The year in review..yea, right!

I wish to start this review to show empathy with all of my East coast friends. This was the view we awoke to one year ago today.
SNOW, lots of SNOW. The big difference between us and the East coast, is we have no SNOW plows. Please look at the street..
The street has SNOW on it. We here just wait for spring. It happened about 2 weeks later. All the SNOW melted, and it was spring. The inconvenience was not noticed too awfully much by those who stayed indoors and ate SOUP. Pumpkin SOUP, beet SOUP, and bean SOUP made with a wonderfully seasoned honey baked ham bone, smokey, slightly salty, BUTTER rich and smooth to the palate.

Why is palate, and pallet pronounced the same, and yet wallet and BALLET, sound nothing like palate or pallet. The Kings English is truly weird.

Did you all know that SOUPy Sales died this year. A great comedian!

More thoughts regarding language: Evocative phrases.
Global Warming, level playing field, Felitz Navidad, HE WATCHED HER BREATHING. Each sound-bite phrase brings to mind a hundred pictures in my head.

Global warming...see the first picture.
Level playing field.... a phrase thought up by business..which is run by golfers who relish in hills, bunkers, water hazards and sand traps.

Felitz Navidad... I love this sound. It is religious, yet not slapping you up-side the head.

HE WATCHED HER BREATHING.....could be a technician in an ICU..or a pulp fiction novel lover propped up on one elbow closely observing the rise and fall of the covers of the unconscious body next to him. OR



Maybe it could be a Boa Constrictor carefully monitoring the breathing patterns
of the queen waiting patiently to begin squeezing. HE WATCHED HER BREATHING. Language..it is evocative, fluid, exciting, stimulating, evasive, cold as SNOW, hot as SOUP, slippery as BUTTER, and as elegant as BALLET..but I digress. I am reviewing the year.

The ups and downs of the economic climate, the stroking of the the egos of politicians, the passion of all of the special interest groups hoping that the favor of their desires will fall into the health care bill that will allow the relatives of the infirmed to say "HE WATCHED HER BREATHING"

I wish you all a wonderful new year, and I resolve to blog more often, and I want you to know that pope eggs Benedict is watching over you.

You can pick your friends, and...

I am going through some of my old travel pictures. Around 1980, I spent a week in the Dominican Republic. I was staying at the Casa De Campo resort, http://resorts.gordonsguide.com/casadecampo/index.cfm a reasonbly expensive place to visit even in those days (I was traveling on an expense account). So one day I was bored with all of the luxury, and decided to wander into town to get an idea of how much of the wealth I was seeing at the resort trickled into town. I was taking a lot of pictures, and realized that I was being followed by a group of children who were as fascinated by me as I was of them. They asked if I would take their picture, and I said ok, just pose but don't make it looked posed. I took the picture, and they all ran away. I really never even looked into the viewfinder to compose the picture, but I've always loved it.

So I was going to make up a story about this picture, but I believe that I could not really make up anything that could embellish the picture. Here is my day visiting The Dominican Republic.

Trains at a distance have every man's wish on board.

But once you are on a train, things change. The first, most obvious change has to do with time. There are tesseracts at every train station gate. When you pass through this portal to the train dimension, your clocks, the printed schedule, perhaps even the day of the week, no longer have anything to do with reality. Departing at 3:45 pm is sort of a guideline, a number to appease accountants, Congress, and the traveling public. In reality, there is train time. Travel at the speed of train- whatever that is. You can neither make it go faster or slower. You, dear reader, are along for the ride with no control of anything except perhaps when to open the bottle of scotch you smuggled aboard. You can pee when you wish, get out of your seat- do a ricochet walk-about to the lounge car, or the dining car at certain times of the day. Please see note about 'train time'. Even dining times are not consistant, and have something to do with what time zone you are in. If the front of the train happens to be in a different time zone that the dining car, you may have to eat an hour early,or an hour later. It is all very confusing.

Speaking of eating in the dining car, I need to describe the accommodations there. There are 14 tables each seating 4 persons, 7 on each side of the train, with a window at each seat, a service area, then a duplication of the first 14 tables. You enter the dining car from one end, and are greeted by the host who seats you at a vacant table, or places you with 2 strangers who may well have been showing up for a different meal depending if they came from the front of the train and in were in Central time zone. For each meal there are 3 0r 4 seatings of approximately 45 minutes each (train time) over the course of a meal period. The actual kitchen is on the lower level of the car while the dining area is on the upper. All food is prepared to order, and cooked on the train which is bouncing back and forth as well as accelerating and slowing sometimes for no apparent reason. I tried to duplicate this feat at home. I would drink a bottle of scotch, then try to cook dinner. It was much like the train in as much as everything continuously moved under my feet.

The serendipity of this arrangement of dining car leads to the purpose of this story: People you meet on a train that you would probably never run into at any other venue on the planet and with whom you have to spend 45 minutes (train time) of your otherwise precious scotch drinking time.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of rail travel, I need to point out something bloody obvious. The tracks are fastened to the earth, the train rides on the rails. You are pretty much at the mercy of where the rails go. You cannot 'turn left to avoid construction', 'make the next legal u-turn' 'recalculate', 'stop at the next scenic overlook' or do any of the hundreds of commands programmed into a GPS system. Yet, inexplicably, our first evening dinner companions brought their GPS with them to the dining table. They had it programmed to Portland from Chicago Union Station. Oddly enough the program was for roads, not RAILroads. Every 38 seconds (train time) this little gizmo announced a recalculation because we just trellised over the road it thought we should be traveling. The couple was transfixed by the voice coming out of the little box. Every time (train time) it spoke, they pressed their food filled lips up to the previously clean window to see if the train had made an error in judgement and had turned right toward Canada by mistake. We avoided these people for the remainder of our trip, and even encouraged the Engineer to drive off and leave them at one of the numerous 'smoke breaks' made at train time intervals.

Next episode: The retired, widowed, elementary teachers who had the only queen sized bed room on the train.

Blame it on Rio

OK, fan club of tens here is my next installment. As many of you know I have traveled a fair bit in my life, and some of the posts coming up will be reporting on some of the more amazing things that I've seen in my ramblings.

Perspective is one of the philosophical ideas that keep me grounded. See the mountain from the valley, and you only have half of the picture. You must also see the valley from the mountain. This essay is on the surface about perspective.


On the surface, some things seem small, inconsequential even unnoticeable amid the thousands of similar objects to which they may be compared. You can look at something and only see part of the picture. You might not even have a clue to what it is you are looking at until you are able to get enough of a picture to grasp how big a problem is or how difficult a solution may be to solve such a problem.


Often issues seem to be black and white, simple enough to grok. Easy for the left to understand, easy for the right. How do you increase employment so that health care cost is lessened relative to income?
How do you get people to work with not much money to pay them?




As you can see in the above 3 pictures a perspective is beginning to emerge. You now have in your mind an idea of the size of the stones on which the knife is sitting. You know the size of the knife relative to the coins in your own pocket. What can we do with a big pile of little stones if we set our collective minds to it?



You could put many people to work for many years to create "The Wave" on the Promenade on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This task employed hundreds for years. It was not a glamor job, it didn't pay well, but in terms of creating a lasting work of art that anyone can enjoy, it is unsurpassed as a public works project. Lest you loose your perspective here, This beach is about 4 miles long. There is a median strip the entire length of the beach, and then a very wide sidewalk fronting hotels and businesses for the entire distance to the vanishing point.



The wave is just the beach side part of this artwork. The rest is geometric patterns that may have required some mind altering yerba máte or a good stiff cachaça to reach it's max potential.
Perspective is the only way we are going to solve the existing health care issue in this country. We need to keep moving back away from the issue until it becomes clear how big of an issue we are really facing.



Solutions can be black and white if you have a pile of each and lay them down one at a time. In case you think this is a one shot deal, Ipanema Beach also sports this style of hand laid mosaic. I am amazed that a society that could have just paved this strip of land and been done with it chose to invest in an art form so massive it employed many people for a long time. This is a public service.

Monkey see, Monkey do.

Well, the trepidation is over. The pre-visit worry that a five-year-old gourmet might reject my meager offerings was quickly dashed when she said "OhIrememberthis place, youhaveapool,canIswim?Isthisbread?Ilikethepearsyourdogiscutewhatisthisplant?CanItaketheseedsoutwewentcamping
canIhavesomelemonade."

I was pretty sure she was comfortable. Iris is a truly engaging, precocious, poised, self-confident blue-eyed sweetie. Her parents were ok, too.

I thought I'd give her an aromatic visit to the herb garden to wow her olfactory senses. I grabbed an obscure green leaf, crushed it gently in between my fingers, "Do you know this herb?" She smelled it and said "OH, That is Lemon Balm." Then she went on to correctly identify, Tarragon, Sage, Fennel, Parsley-differentiating between curly and flat leaf, Oregano, Thyme, Tomato, Chard, Beet, Zucchini, Acorn Squash, Raspberry, Chive, Basil, blueberry and strawberry.

Not to be shown up by a learned child, I grabbed some catnip, mixed it with poison oak, and said, "Smell this!"
She said, "Do I look stupid?"

Her beaming parents loaded her into the car, thanked us for the visit, and drove off to Grandma's house.

I'm having a sip of the new vintage McCarthy's single malt beverage made by Clear Creek Distillery , and watching the alpine glow on Mt. Hood.

How Hungry is the Monkey?

I'm sitting here in the semi-quiet, hearing the sounds of the Ever-Hungry Teen Boy pouring his second bowl of Krunchy-Krap since we got home from the Mahvelous Mexican Restaurant where He had 2 Chicken Burrrrritos con frijoles y arroz y ensalada less than an HOUR ago. The bottomless pit also asked if I had gotten any ice cream at the store today in case he had a small empty spot near his big toe in the next 15 minutes. My background music is Amy Winehouse... Rehab.

Multiple thoughts are running through my head, first did I go wrong telling Ever-Hungry Teen Boy that the first taste was free? Second, if he is already 6ft 2in does he really need to be any taller? After all, only 3 presidents in our history have been over 6ft 2in.

My other thoughts have to do with our brunch guests tomorrow. They are 3. Mom, Dad, and Hungry Monkey.
Dad and HM are co-authors of a cookbook called Hungry Monkey I'm not worried about cooking for Mom and Dad, but I've seen HM on t-v, and she is a food critic. She also loves to be involved in every aspect of the cooking process, and may well call me to task for any indiscretions I may perform. Perhaps I will just send her to the garden to pick her own brunch, and let the prep and finish be on her shoulders.

I've cooked for princes and Presidents and was not intimidated, but gosh ... a 5 yr old food critic with 'tude...

As I type, my Ever-Hungry Teen Boy just went for another bowl of Krunchy-Krap...sigh

It was like sow, but wasn't

My garden will be the analogy for this and some future posts. This theme is not new for sure, but it does encompass everything that I like to talk about, food, medicine, sex, order, and art. I could probably name my garden Maslow. The garden is doing exceptionally well this year. There is an abundance of food because the sex was so good. All the bees, spiders, hummingbirds, worms, beetles and butterflies have put in their collective 10,000 hours, and have helped produce enough food for eating, sharing, and putting by.

The "putting by" part is really satisfying, but it seems to only work well with food. In my case, it certainly doesn't work with money..there is never quite enough to put some by. Have you ever tried to put sex by? Can't. Gotta be used in the moment. Putting food by is like getting a royalty check in the winter, you weren't really expecting it, but you open the freezer and raspberries popped out. To paraphrase Thoreau "Everyman looks at his freezer and pantry with a kind of affection"

In this day of soundbites and tweets a garden stands firm for long term satisfaction. A passerby will ask how the garden is doing, hoping for a "Great", or "Lovely". I, as a philosopher, will begin to perorate on the virtues of front yard-organic-gardening-instead-of-lawn right up to the "eyes glaze over" stage, but when I offer said passerby a taste of something approaching perfection, the glaze goes away and is replaced with a sensation not expected.

Yea, Maslow! Peak Experience Achieved