Christmas Trees, 2021

          The Christmas season is kicked off.  I’ve always liked Christmas immensely, and I taught our daughter to love it as well.  I get to take all the credit here since my better half belongs to the ‘Bah, Humbug’ school of thought who interprets Christmas as celebrating a ridiculous religious tradition sprinkled with crass commercialism.  Oh, yes, he’s a real Ho, Ho, Ho killer when he gets on a BH rant.

         Our first brush this year with the 'Bah, Humbug' attitude came with our Christmas tree.  We have a flower seller whose booth is outside the local convenience store at the end of our block.  We buy flowers from him sporadically all year long.  In fact, he made up the most beautiful bouquet of flowers I’ve ever gotten for my birthday.  Anyway, back to the point…. The flower guy put out for sale a selection of Christmas trees ranging from three feet high to about six feet tall. 

I’ve said for the past month our grandson (AKA the Huckleberry) is going to have a tree at our house which is just his height, and that he can decorate with the unbreakable bedazzled felt ornaments I made.  This is a tradition which we started with our daughter.  Her first tree was three feet tall, and she could reach every branch including the top.  Tiny trees may seem small to us adults, but to a toddler, they are huge!  Each year, as she grew, the tree got taller. 

When you don't have a car you either have to pay a delivery fee or carry the tree home yourself.  It seemed a no-brainer to me to buy the tiny tree at the end of the block.  It's an easy carry home.  It even has a small sized tree stand.  All was fine.  The Huckleberry and his Grandad picked one out since they pass the trees on the walk home from school each day.  

On purchase day, they  discovered  the price was $50.  Bah, Humbug, they walked away without the tree.  I was furious.  This will be the only Christmas I will have to spend the entire season with a grandchild, and it’s not like we can’t afford the tree.  The upshot:  We have a three foot tall $50 tree in our living room decorated by The Huckleberry.  It’s a cute as a bug, and worth every penny.  He loves this tree and wants it lit the minute he arrives at our house from school. 

         Christmas Tree Saga Number Two:  Our family tradition is to buy and decorate our Christmas Tree immediately after Thanksgiving.  Our son-in-law has learned to give the Sweetpea (our daughter's nickname) free rein in trees since she and I love the decoration aspect of Christmas and the tree is the centerpiece.  My mother wrote the ‘family’ and my closest friends when she was barely one year old suggesting giving her a Christmas ornament each year.  Due to her efforts, the Sweetpea has a huge collection of fun ornaments.  The Piano Man (son-in-law's nickname) now has his collection given to him by me which we started in 2009, and The Huckleberry has his.  At this point, there are so many a six to seven foot tree will not display all the ornaments.

         This year the Sweetpea decided to go BIG.  They bought a nine foot tree!  Now, if you have the Texas mini-mansion or a sprawling ranch style home, it’s not that big a deal.  The only restriction is ceiling height.  Well, there's an 11 foot ceiling in their 1000 square foot Brooklyn apartment so, no problem!  Remember the $50 three foot tree?  Well, they paid $95 for the monstrosity they purchased.  (Our Bah Humbugger somehow thought this validated his point the three footer was too expensive.)  Gargantua is a beautiful, beautiful tree.  Its shape is perfect and the branches thick.  It does require a heavy duty stand.  To give you a further scope of the size, it took nine strands of lights.  Best of all, for the first time in a long time, ALL the ornaments are hung, and they aren’t even sparse.  Gigantico only takes up 25% of their living room space.  The Sweetpea and I think that’s perfectly reasonable.  It looks wonderful.  Let the Christmas festivities begin! 

Do You YouTube?

 If you really stop to think about it, YouTube is really amazing.  I mean who knew there were so many cat movie stars?  However, people taking cute little movies of their kitties isn't what makes YouTube fascinating.  YouTube is at its best when it shows ordinary people filming their interests.  Are there terrible films spewing hatred?  You bet.  Are there disgusting films?  Oh, absolutely, but those aren't the ones which make up the overwhelming majority of YouTube films.  My favorite films are by people who want to share and showcase something wonderful.  

I like ALL the Steam Trains Galore videos.  They are perfect for putting a toddler into a tharn state.  (Tharn is the state described in the book Watership Down in which a rabbit freezes in place.)  Thanks, Mike Armstrong (maker of Steam Trains Galore).  I am somewhat baffled about how and why steam trains are so fascinating to him; however, he has traveled around the country filming steam trains running up and down tracks.  His films are very relaxing.

I also like the MTA (transit system of New York) films showing the subway trains running in and out of the tunnels of New York City.  Another perfect film for toddler lunchtime.  It seems to be soothing to the 1 - 3 year old group.  There's no dialogue.  There's just trains running up and down the tracks between various stations.  Let's take the "A" train!

Then, there's the Dad and 10  year old son who have transformed their backyard into a Monster Truck arena.  They have jumps, mud, water, tracks, and all sorts of dirt filled amusements for toy Monster Trucks.  The YouTube films show Dad and son playing toy Monster Trucks in the awesome dirt arena they built together.

Another 'fave' of mine are the Cornell University School of Ornithology YouTube live bird feeder/breeder sites all over the world.  I've watched hummingbirds in West Texas; deciduous forest birds in upstate New York; tropical birds in Panama; and the hatchings of Owls, California Condors, Redtailed Hawks, and Ospreys.  You can even watch a Royal Albatross around on the other side of the world hatch and raise a 'chick' which when full grown will weigh in at around 20 lbs.         

Have you ever heard of Destin Sandlin?  Well, he's an engineer who makes YouTube videos applying engineering principles in fun ways.  Like graphing firing a baseball over 1000 miles per hour through a one gallon jar of mayonnaise.  He loves charts, graphs, math, and his excitement level is off the leash.  His videos are called Smarter Every Day, and he's on the same wavelength as Mythbusters. 

I recently watched a TV program called "GLOW" on Netflix.  It is a reality program about make up artists.  This career employs people not just at make up counters of department stores in malls, but also on movie sets, television sets, live theater, fashion show runways, magazine fashion shoots, and surprisingly YouTube videos.  If you want to learn how to apply false eyelashes or create a 'smoky eye', well, there are You Tubers willing to help you.  Many of them got interested in make up through You Tube.  A new career path in make up artistry is to create a series of 'how to' YouTube videos and amass hundreds of thousands of subscribers.   Manufacturers perk up and pay those folks.

"How to" YouTube videos have revolutionized dissemination of information.  Anything you need to know how to do will have not just one but several YouTube videos by self proclaimed experts.  In the world of home repair alone, YouTube has leveled the playing field.  Not everyone grows up with an expert in the family.  Anytime there was a home repair job my husband used to telephone my father or meet with him face to face since by Dad was a self-taught handyman.  His knowledge was encyclopedic.  Today, my father would be making YouTube videos.

Sponsorship is definitely a way to make money using YouTube.  If you have expertise in any field, you can Vlog on YouTube.  (The snob I am, I always look down on Vloggers.  If they could write coherently, they would be blogging!)  If you can be found by the public in great numbers, you can expect sponsorship and a certain amount of $$.  I don't think very many people can sustain a career using YouTube as their medium.  It's akin to writing a best selling novel, and then continuing to do it over and over again.  In other words, there aren't too many Stephen Kings or John Grishams in the YouTube world any more than the literary world.

It's the accessibility of YouTube to the ordinary person which makes this phenomenon so wonderful.  Who could have predicted this?  YouTubes are just one aspect of the Electronic Revolution which is now shaping all our lives.  Do you YouTube?

  

Dark Time

 When I was in high school, I had a curfew.  My father's dictum was, "Nothing good happens to a girl after midnight."  One of my vivid memories from high school is my Dad dozing on the couch in front of the TV waiting for me to get home on Friday and Saturday nights.  So, what kept me from just tiptoeing past my father's sleeping form if I came home later than midnight?  I couldn't break curfew because of my Dad's alarm clock:  Television actually SIGNED OFF THE AIR at midnight.  There was a waving American flag with the "Star Spangled Banner" playing in the background.  The song was like an alarm to my father, and my happy little ass had better be in the door before the anthem finished.  The waving flag and anthem was then eclipsed by the 'test pattern', or sometimes just 'snow' until television signed back on at 7:00am.  Here's what I mean by test pattern.  It was routinely used as a signal to viewers their TV was not malfunctioning, but rather it was intentionally off the airways.

My point is television went off the air.  Now, true, there were only three stations plus one independent station in 1966, but still, can you imagine in today's shrinking globe a main stream media provider going DARK for seven hours?  I'm not going to claim 'life was so much better' in the supposed good old days because it truly wasn't.  However, I do miss what I think of as 'dark time'.  Even in those days, the United States had a frantic pace of life compared to other developed countries, but compared to today's insistence on a 24/7 life; it was idyllic. 

Life wasn't lived around the clock.  People who worked the 'swing shift' (3-11pm) or 'the graveyard' (11-7am) were pitied.  They were so out of sync with everyone else.  Mostly nothing was open past midnight except bars, the type referred to today as 'dive bars', and they certainly didn't serve food.  You couldn't shop for groceries or for anything else.  There were no all night restaurants except at truck stops, and even back then, truck stops were not known either for their cuisine or their atmosphere.  I can personally attest to this since me and my idiot college girl friends would go to the Dinko Truck Stop outside of Norman, Oklahoma - up and coming town of 25,000 - around 3am. for a 'Dinko Darling' meal.  [Don't ask.  I can't imagine how we avoided ptomaine.  19 year old bodies, I suppose.]  My point is in 1969 in a college town, nothing was open in the middle of the night.  

These days we carry around the 24/7 media provider in our pockets.  For eleven years I monitored my father who was in a dementia care facility.  I called the graveyard shift nurses routinely, and they also called me.  (This was the easiest staff to reach for a 'chat'.)  I slept with my phone turned on to receive their calls or texts right next to my pillow.  That experience trained me to be 'on the grid' 24/7.  That night time experience also trained me to use my phone to play audio books to help me get back to sleep. 

The reality now is I read the news across two major news outlets, listen to audio books, search for e-books and audiobooks to check out for myself and Cedric from eight libraries,  daily use our family channel on Whatsapp, monitor the weather across several locations, look at recipes, find answers to knowledge questions, take pictures, make videos, play games, and clean out my email on a daily basis.  I'm ashamed to say lots of those activities go on sporadically throughout the night.  

The smart phone is so integrated into my life, I don't have the desire or will power to go off grid for more than a few hours at a time.  The convenience of having information, entertainment, and basic knowledge available constantly seems like library heaven to me.  (FYI:  I was supposed to be a librarian, and it's one of my few regrets that I chose teacher over librarian.)

I think it would be beneficial to turn off my phone for seven or eight hours a day of 'dark time' because propaganda, misinformation, data mining, and going down rabbit trails seem to be overwhelming the positive aspects of 24/7 information.  Granted, we are in the earliest days of this phenomena, but individually stepping back and reclaiming dark time in the electronic age may help restore perspective.   I’m identifying feelings of anxiety, helplessness, insignificance, and anger in myself all of which has been intensified by the pandemic phenomena.   I also know those feelings are rooted in the information barrage that is today’s life in 2021.  There are too many choices every direction I look.  I think I need some dark time.

List Making

Someone asked me the other day why I hadn't written a blog entry lately.  Well, it's not for lack of trying.  I'm being blocked by my fears and anxieties.  I can't seem to pick one topic to write about, or if I settle on one, it's too big, and I can't figure out how to whittle it down.  Just to try and 'unblock', I made a list of my concerns.  Here it is.  

The Pandemic

Climate change

Electronics outpacing my ability to keep up

Tribalization of the USA culture

 Dementia

Information Overload

Death of Civility

Public School System

Artificial Intelligence

Cyber Attacks

Wealth Inequality

Racism/Rise of White Supremacy

Facism/Socialism creeping into our politics

Social Media - too few hands holding the reins 

Lack of Trust in American Institutions

Guns - pick either side of the argument - it's all arguing; no solutions

Globalization (both politically & economically)

Solar Flares (also known as "The Sky is Falling")

California falling off into the ocean

Louisiana/Florida three feet under water

The NEXT Pandemic

The Apocalypse - (also known as World War III)

Dystopian/Utopian Societies coming to fruition

Euthanasia/Lack of Euthanasia

The Ultra Right

The Ultra Left

The Electoral College

The Death of Facts

The Loss of Journalism

Death of Paper (Books, Newspapers, Magazines)

Abortion as politics

Too many choices (you pick the product)

The Economy

The Housing Market

Do we stay or do we go?

Selling our AZ house

Cedric's World (both the micro and the macro)

The Anxiety of Weather Monitoring

North Korea

Middle East

Hunger in the USA

I didn't even PAUSE making the above list.  I didn't have to ponder.  And, frankly, I'm appalled by the ease with which the list flowed out.    I've realized mainly I'm distressed about the current climate of negativity which threads through everything.  Most movies, music, books, opinion pieces, news leads, TV shows, documentaries, etc., etc., etc. - negative.  Life around me seems to be more about "Bah, Humbug" rather than "Coming Up Roses".  The Scrooge view is seeping into my personal view of life.  Never have I ever had to search and search for optimism either externally or internally.  Life for me is always half full.  My family kids me I could find a silver lining if my arm fell off.  (I'm not exactly sure about THAT - but you get the picture.) 

I don't want anyone to think, "Curmudgeon" - (if you don't know the word, look it up - you carry a damn computer in your pocket 24/7).  I don't think life was better fifty years ago because it wasn't.  We had dirty air, dirty water, second class citizens, nuclear proliferation, the Cold War (which threatened to heat into Nuclear War), out of control diseases, and a 'hot war' to name a few.  (Again, I didn't even have to pause to come up with that list.)  

Just writing that last paragraph makes me realize every age has its burdens.  Why is it the burdens of this age loom so much larger as I ponder them?  Is it the realization solutions are never nice and neat.  Or is it once one problem solves, another one presents itself?  There's never any laurel resting.  Or does the winding down of my life making me realize the world of humans was/is/will be always infinitely messy.

So, what's the solution:  List making isn't it.  Picking something off the list and work on it? (Yes, idiot I am, I believe one person can make a difference.)  Am I too much inside my head?  Is it vague agoraphobia which came free for me with the pandemic?  Should I disconnect, and just give up?  Looking for solutions here.   Also, looking to hear what you want to read about.  Think of this blog as a suggestion box.  All suggestions welcome.  Just DON'T ADD TO MY LIST.      

Some Thoughts on Social Media

 I was browsing on a social media website today, and one person was outraged that 'over half of the posts have been removed'.   That comment sparked me thinking about the ideas and parallels between 2021 and 1881.  I know that seems like a very long time ago.  I've thought for a long time about the ascendency of the cult of money and status happening within the confines of a revolution.  In 1881 it was railroads.  It seems antiquated today to talk about railroads as some miracle technology which transformed an economy, and became a culture in itself.  In 1881 that's what railways were.  In 2021, if I talk about technology, we all know I'm referring to electronic technology.  It's a miracle that is transforming an economy, and it is certainly becoming a culture unto itself.

The Gilded Age (generally from 1881 - 1905) refers not only to the number of millionaires which arose during the period - many involved in owning or financing railroads, but also to the idea of gilt (a thin layer of gold) over the top of widespread grinding poverty, political corruption, labor unrest, and problems with ethnicity, race, and immigration.  Building railroads and all the industries which fed them sparked innovation and invention in all areas of the economy as well as severely punishing other economical endeavors.  Substitute the word 'technologies' for the word railroads in the previous sentence, and suddenly it's 140 years ago.   This rather all sounds familiar, doesn't it?   I wonder how our age will be designated by the historians?

So back to the outrage on the social media website.  There seems to be some expectation the social media platforms are public forums.  This is totally false.  There is very little social media regulation.  According to an article I read on a website called TechCrunch, there are four bodies of government which could possibly regulate social media:  (1)  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) actually regulates communication, but has no authority over what is communicated.  It's concerned with infrastructure.  (2) State Legislatures are attempting social media regulation coming at it from the concerns over privacy and use of a person's data.  California and Illinois have enacted laws aimed at regulating what's said over social media, and how the social media giants can use information.  (3)  Congress.  Well, Congress is a day late and a dollar short.  They dropped the ball when social media got rolling because Congress is filled with people who realized much too late the power of this new economy.  Think old white/black/hispanic guys.  Out of touch and out of date and so mired in gridlock, the tech giants are  gleeful.  (4)  International law - social media doesn't stop at borders.  However, the chaos of getting international regulations concerning privacy and metadata hammered out make a unified standard of regulation just about laughable.

Wake up!  When you 'post', you do so at the sufferance of the company which owns your social media of choice.  Facebook/Twitter/WhatsAp/NextDoor/YouTube/Tumblr/ WeChat/Pinterest/TikTok etc, etc, etc (and this list currently numbers in the hundreds) are all recognizable denizens of the social media world.  These companies can use and remove anything on their websites at their sole discretion.  (Google, in fact, owns this blog - since I use the app Blogger, which is their creation.) Screaming 'censorship' and 'privacy' and 'freedom of information' is hogwash because these mega companies are not really regulated by anyone.  There's no oversight.  There's no grievance process.  Here we have freewheeling capitalism at both its best and its worst. 

For many years, there have been rumblings and outright shouts about too much government.  A significant number of citizens want less regulation and less oversight at every governmental level.  Social media companies LOVE this.  It makes the majority owners of these companies the most powerful people in the world.  One thing I've always known:  Rich people take care of themselves.  They only think about the public good when forced to by responsible government. 

 2021 - Welcome to the New Gilded Age!  

I think this slogan could definitely catch on.  What do you think?    

The New and Improved MOMA

With our art loving friend visiting (and working on a Coney Island hospital project), we bought our timed tickets, donned our masks, and ventured to both the Metropolitan Art Museum and the new and improved Museum of Modern Art.  The MOMA had been working on a two year expansion thanks to the purchase of the adjoining building at their 53rd St. location.  Now, it's 'stretched' and thus expanded.  The permanent collection fills three floors shown in chronological order.  The remaining two floors house the temporary exhibitions. 

The most talked about exhibition in the City is the 278 Cezanne drawings at the MOMA.  They were a fascinating look at an artist's process.  However, there is something to be said for selection and brevity, and this exhibition is really overwhelming.  I felt like I saw everything and nothing.  Many of the drawings were obviously 'practice' in the how to process.  It was pretty interesting to see him refine his fruit.  He also drew himself repeatedly.  (The full front face is his self portrait.)  I wondered if he spent a lot of time looking into mirrors.

He also practiced drawing his art friends' pictures, sculptures, as well as copying classical sculptures he admired.  This is "Olympia", his friend Manet's famous picture which was a reinterpretation of Venus of Urbino by Titian.

 

  

While Cezanne was fascinating, the OTHER exhibition was the one which I really enjoyed.  It was an Alexander Calder exhibition.  Calder has been involved with the MOMA since 1931 - the year of his first exhibit by the MOMA.  "Lobster Trap and Fish Tail" was specially designed for the new MOMA building - in 1939.  

At the dinner commemorating the 10th anniversary of the opening of the new building in 1939, Calder also designed the ten foot long candelabra decorating the table 

The current exhibitions is full of wonderful examples of Calder's art from large floor pieces to small whimsical wire sculptures as well as his signature mobiles.  If you love Calder, this is the exhibition for you.

The third exhibition was a bit of a dud in my opinion.  It's called Automania, and it was designed to show how detrimental the automobile has been on the urban landscape.  Not terribly successful.  My favorite piece was a Judy Chicago painted automobile hood, (outrageous at the time).  The Jaguar was also so beautiful, and the chrome on the Air Stream trailer was a mirror finish.  

 

I also picked and chose some of my 'fave' pieces from a couple of floors of the MOMA collection.  I loved the new expanded MOMA.  Hope you like my pics!    

https://photos.app.goo.gl/yhfWAuPrYk6E6X2h9

 

Long Island Lavender

 One of the delights of a vacation for a curious (nosy) person such as myself is meeting people who have a passion.  Everyone is usually proud of 'their town', but passionate people are usually attached to and passionate about a very particular place or event.  On Sunday we ran into one of those people when we visited the Lavender Farm.  A woman about my age told me everything there was to know about lavender.

I learned their farm is in two parts:  A 17 acre parcel (see above), and a 31 acre parcel.  Even with all the lavender harvested, the scent was pervasive.  There was no doubt what kind of farm you were visiting.  At the farm store they were selling lavender plants (most of which were still blooming) in the size pot in which you would buy a geranium.  And, the bees were busy at work on those blooming plants.  They were also advertising their once a year lavender honey was now available.  In addition to lavender, the farm has its own bee hives.   

There's French Lavender and English Lavender.  Generally, French Lavender has one bloom per stalk while English Lavender usually has two blooms.  "F" (French) is for fragrance, and "E" (English) is for edible.  Thus, you would make a sachet out of French lavender and brew your tea with English lavender.  The lady I chitchatted with confided she drinks a cup of lavender tea every night right before bed as her sleep aid.

In July, harvest begins as the sounds of chainsaws rip through the air.  One man wielding a chainsaw can harvest one acre a day.  Prior to gas driven chainsaws, lavender was harvested using scythes.  It was a much slower harvest, and less noisy.  If you notice, the lavender plants look like domes.  That's the preferred method of harvest.  Apparently, you never harvest lavender close to the ground

19th century scythe

 The woman I talked to demonstrated how to harvest a geranium sized lavender plant you would buy at their Farm Store.  She thrust her hand into the plant about halfway between the tip end of the plant (where the bloom grows) and the soil.  Then she spread her fingers and mimed snipping the plant just above her fingers in an arc, so you would be left with a dome shaped plant.  To successfully grow lavender, you need six hours of direct sunlight and good drainage.

The store was chock full of an array of lavender products.  I was thrilled to find one of my favorite ointments for dry skin.  It is a bees wax/oil pressed with lavender oil, and I seek it out every chance I get.  I use it at night on my hands and feet since lavender is used to calm angry skin as well as promote sleep.  This store had sachets, neck wraps, bath salts, hand lotion, soap, plants, tea, honey, mugs, aprons, t-towels, and my personal favorite:  a purple t-shirt advertising the Lavender Farm.  I also bought harvested lavender in a four ounce pouch.

I plan to add that lavender to my own rose petals I brought to Brooklyn from my rose bushes in Arizona.  I'm going to be making some sachets out of the Korean silk Marilyn, my mother-in-law, gave me.  (She and Norm, Drake's Dad, spent two years on an American Air Force base in South Korea in the 1970's, and Norm's employees had full Korean ceremonial dress costumes made out of silk presented to both of them.)  Forty years later, I was the happy recipient of the silk.  Since the clothes were floor length and 'full', there was a lot of salvageable material. 

Once again, readers, you now know more about a subject than you ever realized you wanted to know.