Auld Lang Syne

First, a little New Year's music from Petaluma's own David Grisman.

It's New Year's Eve and I'm blissfully alone. Except for a furry and very high-maintenance (miaaoOWW! MEEEoww!) companion.

(I read somewhere that cats only meow around humans. And only because it works. That is, deaf people's cats don't meow.)

Steve is out doing a very non-lucrative gig rather far away from home. I'm feeling slightly guilty because I didn't go with him. He goes with me to mail my newspapers, for Chrisakes. After helping me put all 1,500 labels on them.

But lord knows I'm not too good after eleven. And I hate party scenes where everyone has to pretend to be jolly.

Steve, my love, thank you for this quiet evening. It would be even nicer with you next to me, but even by myself it's pretty good.

Even though it's not particularly cold in here, I've built a fire to sit in front of. Cleo, next to me, smells like an expensive fur coat that has recently been out in the cold night air. Old folk favorites of a mellow nature are playing on the electronic Victrola. I'm almost insanely content.

(Old "folk favorites"? Or is it more accurate now to read "Old folk" favorites?)

Yesterday I read an article about the science of music and the brain. You know how certain music evokes an emotional response that is deeply pleasurable? A scientist has tracked the brain pathway this music stimulates the brain to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

From my suddenly enriched music collection (see previous post), I've created a playlist just for this evening with the most reflective songs. I'm listening to it as I write. It includes tunes from Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, the Corries, Kate Wolf, Judy Collins, Cherish the Ladies, Sweet Honey in the Rock and a group I didn't previously know about, Cry Cry Cry. They are richly rewarding.

There's a New Year's Eve program on TV with Garrison Keillor. I may or may not actually turn it on. I may or may not actually stay up until midnight. I may or may not just turn off the lights and sit silent in the dark, watching the fire and listening to its music.

Addendum: I fiddled around until about 11:30, then decided to turn on the TV. The channel was set at C-Span 2, Book TV, with Karen Armstrong talking about her new book on Islam. It was so fascinating that I forgot all about the New Year's program until precisely 12 midnight. Then I couldn't find the TV remote, which had slipped under the coffee table, and then I figured it was too late. So that's my New Year's Eve experience: pigging out on sweet music, fire and Islamic thought.

I think it's a trend. I only heard one firecracker go off at midnight.

Peace on Earth

MGM Cartoon 1939 Peace On Earth
Video sent by shawshawshaw

Christmas Dreams

Christmas. Always such a stressful season. We work so hard to achieve--or avoid--the fantasy. This year I put aside the ambitions and the worries. Nina came up and actually stayed with us for a week. She brought back episodes of "Due South," a silly but fun detective show about a true-blue Canadian mountie who finds himself in the gritty world of Chicago crime.

In a spectacular act of self interest, I got her the first season of "West Wing" for Christmas. We watched some of it together and Nina the first disc with us to watch later. That and "Due South" will keep us mindlessly entertained for a week or two.

Friday before Christmas, we got the tree. Our choice was between the one Christmas tree farm that was still open--when did they start closing the Christmas tree farms before Christmas eve?--which wanted $40 for any sized tree in stock, and that meant those conical sheared monstrosities that seem to be all the rage; or a Christmas tree lot that was actually more interested in getting rid of their trees than in stiffing the customer. We got a small tree--which is what we wanted--for $12.

Our Christmas ornaments consist of a number of small pine cones I've gathered over the years and spray-painted gold, and paper snowflakes we've made over a decade or so out of round white coffee filters. And tinsel. Sorry, folks, it's one of those childhood tradition things. I remember when the tinsel was actually made of metal--aluminum I think, and my mother and I would carefully separate the fragile strands. Now tinsel is made of mylar, is unbreakable, and comes in silver, gold, white, red, whatever color you want. I chose gold.

We have those little Christmas lights, but one string had gone defunct. Fortunately, the tree was small. Fortunately, I had picked up some more lights at a garage sale over the summer, quite a long string for $1. Well, it turned out the new string was more than just a string of lights. Depending on how you set the dial, its 8 settings flashed and blinked, faded all at once or by color, chased, alternated or did all of these by turns.

I strung the lights around the the walls above the windows and doors, and Steve soon discovered the delights of lying on the floor in the middle of the room and watching the lights go through their changes. He's one guy who doesn't need to get loaded to get high.

Nina is still hobbling around on crutches with a broken foot. So the week of her visit was a matter of being at her beck and call for many of her needs. It caused me to get behind in my work--why did I take on an assignment that was due two days after Christmas?--but it was kind of fun in a way. My task during her upbringing was to try to make her as self-sufficient as possible. I no longer have to fulfill that role, so I can spoil her as much as I want. She's so much fun to have around. We have our shared delights, and those interests we don't share tend to be ones she shares with Steve.

Sky came up for Christmas morning, even though it meant getting up at 8 a.m. Actually closer to 8:30. He was cross when I called, but promised to arrive by 11 if I made popovers. Deal!

Sky gave me an iPOD Nano! ("So you'll be cool!" "You mean I wasn't cool before?" "Yes, but now people will know it.") This is not an item I would have thought to ask for, and I was completely surprised. Truth is, I haven't listened to much music lately, so I was initially dubious about what I would use the iPOD for. Then I realized I could download podcasts of my favorite radio shows and listen to them while I worked in the garden or did housework.

But what has actually happened is that I've started listening to music again. Sky gave me a whole bunch of Beatles songs and Nina gave me her entire folk collection. I've been going through the music, selecting my favorites and rating them. So I have this gift of wonderful music and a way to listen to it without being chained to my computer.

After opening our presents, we journeyed to San Francisco for Christmas dinner at my mom's house. Many years ago we decided to give actual gifts only to the kids. But it was still okay to give cookies or a modest homemade gift basket to adults. Well, the adult gifts got more and more elaborate, with marathon baking sessions alternating with elaborate assemblages of chocolate, cheese, wine or jellies from Costco--in short, stuff that merely served to challenge whatever New Year's resolution we might have made in respect to health, nutrition and simple living.

This year we finally decided to put the brakes on the potlatch. Each person drew a name in advance to give a gift to, and I got my mom. It was so relaxing to have just one present to open. It was nice that the room wasn't so full of presents that we couldn't get close to the tree.

It was also a smaller group, with fewer children. Our children have all grown up! The branch of the family that is now working on a new generation has finally decided to hold their own separate celebration. So instead of 26 to 30 people, there were only 18 in my mother's smallish condo atop Diamond Heights. All of them adults or within shouting distance of adulthood.

Dinner was the quintessential American feast: king turkey and his obligatory constellation of mushy, gooey and sweetened courtiers--mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, creamed string beans, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce. The dinner you absolutely can't get in a restaurant.

We came home with one of Mama's canes for Nina to try out as a replacement for crutches. Naturally, she had to practice walking like House, and arranged to be photographed leaning on the cane next to a piano and popping a pill from a borrowed pill tube. (A sham, of course, since Nina is incapable of swallowing a Vicodin-sized pill even with water, let alone dry, as House does it.)

From Ben and Christine, a framed photo from their wedding.

My intended gift to my mom was to scan all the really old family pictures, which I have in my possession, but what with everything else, I ran out of time, so decided to concentrate on one picture of my mom at age 4, romping in the river with my grandpa. I scanned the black and white photo and hand colored it. It's not perfect, being my very first effort at hand coloring, but it's amazing how it made the subjects stand out from the background.

It was a touching experience, selecting the flesh of these two people who are my flesh and blood, and experimenting with skin tones for them. I felt a newly intimate connection to my grandfather, who died 50 years ago.

U.S. lawmakers urge action after China meeting - washingtonpost.com

U.S. lawmakers urge action after China meeting - washingtonpost.com

It's like the war on drugs. Instead of providing incentives for our citizens to stop using drugs, we threaten other countries who sell us drugs.

Now, we're disgruntled with China because they keep selling us cheap goods. Instead of encouraging people not to buy those goods (and using tariffs to make it harder for corporations to make huge profits with foreign goods), we are warning them of "consequences" if they keep it up.

We are in debt to China up to our eyeballs. Is there anything we as citizens can do to stop the river of money flowing to China? Something to think about next time you're browsing the aisles of Walmart for more cheap crap that you'll throw away in a few months when the shine wears off.

My plan to save the world--a work in progress

[This is a work in progress. I will be supplying links and further thoughts over a period of time.]

Top threats to our survival:

Global warming
Global warming
Global warming
The dying oceans
The dying oceans
Spiraling U.S. budget and trade deficits
Widespread groundwater depletion
The handing of our political process, including voting process, to private profit-making interests
The coming healthcare crisis
Our dependence on foreign energy

Terrorism? Not even on the radar. Terrorism has always been around; it's just that we've never been hit in a major way before. Solving terrorism is simple: treat all nations in an honorable fashion; develop our own lasting energy solutions; avoid wars of aggression. When we do this, terrorists will quickly lose interest in us and refocus on terrorizing each other.

Sounds glib? Arrogant? Lacking in specifics? Prove me wrong. Let's have some dialogue.

As long as we're being arrogant....

Here's how to solve the energy crisis:

• Solar panels on every roof--using newer solar technologies that are more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.
• Wind turbines on every farm in the great plains (and wherever else agriculture and wind coexist).
• Transfer of research money and tax supports from the oil industry to alternative technology, to perfect solar, wind, tidal and other sources of non-fossil energy.
• Acknowledgment that when you factor in the cost of tax breaks for the oil industry, health effects of burning fuel, global warming costs and the cost of wars to protect our oil interests, oil and fossil fuels are far more expensive than every known alternative energy source.
• Mandatory plug-in hybrid technology for every vehicle--the electricity to be generated by by power plants during the night, but even more, by those solar panels on every roof and wind turbines on Midwestern farms.
• Limited use of biodiesel--there are not enough biodiesel resources to convert our whole automotive fleet to biodiesel, but it can be a component of our fuel supply.
• A distributed energy model in which energy is produced and distributed locally, rather than massive power plants supplying energy to distant areas.
• A massive investment in public transportation. Public transportation is a public good, and as such should be subsidized, just as we now subsidize our highways. Just as we don't expect our highways to pay for themselves, we shouldn't expect public transportation to be self-sufficient.
• Strong government involvement in implementing these changes. Why? because private industry sees no incentive to do it themselves. (Environmentally friendly practices can actually benefit private industry, but that's another story, and few industries are up to speed on the benefits.)
  

(Here's a story touching on the government role in protecting our environment: I recently had a discussion with my sister-in-law about low-flow toilets. Among the tribulations of the house she bought a few years ago were low-flow toilets that weren't quite up to the task. Why, she asked, did the government have to get involved in mandating toilets that don't work? The answer is, once the technology becomes mandatory, the genius of American manufacturing will come up with solutions. My sister-in-law's toilets from the first--fairly inadequate--generation of low-flow toilets weren't very good, but the toilets being produced today are vastly superior. I've replaced my old-fashioned toilets with them and found them to work just fine. Without the government requirement, low-flow technology might never have advanced. When my sister-in-law gets over her resentment about government intervention in her life and replaces her first-generation low-flow toilets, she will be pleasantly surprised at how well the new ones work.)

How NOT to solve the energy crisis:

• Ethanol. While there is an argument to be made for using waste materials to generate ethanol, growing corn for that purpose is self-defeating, even though the the taxpayer-funded federal subsidies are a boon for midwestern farmers and the politicians who do their bidding. Growing corn is energy and water intensive. The water comes from our rapidly depleting Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies the Great Plains states with drinking and irrigation water. Massive amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers are required. And by diverting a food staple to fuel, we are compromising our food supply. I'd limit ethanol production to agricultural waste, and even then we have to recognize that by not recycling this waste directly to the fields, we are impoverishing our farmlands.
• Fuel from coal. Our access to coal is almost unlimited. We could develop technology to convert coal energy to fuel for our cars for 1,000 years. But this doesn't solve the global warming problem. We could develop promising technologies that sequester the carbon dioxide from coal and store it in undergound caves or beneath the sea, but I consider this approach dangerous. Global warming is already releasing naturally stored carbon dioxide in water and frozen land. Besides, the technology already exists to make coal plants more efficient and to reduce costs in the long run, but only one coal plant is using the technology because start-up costs are higher in the beginning.
• Drilling in the Arctic, Gulf of Mexico, national reserves or wherever. How can we justify despoiling our environment for the tiny supplies of oil this will yield, when every ounce of oil burned will only worsen global warming crisis?