After pretending I was retired for five months, but most of those with a knee too painful to walk on for very long and thus confined to self-imposed house arrest, it is time to get a job. Being on the dole only lasts so long and that length is about to end. Thus began the depressing and demoralizing slog of looking for work.
Yes, the economy is great! Yes, there are jobs out there! But no, they still don't pay decently and they are all part time. Part time is fine with me but not at $12.50 an hour. I did not want to go back into the hospitality world, kissing butts, hauling luggage, working under the thumb of either a corporate master or a privileged hotel owner. But it's the world I know and it's the job I am good at and it's the one place I knew I could get hired.
In Guerneville exists Autocamp. (autocamp.com) It's a sort of hotel but the rooms are completely tricked out Airstream trailers. They are made to order at the factory in Ohio and then driven to the West Coast. Autocamp began in Santa Barbara and their second location is in Guerneville with a third location to follow later this year, location unknown for now. It is a very cool spot, surrounded by redwood trees, a huge common room with tables, chairs, an indoor firepit, a buffet where they have a continental breakfast and a little market where guests can buy wine, cheese, crackers, S'mores, hot dogs, hotel swag. And bags of charcoal because each trailer area has its own little firepit. In April they put up and opened ten tents that sleep two and which use a communal bathroom/shower area. It is quite the compound. These trailers are not cheap, the rate hovers between $350 to $425 a night for the Airstreams, less for the tents.
Last September I answered an ad for a part time swing shift position. I didn't want the shift but I wanted to see the property and they invited me over for a chat. The manager and I sat for more than an hour, just talking about the hospitality industry, the strangeness of the guests, the idiosyncrasies of different lodging properties. I told her I would call her in the early spring. I did just that.
Autocamp offered me a job which I will take. Probably three days a week, which is just fine for now. Benefits after 90 days if I work enough hours, which is also fine for now. I swore I wouldn't get back into the hospitality mode but there is something about the setting of this property and the feeling you get when you walk onto the property that I like. And bottom line, I am really good at this and they recognized that and they wanted me. There you have it.
Training starts next Monday. Another chapter waiting to be written.
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Eight weeks ago today I had my knee replacement. When you do this with Kaiser, they send a physical therapist to your house the day after surgery to start you on the painful process of PT. Part of the big thing, as I have reported in the past, is the measuring of the bend of your knee.
The day after surgery, the angle for me was 90 degrees. By the time the PT guy signed off and sent me to Kaiser PT department, I was up to 110. Weeks went by (well, three weeks) and I got to 120 and was very happy. Last week, however, I fell back to 115. Sadness. Especially since I thought I was working it hard because it hurt. A lot.
But the PT guy showed me a couple of "leaning in" exercises and today, lo and behold, the bend measured 125 degrees! That's as high as they expect, that is what they consider "full range of motion." This was supposed to be my last Kaiser PT session, and with that sort of number on my chart they were happy to let me go.
All this is to say that the knee is getting better. Getting up from a sitting position still is painful and it takes about 5 seconds of moving it to make me trust it. It still hurts at night but I no longer think I will pop open the scar tissue if I bend it dramatically. I can now stand up and put on underwear and my jeans, instead of sitting on the bed and pulling them up like a friggin old person. I can crank up the resistance level on the bike at the gym and stay on it for more than ten minutes. Any hurt I feel is normal for a knee that was cut open, bones cut out, sanded down and fake, shiny knee parts screwed into those poor bones.
It's all good. I am so happy I had it done. According to friends, one day you realize "hey, the pain is gone" and that's the point I am aiming for now.
Thanks for listening. If you have good knees, be happy and grateful. Love your knees.
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Whatever led me to this book should get an award. I started reading this on Sunday morning and finished it just now, a book of more than 435 pages. I could not put it down.
The story is so enticing: we enter when the main character Ada is just a little girl, being raised by a single Dad, no mother ever in the picture. Her father, David, is a brilliant mathematician and scientist and cryptographer. Ada comes to work with her father at a prestigious tech college in New England, she doesn't go to school but learns everything from her Dad. Needless to say, her upbringing, while intellectual and caring, lacks the touch of a family. But they are happy together, very happy.
Then David is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. (It's not a spoiler, it's just a fact.) And Ada, in her early teens, is set adrift on a sea of confusion and displacement. Some of her situation gets sorted out, but other factors come into play, things no one could have envisioned.
On top of it all, David and his crew at the college are making huge leaps in the early days of the computer age, investigating things like virtual reality and cryptology and coding on a scale that might have even amazed Steve Jobs. It is fascinating to read and because the book jumps around a bit, timewise, we see the initial bearing of fruit in that tech world and then the final products much later in the timeline.
But the characters are what make this book amazing. The past two novels I have loved, "All The Light We Cannot See" and "A Gentleman In Moscow" were of a specific time and place but they were mostly about the people in those novels. This one is the same. They are so finely drawn, so real, the reader has (or should have) great empathy, interest and compassion for them.
I hated for this book to end. The only flaw I found was in the last chapter, which seemed a bit calculating and a bit too crafty. But that's just my opinion and that final chapter did nothing to alter my love for this book. If you find it in the library, please take it out and read it. And if a used copy comes your way, do the same so you can loan it to a friend. It's that good.
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So many people I know have dogs and almost everyone I know loves dogs. Not all of those people know or love Wes Anderson movies but they should. He is the master at oddness in movies, strange but enticing stories, and he almost always has the same cast of characters: Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and so many more. Witness "Moonrise Kingdom" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and many more. All are wonderful but quirky and not mainstream.
His newest movie, just out today is "Isle of Dogs" and you should google it and read the New York Times review of this movie. It sounds bleak and sad but also realistically uplifting and spirited. In stop motion animation (or something like that) it's the story of dogs that are sequestered on a trashy island off Japan and they live a sad life.
But there is more than that, of course, and I cannot wait to see it. Check out the trailers, just google it. And Rotten Tomatoes has already given it more that 90% approval rating and it has hardly been released yet! Such is the power of dogs.
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When I add up where I have lived since 1998, it's rather daunting. I mostly feel bad for little Cooper, although he has shown remarkable resilience in the close to ten places he has lived since I rescued him at the SPCA about ten years ago. And once again, he may need to readjust his dogness, but he will like the new smells.
In 1998 I sold the Big White House in Inverness. That was also the year my Dad died. And the year my divorce from Assbag came through. And the year my daughter left her husband of two years. Whew..... what a year, right? I had Webber then, the Wonder Dog, he didn't care where he lived as long as he had dead things to roll in. We moved into a tiny cottage without heat and without plumbing when it rained but I must say, I loved that place, I had great dinner parties there, really good sex with someone I never saw again after one memorable weekend, a lot of laughs. And from there, in the spring of 1999 I moved into another very lovely cottage in Inverness and there I stayed, and where Webber died and where Cooper came to be, for about ten years.
As I said in last night's post, I had to leave West Marin in 2010 because of the Great Economic Downturn and because I lost my job and could not find another one. Thus began Cooper's ten year adventure of New Places to Live.
From November 2010 until June 2011 I lived with Gabe and Annie, which was lovely. I had dozens of job interviews, none which were fruitful except one in a podiatrist office and the thought of dealing with old people feet made me want to collect unemployment forever. In June I moved, with little Cooper, to Texas for about 3+ months and lived with Jenn. We did fine, she was gone for part of the time, I did some catering, the weather was over 100 degrees every day, we had a few screaming arguments but then, on Labor Day of that year I left and drove north, up through Oklahoma, into Kansas and then veered over to Colorado, (stayed in Golden, home of Coors Beer!) and then to Wyoming and got to visit Yellowstone National Park, then to Montana (Big Sky!) which was so immense and so inspiring in some way. It was like the air was fatter there, the landscape mixed city and country and open land. I want to go back there.
Then into Idaho where I got a call from my friend David Warnimont telling me that my other friend Margaret had broken her leg and did I want her job at a bed and breakfast place in Healdsburg. Well, duh, I was still out of work and my unemployment was soon to end, so Cooper and I hoofed it down to NoCal and I took that job.
We stayed at Margaret's for a little bit, she had an extra vacation rental house that we could use when renters weren't there, and when it was rented Cooper and I stayed in a cheap motel or at my brother Steve's house for a night or two. Then Margaret led me (not physically because of her broken leg and all) to a couple who had a large trailer that they were willing to rent me. So I rented that for two months, worked in Healdsburg and in Calistoga, Cooper sometimes spent the day in the trailer, which was OK. Finally, when I gave up the Calistoga job and worked full time at the B&B in Healdsburg, my friend Jani from Burlingame came up and took me to lunch.
Jani was adamant that I get out of the trailer (and I was tired of sleeping over the poop tank) and just rent a place. My hesitation about lack of jobs for the past two years was mitigated by the fact that I had a little money in the bank and could show that to a landlord so I enlisted my friend Martha to look at some places in Santa Rosa. We found one, on Benton Street. It was a small duplex but it suited me well. (I cannot thank Jani or Martha enough for their combined encouragement and the push they provided.)
I lived on Benton for about 18 months. Then Jenn and I rented a larger (4 bedroom) house in SR and she stayed for about 15 months. I got a roommate after Jenn left but I realized I was not good roommate material, so I found my own place, here on Slater, in SR, and I am happy here.
However, the rent is huge and I have an opportunity to move to a very tiny studio apartment in Glen Ellen, hopefully by June. This will save me so much money that I cannot turn it down. But it will mean the seventh place that Cooper will call home in less than ten years, and that doesn't count the two or three weeks in the rental house and it doesn't count the two months in the trailer.
Yes, that's a lot of moving, not just for the dog, but for me. If I add in the random places I slept and the two months in the trailer, it's ten places I have lived in less than ten years.
Sigh. But the Glen Ellen place will, I hope, last us for more than just a year or two. However, it's one more major adjustment for little Cooper. But there will be squirrels there, I am sure, and a bit of room to roam.
More on that to follow. Thanks for listening/reading this far.
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A few days ago I quoted from James Lee Burke this: if there is a such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my life, it lies in the acceptance of .... the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word or caution from the shadows, somethings visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.
I mention this because yesterday I had lunch with my extra daughter Stacey and she talked about some things she has experienced just after burying her Grandmother. Small things to anyone who wasn't paying attention: rain stopping for the seconds it took to run to her car, not just once but several times in one afternoon, a flower from the funeral left on one of her son's car seats in the back of her car, a few other things that made it clear that her Gramma was still seeing her.
Many people believe in God. Many people do not. Not many people have belief in that middle, spirit world. Oddly, I do. I truly believe that some of the dead carry on. Not all of them. But some. Stacey's narrative confirmed that for me, once again.
When my Mom was alive, I called her every Sunday. Every. Sunday. I remember calling her from a pay phone on an island off of Sicily, from a hotel in Tunisia, many times from Paris or Rome or small towns in other cities in Europe. Now when 4:00 rolls around on Sunday afternoon, I look up expectantly because I expect her to be calling me. So I talk to her for a few minutes, just to satisfy her curiosity of where I might be on that particular Sunday. I do believe she is listening.
There is more to say on this but right now the words are few.
I am aware that most people aren't going to be jonesing to read this book, but I have been to Janesville, Wisconsin, several times and there are people there that I like. Therefore, for me, it was an easy pick. Janesville was the home of one of the General Motors auto plants that closed in 2008. Thousands of workers were laid off. This book is their story.
There is another reason this tale of economic hardship and disruption resonated with me: in 2009, in the middle of the Great American Recession, I lost my full time job in West Marin. I knew the economy was in bad shape but I had never worried about finding a job, I interviewed well, had a good resume, was multi-talented, and on and on. But, like so many in Janesville and all over America, there were no jobs to be had. People with skills that far surpassed mine were also out of work, vying for the same jobs at Whole Foods and Macy's. They got hired; many of us did not.
"Janesville" is a really good read. The author approaches the city's economic travesty via people who worked for GM and who lost their jobs. Therefore, instead of reading about corporate decisions, you read about families and how this changed their lives, how they had to adjust (and many didn't) and the toll this economic disaster took on them. There are moments of grace and honor, and moments of sadness and resolute anger. And there are passages about Paul Ryan and his devious political schemes. Ryan is from Janesville and you might think that would have made him empathetic, but since he was one of the rich guys who didn't suffer from the plant closure, his political fortunes just kept on rolling along.
If you are a library fan, I suggest you take this book out of the library and experience how a really nice city like Janesville bore the brunt, not only of the GM plant closure, but of the subprime mortgage fiasco as well. It's a story well told and worth reading. It's part of our American history and history is always worth investigating.
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If you can stream Netflix, you should check out "Ugly Delicious" which is a peek into David Chang's food life, real life and restaurant life. You can google him and see where his restaurants are but this short series is about him, not so much about his commerce.
Watch the first episode and then, please, watch the second one and the third one. He is all about the food, all about cooking, not about the glamour of it all. The second episode is about tacos, tacos around the world, how almost all cultures have food wrapped in some kind of bread, be it the crepe, white bread, tortilla, pizza dough, nan, dumpling, and on and on. How this street food has become a constant in every place in the world.
The third episode is about Thanksgiving, going back home, sucking it up, dealing with family and loving it all. There is one line in this episode that says something like this: The amount of extra cooking at Thanksgiving is part to fill the hours that could otherwise be filled with emotional connection with your family members. Which is so true, we all often sequester ourselves in the kitchen at holidays because we do not want to have any emotional connection to those we invited to sit at our Thanksgiving table! Which is rather perverse but very understandable. Too much emotion, let's let that go. Just let me cook. My daughter might raise a glass to that sentiment.
David Chang appears to be just a regular guy in this series. He swears a lot, says fuck a lot, is irreverent and yet gets teary when he is around his Mom. He loves food, the culture of it, the preparation of it, the simplicity of it. He has a great smile and he has seductive dimples! His faith is in food, not in the preciousness of it, not in the perfection of it, just in really good food. If you like food, even a little, watch this show. David Chang makes me laugh and makes me want to get back to my stove and cook. And I know that whatever I make, if I like it, then it's good. "Ugly Delicious" is good watching, it will make you laugh, think and want to cook.
I regret that I did not visit one of David Chang's restaurants when I was in NYC last year. I might need to remedy that later this year.
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No one will read this given the title but I have no other way to introduce this movie...... "Marjorie Prime" is rather odd, to say the least but it's actually pretty good and worth watching, has a good cast and a good premise and is less strange than so many other movies out there right now. Seriously, the Oscar winning movie of 2017 was about a mute woman who falls in love with a sea creature. Yes, it was a nice fairy tale but tell me how that's any different than "Marjorie Prime" which just imagines that there could be holographic people who invoke memories of the past for soon to be dead people. Seems OK to me.
And it is OK. As this film moves on, more dead people seem to appear but you don't really know that until they say something that outs them as dead. But it is never a negative thing, all the holograms are kind and they just want to help. Wouldn't it be nice if that could be the reality once our minds start to deteriorate? That a clear copy of someone from our past was there to help us?
Maybe this is a movie that resonates with my generation: we have all buried our parents (or will in the next couple of years) and don't want to be left out on the closeline to flap in the wind when our time comes. It would be nice to have a stand-in for someone we loved to help us go gently into that other goodnight.
I liked this movie, I liked the cast, the characters and the idea that the past and the present don't have to be so far apart. As Faulkner said "The past is not dead. It isn't even past." That's part of what this movie tells me.
It's on Amazon Prime now. Check it out.
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Oh, well, gosh. This book is now on the bestseller list, and good for A.J. Finn. What a coup! A book about a crazy woman who drinks a couple of bottle of Merlot (right there you know she's crazy, right?) a night and takes a lot of prescribed drugs of all sorts and then she sees, what? A murder take place in the house across the street from hers, on about the third floor? Wait, did I mention she is an agoraphobic so she won't venture outside?
What a really novel plotline, don't you think? Is it all in her head or is it real? On the pre-release copy I have (thanks to my bro and sis-in-law from SF) it says "it isn't paranoia if it's really happening...." and that sort of sums it up. Is it real? Is she just a wino drug addict who has a doctor who keeps upping her meds? A woman who has, we discover, has had an incredibly traumatic life changing event in the past year, and could that be clouding her judgement, her memories, her visions?
OK, I did read this entire novel in about 4 hours. It shouldn't take anyone more than about 6 - 8 hours to finish the thing, so maybe two days, three if you don't have a lot of time. (I am a very fast reader of this ..... genre ..... and I was hanging out with a knifed knee, so had the time.) It's a book you take on an airplane for a long flight and LEAVE IT THERE. It's a book you read on the beach and LEAVE IT IN THE SAND. It's a book you do not buy in hardcover because that is simply dumb.
Oh, my. And it's on the bestseller list. Sigh. Again. Have at it.
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Six weeks after surgery and my knee is doing well, at least that's what the PT guy and the surgeon say, both whom I saw yesterday. How would I know? The fake knee could have disintegrated in there and I would have no idea except for the pain, of which there is plenty. (Well, it didn't, I saw the x-rays.)
Last week there was no pain for three days. And then I worked it pretty hard and then there was pain for a week! What to do? Work it for the cause of "range of motion" as they say or let it languish for the cause of "pain free" as I say? I am not sure. Why do I care about the range of motion? It's not like I need my leg to karate kick someone's shoulder. It's not like I need my knee to make that extra point at the football goal. If the knee's range of motion is five degrees smaller than optimal, should I care?
When I go to Kaiser for the PT, they measure the angle of my "bend." (It's the only reason I go there because they charge $17 for me to have PT there, which is pathetic since I am there for about 20 minutes. The other 2 or 3 days a week I go to the YMCA of which I am a member and therefore it isn't a $17 copay every time. Duh.) So, the PT guy measures the angle and for the past three weeks it has been stuck at 110. Last week I painfully worked it enough so that the number jacked up to 120. That is huge, so he says, the final result they expect is 125.
But no wonder my friggin leg hurt for a week, I was really working that bend! I felt happy that I got to 120 but I also was pissed that it hurt as much as it did. This hurting knee thing has got to stop. I am done with the pain, I don't care that it's only been six weeks since the surgery, I want it all to be perfect NOW! Not in a month or three months. Now.
Sigh. The cool thing was the surgeon showed me the current X-rays of the knee with the fake "bones" they implanted and that was actually pretty cool. They photograph very differently than real bones so the fakeness really stood out, it was like gray bones juxtaposed with new, clean white bones. Very nice.
OK, a boring lesson, yes. But there you have it.
For me, there is no reading a James Lee Burke novel straight through. His earlier novels, yes. But not the last few. This newest one, "Robicheaux" is so intense that I can only read it for 30 minutes and then I need a break. I WANT to read it all the way through but my thoughts and emotions get weighed down.
It isn't because the subject matter is so intense, it's a detective novel, one of a series, and as brutal as the killings Dave Robicheaux investigates might be, they are no more brutal than what happens in our daily lives, what we read in the headlines every day. No, the reasons I need to put the book down and walk away for a bit are because of the intensity of the writing, the focus on what happens in his characters' minds, the directness of the insight into the emotional and psychological workings of the evil in our society, the angst and terror and sometimes joy that coexist within everyone.
Just this: "Like an early nineteenth-century poet, when I have melancholy moments and feel the world is too much for us and that late and soon we lay waste to our powers in getting and spending, I am forced to pause and reflect upon my experiences with the dead and the hold they exert on our lives. This may seem a macabre perspective on one's life, but at a certain point it seems to be the only one we have. Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows."
OK, if that doesn't make you want to read it a couple of times and then look up from the page and just.... stop and think about life, death, mortality..... well, you aren't ready for James Lee Burke.
He is one of my favorite writers and I do a little dance whenever a new book is released. It isn't often but I treasure his prose. The detective story genre isn't usually thought of (by those who are neophytes of the genre) as a literary gold mine but Burke is one of those whose prose transcends the genre. I have written about him several times in the past but he continues to amaze me. He lives in Montana. Seriously, his writing makes me want to drive there tomorrow and find him and shake his hand.
That's all..... just wanted to toss that in there. I will be finished with this novel before the weekend is done and it will stay in my mind for a while. His books always do.
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Rotten Tomatoes had a 98% approval rating for this movie. I am in that other 2% of people who did not love it.
There is nothing wrong with this film except that it is so, so slow, way too pastoral and couched in such a dreamy quality that it almost put me to sleep. Long scenes of swimming holes, trees, sky, small Italian village, nothing happening. Oh, then, wait! We see two guys pedaling their bikes through the village and then more pastoral and more skies and more trees. Not even cows to provide some action. I would have liked cows.
Yes, it is probably sensitive and thoughtful and yes, it is no doubt my cynical, impatient and mean spirit that simply wanted the two guys to get it on, to stop with all the slobbery kissing and have sex. Stop with the underwear on the head, stop having sex with fruit. (The peach lobby should be heard on this, peaches were hurt in the making of this film, so sad.)
I like lustful movies and there was enough lust in this movie to fill a swimming pool. I also like sex in a movie and there wasn't enough sex in this movie to fill a thimble. Again, too much kissing, too much groaning and not enough naked bodies. Hey, just saying.
But it is beautiful to look at (while snooze inducing) and the two men are lovely. It is the old trop coming of age story, and perhaps I am tired of that. However, the movie "Lady Bird" was a coming of age movie as well and had some kissing and some sex and was so much better. It was much more real, less bucolic, had sarcasm and wit and at the same time love and longing and lust. It had no cows but no one missed them. And no peaches were hurt in the making of "Lady Bird".
Hey, just my opinion...... but I still feel bad for the peach.
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