7 October 05
Enhorabuena
I don’t have children so I can barely imagine what it must feel like to give birth to a baby who within seconds has medical personnel screaming for oxygen, transfusions, needles, and who is then whisked off to intensive care.
This happened to some friends of my parents’ in Spain some 33 years ago. Aránzazu was born with a hole in the heart. By age 12 she’d had at least five open heart surgeries.
She got married last week in the village of Aránzazu in the Basque country, and she wore the biggest of her scars like a precious necklace, urging us all to embrace life, the life she’d had to fight so hard for.
Hermosa, te queremos mucho…
26 September 05
Move Over, Darwin Fish
Those who wish to proclaim the Revelation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster can now do so on the back of their vehicle.
(From Shakespeare’s Sister )
18 September 05
Not Supposed To Happen
I pay scant attention to college football, but yesterday the UC Davis Aggies managed to beat Stanford in the closing seconds 20-17. This was a long-anticipated matchup. Several years ago, the UCD student body voted to move the student athletics programs from NCAA Division II to Division I, joining the big leagues as it were. I wasn’t very excited by this move, expecting a decade or so of mediocrity to follow, but the choice wasn’t up to me. Anyway, Stanford is the first major Division I foe the football team has faced, and they’re my alma mater Berkeley’s great rival as well. I just became a little bit more of a believer in the Aggie football team!
13 September 05
Stinking Bishop
A British cheesemaker is terrified that the next Wallace and Gromit film will lead to demand for this cheese, which is what happened with Wendsleydale in an earlier film.
Stinking Bishop is made from milk of Gloucester cows and its rind is seasoned with perry, cider made from pears. It is said to smell like “old socks” which may temper the demand, I think…
3 September 05
Velveteen
During Passover this year we went to a seder at a friend’s house. She used a haggadah—a prayer rite, said throughout the course of long meal—put together by a blogger who has long been on our blogroll, Rachel (Velveteen Rabbi). Only she’s not really a rabbi—yet.
Rachel has just been accepted for rabbinic study, a feat in itself and a huge challenge for the future. It is a delight to read about this journey by someone so intelligent, so committed to the paths of understanding of different faiths, so willing to share her own experience.
Mazel tov, Rachel.
28 August 05
Like in the Pueblos
Last night we had our first party at this house, or more precisely, in the area out back which is used mostly for keeping bees, keeping beekeeping equipment, old machinery, and barrels full of old combs which congeal in these temperatures.
We can’t move the equipment, so we strung lights around the perimeter to keep people off the danger zones.
It looked like an old fashioned fiesta in a dusty Spanish or Mexican or Colombian or Puerto Rican town with these lights.
Salsa dancing, bluegrass from our own Chicken Tractor, good food, a nice look at Jupiter + 4 moons in the dob: a fiesta, Pica and Numenius style. With a LOT of help from Tamara. Qué chévere.
23 August 05
On This Day
I am seeking to slow down. I am looking to find those moments of calm, cling to them, cherish them, savor them.
I am seeking a state of quietness.
Of being in quietness.
Besheket.
16 August 05
The Lost Art of the Thank You Note
I have a birthday coming up next week, and my mother sent a card and a gift before she left to visit my brother in Alaska.
We’re in touch a lot, my mother and I: she lives about two hours away. We speak on the phone often, we email. But I don’t write her letters so much anymore. She’s a very thoughtful letter-writer, and whatever awkwardness she might feel socially vanishes when her pen hits the page. Anyway, I picked up my own pen to thank her for my birthday present and suddenly it dawned on me it had been a long time since I had done this for anyone.
She taught us to write thank-you notes growing up. It’s an art, and it follows a very simple formula. The art comes in making it sound less formulaic. It’s not about you, this letter; it’s thanking someone for their thoughtful generosity.
Leslie Harpold of The Morning News has a good column on this (via Rebecca’s Pocket via MakeReady).
10 August 05
Why You Should Pay Attention When Your Mother Says Your Horoscope Sucks
So I get to work on time for once having biked in and I look in my calendar and it says I need to be at the dentist in ten minutes so Kathy says quick take my car so I hop in and get there but my appointment is actually for tomorrow not today but they’ll squeeze me in anyway and the dentist is a kindly tall Swedish endodontist and he explains to me patiently why the root canal I had done in Spain in 1979 is going to need to get redone but that there are Risks like breaking the crown or breaking the tooth and by the way this isn’t cheap and would you like an appointment on Thursday so I think well now that I’m out I’ll just pick up some cat food so I take my keys into Petco because that’s where my Petco discount tag lives and as I’m paying I realize these are my keys not Kathy’s and I don’t have her phone number so I have to call my former office mate whose number I remember to get Kathy’s and then I call the guys to jimmy into the car and the moral is just do one thing at a time like you’re sposed to but to make myself feel better I go to the art store at lunchtime because that always works.
5 August 05
Flu Watchers
The director of the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works, Walter Boyce, was on the radio station KQED this morning in a panel discussion about avian flu. Perhaps it’s time for me to start reading up on this potential pandemic. It turns out bloggers are definitely ahead of the curve in keeping track of avian flu, as this article relates. There’s lots of fine material too at the Flu Wiki.