Against the Wind

Do you still listen to the radio mostly on a radio in your house? Or only in the car because the house has the TV set? I do listen to some NPR, I like Mississippi public radio, as they have made a point to do a lot of local content. I also listen to podcasts some, the Daily Audio Bible has been a mainstay, and the free bits of Economist magazine. This week I found Radio Derb, and thought it was hysterically funny. The full program is 30 minutes or so, but sample a few minutes if you have the time.

Let’s see, what’s happening around here? Pretty slim pickings. I’ve done a little piecing trying to get a good start on the work on the RR, but I’m not liking where it’s going. Part of the process. I seem to get here everytime. My live bridge partners have been cancelling on me left right and center, so even bridge has gone pretty quiet. Then again, playing online, I’m having pretty lousy results, so maybe there’s a reason all my partners are suddenly sick?

Another picture from the crawfish boil, and off to do some cooking.

Darryl and the boys were doing yeoman’s work getting the boiling pot going. The boys thought it was great to watch the work. I took photos.

Who would have ever thought I’d think this was a wonderful way to have dinner!

A series of Crawfish boil photos coming up. That was a fun day!

Meanwhile if you need a righty link, David Warren nails another one.
Testing

One of the advantages of having Barack Obama as president of the hyperpower, is that it puts his great mass of fans, in America and abroad, in the position of having to think about real problems. It turns out the solution to each of them was more complicated than “get rid of Bush.” The world does not spontaneously change when the president changes.

North Korea, Iran, and a seriously unstable Pakistan continue to present plausible and pressing nuclear threats. Islamist terrorists continue to seek soft targets right around the world; and the fanatic Islamist ideology continues to win adherents, even in New York prison cells. For that matter, problems of disease, poverty, petty tyranny and oppression, with or without war, continue to afflict our species, regardless of who comes and goes from an office in Washington…

President Obama has an unusually promising opportunity to show that he is not a chump.

He has indeed what may be his make-or-break opportunity to show not only North Korea, but through what he does there, Iran and the rest of the world, that he can move beyond symbolic gestures. But he must take steps that visibly change North Korea’s behaviour to pull this off.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing. I’ve excerpted the intro and conclusion, but the entire essay makes me wish I were a writer.

Dear Tara,

What delight we share in your acceptance into medical school! We’ve celebrated, given thanks, worked on some of the mechanical details. But a few words, before you get so busy?

First, what sort of doctor do you want to be? I don’t refer to specialty. Gerontology, gastroenterology, gynecology, whatever. Mother had an antibiotic resistant staff infection in her last year. The specialist who treated the infection came with degrees and honors, but the biggest recommendation in my mind is that when Mother went to the rest room in her office and got into a bit of a crisis while in the restroom, she didn’t send in the nurse or the staff to help Mother. She went and saw to getting Mother out of the fix, and dealt with her so respectfully that mother never felt like, “MRSA, left lower leg.” She was Doris with an interest in writing, and wanting to get back to her life. Aim to be that kind of a doctor.

Where does that sort of doctoring come from? My answer is that it comes from a couple of life attitudes that cannot be forced but can be nurtured. Gratitude and humility are the essentials of learning to be the doctor who sees the condition, but beyond the condition, sees the patient, and beyond the patient, sees a person. Neither of these traits can be forced. False humility is a disgusting thing to behold; gratitude cannot be commanded. They can be nurtured. It requires only a practice of a little time and patience.

Time? You won’t have much! The spot of time that I found, the place I could relocate myself in the whirlwind of years past was in traffic. Use the time you are commuting to give your mind some free ranging minutes. Turn off the radio, turn off the telephone and listen to the background noise in your head. Do the children need something special? Is a patient not telling you something important? Does Darryl need attention? Is there an earworm? A song which won’t let you go. It may be speaking to you. Listen. When that’s died down, learn to meditate. Let go of everything (except the motion of cars and people around you) and feel the Force that made the stars. Feel the Power that took stardust and proteins and created a human being, a conscious mind in a mote. Here, humility comes easily.

A practice that builds gratitude is a habit of rising and with the first conscious inhale of the morning, give thanks for the day beginning. You have one more day. It’s a gift. Thanks. Then if you have your loved ones, kiss them each and give thanks. If you have your health draw another breath and feel your lungs expand, and remember all those aeolea, and feel them stretch out exchanging gasses, and give thanks. You did nothing to deserve this. Another gift. There’s time yet for the worries of the day. Let those first three breaths be as a prayer. Thanks for the day, thanks for loved ones, thanks for another chance to try to get it right. Now, dive into the day.

Medicine! What a field. New boundaries, new discoveries. Medical practice changes, politics and lawyers have their bite. What a wonderful opportunity. I love you and am so proud of you. Be the best doctor you can be.

Love, Mom

He’s 90 she’s just short of 84 and the sign on the piano at the Mayo clinic invited people to play. If this doesn’t make you smile, you need to treat that depression!

Photography/Quilting updates

I’m not taking so many photos lately, so I may actually be catching up here a bit. I was fighting the blue funks for a bit and didn’t take photos, but the week of the round robin making flight came. That requires some photos. I took a picture of Deb’s round robin as it left me.

I’d never messed with curved seams, so this was a bit of a challenge, but I liked what I sent on to Janet. Then the mail came within a couple days, and Connie had set me up another challenge, so I had to take a picture. It’s all part of the thinking process.

This is how Karen’s(?)RR arrived at my house. I believe that’s right. I think I have Kate’s now. Since I’ve not met Kate or Connie I have trouble keeping them straight in my mind.

That was mailed off finished about 3 weeks ago. Time does fly. And yes I’m having a lot more fun lately.

Today I went to SS and Church. The SS class was so involved with trying to decide why some stars in Job were called the Pleides, when that can’t be the name those star were refered to …. frankly all the issues of translation are a bit lost on me. But the service was at least ok. They brought out a kid playing bagpipes, which I typed as badpipes… accurate! I found myself close to tears during the service, though I could not say why. Some of it was the organ music. Taps as a recessional was touching. Maybe religion isn’t totally lost on me!

I decided to honor the Sabbath by not cooking, or only light cooking. You have to marvel at how easy it is for me to not cook! I need very little excuse to skip that. And I seem to be able to feed myself very well on tiny efforts. When I stop and think about how abundantly rich I am compared with most people now and throughout history, I cannot but be awed that God has been so good to me. My life has been anything but hard, brutish and short. I have to exercise continuous vigilance, least I eat myself into an early grave, and it may be too late already!

I may not have a friend and companion with whom I can laugh while playing piano duets, but maybe there’s a reason I’m to remain alone. Best for me to believe that.

Another follow on. Megan at the Atlantic seemed willing to defend the finance writer/unrepentant overspender.

At the end of his book’s harrowing account of mortgage mistakes and credit card crises, Edmund Andrews writes: “While our misadventure had certainly been more extreme than those of many other Americans, our situation was not all that unusual.”

She goes on to show how his wife has a history of serial bankruptcies, on salaries of $100K. It looks a lot like he married a spendthrift, and decided to blame the lenders. Still I say, “man up.” Why don’t we demand responsibility from people instead of the constant whining?

Another story Megan has written about a good bit is the federal heavy hand in the Chrysler bankruptcy. Many fund holders having funds in Chrysler were bent with some heavy handed threats to unleash the dogs of the subservient press corps on the bankers again. The few who made fighting noises subsided. But now the teachers retirement funds in Indiana are standing up and saying, “No, we cannot accept.” I hope the bankruptcy goes to court and the secured creditors are honored. Megan has explained well why they should be. Has a gread deal to do with honoring contracts and rule of law and such. Team O seems to feel there’s no problem running roughshod over legal niceties and getting a big chunk of the reorganized Chrysler in the hands of the union bosses. The Financial Times outlines the story.

And last, before bed, a grandma photo. It’s hard to get pictures of the boys that aren’t mugged, but I keep trying.

No whine, just the facts. I rode my bike to LaCombe and back, and I’m a bit tired.

So a photo. Quentin reminds me of an add… really old for some cleaning product. Or the Rosie the Riveter posters.

There was some very interesting prognostication in the comment thread of Belmont Economic stuff…

So what’s coming? A showdown between Congress and the Fed.

The Fed is an independent entity. It is a network of 12 Regional Federal Reserve banks. The Presidents of these Regional Fed banks are chosen by an independent board of directors. Each Regional Fed bank is owned by member banks, but the board is controlled by non-bankers (6 non-bankers, 3 bankers).

This means that the control of the Fed banks is in the hands of private citizens, and not Congress. Each President works for their respective board, which hires and fires them.

The weekend I came home from Mother’s memorial service, Marianne and Barry invited me to go to “Frisco Fest.” They had some sort of bungee contraption, which Barry and Marianne strapped themselves into and jumped. Looked like an interesting arrangement!

A very late cool front has passed through here. No evidence here of the shaking Judy reported from CA.

After my morning walk, Tara came by to run off some paper work for medical school. It seems part of the drill of going to medical schools is to run up about $100K in debt. This will be in addition to the near $20K she accrued and is now deferred on from the BS degree.

Cameron was in the middle of everything Tara tried to do so… small boy that he is a suggestion that we go toss some pebbles in the ditch was just exactly want he needed to do. He chatters non stop as we walk. Weapons. Magical weapons. He’s a magical enthusiasm, and watching him in his green frog boots that he likes to wear for shoes just makes his grandmother grin!

Tania turned umpty ump today. She’s completed another year. I spoke to her briefly as I was walking. She mentioned that she didn’t feel well Friday and left her desk a mess. So she was starting this week behind. I can’t say that I miss that feeling, but I do remember it well. I think one way I had of dealing with boredom was to manufacture a crisis for myself.

The writers are considering putting out some sort of an anthology. We have several poets, and their work would be quite lovely printed into a little pamphlet distributed at the local coffee shops. So I spent some time trying to figure out how to make Open Office act something like MS Publish. I see how it could be done sorta. So as a second task I put myself to taking something I’d written and making the text attractive. Ahem. I couldn’t find the piece that I wrote about William Brewster leaving for the New World. I’ve been reading again about the Pequot Wars. The first conflict between the New England colonies and the tribes in the area came about 30 years after the Mayflower landed.

It seems that the Massachusetts Cape area had been pretty well cleared of any large populations of Indians by disease shortly before the Pilgrims arrived. The Pequots and some tribes from whom they demanded tribute were farther inland.

The second generation of Brewsters in our line, Jonathan’s brother in law, John Oldham was killed by the Pequots as well as a fellow who seems to have had a rather bad reputation. The settlers decided the Indians had to be dealt with, and deal they did. The first armed conflict was a total rout of the Pequots with a village burned, woman and children massacred and what few escaped were captured and sold into slavery in Jamaica. But nevermind… 350 years later some alleged remnant of that population sued to recognized as the Peqout tribe. Sounds to me like a miraculous rebirth. I guess if we can trace ancestry back through all those generations so can a few Pequot too. But how do you claim that such a tribe exists now? Language and customs are long lost. Silliness. I certainly don’t feel like I’m a pilgrim or a Separatist. The series of stories following the generations is no closer to done, but I do want to write up something about the Pequot war as Jonathan was in on that action.

I got the main design area of a quilt top together. I started cutting out the pieces to put together some of the round robin addition, and found that I needed more fabric. I’ve got more of the fabric, but it’s reserved until I add the borders to a quilt top. Ok… I’ll put on the borders. But no. Cameron has played with my long tape measure (a viscious snake) until it’s gone missing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go buy a new long tape measure. I’ve rooted around a good bit trying to find the one that I have.

Meanwhile, a photo from Tulsa. The family gathered in the breakfast area of the little hotel we stayed in, and had game times and story times and good company. Here’s little Cameron in Tania’s lap at full intensity. Tara is beside and Carlo a bit behind.

The LONG and the SHORT of it is that as a tax payer, I’m supporting these people who are now eight months behind on their mortage on a $400K home. It might be easier to swallow if (a) he weren’t such a good writer, and making a living writing about the economy and economic issues for the NYT and (b) there was even a hint of remorse and repentence. Hope you enjoy helping him out. I don’t particularly. He admits to being $15K into his aged parent. Sorry… I’m willing to have a pity party as fast as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. Wonder if he’s making his child support payments to his first wife? Fer crying out loud, man up and be responsible! Don’t set yourself up as an example of the credit crisis.

Late edit… this morning I see another point of view.

Another point of view this morning.

…There was a time when America tolerated a certain amount of this in its writers–one reads nearly approvingly of the repeated flirtations with bankruptcy undertaken by the likes of Dorothy Parker or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But these days, their profligacy, like their alcoholism, is no longer admired, or even tolerated, in the editorial world.

Yet writers are, as a class, extraordinarily at risk. They spend their twenties, and often their thirties, living paycheck to paycheck. They are extremely well educated, and all that education is not only expensive, but builds expensive habits. You end up with a lot of friends who make much more money than you–who don’t even realize that a dinner with $10 entrees and a bottle of wine is an expensive treat, not a cheap outing to catch up on old times. Our business is in crisis, and we lose jobs often. When we do, it’s catastrophic.

Girl Geologist II

I think this was from when mother was a senior at the KU geology field camp in Colorado. Ruffing it in the mountains must have been a bit of a shock to her system, but she grew through all that. Posing in her jeans and rough shoes…life ahead of her. What a gift life is. What a blessing.

Blogging the Proverbs Occasional Series

Proverbs 9:1-6
The Way of Wisdom

Wisdom has built her house,
She has hewn out her seven pillars;
She has slaughtered her meat,
She has mixed her wine,
She has also furnished her table.
She has sent out her maidens,
She cries out from the highest places of the city,
“ Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
As for him who lacks understanding, she says to him,
“ Come, eat of my bread
And drink of the wine I have mixed.
Forsake foolishness and live,
And go in the way of understanding.

First, thanks Nita. Nita sent a quick, “Hey you have an expectation problem.” I do, indeed. I’ve got a princess problem. I’ve always felt that I deserved to be treated like a princess, and the rest of the world just doesn’t get it!

I did, by the by, have a very nice Mother’s Day. Tara and Marianne came over and hung out a bit. They brought a couple of plants… pretty yellow flowers. One is an orchid, and one is a small pot of daisy mums. I handed Marianne the cake mix while I tried to figure out how to get a decent dinner together. I bought a WW cookbook last week, so I was wanting to try one of the recipes.

Darryl and the grandboys came over later and we had dinner on the table, followed by a game…one of the old bookshelf games Mother and Daddy bought. Quentin has discovered games and hates to lose. So he and I tied, leading the field playing Baazar.

This little news item from the Middle East is a bit unnerving. One level of my thought processes say, “Ok, they think swine flu is an act of biological warfare from the US. Crazy man, just crazy.” But whenever someone starts talking about cheats at the bridge table, I watch them very closely. In psychology the phenomenon is called projection. We as humans deny parts of ourselves, and insist it’s someone else’s problem. “THEY’RE cheating” is in my little world really saying, “and I haven’t been caught yet. Is Syria cooking some nasty stuff in hidden laboratories?

In his May 4, 2009 column in the Syrian government daily Teshreen, Charles Kamleh explains how “‘the swine conspiracy’ may be - according to one of the theories accompanying the spread of the disease - the product of one of the American laboratories specializing in developing viruses.”

Following is an excerpt from his column: [1]

“These days, the world is witnessing an unprecedented situation of loss of principles and lack of confidence, within an obscured vision of most of the traditional, accepted foundations of international politics…

“This new situation of the collapse of international foundations and criteria coincided with the most dangerous global economic crisis, and the ‘crisis of the swine flu’ doubled the influential and decisive implications of that global economic crisis.

“That crisis - known as the ’swine conspiracy,’ may be - according to one of the theories that accompany the spread of the disease - the product of one of the American laboratories specializing in developing viruses.

I hope those who can watch this are keeping a very close eye on the Syrians.

Get your kicks on Route 66

Driving from Robert’s house in Norman to Mother’s room in nursing care took me up and down route 66 between OKC and Tulsa many times. Is this oilfield equipment company in Stroud? Imperial or some such… acres and acres of big mechanical stuff. All that collection of equipment was sitting out in a field idle. One time past I stopped and took several photos. It was all fairly recently painted, lots of color.