Twenty-Five Reasons Why I Dislike Young Children***

1)  They are boring; the younger they are, the more boring they are.

2)  It's always me, me, me with them.

3)  They don't follow directions.

4)  Give them an opportunity, and it's whine, whine, whine.

5)  Picky eaters are the norm.

6)  They have to be cleaned and dressed.

7)  You have to tie shoes, zip zippers, and button buttons  for A LONG TIME.

8)  They can't cut up their own food.

9)  Voice modulation is a mystery to them.

10)  They calculate when your food is the most hot and delicious then demand both your hands to do something for THEM.

11)  They take naps at inconvenient times.

12)  They have short legs and no stamina when traveling.

13)  They insist on putting sticky, dirty fingers as well as drool mixed with food on your best clothes.

14)  They drag around disgusting objects which you have to keep track of. 

15)  They wake you up in the middle of the night to look under their beds.

16)  They throw tantrums in public to cause you maximum discomfort.

17)  They interrupt your sex life.

18)  They expect to always open the first present.

19)  You have to clean up disgusting substances they've created.

20)  They bring home diseases and spread them around.

21)  You have to take them trick or treating instead of going to your own party.

22)  You're expected to attend school pageants and photograph them.

23)  They don't understand the concept 'white lie'.

24)  Your embarrassment is their weapon.

25)   They stay up too late and then refuse to sleep through the night.



***Fortunately, my own child wasn't nearly as disgusting as other children.  I don't understand how these other parents put up with their nasty offspring.

Oregon Wine Tourist

When we drove from Portland to Seal Rock, we were amazed at the wineries along Oregon State Highway 99W.  There are hundreds of small vineyards along a one hundred mile route.  There's no way to see them all in a weekend or even perhaps even in a month.  Some of the smaller wineries only make a few hundred cases of wine in a good year.  Even in the biggest and best distributed wineries, there are several varieties made that can only be purchased at the winery.  

I discovered Oregon has a 'state soil'. It's called Jory, and I've been standing on it all day long.  Apparently, this type of soil is mineral rich, iron heavy and eight feet deep particularly around Dundee.  This special soil on the sloped hills in this part of Oregon makes superb Pinot Noir wine.  Even more incredible, identical varieties of grapes have different flavors based on what side of the hill they grow on.  An excellent winery can produce different tasting Pinot Noirs based on the exact location where the grapes have been grown.

My favorite story comes from Erath Winery.  They make several different Pinot Noir varieties.  One of them is called "Leland".  Several years ago, a couple retired to this area, and the guy decided he needed a retirement hobby. He planted his four acres in grapes, and over the years, taught himself how to grow grapes.  Now, Erath buys his entire crop every year and makes "Leland", which sells only at the winery for $50 a bottle.  That points out another wrinkle in Oregon wine country.  There are several vineyards that are NOT wineries.  Some grow grapes and sell them to local wineries.  Grapes with 'reputation', such as Mr. Leland's, are sought after.  Wineries try to lock in their selected growers and build reputations for wine made from grapes they don't even grow.     

We saw every variety of tasting room.  The most lavish was a super contemporary tasting room on top of what passes for a 'mountain' here.  Some were little rooms carved out of the winery floor.  Others were refurbished farm houses.  Wine labels are meant to be distinctive.  My favorite label was the Four Graces Winery.  Its name refers to the four daughters of the owner, and their names are written in beautiful script around the edge of the neck label on each bottle.  Another winery owner loves poetry and calligraphy, so one of their specialized wines is in a bottle that has an original poem written by the owner in calligraphy and then silk screened onto the bottle.  Drake's souvenir of this trip is a hat from a certain winery. Their logo has a pair of meadowlarks, the Oregon state bird, sitting on an Oregon grape branch, not a vine, but a stunted evergreen shrub that is the state plant.  Sadly, the logo was better than the wine. 

A small winery called "Twelve" is owned by an older couple who threw caution to the wind, took the plunge late in their lives and started a winery.  The wife runs the tasting room while her husband handles the vines.  It was revealing how much esoteric knowledge it takes to make great wine.    It doesn't seem to be an exact science.  Each year produces a different quality of wine depending on how wet, how dry, how cool, and a bunch of other factors that are so nuanced it takes years to figure them all out and compensate for them.  Apparently, 2008 was the perfect year for the grapes, and if your wine was bad in 2008...well, as the owner of Twelve said, "Time to find another career".  I also learned today that wine is stored in French oak casks.  Baffled, I asked, "Why not American oak?"  Turns out to have something to do with open/closed wood.  Who knew?  

To my untutored eye, it seemed that the Oregon wine business was mature, but compared to California, it's in elementary school. Since it's a statewide economic advantage for the Oregon wine industry to succeed, it's still collaborative to a certain extent.  The Twelve owner opined that they wouldn't have been able to make it in California because the other California owners wouldn't have been as willing to help them learn. The Twelve Winery make small amounts of wine not yet widely distributed, but it's lovely.      

We managed to see a double digit number of wineries helped by dry weather the first day.  We devised a system to help us decide what we liked.  The supermarkets here naturally carry a big selection of Oregon wine, and I'm hoping our system I recorded on my Iphone is going to help us with future purchases. The weather isn't going to be so cooperative on our second day - an incoming 'rain event' is being referred to as A SOAKER.  Haven't seen one of those here.  It should be interesting.  Even this big event won't deliver constant rain.  It will be intermittent, but when raining, it's going to be heavy showers.  I know we won't be driving all the dirt roads we did today.  Shouldn't be a problem; there are wineries and wine tasting rooms lining the main state highway and scattered throughout the towns of the region.

McMinnville, Oregon is the biggest town with 35,000 people smack dab in the middle of this part of Oregon wine country.  It looks like a fun place to spend a couple of months, drink a lot of really good boutique wine that's never distributed anywhere outside the winery, eat some inventive cuisine which compliments the wine, and access an area of Oregon that looks like it has a lot to offer.

I think we are now heading into the next season - the rainy one.  The weather forecasts are showing only rain for the next several days, then a flicker of sunshine followed by more days of rain.  I wish I could just store some of these and trot them out in Arizona.  On the second day of this little trip, I can see to be constantly wet, bedraggled, and struggling to get rain wear on and off everywhere you go would become very tiresome indeed.    

Why Am I Watching Baseball?

     The Rangers aren't in the post season.  Not an especially big surprise considering their major slump of the last two weeks of the season.  The Rangers East (AKA Baltimore Orioles) got eliminated quickly.  Switched my allegiance to the Yankees, and the Tigers took them out in four games.  I detest both St. Louis and San Francisco (see Texas Rangers 2010 and 2011 World Series appearances for reasons why), and those two teams are the ones left playing in the National League play-offs.  So, why am I'm sitting here casually watching the Giants and the Cardinals? 

      The Cardinals have the best uniforms in baseball.  Even their gray road uniforms are cool.  The Cardinals uniforms have a bright yellow baseball bat across the chest area of the uniform.  A bright red cardinal perches on each end of the bat, and "Cardinals" is spelled out in red script beneath the bat.  These beat Yankee pinstripes and the Old English script 'D" on the Tiger's uniforms. 

     I guess I'm also watching baseball out of habit.  When you start in March with Spring Training, and the regular season lasts until the end of September, baseball games just become part of the fabric of my life each year.  Two of the final four teams will be in the World Series, the iconic United States sports championship.  (It doesn't matter to me that some people think the iconic championship is the Superbowl.  I'm old enough to remember when the Superbowl started, and thus, it hasn't proven itself over time.  Forget the NBA thing; it doesn't even have a name.)  Also, the ALCS and NLCS are when you get to know the players who will be in the World Series.  I'm also casually scoping out possible new acquisitions  for the Texas Rangers.  When baseball teams win consistently, members of those winning teams are often the free agent choices in the upcoming off-season.  Ranger fans are sniffing around for pitchers, and maybe a top line catcher - can you say "Joe Mauer"?  

     I'm always hoping for the chance to see something on the baseball field I've never seen before, and I don't mean a streaker.  There are so many combinations of things that can happen in the field of play; you almost always see something new or at least something bizarre:  My fave from the Yankee/Tiger series:  Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankee, flirting with women in the stands during the game he was benched.  I don't know what all the stink was about; this is a time honored baseball tradition.  

     Now, I'm laughing at the most over the top Giant fan who is wearing black angel wings and a fuzzy orange halo.  If I ever get to that point, just cut me off cold turkey and check me into baseball rehab.  Post season baseball crowds are really fun.  There are 'waves', beach balls, chants, mass superstition charms, hand made posters, banners, counting devices ("K's"), and hecklers.  It's a complex simple game coated with layers of fascinating traditions.  Oh, like the 'rally cap' - team members and fans turn their baseball caps inside out as a symbol to promote a rally to win a game in which they're behind.    

     Look at the facial hair!  I wonder why baseball players like to fool around with facial hair.  A huge percentage of baseball players, both leagues, any team, grow goatees, full beards, mustaches (all varieties), fu-man-chus, mutton chops, and soul patches. Facial hair can spread like a fungus among a team.  The Giants particularly seem to like bushy coal-black beards. 

     I'm also checking out the socks.  There are three kinds of baseball socks.  Well it's actually whether you show your socks or not and if you do, how do you show them.  So far the Cardinals and the Giants have boring socks; meaning there are no socks showing.  Ranger fans know that Kinsler and Murphy always show their socks, Their uniform pants legs end at their knees, and their lower legs are all socks.  In the last quarter of the season ever since 'throw-back' uniform day, Derek Holland has been showing his socks in the throwback style.

     There are commercials between innings; I know, big surprise.  I just realized that modern baseball has different sponsors from the game of my childhood.  It's not beer and chew anymore; it's video games, smart phones and junk food.  Just channel surfed feeling foolish watching a game between two teams I don't like.  My opinion after a round-robin surf:  I can't do better than baseball.  It  
beats out all of the other offerings.  I'm just marking time until 60 Minutes comes on; maybe they'll have a baseball story.

Seasons, Seasons, Seasons.....

These days we tend to avoid the drastic season.  Hopefully, I'm finished with 110 degree days, 15 degree days or nights, tornadoes, hurricanes, Blue Norther's and blizzards.  I can remember the relief of moving to central Texas and re-experiencing the four distinct seasons. I think it's the poets who understand the seasons.  There are beautiful, thoughtful poems written through the centuries that evoke the seasons with word pictures triggering memories.   After twenty years on the Gulf Coast, the initial novelty of a hot, "green" Christmas in shorts and a t-shirt had long worn off.  I always wondered why the Houstonians and New Orleanians didn't demand lines of clothing which were Christmas festive but fabric appropriate for the climate.  Instead, the stores were stocked with heavy sweaters, Ho-Ho-Ho sweatshirts and wool plaids tricked out in green and red with a touch of holly.  You couldn't wear a single item without turning your a/c down to 60 degrees.  Houstonians were not above trying for holiday cheer with a roaring fire in their useless fireplaces while their air conditioners churned out massive amounts of frigid air to make the flickering flames bearable.  Even in the 1970's the December electric bill could be gargantuan. I had a poinsettia bush at my NOLA house that I grew from putting my $4.99 Walmart Christmas plant into the ground around March.  It wouldn't die in the house; I should have known it sure wouldn't die outside.  New Orleans gardening is a cliche:  Stick any plant in the ground and jump back fast before the growth knocks you down.  One woman in my neighborhood actually had a six foot Bird of Paradise bush.  I was tickled to have my own bush full of bright red poinsettias the following Christmas; it was like putting one over on the commercial Christmas industry.  My Sun City house also has a poinsettia bush which made me smile with memory the first time I saw it. In eight years in New Orleans, there was only one three day period of winter.  Normal was all the plants constantly and lushly green.  Deciduous trees tended to be Live Oaks.  The new leaves just pushed the old ones off the tree in the spring.  Other leaves turned from green to brown over the course of three days, fell to the ground, and two weeks later, there were new leave buds ready to pop out.  My next door neighbor didn't replant her annuals for three years running because they never stopped blooming.  It was unnerving to see blazing zinnias and petunias take a one month rest period in January and start up again. One of the joys of Fort Worth was the winter.  After the modest autumn color and the leaves drifting off the trees, I liked seeing the architecture of trees against the pale blue sky.  Winter time in central Texas is short, crisp, and invigorating.  I also liked having occasional snow that would be gone within a few days.  Central Texans never deal with ugly piled up snow, struggle to get places,  clean off cars, or spend 15 minutes dressing a child to 'go play outside'.  We get the greeting card version of winter.  Sometimes they even cancel school at the last minute for an amount of snow people who experience real winter find laughable.  Central Texans consider snow day school cancellation a lottery everyone gets to win.   Once every five years, there's either an ice storm or a significant snow fall.  Ice coats every surface and the severity of the storm determines the depth of the ice.  The morning after an ice storm is almost always sunny, and the ice glints off every surface, both man made and natural as if coated with liquid diamonds.  The only real winter mishap:  Ice is heavy and brings down trees and power lines. Booming shotgun reverberations echo throughout the 'ice day' as branches drop off ice coated trees.  I've seen trees with trunk diameters of 20 inches split in half as if attacked by a giant ax so heavy was the weight of ice on their branches.     Tulsa had 'real' autumn; it's a town of deciduous trees.  The short colorful autumn was so familiar I didn't realize how much I would come to miss it.  The desire for fall and all the sights and rituals surrounding it fueled our trip to New Hampshire.  Other spots around the country have nice color, but New England is the Hollywood of autumn.  Other places are amateurville compared to the fall beauty of the Northeast.  The tree colors were so rich in an undulating palette I couldn't stop taking pictures.      Spring is a different matter.  It's more beautiful on the Gulf Coast because of one plant:  Azaleas.  You can trick an azalea to sort of grow in Fort Worth, Texas, but it's never really happy.  Those pampered, forced azaleas are nothing like the lush shimmering perfection of the two perfect weeks of springtime on the Gulf Coast when the azaleas bloom.  Azaleas are cool green hedges bursting with colors of magenta, peppermint pink, white, and lavender.  New Orleans has the same lovely hybrid azaleas, but they also have wild azaleas.  Wild azaleas have smaller petal pink flowers, and are somewhat vine like.  They have a divine fragrance. My favorite Hove perfume (a New Orleans perfumier) has an azalea fragrance, and it smells like the wild flowers.  That azalea smell always speaks to me of Spring, and reminds me of my youth.   Spring in Texas also means bluebonnets.  If azaleas are the Gulf Coast's spring perfection, the Texas Bluebonnet is the spring flower equivalent of the state song.  Bluebonnets are an obsession with Texans.  They memorialize these flowers with pictures, eagerly await their return each year, and speculate on how good or bad the 'season' will be.  Bluebonnets are wildflowers, and it's illegal to pick them in Texas.  Every bluebonnet season is a crap shoot depending on how wet the previous winter.    Summers are never more perfect than in the Pacific Northwest.  For about three months of the year, each day is azure blue skies, bright yellow sunshine, and mild temperatures.  Throw in a blue turquoise ocean, backing up to mountains with icy rushing streams and it's completely comprehensible why Northwesterners endure the dismal weather of the fall and winter to experience the vibrancy of summertime.  I've never, ever seen more beautiful flowers than are produced up here in the summertime.  What will take me back to Northwestern Washington will be the dahlias.  What delightful flowers blooming prodigiously and waving in all sizes and colors.  Dahlias just perk me right up, and some people grow them and sell them to you.  The "Dahlia Lady" outside of Burlington, Washington had one-half acre of flowers she cut and sold for $.20 a stem. I have a friend who posts poems as part of her 'chat' avatar for perusal by the interested.  Once I access a poetry site, I tend to browse and nibble.  I was already internally noodling about the idea of seasons when I ran across this poem.  Such a fitting ending:

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn by Wu Men (Hui-k'ai) (1183 - 1260) Timeline English version byStephen Mitchell Original LanguageChinese Buddhist : Zen / Chan 13th Century Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

New Season in Oregon

Someone told me the other day that there are two seasons in coastal Oregon:  rain and sunshine.  If that's true, we just entered the 'other' season.  It started raining today and it's supposed to rain until maybe Wednesday.  (That's five days of constant rain.)  The rainy season is something I wanted to experience. 

Does it take a certain type of mental make up to enjoy persistent rain?  Is persistent rain comparable to Northeastern snow that never goes away for months at a time?  What does the human psyche think about 'rainy' vs 'sunny'.  I did a little research by going to a Portland specific website for a discussion of how to handle the persistent rain and gloom of the Pacific Northwest.  Apparently, there are people who feel BETTER in clouds and rain than in sunshine.  The consensus is these folks are in the minority.  Most of us prefer sunshine.  The majority of people in the discussion actually felt you need to take extra Vitamin D in the winter to compensate for the lack of sunshine.  Others felt it wasn't the rain so much as the constant gloom that affected people.  

As to the psyche handling the persistent rain and overcast skies, some said that escaping for a mid-winter sunny climate vacation is all it takes to handle the rainy season.  Others said if you've moved here from 'somewhere else', it's important to shed those ingrained attitudes of staying inside when it rains.  Their ideas involved buying good rain gear, ignoring the rain, and going out, out, outside.  A pretty vocal group touted regular physical exercise as the way to combat the rain blues.

But just as a small minority of people feel better when it rains, there's also a small minority of people who get SAD (seasonally affected depression), and a sunny vacation or all the exercise in the world isn't going to cut it.  These folks use 'light boxes' to simulate sunshine and use full light spectrum light bulbs in their houses.  The final suggestion was hilarious:   If you can't cut the rainy season, just MOVE out of the region.  My personal favorite, and the suggestion that made the most sense to me, was to embrace the rain and enjoy the smells, textures, and sensations that the rain triggers.  I have a feeling those are the minority that really enjoy rain more than sun.

I lived in a rainy climate for eight years, but it was different.  It was a mix of sun and rain almost every day during a significant portion of the year.  New Orleans has about six months of what I term 'tropical weather'.  It's hot, humid, and sunny in the morning and early afternoon. Then it rains almost every late afternoon.  The result is it's steamy for the evening and the night.  My observation was New Orleans natives get edgy and cranky if it doesn't rain.

Just as the Eskimo language has a gillion words for snow, 'rain' up here is graded and nuanced.  mist, misty, foggy, dewy, light, medium, heavy showers, intermittent showers, constant showers, drizzle, sprinkling, spitting, torrents, and 'sheets'.  However, no one talks of 'cloudbursts', 'frog stranglers', 'toad stranglers', or 'gulley washers'.  Pacific Northwest rain is NOT intermittent.  I've been listening, but no one has suggested a euphemism for the Pacific ocean storms that batter the coastline in the winter.  I'm very eager to see one of these from the comfort of my living room, of course.    

Assuming you follow all the suggestions to combat SAD (isn't that a great acronym ), the rain can still restrict your movements.  For example, we are skipping the Lincoln City Kite Festival today because we can't seem to make ourselves stand around in the rain and look up at kites in the sky.  Thus, we come to the other method of learning to live up here:  find an indoor hobby.  There's lots of needlework and woodworking up here.  This is the first place I've lived where the library is open 7 DAYS A WEEK from early until late every single day.  The recreation center is open 7 days a week; and at least 12 hours a day for 6 days of the week.  This house has 15 puzzles stashed away in various cupboards as well as a library of movies.  I came prepared:  I have my sewing machine, and my crazy quilt stuff.  I'm hoping to get a big jump on making it.  Of course, my quilt making will be squeezed between the exercise regimen, the rainy beach walks, and the indoor activities we've been saving for the rainy season.  

I'm hoping to store up the clouds and rain, so I can cope with the relentless sunshine and lack of clouds in Arizona, which I admit, gets on my last nerve.  I think I'm one of those people who prefer the rain to the sun, but I'm getting ready to test that theory.      

           

Officially, October and It's Sunny in Oregon

Shockingly, we go to the beach four or five times a week.  I've taken 180 pictures of this area and most of them are of the beach and sea gulls.  Ok, Ok, I know that all of you don't have my sea gull fixation, but they are really interesting birds.  I think of them as the crows of the sea.  

My beach point is that we can drive less than five miles and be at several different beaches.  The more beaches I go see, the happier I am with Seal Rock. We live right across the street from the most interesting beach.  

Today we did the barefoot on the beach thing because of the weather.  Today the temperature was over 70 and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.  It was so lovely we went to a new beach (Ona Beach), and we had a picnic.  This was at high tide today, and this beach has a creek flowing into it, but the sand is broad, flat, and with very few rocks or tidal pools.  We've been waiting for the perfect day to shed the shoes.  

We have discovered that anytime you 'go to the beach', you'd better be bundled up.  It was very warm today in Newport, but on the beach it was three layers, and a hat for me.  All that and gloves for Drake.  Still, we persevered  found the perfect log, and took off the shoes and sox.  We did about a mile on the sand.  I, of course, even though my pants legs were rolled up, misjudged a wave and got the bottoms of my pants wet and sandy.  

I wouldn't want to be in this ocean much above my ankles.  There's undertow, sneaker waves, and rip currents.  In other words, this ocean on the Oregon Coast is like the apple trees in the Wizard of Oz - it just doesn't much like people.

I've been snapping pictures at every opportunity, and you can whiz through the pictures - mostly there are views from this house, our 'walk to' beach we can see out the front window, other beaches, tidal pools, and sea gulls.  

https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2012OregonCoastAndSealRock?authkey=Gv1sRgCKGYjJek9smMcg   

It's My Birthday

"It's my birthday, and I'll smile if I want to, smile if I want to, and you would smile too if it happened to you."  So.......did you sing along?  You did if you're over 50!!!!!   I had a lot to smile about today.  Of course, I always smile a bunch   anyway, but on my birthday I over smile.  Is that a concept?  Over smiling.  Is that even possible; well, I guess if you're a drooling idiot, maybe.  Not for me, though; it was an over smiling day.  

I woke up OLD today.  You can't pretend to be anything else when you wake up eligible for Social Security - now you know how old I am.  Those of you closest to me know that I've been 62 since January 1st.  I believe in changing my age on the first day of the year - it saves me the trouble of trying to remember how old I am - even I can do that arithmetic [current year - 1950 = my age].  See, I even know the formula.

It's also gratifying on your birthday to go online to discover over 40 emails, and not one of them was for penile enlargement.  I didn't make it to the post office today, so there are probably snail mail cards there.  Speaking of which, I discovered this week that the Seal Rock Post Office is a faux post office.  Somehow, it's not real even though there's a building, a sign, a flag and everything.  If you HAND address a piece of mail:  Jan/Drake Smith, General Delivery, Seal Rock, OR 97376, then it comes to Seal Rock.  HOWEVER, if a computer addresses the envelope, then the address is:  Jan/Drake Smith, General Delivery, Waldport, OR 97394.  I don't understand.  Something about Seal Rock being a contract office, but you can get mail there, mail packages and buy stamps.  I don't know why it's not real.  I did notice that it has funky hours.

Oh, and here's a good mail analogy:  Sarah Lynn has slid into Yale like a birthday card into an envelope.  Catch this:  She's having breakfast with the CEO of Patagonia this week, and she's going to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak in person.  She's going to New York City for dinner as her birthday gift from Jay.  And how old is she tomorrow?  27.  Pretty good for 27 if you ask me. 

And shall we speak of birthday gifts?  Why not?  Here's my gift from Drake: 

It's spiny oyster, opal, lepidolite (it looks black in the picture, but it's really dark purple) inlaid with silver.  It's an artist out of Albuquerque, but he bought it from a gallery here in Newport, Oregon.  Good job, don't you think?  Looks just like me.  He says that he was reminded of a sea gull.  Plus he went shopping today to help me find a long sleeve fleece jacket - even I think it's cold here.  Then we played blackjack for a couple of hours - and the best news -  it only cost me $1.  That's my idea of a win.  We topped the day off with ice cream.  Yummy, yummy.

I love birthdays.  I actually love everybody's birthday.  There's never been a birthday I haven't enjoyed.  I like feeling special.  I like eating sugar in any form:  cake, pie, ice cream.  I'm an equal opportunity sugar eater.  It's a bonus when all your friends send messages, and you get gifts, and have a swell day.  Birthdays.....only 364 days until my next one, but even better, only 1 more day until Sarah's birthday, and 3 more days until Drake's birthday.  The only thing better than MY birthday is our family's birthday week.

Oh, final P.S.:  Thanks, Larry, you're a lifesaver - that micro cell gives us 5 bars in this dead zone of a house.  Anybody can call me anytime now.

If you haven't already figured it out, this is my thank you note to everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday today.