I am not quite sure why we have Daylight Savings Time. And why is it called that? There is no daylight saved. One cannot save daylight, no matter how powerful one is. Perhaps, if there was a "God," that being could save some daylight and then parse it out when needed. But a God-like being would never do that, as we all know, because those God-like beings never intercede on the Small People's behalf, so all that daylight that he/she might have saved would, once again, be wasted. And what would they do with the "saved" daylight anyway? It's not exactly the thing you can wrap up and give as a gift. What a waste of daylight that would be. "Oh, cool, thanks God for this great box of daylight and .... oh, shit, it's gone. Couldn't you just have given me a pass to heaven or the winning lottery numbers for Saturday or a new toaster? Saved daylight didn't work out so well for me, but hey, don't want to piss off God so I will just say thanks and move on.....OK" No lightening bolts, please.
I digress. Daylight Savings Time does not save daylight, it just rearranges the hours. It should be called something like Rearranged Daylight Time. Or Daylight Shifting Program. (I am trying to come up with a cool acronym but haven't hit on one yet, will continue to work on that. SHOD? Shifting Hours of Daylight? Maybe.) But no daylight is saved, as I mentioned above.
When we turned the clocks ahead a few weeks ago, it was nice because it was very dark again in the morning. Hard to get out of bed, yes, but better to walk the dogs. I like it dark when the dogs and I set out on our morning walk. I like it really dark. (I like December for that reason.) I don't even care if it is still marginally dark when we finish the walk, 40 - 50 minutes later but that's how it is now. I understand that the way the earth tilts on its axis, no matter if we have DST or not, by the summer the mornings will be lighter. I get that. So the only good thing to me about turning our clocks ahead an hour is that the advent of DST gives me a few more weeks of darkness (and semi-darkness) that I would not get without DST.
Walking the dogs at 6:25 in the morning is so nice, and so dark and quiet. There is a moment, around 6:30 when the sky begins to lighten. In just one minute the sky bleeds from black towards dark blue. In another moment (and it just takes a moment) the sky is definitely not black and it is definitely dark blue. And just one more click takes it from dark blue to darkish blue. (A fine distinction.) The dogs and I stop then and we wait. We wait for just a blip of time, maybe 15 seconds, and the color of the sky changes again, to the deep blue that you only get before the sun comes up but you know it is no longer night time. The dogs don't care but they are happy to wait with me because I care.
Then the sky quickly gets lighter and lighter and by the time we are back home it's light enough to call it Day.
So we start walking at night and we finish at day. It's a good way to start each day. Even without dogs, it's worth getting up out of a warm, cozy bed and putting on your shoes and jacket (and pants, of course) and heading out before dawn arrives. Look around. It's beautiful.
I cannot, with this loaner computer that I now use, put in a photo of dawn or sunrise or daybreak. Use your imagination. You can see it. You know it. It's right there........
.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
A week later......
... and where does the time go? Honestly. It's what happens when you work every day, you forget to keep track of days and before you know it, ZAP! Another week has been eaten up with the mundane, the trivial and the unimportant.
Work is fine but oh, so boring. I know, I know, I have blown this horn before but it still is boring. Meet and Greet, that's about all it is, plus some computer stuff and making up lists of things people might want to do on the rare chance that they come to the wine country but do not want to taste or drink wine. Which leads me to not even want to talk to them, much less help them find "something different" to do. My response usually borders on the snippy: "Well, what sort of different are you looking for?" How can I know what they classify as different? A walk in the woods might be different enough. Or not. Blah, blah, blah.
I think I am already tired of being nice to strangers, day in and day out. And it's not even April yet. 8 more months of this. Happiness abounds.
My living situation seems to be in a bit of a state of change as well, something that might not be a bad idea. Perhaps mothers and daughters were not meant to live together after the teenage years. It's impossible to pretend to be "roommates" when what we are is family. With a lot of history, which of course all families have, but which does not help promote peace and calm. Ah well, if I move in the next couple of months, it will be merely the seventh place I have lived in since November 2010. Seven in less than 4 years. What joy.
But it's Friday night and it is an actual Friday night for me, which means I have the weekend off! How odd is that? I am going to Carmichael tomorrow to visit my Mom and I am treating myself by staying overnight in a Real Hotel. A Hyatt Hotel, no less, not even a Travelodge. A hotel with a big, fluffy king bed and a cocktail lounge (!) and a real TV with actually broadcast television shows (too bad it's not baseball season) and no dog! Cheap, too, since it's the weekend and it's a Sacramento type business hotel. I am very excited. I will make strangers at the front desk be nice to ME for a change. Maybe I will ask them to plan "something different" for me........
Books: don't bother to read the new book by Isabelle Allende. It's called "Ripper" and it's stupid. Seriously. It's almost like a "Twilight" sort of story but with serial killers instead of vampires. Please.
Onward.......
Work is fine but oh, so boring. I know, I know, I have blown this horn before but it still is boring. Meet and Greet, that's about all it is, plus some computer stuff and making up lists of things people might want to do on the rare chance that they come to the wine country but do not want to taste or drink wine. Which leads me to not even want to talk to them, much less help them find "something different" to do. My response usually borders on the snippy: "Well, what sort of different are you looking for?" How can I know what they classify as different? A walk in the woods might be different enough. Or not. Blah, blah, blah.
I think I am already tired of being nice to strangers, day in and day out. And it's not even April yet. 8 more months of this. Happiness abounds.
My living situation seems to be in a bit of a state of change as well, something that might not be a bad idea. Perhaps mothers and daughters were not meant to live together after the teenage years. It's impossible to pretend to be "roommates" when what we are is family. With a lot of history, which of course all families have, but which does not help promote peace and calm. Ah well, if I move in the next couple of months, it will be merely the seventh place I have lived in since November 2010. Seven in less than 4 years. What joy.
But it's Friday night and it is an actual Friday night for me, which means I have the weekend off! How odd is that? I am going to Carmichael tomorrow to visit my Mom and I am treating myself by staying overnight in a Real Hotel. A Hyatt Hotel, no less, not even a Travelodge. A hotel with a big, fluffy king bed and a cocktail lounge (!) and a real TV with actually broadcast television shows (too bad it's not baseball season) and no dog! Cheap, too, since it's the weekend and it's a Sacramento type business hotel. I am very excited. I will make strangers at the front desk be nice to ME for a change. Maybe I will ask them to plan "something different" for me........
Books: don't bother to read the new book by Isabelle Allende. It's called "Ripper" and it's stupid. Seriously. It's almost like a "Twilight" sort of story but with serial killers instead of vampires. Please.
Onward.......
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Read this book, just go buy it.
Some of you might be familiar with The Moth Radio Hour on random PBS stations. If not, you should be. It's real people telling their real stories, out loud, brave and true. This book, titled "THE MOTH" is a sort of compilation of some of those stories brought together for the first time in print. They have been sorted out, edited, but the really cool thing is that they are all true, all 50 of them, and the voice of the person telling the tale is there. Even in print.
These are stories that will make you laugh out loud and cry out loud. Stories that will scare you with their danger and remind you what hope is. They are all over the map and only one or two are even remotely sentimental. Sebastion Junger writes about the grim dirt of war. Andrew Solomon writes about a sort of exorcism that involves a ram and some blood and maybe it drove the demons out of his head, he still isn't sure. Adam Gonick makes a fool of himself over an internet abbreviation. The list of amazing writers goes on: Joyce Maynard, Ted Conover, Richard Price, Malcolm Gladwell and more writers that I have never read but now will.
All the stories are true and all were spoken out loud in one of the Moth Performance venues. Those venues happen all the time (well, maybe not that often) all over the world. These stories are our stories. We all have been hurt and alternatively uplifted. We have all been scorned and yet lauded. We all know loss. We all know gain. We all cry, we all laugh, we all learn and sometimes are, at the same time, even while learning, often stupid. These stores speak to that as well.
Honestly, I am not a champion of buying books (sorry, authors) because I love our flawed library system. It reaches and provides to the masses, me being one of the masses. But this is a book to buy. Copperfields has it. (Please buy it from a bookstore. Don't get it from Amazon, as much as I like them, support the publisher for this paper back book, it costs less than $20.) Sorry, I digressed.
But get it. Read the preface, the introduction and the forward, they give you good information about how this book came to be. I suggest only reading three or four stories a day or night; they get to you. At first I wanted to read the entire thing at one gulp but there was too much crying and laughing involved and I knew I had to parse it out.
Tell me how it stuck with you. How you wanted to watch those two Jewish boys on the train from Jerusalem to the bringing down of the Berlin wall. How you know how it feels to be made a fool of and yet laugh about it because you are old enough to not care. Tell me that you weren't a tiny bit afraid for the preacher who ran out of gas in the middle of the night in Texas, the sky as dark as an oil spill. And more.
OK, that's it. Seriously, if you buy this book, you will not be sorry, and if you are, write me. I will buy it back from you, full price, and keep it for my own.
"He said: You know, except for getting impeached, we had a really good day."
.
These are stories that will make you laugh out loud and cry out loud. Stories that will scare you with their danger and remind you what hope is. They are all over the map and only one or two are even remotely sentimental. Sebastion Junger writes about the grim dirt of war. Andrew Solomon writes about a sort of exorcism that involves a ram and some blood and maybe it drove the demons out of his head, he still isn't sure. Adam Gonick makes a fool of himself over an internet abbreviation. The list of amazing writers goes on: Joyce Maynard, Ted Conover, Richard Price, Malcolm Gladwell and more writers that I have never read but now will.
All the stories are true and all were spoken out loud in one of the Moth Performance venues. Those venues happen all the time (well, maybe not that often) all over the world. These stories are our stories. We all have been hurt and alternatively uplifted. We have all been scorned and yet lauded. We all know loss. We all know gain. We all cry, we all laugh, we all learn and sometimes are, at the same time, even while learning, often stupid. These stores speak to that as well.
Honestly, I am not a champion of buying books (sorry, authors) because I love our flawed library system. It reaches and provides to the masses, me being one of the masses. But this is a book to buy. Copperfields has it. (Please buy it from a bookstore. Don't get it from Amazon, as much as I like them, support the publisher for this paper back book, it costs less than $20.) Sorry, I digressed.
But get it. Read the preface, the introduction and the forward, they give you good information about how this book came to be. I suggest only reading three or four stories a day or night; they get to you. At first I wanted to read the entire thing at one gulp but there was too much crying and laughing involved and I knew I had to parse it out.
Tell me how it stuck with you. How you wanted to watch those two Jewish boys on the train from Jerusalem to the bringing down of the Berlin wall. How you know how it feels to be made a fool of and yet laugh about it because you are old enough to not care. Tell me that you weren't a tiny bit afraid for the preacher who ran out of gas in the middle of the night in Texas, the sky as dark as an oil spill. And more.
OK, that's it. Seriously, if you buy this book, you will not be sorry, and if you are, write me. I will buy it back from you, full price, and keep it for my own.
"He said: You know, except for getting impeached, we had a really good day."
.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Book: "Chance" by Kem Nunn
I began reading Kem Nunn's work years and years ago, in the 1980's, when he gave one of his first novels to my brother John while John was working as a waiter at the Chart House in Long Beach. (Yes, TMI, but it explains things.) He, Kem Nunn, not John, has written a handful of novels, all dark and noir-ish. He also wrote for the TV series "Deadwood" and more recently "Sons of Anarchy." Right there you know he isn't going to be a happy-go-lucky kind of writer. Villainous cowboys and murderous motorcycle gangs do not make for pretty prose.
Nunn's latest book is "Chance." To describe this book as dark would be like saying kittens are cute. It doesn't do it justice and it is much, much more complicated than simply "dark." The story is ostensibly simple, one guy trying to help out a woman in distress who might or might not have multiple personalities and who is married to a supposedly corrupt cop who could have arranged the deaths of several people and who may have provoked an attacked by a refrigerator-sized man with a Black Widow tattoo on his head who could be an ex-military secret ops guy or maybe is just delusional and who hangs around with an old man who perhaps forges antiques and who drives a Cutlass that quite possibly is stolen. Or none of the above. But seriously, it is much more complicated than that. Kittens are cute, true, but in this book the truth is never that important. Or clear.
It's a wild ride and one that you should definitely take if you like compelling stories that leave you shaking your head now and then because of the twisted nature of the characters. Not twisted in cruel, evil ways (although there is some of that) but twisted in the slight-of-hand ways where you aren't sure who is the good guy or even if there is one.
I liked it. A lot. Nunn's skills have gotten so much better since his last novel ten years ago that I sincerely hope he doesn't wait another ten to write the next one. This is a book I will purchase when it comes on sale because I have the feeling that if I read it again in a year, I will discover another story behind the story, another shill in the shadows who will take the tale to a whole other level. Or maybe that's just my imagination running wild under Kem Nunn's influence. Either way, it's worth the run.
Nunn's latest book is "Chance." To describe this book as dark would be like saying kittens are cute. It doesn't do it justice and it is much, much more complicated than simply "dark." The story is ostensibly simple, one guy trying to help out a woman in distress who might or might not have multiple personalities and who is married to a supposedly corrupt cop who could have arranged the deaths of several people and who may have provoked an attacked by a refrigerator-sized man with a Black Widow tattoo on his head who could be an ex-military secret ops guy or maybe is just delusional and who hangs around with an old man who perhaps forges antiques and who drives a Cutlass that quite possibly is stolen. Or none of the above. But seriously, it is much more complicated than that. Kittens are cute, true, but in this book the truth is never that important. Or clear.
It's a wild ride and one that you should definitely take if you like compelling stories that leave you shaking your head now and then because of the twisted nature of the characters. Not twisted in cruel, evil ways (although there is some of that) but twisted in the slight-of-hand ways where you aren't sure who is the good guy or even if there is one.
I liked it. A lot. Nunn's skills have gotten so much better since his last novel ten years ago that I sincerely hope he doesn't wait another ten to write the next one. This is a book I will purchase when it comes on sale because I have the feeling that if I read it again in a year, I will discover another story behind the story, another shill in the shadows who will take the tale to a whole other level. Or maybe that's just my imagination running wild under Kem Nunn's influence. Either way, it's worth the run.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Faulkner quote
This is a short blog. I read a quote yesterday from William Faulkner that has been bobbing around my brain for the past 36 hours: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
It isn't, is it? It haunts us or taunts us or tickles us all the time. What we think is gone is still here. People die, yes, but if we loved them, they aren't really gone. Deeds, misdeeds, transgressions, acts of kindness, acts of cruelty, it's all still with us. We are the sum of ourselves and we carry around all the joy, hurt, anger, love, happiness, grief, everything we have ever experienced. We think we "get over" things and there is no way to "get over" the past. Deal with it, sure, but we still put things in tidy boxes and put them on shelves. And that's fine with me. I am fine with trying to match up how we feel about the then with how we feel about the now.
Disappointment abounds but so does hope. Sadness wears us down but the prospect of joy keeps us from becoming threadbare.
I am going to go outside now and sit on the patio and listen to the rain.
It isn't, is it? It haunts us or taunts us or tickles us all the time. What we think is gone is still here. People die, yes, but if we loved them, they aren't really gone. Deeds, misdeeds, transgressions, acts of kindness, acts of cruelty, it's all still with us. We are the sum of ourselves and we carry around all the joy, hurt, anger, love, happiness, grief, everything we have ever experienced. We think we "get over" things and there is no way to "get over" the past. Deal with it, sure, but we still put things in tidy boxes and put them on shelves. And that's fine with me. I am fine with trying to match up how we feel about the then with how we feel about the now.
Disappointment abounds but so does hope. Sadness wears us down but the prospect of joy keeps us from becoming threadbare.
I am going to go outside now and sit on the patio and listen to the rain.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Henry and Sam
Three Saturdays ago Henry and Sam were here and spent the day and the night. Their Mom, the lovely Stacey, realized it had been a long time since the boys had gotten to hang out with me and Jenn, and so she made it happen.
It was a rainy sort of day, one of the first that we had had in a long time, so there wasn't a lot of outdoor time, but it didn't matter. Henry and Sam have a lot of Lego's, so we spent some time building crazy Lego creations. They also have a lot of cars, dozens of them, and we turned the hallway into a racetrack. Crashes were common. Some silly kids movies were watched. Sam and I had serious conversations in which his use of language continues to surprise me. He uses big words in the correct context, like "...they were all laughing hysterically!" What 4 year old says things like that?
Henry and I spent some time opening all the spice jars (we have many) and smelling the contents. Henry likes anything that involves the kitchen, so he was entertained as long as there were new smells to experience. All five of us worked on a mural on our hallway wall, butcher paper having been taped up, crayons and markers at the ready. The mural is still up and will stay there until it falls down in tatters.
All of us, and the dogs, went for a walk to the park even though it was raining. The park was flooded so the boys got to splash in the little lake that the rain created. All of us got quite wet but none of us cared. We had hot cocoa when we got home and it was very good.
Finally the boys had dinner and were tucked in, sort of, for the night and the three women had a delicious dinner of Jenn's Famous Pasta and salad and wine. It was a very good day.
I don't know why I didn't write about this day when it happened. Maybe I wasn't ready to share it. But Sam and Henry are such cool, wise, funny people and I wish you could all know them. How easy it is to forget the machinations of a child's mind and how wondrous it is to rediscover that.
It was a rainy sort of day, one of the first that we had had in a long time, so there wasn't a lot of outdoor time, but it didn't matter. Henry and Sam have a lot of Lego's, so we spent some time building crazy Lego creations. They also have a lot of cars, dozens of them, and we turned the hallway into a racetrack. Crashes were common. Some silly kids movies were watched. Sam and I had serious conversations in which his use of language continues to surprise me. He uses big words in the correct context, like "...they were all laughing hysterically!" What 4 year old says things like that?
Henry and I spent some time opening all the spice jars (we have many) and smelling the contents. Henry likes anything that involves the kitchen, so he was entertained as long as there were new smells to experience. All five of us worked on a mural on our hallway wall, butcher paper having been taped up, crayons and markers at the ready. The mural is still up and will stay there until it falls down in tatters.
All of us, and the dogs, went for a walk to the park even though it was raining. The park was flooded so the boys got to splash in the little lake that the rain created. All of us got quite wet but none of us cared. We had hot cocoa when we got home and it was very good.
Finally the boys had dinner and were tucked in, sort of, for the night and the three women had a delicious dinner of Jenn's Famous Pasta and salad and wine. It was a very good day.
I don't know why I didn't write about this day when it happened. Maybe I wasn't ready to share it. But Sam and Henry are such cool, wise, funny people and I wish you could all know them. How easy it is to forget the machinations of a child's mind and how wondrous it is to rediscover that.
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