there, I asked her forgiveness.

By the time I made my way past the rather recently installed drip

and the “world-class oak” (I think it's the tree below, but I could be wrong--there were lots of big oaks there), I was starving. All I’d had for lunch was a banana. I went back to my truck and raided the cooler. Then I drove back to the quality establishment where I was staying and jumped in the pool. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really hot enough, in late April, to stay in the pool for very long.

I finished out the day by eating an early dinner at the cheap Chinese restaurant next door to the hotel.

Where Cabeza de Vaca ...

2007-04-21T09:45:00.000-06:00

Monday, April 23, 2007

My second day of birding in the environs of High Island, I headed to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, one of many strung along the Texas coast. You could spend weeks and not get to them all.

Anahuac is northeast of High Island, on the East Bay. I had to drive right past it to get to High Island the day before.

I was early enough to get this atmospheric photograph. The light was lovely—I wish I had a better camera to capture it.

Then it was on to the visitor’s center, which is tiny, but that doesn’t matter—it’s all about the grounds anyway. And driving. This is Texas, after all. I like the idea of a national wildlife refuge that leads to the sea. Shouldn’t they all?

I spent time near the visitor’s center in the hummingbird garden, but then I headed just a teeny bit down the road and around the corner, looking into the White-Fronted Moist Soil Units, otherwise known as a marsh. They seemed to go on forever. Close in were blue-winged teals, northern shovelers, and long-billed dowitchers (at least, that’s what I called them. They’re more likely to be long-billed because it’s a freshwater marsh, but I’ve never seen long-billed and short-billed together, so what do I know?).

Out in the marsh, I saw some large dark birds, which turned out to be two species of ibis—white-faced and glossy—almost identical in coloring. Now, as I look at the range maps in my Sibley’s guide to birds, I wonder if I really saw the glossy ibis. It’s rare in Texas, evidenced by green dots all along the coast on the map. I do seem to remember a list of birds, posted at the visitor’s center, that included them, but perhaps I’m remembering another spot on my trip. The only noticeable differences can be seen in the coloring around the bill. Yet at the time, looking at them through my scope from a long distance, I was certain I saw both.

Sometimes birding seems like Waiting for Godot. When will that nemesis bird arrive? Would I recognize it if I saw it?

The fun really began after I drove down the road and parked behind some other cars. Aging birders with scopes punctuated the side of the road facing a blackish mudflat, partly flooded. I joined them, feeling young, as I usually do when I’m out birding. (I’m not sure what I’ll do when I’m the same age as most birders, or even older!) After birding long enough at an angle to get sandpiper neck, it occurred to me that I could adjust the head of the scope so that the eyepiece was actually at eye level and I could stand up straight and not grimace in the direction of the birds. I hoped no one noticed my revelation—sometimes my obliviousness to the obvious astounds me.

I felt such joy as I stood there. I had never seen so many sandpipers and plovers in one place. There were certainly enough of them for everyone who was there, and then some. Some bearded man came by and joking accused us of hiding the buff-breasted sandpipers, but there were so many others: black-bellied and semipalmated plovers, black-necked stilts, yellowlegs, willets, whimbrels, Hudsonian and marbled godwits, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated and Western sandpipers.

And that is only a partial list. Birders beside me were calling out “white-rumped sandpiper” and “dunlin” and others. I wished I could see a long-billed curlew, as my father-in-law had when he visited Texas in February, but I had to settle for the whimbrel.

Finally I had to stop. My eyes were giving out from staring at all the small grayish birds scurrying around on the black mud. I cracked my neck as Dana Scully did on one episode of The X-Files and moved on to the willows, where some birders pointed out a nighthawk resting in a tree. Usually I see them flying overhead. (Right now, in August, the nighthawks have been coming out earlier in the evening, even in the late afternoon. Perhaps they’re getting ready to migrate.)

It was the most transcendent birding I’ve ever had.

The ironic thing about Anahuac was that, despite what I said at the beginning of this entry, I did hardly any driving in the refuge. The rest of the day was almost all driving, though, so it more than made up for it.

After Anahuac, I made a snap decision to go back to White Oaks. I just had to see Heron Island and the anhingas again, since I was quite certain I wouldn’t see them (or roseate spoonbills) for a long time. And it was on my way. So off I went, not bothering to pay an entrance fee this time and skirting the picnic tables, where some woman had made me flash my bright orange sticker the day before. (Hey, I bought a $20 T-shirt! And some postcards!) I went to the island and walked through the woods a bit. I visited the trees in the parking lot: still no painted bunting. Damn.

From this point I would be driving a crescent moon, or eyelash, route, along the coast of Texas. Instead of going north to Houston and around, I had followed my father-in-law’s advice and decided to take the ferry from Port Bolivar (pronounced “Ball-i-ver” by the locals), at the end of Bolivar Peninsula, to Galveston Island. On the way I drove through Gilchrist, which was a long necklace of houses on stilts strung along the beach. (In this style; this one is actually from Galveston Island.) They all looked run-down. I wondered if I could actually afford a beach house in Gilchrist and, if so, if I would want to live there. How bad are fire ants, anyway? And the mold? And the cockroaches? Could I live with cockroaches again? And we haven’t even begun to consider hurricanes yet.

After Crystal Beach, which looked considerably more like the stereotype of a beach town than Gilcrist, I came to Rettilon Road and drove to the beach—in fact, I drove onto the beach for the first time in my life. I couldn’t believe how trashed it was. There was a lone trash can with bags piled around it, from the weekend, I guess, and far down to my left a couple barbequed by their truck, attended by a flock of gulls.

I stopped at the barrier that marked the Houston Audubon Society Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, but didn’t actually cross over. I watched some tricolored herons on the beach and then got out of the truck to attempt a picture of a laughing gull surrounded by Western and semipalmated sandpipers. (The Westerns had much more red coloration.) All the pipers hopped on one leg, flared their wings straight up, and tucked their bills under their wings. Until I kept creeping closer, that is. In response, they dispersed, staccato-style. I wished then I’d stolen that really big lens from the female photographer at Boy Scout Woods. I felt guilty for disturbing them.

At Port Bolivar, I found my way to the ferry without much difficulty and was one of the forward vehicles. I don’t think I’d been on a ferry since taking one from some port in France to Dover in 1983—and that crossing was quite a bit choppier, as you might imagine. The entire trip took about 20 minutes. Gulls led us the entire way, and their shadows passed over the boat. I went up some incredibly steep steps to the upper deck to see the gray sea and city from there. I was afraid going back down them. When I drove into Galveston, there were gulls on every lamppost (and anything else vertical). I had a desperate craving for a frappucino but couldn’t find a Starbucks to save my life. Isn’t this America, people? You should be able to find any chain at any moment!

I had to settle for a Chillacino at Ben and Jerry’s. It was just fine. I didn’t bother with anything else in Galveston, just kept on driving southwest, the Gulf of Mexico on my left, down Galveston Island. Soon enough I found myself on the Texas Independence Trail. There were beach access signs along the road at intervals, so I took one and
found myself on this beach, with a sign about nesting turtles.

There were many more houses on stilts, a necessary building style on a barrier island. At times when I was driving Galveston to Freeport, I felt as if I must have gotten lost somewhere, the landscape seemed so undeveloped. (Somewhere in the string of islands along the Texas coast is Follets Island, where Cabeza de Vaca and his companions may have been stranded for a while, early in the 1500s. They certainly came this way, on rafts, but there is much debate about where they actually landed. I had no choice but to drive down Follets, since it’s on the way to Freeport.) Signs along Highway 3005 (the road along Galveston Island) stated that it was not a hurricane evacuation route (since it was parallel to the ocean instead of leading away from it). Finally I came to a series of bridges that eventually got me to Freeport (very industrial, not at all beautiful) and on my way to Highway 35. The bridges gave me the willies—they soared up so high (I suppose to get them above storm surges) that I couldn’t see anything in front of me but the road and anything on either side but the drop-off.

The next highway (332) was a hurricane evacuation route. Much to my relief, of course. Somehow I ended up on Highway 2004, though from looking at the map I’m not sure how. Or maybe I just saw a sign for it; anyway, I was sternly warned not to pick up hitchhikers because of the prison nearby. When I reached Brazoria, a sign proclaimed it the “Cradle of Texas.” I found myself noticing signs all throughout Texas—they seemed so much more distinctive than signs in Colorado. But I suppose that’s merely a function of familiarity.

Past Bay City, I crossed the Colorado River again, which flows south from Austin.

My plan was to sleep at Goose Island State Park, which is on the other side of Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Then tomorrow I would bird Aransas first thing. But I had spent too much time today at Anahuac and White Oaks and couldn’t make it. I found this place to stay in Port Lavaca (The port of the cow). It’s an RV park and bird refuge just past the Formosa Plastics complex at Point Comfort.

I asked a woman sitting in front of her RV if she was the camp host. She said no and told me where to find them. She also asked me where in Colorado I was from and said she had been a camp host at Mesa Verde. I told her my first name and held out my hand for her to shake. She shook my hand but didn’t tell me her name. I’d never had that happen before. When I went in the bathroom and saw my hair sticking out in every direction (hey, it was clean this morning!), I thought I knew why. And, of course, a woman her age should really be the one initiating a handshake.

The camp hosts were more pleasant, although they were also taken aback by my request “to camp in a tent or sleep in my truck.” I asked them if that was an unusual request, and they covered it pretty well. The man took me on his bright green golf cart to show me the tent sites. I picked the one in the corner, away from the road (at least, away from the main road). Then we went back to his site, and I paid him $6 for the site and a $5 deposit for the key to the locked bathroom. He talked about some people who have an “agenda,” referring to homeless people who travel around on their bikes. He mentioned a couple, a man of Spanish and Indian descent and a woman who was “full-blooded Indian.” I wondered how he could tell.

Now I am sitting in the back of my truck, with the end pointing toward the beach. I feel exposed: the bed is open and people keep driving down the road. I need to close up the back and finish Chapter 3 of Anderlini for Lynne Rienner. The wind is so strong it’s rocking the truck a little. I haven’t camped since that lakeside campground in Oklahoma, near Tulsa. I’m looking forward to waking up tomorrow and birding.

I visited quite a few port-o-potties today, at White Oaks, Rettilon Road, and Galveston Beach. (That was a note in my book. Strange, the things that you write down on a road trip.)

Here's another Galveston beach bird.

From Birding Heaven to...

2007-04-20T21:52:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Not a restful night. Lots of people driving back and forth late at night and yelling.

Today I got up at 5, showered in the “private” bathroom, which was a little scummy (bandages on the floor, etc.), ate breakfast, packed up my truck, and strolled twice around the boardwalk near the campground. There weren't many birds, but I did see whimbrel, willet, white ibis, barn swallow, great-tailed grackle, snowy egret, and roseate spoonbill. There were spotted sandpipers on the rocks, and I had a prolonged view of a Savannah sparrow bopping around in a "dry" area. When I turned in the bathroom key, a friend of the camp host told me all about how many birds there would be if it weren't so windy. Thanks, Bub. I didn't know it then, but he was predicting the day ahead.

Then it was on to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. I drove down 35 until I came to 239, and I took that to 2040, which led to the refuge. Aransas is surrounded by farms. I drove through them to get there and on the way out.

Aransas is located on Blackjack Peninsula and was founded in 1937. Its visitor's center was quite a bit bigger than the one at Anahuac, and the grassy grounds around the parking lot were populated by huge oaks—live oaks, I guess, although blackjack oak also grows there. I remember the trees as being quite majestic, unlike anything at Anahuac, which seemed to be mostly flat marshland, and Laguna Atascosa, which seemed to be mostly scrub.

I ended up buying a guide to the driving tour of Aransas, as well as some M&Ms. I was hungry again by then. Fruit for breakfast just doesn't last. I also watched a video and looked at some information about the Karankawa Indians, a group of related clans who were eventually wiped out by settlers who couldn't abide their independent ways (read: refusal to settle down, take up agriculture, and work for white people). The Karankawas may have been the descendants of some of the Indians bands that "enslaved" Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow survivors in the 1500s.

Here’s a quote from the display: “Their way of life was harsh, but the Karankawas were a proud and relatively happy tribe. They were unwilling to surrender ancestral lands and customs for those of white men. Early Texans found this attitude intolerable and wiped out all the native coastal people.” The Friends of Aransas booklet mentions that the remnants of the Karankawas migrated to Mexico in the mid-1800s. The booklet also says, “The Karankawas first encountered Europeans on November 6, 1528, when Alvar Nuñez Caveza de Vaca and his men were shipwrecked on St. Joseph Island (sometimes called San José Island).” But in the book I recently copyedited about Cabeza de Vaca, the tribes he traveled with have other names. I wondered if they called themselves Karankawas later, or if that was an alliance name, or if that name was imposed by others.

I did some birding outside the visitor’s center and among the oaks, but I didn’t go too far on the Rail Trail. Now I wish I had—I haven’t seen any rails on this trip, and I feel that I should have seen them—but I was wearing shorts at that point and decided I needed to put on pants around here to survive mosquito attacks. I did walk over to Alligator Pond/Thomas Slough. I took pictures of some pretty white flowers there (I think the plant was a sedge, as in "Sedges have edges."). There weren’t any alligators in view, nor many birds.

The next stop on the auto tour is Heron Flats Trail. There, like the marsh I birded this morning in Port Lavaca, hardly any birds could be seen. I did enjoy watching some black-necked stilts and great blue herons hunting.

On the way out, I explored the trail, which goes through brush and huge prickly pear and by some marshes and ponds. I saw an alligator lying in the sun all the way across the pond from me. I kept on going, getting increasingly afraid, and finally turned back and walked as quickly as possible past the alligator I had just seen. It made no sign of pursuing me, but I just didn’t feel safe. There was nothing to stop it from reaching me if it wanted to. A man I talked to in the parking lot told me the birding had been good earlier that morning. I had arrived too late—despite getting up so early.

A pattern of frustration was beginning to take shape. I kept driving and was happy to see Birding Trail #1. I ventured into the woods—they were very pretty, and it was nice to feel so solitary there (as if this trip has been anything but)—but the farther in I got, the more aggressive the mosquitoes became. If I stopped to look at a bird, small swarms formed around my hands and face and found a way to sting me through my clothes. I was able to see cardinals and catbirds, but that was about it. I couldn’t pause long enough to wait for anything more unusual.

I stopped at Dagger Point Trail, and it was the highlight of the auto tour. I took the short, easy trail, which wound along the coast. The mosquitoes were just as fierce, but I was able to walk down to San Antonio Bay and get a bit of a breeze. Dagger Point looks across the bay to the Intracoastal Waterway and Matagorda Island, though it was too hazy to see that far. Nearby are the wintering grounds for the only “naturally occurring” whooping crane flock in the United States, but by April they have migrated, to Monte Vista in Colorado and points farther north. If I had wanted to see cranes, I could have taken a boat tour. Apparently that’s the best way to see them, November 15 to April 15. I was a little late.

I saw a kettle of turkey vultures at one stop on the Dagger Point Trail.

I passed on several of the next auto tour stops, including Birding Trail #2, which sounded even buggier, if that is possible, than Birding Trail #1. Instead I went all the way to the boardwalk and Observation Tower. Somewhere in the refuge, I saw feral hogs. It may have been here or at Heron Flats. I’m pretty sure I saw a family of them. The next time I go on the trip like this, I’ll have to take better notes about what I see.

When I got back down to the parking lot and prepared lunch (red beans, salsa, and a salad, along with something to drink), I was pleasantly surprised by a turkey walking through the parking lot. It proceeded carefully across the grassy area in the middle of the parking lot, but didn’t seem at all put out by the cars and people in the area. After lunch I drove back to the Visitor’s Center and then took Highway 774 to Refugio and Highway 77. I had intended to head down 35 and go to Padre Island National Seashore—at one point I was thinking of camping there—but I gave up that idea. I also missed Goose Island State Park, which is famous for its birding. Oh, well—next time.

Highway 774 was a good road—there were hardly any other vehicles on that two-lane highway. I stopped a couple of times to look at a hawk. I believe both were red-tailed hawks. At Refugio I headed south to Kingsville, Raymondville, and Harlingen. Lots of Pirates Landings and Pirates Coves dotted the road signs. I kept looking for barbeque (I felt obliged to have barbeque in Texas), but I couldn’t find any, even in Raymondville, which is a sad-looking town that bills itself as the gateway to the Rio Grande Valley. I remember seeing a black man riding his bike along the street there, looking very poor.

In Harlingen I stayed at La Quinta, after driving in circles for a long time, crossing and recrossing the highway, trying to figure out where the hell I was on the map. There was a man across the La Quinta parking lot tending meat on a BBQ grill. I think there was a pool, but I didn’t use it. The bed had some lovely padding and was level, not tipped down like the one at the Quality Inn. The continental breakfast was not as good as at the Quality Inn, but what a sleep!

Don't flash the pelicans, please

2007-04-19T11:38:00.000-06:00

Wednesday, April 25, 2007, Daytime

Last night I ended up at a La Quinta near the Texas Travel Info Center. As I said, getting to the hotel was confusing. I kept driving in circles, crossing underneath the highway.

But all was much easier this morning, after a good night's sleep. I simply took 106 east out of Harlingen, through Rio Hondo, on the way to Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge, which literally means “Lagoon Muddy Wildlife Refuge.” On the way into the refuge, I saw two new life birds. The first was a golden-fronted woodpecker climbing around a snag. And the second was a little blue heron standing in a marsh along the side of the road. Its color was unearthly: as blue as slate, with a two-tone bill. I stayed and watched it for a long time.

As soon as I got out of my car at the visitor's center, more new species just feet away: javelinas, green jays, bronzed cowbirds, and others hanging out near the bird feeders and water drips. The javelinas would place their front hooves on the trunks of the trees, though I'm not sure what they were trying to reach.

There was a rather fat man with white hair at the desk in the visitor's center. He took a great deal of care explaining to me where I should go and what birds I might have a chance of seeing. We briefly debated whether I should make much of an effort to see more waders, plovers, ducks, and such, since I had seen so many already. He was the second memorable guide I found: the first was Beverly at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. I went outside and started exploring the grounds. I wandered along the paths, searching the trees for warblers. As has been the case throughout this trip, I didn't have much luck finding them. Finally I got warbler neck bad enough to get in the truck and drive down Bayside Drive.

The best action was happening at Pelican Lake, where I did indeed see a brown pelican, as well as lots of waders, sandpipers, and both whistling-ducks. Either they're late migrating or they breed in Texas; most of the other ducks had already headed north by the time I arrived, though of course mallards could still be found, as well as blue-winged teal. I stopped at Redhead Ridge overlook but didn't see any of those ducks there—again, already gone north for baby-making time.

I remember two things about the rest of the auto tour at Laguna Atascosa: the gigantic prickly pear along the side of the road, blooming away as if there were no tomorrow; and the couple on the backside of the road, who had stopped their bikes and were looking intently at something on the right-hand side of the road. I stopped and got out to see what was so important, and they showed me the Harris's hawk that was being pestered by a smaller bird.

It's something I've always loved about birds, how LBBs (little brown birds) like finches will dive-bomb a hawk in the area, how crows and other birds will make sure every other bird in the neighborhood knows that a raptor in on the prowl. I guess I'll always sympathize with the Davids of the world, no matter how much right Goliath might have on his side.

And it's not that I'm against predation: that would be ridiculous, since I have every intention of eating meat for the rest of my life. I may not kill the animal myself, but that doesn't make me more virtuous than those who do; if anything, it makes me a coward. I'm just a predator two or three times removed. And I was certainly cheered by the sight of a kestrel eating a starling in my backyard last year; in fact, I wished that falcon could eat a few million of them.

Damn those fans of Shakespeare, anyway! I wonder how they'd feel if we could send back to England all the descendants of the starlings they released so many years ago.

But I digress.

The white-haired man at the visitor’s center told me how to get from the refuge to South Padre Island (510 to 100). On the way out of the refuge, I saw dickcissels singing from power lines and stopped to admire them.

It was easy to get to South Padre, but as I was approaching the Queen Isabella Memorial Causeway (a bridge) I hit a bird! And from the looks of it, as it slid from my grille over the hood and up my windshield, it was one of the golden-fronted woodpeckers I’d just seen. I saw and killed a life bird in one day! I wanted to cry.

I had trouble finding the Convention Center, which had been recommended as a good birding spot. It seemed I was driving down the road forever. When I got there, I soon discovered my clothing was reactionary—I was dressed for Aransas the day before, covered from head to toe to protect against mosquitoes that here were driven away by Gulf breezes—and soon was far too warm. I had to go back to the truck and put on some shorts and a t-shirt. Nothing like changing clothes in a large public parking lot.

Thus (un)equipped, I could stand to bird the marsh. I didn’t see any rails (my efforts de-railed again!), but there were alligators like this one underneath the boardwalk, and wading birds and sandpipers farther out, including a large group of black skimmers. You can see pictures of the trail at this link: http://sopadre.com/aboutus/photo_trail.php.

The area close to the Convention Center was a great spot to view warblers, including Nashville, yellow, and chestnut-sided warblers and a common yellowthroat, as well as an indigo bunting, an Empid (a group of small, similarly colored flycatchers best distinguished by voice), and a black-bellied whistling duck (of all things) in the tiny pond near one wall of the Convention Center. I started out sitting against the wall, in the shade, next to another aging female birder and a man who was trying to photograph the warblers flitting about, and then moved back and forth from my shady seat to the cement benches in the sun. Both provided good views of birds (and birders and photographers).

Finally, I dragged myself away from the birds and headed for the beach, where I stood in the surf in bare feet and called Todd at work in Colorado, who didn’t appreciate the situation nearly as much as I did. I believe he asked if I was trying to torture him, or perhaps I gathered that from his tone.

At the entrance to the bridge from South Padre, I noticed a sign: “Watch for pelicans when flashing.” That made me laugh.

And then I was back on the mainland. Easy, right? Take 100 to U.S. Route 83 North to Harlingen—except I took 83 South and was having a great time, sailing along, until I came to what looked like a border station. I drove up, rolled down my window, and asked, “This isn’t Weslaco, is it?” The man at the border booth was kind to me. He told me funny stories about all the stupid tourists (he didn’t use that term, of course) from places like Florida who end up driving to the border by mistake; I guess he wanted me to feel I was not the only one. The Border Patrol has a special procedure for these situations: they make all the cars behind back up (luckily, there was only one) and then they send you through the special turnaround lanes (similar to the lanes cattle travel to the slaughter, only you’re still alive afterward).

That unintended detour probably cost me an hour, which became significant later in the day. I should have driven southeast, to Sabal Palm Grove, and birded there, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Instead I backtracked up 83 and headed to the Frontera Audubon Society Weslaco Thicket. By the time I found it—the entrance wasn’t exactly well-marked—it was 6 o’clock, and everyone had gone home for the day. But the sign said the place was “open” until 7, and having it all to myself was peaceful. I sat on a bench by the pool pictured here and ate dinner. At one point I noticed a woman come out of the house next door and eye me suspiciously. But as I was hardly hiding—my truck was parked in the circular drive right next to the street—there wasn’t much she could do. If she did call the police, they didn’t arrive while I was there.

I saw a buff-bellied hummingbird at the thicket, as well as white-winged doves. When I was done with dinner, I continued on to McAllen and the Bentsen–Rio Grande State Park, a World Birding Center. The gates were closed (beginning to notice a pattern here?), but I paid the fee and walked around, which was perfectly legal. (I wouldn’t want to break the law in Texas; they might become prejudiced against Coloradans.)

Night was falling as I ventured into the park, encountering a group of teenagers sitting above a lake. Eventually I ran into a couple returning from their evening birding trip, and the man told me about a ferruginous pygmy owl he’d seen and generously gave me his park map. I did my best to follow his directions (“in a leafless tree past the picnic area”) and eventually did locate an owl, perched on a branch high in the tree. Looking at Sibley’s today, I see that an eastern screech owl is much more likely in the Rio Grande Valley than the owl he claimed to have seen. And although I don’t recall the owl having ear tufts (like the screech owl), I can’t say for sure, and I think it was larger than a sparrow (again, like the screech owl). It wasn’t completely dark at the time: I could clearly see the owl on its perch and could make out some white on its breast and belly (which would indicate the pygmy owl). I suppose that man could have misidentified the bird, but at the time I thought I saw a ferruginous pygmy-owl.

In any case, it was way past time for me to be moving on, as much as I might want to camp somewhere nearby and bird the park the next day. It was late Wednesday night, and I needed to be in Albuquerque by late afternoon Friday. I had a good chunk of Texas to cross, as well as most of New Mexico. I headed for Laredo.

My plan was to camp at Lake Casa Blanca International State Park, on the eastern side of Laredo, but when I arrived at 20 till midnight, it was closed and had been closed since 10. I tried getting a room at Staybridge Suites but didn’t want to pay $139. The man at the nearby La Quinta said he was full; in my exhausted state, I suspected him of lying. He told me there were hotels farther up I-35, and I foolishly believed him.

Meet the Border Patrol

2007-04-18T11:41:00.000-06:00

Thursday, April 26, 2007

When I left Laredo, I had been driving and birding since 8 am Wednesday morning.

I found myself in late-night road construction hell, driving in a single lane with concrete barriers close on either side of me. I feared I was going to crash. Some driver came up behind me with brights on. I flashed my lights—even though I was ahead—and he turned his off and back on as bright as before. That was helpful. Eventually I found a rest stop, where I watched the bats hunting in the bright lights and listened to the truck engines across the parking lot. I felt afraid to get into the back of my truck and stretch out in my sleeping bag—as if being so enclosed without an easy exit would endanger me.

After an hour or so of trying to sleep in the driver’s seat, I went up 83, at that point a two-lane highway that veered off northwest from I-35 toward I-10. I pulled off somewhere, in the dark, and attempted to sleep in the driver’s seat again, but it was not to be. Although there was little traffic on this road, the trucks that did go by created a whoosh of air that shook the truck. And then—flashing lights behind me!

I have to backtrack here. Before I left Colorado, I had been copyediting a book on a serial killer who liked to murder women on the side of the road. And here I was, on a dark road at night, with someone behind me in an “official” vehicle. What if it was an impostor? With that rational question in my mind, I started the truck and drove up the road a ways. Back on came the flashing lights. At that point I succumbed to the inevitable, but I wouldn’t lower my window all the way until I saw a man in uniform. Then I informed him he had scared me. He apologized but said that this road was a preferred route for illegal aliens.

So in one twenty-four-hour period in Texas I encountered the Border Patrol twice. I drove on. On the edge of some Podunk town, I got stopped by a cop again, for going 40 in a 30 zone. By this point it had to be 3 in the morning, and I suppose he was just trying to keep awake, but it made me want to cry. I managed not to sob on the cop and only got a warning anyway. I drove on, through what I thought at the time was Texas hill country (I was going up and down hills, after all) and collided with another bird in the dusk. It made a huge thump. I stopped and looked for it but couldn’t find it.

Finally, about 7 am, I arrived at Garner State Park, north of Uvalde on Highway 83, with a desperate need to pee. The park wasn’t staffed yet, and I couldn’t figure out how to pay the entrance fee, but there was no gate, so I drove in and found a bathroom, just in time.

It was an extra-nice bathroom for a state park. It had a flush toilet, and outside the bathroom was a hummingbird feeding station. Although it was a chilly morning, I sat and watched hummingbirds for a while. Then a large herd of white-tailed deer moseyed through the parking lot. As I drove out of the park, I saw a turkey displaying in a grassy area. It came to me suddenly that if I hadn’t taken that detour to Mexico, I most likely would have missed the hummingbirds and the deer and the chipping sparrows and the turkey, not to mention the owl in McAllen. It had been a painful night, but it was over, and now I had a chance to get to Carlsbad earlier than expected.

Later that morning I bade good-bye to 83, which was a really pretty drive most of the way, and headed west on I-10 to Ft. Stockton and U.S. Route 285 North, which I would take almost all the way back to Denver. Near Iraan, which is north of I-10 on 290, I saw a wind farm that went on for miles. Somewhere before Ft. Stockton, I pulled off on River Road (perhaps the Pecos River?) to rest. I still couldn’t sleep, but I did see a sage sparrow and got some nice pictures of the local flora. Eventually I arrived at the Texas state line. It was hard to believe when it happened because I had been driving through Texas since April 18, and today was the 26th.

And, of course in this case, leaving Texas meant entering New Mexico.

I stopped again on 285, south of Carlsbad, trying to gauge whether I had enough time between semis to pee on the side of the road without flashing any truckers. A red truck passed me, turned around, and came back. All my fears flooded back, but the men in the truck were merely worried that I had broken down. In a way they were right: here I was mentally accusing them of being rapists, and they were trying to help a stranded motorist.

As I paced up and down the shoulder, trying to ease the cramp in my hamstrings, I noticed that although the overall landscape was ugly, individuals plants were very pretty and very green. I think it was at this stop I tried to convince myself I had seen a verdin, which is, as Sibley says, a “drab gray bird of the arid Southwest” (except for the yellow on its head) that likes desert scrub. Alas, it was too far away for me to see more than gray and a flash of yellow.

I arrived in Carlsbad that afternoon and drove to Whites City (named after Jim White, an early explorer and one of the main people responsible for getting the caverns declared a national monument), where I paid an exorbitant fee for a campground ($22.50) that turned out to be pretty rundown. I set up my tent, rested for a while, and ate a microwaved dinner at the Velvet Garter.

Then I drove up a very windy road to the Caverns to see the bats. I believe they started their nightly exit around 7, and when I left at 8:12 they were still going. It was my second time viewing bats on this trip, but this experience was more intimate. When they were circling and spiraling just outside the cave opening, around which the Park Service had built an amphitheater, their wings sounded like gentle rain. The park ranger had a massive cylindrical bat detector, which he used to determine when they were coming out.

He made us turn off our cell phones and digital cameras because they sound like nails on a blackboard to bats. I wondered if my picture taking in Austin had that effect. He said these bats were 99 percent Mexican free-tailed and 1 percent myotis, but the myotis go out a different opening because they’re smaller. Most of the bats at Carlsbad migrate; those who don’t are unhealthy the following year—I suppose because of a lack of food.

The magic of caves

2007-04-17T11:42:00.000-06:00

Friday, April 27, 2007

I woke up this morning to my cell phone alarm, thinking it was 6:16, but my phone clock was wrong because there was no service at Whites City and it hadn’t changed to Mountain Time. So I got up an hour earlier than expected, still needing more sleep.

The campground was nicely situated and I slept well, but the bathrooms were a pit. The buildings need to be torn down and rebuilt. Part of the ceiling in the women’s bathroom is gone and the countertop is falling away from the wall; obviously a pipe burst at some point and caused a flood. The showers themselves were all right, and the water was hot, so I can’t complain too much.

I packed up all my stuff and drove back up to the visitor’s center. The earliest I could get into the caverns was 8:30. When I arrived, I wasn’t sure the center was open; there were temporary buildings all over the parking lot. I did some birding and talked to some other people who were also confused about where to go. Turned out they were just about to begin a renovation of the fifty-year-old center, but they had not yet moved everything into the temporary buildings. I went into the center and paid for a self-guided tour with a recording. Since I had to be in Albuquerque that afternoon, I didn’t have time to walk down from the natural entrance. I took the elevator instead.

The elevator takes you down near the rest area and lunchroom. It’s absolutely amazing, the things they managed to cram into this underground space without completely destroying it. Though I did wonder how much damage all the early explorers did.

I took lots of pictures, most of which didn’t come out: my little camera just doesn’t have enough flash power. My favorites were Lion’s Tail Stalactite, which looks like broccoli hanging from the ceiling, and Top of the Cross, where a huge stalactite is reflected in a pool. I was glad there weren’t many people around; I would have been on edge, waiting for someone to molest the formations. Speaking of that very thing …here’s one they moved to the visitor’s center so that everyone could get their jollies before they reached the cave.

For most of the Big Room tour, I was almost alone in the cave, on the paved trail. Many times I heard nothing but water dripping; the recording from the wand unnaturally loud, almost unseemly. Other times I heard voices but couldn’t locate their source.

I’ve searched for magic since my teens, in Tolkien and elsewhere. Magic happens when something opens up that you haven’t seen before: here my favorite thing was to look through an opening to whatever lies beyond. To my sadness, I couldn’t linger in the caverns. I bought a cookie and coffee in the lunchroom and bought Todd a bat t-shirt, since he’s a member of the Colorado Bat Society. The man who sold me the t-shirt worked three summers and one winter at Yellowstone. Now he’s doing seasonal stints in New Mexico. The elevator attendant told me she grew up in Carlsbad. She's fifty years old, so she’s been coming here for more than forty years.

As I came out into the parking lot, a schoolbus drove up. Yes! I congratulated myself, thinking of the hordes of shrieking children in matching t-shirts at the Dallas World Aquarium. I got out just in time. If I ever come back, I’ll remember to show up first thing.

Now it’s off to do more driving—after all, this is a road trip. But first I had to travel from Whites City to Carlsbad. I was jonesing for a latte, which led me to the NazzBar at the northern end of Carlsbad. Thus fortified, I sallied off into the wilds of New Mexico. North of Artesia, on the way to Roswell, I came across the following series of roads: Chickasaw, Ojibwa, Shawnee, Calusa, Anasazi, and Omaha. Hey, why not just name all 562 tribes recognized by the federal government? (Yes, you may pause to call me a know-it-all now.)

I really wished I had time to explore Roswell, but I could just spare time to stop in the middle of the road to take this picture. In addition to that sign, somewhere along the way to Roswell the pro-life signs reappeared, as if returned by aliens: “Cherish Life: It Begins at Conception” by Pro-Life Across America.

I stopped at the Phillips 66 in Roswell to fill up the tank. The gas ratings were 86 and 88, which I had never seen before. it’s always 85, 87, and 89 or 91. Another sign of alien life was the eyebrows on the clerks in the store: really long and thin and painted-on. I went in the bathroom there and was finishing up when a thin woman wearing a sparkly belt (among other things) and a child with an urgent need to pee knocked on the door. I yielded the facilities but then had to pound on the door and ask for my bag.

Roswell is another one of those towns strung along a highway. Such towns have such an unnatural air to me, but I think that must have to do with growing up in a big city. Towns along highways must number in the 1,000s—no doubt there are more of them than cities like Kansas City.

On the way through Roswell I found the Rib Crib and Bitter Lake. Most of the drive north was pretty boring, but there were some pretty spots. I saw pronghorn south of Vaughn (the name of a character in Crash, which I recently saw), where I had intended to turn west to I-25. Instead I continued north to Clines Corners and I-40, which I decided would be faster.

In any case, I was nearly an hour late to pick up Todd at the Albuquerque airport. The traffic was bad on I-40, and we had a hard time connecting because at one point he stopped answering his phone. I had to drive around the airport twice, which I always hate: I’m afraid I’ll get on the wrong street and end up God knows where. Finally I did get him and his luggage into the truck, and we set off for [Judy] Anderson’s Victorian House B&B in Albuquerque. We stayed there years ago when we toured Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and various pueblos, and now we were back.

We ate dinner at a southwestern place Judy recommended, which didn’t impress me too much, and then it was back to the B&B so that I could catch up on some sleep.

While at the NazzBar, I took this photograph of the front of the grill. This trip happened to fall over Earth Day, so in addition to driving nearly 4,000 miles in a truck that gets 15 miles to the gallon, I contributed to the decline in pollinators across six states.

Go soak yer head

2007-04-16T11:43:00.000-06:00

Saturday, April 28, 2007

I did a little birding this morning before we left for Santa Fe. There I wanted to visit High Country Gardens, a nursery that specializes in plants native to the West, and when I did I discovered that one garden center is much like another. I bought a Dramm sprinkler and spray nozzle, and then we found our way to downtown Santa Fe.

There I made a lovely discovery: the scroll manuscript of On the Road, which I had missed when it was at the Denver Public Library, was on display at the Museum of New Mexico in the Palace of the Governors. After lunch at Catamount Bar and Grill, we toured the museum. To construct the scroll, Kerouac had glued or taped sheets of paper together and rolled it all up so that he would never have to stop typing to put in a sheet of paper. About 20 to 30 feet of the manuscript had been unrolled and secured under glass; you could read along and see Kerouac’s notes. A film was playing in the corner, and there were displays of books on the walls. Perusing the scroll and the information about the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955, where Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was first read, filled me with joy.

When we’d had our fill of Santa Fe’s main square, we drove north on U.S. Route 285 to Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort and Spa. I’d planned to go to two spas today; this was the first. It had been renovated a bit since the last time we’d been there, in December 2005, and didn’t look quite so run-down. I don’t know how good the accommodations are, but the ten pools are unique: the outdoor Iron Pool, with a pebble floor that feels lovely on the feet; the cooler indoor Soda Pool, where I could stay for hours; the Mud Pool and two hot pools by it; the three private pools with kivas; and the swimming pool and associated hot pool. We had a good time there in the mud pool, as this picture of Todd shows.

But there was no dawdling for us. We headed north on 285 into Colorado and made a brief stop in Antonito at Silo Park. We dined at Trujillo’s in Alamosa, where Todd had filet and I had pasta. Then we drove north on state route 17 to Mineral Hot Springs, where Joyful Journey is located and I had reserved a yurt. We got there pretty late but were still able to soak before we went to bed.

Jeff's out pumping

2007-04-15T11:44:00.000-06:00

Sunday, April 29, 2007

We also soaked the next morning before Todd’s massage.

Joyful Journey is a very basic hot springs in some ways. It has only three pools, one of which (with the awning) has been so hot the two times I’ve visited that I can stay in it only a few minutes.

There are two other pools of varying temperature. The one nearest the main building is surrounded by columns.

The third is larger and shallower. Todd and I soaked in that pool, along with another couple, a rotund woman and a man with a short ponytail. He put his legs on a water noodle, and she wrapped her arms under his armpits and up his chest. She pulled him as close to her as she could and kissed his forehead.

All the pools (and the area around our yurt) have spectacular views of the surrounding scrubland and the Sangre de Cristos mountains. I did some birding while Todd was having his massage, enjoying the antics of a rock wren, among other birds.

After leaving Joyful Journey, we stopped at the Sangre de Cristo Café and Tradito Coffeehouse in Villa Grove, where I had to do some to-ing and fro-ing to get a latte. When we went into the café and asked about coffee drinks, the person behind the counter said, “Jeff’s out pumping propane, but we’ll have him make a latte for you.” (I guess that makes him a Renaissance man.) I got my latte and then an hour or so later we had lunch at the Thai Mini Café in Poncha Springs. From there it was back to Denver and the monumental task of unpacking and washing all my crap.

Why is it that vacations always end in so much work?

I guess it’s because I don’t have servants to do the job for me!

Here's a link to a map of my journey. Click on "Beth's April 2007 birding trip." I'm not sure why I can't link to it directly--I've never created one of these Google maps before.

Where, indeed?

2007-04-12T21:09:00.000-06:00

Here's some righteous anger from Lee Iacocca. It's from his new book,
Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

I particularly like, "'Stay the course?' This is America, not the damned Titanic."

5 Things you don't know about me

2007-04-08T20:19:00.000-06:00

I've been tagged by Jer, so here goes:

1. One of my nicknames as a child was Little Whale. I have no idea why.

2. The only things I've had removed from my body are wisdom teeth and moles. And when the mole is on the foot, boy, do those needles hurt!

3. My mother and the Queen of England have the same birthday: April 21, 1926. And my mother's mother was born on August 4, the same day as the late Queen Mother. Hey, maybe they should adopt me.

4. That same grandmother spent part of her childhood in a Catholic orphanage. One of the things I regret most is that I can't remember ever talking to her about it or asking her what her childhood was like. Maybe I did--maybe I just forgot.

5. Sad love stories are the only ones that seem true to me.

Long live Radio Paradise! Die, Clear Channel, die!

2007-04-08T19:32:00.000-06:00

Check out this petition for Internet radio.

And while you're at it, listen to Radio Paradise. It's an awesome station.

And if you still can't stop, check out Transmitters Uniting the Peoples of the Americas.

You dig

2007-03-28T19:48:00.000-06:00

Here's my latest gardening article from the Rocky Mountain News.

April chores key to a good season

Cautionary tales for rich white people

2007-03-26T19:18:00.000-06:00

OK, catching up on the blog here.

I went to see Bill McKibben, who wrote The End of Nature and just published Deep Economy, speak in Boulder tonight. His audience was old white people from Boulder, not one of whom I recognized. That shocked me. I thought at least one person from Wildlands Restoration Volunteers would be there, or maybe the Nature Conservancy, but no. I felt almost young in this audience.

McKibben was the first to write about global warming (in The End of Nature) for laypeople. He says that in all the years he’s been studying the issue, he noticed that scientists have become increasingly panicked. Regular people are beginning to take notice, but they’re not panicked yet. I wonder what it will take?

At the end, I got up and asked him if anybody had been exploring options for keeping the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets from melting. He answered me as if I were crazy. But after he said that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise ocean levels several meters, should it melt, I thought it was an eminently practical question. Why NOT try to keep the Arctic ice from melting?

After all, the global warming we’re seeing now was caused by events decades ago. It’s going to take us decades to get emissions to zero. So we’re going to be warming the globe for a good many years. I think we should do something now to preserve the glaciers and ice sheets we have left.

Ski shit and die

2007-03-22T09:59:00.000-06:00

Do corporations live in the real world?

This news item made me wonder. And those of you who like to ski and snowboard should sit up and take notice. Where else in the country do you suppose they’re trying to make snow from effluent?

9th Circuit Court of Appeals Rules for Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe in San Francisco Peaks Case

The Arizona Snowbowl resort wanted to expand a ski area into an alpine ecosystem on the San Francisco Peaks—hence the lawsuit from the Indian tribes.

But what they also wanted to do was make snow from treated sewage that would be piped in 15 miles from the Rio de Flag wastewater treatment plant and stored in a 10 million gallon storage pond. Just what I want near my ski resort or sacred site—a big lake of treated shitwater! Hey, kids, let’s go skate on frozen shit lake!

Some of the language in the decision makes me wonder how the judges could have written it with a straight face: “We conclude that the [tribes] have shown that the use of treated sewage effluent on the Peaks would impose a substantial burden on their exercise of religion,” the court said. “This showing is particularly strong for the Navajo and the Hopi.”

And then there’s this little tidbit (pun intended): The court also found that the Forest Service “neither reasonably discusses the risks posed by the possibility of human ingestion of artificial snow made from treated sewage effluent nor articulates why such discussion is unnecessary.”

It's one thing to spray effluent onto a field, where it can sink into the soil, mix with it, maybe fertilize it. But who wants to ski through powder made from this stuff?

True love

2007-03-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I had the best hot dog of my life.

I went to Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs on Colfax and fell in love with the California dog.

It has romaine lettuce, people! Romaine! And I loved it, the taste and the texture.

Oh, and cheese and tomatoes and grilled peppers. And spicy mustard, which is the only kind that should be allowed in the world.

Don’t get the fries, though. They were like bad McDonald’s fries, only three times as expensive.

Akumal Journal

2007-03-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

We get up early to heat to Akumal for some diving. Our plane is full and delayed. I sit next to Elmer and his wife, who is sensitive to perfume and the smell of some foods. I hope my beef sandwich doesn’t bother her. we got into Cancun and went through Customs, which didn’t take nearly as long as in November 2004, when we traveled to Akumal with Todd’s parents, Matt and Rachel and Elliot and Kristina, and Kent and his friend to spend Thanksgiving in Mexico.

We stepped out of the airport and there was a huge crowd of men holding signs with company names or names of people. It was a very male-dominated place—I’ve felt that other places in Mexico. As we walked through the airport, almost all the employees in the booths were male—there was the occasional woman. We got picked up by a guy from Akumal Vans, with whom Todd had previously made a reservation, and he drove us to the headquarters. Then a woman drove us to Akumal in a car. It took 1.5 hours from arrival to Akumal. I tipped her $20. I asked her about work, and she said she’d been working since 7 am—and she wouldn’t get back to Cancun from this trip until 6—a long day.

A work crew was widening the road at Akumal, and she had trouble finding the exit. Finally, we did.

We are in room 301 of the Vista Del Mar hotel in North Akumal, which is owned by a man who lives in New Mexico. It is near Akumal Dive Adventures, Mango Café, and La Buena Vida restaurant, which he also owns (those who stay at the hotel get a discount on dive rentals at ADA). It has a narrow road that is pitted with potholes in places and paved with pavers and cement in others (in front of really nice houses with “No Trespassing” signs). There are always short men working on the road (the Mayan/Mexican men I meet are almost all my height or shorter). The maids were white dresses with square, scalloped necklines and bright embroidery. They look Mayan. Todd and I were discussing the racial hierarchy here and where mestizos fit in. I told him that Mexico had much more of a mestizo culture than the United States. There is a even a monument in Akumal to a man who formed the first Euro-American family in 1511: Gonzalo Guerrero, from Palas de Noguer, Spain. He was shipwrecked near Akumal Beach and ending up marrying Xzazil, a Mayan princess.

The first night we walked into Akumal, about a mile, and stopped by the Centro Ecologico de Akumal. They had a silent auction in progress. It reminded me of the events Eco-Cycle used to throw, except CEA had Mexican vacations and stuff. Then we went to eat at La Cueva del Pescador, where we ate and had yummy shrimp tacos in November 2004. Both of us had shrimp: I had Camarones Tequilas and Todd had Camarones Diablos (a?). Then we walked home.

I slept pretty well the first night, but Todd had to get up and close the doors to the balcony because the sound of the surf kept him awake. I woke up Thursday morning at 6, which is 5 pm Denver time.

Our room is only about 10 by 10 feet. It has a white ceiling with a fan and a blue wash on the walls. Everything is tiled, which makes it easy to clean the floors. Bathroom: tile on floor, smaller, beige tile on wall, patterned tile as border. Warnings about the septic tank and the amount of time it takes hot water to reach the room. In reality: less than a minute. The showers were usually too hot.

2007-03-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

Thursday, February 22, 2007

I was tired all day and a little nervous because I hadn’t been diving in 8 months. We set up our stuff and they hauled the heavy stuff out to the boat. José and Lupé would put on 1 BCD and throw another one up on their shoulders. It was impressive. The boat is a long, narrow motorboat—perhaps 20 feet long—not as long or as wide as the dive boats at Andros. It had 1 motor, not 2, like the Andros boats. Instead of climbing down from the dock onto the boat, we picked our way over the coral and rocks, which feel sharp through the booties, hook 1 leg up over the boat, and pull ourselves in. Then we find our stuff and sit down by it.

They motor slowly out of Half Moon Bay (Akumal Bay has the Akumal Dive Shop) and out into the ocean a little way. They never go very far. They slow ride out does tend to make me queasy, however.

Our first dive was to La Tortuga reef, and indeed we did see a turtle. The leader was Lupé. There was a couple—the woman had long, chestnut-colored hair—a man named Vinizio or something like that, and Todd and me.

They stopped the boat and briefed us on the dive—how we get in, how deep (80 feet), how long we’ll be under water, how to stay down until we reach 700 psi, and then to go up and do a 15-minute safety stop. We put on our masks and fins and they held our BCDs for us. Then we propped our butts up on the edge of the boat—I felt a strong jerk as the 40-pound tank dropped down my back—and then I leaned back and fell into the water. My left hand hit someone as I went in. Then I saw that the woman with chestnut hair had a free-flowing regulator. She kept hitting it with her hand and the DM finally told her to use the second stage instead. Then we descended.

Compared to Andros, Akumal reef has vast expanses of sand. I assume that if it were a sign of degradation, there would be more bleached and damaged coral. But I don’t see any bleaching—just lots of brown coral. Perhaps it looks less colorful because it’s a cloudy day. I saw a turtle and a ray. I see elkhorn coral.

Then the boat goes back to the bay (faster than it went out), we sit a while. I consider just doing the one dive, but Todd wants to dive again, so we go out to Yool Canal. Todd said he was a little bored, but I liked it well enough. I would have liked to spend more time hovering by cleaning stations, but this was a follow-the-leader dive. Saw flounder, plus a fish with the same coloring that rested on the bottom, about 8 inches long, with yellow/gold stripes.

Todd and I have been practicing our ascents and are doing rather well. We tend to go up and down a bit too much, but we were able to do our safety stop at 15 without (without hanging onto a line, as we did in Andros), without too much of a problem.

I felt queasy after this dive and had to rush to the bathroom to poo. I had eaten bread all day—chocolate muffin, cookies for a snack and for lunch, and watermelon juice. All day I burped watermelon juice. The word for watermelon in Spanish is “sandia.”

I was so tired after this dive I just wanted to lie down, so I did, and Todd went to La Buena Vida for lunch. About 3 or so I went to the dive shop to get my sunglasses, which had left in the boat. I hung around for a while and then went back to the room, waking up Todd in the process. Then I went to the dive shop and Lupé was there. He said the fishing was bad. They didn’t catch anything. He was kind enough to wade out to the boat and get my glasses. I had been afraid to earlier because my shoes weren’t stable enough to go to rocks and I didn’t want to go barefoot and I couldn’t get to my scuba booties because the dive shop was locked.

I took many pictures of a pelican sitting on the Akumal Dive Adventures boat. Then I went back to the room and we got ready to go to the CEA gala. We got there at 6:30. I became annoyed with Todd because he was leading me all over the place in my white sandals and my feet hurt. When we got to the gala at Lol-ha restaurant, the bidding was over. We were disappointed—we had wanted to bid on some photographs. I got a rum and pineapple juice and then we went to dinner at Lol-ha. There were paintings with a cubist flavor on the walls. I wasn’t sure if they were prints or originals. One was of a forbidding face streaked in paint (like war paint). There were long ribbons of cream-colored fabric hung from the rafters that formed billows and twists. It is an airy, breezy place.

I had carne tampiquena (what’s in that anyway?) and a green salad, which seems not to have bothered me. I had merlot and Todd had pinot grigio.

During dinner, a couple entertained us with Latin dances (I had no idea which dance they were doing—maybe the website for CEA says?). They were great. She did splits, cartwheels, etc. They were beautiful to watch. They were dancing on a stage, in front of a screen on which were projected pictures from CEA (turtles, staff, etc.), draped by the same kind of fabric hanging from the ceiling.

Then we paid the rest of the bill and went into the snack bar, which is outside by one of two bars and the beach (with its private property sign. I had chocolate mousse cake and Todd had tres leches cake. My cake tasted as if it had been brought in frozen. Then Bandikoro began to play—they’re an African percussion band with two women. It was the first band Todd had ever seen that had 2 marimbas. They played percussion for a while and then switched to more of a dance sound.

The pair who danced earlier got up to dance. By now it had become obvious that they were married because their son was with them. Their dancing to Bandikoro was equally impressive, though they didn’t have room to do things like splits. At one point, the woman’s hair extension fell off—she actually had only neck-length hair—and she shrieked and her friends shrieked almost as loud with laughter. Later the husband danced with one of her friends, who also seemed pretty good, and tried to teach a white girl to dance Latin-style. Todd and I got up to dance and I tried to do a cumbria box step of sorts. Mainly it made my calves hurt.

2007-03-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

Friday, February 23, 2007

We skipped the morning dives and walked in Akumal. It was hot. We took our laundry to the lavanderia, where we’ll pick it up at 6 on Saturday. Then we went to Ixchel Boutique to spend the gift certificate we won at the CEA gala. It was a woman’s boutique, so I bought a pair of black silk shorts.

Then we sat on the sand in the shade of some palm trees, near the Akumal Dive Shop. Some men asked us if we want to go fishing or snorkeling. I didn’t remember people accosting us like that in 2004. I didn’t like it, but I simply said, “No, gracias.”

We had forgotten to bring a towel. We could have sat in a beach chair near Lol-ha, but we would have had to pay for it. There was a “Propriedad Privada” sign on the fence surrounding the snack bar. It made me angry that all this development for tourists like myself could cut off the locals’ access to the beach. They should be like Hawaii, which makes all beaches public beaches, whether there’s a resort on them or not.

We walked out on the pier, which was public, and took a picture of the cannons that once guarded Akumal from pirates. We couldn’t get to them because that would have required crossing private property.

Just when I was starting to get grumpy in a “Yeah, I’ll come here but I’m going to be disapproving anyway,” stupid sort of way, a group of disabled adults children and their caretakers came to the beach and sat under trees to our left. It was a small area, so they were really crowded in there. Some of them went down to the boats to go snorkeling, I think, or swim in the small swimming area. Beyond that perhaps 20 boats are anchored, more than were here in 2004. People snorkel among those boats, but that seems dangerous to me. I saw a man with 1½ legs in a wheelchair, a woman, her feet turned out severely, using a walker, some Down syndrome kids. They were like a breath of realism into the white tourist enclave that is Akumal.

As we walked to La Loncheria, a diner type of lunch place, we passed the white van those people must have arrived in, marked “DIF,” no doubt for the government agency that was taking them on this beach outing. La Loncheria is a little dive at the end of a Mexican-style strip mall (or, at least, the Maya Riviera type of strip mall) that serves great food. I had chicken tacos and Todd had chicken enchiladas with salsa verde and what passes for sour cream here, and we both had limonata (limeade).

Afterward, we went to the two grocery stores in Akumal, Chomak and Mercado de Akumal, which was much smaller. (Chomak is right next to La Loncheria.) Later in the week, the Mercado would mysteriously close for two days, and there was an official-looking “Clausurado” sign on the door, which must mean something like “closed by the authorities,” instead of the more usual “cerrado” (closed). There was also a sticker that I thought might have something to do with a union, since it had a name on it beginning with “Trabajadores” (workers). Then we took a taxi back to Vista Del Mar. I rested for a while and then went and found Todd near the dive shop.

The dive on Friday afternoon was to Las Redes (the nets), where we went on our first and third dives in Akumal. I was amazed by all the fish—I had remembered Akumal dive sites as being rather barren. We saw a huge black grouper, a turtle resting on coral, a lobster, 2 rays. The others saw a squid, but my mask was hard to see through—damn defog! It’s supposed to keep my mask from fogging up like a car windshield on a cold night, but it just makes my mask dirty. I had to keep letting water in my mask and clearing it so I could see things.

When we reached the surface, I had trouble getting into the boat. I got my weights up all right, but I couldn’t get out of my BCD. Plus I swallowed some seawater while switching from my regulator to my snorkel. We had to wait a while at the surface until the boat came around, and finally I starting floating face-down in the water instead of trying to keep my head above water because my inability to do so made me feel panicky.

When we got into shore, I asked José what to do. He said I should unhook one of my shoulder clips and then undo the waist clip and Velcro belt. Then it would be easier to slide out of it.

After the dive, I spoke with Shaleh, the instructor (that’s a higher level than dive master), if things had changed much in Akumal in the 9 years she’d been there. She said, yes, lots of development. She said the guy who ran the hotel had a hard time getting the dive shop permits. Akumal Dive Shop (in the main part of Akumal) didn’t want another dive shop nearby. They said Half Moon Bay was a protected area and that there shouldn’t be boats coming in and leaving oil and gas residue in the bay (tourists are asked to snorkel in shirts instead of using sunscreen because it damages the coral). But finally the owner got the permits.

We cleaned up after the dive and headed to La Buena Vida for a snack. We had avocados stuffed with ceviche, which is fish (or possibly meat, I’m not sure) “cooked” in lime juice. It was really good. I had a shot of 1800 tequila anejo, which I thought was a little harsh.

La Buena Vida is situated only a few feet from the water. There are long tables outside where groups can sit, or you can sit on stools in the cement or on a swing. There is also an upstairs dining room with high ceilings under a thatched roof and metal outline sculptures of a swordfish and a shark. There are metal sculptures at the door of horse skeletons with gas flames rising around them. It is almost always filled with white people and playing Bob Marley.

After spending some time in the room (I wrote in this journal and he surfed the web—the hotel has decent WiFi), we went to La Lunita for dinner. It’s farther down the North Akumal road toward Yal-ku Lagoon, which is a popular snorkeling place where fresh and saltwater mix. All the outside tables at La Lunita were taken, so we sat just inside the door, but it was still really windy. To my left was a small outdoor pool done in tile.

We had a spinach mushroom soup (50 pesos) and a Jicama, Beet, Carrot, and Cucumber Salad with Balsamic and Honey Reduction (50 pesos). They serve little crusty rolls of wheat bread that are hot and delicious. I had a shot of Centenario anejo, which I liked better than the 1800. I ordered Plantain and Walnut Stuffed Chicken Breast with Mole Poblano for my main course (135 pesos), and Todd had langostinos (langoustines; a type of shellfish between shrimp and lobster in size). I like the salad better than I liked the soup—there was something a little strange about all the spinach. Todd had a little trouble getting the meat out of the shells with his knife and fork. They didn’t give him anything to crack the shell. I liked the taste of the mole; it was smokier than I’ve ever had before because of the roasted chiles. We had a dessert that I wanted to have again—frozen bananas coated in chocolate ganache with chocolate ice cream.

La Lunita was the first truly upscale restaurant I’d been to in Mexico. But the waiters aren’t as solicitous there. They never come back and ask you how you like the food. I guess they figure if you don’t like it, you’ll complain.

2007-03-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

Saturday, February 24, 2007

We did 2 dives this morning, to Horseshoe Reef and Motorcycle Reef. At Horseshoe, we saw 2 rays, a turtle in coral and a turtle at the surface, an eel that I barely glimpsed, and lots of other fish. One diver got stung by a small jellyfish and her neck got all red and swollen. She and her husband were the second couple we met from Montreal. The first Quebecois we met, Guy, spoke English, French, Spanish, and enough Italian to get around Italy without using any other language.

My computer kept beeping during this dive because apparently I was breathing too fast. I also had to make a deco stop (decompression stop) because we went to 84 feet for longer than my computer thought we should. Instead of hanging in the water like a barracuda, I flailed quite a bit and kept ascending and descending a few feet.

Our second dive was to Motorcycle Reef. We saw 2 barracuda—I thought they were eyeing me and kept glancing at them nervously. Most of the barracuda we’ve seen in Akumal are 1 to 2 feet long, but I did see one in 2004 that looked to be 3 or 4 feet in length. None of them has ever bothered me, but I’m not willing to approach one. I think that would be like approaching a cougar or a bear.

I saw a turtle eating coral—I wonder if it’s a regular part of their diet or they need the roughage?—with 2 small yellow remoras attached to its back. It swam up and the remoras eventually fell off. We saw another turtle in coral and so many other kinds of fish that I lost track.

The sun came out as we reached the dirt bike in a patch of sand that gives this reef its name. It shone down on it, making it into some ghostly presence that seemed about to take off into the distance. Apparently somebody dumped this bike into the reef, and when somebody diving down there sees that it has fallen down, they set it upright again.

On both dives I got out of my BCD more easily. I didn’t feel queasy at all after the first two dives—I guess I got used to the motion of the boat going up a wave and then falling down into the trough.

Diving is sometimes a pain in the ass, especially when I’m not excited about carrying a 40-pound tank on my back, but it’s also wonderful and a huge challenge. I’m always learning from it. I wonder when I’ll feel that I really know what I’m doing. I’ve done 28 dives so far, and I don’t feel that way, especially about buoyancy control. In any case, it isn’t at all what I expected. I think I thought it would be like some transcendent experiences I’ve had in nature in the past, but it’s much more demanding than going on a hike, mentally and physically.

There was a great wind today and a lot of whitecaps in Half Moon Bay as a write this. There are also many people snorkeling in the bay. A boy walked by with black curly hair like that of a Greek god and dark skin, except where and coated his feet. A great-tailed grackle perched on the thatched roof of a hut, sounding like a rusty hinge.

2007-03-01T20:53:00.000-07:00

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Today we dove Hidden Worlds—the Bat Cave and Dos Ojos. I spent a lot of time tensing up my shoulders and worrying about buoyancy. I bumped the top of the caves in a couple of places and had a buoyancy issue for some reason. I think I was bothered a little by diving in an enclosed place. The stalactites (hanging from roof) and stalagmites (growing from the bottom) were amazing, including one that looked like a mother and child. On the second dive, we swam through a shallow place where people were snorkeling. In the light their bodies looked like quicksilver. I saw a swimmer who was missing part of a leg, just like the man I saw on the beach a few days before.

There was a rusty blue ladder down into the cenote, but that was only one of many openings. The dive masters hauled the tanks up and down on ropes. One of them, Matthew, was Shaleh’s son. Our dive master was Juan Carlos. He gave Todd and me and George and Christine (a British couple) a long lecture about not stirring up sediment or damaging the environment. I wonder how many times a day he can dive the caves.

There were strings everywhere (like some Mexican version of Tom Sawyer) tied to rocks to mark our routes. We often encountered other groups of divers (four was the maximum per group). We signaled each other by swimming our lights steadily up and down, up and down against a wall. If we were signaling “OK,” we would swing the lights in a circle. A light swung really fast meant an emergency.

I don’t know why I didn’t like it more. Todd said he felt very relaxed.

We went to La Buena Vida for dinner. I had Pollo Pibil, a Mayan dish in which chicken is coated with a red, rather smoky sauce, and Todd had the catch of the day, which was, of course, grouper. Even though I don’t eat grouper in the United States because it’s overfished, I’ll eat it in Akumal because I figure they’ve caught it there with a hook and line rather than some more destructive method of fishing.

There’s a nice breeze on our balcony tonight, unlike the gale last night. It seems to be windier in February than in November. The waves in Half Moon Bay seem to come in threes. The third is the biggest and most definitive.

2007-03-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Monday, February 26, 2007

Today it was too choppy to go diving. We snorkeled in the bay in the morning and afternoon, but it was hard to see because of all the sand in the water. I did swim in a school of smallish fish—possibly snapper. There were a lot of them, and the pelicans and the terns were feasting on them. I saw black urchins near the few rocks in the bay, a pufferfish, some black fish, and brain coral.

We rented two ancient 1-speed bikes and rode into Akumal and ate Lucy’s famous shrimp tacos for lunch. We also had two of her empanadas, which were good. They had a problem with their electricity, so we didn’t get to try her homemade ice cream. We tried to exchange money, but the exchange was closed, so we went to Turtle Bay Café and got chayagua/chayagra (a drink from a local plant that tastes green and sweet) and ice cream. Then we rode back home.

Pretty much all we did this entire week was dive, eat, sleep and get from one place to another.

We went back into town later to get our laundry and discovered that the Mercado de Akumal was closed. We went to pick up our laundry, and the woman joked, “No ticket, no ropas” (clothes). I asked her why the market had closed and she would only say, “Problemas.” I wonder if that meant, “None of your business!”

We took a taxi to Akumal Pueblo (across the highway, where many of the workers live). The car’s windows were dirty inside and out and the driver had Mexican music on really loud.

We went to El Ultimo Maya for dinner. The menu didn’t look very “Mayan” and the waitress didn’t speak English. She took our order, but then she came back and kept saying something about “veinte minutos” (twenty minutes) that we couldn’t quite understand. When I said to her, “Le entiendo” (I don’t understand you), she kept repeating herself. It didn’t occur to me until that I should have specified that I didn’t understand certain words she was saying because I don’t speak Spanish very well. This dinner really taught me how poor my Spanish is. Eventually we got our food—possibly even sooner than 20 minutes. The shrimp cocktail was good, the fajitas were average, and Todd’s rice milk with tamarind was good.

Afterward, we walked back down the hill to the taxi station. It was a very different atmosphere from the other side of the highway. Here I really felt like a foreigner. I’d like to have spent time there in the day, but I wouldn’t want to go there alone at night, with all the (rather short) men hanging out on street corners.

2007-03-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

We rode our bikes to Yal-ku lagoon and snuck in the back way, by someone’s house. There were lots of fish—several silvery species, including one with black tails; fish with yellow fins all around, rainbow-colored fish that looked like there were wearing lipstick, a dark fish with orange side fins and purple one on top, a trumpet fish, a barracuda, and a big brown-black grouper just hangin’ on the bottom. there was a school of inch-long fish, perhaps the ones we swam through so long ago in Akumal on our first visit. There was another school of much larger fish, which were slender and long and had black tails. They kept swimming one way and then doubling back on each other.

The water sounded like it was crackling. Todd thought it might be the sound of water seeping into the lagoon from the groundwater. All I know is that it was different from the sound I hear while diving, which sounds like a boat engine going over but must be the sound of the waves on the surface, 60 or more feet above us.

We had a veggie burger and a smoothie for breakfast at Mango Café. Then we set out on the 11 o’clock dive.

It was my best dive ever in Akumal. We went to Sponge Reef and dove to 80 feet because the surf was so high. When the boat was going out, sometimes a lot of water slopped over the side. We dove with three other men—two Scotts and a Bob. One of the guys said he had been certified years ago but hardly ever dove. That turned out to be a bad thing for him because apparently he didn’t remember much of his training.

I was amazed by all the sponge coral (which look like vases) and all their sizes and colors. Other sites in Akumal had only the black sponge corals, and I wasn’t even sure if they were sponge coral because they were almost closed at the top. There were lavender ones and orange ones and more greenish ones. I even saw a patch of bright green coral. There wasn’t really any elkhorn coral at this site, though I did see staghorn. This coral was more the mounding type, at times 15 feet tall. We saw a small barracuda, which followed Todd for a bit, a porcupinefish, a small puffer, a green moray, and a turtle in coral. There were tons of other fish. As we went on, the coral became less varied and there were more patches of bleaching and more coral debris, probably caused by Hurricane Wilma in the 1990s. I liked this landscape—lots of coral canyons.

Two of the Scotts/Bobs blew through their air in about 20 or 30 minutes and had to go up. Then they sat in the waves for 10 minutes and got sick.

When I got back to the dive shop, I discovered I’d been diving with 14 pounds. I’ll have to add checking that the dive shop has given me the right amount of weight to my list of things to do before a dive.

After the dive, we rode our bikes into Akumal and ate at La Loncheria. Some man on a four-wheeler said something to me as I rode along, but I couldn’t understand him. Todd had choc-puc (Mayan pork) and I had res asado con mole (grilled beef with mole sauce). It was good, less smoky and more spicy than at La Lunita. Then we rode back to the hotel to have our massages. My masseuse was named Mirea and grew up in Mexico City. I didn’t realize it had a population of 22 million. She said the holidays were the best time to visit because there are fewer people then (maybe they leave the city to go home to their towns?). She lives in Playa del Carmen but works in Akumal and prefers Akumal to Mexico City. She learned massage at a spa in Playa del Carmen and then went to school in Tulum and took a five-month course.

I told Mirea I was a copyeditor and she said I had the “same energy” as a friend of hers who writers for newspapers in Mexico City.

Now I’m writing as I sit on the balcony, which faces east, so evening is a good time to sit here. The terns fly by, whistling royally. The pelicans dive, doing somersaults as they bills touch the water. I think they are all playing in the last rays of the setting sun.

We went to La Lunita again for dinner (lalunita@prodigy.net.mx). There is a sign on the street indicating the restaurant, but it’s across the street in a hotel. You follow the signs to the back and there it is, a small white room with a patio in back and a bar separating the main room from another room. There is an outdoor pool off to the right. It is always crowded—Todd and I decided that if we eat there again we’ll make reservations. It had beige imprinted tiles on the floors and 1 wall. The other walls are finished in a rough plaster, probably on some type of cement-block construction. There is Mayan-themed art on the walls.

I got Filete de Boquinete con Mantequilla and Almendras (140 pesos). The waiter said that was snapper. Todd had crusted salmon with tomato sauce. I asked the waiter where the salmon came from, and he said the Pacific. We had the chocolate-covered frozen banana with ice cream and pecans (45 pesos) again, but because they stuck us in a hot, dark corner (we had to use a flashlight to read the menu) and neglected us for a while, we weren’t as happy with dinner this time. I kept thinking how my legs in the too-tight pants were either like sausages or very similar to the bananas coated with chocolate, and also how it looked like there were two turds in raspberry sauce on the plate. Then I started thinking about how much weight I had gained on this trip and how all the tourists in Akumal and most of the workers are fat. Then I realized that everyone in this restaurant was white (except the staff) and that I’d seen only one black person on this trip.

So it's probably a good thing we're going home tomorrow.

Fashion forward

2007-02-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

I felt a strange sensation yesterday as I settled into the car seat on the way to another of Todd's movie shoots.

A cool sensation.

So I stuck my hand under there and, sure enough, found a hole in my jeans.

Of course, it's my favorite pair.

As soon as I told Todd, he started mocking me for my expensive taste in jeans.

"Oh, I buy a pair of $40 jeans that last for years, and yours cost $200 and last for a month!"

So I pointed out that these were the cheap jeans, at $50, and that I'd never paid $200 for a pair. Yet. I buy all the expensive brands on sale. Plus, those expensive jeans are made in the mainland USA. Nobody's being forced to take $3 a day or have an abortion because pregnant women are not allowed to sew.

Maybe those great guys in the Marianas Islands are afraid the babies might jinx the machines.

Anyway...

All afternoon long I was bending over to pick stuff up, set stuff up, and ripping my jeans even more. By the time we went to dinner, I had to hold my purse in a strategic location. The hot pants look just doesn't go over well in February.

But actually, I think they will make a cool pair of shorts for this summer. Which I need.

Hypervigilance

2007-02-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

So I bent over on Sunday (hey, you with the dirty mind, I was getting something out of a file), and my back seized up.

Some people say their backs "went out." Mine doesn't go anywhere. It's like someone stuck their hands into my lower back and then clenched them really hard. Then I can't stand up straight, and I walk around like I've got something stuck up my butt for a few days. It doesn't hurt much; it's just really stiff.

The first time this happened, in 1995, it felt like a zipper was being zipped up across my back. That time, at least, I was doing something marginally cool: I'd decided that if I could do 75 pounds on the stomach machine, I could do 75 on the back machine.

That is so not true.

Having some minor health problem like this always reminds me, unfortunately, of the weird ways in which my mind works. Within a few seconds, I was imagining all the reasons I could have back problems.

Doctor: Well, I've read the MRI, and you have a spinal tumor. Generally, they're benign, but we'll have to do a spinal tap.

(Cut to me on a metal table, and some white-coated sadistic type sticking a two-foot-long needle into my back.)

The Doctor again: There are two options. We can remove it surgically, or we can try to manage it.

Me: Which do you recommend?

Doctor: People who've had the spinal surgery generally develop mobility problems later in life.

Me: How much later?

Doctor: Five years or so.

Me (a little desperately): What's the other treatment?

Doctor: It involves weekly injections into the tumor for about 6 months. That usually shrinks it to the point that it doesn't interfere with mobility.

(Cut back to the shot of the person with the big needle.)

I don't know if this reaction is genetic or has to do with years of waiting for some big fight to break out between my parents and one of my siblings. It can be amusing.

But right now, when I'm about to go on a diving trip where I have to hoist a 40-pound tank on my back, it's annoying.

Leftover dominatrix

2007-01-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Speaking of saving things, I made Todd eat leftovers for the second night in a row. I, personally, was saving myself for pie (see next post). So I go upstairs to work a little more and I hear him talking to the cat, in mournful tones:

“Rufus, you and I have to singlehandedly eat all the leftovers so that Beth and I can go out to dinner someday.”

Tonight he’s gonna get Bayou Bob’s greasy Cajun, so that should make his dieting ass happy.

Bush is so green

2007-01-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

So, I didn't actually listen to the State of the Union address last night, because I can't stand to look at Bush for that long (and my neighbors were having a party for National Pie Day anyway), but I heard he mentioned these words:

CLIMATE CHANGE

Probably he said them in hushed tones.

In case you're so motivated by the State of the Union that you want to do something, here's a commonsense list from Co-op America:

Twelve Steps

Just think of it as Alcoholics Anonymous for those of us with big houses and big cars (like me). Give yourself over to the higher power of biodiesel or wind or solar.

Hey dudes! Let's worship the sun!

It's that time of year again

2007-01-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Today is the 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade.

I think 2006 may have been a turning point in the struggle for women's reproductive rights. Pro-choicers stopped being on the defensive last year. Instead of running scared from the ridiculous South Dakota abortion ban, they came up with the innovative solution of having a referendum on the matter, and the people defeated it. I'm looking forward to lots more anti-choice measures being overturned soon and many more pro-choice measures, including comprehensive sex education, becoming the norm.

The anti-choicers will finally have to admit that giving our children information is the best way to keep them from getting pregnant before they're ready.

Here's a revised version of the article I posted here last year. It's a little more negative than what I said a couple of paragraphs up. It's good to see what difference a year can make.

However, I still think that women should take more control of contraception. It's not as if men are rushing out to use it, after all.

Into our own hands

by Beth Partin

So close to the thirty-fourth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, how long it seems since the spring of 2004, when I flew east to join the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., and felt briefly hopeful about women’s rights in this country. The more I consider the political landscape since then, the more I see how false that hope was and how urgently change is needed.

After Bush won reelection, I gave up on traditional methods of securing women’s reproductive rights. Since the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I have harbored grave doubts about the longevity of Roe v. Wade. And ever since pharmacists have started organizing for the right not to fill prescriptions, I’ve worried about the availability of birth control.

The Democrats’ victories in 2006 made me happy, but they did not change my mind about the state of reproductive rights in the United States. Let’s face it: since the 1980s, the Right has been gaining ground. I don’t see the Left gaining ground. Instead, I see members of the Left crossing over in order to win the enemy’s support. What kind of fight is that?

A better option for women would be for them to return to the basics of providing reproductive care for themselves, using some old methods and some new ones.

At first I thought of flashing pictures of women who’ve died from abortions to counter the pictures of fetuses. I wanted to organize a wave of righteously angry pro-choice women and men to drive so-called Christian protestors far from clinics and other public spaces. We’d herd them home and protest at their houses and businesses, do unto them exactly as they do unto abortion doctors. In 2006, Operation Save America posted fliers in Dr. Warren Hern’s neighborhood in Boulder and got away with it, so I thought, why not turn their methods on them and see if they’re flattered by the imitation?

But that would involve fighting on their terms. I cannot stress strongly enough that women who care about access to reproductive rights must cease to engage with the Right and make choice a reality, instead of waiting for the courts and legislatures to grant it.

We need to take abortion underground where protestors and legislators and prosecutors cannot find it. Wherever we take it, we need to keep it safe (whether it’s legal or not, whether Roe v. Wade stands or not). To do so, we need a network of doctors who will smuggle emergency contraception and RU-486 to women who need them, doctors who can teach medical residents and nurses in their area to perform safe surgical abortions, thus creating an ever-expanding network of abortion providers. Other people would be solicited to provide funding for these underground abortions and, at some point in time, money to purchase the contraceptive method of her choice for every American woman who cannot afford to pay for it herself.

These “clinics” would have to be highly mobile, not only to get services as quickly as possible to the women and girls who need them most, but also to avoid triggering state laws that criminalize transporting a minor across state lines for an abortion. They would need to be easily dismantled into their component parts, thus making them harder to track.

Why make this proposal?

Because I’m sick of the rhetoric and disgusted by the amounts of money spent by both sides since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was handed down. (I wonder how much health care for women all those dollars would have bought.)

And because I think that women should be making these decisions for themselves. We must get over the idea that we need permission from our government to exercise our right to choose.

And because I believe that in a few years, women will desperately need the service I propose. Some need it now.

We're in hot water

2007-01-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday Brothers Plumbing paid a visit to our house.

Todd and I seem to have an extraordinary capacity to let things go around the house. But we finally got tired of water leaking through the bathtub faucets and the general difficulty of getting hot water in the house.

We had them rebuild the faucets and check the water heater. Apparently the dip tube had completely corroded after more than a decade of use. So they fixed that, and now we can get hot water within a minute or less! I'd been wondering why our household water use had been increasing when I have every low-flow appliance you can think of in this house. I guess it was because you had to run the shower for 5 minutes to get any hot water at all.

Just to be safe, we also had them replace the valve in the shower, which was quite expensive. But that valve was put in when companies were scared of being sued by people getting boiled in the shower, so they were set to be cooler. As the plumber said, "You're not going to get cold showers now."

I think I'll be able to live with it.

I wish I were in one now

2007-01-16T20:49:00.000-07:00

I published my first travel article on Sunday, January 14, in the Arizona Daily Star. Check it out--it will probably be online until Friday or Saturday.

"Plentiful Hot Springs Delight Skiers"

That pool on the right, where one person is standing and one is sitting--that's about 114 degrees. It's a natural formation. You walk across a partially submerged bridge to get to it. It's one of the best pools in Colorado, I think.

The Pope considers the morality of murdering one’s spouse

2006-12-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a breathtaking article regarding what passes for moral thinking at the Vatican.

"Blessed are the Condoms"

The Pope is actually thinking that it's not OK to give your spouse HIV. Isn't that big of him?

Over Christmas I went to church with my in-laws to see my niece perform "Hark the Herald Angels Sing." I sat there in that nondenominational church thinking, "Beth, you really do need to get over the resentment you feel every time you attend a church service. Time to move on, hmmm?"

But then I read this article.

Breth continued

2006-12-28T22:04:00.000-07:00

You know, it just occurred to me that Microsoft STILL hasn't answered the original question:

How did you update my computer when automatic updates were turned off?

Sigh...

It's hard to fight da man.

Breth? Breth who?

2006-12-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

Here's the reply I got from Microsoft (my thoughts follow in square brackets, and the reply I made in an email is in curly brackets):

Hello Breth,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Online Customer Service.

I understand that you wish to know how the automatic update was installed on your computer, without prior notification. I realize the importance of your concern and would be glad to assist you.

[Hello, Breth: I am an automaton programmed to use nineteenth-century English. Or else I went to a public school in India dating to the British colonial era.]

As a Customer Service Representative, I would like you to know that if the automatic (recommended) has been selected in automatic updates tab, then it will download and install them on your computers automatically. Some updates require you to accept an End User License Agreement (EULA), answer a question about the installation process, or restart your computer before you can install them.

[Breth, a lot of stupid people use the Internet. Most of them don't know how to manage their security settings.]

{Dear Naveen,

I do understand that if I had Automatic Updates checked, then the updates would install.

In fact, I had another option checked--the one in which Windows is supposed to notify me of the update and give me a chance to install it. Therefore, I was surprised when I noticed my computer restarting--the updates had been installed automatically, even though that was not what I wanted.

Beth}[Subtle, wasn't it? Hey, Naveen, BETH is my real name!]

For more information on automatic updates, please visit the following link:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/
security/update/downloadinstall.mspx

I hope the above information is helpful. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for using Microsoft products and services.

Naveen
Microsoft Online Customer Service Representative

If you have any feedback about your Online Customer Service experience, please e-mail my manager, Abhijit Rao, at ocsmgrs@microsoft.com

[That would be mean, wouldn't it? Besides, Naveen didn't reply to my second email. Niyas did. What's with all these employees with N-names?]

I just went and followed the directions Niyas sent me. Nothing new there, except that I learned to get to the Control Panel by typing "sysdm.cpl" in the Run box.

Aw, gee, ain't computers wonderful!

Microsoft, my brother? Or my bother?

2006-12-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

I’m creeped out.

The other day I changed the updates on my computer so that I would be notified of updates but not subjected to automatic installs.

This morning, I find my computer restarting. Why? Because Microsoft installed some patch it considered more important than my preferences.

Which leads me to two conclusions: either Microsoft can override my preferences any time it wants, or somehow the preferences under “Updates” don’t stick.

Blogger comments!!??*#!!

2006-12-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Hey, Jer, I'd be happy to send you some stories. I tried to send you my email, but I couldn't manage to post a comment on your blog. It didn't like my Blogger username and password. Then I tried posting an anonymous comment, but it didn't like that either. If you're willing, could you leave your email address in a comment?

Or you could wait for me to post the stories on the web. That will probably take a couple of months. Up to you.

The seduction

2006-11-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the last session of my Advanced Short Story class, in which they discussed two of my stories. I had picked the last classto workshop two of the stories from my linked collection, "The Price of Silence."

One man said he was "entranced" by my character; two others said they were "blown away." The first story discussed was about abortion: it was interesting to me that the men liked it more than the women. Maybe the men feel intimidated talking about it and so can't criticize it as well? Anway, I have no idea how to fix the second story, which nobody liked as well, at this point, but I'm hoping their written comments will give me some direction.

I had planned to take all these stories and put them on a website, move on with my writing life, but this workshop seemed like a siren's call: oh, come on, you can get them published. Just try a little harder!

After sending out 70 submissions from this collection in 2005 and getting no publication offers, though, I'm not sure I want to go down that road again with. Maybe an unconventional approach will suit me better. In any case, it would be quicker than waiting for some graduate student at some literary magazine to read my stories.

I'm surrounded

2006-11-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

Dinner is long over.

The football game plays downstairs.

My loyalties are mixed, with Denver (where I live) playing Kansas City (where I grew up). Luckily, I am not enough of a sports fan to exercise myself over it too much.

Today began with a long walk to Stearns Lake with my inlaws, made longer by stops for birding. We saw two red-tailed hawks perching in barren trees, rafts of ducks on the lake, and a variety of sparrows. Not bad for late November.

Our dinner was untraditional in that the meat was pork, but it did include butternut squash and potatoes, both native to the Americas. We had a lovely wine, half semillion and half viognier, from a vintner in the Grand Valley. Definitely will get that one again.

We did our best to get all the food and drink for our dinner from within 100 miles (Treehugger's 100-Mile Thanksgiving Challenge). Right now we're in third place among all the entrants. We hope we stay there because then we'll get a $100 gift certificate as a prize.

Todd did the planning of the menu, and he did an excellent job.

I feel very peaceful. There was a hectic moment midday when we were making gravy and mashed potatoes and trying to determine what the hell was going on with the bread, but all in all the day was relaxing. That's the way holidays should be, I think. Not too much work on a meal that lasts only 45 minutes or so.

My blessings to all of you. The holiday season has begun. Enjoy the season of light.

All's right with the world

2006-11-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

Rufus has just haired me up and jumped off my lap so he can lick himself.

I meant to blog about the election, but now it's almost 2 weeks later. Here's my summary: Goodbye Pombo! (the guy who wanted to gut the Endangered Species Act). Goodbye Santorum! (the senator who was, in short, something of a freak. But at least he does like Lord of the Rings...) And Senator Inhofe won't be chair of a committee anymore. He has been described as the stupidest member of Congress.

Hello, John Hall! (He wrote "Still the One," which was recorded by the Orleans and is one of my favorite songs.)

And, to keep it local, Hello Dianne Primavera! She's my state rep. Now if we could only get rid of Shawn Mitchell, my state senator...but that will have to wait another 2 years.

I'm performing my semi-regular ritual of getting rid of all the little yellow stickies that have accumulated on my desk. They've been consolidated into one. That's what I consider getting organized.

Of course, it would all be a lot easier if I hadn't had that martini. At least I convinced Todd to cut the recipe down from 8 shots to 4. Otherwise, I would have been toast.

Some friends of ours went out Friday night to celebrate one of their birthdays. We joined them for a while and then left to see a movie. It was probably best for all concerned, because my husband and I can't hold our liquor, and we can't hear anything anyone says at bars anyway. But unlike at concerts, we're expected to converse. It's not that we're antisocial...we like our friends; we like parties; we like music. But put them all together at a bar... Somehow I keep thinking that if I try hard enough, I will be entertaining at a bar. This has been going on since I was a teenager, you understand.

What would King Missile say?

New digs

2006-10-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

Todd and I are thinking of moving into a cohousing project in Denver. We’d end up with less of our own space (probably half as much) and a bigger mortgage.

Insanity, you say?

Maybe. Who knows what form and size the mortgage will take. We don’t even have a unit design yet.

But I spend Sunday at a seminar designed to rectify that situation. We came up with the most pie-in-the-sky ideas you can imagine: a greenhouse, graywater incorporated into the project even though it’s illegal in Colorado, safe places for kids and dogs to play just a few minutes north of downtown Denver. I can’t even remember it all. The architects will take this list and turn it into condos and apartments.

Todd and I could end up with a space designed more for our needs instead of the needs of a family. We could end up with 360-degree views from a rooftop deck and a location a block from the Platte River and a decent walk or bike ride from downtown. Those thoughts make me happy.

It’s part of a new development called Taxi, in the River North district. Yesterday we were tossing around names for our part of it. Ted had suggested Cab, which I didn’t like, but then we came up with CaBooty, which we thought might be family-unfriendly, and Loco (you know, “Loco near Lodo”?).

The idea of leaving my garden makes me unhappy, however.

A new skin

2006-10-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

My house is dim today because of the brown paper taped over the windows.

Dami, who may be the first person from Mongolia I’ve ever met, was here prepping the house with his crew. I love the way he talks: his accent is definitely Asian, but his native language sounds more like Navajo to me than Chinese or Japanese, and he speaks very deliberately.

They painted the base color today, and I snuck out before dinner to look at it. It seemed quite blindingly white. We had a gray-based white before, and this time I thought I was going for more of a creamy white. I’m not sure if I like it yet. I’ll go out in the morning and look at it again, when the light is better.

Then tomorrow they have to paint the trim. Right now all the gutters are wrapped up—I asked them not to paint them because they’re new and it would void the warranty. The house looks quite ghostly, appropriate for Halloween.

The company doing the paint job is Eco Handyman. I heard of them from Boulder Green Building Guild.

They’re expensive, but so far they seem to be good.

The company that did the gutters is Accent Windows. They're a Westminster company that actually manufactures windows in Colorado. They claim that the gas in double-paned windows manufactured at lower altitudes expands at a mile high and may actually escape the window. Don't know if that's true, but it sounds possible. They also do gutters, siding, and doors.

2006-10-24T21:06:00.000-06:00

I’m on my usual pre-Christmas kick of buying holiday music. Found two CDs that seem pretty unusual, American Indian Christmas and Sacred Season. Get the info at Southwest Indian Foundation.

Recyclemania!

2006-10-24T21:03:00.000-06:00

Check out this blog for purses, belts, and jewelry made from recycled items!

Do androids...

2006-10-15T21:12:00.000-06:00

I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica, the new version—I never saw the original series. I don’t suppose that the “Androids got out of control and tried to destroy humanity” theme is all that original, but maybe it was when the series was conceived. I love what they’ve done with it, though. It’s cool that humanity has gone back to believing in multiple gods and that the Cylons, who at one point were trying to destroy humanity, believe in one god. It’s cool that their superior “air power” doesn’t enable them to prevail completely. One could even make the argument that the definitions of hero and antihero, terrorist and defender are turned on their heads in this series. I think, for example, of the moment when Sharon, a Cylon, is asked about being downloaded to a new body. She says, “Death becomes a learning experience.” And her point is, why wouldn’t anyone want that?

In the latest episodes, the Cylons have showed up on new Caprica and tried to do something, though it’s never clear quite what, with the remnant of humanity living there. It’s obvious to any viewer with half a brain that they’re the Americans and the humans are the Iraqis. The difference, of course, is that the Iraqis don’t have starships waiting to try to evacuate them. I wonder if they wish they did?

One of the blogs I read regularly is Baghdad Burning. In one of her last posts (dating from August) she said that everyone who can leave Iraq already has. Since she hasn’t posted for more than two months, I wonder if she left, if she died, or if she’s in hiding. Maybe her family got one of the bullets in the envelope that she mentions and had to leave their home. Or for all I know, she hasn’t been in Iraq for months or years. It’s difficult to know what’s behind any blog.

Is it autumnal?

2006-09-18T21:38:00.000-06:00

I just witnessed somebody else's near-death experience.

I was pulling out of the Broomfield park-n-ride, turning right, but there was someone turning left. That car went ahead and almost got run over by a bus that was just then turning into the park-n-ride. The driver waited for a moment, as if she thought the bus might get out of her way, and then backed up.

As we turned out of the park-n-ride, she was in the lane turning left onto Wadsworth, but she didn't pull up to the intersection. Instead, she stopped two car lengths back and sat there. I was about to turn right but hesitated. Then a bus pulled up behind her and a car pulled up behind me.

I put my hazard lights on and went over to her, apologizing to the people behind me on the way. I knocked on her window. It took her a minute to open it, and I asked, "Are you OK?" She didn't respond . Then I said, "Hey, you're blocking traffic," and she said something about blocking the bus and gave me a look that said I just didn't get it. Then she floored it through the yellow light.

I just hope she gets home without killing anyone.

The weird thing is, if she hadn't turned in front of that bus, I probably would have. I didn't see it until it stopped for her. So she very well could have saved my life, or at least saved me from getting into another wreck in the truck.

To the woman who is weirdly petulant toward buses: thank you.

The first wind of winter

2006-09-16T21:30:00.000-06:00

About the only thing I can't abide about Colorado weather is the wind we get up here in the winters. The land rises up from Boulder to Broomfield, and we're at the top of it, just where Rock Creek Farm open space meets Miramonte. Today we were getting nearly 50 mile an hour winds. We had to put the umbrella from the deck furniture in the garage, because even closed and tied, it was catching the wind and threatening to blow over and scrape more holes in the deck. We took my three plants in the huge pots and put them in the garage, where they won't get any light but at least they won't break or freeze tonight.

I have pepper plants and mint plants all over my kitchen, and a serviceberry that I haven't planted yet in the hall.

The wind makes me feel like I'm screaming inside, especially when it lasts two or three days in a row.

Last winter was especially windy. I hope this one is calmer and a LOT snowier.

***

I'm at home tonight, with Rufus on my lap and Todd downstairs, doing copyediting. I took too much work this month, but I'm enjoying every job. This particular book is about a Jew fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Not your usual image of Rebel soldier, is it?

Even though I hail from Missouri**, I don't consider myself Southern, so I had to go look up Battle Hymn of the Republic and sing a verse or two. Then I realized, what am I singing? Julia Ward Howe is saying that God is on the side of the Union.

I hate that kind of shit. The God I believe in is way above all that.

**See information online about the Missouri Compromise.

Endings

2006-09-13T10:59:00.000-06:00

I’ve decided not to renew my Krav Maga contract for another year.

It’s been two years of heavy metal music, torturous pushup drills, and choking. I’ve loved almost every minute of it.

But I need a break.

I have too much going on at night nowadays to be taking classes at dinnertime. Not to mention that fact that I typically eat a little before these classes, and then when I come home I’m ravenous. So I haven’t lost any weight, despite the intensity of the exercise. In fact, I gained 5 pounds last Thanksgiving and haven’t gotten rid of it.

But I did buy a standing punching bag, kick shield, and punching mitts for use at home. Now I can spend as much time as I want practicing my footwork while kicking and improving the strength and speed of my punches.

I may go back sometime, but probably not for a year.

Toasters Repaired

2006-09-13T10:50:00.000-06:00

I’ve just had one of those writing moments that makes it all worthwhile.

I was editing a poem that I first wrote four years ago. It’s a love story conducted by a cat, and I had always loved reading it to myself but hated reading it aloud. It’s mostly noun-verb-direct object sentences, which gets deadly boring in a reading.

But now I think I’ve fixed it so that it will read better. I’m going to memorize it so that I can give impromptu readings if I want, not be tied to a piece of paper with my oh-so-precious words on them.

The woman in the poem has power over electricity. Originally I had her fall in love with a groundskeeper, but then I hit on the idea of calling him “Groundsman,” to stand not only for the work he does caring for a park but also for his ability to ground her—because electricity that isn’t grounded is dangerous. I’ve been patting myself on the back all morning.

Now if I could just transfer this feeling to my fiction…

High on words

2006-08-10T21:52:00.000-06:00

High on words

I just got back from a kick-ass poetry reading.

Now I’ve been to many readings, and most poetry readings do NOT kick ass. Much as I love reading and writing poetry, I must admit that.

Usually I zone out after 5 or 6 poems, but these poets kept my interest for 2 hours. That’s amazing.

Several of the readers were friends of mine I met in local workshops, but there were two young readers tonight who inspired me. One rapped for us, which made me want to go home and trying my hand at it, and one read his poem in the style of Audre Lorde—that is to say, with a delivery somewhere between speech and song. If you haven’t ever heard Lorde read, I suggest going online and trying to find a recording.

To find out about local poetry readings, go to http://geocities.com/coloradopoets/index.html and click on Colorado Poetry Events.

Another cool thing about this reading was that several people asked me if I was going to read. That's always a nice feeling.

***

Earlier today, when I was driving home, Bryan Adams’s song “Summer of 69” came on the radio. I’m a sucker for anthems to youth, I guess—“Those were the best days of my life” always remind me of the months I spent in England in college. It’s the only time in my life I can remember being content to be exactly where I was—the only time I wasn’t looking to the future or to some other place.

Magic and disease

2006-08-08T22:51:00.000-06:00

I've just finished book 5 of the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card. It's titled "Heartfire" and it's got a romance novel cover, but it was a good book.

Ever since I read Tolkien when I was a teenager, I've loved books about worlds where magic is practiced. I especially like the Alvin Maker series because there are so many different kinds of magic: white people have "knacks" that let them do things like shape wood or stone; blacks use their power to create objects that contain their true names and just about anything else; and Indians use their power to maintain an identification with the natural world.

The problem I sometimes have with such books is that, as I've described above, they tend to essentialize the races: elves are one way, dwarves another; whites have this gift, Indians another, and so on. A teacher that I respected greatly called Tolkien a racist, and I can see his point, though I don't really agree. I do wonder, however, what Sherman Alexie would make of Orson Scott Card's "Reds": would he say the story of Tenkswatawa the Prophet and Tecumseh the warrior was romanticized? Just plain racist? He's on record as stating flatly that white people should not write about Indians.

***

Rufus is lying on the floor, looking so much like Puss in Boots from Shrek 2 that I want to laugh and go all Zorro on him.

***

Just found out that in the past 15 years, people have been publishing books about their experiences with polio. My father got polio when he was 9 months old, in 1926, and has had a bad leg all his life because of it. The woman he loves also had polio, though she had a different kind and I believe was in an iron lung for a while.

I was thinking of compiling a book of polio stories, but it seems that's already been done in some way or another, though I suppose the world could always use more. Two things fascinate me: the stories of how close we are to eradicating polio worldwide and the misunderstandings that prevented it in 2005; and the possibility of making a story out of my father's polio and the turmoil in his early life caused by his father. If I did edit a book, I'd call it The Last Generation, because that's what people like my father are and that's the generation of the babies in India and Nigeria being stricken now.

Let's get it off our chests

2006-07-31T08:44:00.000-06:00

I just went to a page on the Ms. Magazine website and signed a petition declaring that I'd had an abortion.

It's part of a campaign promote more honest dialogue on the subject.

Here's the link to the "We Had Abortions" campaign.

Oh goody for me

2006-07-26T13:31:00.000-06:00

I did something virtuous today.

I ordered a replacement saw blade for my hand saw instead of buying a new one.

The blade cost about $20, and the entire saw cost about $2 more. The shipping charges were $8.

Americans are never going to turn away from wastefulness until we make it more economical to repair something than to replace it.

Anyway, I've done my part today.

Nativescaping

2006-06-11T22:06:00.000-06:00

I call myself a writer, but one of the things I love most, the thing that I find easiest to do because it’s purely physical and involves only a little bit of design (I’m not especially gift in that area), is landscaping my yard. I want to turn it into a quarter-acre of low-water, native plant heaven. And I hope that since it’s on a park, people will see it and be inspired to rip out their bluegrass deserts.

OK, I don’t mean to be an anti-suburban, anti-grass snob. I’ve lived in suburbia most of my life.

What am I thinking?

OF COURSE I mean to be an anti-suburban snob. I fucking hate suburbia.

Yesterday I was visiting a limeade stand (that’s another story) in a fairly new suburban area in Lafayette. The houses were all the 3-car garage type (but at least the garages were on the side—I just love the “Hi, I’m a garage with living quarters attached” look), and they had tipped their hats to New Urbanism by adding xeriscape areas here and there. But the lawns were ridiculously huge, the kind you really want a riding mower for unless you get all your exercise from mowing. They were beautiful houses, but I just don’t see the need for all that space, inside or outside.

When I was studying at the University of Sussex in 1982, the Brits I knew used to tease me about everything being “bigger and better” in America. It’s funny how Americans are so obsessed with size.

I guess after the frontier went away in 1890, we brought it indoors.

A friend of ours is trying to get a cohousing project off the ground in Denver. Cohousing offers houses (usually smaller than the norm) clustered around a common area. There’s a common building where you can fix group meals or use whatever community equipment has been set up.

I like that idea. I love spending time planting buffalograss or native sages in my yard, but I’d be just as happy with a common area that I didn’t have to spend so much time on. I’d be happy with a smaller place to garden.

As it is, my yard has become something of an obsession. And it never looks as good as I think it should.

Marked

2006-05-31T22:23:00.000-06:00

I’m sitting here with a huge shiner under my left eye, courtesy of a woman named Jessica in fight class.

Heh. Two weeks ago I gave another Jessica a black eye. I guess it’s karma.

She and I were practicing ground fighting, and in the process of trying to get out, she elbowed me in the face. It hurts.

When James saw it, he gave me a high five. And another guy said if he wasn’t married, he’d hit on me because of the shiner.

I think I’m probably a little too proud of it.

Jessica asked the instructor if black eyes happened a lot in jiu jitsu, and he said, “Yeah, with beginners.”

A double meaning? Really?

2006-05-18T11:39:00.000-06:00

Here I am blogging when I should be working.

I'm doing a query integration (after the manuscript comes back from the author, the copyeditor goes over it again and enters the author's changes, responses to questions, and so on), and I like to listen to music while I do QIs.

I was listening to "Love Shack" and decided I just had to know what "Tin roof, rusted!" really meant.

Here's a link: Song Facts

Does it really refer to being pregnant?

I have to confess that until a few months ago, I thought the first word was "Hen-reeeeeeeee!" I can never understand song lyrics.

Compulsory gender

2006-05-15T11:51:00.000-06:00

Finally I'm going to reply to Callan's May 5 reply to my earlier entry about what "genderqueer" means.

In a comment, Callan wrote: "Transgender isn't rejecting male and female, at least not to me. To me, it's moving beyond complusory gender, accepting indvidual essence and choice over generalized rules about what males and females SHOULD do."

I couldn't agree more, but the problem is, gender is such an insidious thing, far more ingrained in the social fabric than race. I think that's why racial politics have changed more than gender politics since the 1960s.

I'm not sure how a person like me--as Callan said, "someone who feels that their gender is centered in their body, who feels normatively sexed/gendered"--can move beyond compulsory gender easily. I've always had what I thought were some unusual ideas about the roles men and women should play in relationships and society, and occasionally I wish I could switch to a male body so I could know what it feels like for a man to have sex, but that's about it.

Callan said: "Until you have seen your gender shift in the eyes of someone you are engaged with, like when the police officer sees your driver's license and stiffens, well, you don't know what it's like to feel the gender slip."

No, you're right, I don't. I do know what it's like to feel like a woman with a capital "W." By that I mean those times when a man tries to fit me into one of his fantasies about women when I'd really rather be doing something ordinary, like the laundry.

Take the time I was running an errand, trying to mail some letters at the Boulder post office, and two men standing nearby started discussing me. One of them thought I was cute, apparently. How unsexy it is to have a man start discussing me as if I were a piece of meat! Especially when it's dark out.

Both situations can produce fear. And I guess both situations involve somebody trying to impose perceptions on us. But I don't think mine fits into the "genderslip" category.

Maybe if I'd kicked them in the balls, it would have.

Back to Callan's post: I like the idea of feeling like both genders; it sounds wonderfully liberating, until you try to shoehorn it into the reality of everyday America.

Silver Screen

2006-05-15T11:05:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been dabbling in movies because my husband is pursuing a career as a sound man for film. I acted in one short film, "Seven Cups of Joe," that was directed by Patrick Sheridan as a Group 101 film. And I told Todd recently I wouldn't mind being his sound assistant on a future film. I don't know a damn thing about sound, so I figure I might as well start learning.

The other night the two of us went to see "The Goal," a film about quad rugby by a local director named Darla Rae. The movie itself wasn't that great--it had too much going on--but the story was inspiring. Not bad for a first feature.

I learned two things from this film:

1. Quads can die from urinary tract infections.

2. The wheelchairs for quad rugby are really cool. They have tilted wheels to improve balance, and the players are strapped in at the knees so that they can run into each other but not fall out of their chairs.

Recently another film came out on the same subject: Murderball.

At the movie screening, I also met Miss Wheelchair Colorado, Nichole Campuzane. I asked her what she had to do to win that title, and she said that she filled out an online application. In the competition, contestants are judged on their plans for advocacy and their speechmaking ability.

There's a quad rugby team in Denver. Go to the Harlequins site and scroll down to Quad Rugby.

Personally, I prefer Elvis

2006-05-12T09:52:00.000-06:00

Here I was, Friday morning, casually browsing the news before heading off to the Denver Botanic Gardens yearly plant sale, and so I decide to find out how Tony Snow is doing as Bush's spokesperson.

And then I was stopped dead by this paragraph in the article:

"For instance, one reporter asked about the government's abrupt end this week to an inquiry into a warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance."

I'm not sure I read that right. The NSA gets to decide who investigates it?

Under this president, apparently it does.

Oh, and just so you know, both the current president and his father think that Jeb Bush would make a fine president too.

Welcome to the monarchy, baby.

Here's the link: Snow Makes Solo Debut

What if it really came true?

2006-05-07T20:24:00.000-06:00

Watch this short film:

http://www.renewus.org/index.html

and tell me what you think.

Drowning in email

2006-05-04T11:24:00.000-06:00

I’ve been reading Grist’s Poverty and the Environment series again.

Here are some salary facts:

$51,138 -- median annual income of a white man with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$41,916 -- median annual income of a black man with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$33,142 -- median annual income of a black woman with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$30,082 -- median annual income of a white woman with a bachelor's degree in 2003
Source: “Holding a Four-Year College Degree Brings Blacks Closer to Economic Parity With Whites,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

Looking at some of the salary figures for people with master’s degrees in the article above, I’ve never come close in terms of yearly salary. In terms of hourly wages ($22 to $30 per hour, just for copyediting), I’m around the median income, but here’s the sad fact of freelance life: to earn a decent yearly salary, you probably have to work 60 hours per week. And I've never been able to manage more than 30 hours of editing per week. My eyes just can't take it.

Check out some of the articles in Grist. Click on the Poverty and Environment ad in the upper right-hand corner, or type "Poverty and Environment" into the search pane. Once you've reached the introductory article, scroll down to the end and click on the list of articles. Under Weeks 1 and 2, read the article titled "Facts and Figures." That's where I got these salary figures.

Forty-something and bruised

2006-05-03T21:59:00.000-06:00

Just when I thought I was magically aging backwards like Rachel in the Hyperion/Endymion series, actually getting/looking younger, I go to the eye doctor and get a prescription for bifocals.

That pisses me off for two reasons.

Three years ago, I had LASIK. Aaaaaaaaaaah, goodbye to four-eyes forever!

It wasn’t perfect, though. They didn’t correct my right eye quite enough, so I was still slightly nearsighted in that eye, and it’s gotten worse. Not bad, mind you, only about half a diopter, or 20/50. I could probably drive with two eyes like that—so what if I turn into one of those drivers who veer onto the exit ramp because they’ve just managed to read the sign! With just one eye that blurry, I can still read tiny type on bottles, but when I’m working on the computer, my eyes can’t sync up. It’s tooooooooooo much of a difference.

My husband got “computer glasses,” and he says they help. But me, the one in this house over forty (violins here)—I get bifocals.

Only now they call them “progressive lenses.”

Yeah, I feel sooooooooooo much better.

And they only cost $213 with insurance! How will I afford my Chanel sunglasses now?

***

In case you’re wondering, there were too many vowels in my life, so I put them in this post.

***

I went to Krav Maga to work it off. Actually enjoyed going to a Level 1 class—the workout is harder and simpler, all at once. I don’t have to focus on technique, which takes me longer to get than most other students at my level.

We did 360 defenses against haymaker punches (or is it rainmaker punches, as in a rain of blood?). Anyway, must go ice my arms now.

Out and About

2006-04-30T00:09:00.000-06:00

Lately I’ve been editing a guide to colleges for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, and allied individuals.

Whew! That’s a mouthful.

I’ve learned a few interesting things from it. Apparently “intersex” is the correct term for “hermaphrodite,” which some consider an insult. I don’t know why it’s an insult—Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who apparently merged with a nymph at some point and thus had two sexes—but that’s what I read. I don’t know much about the history of that term as applied to people who have something other than one simple set of genitalia, or gonads, or chromosomes. You know, the people who get “fixed” at birth so they can fit into one side of the dichotomy or the other? Not that having a mixed set would be simple in this world…

“Transgender,” on the other hand, refers to people who don’t accept the male-female dichotomy. Yesterday I read this quote from a student: “My current math professor is comfortable using masculine pronouns with me (I use both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe myself).” I’d like to sit down and have a good long talk with such a person, especially about the intersection of genitalia and gender.

I don’t believe that certain things—like war—are masculine and certain things—like flower arranging—are feminine. It depends on who’s doing them. If a woman does something, anything, it’s feminine. If a man does something, it’s masculine. If a man and a woman are doing the same thing—say, murdering an enemy—at the same time, then it’s both masculine and feminine at the same time.

That’s pretty simple to get your mind around, I think. But it’s still a dichotomy.

But what I find it hard to get my mind around is what it feels like to describe yourself with both male and female pronouns. I want to know: how does your body lead you to describe yourself that way? Or is there some kind of disconnect, and what caused it? What does “genderqueer” really mean?

Does this massive edifice we call “gender” really have much to do with our bodies, anyway? Maybe our bodies are just the excuse.

Pertinent or impertinent?

2006-04-07T09:21:00.000-06:00

I copyedit a lot of books for Lynne Rienner Publishers in Boulder, Colorado. My most recent project, about how the Internet will probably NOT solve all the economic problems in the developing world, included this quote from a speech by Karl Marx on the anniversary of the Peoples’ Paper (see Berman 1988, 20):

“The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. … At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. … All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into material force.”

Spring forward into health

2006-04-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

I’m always glad when daylight savings time returns. I much prefer days light until after 7 pm. It’s at this time of year that my spirits really begin to lift, and I think, “Summer is just around the corner!”

I also have reason to rejoice because my sister is at home convalescing. I’ve spoken to her twice—once in the hospital and once at home. When I talked to her in the hospital, it nearly broke my heart because she sounded so feeble. When she called me from home on Tuesday, she sounded almost normal.

She’s taking a month off from work and will have to do some cardiac rehab. I asked her what she was going to do with all that time, and she mentioned some of those projects we’ve all got on the back burner, like reorganizing photographs, and said she wanted to spend a lot of time enjoying spring.

***
Last night Todd and I went to a screening of Group 101 short films. Group 101 comprises directors who commit to making one short film a month for 6 months. Every month they choose a new theme: this month it was teeth. I made my acting debut in one of the films, “Seven Cups of Joe.” Watching myself onscreen was a lot less scary than I imagined. The director and his wife gave me a lot of compliments, which was nice. Compared to the actor who was playing my boyfriend, who performs in an improv group every week, my facial expressions were fairly static, and I didn’t really know how to interact with the camera. I thought I did OK for never having acted before (unless you count playing the hospital visitor in Good Morning, Miss Dove in high school).

I had a great time doing the scenes, though. It was fun to work with Troy because he’s so good at pulling lines out of thin air, and I learned a little bit about how you want to position people for the camera.

Pity fest

2006-03-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

What a hellatious* week it’s been.

On Monday I found out that my sister was in intensive care at Research Hospital in Kansas City. My other sister called from California to give me the heads up. She said that our older sister sounded like she was crying and gasping for breath as she talked on the phone. Despite being a nurse, she let herself get so sick that she had to call Dad to take her to the emergency room. She thought that she had the flu and she was reluctant to call Dad for fear he’d get it and die or something, but she just couldn’t take it any longer.

All this raised the specter of another member of my family dying while I was away, as happened with my maternal grandfather in 1983, my maternal grandmother in 1990, and my mother in 1992. I’ve lived away from my family so long that it seems normal, but during weeks like this one I realize how much I miss them. I’ve never actually lived in the same town as my family while living in a separate dwelling. It’s feast or famine, baby—in their house or in another time zone.

Sometimes I can’t decide which is the feast and which the famine. But lately I’ve come to think that’s my failing, not theirs.

So my sister’s been in ICU all week. They moved her to a private room and then had her in procedures all day because they suspected a heart attack. Turns out her heart was slightly damaged, possibly by a spasm of a coronary artery, but there was no clot or blockage. Also, she has fluid in her pleural sac. They say she’s got a severe infection, but they can’t say if it’s bacterial or viral, and they don’t know where it originated. What good are doctors anyway?

Today Dad said she was looking much better. I was complaining to a friend how much I disliked not being able to just hop in a car and visit her, and my friend said, “Well, it’s not like you have a full-time job at an office. You can go visit her if you want.”

It’s true. I could. It’s just that I get in this mindset in which I think, “Well, I have three freelance jobs due by mid-April. I’m swamped with work.” And I was waiting for my other sister to travel, or for Dad to tell me I’d better get on a plane.

Tuesday night I went to the second night of my short story workshop. It didn’t go very well. The instructor started off discussing a short story by Deborah Eisenberg that most of us had not finished (I had, and one other person had). The discussion limped along, to say the least. Then began the critique of my story, which I have to sit through without commenting. Normally I’d get to comment at the end, but the instructor announced that he had to go to the bathroom, ratcheted out a few more comments, and flew away. I explained to the other people in the room that I was working on a linked collection of stories and wasn’t sure whether I even wanted each story to stand alone. Then we moved to the next story. At one point the instructor said, “Now I’m going to put on my angry face” and proceeded to tell the poor guy how all his characters were undeveloped. I really didn’t agree with him, but I think the instructor’s negative attitude led us all down the same path. (I couldn’t help but think of the last workshop I was in, with a much more positive instructor.) Then the instructor said “angry face off” and chuckled, as if he’s done something funny.

It was like being in graduate school again, with all these guys who wanted to be the next great experimental writer that you’ve never heard of.

It didn’t help that Todd called twice during class to give me the latest on my sister.

It was a good thing that I had schedule some pampering Wednesday. I had a haircut and a makeup lesson, which was really fun. This woman had given me a bikini wax and a pedicure before, and I wasn’t very impressed by either of those (she didn’t get EVERY SINGLE HAIR, and the painting on the nails was crooked!). But her makeup lesson was great. Sometimes it’s fun to be paid attention to that way.

After I got home, though, I started to cry through my four coats of mascara (“It looks so natural,” she said). I didn’t know how my sister was doing, and I couldn’t talk to her because she was in ICU.

Also, I thought maybe I should just give up writing fiction. So far I’ve published a short story in 1991, a short novel in 1998, and a short story in 2006. Every seven or eight years—that’s me. I was wallowing in self-pity until after Krav Maga (always good for a pick-me-up) and complained to a friend that I had lost confidence in my ability to tell when a story was done. After I told her a little bit about the collection, she suggested that I might not be writing stories, but really a kind of novel.

That and talking to Dad helped me feel a lot better.

*My spell check thinks this word should be “hilarious,” “elations,” or “gelatinous.” Any other suggestions?

I am snarky

2006-03-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

I get an email newsletter called the Weekly Grist, which has cool, amusing, snarky articles about environmentalism. What I find most refreshing is that they don't take greenishness too seriously.

Go to

www.grist.org

and search for the series on Poverty and the Environment. I especially liked the walking tour of the South Bronx that mentioned it used to be a getaway for the rich. Wonder when that was...

But what got to me are the articles about mountaintop mining. How, in the age of the Clean Water Act, can a coal company legally blow the top off a mountain, cracking the foundations of nearby houses in the process, and then dump all the rubble into a stream, choking and/or poisoning it?

Stop using coal, people! Get Windsource!

Oh, except that Windsource is full. Put yourself on the waiting list.

Salt and Butter Body Company

2006-03-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

Check out this local woman who makes body butter and bath salts.

www.saltandbutter.com

Culture Club

2006-03-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Had two fairly unusual cultural experiences this weekend—an improv show and a ballet.

The improv show featured one of Todd’s Frisbee friends, along with five other people who had graduated from improv classes held by Bovine Metropolis Theater.

Bovine Metropolis—get it? Another name for Denver?

It’s the kind of show in which the actors feed off suggestions from the audience. It went on for about 2 hours, and they did a really good job.

My favorite suggestion came in response to this question: What else can she find on the floor?

The answer: drool.

The actress bent over and said, “Yup, got one all the way to the floor that time.”

***

On Sunday we went to see a ballet called Anilla by the Lemon Sponge Cake ballet company. Definitely not classical ballet. The music included songs like “Ma Vie en Rose” (Is that right?) and industrial sounds. Sometimes the three dancers simply walked across the stage, or stood in position, or fell to the floor; you could see how the choreographer had worked modern dance into the ballet moves.

My favorite dances were those featuring the male dancer and the female brunette with scary-looking leg and arm muscles. He would drag her onstage, set her up, and then move her into various positions as if she were a doll.

What we find out late

2006-03-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, Todd didn’t need to wait long for his doctor today. And as an added bonus, his knee doctor told him something he’s never heard before.

About his feet—not his knee.

Todd has always had the flattest feet I’ve ever seen. If he lay down on his stomach, bent his knees, and held his feet steady in the air, you could eat sushi off them, or some other elongated finger food. I wrote a poem about them once, which didn’t exactly thrill him. He felt that I was remarking on his imperfection. But I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as an essential feature of Todd.

The doctor asked him if at some point in his life, say, puberty, he began to notice that he ran more slowly than other people. Todd said he had always noticed that, especially when playing Ultimate Frisbee.

No matter how much leg muscle or gluteal muscle he built up, the doctor informed Todd, he would always run slower than other people. It was due to the structure of his feet—there were bones in his feet that were fused, making it impossible for his feet to push against the ground with enough power to generate speed.

I thought it was rather wonderful that his doctor told him that. Finally, Todd, said, he understood why he ran the way he did.

***

My sister once told me of a similar experience she had with her gynecologist/obstetrician.

She has six kids, and the doctor had induced labor for one of them, I forget which. My sister fell asleep after labor had been induced. Now that didn’t mean much to me, since I’ve never given birth, but the doctor was startled. She asked my sister how she could sleep after being induced, and my sister replied, “It’s no worse than my periods.”

That was the same sister who was told by doctors that her horrible cramps were all in her head.

Shiny and Happy

2006-02-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

For the first time in three years, I've been writing a new short story. It's called "Aperture" and it stars a young woman named Hope, who is held up at gunpoint. She turns on the attacker and in the process, a little girl is killed.

I had a workshop of it the other night in the Lighthouse Writers class, and I thought the comments were pretty positive, given that the story was 2 weeks old. I think the story needs to be a few pages longer--and maybe I need to take out the part about Hope having a vision--and then it will be ready to go.

For a long time now, I've had an idea for another story collection (in addition to The Price of Silence, which I've been working on for years) called Women in the Wrong. Hope's story could very well be the first one in that collection

A new take on the cartoons

2006-02-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Check out this article in the Nation:

"The Right to Be Offended"

More comment begging

2006-02-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

I decided to turn off comment moderation, since that seems to be preventing people from leaving comments on my blog.

Word verification is still on, though.

Please, leave a comment so I can see if the comments are working now.

Hey you!

2006-02-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

I know at least 2 people are reading this blog, because they said they were.

Nobody has commented since December. I’m beginning to feel really lonely.

Write something, please!

Don't apologize

2006-02-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

I read an article today that really pissed me off.

Apparently some Danish newspaper, and then some French newspaper, published a cartoon that showed Muhammad, the Prophet, with a missile instead of a turban on his head. See the cartoon here. If that link doesn't work, go to Yahoo News and look for "Protests over Muhammad Cartoons Escalate."

Muslims (at least, some Muslims) are up in arms because Islam forbids making images of the Prophet (that's idolatry) and because the cartoon is disrespectful to Islam.

On the first count, the people who drew the cartoon aren't Muslims, so they aren't bound by the prohibition against images. And on the second point--well, the response to the cartoon proved the cartoon's point.

In Palestine, militants went around saying that if there was no apology for the cartoon, they would begin shooting Europeans.

Remember former Senator Jesse Helms getting so pissed off at the National Endowment for the Arts? "Pissed" is apropos because he was incensed by a work of art the NEA had funded called "Piss Christ." I never actually saw the offending artwork, but it was supposed to depict a crucifix in urine. According to the secondhand information I read, the artist was protesting the commercialization of Christianity.

Disrespectful?

You bet.

Making a political point?

Also true.

Helms tried to shut down the NEA. That was ridiculous enough. If he wanted to shoot somebody, he didn't say so, as far as I know.

I'd say it's time Muslims made like Jesus in the temple and cast out the Pharisees from their midst. If they really want Islam to be the religion of peace it's supposed to be, they need to get rid of the militants. They need to make it clear to these people that their reactions are uncivilized.

And lest I seem holier than thou, there are days when I read about so-called Christians in this country and feel the same about them.

Don't apologize, Europeans. You have a right to point out that some Muslims have turned religion into an excuse for violence.

Americans are so formal

2006-02-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

I learned something today while copyediting (good, isn't it?)

I had always thought that thee, thou, thy, and thine were formal versions of you, your, and yours. Turns out I was wrong: they are the informal pronouns.

Wikipedia explains it all. If you trust Wikipedia, that is.

I am Supergirl?

2006-01-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Your results:
You are Supergirl

Supergirl		90%
Wonder Woman		90%
Superman		80%
Spider-Man		80%
Green Lantern		80%
Robin		70%
Hulk		70%
The Flash		40%
Batman		30%
Catwoman		30%
Iron Man		30%

Lean, muscular and feminine.

Honest and a defender of the innocent.

Go here

Random activities

2006-01-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird month.

Todd had knee surgery on January 9, and for a while there he had to wrap his knee in cling-wrap when he took a shower.

That's kind of a private joke because Todd once found this website that was all about Roy Orbison (the guy who sang "Pretty Woman") in clingwrap. So there my husband is in clingwrap, hopping out of the shower while I really hope his good foot doesn't give way, and he's all wet and "Yes" is written in black letters across his thigh.

Sounds like a recipe for a good time, doesn't it?

By the time he's gone through all that, all he wants to do is go back to sleep. But at least I get to take off the clingwrap.

Also, this month, I got to read a gay romance novel. Copyedit it, that is. It was a good read--the characters were great--but all that happened was that the guy learned to like himself more. Oh, and he went to Brazil to study monkeys. I wanted him to change his life a little more, I guess.

And every Friday, I'm taking an Intro to Fight class. Last time, we actually got to punch each other a little. But since my partner and I couldn't manage to keep our mouth guards in without gagging, we weren't comfortable with doing any real punching.

Damn. Got to give and get a couple of good punches sometime.

Into our own hands

2006-01-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

Today is the thirty-third anniversary of the Supreme Court handing down its decision in Roe v. Wade.

How long this anniversary seems from the spring of 2004, when I flew east to join the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., and felt briefly hopeful about women’s rights in this country. The more I consider the political landscape since then, the more I see how false that hope was and how urgently change is needed.

After Bush won reelection, I gave up on traditional methods of securing women’s reproductive rights. Since the confirmation of John Roberts and the nomination of Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I have harbored grave doubts about the longevity of Roe v. Wade. And ever since pharmacists have started organizing for the right not to fill prescriptions, I’ve worried about the availability of birth control.

Let’s face it: since the 1980s, the Right has been gaining ground. I don’t see the Left gaining ground. Instead, I see members of the Left crossing over in order to win the enemy’s support. What kind of fight is that?

A better option for women would be for them to return to the basics of providing reproductive care for themselves, using some old methods and some new ones.

At first I thought of flashing pictures of women who’ve died from abortions to counter the pictures of fetuses. I wanted to organize a wave of righteously angry pro-choice women and men to drive so-called Christian protestors far from clinics and other public spaces. We’d herd them home and protest at their houses and businesses, do unto them exactly as they do unto abortion doctors. Operation Save America recently posted fliers in Dr. Warren Hern’s neighborhood in Boulder and got away with it, so I thought, why not turn their methods on them and see if they’re flattered by the imitation?

But that would involve fighting on their terms. I cannot stress strongly enough that women who care about access to reproductive rights must cease to engage with the Right and make choice a reality, instead of waiting for the courts and legislatures to grant it.

We need to take abortion underground where protestors and legislators and prosecutors cannot find it. Wherever we take it, we need to keep it safe (whether it’s legal or not, whether Roe v. Wade stands or not). To do so, we need a network of doctors who will smuggle emergency contraception and RU-486 to women who need them, doctors who can teach medical residents and nurses in their area to perform safe surgical abortions, thus creating an ever-expanding network of abortion providers. Other people would be solicited to provide funding for these underground abortions and, at some point in time, money to purchase the contraceptive method of her choice for every American woman who cannot afford to pay for it herself.

These “clinics” would have to be highly mobile, not only to get services as quickly as possible to the women and girls who need them most, but also to avoid triggering state laws that criminalize transporting a minor across state lines for an abortion. They would need to be easily dismantled into their component parts, thus making them harder to track.

Why make this proposal?

Because I’m sick of the rhetoric and disgusted by the amounts of money spent by both sides since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was handed down. (I wonder how much health care for women all those dollars would have bought.)

And because I think that women should be making these decisions for themselves. We must get over the idea that we need permission from our government to exercise our right to choose.

And because I believe that in a few years, women will desperately need the service I propose. Some need it now.

Thank God for the end of 2005

2006-01-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

The New Year has come and gone; my cold/flu has come and gone and returned, and I am SO looking forward to 2006. Getting through 2005 was like slogging through mud sometimes: didn't do much writing, didn't get anything published--even the one story that has been accepted for publication is still languishing in Feminist Studies' backlog.

And no, they wouldn't hear of me sending it out somewhere else. I thought it was a win-win for everyone: if I place it elsewhere, they get to reduce their backlog, and if I don't, they can publish it. But no. God forbid common sense overtake the literary world.

So I've decided to make some changes in 2006 (in addition to my perennial New Year's resolution to lose weight by eating better chocolate; of course, a lot of sampling is required to determine what's best). I'm taking a short story workshop from Lighthouse Writers, and I'm going to hire Writer's Relief to send out at least one story for me. I'm also going to take a page from a fellow writer's book and stop spending so much damn time reading these literary magazines. They all exhort you to, but it doesn't make anything easier for the writer, and that's what I'm all about this year.

My New Year's resolution is to be a happy writer, whether I get published or not.

And that should make people around me happy.

They won't have to listen to me whine so much. Instead, I'll be spreading joy wherever I go.

Hesitant

2005-12-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

Just got back from hubby’s Christmas party, where we had a nice time (apparently a chocolate fountain is the latest hot new gadget), and I put on my PJs and started thinking about self-defense.

I’m not natural fighter, you understand. I’ve been taking classes for a year now, and I’m just learning how to throw a good hook punch. I still forget to put my body into punches.

Once you know how to fight a little, there’s the question of what to do with it. Should I take on the annoying person at the movie theater who saw my jacket on a seat (in a row with 4 other empty seats, you understand) and threw it on the floor? But then I imagined myself trying to explain to a jury why I couldn’t sit in one of the other 4 seats and just get over it already.

“Your Honor, he needed to be taught a lesson.”

“Here’s a lesson for you: a week in jail and anger management lessons!”

I don’t quite understand how a guy can come along, act like a jerk, and then put me in the position of looking childish. But that’s what happened.

I suppose I could have asked them to move, but I was afraid to. I was afraid it would start a fight that I wouldn’t be able to finish. And the only way to get over that fear is to fight, so it’s something of a dilemma.

When I started this post, I meant to write about fighting from a different angle. Even if I’m not the most perfect fighter, I’d be pretty good at teaching other people how to fight, at least the basic stuff. Some days I dream of going to some part of the world where women are really being dragged through the mud. A place like the Congo or Darfur, where women are being gang-raped to send a message. I dream of going there and teaching them to fight and making everything better. I know in my heart it’s nonsensical—what good is a left hook against shoulder-launched missiles and men on horseback with guns? But I still can’t get the idea out of my head.

Is it possible it could have a ripple effect? That it would make women start fighting back in all sorts of ways? That’s what I hope for. But I don’t know how to begin.

I don't like it, but I love it

2005-12-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

I’m not really a Christian.

Oh, I was raised that way, and I still looooooooove to talk to Jesuits about religion (not that I meet that many these days), but I can’t be a Christian because I don’t believe in sin. (Though I’m just as qualified to comment on what Christianity is and should be as a true believer. An upbringing in a faith is enough to make you a judge of that faith. Even a faith that tells you to “judge not.”)

If you don’t believe in sin, you don’t believe you need to be saved, no matter what all the Christians you know think about the state of your soul.

But this is not a post about religion, even though I love to discuss it. It’s about Christmas music.

I’m determined to have the largest Christmas music collection in the world.

Here’s what I have so far:

Aaron Neville’s Soulful Christmas
Alabama, Christmas
A Very Gospel Christmas
A Very Special Christmas
A Very Special Christmas 3
Beach Boys, Merry Christmas from the Beach Boys
Barenaked Ladies, Barenaked for the Holidays
Christmas with the Stars, Volumes 1-3
Christina Aguilera, My Kind of Christmas
Cyndi Lauper, Feels like Christmas
Elvis Presley, If Every Day Was Like Christmas
Heart, A Lovemonger’s Christmas
Judds, Christmas Time
Kenny G. Miracles: The Holiday Album
Linda Ronstadt, A Merry Little Christmas
Luciano Pavarotti, O Holy Night
Lynyrd Skynrd, Christmas Time Again
Mahalia Jackson, Silent Night, Holy Night
Manhattan Transfer
Shawn Colvin, Holiday Songs and Lullabies
Temptations, Give Love at Christmas
Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Christmas Eve and Other Stories
Ultimate Christmas Album, Volumes 3 and 4 (never got 1 and 2)
Willie Nelson, Pretty Paper

As you can see, I have a ways to go. I haven’t even cracked 30 total yet! In 2004, I only bought 1 CD. My kitchen was torn up, we had a fridge in our living room instead of a tree, and I just wasn’t in the mood.

Feel free to send me something I don’t have or to recommend something.

My least favorite was the Manhattan Transfer CD, although I think I should listen to it again. I always need to listen to CDs several times before I know what I think of them.

My favorite now is the Cyndia Lauper CD. Most of the songs on it are not traditional Christmas songs. Some are silly, and a couple are beautiful, but most are original.

I don’t understand why some artists make Christmas CDs. The Barenaked Ladies, for instance. They sing the songs with no conviction whatsoever. Why bother? Do they need the money that badly?

It’s hard for me to understand what motivated this project of mine. It must be nostalgia, the kind that grips me every time I return to Kansas City and feel compelled to visit all my old haunts, including the house where I lived until I was 11. I don’t really want to get to know the contemporary Kansas City; I just want to recapture the past, boredom and loss and joy and all. That’s how I feel about Christmas.

Here are my favorite individual songs:

Ave Maria, Heart
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, The Judds
Blue Christmas, Sheryl Crow
Christmas Blues, Willie Nelson (instrumental)
Christmas Everyday, The Temptations
Christmas Song (Roasting Chestnuts), Christina Aguilera (the only version of this song I’ve ever liked)
December Child, Cyndi Lauper
Jingle Bells, Willie Nelson
Go Tell It on the Mountain, Mahalia Jackson
No Room at the Inn, Mahalia Jackson
O Holy Night, Pavarotti
Oi to the World, No Doubt
Pretty Paper, Willie Nelson
River, Linda Ronstadt (“I wish I had a river I could skate away on,” written by Joni Mitchell)
Silent Night, Stevie Nicks
Skynyrd Family, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Such a Night, Aaron Neville
What Child Is This? The Judds

If you want, I’ll burn you a CD with my favorites on it.

This is about a cat, or, I’m desperate to meet people

2005-12-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Rufus is our cat. He’s a 10-year-old black tabby whose owners gave him to us because he didn’t “travel” well, but really they got tired if him biting their other cats on the butt. I’ve seen him do it, too. The other cat always shrieks indignantly.

But we seem to have acquired another cat, an orange tabby with a beautiful white breast and the most wistful eyes. When he tilts his head and looks at me that way, I’d swear he’s a girl, but it’s just his expression. At that point, I usually let him in.

Todd and I wondered if this cat had an owner, but it looked well-cared-for, so we assumed it wasn’t feral. Just to make sure, though, we bought a collar and a little message holder—you know, like a bottle tossed in the ocean with a note?—and wrote on a slip of paper, “If you own this cat, call us at this number.”

And she did. Her name is Sarah, and the cat’s name is Bailey. For a while we called him Pedro after the character in Napoleon Dynamite. He answers equally well—that is to say, not at all—to either one. But he will come to “kitty, kitty, kitty.”

(Everyone should do what our friends did and name their cat “Kitty.”)

Sarah and I had quite the conversation about Bailey/Pedro. We agreed that he was getting fat, even though he’s eating Rufus’s diet food. We agreed that he was very friendly. I learned where her house was, and vice versa. I even told her to come over sometime, though I doubt she ever will.

It would be fun to know everyone who lived on the park. We should have a Lac Amora park party. With our cats.

This is not about a cat

2005-12-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Krav Maga with scraped knuckles and a bloody elbow. When I was first doing Krav Maga this sort of war wound impressed me. Now I just think, “Damn, I just got rid of that scab and now it’s bleeding again.”

The woman I was fighting—or maybe I should say girl, because she’s in high school—was not gentle. She hit me in the head and kneed me in the belly and a few other things I can’t remember. It made me want to be more aggressive.

I think in a fight the main ally of the winner is aggressiveness, or determination, or, perhaps, heart. The ability to keep going despite all evidence that it’s a bad idea. It’s something you learn in competitive sports, but I never played them much—or wanted to. I’m learning it now, in a fight class, but it’s hard to battle so many years of trying to be “nice.”

The problem is, nobody likes “nice” people that much. They say they do, but they would rather spend time with the feisty ones. And how many guys struggle with being labeled the “nice guy”? If being nice is so great, then why are there buttons reading “No more Mr. Nice Guy”? If someone’s in your face, telling you to be nicer, then that person is trying to manipulate you so that she can get what she wants. It’s that simple.

It's my leftovers and I'll get fat if I want to

2005-11-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Recent developments this week:

For breakfast and lunch on Friday, I had leftover dressing, cranberry relish, and green bean casserole.

I saw my sister's mother-in-law and my sister's sister-in-law. Isn't it weird that the latter is my sister-in-law, but the former can never be my mother-in-law? It makes me feel like Ludwig Wittgenstein obsessing over the sentence "Green is green" because the first word is a noun and the second is an adjective.

Trust me, Virgos and copyeditors like this kind of shit. And when you're both, well...let's just say, you'll never be any good at cocktail parties.

Todd did sound on two short films, one until 3 o'clock Wednesday. The fact that we had a fight that morning had nothing to do with his lack of sleep or my period coming on.

It's getting so fucking sneaky these days! After I had my tubes tied, I could tell it was coming because I started fantasizing about movie stars two days beforehand and inevitably felt that my life was a piece of crap. Now either I fantasize about movie stars and hate my life all the time, or my hormones are descending slowly toward menopause.

No! Say it isn't so! I love my period.

I made chocolate mousse tonight, and even though I used 85% dark chocolate and halved the amount of whipped cream that went into it, it still wasn't chocolaty enough. Maybe I need to use milk chocolate. Maybe I need to double the amount of chocolate. Maybe I should try sour cream instead of whipped cream. I just don't know.

Why doesn't restaurant chocolate mousse always taste better than the ones you make yourself? What is their secret?

Rufus wants you to know

2005-11-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

that he'll bite you on the butt if you eat his food the way the stray orange tabby does. Rufus doesn't bite me, of course, even though I cheat on him with other cats.

Been going to the Denver Film Festival this week. Am writing this way because going to see Annie Proulx on Saturday. Shipping News, anyone?

Best movie: To the Other Side, three stories about the children of migrant worker fathers. A lovely fairy tale. See it if you can.

Worst movie so far: Buried Forest, part of the Salute to Japanese film. Perhaps wanted to salute this movie as the slowest movie EVER.

Most annoying rejection this year: the one just received from Other Voices in which the reader sensed a sexual attraction between Natalie and her newly dead uncle. Necrophilia, anyone? What an idiot. Must have taken 5 minutes to skim every other page. Is some sex in the story, mind you, but only between Natalie and her boyfriend. Ken doll mentioned twice in story does NOT participate in any sex acts.

Best thing that happened this week: I went to EcoCycle's volunteer love event (naked people recycling together, woohoo!) and won an organic cotton bathrobe. (To put on after the volunteer love. Came with pack of Camel lights in the pocket.) I believe it's the first raffle I've ever won.

My therapist has a low sperm count

2005-11-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Sex left a comment on my last post about our similar shoulder afflictions. It reminded me of one of the physical therapists I went to about it.

One of the things I had done to me to solve my pain-down-the shoulder-blade-and-all-down-the-right-arm was neck stretches. So here I was on my back, my head in the hands of this big blond guy, and he's moving my head back and forth and telling me about him and his wife's attempts to conceive.

"The doctor told me I have a lot of the little guys," he said, "but they're not very fast."

Now, usually, when people say weird things to me, I can't think of a reply for 5 hours. It's why I never became a lawyer like my father. I'd have to call a recess before I'd be able to respond to a smartass remark from the other side.

But not this time. Oh no: the thoughts were coming thick and fast, and "Thanks for sharing" delivered in the ultimate sarcastic tone was the least of them.

So big blond fella pushes my head over to the right. Gently, of course. He's trying to stretch my brachial plexus (a complex of nerves and muscles in the neck), not break my neck.

For once in my life, I held my tongue when I should.

There was another therapist who once said to me, as he was stretching my arm into a completely unnatural position, "Tell me if I go too far."

It's like going on a date in the 1970s, except that boys then generally didn't tell me to stop them if they went too far. They WANTED to go too far.

Oh, and what the therapist was doing FELT GOOD. And I knew it was good for me too. But I was still glad when I didn't have to see him anymore. He looked like the man who'd just broken my heart. So badly that when I went on my first date with the man I married, I hugged the car door the entire night. I was afraid he might want to kiss me or some such shit.

But I guess I must have missed all the excitement, because in 2004 I started a course of rolfing. In rolfing you wear a bra/bikini top and shorts and walk around in front of the rolfer so he can see if you're "balanced." I know, I know, it's a cheap way to get a man to look at me.

And I was paying for it, no less.

Deep inside early morning Denver

2005-10-29T04:54:00.000-06:00

OK, so I don't LIKE to be up at 4:54, but I woke up at 3:30 and thought I would bless you with my wisdom since I can't fucking sleep.

Years ago Todd decided he wanted a firm bed. I went along with his idea, because who can turn down something that's so good for you? The problem is, everytime I do anything in a workout that strains my shoulder, I wake up at some ungodly hour with one or both hands tingling and my neck sore.

And then I have some cereal and go online. What else can a sleepless girl do?

Usually the repetitive motion injury I got in the 1990s doesn't bother me anymore. But in Krav Maga last night we were doing kick defenses (I wrote "dick defenses" the first time), which are amazingly graceful when done right. You can reach out and push the leg away, with hand or foot, depending on the height of the kick, and blade your body at the same time. It's like an aerobics workout ('twist and bend and twist and bend').

At one point we were punching down and across our bodies to defend from a low front kick, and every time my hand met my partner's shin pad, I got another scratch from the damn velcro.

Normally I'm proud of the bruises I get in this class, but scratches I don't like. They'll leave another scar on my arms.

Now I think I'll go sleep in the soft bed in the guest bedroom. My mother-in-law insisted on padding. Now SHE has some sense.

And then I'll get up at 6 and go look at loons (the avian kind).

Bad, bad teeth

2005-10-24T22:43:00.000-06:00

Great, it’s Halloween. I’m still paying for all the Halloween candy I ate as a child.

Yep, on November 1, I get not one but two onlays. I get to spend the morning after trick-or-treat with a lovely green dental dam in my mouth.

My new dentist looks like Cameron Crowe. He has specially made tiles on the ceiling with leaf designs in them. He has fancy x-ray machines in special closets.

I really like that.

But then I’m easily impressed.

I can only hope they’ll give me laughing gas. And then put me in the closet with my mouth wide open and green plastic hanging out. At the rate I’m going, that’s the only costume I’ll come up with for Halloween.

Planets of Cold Illusion

2005-10-11T23:08:00.000-06:00

I like astrology.

There, I’ve said it. You may all label me a new age freak now.

But I don’t care. I’ve actually been interested in astrology since I had my chart done in high school, and I’ve been carrying around that chart with me ever since. I pull it out and look at it sometimes, noting how most of my planets fall in the bottom half of the chart, which is a sign of an introverted person, and how I have no planets in fire signs. Those of you who know me will find this information appropriate.

I guess saying that “I like astrology” doesn’t do my feelings justice. It would be more accurate to say that I enjoy astrology as a way of thinking about myself.

It’s hard for me to admit that I think about myself. I grew up in a family where it wasn’t appropriate to brag or to perform too much, unless one was performing on an instrument, such as a piano. Self-knowledge was admirable, but doting on oneself—say, by thinking about one’s positive character traits or beauty—was frowned upon. Go figure that one out.

Now I don’t mean to make my family sound like a bunch of Puritans—they’re not. They’re fun people, just a bit reserved. They’re more likely to ask about you than tell you about themselves. I find myself in this situation a lot, listening to my friends talk about their lives. I always end up talking less about my life than they do about theirs. I truly do try to break this habit, because I think it allows people to take me for granted, but I’ve done it for so long…

So I compensate by reading about planets and houses and aspects. I wonder whether the gravity of the outer planets really might affect my personality, and if I might ever feel it. It’s a little bit like thinking about God, except that I know that the planets really exist. People have seen them through telescopes (is that like “through a glass darkly”?). Probes have burned up in their atmospheres.

In some ways, astrology is much more satisfying than praying, because I never have to wait for an answer. It’s all interpreted for me.

And I don’t use astrology to predict what’s going to happen in my life. I have had the experience, occasionally, of reading a past horoscope and saying, “Yeah, I really did crash and burn that month!” But if I had read the horoscope before the crashing and burning, I would have disregarded it.

What I like best about astrology books and charts is finding bits and pieces of my personality there. If something doesn’t seem to fit, I just ignore it. If the description of Virgo, say, is a bit too neatnik for my tastes, I can use it to wrestle with my insecurities. Or I can use a more positive description of my chart to inspire myself.

And who wouldn’t rather have inspiration than sermons?

What would you do?

2005-10-05T09:19:00.000-06:00

I just read the most amazing book, Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail. I have never read any story like it. It’s the story of the Oufkir family, who were imprisoned for 14 years and then held in house arrest for another 5 years after their father attempted to assassinate the king of Morocco.

Here’s a sample (the speaker is Malika, the eldest):

“Each of my birthdays was like a dagger piercing my heart. At the age of thirty-three I became resigned. I would never experience a great love; I would never have my own family; no man would ever take me in his arms and whisper sweet nothings or words of burning passion in my ear; I would never know the physical and mental thrill of being in love.”

At that point, she had been in prison since age 18. Her youngest brother had been 3 when they were spirited away.

They escaped from prison in 1987 by digging a tunnel. For most of the time they were in the last prison, they lived in cells next to each other but were not allowed to see each other.

Can you imagine? Being a few feet from your mother or brothers and sisters, being able to hear them, but not seeing them for something like 8 years?

They decided to dig the tunnel (using a spoon and a can lid) after almost all of them attempted suicide at the same time. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Like a melodrama.

Here’s a description of what they ate:

“Every two days, the guards brought us bread in cardboard boxes. I would tip the loaves out onto the floor and Soukaina and I would quickly lift up the flaps on the boxes and remove the thin layer of paper that lined them. We used it to write down the stories I told. The paper was as precious to us as food.
One day, while I was busy pulling off the paper, I saw the three girls licking the floor for crumbs that had dropped from the box. From that moment, I established a rule. Instead of fighting like stray dogs, they would each have their day, their turn at the crumbs.
At Bir-Jdid we were never once given a normal egg. The shells were green, and inside was a vile black liquid, the smell of which made us feel ill….”

They were incredibly resourceful, thanks, according to the book, to Malika. They made up plays; she told a story she made up on their "radio" that they used to connect the cells, even though they could hardly see each other; they laughed at whatever they could. In short, they constructed a life for themselves out of what they had.