9/29/09:
See you in October...
The Size of Happiness
Another thirty cows - another seven
acres fenced for grazing, in a field
that last year looked a good halfway to heaven;
but the very week the sixty yield
that extra hundredweight of milk, already
I'm looking beyond that pasture, where the hill
runs right into the sky: It's not enough.
That's happiness. You never drink your fill -
love, money, land. The milk you're dreaming of?
Even before production's holding steady
way beyond what you'd have ever thought:
Couldn't your herd-average be higher?
Fields that once you never could have bought;
lovers that once you hardly dared desire;
visions - gallons - once they're in the can -
the very afternoon your new tank's full
of fresh ambition: Sixty Ayrshires -
impossible? Not only possible
but insufficient. Dream of mountain pastures;
own them, and you're back where you began.
Contentment is the only kind of plenty,
and that's the domain of cows, who know the size
of happiness. With ten - a hundred twenty -
no matter how many cows your new barn ties,
you're several acres short of paradise.
— Debra Warren
9/26/09:
My stitches came out yesterday amid welcome news: the edges of my biopsies had normal tissue- no more cutting. Whew... All of this elevating feet and putting on cold packs, plus hobbling gingerly when up and about, has left me behind in the things I wanted to do outside. Some plants will likely have to wait until spring to move to nicer quarters. Today we painted the trim around our garage and crawl space doors. It was a perfect day for painting outdoors, sunny, dry and cool.
Today Glenn Beck was in town, as were about 800 protestors. We stayed home. The Mount Vernon Mayor's choice to honor Mr. Beck is an interesting one to make in a county with 15% of its citizens Hispanic. We've got lots of hot, dry fields to be tended. To add a touch of irony the mayor decided to donate proceeds from the affair to the local arts theatre, The Lincoln. The mayor has strived to put the Lincoln out of business since he came into office as it tends to attract patrons who think, just as he tried to hold closed city meetings to prevent citizen input when he started. Birds of a feather...
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.— Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
9/20/09:
As everyone knows, voices of hysteria, anger, misinformation, and hatred have been loud and virulent of late. Our town is currently in the midst of controversy as Mount Vernon's current mayor has invited a one of these voices to receive honors in the town's name when neither its voters or voted representatives have had a say. Edward R. Murrow also came from this area, leaving all sorts of interesting comparisons to the imagination. The Seattle Weekly carried an interesting article on the subject this last week: click here to read.
President Obama is not the first to be vilified by right wing extremists, the President up to the left also was treated to the joys of hatred before he was killed by those who hated what he stood for. If you click on President Kennedy's picture you can see some of the information publicized about him by the super-patriot commie haters of his day. It makes me feel better to know the world has survived such insanity in the past, thus creating hope where it was foundering.
It should be an interesting week, in many ways.
Enjoy the little gif to the right to start the week off right, with a chuckle. Au revoir.
Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before.— Dwight Eisenhower
9/18/09:
Jay has been kind enough to help me examine my feet to determine if they are progressing properly on their path to being covered with uninterrupted skin, but (as you can see by the picture to the right) it is a lot for me to ask. Work was too hard on my left foot Tuesday, with its large biopsy site, so I came home 2 hours early. A good, long icing helped but did not address the pressure placed by my shoe on the exact area of the missing skin. The next 2 days I wore my old friend Aircast on my left foot, which kept the pressure off better and kept my foot flat rather than bending in the skinless spot. Today I simply wore my crocs and the foot fared fairly well; not too swollen but simply tired and sore. Yeah, closer to the normality I crave!
If you click on Jay's picture you can check out the French Paper Company's interesting button offerings, including the second button. Jay gets some specialty paper from this company at times for orders at work and today mentioned these interesting items they sell. I linked to this company a few years ago, so it might seem familiar... More interesting stuff later, ciao.
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.— Sir Frederick G. Banting
9/14/09:
I stayed home today to ice my left foot as it still did not fit into my crocs with any room for comfort. I have iced it many times and it is beginning to de-swell, most likely enough to don crocs and limp about outside of my home tomorrow, hopefully without further injuring it. In a few days it will simply be sore and in a few days more it will really only hurt when I think about it... then the stitches will come out and it will fall into that archive of anecdotes I have stashed away in my brain and on these pages. Let's hope so anyway, no more weird margins please. Later...
THE FIRST DEATH
Was a horse, that ran out of an
alley onto Burnett Ave., in Louisville, Kentucky;
the alley bricks, mossed and russet.
He'd broke away from a coal wagon, the wild
eyes and foaming bridle,
and fell in the street, head landing
on the bricks. I was six, and thrust my own head
into a wedding of sensation, knowing
inescapably. The crowd gathering,
and its bloody appetite
hit me straight for the rest of
my life. The human lust for death
so grinningly expressed.
Many and many a funeral I have avoided,
for the dignity of the horse.
With his eyes wide open,
and our glances
meeting.
— Jane Mayhall (1918 - 2009)
9/13/09:
Ouch... this is an actual photo of my left foot this morning. If you are brave and wish to, you can click on this small photo and see a better, larger picture of it alongside my right foot, which has its own stitches on the inner part of the big toe.
As you can see from this morning's comparison, my left foot is swollen, especially when you check out the toes. Today my foot squeezes into my crocs, leaving the injured area (strategically located as it is) pressing up against the side of the shoe and leaving a red tinge on my white bandage... thus, ouch.
Last month's smaller biopsy had started to calm down by this, the third day. Maybe tomorrow it will lighten up. Ciao.
My wife says I'm the second smartest. She claims there are 80 guys tied for first.— Columbo
9/12/09:
I have been so busy I have not made an entry for several days, spending much of yesterday and today elevating my feet and saying "ouch" whenever I walked about... yes, the next step in the investigation of changing moles on my feet has happened and is progressing. Yesterday they took a larger sample of full-thickness skin from the outside edge of my left foot, trying to take out a piece big enough that the outer edges or margins show all normal cells. The piece they took out this time was elliptical in shape and about the size/shape of what you can see of a human eye, sewing the rest back together with multiple stitches that, due to their location, pull with every step... While they were at it a punch biopsy was done on a similar mole located on the inside of the big toe of my right foot— why not? Just get it all done. It was exhausting. I almost went with Jay into town today to the library, but found even my crocs too tight on my left foot, making the pain of stepping even worse. I stayed home stocking-footed. The picture to the left is not of my biopsy but of a biopsy like mine, just not on a foot. It links to a poem in the New Yorker called "Army Cats" which you might like to check out.
I read a library book by Adam Gopnik called Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life recently and enjoyed it more than I thought I would at first. Mr. Gopnik discusses the lives of these two men who were so important to mankind's modern history and born on the same day, February 12, 1809. I took the effort to make up a page with excerpts from the book that I thought you might enjoy so that if you did you might seek out the book to read. Click on the book cover picture to the right to read more... enjoy, see you later.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.— Soren Kierkegaard
9/7/09:
I have 3 roses in the front yard, all of them need to be moved because our butterfly bush crowds them— one of many tasks on my agenda that will be completed, mm, in the future. The picture to the left is of the middle rose plant, which is blooming now, as we speak. As you can see when you click on this little picture and see the larger version, it is lovely. I like the shade of red and the light inner leaves. Yes, nice flower. Hope it makes through the transplanting when I get to it...
I have posted pictures of my house plant to the right before, please forgive me the redundancy but its flowers are, well, they are really cool. Once again, you can click the small picture to see a bigger version. I like my flowers.
It was rainy and windy yesterday, got my hair trimmed, got groceries and went to a movie. No yard work was done. Today was nicer and I harvested green beans and tomatoes from Jay's gardening efforts. I think the bush beans I picked were the last of the season, but the pole beans seem to be still going strong. I made the usual green bean casserole (add lots of mushrooms, don't forget the onions, forget the canned fatty onion rings and simply sprinkle with salty roasted almond slivers after dishing out...) and "frenched" the rest before freezing. I also picked what looked like our last zucchini, shredding and freezing 4 loaves worth and making 3 big loaves (substitute applesauce for 1/2 the oil). I had to use pecans because we were out of walnuts— yikes, yummy anyway!
We like our flowers, vegetables and other plants that draw hummingbirds, bees, toads and other life to our yard. We also like to listen to Birdnote on NPR. Today the show started with a bird song I remember well from my childhood, the song of the Bobwhite Quail. Apparently the Bobwhite population is down 80% in the last few years, along with a precipitous drop of several other familiar birds. The program went on to say "New York Times essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg writes, '...we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, has argued ... that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the...diversity of the biological life around us as on any inherent quality in our genes.'" Hear, hear.
The world's changing, there's nothing new about that.
— Cindy Jardot, from a lecture presented at her home 8/30/09 and dutifully recorded by her husband Jay
9/6/09:
I mentioned earlier that I would get back to my colonoscopy adventures... I had one of a series of colonoscopies 8/31/09 and it was clear so I do not have to have another one for 7 years— yeah! Although they detected no signs of cancer or unusual growth they once again found surprising things up there. Back in August 2004, if you remember, they found a talented skate boarder up there, while this year they found the gal whose shoes are at the bottom of each of my monthly pages, plus her little dog... Now isn't that a nice, shiny clean colon?
Back on August 8th I linked to two photos of mullein plants in our yard, one from this year and one from 2004. Our prize mullein this year has continued to grow and what I am calling its final height turns out to be 9'. I did not get a photo from exactly the same vantage point, but if you click on the picture to the right hopefully you can make out that it is at least half a foot taller than it was in early August. It is true, we are easily amused, and happy...
So it is Labor Day weekend, a holiday that has lost much of its meaning. Labor is struggling these days as unemployment remains high. The last couple of decades have seen the erosion of unions along with the middle class, the bogeyman of "Big Government" being raised to frighten people into supporting measures decreasing their rights and safety, our current economic crisis being just one example of what poor regulation or poor enforcement of regulations brings. The other bogeyman that gets paraded about in order to distract people from complex issues with something easy to hate is illegal immigration— people who are different. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ushered in a concept heretofore nonexistent: illegal alien. There were no illegal aliens before that, the United States and the Territories were filled by people from other countries. It wasn't a problem until people who weren't really white came without shackles... here to work their asses off for virtually nothing. Can't get much more evil than that. I wonder what would happen if we embraced energetic, cheap labor and used it to build our country? Lords knows what evil lurks there... Happy Holidays.
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.— Robert Orben
9/5/09, Section B:
I said earlier that I would have "more" about our tour of the stove factory last Saturday, and here it is: click on the little picture of Jay to the left for a treat.
I did not get my camera out in time to catch Jay in the act, but I did get to capture his face after the fact... Jay got to run the punch press, punching holes in a big, thick piece of metal. Fun, boy fun. You can see the big machine behind him, and the two big red buttons he pressed to run the punch.
It was a good day, like many others streaming by. Ciao.
That best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.— William Wordsworth
9/5/09:
"In one group of 9000 white families, the committee found that the collective expenses of 4 per cent of the families were as large as the collective expenses of 80 per cent. Of the low-income families, the expenses of 80 per cent were less than $60 per family per annum, while the expenses of 3 per cent were above $50. These high-expense, low-income families did not find their burdens bearable, merely because the average costs of medical care are not excessive for families with average incomes.
The budgeting of family income, which has been encouraged of late years and has been facilitated by the use of installment payments, may assist families in planning for expenditures which can be determined in advance. But the unpredictable nature of sickness, and the wide range of professional charges for nominally similar services, render budgeting for medical care on an individual family basis impracticable. On the present fee-for-service basis, it is impossible for 99 per cent of the families to set aside any reasonable sum of money, with positive assurance that no more will be needed for medical care...
voluntary health insurance will not meet the needs of those who are in greatest need. It will not reach the unorganized, low-paid workers. It will not solve the problem of satisfactory care for all the people, which is the very problem the committee set out to solve. Already most European countries have abandoned voluntary systems in favor of compulsory systems...
The minority members are essentially laissez faire economists. They insist that doctors be left alone to solve, in their own way, the problem which, after centuries of trial, they have been utterly unable to solve. In other fields of human endeavor, there is painful evidence that leaving each individual and each group alone to provide commodities and services in its own way, in pursuit of its own profit, fails to provide all the people with the food, clothing, and shelter which society, in the United States at least, is fully equipped to provide.
We learned this lesson long ago, as far as education is concerned; but the analogy between education and health is like a red rag to a majority of the medical profession. The trouble seems to be that it is a remarkably sound analogy. Certainly human welfare depends on the health as well as the education of all the people. These objectives cannot be attained if each member of society is allowed to be as ignorant and as sick as he pleases, or if each member who wants the help of a teacher and a doctor is obliged to pay for such help, without the aid of any method of group payment."
The above excerpted from an article in: Atlantic, January 1933
I got to the above quoted material from a link in a New York Times editorial to a current Atlantic article titled How American Health Care Killed My Father. That article sported a side bar with articles/links for older articles about American health care reform, the above included. If you'd like to read the 1933 article you can click on the picture of the Atlantic Puffin.
For seeing they saw not, and hearing they understood not, but like shapes in a dream they wrought all the days of their lives in confusion.— Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC)
9/2/09:
Jay and I had a very nice day Saturday. We went down to Seattle to see a play at the Intiman called "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, based on her book of the same name. The picture to the left is of Joan and links to a page about her that displays a picture of herself, her husband and her daughter— she is the only one still alive. The play is a one person monologue in which the actress delivers the thoughts and narrative of Joan Didion as she lives through the sudden death of her husband while her daughter is in a coma, then lives through her daughter's death as well. It is a time of the very common magical thinking that accompanies and inhabits grief, when life becomes unreal and one believes in "if", as in if I give away his underwear and socks but keep his shoes where he left them, he will return... They play was not as powerful as I had anticipated, but it was very good and we enjoyed attending it.
On our way down to Seattle we stopped off in Mukilteo near where I used to live (interesting to see the old neighborhood, more or less) and toured the factory where our Lopi gas stove in the living room was built. The Travis Industries site was impressive, the tour was quite well-presented and interesting. The staff seemed very happy with their employer and the positive energy was nice to behold. They were having a 30th anniversary celebration, complete with hot air balloon and band, but we had to cut the long tour short so we could get down to Seattle for the play. More on that later...
On the way home we stopped in Everett to go to a Chinese restaurant we enjoy so we could get their yummy Lovers' Eggplant and special vegetable Egg Foo Young, a nice treat in anticipation of my liquid diet the next day for colonoscopy prep... more later on that too!
As always, the month begins in excitement, tromping forward for more. Ciao.
The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied nor extenuated.— John Stuart Mill
Jardot's World: September Edition, 2009
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