30 . . . wha ?

Don and I were married 30 years ago on April 8, 1978.

My late brother Bennett took the photo, above, upon Don's and my engagement to be married, in August 1977. (My apologies to Bennett, and to you, for not PhotoShopping out the discolorations, which are especially visible if you click on the image to see it bigger. My wrist doesn't have the strength or fortitude.)

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I think it's my favorite.

Cherry pie with tart and dark sweet cherries.

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wind advisory

Click on the cartoon, above, from Jack “the Stargazer” Horkheimer to read the apparent origin of the old saying “in like a lion, out like a lamb” referring to the month of March. I find the story especially compelling since I am a Leo lion married to an Aries lamb.

Monday I’m not sure if March went “out like a lamb.” It did get warmer here in Michigan. But the wind kicked up, and we had a thunderstorm, both things I love, most of the time.

When I was a girl, we used to sit on our big front porch while thunderstorms pelted the ground, lit up the sky and filled the drain gutters to overflowing in our small town. We loved it.

In the middle of a windstorm at the lake I remember watching from the cottage down the hill while one of my sisters sat perched at the end of the dock, wrapped in a thick blanket, staring at white capped waves blowing across the water, her hair snapping like a flame.

In an airplane in 1975, I didn’t love high winds when returning from an eight week study abroad program in Europe, into the little Lansing airport. The winds were so gusty that our pilot, just before landing, suddenly torqued up our engines and soared back into the clouds for a different approach, into the wind. My parents were on the ground watching our wing tips dip side to side, almost scraping the tarmac.

Another time I didn’t like high winds was in ’79 when Don and I drove into southern California on one of our twenty-something adventures at midnight ready to pitch a tent in the KOA campground in the middle of a Santa Ana (pronounced “Santana”) windstorm. We managed to pound the tent stakes into the cement-like ground, but the wind flapped our tent so violently we couldn’t sleep, even though we had been driving west through and from Texas all day and were exhausted. We tried sleeping in our sleeping bags sitting in the front seats of our little Dodge Horizon. No good either. Then we drove another hour to Ginnie’s house (they weren’t home) in Pasadena and pitched our tent in their back yard (no doubt giving the neighbors pause).

I don’t like driving my tiny Chevy Aveo in high winds because it isn’t heavy enough on the road and gets blown around while I hold the steering wheel tight. Remember the Yugo that got blown off the Mackinac Bridge?

In 1989, a tragic accident captured the front pages of state newspapers. Leslie Pluhar's 1987 Yugo, a small car, plunged from the bridge more than 150 feet to the straits below. It was the first vehicle to fall off the five-mile span since it opened. Gale force winds blowing from the northwest helped lift her car off the roadway and over the side. In 1990, a Senate committee recommended replacing the bridge's 36-inch high outer railing with a 48-inch railing that curves inward toward the bridge deck.

Let me tell you, I thought about that incident when I drove across the same bridge last October.

But when I’m at home in my warm house, in jammies reading the latest New Yorker or The Sun, I love to hear a wind storm howl outside. That erratic tap tap tap of branches on the window and an occasional look out at the tilting trees, flexible and strong, is reassuring, even though I know most likely there will be branches torn and grounded by next morning.



This photo of our corn crib shows seeds blowing last May - not snow

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opening up space

The little volume control on the taskbar at the bottom of my screen disappeared. I asked Peter on google-chat how to get it back, he suggested restarting, so I did. Nope, still gone. I don’t want to be going to Start → All Programs → Accessories → Entertainment → Volume Control every time I want to mute my sound.

Because Don was busy at school Friday night as Master of Ceremonies for “Family Fun Night” I was home with lots of free time. As I was browsing the various unknown programs array when you click “Start” next to the Microsoft logo, I found the “Disk Defragmenter” tool (although I doubt I could find it again). I thought, hey, good idea to defragment. That was about two hours ago, and it’s now at 42%.

What’s cool about this Disk Defragmenter is that it is moving files around that can happily be contiguous and save space. You can see the top row there before defragmentation. The bottom row is in process. All that white unused space is to the right now, and the contiguous blue is clustered together, using space more efficiently. It just needs some time to regroup and open up that empty space.

Defragmenting is what Inge and I talked about at lunch earlier Friday. Not about computers, but rather daily life. And we didn’t use that word, but it seems right now.

She was telling me how she had gotten sort of crusty (my word) with built up stuff (I won’t tell you what kind of stuff, since that’s her business if she wants to blog about it) and that she had spent some time putting her consciousness on it and “stalking” it. Then she found insights and connections in her readings that reaffirmed her life calling, and she felt renewed.

You gotta understand. Inge and I are pretty introspective. We’re perfect friends for each other.

This is the most stressful time of year in my job. Papers, records, mail, journals and books pile up, waiting for less busy days to read, sort and file them. Students get annoying, colleagues get annoying, the University gets annoying. I can let resentments build up.

Friday morning my friend Alek in Greece posted this great black and white photo of an old Athens restaurant with a huge window and high ceiling. Something about that high-ceilinged room ~ head space ~ reminds me of defragmenting. You’re out on the busy streets of Athens, you stop shopping and bumping into people and step into this cool space and drink a café. All that chaos from the street hovers invisibly above your head. Your solitary self settles and regroups.

It’s fairly easy to see the need to declutter my house - throw laundry in the hamper, clear off the counters and put the dishes in the dishwasher, pick the newspapers up off the floor. It’s not as easy to see when my computer files need to be reorganized. It’s even less easy to see when I need to defragment and open up some space in my own head, free of crapola and annoyances that like to add up. And I guess my point is that it’s probably more important to do it when I am stressed and busy than when I’m not.

Hey! The Defragmenting is done. The report says:

0 files fragmented (I guess it didn’t need defragmenting after all.)
I have 8,236 folders (all those photos).
I have 36% free space.

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mom's jewels

(Click on the images to see the pins better.)


Mom was 40 years old when I was born. She was born in 1916. You can do the math.

She was of the generation of women who wore matching shoes and purses, and hats too, until the late ‘60s. Because she was a preacher’s wife, she dressed up every Sunday.

Fine jewels weren’t affordable or appropriate.

Costume jewelry was just right. Some of these pins belonged to my mom. Some I bought. Some were given to me.

This one was given to me by my sister Ginnie when she came back from Peru. I might have been 11 or 12 at the time.

Mom used to say:

“You get hungry for what you feed yourself.”

“Don’t let intellectualism take the place of God.”

“I always knew I had to marry a preacher and a redhead.”

“I try to be funny, but no one ever thinks I am.”

That last quote is a jewel I share with my mom, along with these pins.

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a flick of a switch

While Don was recuperating from shoulder surgery, we got hooked watching "24," the TV show that started in 2001 about the CIA operative Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) and the counter-terrorist unit in LA. Now that we can queue TV shows on Netflix, four episodes on a DVD, we could watch interruption-free, one episode after another. The writing is quite good, and the acting is excellent.


We finished the third of the six completed seasons last week (the seventh season premieres January 2009). In a strangely oxymoronic way, the show displays politically progressive viewpoints, while in the context of the very structures Progressives would like to see changed or eliminated. The politics in it are complex, not black and white.

Each season became more intense, the violence more graphic and more personal. Sure, Jack Bauer is a great guy who only tortures someone because he needs to save a million Americans. But this past season (3) when he had to shoot a colleague in the head and deliver his body to the terrorist enemy (a former British MI-6 agent gone sour) to keep him from releasing a biological weapon that would kill millions of Americans, we decided to stop watching.



Two out of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture this year were violent films, including the winner, “No Country for Old Men.” The other is “There Will Be Blood.” Today we decided to take “No Country” off our queue because it’s rated R for strong graphic violence. Everyone says it’s a great movie.



It’s sort of strange that we cover our children’s eyes to protect their developing minds from violent acts, but it becomes okay as adults to entertain ourselves with it. I know it's out there in the real world, but as my mom used to say, "you get hungry for what you feed yourself."

I dunno, I’m getting sick from feeding myself violence through the TV.

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addressing race

After Barack Obama's race speech, below on YouTube, people are talking about the race issue again. He acknowledges anger among Whites and among Blacks. Whether you want him to be President or not, to listen to a man who is a viable candidate for President of the United States who has relatives of practically every race, address the issue of race head on, is remarkable. He is the son of a White woman, apparently descended from slave owners, and a Kenyan father. His wife Michelle is descended from slaves and slave owners.

I am descended from slave owners. But my parents raised us to treat people of all races with utmost respect. Before I was born, my father was a poor Baptist preacher in the South who told the story of the Good Samaritan with the Good Samaritan as a Black person. You know the story. A man is robbed and left for dead, all the "good" people like priests walk by him, avoiding him lying there on the road. I suppose it was about the blood they weren't supposed to touch. Along came the Samaritan (Jesus' audience in this story, the Jews, hated Samaritans) who tended the man and paid for him to be nursed until he recovered. Ok, so my dad told the story from the pulpit with the Good Samaritan as a Black man, in a little rural church in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. After the church service, the Elders came to him, saying, "Rev. Hart, we'd appreciate it if you'd please only preach the Bible."

In the 1990s I got a seven-year education in American race relations when I worked in a University office in which I was one of two White women. The rest of the staff (10 or so people) were either African American or Latino. I learned that my friend Sheree, a beautiful AA woman of 35, felt discriminated against every time she went to the mall and the staff stayed close by her and left White women alone. I learned that there was deep anger between African Americans and Latinos. I learned that some African Americans felt superior to Whites because they believed they would never degrade other humans through slavery. I learned that even after 140 years, Whites can't necessarily expect that African Americans are ready to "move on." I learned that I basically have nothing to say as a White person, about what an African American or Latino person might feel or should do.

This is the first 9-minute segment of Obama's speech two days ago. You can download segments 2-4 from the sidebar at YouTube.

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