Hopscotch

A Mighty River

2011-02-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

A Mighty River

I hear the impatient idling of the powerful diesel engine of the large articulated bus at the busstop half a block away. The light of a new day is barely seeping into my room. I roll over and look at the clock. Seven-thirty a.m, as usual. The large apartment block between my small townhouse and the busstop is emptying its occupants: young and middle-aged, singles and married into that bus and the others that have already come and gone.

They are the workers and the employers, the students and the professionals, the movers and the shakers, all joining in a fast-moving, turbulent, dynamic river of life that churns downtown with the energy of ideas and commerce, services and production, aspirations and dreams.

My wife and I used to be part of that mighty Amazon fed by all those commuters crowding quickly into the impatient buses, trains, ferries, planes, cars on this and every other morning.

But these days, in earned retirement, I can pull the covers up to my neck again, and roll over snug in the realization that I won't have to face a whole day of work on not enough sleep, again.

Retirement is a quieter tributary as life meanders through visits from grown sons and daughters, grandkids, photos, phone calls, the odd trip or cruise, e-mails, books, reflections and memories into that contented fulfilment into which my life partner has peacefully tiptoed before me.

Elena

2011-01-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

Elena has come home.

Marc, Lise and I brought her back to this center of her world, her life: her favorite spot next to the fireside, me, her son and daughter and their families.

Elena taught me not to dwell on the end of events but on the events themselves. To her, it wasn't the end of the weekend that counted, but the rest of the weekend. It wasn't the last day of a vacation that mattered but what we experienced in that wonderful new city or place. It wasn't the sadness of the day our children packed up their belongings and left home to establish their own careers and families that lasted but our memories of while they were with us and our confidence that they had learned to be fine and responsible adults.

To Elena and me life is not a series of events with ends but an evolution through phases that flow seamlessly into each other, a flow that began before us with our ancestors and which, with the modifications we made, will continue to flow through Marc and Lise and their families. Everlasting life is not a mystery, an abstract concept but this very tangible stream of characteristics, behaviors and traits evident in our family, a stream that Elena has influenced so lovingly, so greatly and so well.

This is Elena's favorite baby picture. Deliberately tongue-in-cheek, she labeled it "Sweet Baby". She knew that she was being anything but "sweet", trying hard to pull off the cap that she was being made to wear especially for the photograph on that hot day, just for the occasion. That gesture would be symbolic of the person she always has been, a person who rejected any sort of pretense in herself.

Fortunately for me she could tolerate pretense in others because, she later revealed, she had taken an instant dislike to me when our paths first crossed accidentally. She thought I was putting on an air of intellectual superiority.

Elena's self-image as a woman, wife, mother, professional, friend, was never diminished in spite of the consequences of the numerous serious disappointments, obstacles, accidents, illnesses and surgeries she endured, any one of which could have devastated a person who was not focussed on the essential qualities of those roles.

Material things and ceremony didn't mean much to her. What she valued most were her family and friends and the enjoyment, knowledge and experiences she gained from travel, books and more recently, from her unique talent in using information technology.

She could look back on her life and justifiably be satisfied with the way she chose to live it and with the decisions she made. She was especially happy and contented with how she and I have grown together, with the way our son Marc and daughter Lise turned out and with the way they are maturing and raising their families.

As I hold your urn I wish you were pretending now, Ellen, Elena, Honey, Mom.

We love each other now, Elena, as we have for forty-six great years.

And we always will.

TQME

Louis, Marc and Lise

(Elena and I always signed our notes and cards with this coded message.

Te Quiero Mucho Elena

I love you so much Elena)

A Seamless Life

2011-01-14T00:43:00.000-08:00

Some months ago my iPad joined the rest of the paraphernalia on the table beside my chair that I use from time to time all through a normal day: current magazines, a book, a cup of tea, a plate with snacks, the odd bill that came in the mail...you know the stuff I am talking about. But as I have added more and more apps and discovered more and more of its capabilities, my iPad has been taking over more and more of the functions of those items while enabling new ones such as e-mailing, puzzles, games, voice mail, Netflix movies, photo albums and armchair travel.

This morning as I sat there with the iPad opened like a book on my lap, reading, a little message flashed in the middle of the page. It announced a Skype video call from a sister 3,000 miles away. A touch of a finger tip on the Accept button: no mouse or even trackpad to locate, and her live picture opened up right there in the middle of the page. Didn't have to reach for the phone, no Bluetooth headset in my ear...absolutely seamlessly I chatted with her. When we hung up, also just a tap of a fingertip, I was right back where I had been on my page.

The other day as I read a newspaper on the iPad a reminder from the iPad's calendar to call my bank popped up. I was grumpily about to get up from my chair, hunt my bank statement, look up the bank's phone number and find a phone, and a pencil and piece of paper to make any necessary notes. Then I remembered I could do all of that right there on the iPad. In fact I didn't even have to use a phone at all. In less time than it would have taken just to listen to the bank's phone system's voice menu, I had done my business, no lingering frustration of having had to wait interminably for a representative to take my call, as always happens, no annoying paper note to lose. And I continued right where I had left on my newspaper, a happier man, with more time for my tea and more time to exercise. Well, at least to keep checking Google for the research that one day will assure me that all that concern about exercise wasn't necessary after all, just as I thought.

No wires to trip over, no attachments, not even the necessity to find a table to rest a hot laptop. No tv remote.

Ahhh! The Seamless Life has arrived!

Welcome 2011

2010-12-31T20:35:00.000-08:00

Ants?

2010-12-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

No, this is not a photo of ants taken with a macro lens.

It's a picture of people skating in an outdoor skating rink in Narbonne, France, set up for the Christmas holidays.

At night the rink has been illuminated with colored floodlights.

Normally this area is an archaeological dig framed by a town square, with steps leading down to the remains of an old Roman Road. One evening recently, I watched on my iPad as some trucks and construction equipment pulled up to the site and in a few days this temporary skating rink was built over the pit. The outdoor cafés here, no longer appealing in the cold weather, gave way to a new round of fun activities for the public.

Christmas Cake from Dave and Sandra

2010-12-18T17:26:00.000-08:00

When I signed the receipt on his digital device and the Fedex deliveryman handed me the package, the last link of my last remaining bond with the family Christmas traditions of my youth was completed. The package from my youngest sibling, Dave, would contain the Christmas cake he sends me every year without fail. It had traveled the past twenty hours from the Tropical heat and rain of Trinidad, been prodded, probed and sniffed by US Customs, transferred in the dead of night at some snowbound airport somewhere in mid-USA. Now it was in my hands, no longer a package but a bond with long past Christmases and parents and siblings gone or scattered.

Dave has found a way to get this Christmas cake to me every year for decades. It has not always been convenient for him. One of the most memorable episodes was the Christmas when he used his valuable pass he earned by working for an airline to fly most of a day and all night to bring it to my home in California, just about collapse on the sofa in the livingroom for a few hours of sleep and fly all those hours again back to Trinidad to be with his family.

I refuse to call this cake a fruitcake. A traditional Trinidad Christmas cake bears as much resemblance to that often derided concoction we know as a fruitcake here as a Rolls Royce to a battered Yellow taxicab.

It is black or almost black in color from the liquid "burnt sugar" used in the batter. I suppose the culinary term would be caramelized sugar, but it was always called burnt sugar when I was a kid and vied to lick the remnants of batter from the mixing bowl. It was always pure coarse brown cane sugar, burnt in a blackened cast iron pot. The raisins, currants, prunes, cherries, citron and other fruits the cake is made of blend into a heavenly aromatic dark mush after soaking for days in cherry brandy and rum. After baking the cake, more like a pudding in consistency is kept moist until eaten by more infusions of those spirits.

The thorough house cleaning, painting and varnishing, the presents Santa used to leave under the bed and the family under the Christmas tree, the Midnight Mass in the old parish church across the street, the merry crowds of family and friends, the lustily sung Christmas Carols, the toasting and the Christmas cake that signified Christmas, I have been separated from, except for this cake.

This afternoon as I enjoy a generous slice with my tea out here in the Pacific Northwest it will be a reunion of sorts with a joyful Christmas Past.

Thanks Dave and Sandra and a Very Merry Christmas to All.

Hawaii

2010-12-06T23:41:00.000-08:00

Somewhere down on that beach my granddaughters were surfing on their boogie boards and no doubt planning to return as teenagers to join those people out there on real surfboards waiting to catch a big wave.

My surfing was taking place just a block away on the landward side of this same beach, at the WiFi hotspot outside the Apple store in Waikiki. At the end of the day the girls could show off their new tans. I had my e-mails saved on my iPad. Hey, both activities are "surfing", right?

It's a tourist ritual to hang out at Waikiki Beach to watch the Tropical sunset, all five minutes or so of it. The sun just plummets into the sea on the horizon usually in a spectacular display of color. Visitors from higher northern latitudes, accustomed to the long twilight there cannot help but marvel how there is no long transition from daylight to
nighttime here. Sunset is like throwing a switch, with just that magnificent spark as day and night break contact.

Then the hotels illuminate their palm trees:

And a fire dancer energizes the crowds.

Letters from Port-of-Spain

2010-11-27T00:53:00.000-08:00

I have twice had discussions with personnel at airports about whether the place of my birth, Trinidad, so named by Christopher Columbus more than 500 years ago, exists or ever existed. These were serious discussions as my being allowed to board planes depended on my credibility.

The first such discussion was with an airline representative at the check in counter in Los Angeles who thought the destination on my ticket, Port of Spain, Trinidad, was a mistake. He could accept my transit point, Miami, but he was incredulous when I insisted that Port of Spain was an actual city and that Trinidad was a country. Eventually with a “That must be a new place” shrug he completed my check in.

The second discussion fortunately took place many years before the paranoia that followed the hijackings of September 11, 2001, as I was about to enter a plane in Amsterdam for the flight back to the USA of which I had already been a citizen for most of my life. In those days there were occasional hijackings, usually to divert a plane from Cuba to the USA from its scheduled destination. The hijacker usually didn’t have any further interest in the passengers or plane once it landed. Violence was rare.

Whenever a hijacking occurred there would be some increased security procedures at airports in the area. Such was the situation in Amsterdam, and in this case the procedure was stationing two or three US security agents at podiums at the entrance to the jetway to planes bound for this country. The job of these agents was to form a psychological profile of each passenger depending on the kind of answers they gave to apparently random questions. My last question was where was I born? So I said “Trinidad”. My inquisitor shot back : “I mean the country where you were born.” He repeatedly just would not accept “Trinidad”, until it occurred to me to direct him to the information printed on my wellworn US passport. I know how I silently profiled his knowledge. I don’t how he profiled me, but I am thankful that those were the days before people got put on “No Fly” lists. Who knows, I might still be languishing in some holding facility in Amsterdam, a man without a country. Nice melodramatic thought, no?

A recently published book Letters From Port of Spain by Ric (Ricardo) Hernandez will help convince any post-Google skeptics in a most gentlemany, erudite way that Trinidad, or to give it its present full political name: The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, does actually exist and has existed for some time. Expats like Ric and myself remember it as a delightful island with a highly educated, ambitious and courteous population. As another Trinidad expat put it in an e-mail recently, it was an island where “being nice” was appreciated and where people responded to “niceness” “like flowers turning towards the sun”.

The content and style of Ric’s writing reflect that, “niceness” being not syrupy triviality but a preference for sincere family and social ties, beauty, refinement, kindness, wisdom and knowledge.

I came across Ric Hernandez’ writing by chance when I read one of his weekly columns in the online edition of the newspaper, The Trinidad Express. His style stood head and shoulders above the usual fare. I enjoyed them as essays, in form and content erudite, articulate, with the sophistication of a writer who was well read, well educated, well traveled and had a very wide knowledge and understanding of the world.

I was very disappointed when he stopped writing those columns and I wrote to the Editor of the newspaper to say so. I copied that e-mail to Ricardo and so began our cyber correspondence. In September of this year I had the pleasure of actually meeting him and his wife Janice in person here in Seattle. At that time he showed me the proof copy of his book Letters from Port-of-Spain in which he has collated those columns. The book was just published and I am happily reading the copy I received from Barnes and Noble.

Many of the “letters” are recollections of life in the Trinidad of Ric’s and my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Others reflect his profound interest in literature. My reading will be interrupted for a few days while I am away from home but I look forward to continuing to read Letters from Port-of-Spain especially on those Winter days by my fireside that are made for nostalgia.

A week has elapsed since I wrote the above paragraph and as if to encourage me to delve right in again to Letters from Port-of-Spain, Nature greeted me with the residue of a snow storm as my plane landed in Seattle from sunny Hawaii.

Beignets

2010-11-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

The last time (and the first) that I tasted beignets was back in the 1970's in the city famous for them, New Orleans. Beignets are a deep fried pastry, like a doughnut without the hole, but it should be illegal to call a New Orleans Beignet a doughnut.

Recently my 11 year old granddaughter developed a serious interest in cooking, and has been assiduously learning how to cook. One of the things she has taught herself to make is Beignets. She had set aside some for me from her first batch, but her parents and sister ate them all up, over her protests. She and I agreed that my portion from her next batch would be protected at all costs.

True to her word last Saturday night she got her Dad to rush her over here to my home with a fresh batch.
She literally ran up the stairs with them, although that was partly because she couldn't wait to pass them to me so she could get to my iPad.

Weren't they delicious!
She had made some with bananas, some with blueberries and some were rolled in confectioner's sugar. The ones that survived my first gorging have been eaten with a steaming cup of tea the last several rainy afternoons.

Just wait till she introduces them to New Orleans!

Fall in Budapest

2010-10-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

Short days, long evenings, low, gray skies, chill, damp rain: typical Fall weather wouldn’t change my routines when I had to go to work, raise kids and putter about with Do-it-yourself projects and maintenance around the house.

Now though I have to find things to do to keep the devil away from my idle hands that complain at the thought of being exposed to Fall weather. My iPad has come to my rescue and I can while away some time comfortably with it by my fireplace, an activity my whole body thanks me for and which keeps that devil at bay.

For the past ten days or so I have been taking this sequence of screen shots of a corner of a park in Budapest that is scanned continuously by a webcam, observing the inexorable march of Fall reflected in the changing color of the trees and as they lose their dense foliage to become bare trunks and branches.

In the beginning, just a few pale reddish patches, still mostly green.

The reds are taking over and the green a paler shade.

On this sunny day, the trees are ablaze with vivid red and golden leaves.

The reds are turning to brown and the leaves are beginning to fall away. Note the workers raking leaves.

Overnight most of the leaves have been stripped from the trees, most of the branches are bare and the grass is littered with fallen leaves.

Norwegian Cruise Lines Punished for Poor Treatment of Disabled

2010-10-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

I posted a blog following a cruise to Alaska on board the Norwegian Cruise Line’s Star in July in which I complained about NCL’s shabby and inconsiderate treatment of passengers who required a wheelchair.

Yesterday I felt vindicated and I admired our legal system for pressuring NCL to improve its service to its physically challenged passengers. As a result of a lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department on behalf of 9 handicapped passengers on an NCL ship on a cruise in Hawaii, NCL will have to compensate them a total of $100,000 and pay an additional $40,000 to the government as well as agree to making a number of improvements in the way it deals with handicapped passengers.

This is an excerpt from the report in USA Today:

Norwegian Cruise Line to pay $100,000 to nine disabled passengers who alleged discrimination

By Gene Sloan, USA TODAY

Courtesy Norwegian Cruise Line

Norwegian Cruise Line has agreed to pay $100,000 to nine cruisers with disabilities who allegedly were discriminated against on one of its ships.

The U.S. Justice Department, which announced the settlement on Monday, had sued the line on behalf of the cruisers, five of whom are deaf and four of whom use wheelchairs.

The Justice Department says in a statement that the five deaf cruisers did not receive interpreters and other auxiliary aids, or a closed caption TV, while on voyages around Hawaii on a Norwegian ship, and "thus were unable to enjoy the activities on board the ship or the shore excursions because they could not understand what was going on and communicate effectively."

The agency says the four cruisers who use wheelchairs did not get accessible buses between the airport, ship and hotel, and on shore excursions; had to wait hours for an accessible bus at times; were unable to go on shore excursions because of the lack of an accessible bus; were charged extra for accessible transportation; and/or were not allowed to get on and off the bus during a shore excursion even though the bus was accessible.

The Justice Department sued Norwegian under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

And from AOL news:

Norwegian Cruise Line Ordered to Improve Services for Disabled Travelers

by Fran Golden Subscribe to Fran Golden's posts

Posted Oct 26th 2010 10:47 AM

Norwegian Cruise Line has agreed to pay nine passengers $100,000 and a civil fine of $40,000 to resolve a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The consent decree, filed by the Justice Department in federal court in Miami, settles complaints that NCL did not provide adequate services for five deaf or hard of hearing passengers and four passengers in wheelchairs who took cruises in the Hawaiian islands.

NCL also agreed to "ensure that individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing get the auxiliary aids and services they need..

Costa Maya, Mexico

2010-10-16T23:50:00.000-07:00

When I travel I tell myself I am not a tourist because tourists in my mind do silly things like adopt silly poses with dignified statues. But here I am doing just that, in Costa Maya, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico.

I must remember that when I do stuff like this I must take another picture of the statue without me because embarrassingly I could not Photoshop myself out of this one and only picture I have of this representation of the Mayan figure Chacmool who guards the entrance to this faux Mayan shopping plaza. But Costa Maya is purely and simply made for tourists. It is a collection of tourist facilities at the end of a long, unadorned concrete jetty for cruise ships,

long strips of white sandy or rocky beaches and cabanas

A port of call carved out of the extensive featureless jungle beyond.

There are two villages within some miles of Costa Maya and some unexplored small Mayan sites in the jungle, but those are largely beyond the reasonable reach of a cruise passenger who has only a few hours on shore.

So one does touristy things.

Sightseeing here is simple and two-way: from the ship you look with envy and impatience at the white sand, colorful buildings, thatched cabanas and the warm clean surf lapping at the shore at the other end of the dock. From the white sandy beach and thatched cabanas you look at your ship at the other end of the dock and think of the splendour of life at sea.

In between you pose with Chacmool, perhaps with a shiver down your spine recall that in the days of the Mayas, it is thought, sacrificial human hearts would be placed on that tablet on his stomach.

Or you visit this replica, on a much smaller scale, of a Mayan pyramid of the kind that are found all over Mexico.

Pretend to be scared by this fierce jaguar, an important figure in Mayan culture.

A Mayan style arch forms the entrance to a shopping mall with the customary souvenir stalls.

You might be lucky to catch an outdoor folkloric dance at this plaza.

Or take in the vivid colors of the various buldings.

When your sightseeing’s all done, this oversized bottle of Mexican beer may persuade you to slake your thirst. ¡Bienvenidos, amigos!

Fall and the Cayman Islands

2010-10-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

Usually “Fall” as in Autumn refers to the red, golden, brown and yellow leaves falling to the ground and carpeting it with their rich colors. This Sunday afternoon though it just refers to the rain that has been falling all day from the low, overcast sky.

No wonder my mind turned to sunny beaches and taunted me with visions of the Cayman Islands, Cozumel, Costa Maya and Roatan, those Tropical ports of my recent cruise. I had written about Roatan then forgot all about posting about the other ports, mostly because I didn’t get off the ship at the others so I didn’t take any pictures on shore. In my reverie this afternoon I remembered that I had some pictures from a previous trip. It took some fishing around in my files to find them because I couldn’t remember what year I had visited them. Time has become such a blur.

When I saved those pictures my older computer software just put them into folders which I labelled with the year. I have not yet transferred them to my current catalog which tags my photos in several different ways making it easy to retrieve them. My favorite is the Place tag that brings up a map of the world with a stick pin indicating places where I have taken pictures. Click on a pin and those pictures appear on the screen.My next camera should automatically do that tagging.

A pirate might greet you in George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands, but he will be a friendly fellow and instead of plundering you he will be offering great prices at a Duty Free store.

The real current buccaneers are just further down the street, in what seem like warrens of small offices in highrises. These are the “offshore banks”, havens for corporate and wealthy taxdodgers in the US, Europe and other big countries, politicians hiding nest eggs for when they are out of power, and money launderers. I never knew there were so many Irish banks, for example. Don’t look for counters and bank tellers or local customers waiting to cash a check in these places. These buccaneers are affable, young, college graduates, mostly expats armed with laptops, cellphones and degrees in finance, not cutlasses. And they are well-dressed. No bandanas. At the time unregulated Reaganesque and Bushian hedge funds and other wealth-from-nothing financial schemes were bubbling along nicely in the US and these offshore banks were flourishing. I wasn’t tempted to go ashore this time to stock up on the duty free cognacs and whiskey because you can no longer take liters of liquids as hand luggage onboard the flights home and it’s risky to pack bottles in your manhandled checked luggage, but I was tempted to go to see how many of those “banks” were out of business on this cruise.

Perhaps it’s fitting that just a short drive from these financial operations takes the traveller to Hell:

Not a bad place at all in this tourist version. The only heat is from the glorious Tropical sun. No brimstone here, just a harmless interesting lava formation:

There are all the comforts of Paradise: lush greenery, magnificent multi-hued seas, beaches, swimming pools, airconditioned five star resorts, free samples of rum cake, even a post office (no need to wait for the Hungry Ghosts month to contact the folks).

You can assuage your environmental zeal by visiting the turtle conservation center:

or just pick up shells on the beach.

The ultimate in peaceful coexistence, Hell and a Tropical Paradise?

Man Overboard

2010-09-23T14:17:00.000-07:00

A few of my siblings and I were having a relaxed conversation in the almost deserted restaurant of our cruise ship, the Solstice, some time after midnight when there was a terse message over the Public Address system:

“Man overboard. Starboard side”

No exclamation marks in transcribing it, because it was delivered very calmly.

It took a few moments for the implication of that matter of fact statement to sink in. There was someone all alone out in that blackness fighting for his life. Someone who just a short time before had probably been watching the entertainment along with us in the theater, who was one of the hundreds of cheerful passengers on this glittering ship. At this very moment he, or she was drifting farther and farther away down there tossed wildly by the choppy sea.

We all scattered to our staterooms. Mine was on the starboard side. I went out on to my verandah and instantly I became a witness to the drama of the search for the man overboard.

There was no distnguishing the sea from the sky. Everything beyond the glow of the lights along the hull of the ship was total blackness. The strong wind wailed like a banshee as it squeezed through the crack in the sliding glass door that I had not latched behind me. The sea was in turmoil, waves chopping the surface in all directions, their tops whipped into surging whitecaps. Occasionally in the distance where the horizon should be flashes of lightning gashed the blackness momentarily silhouetting enormous turbulent cumulus clouds.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could see two tiny lights, far away, the beacons of a lifeboat that had been sent out to search. An intense beam of light from a powerful searchlight from the bridge up front shot out towards the tiny beacons. It swept that area for a while then seemed to fix itself on one spot while the ship very slowly moved in wide arcs back and forth.

A coded announcement “For the crew: Oscar, Oscar, Oscar.. (I couldn’t distinguish the rest)” suddely broke the silence. I could hear a small fast boat slapping across the waves as it sped away from the ship towards the beacons of the lifeboat.

On the lifeboat deck far below my verandah I could see crewmen readying an open utility boat for launching over the side.

After a while the ship’s horn sounded once. It must have signalled confirmation of a message from the lifeboat out there in the dark.

The launch crew below sprang into action. They were purposeful and disciplined but the wind, the rocking and plunging of both the ship and the small boat dangling by cables from the winches made this operation very dangerous. All of those crew were risking their lives. They could be crushed between the ship and the boat or thrown overboard.

Before the utility boat was lowered into the water, an officer dressed in a white tunic, carrying a black kit got on board. He must have been the ship’s doctor. I imagine it would be his job to either assist a survivor or certify the victim dead. In either event it indicated the impossible had been accomplished: the man overboard had been found in that black malestrom.

Getting the utlity boat into the water was a feat of seamanship and courage. Not only was there the danger as it swung from its cables threatening to smash itself against the ship’s hull, but as it neared the water, large waves kept tossing it upwards then left it dangling in their troughs. It was like trying to break a wild stallion.

The difficulties and danger didn’t end when the boat was cast off. Evidently the objective was to speed to the lifeboat, but going fast in the turbulent water put the boat at risk. At times it would pitch up almost vertically and a moment later dive just as steeply. You could hear the thudding as it did so and the different pitch of the engine as the propeller at times came right out of the water. The sound of this contest between boat and sea continued after the boat disappeared into the darkness.

More oficers and crew gathered expectantly on the lifeboat deck below as the sound of the returning utility boat with the doctor was heard.

Getting it back up onto the ship was as difficult as getting it into the water. The officer in the white tunic with the black kit stepped on to the deck. Then from the small enclosed part of the boat emerged two or three crew members carrying the survivor supporting him by his arms. He seemed unable to support himself, or reluctant to be brought on board, his bare feet dragging. He was dressed in a shirt and shorts.

Cheers broke out from observers in their verandahs.

It was amazing that anyone would survive out there, incredible that he would be found.

As he was laid on a stretcher on the deck and taken away , he was hidden from my view by several crew members bending over him, but the great amount of activity seemed to indicate some sort of commotion.

At breakfast the rumors began to circulate.

It was obvious he had not fallen but jumped overboard. It requires a very determined effort to fall off a cruise ship.

His going overboard must have been witnessed because the location had been quickly marked by a location device thrown into the water, and that helped account for the fact that he was found.

Who had observed him? One version was that the personnel monitoring the security cameras on the ship had seen him go overboard and immediately alerted the bridge. Another rumor claimed he did it in the presence of some passengers.

It was rumored that he actually wore a life jacket as he jumped. As odd as that appears, considering that he hadn’t drowned in that turbulent sea and taken with another rumor, that he had resisted rescue (and I guessed that he was struggling to get free from his rescuers as they tried to help him off the utility boat and on to the stretcher) it would be consistent with the behavior of a mentally unbalanced person.

The fact that he was rescued was a tribute to the skill and professionality of the crew. Some of them had even unhesitatingly risked serious injury or death.

Western Caribbean Cruise

2010-09-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

Usually on the morning after I return from a trip I call some of my siblings, who all live thousands of miles away and whom I don't see for years at a time, to let them know I am back home. That may be a habit motivated by inherited remnants of our mother's anxiety about our whereabouts and safety whenever we were not at home, and especially when we were travelling.

I was about to instinctively reach for the phone when I realized that this time a call was not necessary. My siblings, with one exception, had accompanied me on this trip. We had finally been able to have an almost complete family reunion after more than ten years.

A cruise seemed to be the best venue for this. We sailed out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a port that was as equidistant as possible for all of us. A gettogether for our family, as for most, I am sure, involves a lot of cooking, cleaning up and other busy work that severely reduces the amount of time for bonding and catching up on news. A cruise would eliminate all of that. If tensions arose, as also happens with family reunions, the gigantic ship, three football fields long, fifteen decks high and with a maze of restaurants, shops, theaters, lounges and other nooks and crannies would provide lots of places to hide. As an absolute and drastic last resort one could also jump overboard, as a passenger did one night (more of that later).

The itinerary was the Western Caribbean, with calls at Georgetown, in the Cayman Islands, Cozumel and Costa Maya, Mexico, and new for me, Roatan, Honduras.

That two hurricanes were churning about or developping in the Gulf of Mexico which we had to transit was cause for some concern even though with modern weather mapping ships have a lot of time to alter course to avoid dangerous conditions and will do so since no cruise line wants its ships full of seasick passengers. The magnificent weather we had at each port and most of the cruise emphasized that such concern was unnecessary.

Let's take a look first at Roatan, a small island belonging to Honduras where the vegetation in typical Tropical fashion is lush and colorful, the sea, even at the dock, is crystal clear, there's not a highrise in sight, enough infrastructure to show that there is no evident deprivation

Roatan provided a friendly welcome with folk dancers in their elaborate dress dancing to lively traditional music. No intrusive security meant to make you feel like a potential terrorist. And immaculate duty free shops including one drugstore which offered generic versions of Viagra, among other medications, as well as genuine potato chips and sunscreen.

Wrong Side of the Digital Divide

2010-08-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Having used personal computers since the introduction of the first Apples, and possessing a fair share of digital devices, I thought I was on the right side of the Digital Divide until my ten year old granddaughter showed me the tattoos on her arms last night.

First a disclaimer: I believe, I hope, those tattoos are water soluble drawings, not etched permanently into her skin.

There was a small tattoo on each arm, and together we admired them, she with glee, I with great uncertainty as to how to address her pride in them. So, I settled for a neutral approach, intending to merely describe them and use some humor.

The one on the left arm went well: we agreed it was the sun and that it was cheerful.

The tattoo on the right arm was a small circle with a couple of dots in the middle, and that was what made it clear I have not really crossed the new location of the Digital Divide.

I ventured that the symbol was a button. Immediately she jokingly pressed it with a finger. Now my intention was that we would banter about the incongruity of having a shirt button on one’s arm, but that connotation of “button” was lost on her. Instead, the first meaning of “button” that came to her mind was an icon on a computer screen that you tapped.

To my generation, and even her parents’ generation, digital devices are accessories, used as needed for discrete purposes: work, e-mail, messaging, media. On the other hand her generation has incorporated digital devices seamlessly and pervasively into all aspects of their lives.

I had begun to notice that trend during the vists of my grandchildren. In the course of a typical visit, they tend to routinely weave five or six digital devices into normal social and personal interaction as easily and as naturally as they used speech, drawings, paper, pencils, crayons, stickers, scissors, tv, just a few years ago.

Want to play a game with them? Out comes the Nintendo Wii and they hand you a controller. Ask about their summer activities, they may show you an animation project they did on the computer. Remind them to do their homework, they go online. They eagerly share with you some cool App on their iPod Touch that you haven’t heard about and show you how to use it or play it. They will helpfully enter their new cell number in the address book on your phone . Give them an order for Girl Scout cookies, they send an e-mail to themselves on their laptop then later they send you an e-mail with the amount you owe. They discuss books they have read or downloaded. If you have a device they don’t, they explore it. A topic comes up in conversation and they delve into it with you with a Google search or a Podcast without a hiccup in the flow of conversation. Their music and videos are streamed to their mobile devices. Want to know what the new puppy looks like or who the current boyfriend is? Up pops a picture in Flickr while they describe them to you. Tell them that with your diminishing memory you may forget to send the DVD you promised them, they will say “No problem. I’ll text you”. You refer to some temperature or measurement in a form they don’t understand, they will convert it immediately online. Want to take them to their favorite pizza parlor but don’t know how to get there, they find a route for you on GPS.

They don’t want a candy to take home anymore. They want your iPad.

Shakespeare in the Park

2010-08-02T17:54:00.000-07:00

On some Sunday afternoons in the summer, a small sandwichboard sign appears at the entrance to the park across the street from my house.

It advertises a performance in the amphitheater there of a Shakespeare play later that afternoon.This Sunday’s performance is “Romeo and Juliet”.

Amphitheater may be somewhat of an exaggeration, given that the venue is not much more than a grassy clearing amidst the cedars in that section of the park, a small hollow where people will spread their blankets or set up folding chairs to watch the performance, where children can run off and swing or slide or romp in the playground right next to the venue, easily incorporating a Shakespearean play into thier children’s vigorous, noisy, fun activities. People strolling or cycling past along the trails will pause to look on then continue on their way.

That’s something I like about Seattle. So many of its functions blend so easily into everyday life that they seem spontaneous, uncontrived...even a Shakespearean performance. Romeo woos Juliet in the shade of a large cedar while a jetliner flies low overhead, Prospero and Caliban come to terms in their fantasyland while children create their own fantasies in a playground a stone’s throw away without a thought of incongruity, without a stage, without a Box Office.

First Flight

2010-07-24T21:23:00.000-07:00

I missed the first flight of one of the the two fledgling storks. I was just in time to see his tail as he left the nest.It seemed more as though he had fallen out of the nest rather than flown off, but I knew he could fly when he flew into the nest from off camera a few minutes later.

Since then he has been away from the nest for a while every evening.

The other stork seems very agitated when he is left alone and I wondered why he didn't do as his sibling and go joy-flying around.

This morning, my time, evening his time, he flew. I don't know if it was his first flight, but it was an exciting moment for me.

I will let the following sequence of pictures tell the story:

For the birds

2010-07-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

In the nest on top of a chimney several storeys above the main street of the ancient town of Gengenbach in Germany, where they were hatched a few months ago, two young storks await their mother who will soon bring them their food.

I have been watching them through a webcam that that can be trained on them or on various other sights in the town below. It's a sight that I would not be able to enjoy if I were a tourist on the ground.

These young storks are as large as their mother, and I marvel at how mindful of each other's space they seem to be. They barely fit in, or rather, on, their nest, which is more like a platform than a nest. No safety railings here. They could easily jostle each other out of the nest to their doom. When they spread their large wings, they seem to be mindful of where the other one is and so do not inadvertently knock each other off.

Patient watching rewarded with some amusing poses:

One bird, four legs?

Two birds, three beaks?

Two birds, one head?

Recently they have been spreading their wings preparing for flight

Just after I snapped this screen shot, this stork, the larger of the two, rose straight up about a foot into the air as he experimented with flapping his wings. It happened too fast to capture that exciting event.

One day soon they will take to the air on their maiden flight. I fervently hope I will witness that moment.

They will soar above the main street of Gengenbach

Perhaps someone in the market in front of the Rathaus (Townhall) will look up and spot them:

Then they will go about their mission of delivering babies all over the world. No? Well, that was what I was taught in those days when that was as much sex education as you got officially.

A Bird's Eye View

2010-07-14T22:45:00.000-07:00

The other day as I was flipping through my favorite live webcams doing my armchair travel, one of the cameras seemed to be obstructed. Odd, because that camera is located high above the city in a building, probably a tower, so it wasn't likely a person would be standing in its line of view.

There was a slight movement and the bird, whose back I had been seeing, turned its head to the left and solved my puzzle. This bird had perched right in front of the camera.

I realized that both the bird and I were looking down from the same vantage point on the Medieval city of Kuressaare, Estonia, below. He seemed to be gesturing me to take a look and share what he was seeing.

For a while I could say I was enjoying a real bird's eye view of that city.

On Board Norwegian Cruise Lines' Star to Alaska

2010-06-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

Alaska Cruise June 2010 on the NCL Star

One of the benchmarks of a business plan for a retail outlet is revenue per square foot.

It is not the model for executive suites, or country clubs, or churches or, until my recent cruise to Alaska on board the Norwegian Cruise Lines ship The Star, cruise ships.

At least that is not the image projected in the seductive promotions for those glamorous, carefree floating resorts. It was certainly not the model on that same cruise line when I cruised on its ships on two previous occasions. It has not been the business model on two other cruise lines I have sailed with.

The NCL Star at 91,745 tons and 965 feet long is a large ship. It is typical of cruise ships, sleek, majestic enviable. But as we cruised I began to become aware that something about life on board a cruise ship was missing on this ship.

What I would call “the cruise experience” was gone.

The fault was not that of the crew. The crew were all very attentive, helpful and friendly.

It wasn’t the food. Menus in the main dining room were creative, the food very good, the presentation and service excellent. The signature chocolate buffet late one night still offered chocoholics a taste of heaven.

While some of the entertainment was very amateurish, the staging of the main shows was quite spectacular. There were tall exciting spiral waterslides in the pool that might tempt adults to get out of the hot tubs or deck chairs and recapture some of the exhilaration of youth.

It wasn’t the interior decor. There was the usual central glitzy soaring atrium, the attempt at an ambience of opulence in the main Versailles diningroom. Attention had been paid to the bathrooms in the stateroom where there was a small sliding glass door to the shower stall instead of the usual thin plastic curtain, and another sliding door separating the toilet from the washbasin area. Remarkable. The crew kept the ship very clean.

But some grinch or more likely, bean counter of an executive board had stolen the “cruise” from “cruise ship”.

You could just imagine the process as they went through the ship trying to wring more revenue from each square foot of its decks, passageways, lounges, not by adding value ( at least not for the passengers or crew) to these but by turning them into so-called “Specialty Restaurants”, super-priced “Garden Villas”, eliminating even the usually complimentary lemonade from the cafeteria, and keeping the passengers circulating around the shops, buying photographs, paying extra for “specialty” restaurants rather than encouraging them to sit around, relax and enjoy panoramic views from expansive public areas by severely limiting such areas.

They may have started with the staterooms.

No more Room Stewards with a name and a telephone extension number and an assistant. Probably eliminated a few hires. And why not? The telephone operator could channel requests for that clean towel or small repair in your cabin in between her other calls, no? Or for a bar of soap. No, not soap. No more little bars of soap. Just a soap dispenser with industrial grade detergent. Is it really necessary to have an employee with a smile and helpful attitude to introduce him/herself to the guest at the beginning of the cruise as your assigned Room Steward anyway? Couldn’t he/she be more profitably used by sending him/her wherever a cabin needed attention anywhere on the ship or to free up personnel to sell Welcome Drinks at the Grand Atrium on embarkation? Every small profit counts. Certainly. The guests won’t miss the personal touch, would they? You even eliminate the pitcher of water in the cabin to steer the occupants to the almost $6 USD bottle of designer water in its place if he is incapacitated or not motivated to walk the 600 feet and several decks to the cafeteria just for a generously free glass of water with ice or too finicky to drink the water from the tap. Oh, but a bucket of ice is still provided and the guest can wait for it to melt. So many alternatives. Thank you NCL.

And those staterooms: no armchair. Just a cafeteria style straightback tubular steel and plain hard plastic seat and small back panel type chair and a matching wellworn stool, no back. Just the kind of furniture for a romantic room service breakfast, right? Or for sitting around to read that novel you packed. Well, if your cabin has a verandah, at a premium of course, there’s a more comfortable deck chair out there, leisurely on a Caribbean cruise but on an Alaska cruise?

Ah those ever-present bracing 20 mph headwinds, created by the forward movement of the ship, chill even in the Tropics, biting in Alaskan waters. On every other cruise ship I have sailed you needn’t brave them to have a wonderful 180˚ view because there has always been a vast totally enclosed lounge the entire width of the ship and located right up front. On The Star if you wanted such a view you had to brave the elements and that headwind because there is no such enclosed observation lounge, just open decks up front. There are glass panels with gaps between them. Ineffective. The design also spoils your photography because exposed glass on ships is always marred by salt residue.

What happened to the panoramic observation lounge? The closest thing to it is a similar but much smaller structure midship with a view of the pool, waterslide and some masts. The top level is occupied by those super expensive villas, The lower level is a cramped bar. You don’t have to pay to sit in it of course to admire the waterslide, unable to see the wide horizon hidden by it, but it is so evidently a bar that you feel odd sitting there and not buying a drink.

And that seems to be the idea also behind what are normally choice public lounging areas on other ships which on this ship have been designated “Specialty Restaurants” with a cover charge. They are not walled off but even outside of restaurant hours they are unmistakeably revenue-producing areas, meant for business not lounging with a book. Since they occupy most of the best vantage points other than your own cabin it means few places to just stop by and admire the view.

Every cruise I have been on has had a cocktail party hosted by the Captain for all the passengers. Not this one. There was a cocktail party for members of NCL’s frequent cruisers’ club. Other than that if you wanted to have your picture taken with the Captain there was a session at which the professional photographers would take it and of course you could buy a print. Don’t think of taking out your little “point and shoot” digital camera and doing it yourself. And those photographers...every single evening they prowled the main dining room taking not just a picture of couples but of each individual as well. Three pictures instead of one. No obligation to buy of course but...

But I save the worst for last, and this may have explicit language, so be forewarned. On cruises significant numbers of passengers require wheelchair assistance. The usual cruise line practice is to provide curb to cabin assistance, but on every cruise I have had, even those with large numbers of such guests, if the passenger requested and there were sufficient wheelchairs (and there always were), the line would leave the wheelchair with the passenger for use on board.

Well here was the ultimate captive market for NCL’s revenue magicians. If you wanted a wheelchair on board you had to rent one. Granted, even that in principle might be ok. But there were two absolutely devious and heartless aspects to NCL’s practice.

The minimum rental on this 7 day cruise was for 10 days, at an unreasonable minimum charge of $125 USD. That was Gotcha #1.

Gotcha #2 should be qualified with an expletive. On the last evening there was an announcement that those who rented wheel chairs were expected to turn them in that night to have them inspected and the paperwork completed before the rush of disembarkation. The announcement added, seemingly solicitously, that NCL would provide complimentary wheelchair assistance from the holding area for disembarkation the next morning upon request. Of course that overlooked the little matter of the handicapped person having to get around from the moment he/she returned the rented wheelchair at the Reception Desk, till next morning when he/she would have to find some means of navigating the up to 600 feet and some decks to the holding area.

I happened to be sitting listening to the music in the Grand Atrium near the Reception Desk that night at about 10:30p when I witnessed the most disgusting impact of the totally greedy and inhumane business model that NCL seems to have applied to its cruises.

A very overweight middle-aged lady wheeled an equally overweight sickly elderly female relative to the Reception Desk to dutifully return their wheelchair. With difficulty the older lady got up from the chair and unsteadily supported herself with the help of a cane on legs too weak to sustain her weight while the checkin process proceeded. When the process was completed the pair shuffled off with evidently great discomfort and difficulty holding on to each other. Distances to staterooms are quite far in a ship the size of the Star.

But the ultimate in indignity was that as they passed it was obvious that the older lady was incontinent and had to shuffle along at her slow pace, her pants wet, through the public passageways of this glamorous ship all the way to her cabin. Meanwhile there were still technically three days of wheelchair rental that she had paid for but could not use.

I inherited from my mother a resistance to seasickness, but I came close to puking as I seethed with rage and disgust at Norwegian Cruise Lines at how low they had sunk.

The receptionist was pleasant, quick and efficient, and doing her job. She couldn’t see the lady’s predicament from her station. I repeat, all the personnel on the ship were excellent, professional, helpful and friendly. She is in no way to be blamed in this.

It’s those bean counters isolated in the plush no-expense-spared executive suites where revenue per square foot is irrelevant. They had robbed that elderly lady of the cruise experience that was owed her. They had robbed her of thirty percent of the rental of her wheelchair. They had even robbed her of her dignity. They had reduced the pleasure of cruising for most guests, herded them by the interior layout of the ship as much as possible from lounging areas with views to revenue-producing outlets and impersonalized the cruise experience.

Tracy Arm Fjord, Alaska

2010-06-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

It seemed a great idea to get me out of my armchair to do some real travel: a cruise to Alaska on three days' notice. No hassles of air travel involved, just an easy ten minute taxi ride from home to the dock. All ticketing and security registration online. Our trusted travel agent taking care of all the details.

And so without a second thought we were off to Alaska last Saturday for a seven day cruise aboard Norwegian Cruise Lines' Norwegian Star.

Even packing was a breeze since we were informed that there would be no formal dinners scheduled and NCL's "Freestyle Cruising" meant that we had dinner on our own schedule. There was no need to wonder whether we would draw the Early Seating for dinner or have to dine later than normal if the luck of the draw had assigned us to the Late Seating. Best of all, I'd have an opportunity to try my new iPad "on the road."

The travel industry is full of paradoxes, absurdities, restrictions, fine print and illogic. Cruising embodies all of those to the highest degree. I was to experience that very shortly.

But that will be the subject of another post.

This post will be all about the highlight of this cruise, the hours spent gliding along the mirror smooth waters of the Tracy Arm Fjord amid magnificent scenery on the way to and from the Sawyer Glacier.

The remnants of a glacier retreat above the fjord.
Rock formations stunned with their variety of shapes and colors. The reddish color ones looked somewhat like those mysterious monoliths that guard Easter Island in the Pacific.
Finally, Sawyer Glacier, the parallel moraines it is carrying along looking very much like tire tread marks!

House Numbers

2010-06-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

Only the mailman seems to use house numbers to locate me anymore.

This realization was impressed on me the other day when a new address plaque for our house was delivered, a present from my spouse. On it was printed not the street number of our house but its precise Latitude and Longitude. Even those coordinates which I had used in poring over maps in high school geography classes long ago to locate faraway cities had been modified: instead of degrees, minutes and seconds, the Latitude and Longitude were stated in degrees followed by the decimal equivalent of minutes and seconds. Pinpoint accuracy. To check it out I entered those coordinates into Google Earth and there instantly appeared a satellite view of my roof with a pin stuck into it..

I wonder how long it will be before the mail service begins to accept addresses stated in terms of GPS coordinates in addition to traditional street number addresses. Think how fast an electronic sorter would help distribute the mail using that system.

Already “Location Based” services have become universal. Often my iPod Touch will flash a message that a certain site requests that I permit it to use the Location Service of my device when all I wanted was a general weather forecast or the news.

Every item I order on the net is accompanied by a tracking number that enables me to follow precisely and in real time the movement of say, a laptop, from its manufacturer in China, though its transfer to another air freighter in Alaska and on to a truck in California. I have learned the names of forlorn truckstops in small towns somewhere out in the Midwest where my package was transshipped in the middle of the night. When I hear that jumbo air freighter throttling back right over my house at 3:55 am every dawn on its final approach I have a pretty good idea that my package is going to be at my doorstep when I wake up because I had tracked it being onloaded at that forwarder’s hub in Memphis thousands of miles East earlier in the night. And all of those logistics were using GPS coordinates, not street numbers.

All of which has prompted me to think: What if I followed that line of Latitude that runs right through my house all around the world, 16,517 miles, back to my house? (Click on arrow to start movie clip)

My geography lessons always defined Latitude as “an imaginary line” but for me 47°N begins as a very real line, a narrow path up a low berm across the street from my front entrance that disappears into a stand of trees.

I have often thought of travelling around the world and I have even planned such a trip several times using the conventional way of checking airline routes and schedules and fares, flying in a zig zag route from major airport to major airport following the logic of the air travel business.

But now I am going to find out what lies straight ahead over the horizon as I look due West through my front window and follow footpath Latitude 47°N (approx.) beyond those trees.

It’s not going to be a physically or logistically demanding journey.

Except for the first thirty minutes or so as I walk along Latitude 47°N to the water’s edge at Puget Sound I will be doing most of my travel at my computer using Google Earth. Can’t blame me: how would you like to trudge through Mongolia, or vast expanses of Central Russia, which to my surprise I discovered are directly beyond those familiar trees outside my front window, over the horizon, across the Pacific, on the other side of the International Dateline?

Following Latitude 47°N to the water's edge at Puget Sound:

Marktplatz, Coburg

2010-05-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

My first view of the Marktplatz of Coburg, an ancient town in Bavaria, Germany, was from somewhere high up in this building, the Rathaus or Townhall.

At the time I was sitting in front of a warm fire here in my home in Seattle with my iPod Touch, having just discovered the wonders of looking at almost anywhere in the world, live, thanks to Livecams, an app with a database of webcams all over the world, and I was looking at the view from one of those cams which looks down on the Marktplatz from high in the Rathaus.

One advantage of watching the world through a webcam is that you can witness the rhythm of the life of a city as it changes from morning through the night, through good weather and bad, from season to season. As a traveller one can usually spend only a few days, a few weeks if one is fortunate enough, in any one place, not long enough for that.

The first time I saw the Marktplatz in Coburg it was nighttime there, eight hours ahead of my Seattle early afternoon. The square was deserted, crisscrossed by the tracks of vehicles in the recently fallen snow.

The next night that same square was alive, brightly illuminated and festive with its Christmas Market.

That scene lasted for some weeks, till one day workers with heavy construction equipment and trucks showed up, dismantling the stalls and taking them into storage for next winter.

Marktplatz reverted to a quiet stately role, the statue of Prince Albert, the consort of Britain’s Queen Victoria at its center. (That match was made here in Coburg and Victoria is said to have declared that she would always consider Coburg her second home. She made several visits here during her reign).

But not for long. One morning I logged on to find the square occupied again with busy stalls and crowds of shoppers milling about them. This had been its traditional role for centuries and the reason for its name Maktplatz. Those stalls would disappear during the night, a cycle, I would soon observe, of a market that takes place every Wednesday.

One weekend recently the square was the venue for an exhibition of classic cars.

Last weekend there was what appeared to be a candlelight vigil, most likely a religious observance.

One evening a large van parked in the square to offload tables and benches. Soon Marktplatz was turned into what must have been a beer garden. You could see smoke rising from the mobile kitchens, enticing, no doubt, with the aroma of bratwurst, urging one to quaff a stein of freshly drawn Bavarian brew! Summer had arrived in Coburg.

At intervals in this constantly changing panorama, a small van or two will park, in the same spot week after week, an awning will be unrolled and an entrepreneur will set up shop for a few hours.

Bustling life is constantly flowing through the Markplatz, but it also ebbs from time to time. Then, the fountains gush but not vigorously, a family strolls through with a toddler breaking from its parent’s hand to run away to the fountain, a mother pushes a stroller, a cyclist rides through, the odd car or truck takes a shortcut, a small knot of tourists clusters around a guide at the base of Albert’s monument. Markplatz, Coburg, may slumber occasionally, but it never sleeps.

Spring Shower in the Emerald city

2010-05-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

If it's raining
Have no regrets

from the song April Showers

Postpartum Depression for Dads

2010-05-18T15:40:00.001-07:00

Postpartum Depression for Dads

A news item today reports that researchers have found Dads suffer Postpartum Depression too.

What took them so long?

Maternal Postpartum Depression occurs shortly after the birth of the baby.

Dads have long known that Paternal Postpartum Depression Onset (or better known as PP’d On) sets in 16 years after the birth or at about the time the son gets his driver’s license and the daughter goes to her first Prom. It coincides with the realization that your progeny are determined to erase any apparent connection to their Dad in their manner of grooming, dress, music, vocabulary and values. They shut themselves in their rooms, deaf to anything Dad says. They would change their inherited DNA if they could. Drives Dad insane.

But the PPD gets worse a few years later when Dad and Mom have to pay the kids’ way through College. Dad becomes aware that the tuition and accommodation would easily pay for that sports car he had always dreamed of buying as soon as he began earning a decent salary after all his years of toil and study. And as if that doesn’t depress him as much as he can bear, he realizes he won’t even be able to afford a Male Midlife Crisis some years down the road: you know, the new unnecessarily expensive car, the boat, the condo at the marina, the irresponsible behavior, the move up to premium booze from domestic beer or even a new pair of jeans.

As the statements for the credit card you gave son and daughter to tide them over some of the typical college student’s unforeseen necessities, like books, arrive, Dad notices that his credit card has gone to trendy places he would never dream of patronizing. Dad treats himself to frozen pizza from the supermarket, son and daughter and truckloads of friends go to a place that charges ten times that. Dad splurges on a pair of Levis jeans once a decade from Penney’s, daughter gets hers at some trendy place he never knew existed, paying a whole lot for the fashionably shredded knees. You question these extravagances and you are met with that “Oh Dad!” that means you are so out of it you’ll never understand them ever again.

Twenty-six years after the birth Dad is about to get over his Paternal Postpartum Depression when son calls to say he’s worried and embarrassed. Dad thinks that at last he has become relevant again. That euphoria lasts for mere seconds until son clarifies that he is worried and embarrassed because he recently discovered to his horror that “I am beginning to sound just like you” when dealing with his toddler’s behavior.

As the grandchildren approach adolescence and your son and daughter begin their difficult task of dealing with it, you are at last delighted when they occasionally seem to want some sage veteran Dad’s advice and support. It’s your moment for revenge. Instead of offering a sympathetic shoulder, you cheerfully relate anecdotes of all those times when they had challenged you and driven you to distraction. You begin to laugh hysterically the more they insist they are serious.

That’s when they call in the men in the white coats to take you away. Paternal Postpartum Depression is incurable.

However It can be relieved so long as your savings last long enough to bribe your grandchildren with the latest video games, and you can indulge behaviors that you scolded and grounded your own kids for.

But Is it a Book?

2010-05-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

Guanaguanare said...
Just found this post, Louis. You are making me VERY interested...that e-book feature sounds great! Please tell us more as you explore it.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lcFOUghavZ4/S7mTINAR38I/AAAAAAAABZU/4zr1iaItiNI/s1600/iPad.jpg

Two internet friends, Ric and "Guanaguanare" who are serious bibliophiles recently indicated their strong interest in, but some reservations about the iPad as an e-book reader. Knowing that these two very cultured gentlemen do not read books only for their content but as a sensual experience as well, savoring the feel of the book, its binding, its entire provenance, I decided to take my iPad for a "road test" today, to see how it measures up, not just as a reading device, but as a book, as they might regard a book and as I used to, and still do, myself.

I took my iPad with me to the doctor's office today. I would see if it would withstand the challenge from the vivid illustrated covers of the usual magazines in a doctor's office, assuming that they still had covers. To see if in spite of being an electronic gadget without the warmth of a bound book it would provide enough of a sustainable booklike experience to resist the easy, short articles better suited to the distractions and anxiety of a medical waitingroom than a book. I also assumed that wifi would not be available there so I wouldn't be tempted to use any of the myriad other capabilities of the iPad, so it would be a book and nothing else but a book.

My electronic bookcase contains just two books at the moment: James Joyce's Ulysses and Winnie the Pooh. Just in case you are wondering about my literary taste, let me say that Winnie the Pooh comes pre-loaded with every iPad, a manifestation of executive power, its inclusion being the personal decision it seems of Apple's CEO Steve Jobs himself, who happens to like Winnie the Pooh. And while at first I wondered about his choice, I recalled that Winnie is prized highly by the eminently erudite Ric who wrote a blog about his delight in it:

http://richernandez.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/my-pooh-christmas/

It turns out that those two books were a good selection.

Winnie the Pooh showed off the capability of the iPad to render illustrations beautifully and faithfully, in color, equal to the printed book.

Ulysses could be enjoyed as I would have done with the printed book, flipping back and forth between virtual pages very naturally with my finger, not with a button or from a menu.

Without interrupting the flow of the book, with a press of my finger I could call up the meaning of any of its numerous unusual words or highlight with a virtual yellow highlighter any remarkable passage I might want to return to. But, while I would normally cringe at defacing a book, those markings can be completely deleted. I could also select passages for pasting into a document.

The iPad nestled comfortably on my lap as I read, again, just like a book, and didn't get hot like a laptop. The pages seemed to have the tint and texture of paper and they seemed to curve realistically inward towards the spine of the book. The black frame of the screen around the three-dimensional representation of the leaves of the book disappeared from one's consciousness, leaving nothing but the impression of holding a real book.

Adding a leather jacket to the iPad, which I intend to do, will be the final touch that makes it easy to achieve that "willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge) in this case to immerse oneself as fully in an e-book as one would in a bound book with paper pages. In a doctor's office as in bed.

I cannot imagine anyone taking a beautiful but hefty bound "Complete Works of William Shakespeare" to bed to read one of his sonnets, but one might be tempted to cosy up with a slender iPad.

Out of the Box

2010-05-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

Usually "Out of the Box" refers to a way of thinking.

Today it had its literal meaning for me, as I eagerly took my new iPad out of its box and became acquainted with my new, shall we say, device, rather than "toy"?

This will be a very short blog, because as you see in the photo, I am syncing it with my computer and then I am going to spend an uninterrupted time putting it through its paces. I know that time will be uninterrupted because my spouse is doing the same with hers, which also was delivered today. At least she has a good rationale for getting hers: it's Mothers' Day this weekend. On the other hand I have no such excuse for mine, but I'll find one.

I guess we'll be having just a virtual dinner this evening, or a trip to MacDonald's.

Why I Go Back

2010-04-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

I have been eating at this restaurant, Taste of India, in the university district in Seattle for a number of years.

Obviously I like the food. In fact it was an "Eureka!" moment for me when I ate my first meal there and my craving for Indian cuisine, authentic Indian cuisine, was satisfied after numerous disappointments with what passes for Indian food so often in the US: the Chicken Tikka that is only brushed with a synthetic orange color dye and has never been inside a tandoori oven, the naans that are more tortillas than naan, the curries so bland that they could be barbeque sauce. Not that tortillas and barbeque sauce don't have their merits, but, no matter how disguised, they couldn't convince as Indian food a palate that had been hooked on Indian food cooked by Indians in Indian households in Trinidad or by Indian hawkers there and by Indian friends and cooks in Malaysia.

It is no wonder that this unpretentious restaurant, tucked almost unnoticeable among old, small buildings housing sundry small businesses and old small houses of an earlier era (it is actually one of them, garage included, converted into a restaurant) has won a prestigious Zagat award. The food is really that good.

But what brings me back is also the staff and attitude there, and as satisfactory as the service always is, today's incident surpassed all my previous experiences.

It was by itself a small gesture, but far above expectations. I had stopped by on this very gray, chilly, wet Seattle afternoon to order some takeout food to eat at home.

As I sat in the restaurant waiting for my order, my wife stayed in the car in the parking lot, some distance from the entrance. The young host offered me chai, then water but I declined. After a few minutes he offered me beverages again, and after some persuasion I settled on a decaffeinated coffee, which he had to brew especially for me because most customers prefer regular coffee, I suppose. After serving me mine he asked what my wife out in the car would like. I was surprised because he could not easily see my car from his station.

I requested a decaf coffee for her. He brewed that cup and I thought he would give it to me to take out to my wife. But, after asking me if she took sugar in her coffee, he went outside in the rain to my car and served her her coffee. He had even thoughtfully poured the coffee into a disposable cup so she could drive off and finish it in the car. He did all of this in the most matter of fact way.

I think that after that, even if the food weren't so good, I'd keep going back to the Taste of India.

It Must Be Summer

2010-04-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

In Southern California the swallows returning to their nests in the walls of the ruins of the old Mission in San Juan Capistrano on March 19 each year announce the arrival of Spring there.

Here in Seattle, the imminent arrival of Summer is heralded in a less poetic way by another bird, an old warbird, a restored B-17 "Flying Fortress" World War II bomber. It comes to Boeing Field for a few days around this time of year just before the big events of Summer: the opening of the Boating Season on Lake Washington (next weekend) and SeaFair which goes on all summer long with exciting events such as big outdoor concerts, a hydroplane race and the Blue Angels. For two days you can buy a 40 minute ride in it over downtown Seattle, experiencing some of the spartan, noisy life on board of its World War II crews.

The unmistakable drone of its four big piston engines woke me up on Saturday morning as it flew low right down my street almost directly over my front balcony and seemingly just above the trees in the park on its final approach to Boeing Field.

Last year I was able to get a still picture of it as it flew past. This year I hastily got my little Canon still digital camera, set it on movie mode and anxiously watched the clock figuring it would return in about 40 minutes with its next load of sightseers.

Sure enough on schedule, I could hear its rumble as it came up from behind the trees and I ran out to my balcony to capture this video of our bird.

An Update

2010-04-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

To my great surprise, my Lilac tree, pruned to within an inch of its life, has valiantly put forth three sprays of flowers, two of which are in these photos.

No Lilacs This Spring

2010-04-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was looking forward to the lilac tree in my front yard bursting into color as Spring took hold. I didn’t expect the blooms to be as abundant and as vivid as they were a few Springs ago when it looked like this:

After that magnificent show, the tree hadn’t been pruned back and so last year’s bloom was rather disappointing, and this year, since another year had gone by without the required pruning, all that old growth and little new growth wouldn’t produce a lot of flowers.

The front lawn had turned into a nice field of very healthy dandelions that no amount of uprooting could control, so I called in a gardener to replace the lawn. That would also be a good opportunity to finally get the lilac tree pruned, I thought, although it would mean few lilac flowers this Spring.

My gardening competence ranks about the same as my competence in the kitchen, where it hardly rises above that of unskilled dishwasher, so I asked the gardener to trim off a few of the tips of the branches of the lilac tree. Of course that would have been futile, and my spouse, who is a proponent of severe pruning, gave him other instructions.

This is not the first time my spouse and a gardener of similar persuasion have colluded against me. At a former house, she and the gardener had arranged to prune a little tree in the front yard that I liked, resulting in my coming home to a skeleton of stubby bare branches of what had been a nice bushy tree. Of course I ranted, but I was chastened when the following Spring that skeleton had bloomed into an even lovelier tree than the one I had liked and it continued to thrive until the next pruning, thriving on that one too. And so it went until today it is a very respectable tree. If you look closely enough you can even see it in a Google Earth satellite picture!

My faith and hope were severely challenged last weekend when at first I saw no sign of my lilac after the gardener had left. Some desperate scanning revealed that it was now no taller than the hedge next to it and its few spare branches blended into the surroundings: the electric light pole, the cable supporting the pole, the hedge and the dead and dying shrubs next door.

Gone were the few buds that might have blossomed into flowers. There will be no lilacs at all this Spring in my front yard. My spouse and the gardener assure me there are going to be a lot of them next Spring. They are going to have to put that in writing.

Of Coconut Palms and Daffodils

2010-04-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

The SMS along with the almost live cellphone photo of the beach in Hawaii, the swaying coconut palm trees ( ok, it was a still photo, but aren't they always swaying, in a cool, gentle breeze? ), the azure ocean and clear blue sky, was meant to be an ironic taunt dripping with crocodile tears:

"Sorry about the weather".

And it was effective, as I had just come in from a sunny but chilly Seattle afternoon. Images of pale wintered bodies, basted generously with coconut and pineapple scented sunscreen being slowly roasted in the friendly Hawaiian sun seemed a desirable fate, never mind health warnings.

In sheer retaliation I shot back with a picture of golden daffodils that my wife had happened to snap quickly with her iPhone as traffic slowed while we were driving through the University of Washington campus a few minutes earlier.

That will show them, my lucky offspring frolicking in paradise, without us, I muttered as I dashed off my e-mail.

Then I began to understand why those British colonial masters who had forced us in our school curriculum to marvel at Wordsworth's "host of golden daffodils" had never reciprocated by including our coconut palms swaying in a heavenly Tropical climate in their curriculum in the UK. They had never mentioned that those daffodils, bright and golden as they were,"tossing their heads" in their "dance," were really shivering in the chill of Spring. There might have been a mass exodus from bleak motherland Britain to the Tropics, never mind their poetry.

Up against that beach in Hawaii, you lose, Wordsworth.

The iPad That Came to Dinner

2010-04-05T00:36:00.001-07:00

The iPad that Came to Dinner

A guest at Easter dinner tonight brought the iPad he had purchased the day before when iPads first went on sale. It caused almost as much excitement as the new baby he and his wife had brought along.

I had decided to wait until the 3G model becomes available in two or three weeks, but after getting my hands on this iPad, it’s going to be very hard to restrain myself from going to the Apple store tomorrow and getting my own non-3G model.

I tried out its capability as an e-reader. Like most people who have delighted in books, real books, I have been cool to the idea of e-books, until tonight. Just wait until you realize that the pages not only turn with your fingertip, just as with a printed book, but the page will even stop in mid-curl if you stop “turning” it. You can leaf back and forth, just as with a real book, no buttons or commands involved. There is the feeling that you just can’t cosy up to an e-book in bed or wherever, but in its leather case, the iPad felt just as sensuous as a bound book, and along with that realistic page turning, the absence of buttons or keys or a menu, it’s easy to forget that this is an electronic device. And when you are ready to put it down on your bedside table, the case closes with an adieu just like the cover of a book.

In addition to having the feel and manners of a bound book, the iPad is capable of adjusting the size of the text and the brightness of the page to suit one’s physical needs, an important consideration for declining eyesight or restrictions in one’s environment such as a partner who would rather sleep or in, say, a situation with no ambient light. I could even adjust the text so that I could read without my eyeglasses. It should put the joy back into reading for anyone for whom the act of reading is becoming or has become somewhat uncomfortable.

At the end of dinner the owner produced his iPad claiming that it wanted to say “Goodbye” to me. Well, it almost said “Goodbye” to its owner instead. But I knew I couldn’t run away with it fast enough, and besides he knows where I live.

The World's Most Magnificent Bookstore

2010-03-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

Recently this article, titled "The Most Magnificent Bookstore in the World," was brought to my attention.

If you like books and bookstores, I would strongly urge you to visit this site:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/16/el-ateneo-the-most-magnif_n_501094.html.

As a teaser I am adding this photo of its interior.

Photo credit: The Seattle Post Intelligencer

888

2010-03-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

Knowing that for the Chinese the sequence of "888" is very auspicious, and being the 8th name on a tagging list requesting me to publish Picture 8, Folder 8, on my harddrive, how could I pass up the opportunity...so here goes...Who knows, later I may just go out and buy a Lottery ticket.

Picture #8 is this photo taken in the 1960's approaching the island Janitzio in Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico.

I am also publishing another photo in that series to put the first picture in context. The fishermen who fish the lake are known for their unique butterfly-shaped nets.

Photo credit: my wife (you can't imagine the royalties!)

Haiti, Snubbed

2010-02-24T23:07:00.000-08:00

Mea culpa. I have just done it myself. I snubbed Haiti. I left it out of the list of countries at the end of my April 2009 blog about my TransAtlantic Cruise.

I feel quite ashamed about that because during the cruise I had made a mental note to protest how Haiti had been treated in the information by the cruise line about our port there and worse, by a certain shipboard incident.

The first port of call on the itinerary was scheduled to be Labadee. The literature gave the impression that it was some sort of autonomous privately owned territory, an island(?) owned by the cruise line. That Labadee is geographically and politically a part of Haiti was downplayed.

But much worse was an announcement aboard the ship that although there is a time difference of one hour between Labadee and Miami, the port from which we had sailed two nights and one day earlier, our ship would not bother with that technicality, would ignore Haitian time, and that the times of our arrival and departure there would be based on Miami time.

There was some specious excuse that it was because we wouldn’t be there long. Well, our stop there would be just as long, or short, as any of the other stops along the way, but local time was always observed at the other ports and if necessary, a time change made during the night before arrival. This has been done for every port on every cruise I have taken and I believe it’s the normal practice.

Not only that: Maritime navigation has always been known to rigorously observe Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or local time, even in the once odd case of Singapore that until fairly recently used a time that was only 30 minutes, not the usual one hour, different from adjacent time zones. Our ship meticulously adjusted its clocks as we passed through several time zones out in the Atlantic even when it wouldn’t have been noticed or mattered for the daily schedule of meals and activities and no ports would be involved.

Haiti may be an abysmally poor, undevelopped country, but surely that condition does not warrant such a cavalier slight of its sovereignty or suspension of long-standing universal protocols.

Was it some kind of retribution that all shore activities, including the highlight, a barbeque, with food, drinks, equipment and entertainment to be brought to the beach from the ship, were rained out?

P.S.
I wrote the item above back in April 2009 but didn’t publish it and overlooked it until now, almost a year later. Perhaps reflecting on the recent catastrophic earthquake in Haiti jolted my memory and prompted me to retrieve it from my files.

A Milestone

2010-02-19T00:32:00.000-08:00

One Hundred

A number almost always associated with some important milestone:

In games and sports, a hundred points or runs or goals

In distance, one hundred miles or kilometers seem a significant distance

A hundred dollars still seems a substantial sum of money, unless you are in line for a bonus from your Wall Street partner.

A century of history or a grand old age for a person or a building.

This is my hundredth post. I thank Pak Idrus for the impetus he gave me to start posting and the many others who have encouraged me to this milestone .

Writing Hopscotch has led to some introspection. As I do so, the word complacent seems best to describe my current status.

For most of our lives we have been urged to avoid complacency and we have passed that lesson along generation after generation, usually because of its connotation of indifference. Even using its better connotation of self-satisfaction, complacency always seems to be an attitude to be avoided.

That’s good and necessary advice for those stages in life in which we are preparing to be responsible members of society and the years while we are expected to be productive, as career workers and professionals, as responsible partners, spouses or parents, as dynamic individuals creating and pursuing challenges and goals.

What then when someone has fulfilled those expectations? What if there’s no need to find new challenges? What if you have reached the limit of your health and physical ability? What if your body prefers a pleasurable stroll to working out on a treadmill promoted as some vague hope of postponing the inevitable?

It’s not that one then sits around in mind-numbing lethargy.

Quite the contrary. It’s the exhilarating complacency of having made all the hard moves in the game and of confidence in being able to handle anything that may come up, of the freedom to feel satisfied whether you choose to opt in or opt out.

Picnic at Powerscourt, Dublin

2010-02-11T22:51:00.000-08:00

A bus ride of thirty or forty minutes would take you from the heart of Dublin city to coves, beaches, small seaside towns or open country.

Many of the student associations and clubs at my university would simply tack up a notice on one of the bulletin boards around the campus to announce a Saturday or Sunday excursion to one of those venues and a group of students would show up at the appointed busstop. No further organization was necessary. No one would have the faintest idea of the return bus schedules; there was bound to be a bus back every half hour or hour at most. At first it took a degree of faith in each other to just stand at some forlorn signpost along a country road with no signs of human habitation in evidence, waiting for a bus back home at the end of one of these excursions, but no one had ever been lost that way and one eventually became pretty nonchalant about the bus service. No one brought food for that matter, so what I call a "picnic" would have been a very impromptu affair. What mattered was mainly the conversation, or in the case of beagling, some crosscountry running.

One favorite venue was Powerscourt, at that time the actual baronial residence and estate of a real English Lord, Lord Longford, now a swank Ritz Carlton Hotel.

The vast grounds that included formal gardens and wild fields of woods, meadows, heather and even a waterfall, were open to the public. I don't think they even collected an admission fee at that time. Lord Longford was a very public spirited gentleman. At his own expense he maintained the Gate Theatre in Dublin, a fine small theater where budding actors and playwrights were given an opportunity to hone their skills and ticket prices were kept very reasonable. Often His Lordship himself, a man of lordly girth, would stand in back of the theater, dressed formally, sometimes wearing a red cummerbund, silently and unobtrusively holding a basket into which patrons could deposit donations to help sustain this wonderful theater.

At Powerscourt we would find a deserted glen near the waterfall and spend the time talking, discussing, laughing, arguing, smoking, just lounging about or lying in the fragrant, springy heather.

Back in Dublin we would go our separate ways to our digs, bedsitters or apartments, often to a pot of steaming hot tea to shake off the chill that for those hours of sheer simple pleasure we had not noticed in the slightest.

Give Me My Sports Coat

2010-02-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

I don't often think of my age. I have better things to do with my diminishing supply of brain cells than to use them to try to comprehend that increasingly large number. But I do think about my obsolescence, thanks largely to a close relative who frequently suggests that everything about me, from my taste in cars, clothes, music, colors, furniture and restaurants to conventional wisdom, lifestyle and colloquial expressions is outdated. And hints that it always has been. For those comments I frequently strike her from my will, a retaliation she shrugs off, aware perhaps of the projected limited size of that inheritance or that I intend to spend it during my lifetime, on me, anyway.

What I thought was an insignificant remark about my wearing a sports coat as I played the role of a tourist in Madrid many years ago elicited a less than complimentary "Ooh la la" from her and suppressed giggles from CO'78 who, I suspect shares that relative's awareness of the emerging dominance of their generation.

They are mistaken about it being odd to wear a sportscoat in public, as a tourist, in Madrid or anywhere else, back in 1959. To prove my point I spent much of last night poring through my photos of that era (yes, there were cameras then) and picking out that ever-present sports coat as I went through life, not perhaps as a fashionista but certainly not as an oddballl.

That evidence will be tendered below, but first a note about 1959 in Europe. Sports coats and ties were as normal then as Tweets are now. Even in casual situations. Even at home. Even for the urchins selling newspapers in Dublin, tattered though those may have been. It was the time of "Angela's Ashes" in Ireland but those downtrodden males in that gloomy novel would all be wearing sports coats, I'd wager.

What I didn't mention in that letter was that the sports coat was made of Irish wool tweed. Now, that was madness in the sizzling heat of summer in Madrid, but it was the only kind I had. Given that I was living in Ireland at the time, and had absorbed the fact that summers there were not much different than winters except for the length of daylight, it hadn't dawned on me as I prepared for Madrid that all summers all over the world might not be like Irish ones. The dress code for the institution in Madrid where I would be doing research required a coat. Madrileños, I discovered too late described their climate as "three months of winter, three months of hell", and there I was sweating it out swathed in a wool sports coat. Mad dogs and Englishmen had nothing on me.

Undergrad or Tourist, a sportscoat was de rigueur

My roommate and I just back home from a normal day at the University having our supper.

On a picnic with classmates, or relaxed at home with my Irish host on any evening after work.

Even on a Sunday afternoon drive in the countryside to admire the scenery or pick wild blackberries....every adult male wore a sports coat.

But there was an exception: hitchhiking across Spain (it was still safe and a rite of passage to hitchhike in Europe) was a time for jeans and that duffel bag, with badges of places visited sewn on to it:

El Rastro, Madrid

2010-02-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

From an old letter home from Madrid:

Last Sunday I went to visit “El Rastro” or one of the most Madridian parts of Madrid. El Rastro is an old quarter of Madrid and that means narrow streets, tiny pavements, houses built just 2 - 3 feet from the road, cobbled streets, a lot of dead-ends and some low hills.

On Sunday mornings the streets within dozens of blocks are turned into an open-air “market”. When I say market you think of provisions (vegetables, tubers,fruits, in Trinidad) and meat (a "wet market) but that’s not the meaning here. In the Rastro there’s everything and I mean that. Some stalls deal in rusty discarded parts of motorcycles, electrical equipment, etc., etc., some sell rags and most of what is sold is secondhand. Dave would have a field day looking at all the odds and ends here. And there’s no attempt to make things look better than they are. For example, you know all those old motorcar parts rusting in the yard. Well, just bring them, as they are, dump them onto the pavement in El Rastro and you will be absolutely in step with the rest. Clothes, pens, food, iron railings, junk of all sorts, and even some motor scooters and trucks are sold here. I was a complete tourist in shades and sports coat. Hundreds of people come to look around and the clang of passing trams adds to the oldtime flavour. The stalls are usually just collections of objects for sale lying in heaps on the ground, and ropes holding tarpaulins to shade the sellers crisscross the streets. From a distance it looks as though the wash is hanging out to dry between the houses.

The Creation of an Angel

2010-01-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

It started off as one of the many usually insignificant candid photos a grandfather with a simple digital camera would snap of his granddaughter at some function.

But a little gleam in her eyes and her angelic look, with eyes uplifted, caught my attention, so I isolated her from the rest of the picture.

I had to create a context to communicate my idea of this angelic moment, so my spouse searched out a picture of a church window and I blurred it to produce what a good photographer would use differential focussing to do, namely, de-emphasize it

Then I superimposed my granddaughter's picture, and , Voilá! there was a new little angel:

Using my computer with Photoshop and other similar software to create pictures, modify or technically enhance photos has become one of my retirement activities.

As I discover more and more of its capabilities I am awed by its potential for artistic expression as well as for deception. On the one hand it can be used to create fictional graphics, which might be nefarious, or innocent enough, to amuse by being totally outrageous for example, as in this picture of me (my head at least) surfing in Hawaii.

On another level it can allow someone to exercise some artistic creativity by changing the mood and nature of a photograph as in this attempt to to make a photograph look like a drawing:
or to "age" a recent photo:

One of the projects that has given me the greatest satisfaction was to include my father in this old family portrait from which he was missing. I also happened to have a picture of him taken on the same date and in the same room as that family portrait so I put the two together. It was one of my earliest Photoshop efforts so it's a little rough.

Using the computer I will at times technically improve a photo that was affected by lack of photographic skill on my part or poor lighting conditions, as in the photo below.

Sometimes I get lucky and Photoshop becomes unnecessary:

Misty Dawn

2010-01-16T15:28:00.000-08:00

It was one of those rare mornings when I got up early, earlier than the sun which, like me, is reluctant to rise these wet winter mornings.

I went down to Fishermen's Terminal for breakfast. Outside my window the tattered mist was transforming the scene of fishing boats tied up at the dock lying still in the mirror smooth water into an Impressionist vision.

At the base of the memorial to the fishermen lost at sea, the tributes of flowers and mementos lay wet from the drizzle with which Mother Nature had wept over them all night long,mourning the lives taken when, with a different, raging demeanor she had swept them into lonely stormy seas far over the shrouded horizon.

Haiti: Pat Robertson (yes, the "televangelist") you Ass

2010-01-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

Pat Roberston that ASS (that's the polite version) should GO to HELL (in the Christian interpretation of that place) for his inane and completely un-Christian statement about the earthquake in Haiti as quoted in the media today.

I feel polluted merely by quoting it.

"Raised eyebrows" says the reporter. That's a gross miss-assessment of the aversion his ridiculous statement should produce.

Pat Robertson On Haiti: Earthquake Punishment For Pact With Devil

.. American televangelist Pat Robertson raised eyebrows when he said on today's episode of the 700 Club that the deadly Haitian earthquake that is believed to have killed thousands of people is God's vengeance for a "pact" Haitians swore to the Devil. Robertson said Haitians have been cursed because they made a "deal" with the Devil to free themselves from the French. He said even after the French were gone, the Island of Haiti has been cursed by "one thing after the other."

Robertson said, "the Island of Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island." But, Haiti has to endure hardships due to the God's vengeance for deals with the Devil, according to Robertson.

Robertson's comments have stirred a lot of anger from Internet users who have lambasted Robertson on their blogs and Twitter feeds.

No comments or apology have been issued from the producers of the 700 Club yet.

2010

2009-12-31T16:48:00.000-08:00

Terry

2009-12-29T17:38:00.000-08:00

Dad's fond nickname for Terry was General T because as an infant one of his favorite gestures was a salute, as in this picture.

Terry, your sisters and brothers salute you one more time.

Rest in Peace

Greetings at Christmas

2009-12-21T22:43:00.001-08:00

First Flight

2009-12-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

It is a thrilling, even poetic moment when a brand new aircraft leaps from the ground and soars for the first time into its element, the air. It is even more so when that airplane is the first of its kind.

This was such a moment today when the first Boeing 787 took to the air for the first time from the Boeing plant about a 30 minute drive from where I live.

The first Boeing 787 at the moment it left the ground for the first time.

I was excited when I learned that after flight-testing for some hours it would be landing at Boeing Field about the same distance south of my home because planes on their final approach to that field often fly low right over my house. They fly even lower when the weather is rainy with thick, low, overcast, just as it was today. With luck I would have a good view of that 787 on its first ever final approach to landing.

I was very lucky. It came in from behind the tall cedars, low, slow, huge, and with two small chase jets just feet off each wingtip, flying directly overhead.

This is the plane that our grandchildren will be doing most of their flying in and which this generation of children and grandchildren will be piloting. Much to my envy, my granddaughter was invited to the Boeing Plant to watch the takeoff, then was driven to Boeing Field to watch the landing.

My granddaughter at the Boeing Plant as the 787 taxis to its maiden flight in the background.

Below is a CNET videoclip that captures the elation as Boeing workers who built the plane cheer as it successfully takes off.

A Forgotten Packet

2009-12-10T16:47:00.000-08:00

Remember Airmail writing pads? The ones that usually had “Par Avion” and a drawing of an airplane along with its label?

During a lull in using my computer last week I rummaged around in my bookshelves and from the back of a cabinet I retrieved a packet that somehow had survived the many cullings as I reduced the number of belongings I had to move when I migrated from one residence to another over the past five or six decades.

That packet hadn’t been opened in at least 30 years, but was in pristine condition, so what could it be?

There they were, fragments of two Airmail writing pads and assorted loose sheets of writing paper. They were filled with the writings of a young man who was uprooted right at the beginning of his maturity and transplanted into a completely unfamiliar world, far removed from his first and only home and his extended family. A young man, with an upbringing that had stressed close family ties, a network of mentors, authority figures, wise elders and institutions that determined and monitored everyone’s values and behaviors for generations, cut loose from every one of those influences. A young man, who had only lived in a world where one’s life was pretty well mapped out and where there were always nurturing relatives, priests, guidelines and dogmas to keep him on course but who was now free of all those supports. A young man where no one took note of him or anything he might do, or cared what he did.

The writings seemed to fall into two categories: the introspections of that young man trying to find himself, to establish his own identity as he observed, misunderstood, marveled and interacted with his unfamiliar world, and the pseudo poetic laments for his usually hopeless and largely fantasized romances.

I hardly recognized myself.

By what miracle or good fortune did I morph from that person I was embarrassed to identify as me in those writings into a reasonably mature senior citizen?

And how did those writings happen to be on obsolete airmail writing pads?

Well, it was largely because I didn’t have a camera in 1959. Actually I did possess a good 35mm camera and even a light meter and a folding flash that used up one flashbulb for each flash... but you only carried around all that cumbersome gear to record rare special events. More compelling was the long time and the expense it took in those days to use up and develop those expensive 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film then airmail the heavy prints overseas back home.

So, I wrote letters, lots of them and at length trying to recreate all those new scenes, events and experiences that I so wanted to share with my parents and siblings who I knew strained to imagine just what my new world was like. Just before I left home I happened on my mother more than once holding her forearms in the fridge trying to feel the unimaginable (for us Tropical natives) cold her poor son would soon be enduring. Some of those letters I didn’t mail, or copied to myself, and there they were, some, leaves still attached to the pads.

They were thin and fragile to the touch as though they would disintegrate just as the uncertain young man they revealed had disappeared into time past.

I won’t be blogging about that young man. There are one or two passages in which this young person looks in wide-eyed wonder at some scene or place hitherto unknown to him and those I may publish.

The Holiday Season through my Window

2009-12-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

I have long wanted to visit the outdoor Christmas markets that spring up in city squares in Germany.

The thought of wandering outdoors in northern European winter weather usually cooled and dampened that desire, or some other practical consideration got in the way.

This past week as I trolled the live webcams on my iPod Touch I joined Germans and Hungarians, Austrians and Bulgarians as they strolled bundled up in their coats and caps sometimes in new-fallen snow, sometimes in the rain, enjoying the strings of lights and garlands, sparkling Christmas trees, a Gingerbread-house-styled booth, an impromptu ice-skating rink, lines of little stalls with families queuing up no doubt to buy some warm treat, toy or decoration.

For me one of the greatest values of IT and Blogging is their immense potential for increasing one’s awareness of other cultures when firsthand, personal contact is unavailable. As one after another Christmas market popped up on my screen I began to realize that most of them were in Eastern European countries that had until fairly recently been communist: Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic. During the Cold War such countries were always portrayed as dour, soulless, no joie de vivre: the last place one would expect to find Holiday festivities.

That cultural shock was like the one I had many years ago when, while traveling in Southeast Asia, I had the unexpected delight of finding that some of the most lavish, creative and cheery Christmas and Easter displays and festive crowds I had ever seen or mingled with, were in the streets, shopping malls and hotel lobbies in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Hong Kong.

So, once again, the internet has caused me to adjust some of my cultural perceptions, or shall I say, misconceptions. I trust a lot of others are correcting theirs too as they look out on and participate, live, in this wide, surprising world.

* Click on pictures to enlarge *

Thanksgiving

2009-11-19T00:35:00.000-08:00

In my childhood and teen years I thanked God for everything. Everyone did. You thanked Him for all the things you had and for all the things you didn’t have, for the tribulations He spared you and those inflicted on you: the former showed his love, the latter was His way of testing your love.

You might think that this reflection comes as I prepare an edifying invocation for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

It doesn’t. Now I give thanks mainly because I never became addicted to smoking and radio talk shows and that I am not a Republican, not exactly what you close your eyes and say in solemn tones before a joyous feast.

This solemn recollection comes as I am doing what I usually do when my wife prepares dinner at home: the unskilled tasks of washing the vegetables, and later, the pots, pans and dishes. It’s the only contribution I can make or that she wants me to make, given my utter lack of culinary skill.

The fervent thanks comes to mind because I recall how much more complicated those tasks were back when I was a kid. You had to wash and clean all the food ingredients, thoroughly.

You sifted the flour, I never knew why, but I suspected it was to isolate the odd weevil: hey we lived thousands of miles from any wheat field and transportation was slow, so one or two would have crept in while government regulators were busy dealing with World War II.

You “picked” the rice, meaning you spread it out on the table and laboriously picked out every tiny grain of gravel or granulated asphalt or husks that escaped the winnowing wind which blew those particles from the crumbling, partially paved rural road on which that rice had been laid out in the sun to dry.

The first time I tried to help my wife with cooking chicken, she asked me what I was doing, as I was trying with surgical care and precision to remove every trace of membrane that didn’t look like meat from the “Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast”. That was what I thought I had seen my mother and sisters always doing when preparing chicken, whole chickens, raised in our backyard, or any kind of meat, didn’t they? How was I to know that that was already done at a processing plant before that chicken was packaged?

Washing vegetables meant washing each leaf of lettuce, individually, peeling every carrot, scrubbing every cassava, yam, dasheen or potato, scrutinizing every organic (the only kind then) fruit for the odd worm.

It’s a role that I, as a male, inherited from a culture and generation in which males were nourished by the womenfolk: mothers, wives, sisters. Even in the years while abroad at university, it was the kind Irish lady of the household with which I lodged who provided most of my meals. In my early post-university years when I had to fend for myself as a single adult male, I did what single, adult males of most species do for survival. I hung out with similar single adult males and as a pack we foraged for food: from compassionate wives of married friends, girlfriends, fastfood joints, the occasional splurge on a dinner date...those were survival.

So, I never learned to cook.

I have tried to adjust to my new reality of a household in which there’s no division of labor along gender lines. In fact I fancy that I make a reasonable boiled egg and choose just the right number of seconds in microwaving frozen burritos, chicken pot pies and vegetables. But my wife and kids are unanimous in assigning me those unskilled tasks when they are cooking. I wonder why.

Or should I just be thankful?

Windows Opening on the World

2009-11-07T22:49:00.001-08:00

Somewhere among the muddled memories of my High School days is a line of poetry that refers to “Magic casements opening on...faerie lands forlorn”. Or something to that effect. The poet is either Keats or Coleridge of the group of English poets then known as the “Romantic Poets”, later, as the “Lake Poets”. I remember it because my English Litt. teacher hated it and expressed his loathing at every opportunity.

I couldn’t understand why he disliked it so much. There were numerous other passages that to me were just as overblown.

Besides, to me, windows had always seemed as, well, windows, letting in the riches of the outside world. I wasn’t much of an outdoors kid, so for me, windows were an important conduit to the world outside.

They let in the clean fresh breezes after rain. The “Demarara” windows at rented seaside vacation chalets, large slabs of solid wood or framed wooden jalousies, hinged at the top and resting on a broad shelf-like sill that jutted out from the wall, and propped open with a stick, framed tranquil expanses of sea with an occasional fisherman’s pirogue moving too slowly to leave a wake, just a transitory thin furrow. The fragrance and colors of Tropical flora came into the house through windows. People talked to each other through their windows. The palette and pastry sellers, the women who did the laundry, the postman, all announced themselves through the front windows.

Windows protected you from the forbidding aspects of your world, like lightning and thunder, and the dark of night. And every now and then, by accident of course, I batted or threw a ball through the glass pane of a closed window touching off a less than pleasant encounter with the neighbors or my parents.

After I left the Tropics and woke up on my first morning in London I realized that windows could open onto a lonely, drab, forlorn world of stark chimney pots vague, gray and ghostly in their shrouds of coal polluted air. Close the sashes as tightly as you could and the bleak, damp air still crept in and wailed and rattled as it did.

New windows rapidly began opening when I went overseas to study. They were metaphorical windows: opportunities that opened on to new vistas of career and personal development.

There have been memorable windows along my travels: my hotel room in Vienna with twelve foot ceilings and tall windows draped with heavy velvet curtains that looked out across to the Opera House and down below, on the busy Ringstrasse with its trolleys and a walking street with its patisseries and fine shops. A panorama of snow-covered jagged Alps and the quaint ancient wooden covered bridge filled my hotel window at Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. The fantasy of a city built on water, that magical element of my childhood, eventually fulfilled itself in the view of the canals of Venice from a hotel window. In the window of my cruise ship docked in Alicante, Spain, the defiant, turreted walls of the Moorish fort marching across a hill still glowered defiantly as they did at attackers centuries ago.

For various reasons, but mostly because airports have become such a nuisance and planes beset by irritating, unnecessary and unexpected annoyances, I haven’t travelled much recently, but I have found a rich source of wondrous windows to a world far from forlorn in the form of live webcams.

As I sit by my fireside, at the touch of an icon on my handheld iPod Touch a panoply of windows puts me into any kind of live milieu, indoors or outdoors, that I can wish for. There are sunny beaches and resorts to escape to when the chill, dark weather of Seattle closes in. The pandas, tigers and other exotic animals in zoos tumble and prowl. College campuses and bookstores, bars, restaurants, museums, pachinko parlors and even a barbershop in Tokyo, construction sites, cruise ships at sea...something is open at any time of day or night.

My favorite scenes though are of city centers. I have become well acquainted with the daily rhythm of life at a busy intersection of a city in Hungary and another in Bulgaria. The webcams at those two sites offer especially fine resolution in their pictures, have a good frame rate so that movement seems pretty natural and both have functions such as panning, zooming and tilting that can be controlled by me sitting here thousands of miles away.

Those cities are 8 and 9 hours ahead of my time, so at my nighttime I join in the bustle early in their workday: the trams closely following each other, picking up and letting out their passengers, cars and delivery trucks circling the traffic roundabout, the people dressed in their winter coats hustling along or stopping to chat and gesture, going into and out of business places. The pictures are sharp enough to distinguish some facial features. Once I could even conjecture a snippet of the conversation of a group of three people waiting for their trolley: one of them gestured, and the other lifted his foot and pointed at his shoe. “Yes. New pair of shoes...like them?” They were all slightly just larger than large ants, five or six thousand miles away, but it was like being there, a tourist chancing upon a conversation.

After I wake up on my morning I can observe the scene at the end of their day: employees pushing large trash bins out to the sidewalks to be emptied later then walking off with a shopping bag, or returning to the shop’s door to check that it is locked before driving away in a car that has pulled up to the curb for them.

The city is shutting down for the night: trolleys are less frequent now, the traffic and pedestrians almost all gone. Traffic lights blink to empty streets. I feel as though I should be turning up the collar of my winter coat, checking the door one more time to see if its secure, then walking out of view.

A Glimmer of Light

2009-10-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

A Glimmer of Light

An automatic night light in the bathroom keeps me from stumbling into the bathtub or worse in the dark. Its sensor turns it on when the room is dark, then turns it off when there’s other light. For the next several months of feeble light of the Fall and winter in practice it will be on all of the time because there is rarely enough natural light to activate the sensor. It will stay on except when I turn on the ceiling fixture.

It was quite a surprise this morning to find that there was enough natural light to activate the sensor of that night light.

Could it have been a parting gift of Mother Nature on this last day of Daylight Saving time?

As of Sunday, night will begin falling before 5:00p, today’s 6:00p. which already feels far too early for it to be dark outside. Already the time between sunrise and sunset is less than 10 hours, but daytime is actually even shorter than that because like me, the sun is usually reluctant to start the day and starts fading long before it sets.

Coming from the Tropics where it’s almost always 12 hours of daylight and 12 of night throughout the year, I still marvel at the varying lengths of day that accompany the seasons.

Lawton

2009-10-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

Lawton

For years I had periodically resolved to do a Google search on my former colleague and friend, Lawton, or take a chance on calling the phone number I had for him from a very long time ago.

Lawton and I and a mutual friend had spent many evenings at the office he managed while he worked long after all the other personnel had gone home, until one or other of the three would decide it was time to find something to eat. That usually meant driving to the pizza parlor where we had become regular customers.

I have no idea why, last Sunday, on a lugubrious, wet, gray Fall afternoon, just another like so many at this time of year, I actually typed his name into my browser. I would like to think that it was some conjunction of prescience and nostalgia stripping away the accumulation of excuses and procrastination with which I had covered up my negligence, just like the strong wind that at that moment was tearing all the red, gold and brown leaves off the trees. But I know it was sheer coincidence.

Lawton had passed away barely a month earlier.

His obituary remarked that he had never missed a day’s work in forty-seven years, that he was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, that he always made those around him happy. It listed his many talents and the numerous community activities and groups that he led or participated in.

The grief and gloom descending as I read on was suddenly replaced by a triumphant pride as I read that four years before his passing, the city had renamed the school where he had managed the office for fifty years, for him. That was no perfunctory honor. That school Board has a strict policy of naming its schools only for the Founding Fathers of the nation. This is the only exception it has made in its almost 90 years of existence.

It was so fitting, for Lawton was an exceptional man.

Robots at School

2009-10-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

My son’s e-mail arrived at about midnight. It was a message confirming that he would be picking me up to take me to his daughter’s extra-curricular activity at her High School the next day, Saturday. It was a routine message, except for the few words at the end.

He knew I would be awake late as usual, at the computer, when the e-mail would be delivered. He ended with an injunction:
“Go to sleep! :)”

How often his mother and I had said that to him, tenderly, sternly, exasperated, always affectionately! The smiley face he had added seemed to say that yes, he remembered, and was happy with the memories; he was turning the tables on me. I felt a circle had now been closed.

On Saturday morning we drove in heavy rain past playing fields where teams of little children were slogging in the water and mud playing soccer while their parents stood on the sidelines urging them on. Thirty years earlier we would have been out there in the rain and cold, me insulated in a jacket, gloves, scarf, cap, my son in his uniform getting all muddied up, so much so that sometimes I would have to hose off his legs on the patio outside the house before he could run inside for a hot shower.

Today, it became more and more evident to me how my son’s role and mine had now been reversed. He was in the driver’s seat, literally.

And times had changed too. Yes, there were still those soccer matches, and at that moment his younger daughter was playing in one, watched by her mother. But he and I were headed to the school gym to watch a contest of robots built and programmed by his daughter and her colleagues at their school, something undreamt of as a high school extra-curricular activity when my son was a student.

The robot players in action:
(Please click the arrow to start the video clip)

Meet the robots:

Fishermen's Festival

2009-09-28T23:33:00.001-07:00

at
Fishermen’s Terminal, Seattle

Fishing has supported human life for thousands of years.

Primitive fishing in streams and lakes was a placid activity, but large scale commercial fishing, such as is done by the fishing fleet based here at Fishermen’s Terminal in Seattle is very arduous and very dangerous. The daily floral tributes at the base of this monument in memory of fishermen lost at sea attest to the heavy price the crews of the fishing vessels sometimes pay to bring us our sustenance from the sea.

The names of some of the more recently lost fishermen are written on this survival suit.

You may have watched a very dramatic documentary “The Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel. This is the ship featured in that tv show. It is open to visitors so I’ll take you on board later on in this narrative.

Every year on the last weekend of September the Fishermen’s Terminal hosts the Fall Fishermen’s Festival to honor those hardworking, courageous men and women who sail out from here into the Gulf of Alaska, some as far as the Bering Sea and to give the public an opportunity to visit their boats, see the nets and gear they use and enjoy some of their catch.

This is the Ballard Bridge which I often drive across,

or where I sometimes sit in my car with varying degrees of impatience when it is raised to let a ship through. At those times I get a glimpse of the vast fishing fleet down below.

Today I am down here at the Festival getting a close-up view of the boats.

Imagine, as the fishing vessels set out down this ship canal to Puget Sound and out to the Pacific, at certain months of the year there are mature salmon swimming below them in the opposite direction on their way to the streams where they were born three years or so earlier to spawn a new generation. At times, the hatchlings will be swimming in the same direction as the boats out to sea to become their catch later on.

Let’s go to the Fishermen’s Festival: (Click on picture for slideshow)

The Graying of America

2009-09-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

We have been told for some time now to prepare for an America, in fact a world, dominated by older people.

But who would have guessed these consequences of such a shift of demographics?

Yesterday my wife e-mailed me a newspaper report about a couple being robbed while having “an intimate moment” in a dumpster in a lane outside an apartment.

Wacky, but not particularly thought-provoking... until I read the details (no, not those details):

The couple were 44 years old, the robbers in their 60’s and 50’s.
Think about that: the couple making out were middle-aged, not teenagers. The roving delinquents, seniors, not twentysomethings.

And the place? well it used to be a car parked in a secluded spot, a movie theater...those teenage hormones raged all the time so a couple could pick and choose their trysting place. Now, it’s a matter of when and where the Viagra kicks in for its limited opportunity.

The future is here and it’s not too pretty.

Update-It's a Jungle Out There

2009-09-06T23:34:00.000-07:00

The cougar was captured before dawn on Sunday, tranquilized and later released into the wild.

This is the report in The Seattle Times.

It's a Jungle Out There

2009-09-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

It could be called a jungle: often wet, usually damp, densely wooded with rough undergrowth, the expansive area across the street from my home would be a jungle, except that this is the temperate Pacific Northwest of America, not the steamy Tropics. So it is called a Park, a Nature Preserve. Not a setting in which one would expect a wild cougar to be prowling. But there have been four sightings so far this week of such an animal there and in the lane two or three blocks away.

The police have set up a barricade at the entrance to the park to keep people out. TV channels have their vans with huge satellite dishes and tall antennas parked along the street in front of my house. These are accompanied by SUV's with the camera crews and reporters. This morning a news helicopter noisily hovered overhead for some time.

Somewhere deep in the wilderness Park Rangers have set up a trap suitably baited with Pacific Northwest salmon and other meats. They are using special tracking dogs that face down large wild animals and chase them up a tree.

For a street that looks more rural than urban and where the only traffic is the occasional car or delivery van, this has been quite an exciting scene.

So far the cougar, if indeed there's one lurking there, has been elusive and the park is due to remain closed through the weekend.

I have a feeling that my doctor will make a note about my mental health in my chart when I tell him that I have not been taking my prescribed exercise walks in the park because there's a mountain lion out there.

One fierce fan of the Washington State University, whose football team is called The Cougars wrote in a newspaper today that he welcomed the cougar and hoped that it would devour all the Huskies around, the Huskies being the football team (and the fans) of the University of Washington, the arch rivals of the Cougars.

The park has been barricaded:

TV camera crews are camped out in front of my house:

Like being on an Urban Big Game Safari:

Sister Paul's Diamond Jubilee

2009-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

In August my sister, along with two other nuns, Sisters Reina and Philomena, celebrated their Diamond Jubilee as members of the community of nuns of St. Joseph of Cluny. All three had made their first vows in 1949.

Regrettably I was unable to attend that event.

I have made this video clip using photographs kindly given to me by Mr. Raymond Syms in association with the Catholic News of Trinidad and Tobago, and by another sister who did attend.

I dedicate this video to my sister Gloria, Sister Mary Paul, on behalf of our parents and siblings who also were not present to beam with pride as you repeated the vows we witnessed you make sixty years ago and which you have faithfully kept.

( I suggest playing the video twice: it seems to play more smoothly the second time)

Senator Ted Kennedy

2009-08-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

With the passing of Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy, this country has lost one its giants.

Below is an e-mail from President Obama about Senator Kennedy that I received tonight. It eloquently articulates the significance of this great man for all the citizens of this country.

Louis -- Michelle and I were heartbroken to learn this morning of the death of our dear friend, Senator Ted Kennedy. For nearly five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well-being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts. His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives -- in seniors who know new dignity; in families that know new opportunity; in children who know education's promise; and in all who can pursue their dream in an America that is more equal and more just, including me. In the United States Senate, I can think of no one who engendered greater respect or affection from members of both sides of the aisle. His seriousness of purpose was perpetually matched by humility, warmth and good cheer. He battled passionately on the Senate floor for the causes that he held dear, and yet still maintained warm friendships across party lines. And that's one reason he became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy. I personally valued his wise counsel in the Senate, where, regardless of the swirl of events, he always had time for a new colleague. I cherished his confidence and momentous support in my race for the Presidency. And even as he waged a valiant struggle with a mortal illness, I've benefited as President from his encouragement and wisdom. His fight gave us the opportunity we were denied when his brothers John and Robert were taken from us: the blessing of time to say thank you and goodbye. The outpouring of love, gratitude and fond memories to which we've all borne witness is a testament to the way this singular figure in American history touched so many lives. For America, he was a defender of a dream. For his family, he was a guardian. Our hearts and prayers go out to them today -- to his wonderful wife, Vicki, his children Ted Jr., Patrick and Kara, his grandchildren and his extended family. Today, our country mourns. We say goodbye to a friend and a true leader who challenged us all to live out our noblest values. And we give thanks for his memory, which inspires us still. Sincerely, President Barack Obama

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let's Set The Record Straight

2009-08-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

The following is a copy of an e-mail I received today and which I wholeheartedly endorse.

YES WE CAN

Louis --

It feels like a new lie about health insurance reform crops up each day. Government taking over all health care? Not true. Euthanasia for seniors? Couldn't be more false. Rationing of care? Reform will stop rationing, not increase it.

These lies create fear and anger, and we're seeing the results around the country. Frightened crowds have flooded town halls, and the office of a Georgia representative was defaced with a swastika.

It's time to set the record straight -- and, more importantly, expose the special interests and partisan attack organizations behind the lies and misinformation.

That's why we created our new "Setting the Record Straight" site. Check out the site today and then spread the word to your friends.

As the site makes clear, these lies are no accident. They're part of a deliberate plot by the special interests who profit from the status quo to kill any reform at all. While Americans watch their paychecks dwindle, their coverage disappear, and their businesses struggle, special interests are trying to scare folks into opposing reform.

Our "Setting the Record Straight" site has all the info you need to fight back, as well as easy ways to get involved in the fight for health insurance reform. We'll be updating it often with new information debunking health care lies, so stop by regularly.

As we learned during the campaign, lies like these can spread like wildfire through viral emails and from friend to friend. The best way to stop them is to arm yourself with the facts -- and make sure your friends and family know the truth.

Check out the site, and share it with everyone you know:

http://my.barackobama.com/record

Thanks,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Live!

2009-08-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

It was our son calling on the phone:

"Dad, open the webcam App on your iPhone. We are at the Tommy Trojan statue at SC and we are going to wave to you!"

At that moment my son and his family were 1,100 miles away from here, on a trip to Southern California, and they were at his and his wife's old Alma Mater university. One of the live webcams available on this application on the iPhone is a surveillance camera on a rooftop trained on the university's mascot, the statue of "Tommy Trojan". We had bookmarked that site, just in case a moment like this turned up ( parents get sentimental, ok?). We had used it once before to see our daughter and her family when they had been re-visiting their university.

"OK, we see you" and on cue the family waved. For a moment, that "wish you were here" message millions have written with some nostalgia on countless postcards seemed to be fulfilled. We were there, seeing what they were seeing, in real time. Well, perhaps with a lag of less than 3 seconds, the refresh rate for that camera, but close enough.

And there's better to come by way of connecting socially. Already there are streaming videos from webcams all over the world. Sometimes late at night we watch the changing scene: traffic, people strolling, stopping to talk, going into and out of buildings in the middle of the day almost half a world away. Right here on our iPhone or laptop. If you coordinate the date and time in advance, you could even see friends wave to you from the deck of their cruise ship as it waits in a lock on the Panama Canal, and experience the context in which they are.

Trivial? In the grand scale of things, perhaps. But it may also be priceless, as we are reminded in that wellknown credit card commercial.

For us seniors, as pedestrian as this technology is, it is still tinged with awe. When we left to go overseas to study, or even on a vacation, we were essentially cut off from those we left back home, our almost sole connection the mail that took at least two weeks between an event or a question and the feedback.

The Sky Is Not the Limit

2009-08-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

The motto of my high school, in Latin, was: “Per Ardua Ad Astra”, if I recall correctly. Translated into English it is: “To the stars through hard work”.

In those days, reaching for the stars was meant purely metaphorically, and the curriculum reflected that: English Grammar and Literature, Mathematics, Geography, History, one classical language (Latin or Greek) and one or two “modern” languages (usually French and/or Spanish), Chemistry and Physics and Religious Knowledge (mine was a Catholic school). This was cutting edge education of the time and my high school did produce several alumni who achieved varying degrees of “stardom” in various fields and professions in many parts of the world.

It’s more than fifty years and two generations later as I accompany my 13 year old granddaughter to an orientation function for the high school she will be entering when the new school year begins in September.

“The Sky Is Not the Limit” is the theme of this school, but unlike the metaphorical stars I was reaching for, the mission of these students is to master aviation and robotics technologies designed to take them beyond today’s boundaries.

It’s a public school, and it is special. It is not a neighborhood school, drawing its students only from its immediate area. Applicants from beyond the neighborhood are rigorously screened and interviewed. In addition to their teachers, students are mentored by high achievers in the world of space and aeronautics.

The school has a specific focus: aviation and robotics. The site of the orientation left no doubt about that. We assembled, not in an auditorium, but in a cavernous working airplane hangar, cleared for the occasion. Outside, on three sides of the hangar were parked numerous planes, from tiny two seater trainers, to light aircraft, vintage planes, a sleek stunt plane, helicopters and corporate jets. There were constant whines and roars as planes and helicopters kept taxiing in or out and commercial jets landed or took off from the runways nearby.

But what symbolized most clearly the literal thrust of the motto: The sky is not the limit, was the keynote speaker: one of six Blue Angels pilots. This young man with whom students and parents chatted, got autographs and shook hands, would shortly be striding with his five fellow Blue Angels to their sleek, state-of-the-art jet fighters and with a thunderous roar, would be streaking into the sky and performing incredibly dangerous and precise manoeuvres at 700 mph low over Lake Washington.
(If you have seen the movie “Top Gun” you would have some idea of the kind of flying these special pilots do)

His presentation included a short video of the Blue Angels performing. Below are clips of that interspersed with photos of the pilot during his address. In the banner picture above this pilot is second from the right. Above him is his autograph.

Seattle Sizzles

2009-07-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

The temperature at Seatac Airport today, 29 July 2009 at 4:19p, set a new record high.

The record temperature as it was shown on my iPhone.
The thermometer in the banner is on my balcony.

Earlier, at around 2:30p, I had taken these screen shots on my iPhone of the temperatures at various cities around the world where relatives and friends live.

The Movie _ Grandparents U 2009

2009-07-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

Feats of Great Strength

2009-07-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Feats of Great Strength
(at WWU Grandparents U 2009)

Along with other grandparents I wearily sat down, sweating and panting on the low circular concrete wall that marked the Point of Interest we had been assigned to find using our GPS devices. Of course the granddaughters and grandsons who had been using their greater familiarity with such digital devices to lead us to it still had vast resources of energy to climb on the sculptures nearby. Well, they were carrying around sixty-odd years fewer than any of us.

Too tired to lift my eyes towards the magnificent blue sky, the towering trees and fine buildings on this Western Washington University campus, I noticed there was an inscription in the concrete on which I sat:

FEATS OF GREAT STRENGTH

So, that, after all, was the official name of this Point of Interest, which the kids all referred to as “The little green men”! One could understand their terminology since this was indeed a group of sculptures of small, green, leprechaun-like figures, and kids are usually so literal. It didn’t matter much that those little green men were all supporting huge rocks: Feats of great strength and cooperation.

As I sat there my mind, much more functional at this point than my body, suggested to me that what this 2009 session of Grandparents U and the previous one in 2008 accomplished were also “Feats of Great Strength” and cooperation on several levels.

It wasn’t just that some or most of us had to labor mightily to keep up with our much younger grandchildren as they happily and energetically went about our projects on the hilly campus unhampered by age, and perhaps triple or quadruple bypasses, heart valve replacements, implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, heavy knee braces or other prosthetics or beer bellies.

The greater feat of strength was the bonding that was taking place across three generations.

The grandkids and grandparents were reaching across sometimes huge experiential differences, such as those of us in the GPS course who were more familiar with compasses than mapmaking with these wonderful technological tools that were second nature to our grandchildren, who in turn might never have handled a compass or who are comfortable with Google Earth but never used an atlas.

Drawing on the supreme self-confidence of our youthful colleagues, we stifled embarassment to display as nonchalantly as our grandchildren our works of art made in the course on Painting with Watercolors before the assembly of the entire student body and staff at the closing ceremony.

In “Earthquakes and Volcanos” we shed precious energy and perhaps some dignity to jump up and down with our grandchildren to generate “earthquakes” which were duly registered on a seismograph.

Kids may love to deal with what they consider “yucky”, but as adults we might have had to suppress a degree of revulsion to reach into a tidepool or a bucket to retrieve slimy sea creatures like the sea cucumber as we collected specimens for the Marine Biology class.

At the end of Grandparents U 2009 we grandparents could kick back, we could relate to this little green man, satisfied and contented that we had successfully fulfilled our parental responsibilities: we had satisfactorily raised the parents of these happy, self-assured, knowledgeable, capable, caring youngsters so confidently preparing to accomplish feats of great strength in coming generations.

*** WWU GRANDPARENTS U in Pictures(Click on each picture to enlarge)

Registration and Orientation

Mapping with GPS

Painting with Watercolors

Taste and Tongues

2009-07-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

Taste and Tongues

Methinks I shall have to make two adjustments to my lifestyle.

My wife, ever concerned about my general knowledge and my health, has recently sent me two e-mails with research that may suggest how to stave off dementia. I wondered for a while which was her motive, but since it seems logical to think that if I were sliding into dementia I would be the least likely person to notice, I guess she was passing on the information for my general information. At least I hope so.

The research suggested two ways to postpone the dementia that sometimes comes with advanced age. Not that I am there yet ( I mean advanced in age) but I would like to get there sometime.

It seems one way is to function in several languages.

I definitely have slid back in that respect. In California I used English and Spanish routinely in my everyday life. Here in Seattle there has been little need for Spanish other than the infrequent occasions when a monolingual English-speaking friend who has monolingual Spanish-speaking contacts in Latin America, copies me e-mails to translate or my wife forwards an item from a Spanish-language source on the internet. Even our household use for Spanish as a means for my wife and me to communicate secretly when the kids were present is no longer necessary or effective since they no longer live at home and, as we later discovered, as kids they had long been able to figure out what we used to think was secret communication anyway.

The other preventive mental health measure I need to take is to increase my intake of wine to one glass a day. My current dosage is far less than that, unless beer can be included as part of such a healthy regimen.

Looks like I shall have to add these routines to the pleasantly limited choreography of my current retiree lifestyle.

If only I could recapture those few days when both chores came packaged together on a cruise on which the sommelier giving a course on wine appreciation spoke Spanish and the wine was served at dinner by a Spanish-speaking señorita.

As they toast in Spanish:
¡ Salúd !

Chuckanut Drive, WA

2009-06-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

Driving the 90 miles or so back to Seattle from Bellingham, just south of the Canadian Border, I usually take the fast Interstate Freeway. But this sunny, languid Sunday called for a more leisurely trip along the Pacific Northwest Coast.

The name Fairhaven conjures up a quiet old seafaring town, and that is just the impression one gets driving the country-like roads that curve unhurriedly through the residential areas of this old quarter of Bellingham before joining the coastal highway known as Chuckanut Drive.

For 21 miles, this two lane road follows the coastline, clinging to the face of the Chuckanut Mountain as it descends steeply into Puget Sound. It winds between huge granite rocks and towering cedars.

The trees frame magnificent views of the blue waters of Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands. One might catch sight of an eagle soaring high above or a cruise ship heading for Alaska. There are numerous places to stop and admire the view and catch glimpses of the railroad track far below. The train ride along that track, from Seattle to Vancouver is itself spectacular.

The Emigrant's Dilemma

2009-06-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

When you immigrate into a foreign country and you put your roots down there, you are sometimes caught in a dilemma. I am firmly of the opinion that when one has emigrated from a country, that person should not think of himself or herself as keeping one foot in the old country and the other in the new.

With the easy flow of information across the globe, if one has relatives or friends in the old country, it’s likely one will be well aware of conditions there. When the economic, political or cultural situation there seems to be headed in the wrong direction, what does the expat do? Do you offer your insights in the many ways now available: e-mail letters to the Editor of the online local newspapers, blogs, social networks?

Or are you now an outsider, who should not be meddling in affairs that are no longer your own?

For many years I steered clear of making any public comment on the state of affairs of my native country, although I was keenly aware of it sliding into deeper and deeper problems.

That country has now become mired in numerous serious problems with no solutions in sight and I have found myself writing letters and comments to local newspapers. Because some of my contacts there feel uneasy about this I have deferred to their sensibilties and I often ask for a pseudonym to be used if my letters are published. I would rather not, but there again is another dilemma: I stand by my opinions and I am comfortable with being identified as their author, but then again I don’t have to live there so I am spared any fallout, unlikely as that is.

At times I question whether I should get involved at all.

What would you do, if you were an expat?

Bavarian Festival in Leavenworth

2009-05-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

Our son took four generations of his family to Leavenworth to celebrate Mothers' Day. A Maypole Dance, Bavarian folk music and street dancing greeted us on our arrival there. A wonderful day was capped with German food for lunch and even a touch of winter as we drove through Steven's Pass at an elevation of 4,000 feet on the way home.

North Beach

2009-05-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

There's a reason why Seattle is called the "Emerald City": the frequent rain not only nourishes the trees but keeps them washed and free of dust and the residue of air pollution. Across from my house on a lovely Spring day, like today, the variety of trees turns the forest into a collage of different shapes, textures and shades of green.

Less than a five minute drive from home is North Beach, which borders the Puget Sound. Access to this beach by motor vehicles is controlled, so there are never many cars there at any time, and in mid-afternoon, in mid-week, we had the beach, the little lighthouse and the expanse of wild nature preserve adjoining it almost all to ourselves, except for a couple of adults and small children.

Driftwood, gnarled and bleached, washed up onto the beach, presents an ever-changing exhibition of sculptures.

Even Mount Rainier's snow-covered craggy flanks can be seen in the distance, if you look closely.

A Bavarian Town in Washington

2009-05-13T00:20:00.000-07:00

Our son's Mothers' Day treat was a three hour drive over the Cascades Mountain Range to Leavenworth. Leavenworth was an old logging town in the mountains that was transformed into a full scale replica of a town in Bavaria, Germany when the logging industry was phased out.

The drive there prepares you for the fantasy of being in Germany.

For much of the way the highway closely follows the Snohomish River into a very Alpine-looking valley with glimpses of bare, rugged, snow capped peaks, passing through tiny towns with names like Goldbar, Sultan, Startup and Index, past meadows then cutting through thick pine forests clinging to steep valley walls, winding all the way up to the ski resort at Stevens Pass at 4,061 feet (1,238m), where the slopes were still covered with snow.

For much of the way the river is just a few feet from the road and presents an ever-changing spectacle: sometimes churning along over boulders in foaming cataracts

sometimes as a still pool lingering under trees or meandering slowly around little islands of gravel.

Front Street, the main street in Leavenworth, was filled with visitors and mingling with them were local residents decked out in lederhosen and Bavarian skirts and blouses

The sound of an Oompah band filled the air and built up expectations for the Maypole Dance to come.

The Maypole Dance in the main square was delightful.

Over a hearty German meal at a Bavarian style restaurant

amid murals of Rothenberg, Regensberg and other old Bavarian towns we toasted the three generations of mothers in our party.

Thunder in a Clear Sky

2009-05-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

Thunder in a Clear Sky

There was no mistaking it. That distinctive rumble of four mighty synchronized "Cyclone" radial engines increasing in intensity until it was directly, low, over my house this fine Spring Sunday, causing it to vibrate. Completely different from the usual whine of the engines of the jets throttling back as they make their final approach to Boeing Field just a few miles south of my house. I rushed to my front window, just in time to get a glimpse of the ancient B-17 lumbering overhead.

At that moment my memory raced back more than sixty years to the warplanes that sometimes flew low past my childhood home in Trinidad during World War II on their way to Waller Field, a US base there at the the time. My eldest brother was an ardent model airplane maker and with him I would look at the Popular Mechanics or Flying magazines to identify the fighters and bombers or as he laboriously made scaled drawings, based on whatever pictures were available then, for the models of the planes he used to make.

I got my camera ready. I knew it would be back because at this time of year, leading up to Memorial Day, that restored B-17 is based for a while at Boeing Field where the public is offered 20 minute rides in it over Seattle.

As I waited eagerly for the drone that would indicate its approach, I reflected on what a different significance that sound had for millions in World War II. Known as the "Flying Fortress", it was then one of the most lethal weapons. B-17's dropped 640,000 tons of bombs on Germany (Wikipedia). They carpet bombed cities in Germany. Their gunners shot numberless German fighters out of the skies. Accounts of Flying Fortresses returning to their bases damaged to an extent that it seemed impossible they could fly have become legendary.

Who know what missions this very B-17 now taking tourists for rides had flown? What did it leave below in its wake in World War II? It seemed so innocuous as it flew so low and slowly over my roof as I took this picture, a curiosity, a relic, now

OBAMA'S first 100 days as President

2009-04-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

Anyone to whom it hasn't been obvious that Obama has been proven an outstanding President is still blinded by the debris left behind by the catastrophic Bush Administration.

The call I made for prosecutions in my January 17, 2009 Post, has become widespread and more insistent. The destruction of the US Constitution and traditional US values, the contravention of the Geneva Conventions and of common human rights and decency were too egregious to be swept under the carpet.