NFUs - Keep on Truckin' Again

I haven't gotten the mike for the iPod yet, but I installed the music recording program, and it's already an improvement over the built-in memo recorder. With the microphone and a more strategic placement in the room, I think I can eventually get a decent recording. 


I gave it a shot our last session and managed to get a couple tracks down that don't sound too bad. I've uploaded them to SoundClick -- Viper and a better version than the first take I had up of Keep On Truckin' Mama, and you can hear them there, or on the player down the page. 


Rock on!


Well. Maybe not "rock" so much as, um ... something ...

Adventures in Cooking

Last night, out of nowhere, I decided that I need to try to cook a shrimp étouffée. 


Not something I know how to do, but I can make a roux, and even though we didn't have two parts of the southern trinity -- bell peppers and celery -- I did have onions and garlic.


Generally, one makes the roux -- flour and butter, in more or less equal parts -- and cooks the trinity separate, marrying them with the protein in a threesome and adding other bits. Crawfish is even tastier, by hard to come by up here. 


Because I had a large skillet, I was able to cook the onions and garlic -- finely chopped -- shove them to the side, make the roux, and mix 'em together in the same pan. I did what is called a blond roux -- you can cook it anywhere from white to almost black, and blond is good for this kind of dish.


To this, I added a pound of peeled shrimp, some diced tomatoes and water, and seasoning, primarily Tony Chachere's Original Creole Seasoning. (That's pronounced "Sah-shoo-ray.") Along with some pepper and salt. 


Doesn't take long, under thirty minutes from start to finish, not counting the rice, over which you ladle the shrimp.


This is is a keeper, something I'd do for company ...

TechnoGeekery

Discovered that for six bucks, I can get a program for my iPod (FiRe) that will allow music recording at a better level than the built-in voice memo function. And for about sixty bucks, there's a nifty little microphone, the Blue Mikey, that plugs into the iPod and improves the sound quality considerably when there are multiple instruments blasting away.


What will they think of next?

Equal Rights

Some years ago -- at least fifteen or so, judging by the car I built her on -- we had a pretty good snowfall. I came across these two images when I was looking for a vacuum cleaner bag in the hall closet and managed to knock a box of old photos off the shelf and onto the floor.


Been a long time since I had a dull moment. Really.

Who Are You?

For the soundtrack of this post, crank up the cut from the Who's eighth studio album -- also half of a double-A sided single from 1978 "Who Are You?" -- with Roger and Pete and John, and the about-to-OD-and-die Keith "Moon the Loon" on drums ...


Whoooo are you?  Who, who, who, who?


I was asked that by a psychologist once, and when I started into my response, she smiled. 


What?


Seemed I did what most people do when asked the question -- I went into a litany of what I did, believing that who you are is what you do. (Fun quote from Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl: "Ask an actor a question, and he gives you his credits ...")


Well, I'm a husband and father and writer and martial artist and ...


No, no, that's what you do. Who are you?


I thought the question was disingenuous at the time, and to a large degree, I still do. Actions speak louder than words -- you can say this or that; what you do demonstrates the truth.


But I got the shrink's point: Look deeper. You are more than what you do. There is, at the core of things, past the monkey brain and the twitches and hormones and all, an essence. The spirit, if you will; the soul, the ghost in the machine. It's jacketed and constrained and munged up with fuzzy terminology that doesn't hit the mark -- id, ego, super-ego, animas, animus, persona -- the list goes on -- but it is not those. 


When you aren't doing any of the things that define you outside the shell, then who is it at home?


Hard to pin it down, but this knowledge is the focus for religions and navel-gazing and self-help books, and is one of the the Big Three Questions:


Who am I? Why am I here? What does it all mean? 


Three real bitches to answer, but some believe that if you get one, you get them all -- at least well enough to keep on truckin'. 


Most people who feel that they know these answers have them from an established system of belief, and they accept the answers found within as valid. Nothing wrong with that -- faith comes from a lot of places, and whatever works for you? More power to you, and amen.


The happiest people I have ever met are those who have gone inward, seen what is at their cores, and come to terms with it, whatever their guides were to get there. And, as I pointed out in a post about George Emery not long ago, there follows then the quote: "When you know who you are, you know what to do."


I believe this is the heart of revelation, of epiphany: When you know yourself, you know the universe. You know God. 


If you are blessed with good luck, you might find this knowledge in your lifetime. 


And maybe Popeye the Sailor nailed it: I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam ...

Temptation

My mother makes something she calls Brown Candy. Her recipe is: A pot full of white sugar mixed with sweetened condensed milk, melted and cooked to hard ball stage, then poured into a buttered pan. When it sets, it looks like vanilla fudge. If you are getting creative, you can toss in a few chopped pecans, but basically, it's pretty close to rock candy in terms of how sweet it is.


She makes it at Christmas, along with other candy and a rum-soaked fruitcake, and she always sends a box of these goodies to us.


My wife and daughter-in-law sometimes get together and make this candy, and with a couple variations, have improved the recipe, giving it even more of a kick.


I have mentioned here that since my trigylcerides were elevated, I decided to cut out sugar, or at least cut way down on it. There's a reason the heath foodies call it "white death," and simple sugars in any form are generally bad for your system. We all know this, and most Americans, save diabetics, shrug this off and eat plenty of it anyway. Getting a lot more Type II diabetes than we used to have as a result. Probably 90% of those in the U.S. who have diabetes have Type II, or adult onset, and for most of those, over-indulgence is the reason the tendency flowers. 


From the first website that pops up on a Google search: 


"In the last 20 years, we have increased sugar consumption in the U.S. 26 pounds to 135 lbs. of sugar per person per year! Prior to the turn of this century (1887-1890), the average consumption was only 5 lbs. per person per year!"


I don't know how good these numbers are, but all you have to do is look around at how many obese folks you see to get a sense that a whole lot of us are eating too much of something, and white death tops the list of Stuff We Don't Really Need. Look at the packaging of any processed treat that you eat, how much of what's inside are simple carbs. 


Yadda, yadda, yadda ...


So, anyway, the candy package arrived. 


The problem is not just that it tastes really good. It's that the association with happy times is powerful. Brown Candy is the taste of Christmas. 


Did I throw it out? Pass it along to somebody else? Nope. Most of the candy in the box, yep, That went to the grandkids, but I kept some of the brown candy. And with due ceremony, I sat down and ate a piece of it. Slowly and mindfully. Normally, I would have gobbled five or six squares and only stopped because I felt like a pig, but so far, just the one.


That one piece? Nearly took my head off. Once you ease up on the sweets, when you aren't acclimated to a steady diet of  'em, the sensation  when you do indulge? Man. It's a hit like cocaine. It spikes your blood, gives your taste buds a rush, and tells you just how potent the stuff is. 


Getting off sugars completely is hard, I'm not there, but I am way less, it has made a difference in how I feel, and I'm still down six or eight pounds from where I started when I decided to back off. 


Your mileage may vary. But your teeth and your pancreas and lipids will thank you if you ease up on White Death. 


Advice from your friendly neighborhood old guy. Ho, ho, ho ...

White Trash Christmas 2010

Close enough to Christmas to put up the tree ...


And close enough to embed the video ...

When the Rain Comes ...

Portland gets its rain in small doses but frequently during the season, which runs from October through June. Now and again, however, we get buckets of the stuff. Set a new record for the date day before yesterday, had a lull yesterday, and will probably break the record again today ...

Bumper Sticker of the Day

Bisexuals

have twice as much fun.

Not my thing, but you gotta admire the nerve to stick that on your car. A beamer, as it happened. I was too slow to get the picture, but the memory lingers ...

Dancing

Most recent Sera class started with a tight and condensed version of Djuru Sepok. (Or maybe "Sepak," I'm never sure which, given the idiosyncratic spellings of Bahasa and Javanese, neither of which I know. I pronounce both close enough to the same way to fake it in conversation, but not when writing.)


However you spell it, this is a kicking form,  training for leg-strength and balance. If you have a mind to start up the old "alive" or "dead" debate -- don't bother, I've heard it too many times already. You aren't going to change my mind. If I wanted to do it the other way, then I'd be there doing it that way.


 The form is something we use because, aside from strength and balance, some of the specific moves can translate to something useful, so it's more specific than general calisthenics.


As my teacher points out, you don't use forms for fighting, and any combination longer than three moves is probably not real useful -- can't get it done in three, you likely can't get it done in four or five. 


Or as Monty Python has it it in the Writ of the Holy Hand Grenade, "Three shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the counting shall be three ..."


The longer form ranges around and covers more ground, first one side and then the other, and I confess that at the moment I can't remember it all; however, there is this wonderful thing called "writing it down" that I have found most useful. Like many activities, the use-it-or-lose-it dictum holds sway. Fortunately, if you haven't used it for a while and you have written it down -- in a way that jogs your memory, which is sometimes quite the trick with physicality -- then you can recover it. I've found that more often than not, the moves come back pretty fast.


I have the form written down. Once I get it remembered, I am going to crank up the video cam and record it. I'm a writer, but pictures often do a better job than words. Pictures and words are better than either alone: Here is what it looks like; here is what we call it, and what those terms mean.


This dance, like other forms, is not a fighting exercise, but an exercise to help prepare you for fighting. You ought not have to be an Olympic-class jock to make a style work, but being   fit doesn't hurt, and strong and supple legs are an asset. Better too much ammo than too little.


Since our workouts in silat class haven't been real athletic of late,  I figured that I could hit the gym that same day and do a fairly good workout for my legs. Bad timing -- Murphy must have been watching and rubbing his hands together in glee. Need to get our legs in shape, Guru says. Hey, I'm ahead of you, I already did that, so we can skip it ...


Uh huh. Right. You get to do it again ...

How to Write - Pacing

I've addressed this before, here, and here, but I recently read a book ms from somebody I invited to send it when he was done, and since it came up again, here's what I had to say to him about the subject of pacing:


Dear __________,

You have a pretty good story, and interesting characters -- a good effort for a first novel -- you should be pleased; most people never get this far.

My main criticism goes to the pacing, which is always a tricky beast, and not something most beginners have any idea of how to do. I make the novel at just under 80K words, which is a good length, but the pacing is off.

Not a difficult problem to fix, but it will require another pass before you try sending it around -- in my opinion, which with a dime will get you ten pennies, if somebody wants to make change ...

The quick and dirty course: There are three main ways to move a story: Exposition, dialog, and action. Exposition is the slowest, dialog and action both faster, and the balance among the three is what gives your tale its pacing. Ideally, you want something like an ascending sine-wave, up, down, up, down, all the while slowly climbing to a high point and a leap off the cliff to the end and finish -- like a roller coaster.

If you have too much exposition, it feels slow. Dialog and action can break up the internal monologues and descriptions, but if they are too heavy with qualifiers, they don't do the job and actually make the problem worse, and you don't want stately in an action-adventure novel. There are places where you need lean and mean.

You've probably seen this before, but here are two visual aids for a page layout:

--------------------------------

-------------------------- 

---------------------------------

-----------------

------------------

--------------------

------------------------

----------------------

and this:

------------ 

------ 

-------

--

--

------

-----------

----------------------

--------

You see the difference -- shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, choppy exchanges, play faster because they are literally faster to read. You have fewer words on a page, and if you use punchy terms -- smash, stab, thrust, whack, like that, to ramp up the imagery, the pages get turned faster, which imparts a sense of speed to a reader. 

Want them to hurry along? Write short and tight. If you want it exciting, moving them along faster helps.

Chapters are another way to alter the pacing -- a longish chapter followed by a shorter one, followed by a medium-length one -- don't make them all the same length. Might average eight or ten pp each, but now and then, a three- or even a one-pager is valid and can pick up the pace. 

There are places to walk, and there are places where you want to run like a scalded cheetah. You don't want a steady pace throughout. Sprint, jog, walk, stand still, sprint again.

No reason you should know this, it's a fairly advanced writing skill and not easily taught, but that's what you need to do. 

While the writing itself isn't bad, most of your text is homogenized, i.e., the paragraphs and sentences tend to be the same length and this makes for a kind of slow-jog monotone in delivery. You don't want this. (Pick a couple pages at random and look at them; what I mostly see is: Four or five lines to a graph, seven or eight graphs to a page. This is okay for a few pages, but more than that, readers will start getting bored. You need to vary it.)

Once you see this, you'll wonder how you missed it -- and you won't miss it again.

Break them up. Use active voice and not passive. Instead of phrases like, "Heading up the mountain, he ..." say instead, "He headed up the mountain." Simple past tense flows better. Clean and crisp are the way to go. Don't worry about style, just tell the story. Style comes on its own. 

Fix this, you are 85-90% of the way there.

Bee Here Now

Last night as I got into bed to retire, I felt a small stab in my upper back as I lay down. Huh. I got up, looked to see if the dogs had maybe dragged something sharp into the bed, a twig or somesuch, but didn't see anything. 


Oh, well.


I brushed off the sheet, reclined again, and began reading. 


The spot got kind of itchy. What is that? About which time I looked up to see a bee flying around the room. 


To those who think that The New Yorker is a liberal rag with no use save to support left-wing loonies, let me assure you that a folded copy of the 'zine is an excellent bee-smasher.


It was only then that I put two and two together and realized that the little sucker had stung me. What it was doing on my bed, just under the edge of my pillow? Who knows?


The term "bee" is inaccurate, since it is -- was -- almost certainly a common wasp, aka a yellow jacket. It didn't leave the stinger behind as honeybees do. It was one of the critters that fill up the wasp and hornet traps in the warm seasons. Doesn't seem as if these things would be around in the Oregon winter, especially after a couple of hard freezes, but there it was. 


Fortunately, I'm not allergic to such things.


Never a dull moment. 

Jockery

Part of going back to the gym is knowing that now and again you will wind up sore the next day. Especially if you go down the path to muscle failure. I forget which Weider principle this is -- and surely is it one of them, 'cause there is the Weider Everything Else I Forgot to Mention By Specific Name Principle -- a joke only appreciated by iron pumpers who've read the Joe Weider bodybuilding zines.


Basically, the exercise about which I am talking involves doing descending reps of something until you can't do any more. 


Take chins, for instance. Suppose you can do a dozen reps in good form. 


So do that.


Wait a few seconds, catch your breath, then do another set. Chances are, you won't get twelve reps, but you might get nine or ten. 


Wait a few seconds, then do another set, as many as you can.


Keep on doing this until you get to the point where you can't do a single rep. Where you can't do anything but hang there twitching.


You're done. Move along. 


I don't do this often, since it cranks up the lactic acids and cooks me real good for the next day or two, but now and then, the madness takes me ...


(It's not, as you might think, the most exhausting pumping exercise -- eccentric reps are. These involve a training partner who helps you hoist more weight than you can on your own, which you then lower. You can lower more weight than you can lift. Doing this doesn't take long to achieve the burn, and it's the molten lava kind of burn. This is one you do infrequently. Maybe every twenty years or so ...)


Here's the thing: Last trip to the gym, I decided to do sets of descending reps to failure in a couple of exercises. Which I did.


However, even though I was exhausted, come the next day, I wasn't sore. No muscle aches, no lactic acid build-up enough so I noticed. 


I'm not sure what this means. If it's a good witch or a bad witch ...


(By the by, that's not a Photoshopped picture. The guy -- sometimes called The Man Whose Arms Exploded -- is Gregg Valentino, a fellow who injected steroids every place he could reach, along with God knows what else, and who nearly killed himself doing it. Gives new meaning to the term freakish when applied to bodybuilders ...)

NFUs - Keep on Truckin' Mama Jam

First the excuses: This is recorded with an iPod set upon a metal chair -- I don't know what I could have been thinking -- and the result is a wax-and-wane wah-wah effect that makes an already-crappy microphone pick-up worse. Next time, I'll try it on a soft surface and in a better location. It's just to give you an idea -- we sound much better live. Really.


Instrument-wise, we have Nancy on piano; Ian on mandolin; Casey on single-string washtub bass, and two acoustic guitars, Lou and Yours Truly. (Our banjo player Jesse was out sick.) Ian sings the lead, and others of us chime in along the way, including Mira, who also does handbourine(?).


The song, "Keep on Truckin' Mama," pre-dates R. Crumb's use of the keep-on-truckin' phrase by at least thirty-some years -- the earliest version I can find of it comes from the 1930's, Blind Boy Fuller, channeling Blind Blake. Though ragtime claims it predates that by years, I can't find it. Every other singer who did it added verses, and some of them are nasty. I first heard it by Hot Tuna, but even The Temptations did a cover. 


The chord progression is pretty much the same as that Alice's Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie.


Listen here ... 

Rearranging

The process of changing keys on songs I learned whilst my guitar was tuned down a full step continues. Got half a dozen or so done, and it has been a good exercise. Still slow going -- I don't know those progressions well enough so I can do them without thinking. 


A recap for those wondering what I'm talking about:  For the last few years I have kept my guitar tuned down from standard. (Standard tuning, the open strings are, from bass to treble, E, A, D, G, B, E.  The tuning I had gotten used to using was D, G, C, F, A, D.)


The reason for the new arrangements is that when I started jamming with other players, either I had to be in tune with them, or shift chords on the fly. If I was playing a G-shape, it was actually an F-chord, so even though the music is mostly simple, I have to do it for each song.


Either that or use a capo, a mechanical device which barres a fret and raises the pitch. Capo up two, and you are in standard tuning. Problem there is that a capo swipes a couple of useful frets, and it invariably causes strings to go sharp or flat, requiring re-tuning. 


In standard tuning, many of the songs I learned while down a step have high notes I could barely reach then; tuned up, I can't get there. 


The new arrangements aren't hard to do -- the ratio is the same between chords, save for some sharps and flats along the way -- so if you want to go from playing something in D to playing it in C, you just drop each chord a letter. Between some of them, you have to add a sharp or a flat (half-step), depending on the key, because of how music works on a guitar.


I can sing comfortably in several keys, depending on the song. If I could manage them with the low tuning, I can still manage 'em by dropping the chords a full step. This causes some problems, in that some keys require finger-busting positions. Easy, major chord progressions in, say, C, need different fingering to do them in B-flat, even with barres.


Same words, same rhythm, but if you have been playing it one way for several years and you change it to another way, there's a reset button that's got to be pushed a time or twelve.

(There's a whole other post I could do on this learning-a-new-way biz. I've spoken to it in martial arts discussions, when you are presented something new, for instance, at a seminar, that doesn't work with what you already know. Holds true for all kinds of activities. Not to say you can't learn a new trick, but that if you are an old dog, it's harder because if you want to do it, you might have to un-learn an old trick first. Sometimes, it might be worth it. Sometimes, it won't be. You have to decide if it is or isn't.)


Fingerpicking notes on the fretboard adds another level of complexity. The strings you pick in an open chord in first position aren't the same for that chord six or eight frets up the neck; nor are they the same from key to key, even in the same position. 


Ah, well. Just like everything else in my life, it's a work in progress ...

Clapton Isn't God, But ...

Eric Clapton is on tour. Despite the fact that he's been part of my musical background forever  -- a Beatles-era guy who played with them, and whose Derek and the Dominoes album provided two songs I do on my guitar, "Layla," and "Bellbottom Blues," we've never seen him live. 


Tickets went on sale at ten a.m. today. On the stroke of ten, I tapped the buy tickets button and got put into the queue, whose clock animation began. And which then ran for thirty-three minutes ...


The way ticket sales are done these days is arcane. A certain number of them are sold in advance to what are essentially legal scalpers. The prices on those get jacked up PDQ. A floor ticket that goes for $125 face value -- spendy enough, thank you -- will go anywhere from ten to twenty times that much on the re-sell market. Who can spend a couple thousand bucks for a concert ticket? Not me. 


The promotors are apparently required to hold onto and sell a certain number of tickets at an advertised time and for face-value, and if you can time it right, you can snag some of those. You select "best available," or however much you can afford, and wait to see if you'll make it before they run dry. 


We lucked out. We got two good seats for less than an arm and a leg. Not the best seats -- there are folks who have that button click timed to the mirco-second, but not bad. Given what they are going for from the scalpers, we could already get thrice what we paid them, but we won't.


Yeah, yeah, geezer rock. But assuming the old guy survives until then (and us, too,) we'll see him live. 


Layla -- you got me on my knees/
Layla -- I'm begging darlin' please ...

Tattoo Who

My son-in-law, Mÿk Olsen, has gotten a gig doing tattoos -- trained and licensed and all -- at Style Ink,  a combination hair/tattoo place, in Portland. If you are local and into such things, you might check him out and see if his work resonates with you -- he's artistic as all get-out, and reasonable -- in both price and demeanor ...

Ten Cent Town

Went out for dinner last night at at place in NW Portland called The Canvas. A little bistro in the old warehouse district of alphabet streets, this being on Upshur, getting close to the river. An arty place -- you can actually sit and draw or paint using materials they'll supply. We went because our massage therapist, Diana, was doing a musical gig. She's had several bands over the years, and is now in a trio doing eclectic stuff -- covers from Springsteen to Fogerty to originals, folk, rock, country. That's Diana, KC and David.


She's an accomplished musician, plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle, and has a great voice, and even though they've only been practicing for a little while together, the harmonies were pretty tight. They sounded a lot better than the vid I got. 


The bistro had a not-so-good sound system, and the cam and mike on an iPod Touch are not what you'd consider first-rate. Or second- or third-rate, but it was what I had, and at least you can get an idea of how they sounded. I stuck it up on YouTube -- the iPod doesn't want to email big files, and it was either that or break it into three or four chunks to mail to myself, then cut them together. This gives you a little sharper video, but there's that matching music and lyrics that needs a delicate touch. 


Next up, we're going to have to go to the White Eagle, in the Mississippi district, since the NFU's hang out there and sometimes do open mikes ...

Good Intentions

Back in 1996, when I was doing book reviews for the local paper, I had occasion to interview George R.R. Martin, who was on a tour to promote his new fantasy novel series, "A Song of Fire and Ice." The first novel, A Game of Thrones, was just out, and at almost 700 pp, a thick and juicy read. Really convoluted -- you needed a family history to keep up with the characters, and he thoughtfully provided one. 


Martin told me at the time he had intended to write a trilogy, that's what he pitched to Bantam, but realized that he would need four books instead of three. If I write more than four, he said, you have my permission to shoot me.


I supposed that would be doable -- there are already four books published in the series, with three more on the drawing board.


At least.


I don't want to shoot him; indeed, I want him to live long enough to finish the series, just as I did Roger Zelazny when he was plugging along on the Amber novels. Roger had the grace to finish those before he passed away -- too young -- but at least he wrapped them up.


George is looking a little long in the tooth, and it's been what? five years since the most recent novel?


Stay alive, George, stay alive.

Magic Hands

Saw Tommy Emmanuel's Center Stage gig last night on PBS's pledge eon. Fifteen minutes of playing, then fifteen minutes of asking for money, but since you can time it, you can skip most of the latter.

If you haven't seen Tommy play acoustic guitar and you know anything about the instrument, have a look. He opened with this Beatles medley -- watch how that capo just ... goes away about a minute and fifteen seconds in, during "Here Comes the Sun."

Those scratch patterns on the guitar come from playing them like percussion instruments -- he sometimes sounds like he's got half a band onstage with him -- and if there's anybody better who enjoys what he does more, I've never seen him. If you watch the vid, bear in mind, this is one guy with a guitar making all this music, and making it look a lot easier than it is.

Bonus vid: Tommy's version of "House of the Risin' Sun." Listen to the drum brushes he makes with his nail on the box toward the end.

Baby, You Can Fix My Car

Took my car in yesterday for what I thought was a leak in the cooling system. 


Turned out, it was a leak in the cooling system ...


The shop is called Mini-Madness, in Hillsboro, only a few miles from here. I did a web-search and found it, and while their primary business is hot-rodding Mini Coopers and Beamers, turning them into racing bombs -- they have a conversion kit that can coax 335 HP out of a Mini, which is madness -- they do regular repairs and maintenance.


They make most of their money souping up Minis and BMWs, and selling parts for others to do so, and if you are a car-geek, here's a four-minute video of an endurance race featuring a Mini Cooper and a Corvette. Not to give anything away, but don't bet on the 'vette ...


I talked to the owner, George Mehallick, and when I arrived, he asked a couple of questions, looked under the hood, and made his diagnosis -- probably the seal in the thermostat housing. Since these things are built like Swiss watches, he'd have to take a bunch of crap off to get at it, and it needed an oil change and could use new plug wires -- he showed me why -- it might take a while.


Whatever. I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere and have the temperature gauge peg and red light again. Been a long time since I owned a car upon which I could actually work. As Tom and Ray Magliozzi (The Tappet Brothers) offer on NPR's "Car Talk" Saturday mornings, shade-tree mechanics can't do the electronic diagnostics and modular stuff without a shitload of computer gear, and if you have a new car that needs work, take it to a shop. Fine by me -- when I had to repair stuff because I couldn't afford to pay somebody, I swore if I ever had enough money, I'd hire somebody who knew what they were doing. 


That was at eight-thirty a.m.. At three p.m. George called me. All done.


Wow.


Wasn't cheap, of course, but at least it seems to be fixed. Guess I'll find out if it goes clunk while I'm on the road to silat, but failing that, if you have a Mini or a Beamer and you are in the Portland tricounty area, you might want to check this guy out -- when the mechanic opens the hood and starts talking -- and in the case of the Mini, just knowing how to open the hood latch requires specialized knowledge -- if he knows what he is about, you can tell. 


This guy knows.


A hint as to his attention to detail, he has a salt-water aquarium in his office, and has in it with the fish, a clam, and he grows his own coral. Tricky stuff, that. 

Christmas Song

Okay, the usual excuses: The light was bad, my arm was tired. I had two broken fingernails, and this was maybe the fifth time I sang the new song all the way through. Plus my voice is what it is, and my guitar squeaks are part and parcel of it ...


Listen to it here, or in the player down the page on the right. 


I figure another score of songs, I might start getting a little better at it. It's part of the creative process, the willingness to produce a certain amount of crap. Everybody has to start somewhere, and that becomes the benchmark to show improvement -- if there is any ...


Got to put my car in the shop -- that cooling fan thing came back and it's guzzling coolant -- thermostat, maybe a leak somewhere. First time in for repairs since I got it, if you don't count the bodywork when I got the front end caught on a ladder ... Not bad for an '06 model. With any luck, it won't take too long to fix, nor cost an arm and a leg ...

Concentration

We went bowling while the family was here during the holidays. Not my sport, though back in the day, my parents were in a league and I learned how. Even how to keep score in the pre-computer days. 


Observe the focus. The concentration. The steely-eyed resolve ... 


This would have been just before I broke two of my guitar-playing fingernails. And probably just before I threw a gutter ball ...

Movin' On

I brought this up in a post a month or so ago, but it bears repeating.


Tomorrow, November 30th, will be my wife's final day working for the Lower Columbia River Ports. She signed on there ten years ago, based out of the Port of Portland, to shepherd  to completion one of the largest-ever public works projects in the Pacific Northwest. 


Not to spend too much time on the details, but the basic effort was to deepen the Columbia River ship channel another three feet. The channel has been dredged to forty feet for decades, since the mid-1970's, but the extra yard became necessary for the ports to stay competitive -- to allow larger ships to call, and to load the smaller ones heavier. Talking billions of dollars. Thousands of jobs.


The notion started twenty years ago, and mostly nothing happened until five or six years had elapsed. There were some good folks working it, but they weren't getting traction. The Colonel on the Corps side, Bob Friedenwald, retired, then went to work for the ports.


Dianne signed on to something called the Channel Coalition, ran that for a time, then was hired by the ports to manage the project from their end. 


These days, every "i" must be dotted, every "t" crossed, the environmental regulations, at local, state, and national levels are so convoluted as to be nearly impossible to satisfy. Every agency and its kid sister had input and the ability to offer roadblocks. The elected officials in the Northwest had to work their asses off to keep the money coming in, and the two primary managers -- Dianne, at the ports, and Laura Hicks, at the Corps of Engineers, had to produce documentation that started with a slim notebook and eventually ran to shelves equaling thirty feet. Wetlands, mitigation, crab fishermen, dredge material disposal, town meetings, environmentalists, it was a long, long road, many bad stretches and blocks, and if not for the work of a bunch of folks, wouldn't have happened.


Chief among those who made it happen were Dianne and Laura. Without them, it would have died, more than a few times.


It's a big, big deal. 


It moved forward. Eventually dredging began. And this month, the last of the 103-mile stretch was finished. This seem to be a perfect time for Dianne to walk away, to retire on a high note that wasn't going to be topped. 


She did a thing, and it was of great import. It wouldn't have happened without her, and it will echo and reverberate through time for as long as there is ship traffic on the Columbia River. Something to be proud of, this.


And someone to be proud of, too.

What's in a Name?

When I was a middle-schooler, the male/female career path in the U.S. was less flexible than it is now. There were mandatory classes for girls and boys that were different. We all took English, Math, and History, but the girls took Home Ec(onomics) and the boys took Shop.

Louisiana not being a bastion of equal rights, nor of anybody's liberation in particular, that's how it was in the early 1960s; however ...

There was a class that boys had to take either in the eighth or ninth grade. For the life of me, I can't recall the exact name, but it was something designed not to be off-putting to young men, Consumer Science or somesuch. Whatever the name, it was flat-out home ec -- the skills taught were how to iron a shirt, sew on a button, balance a checkbook, and basic cooking -- as I recall, we cooked two things: a hamburger, and fudge, which, when you think about it, was one more thing a young man in those days needed to know how to cook ...

Few boys in my day would have volunteered for such a course, given an option. Home-making was for women, and if you needed any of that stuff, that's what mothers and sisters were for, and what your wife would do once you left home and got hitched. Yeah, you might roast something over an open fire if you'd shot it, but cooking? In a kitchen? Sewing on buttons? Ironing a shirt? Geez Louise! Sissy stuff!

Of what I learned in junior high, that class was as useful as any, and more than most. In Shop, I learned not to put my fingers into the saw blade, how to make a ring out of  a Monel nut, and how to polish plexiglass. I have ironed more shirts, sewed on more buttons, and cooked way more hamburgers over the years, and even though my wife is better at all these things, I can, in a pinch, manage.

I think maybe a lot of what passes for education in today's schools might be tweaked and tuned toward the end of practicality thus, and earlier than senior year, too.

Willie With Weed

Country singer Willie Nelson has been busted for -- gasp! -- possession of cannibis! 


I -- I'm shocked! A musician with marijuana! A guitarist with ganja! A player with pot! 


What is this world coming to? 


And by Immigration this time. In Texas. Apparently they thought Willie Nelson's tour bus was full of illegal immigrants. Agent said he caught a whiff of weed when the bus's door opened.


A whiff? Shoot, I smelled those burning leaves all the way up here, in the rain. Willie's bus must go down the road like something from a Cheech and Chong movie -- you could hide a battlefield with the smoke ...


Does seem as if Willie gets busted every time they crank up the tour bus -- dope, dope, dope, even moonshine once. Man is seventy-seven years old. If he was gonna quit toking reefer, probably he'd have done it by now ...


Leave the man alone. He's not driving.