This rain that soaks us through

It's June in the Pacific Northwet. The weather prognosticators tell us we can expect nothing warmer than 57° (13° C) today and, of course, it is pouring rain. This is quintessential June weather for us. The weather of every sodden June camping trip, every underwhelming June vegetable garden, every long distance stare into the ever-out-of-reach mirage-like notion of summer.

Most of my hiking/camping memories are cradled in the associations of rain. Rain slick creek-side rocks and boulders, fern-rich undergrowth tightly holding fists full of gathered rainwater with which to drench passing jeans, and an ever-dripping canvas of pine trees that didn't so much provide cover from the steady rain as slow it down to a fine steady mist, like flour passing through a giant sifter.


Gary Snyder conjurs some of this in his poem Endless Streams And Mountains, as he follows streams from a lake or river up into many mountains and past several stories. It isn't a rain poem, per se, but my associations of mountain streams invariably dress the mental imagery his poem conjures in wet and steady rain:

Clearing the mind and sliding in
to that created space,
a web of waters steaming over rocks,
air misty but not raining,
seeing this land from a boat on a lake
or a broad slow river,
coasting by.

Because of our rain we are lush, verdant, elaborately and explosively green, redundantly so. There is something comforting about this combination of really wet and really green to those of us born to it. I think we must be rocked to sleep so often by the sound of falling water spattering against foliage and the tangibly expressed humidity of rain that it seeps into our subconscious to become the definition of calm.

Then we grow older and have to commute in the stuff and it begins to form new associations. Ask the many high school age kids I pass on my way in this morning, miserably absorbing the rain without coats or umbrellas (uncool garb), sulkily ignoring each other in small loose groups as they wait for a bus they don't want to take.

Ask the freeway commuter whose already-tedious crawl becomes an instant creep while drivers fail to account for reduced visibility, wet pavement, and failing patience. Ask the parent at home with small children who will not-be-going-outside-in-this-downpour-thank-you-very-much! Ask the employee who works with his or her hands in the outdoors, who knows no amount of rain gear will keep them warm and dry throughout a full day of this rain.

Me, though, I have a short freeway-less commute. Four or five songs worth of travel time, half a dozen at most. I won't get my shot at being wet until I walk from my office to meetings on the main campus, a short half-mile through dripping greenery full of the smell of damp earth.

Driving in this morning, the wipers are swiping someplace within the signature time of the music, while Michele Legrand languidly slides from one rhythm to the next amid a thousand dazzling piano notes. The iPod favors jazz this morning, with Bob James up next followed by Ellington and his band. Just as I pull into the campus parking lot the iPod shifts to a little Rocco DeLuca, and the tempo changes.

Today's full playlist:
- Michel Legrand: Les Enfants Qui Pleurent
- Bob James Trio: Nightcrawler
- Duke Ellington: Arabesque Cookie
- Rocco DeLuca and the Burden: Bright Lights (Losing Control)


- Posted via Hermes.

Blessedly beyond bandwidth

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in a quaint little Bavarian-esque mountain town on a beautifully warm and sunny morning, enjoying a couple of days of decidedly non-commuting. This morning's playlist has been selected by Starbucks and has been a steady stream of classic jazz gems that are giving my calf muscles a steady workout as I irresistibly tap along. Temps are expected to reach the mid to upper 80's (25° C or so) today.

The sun sits someplace up beyond the roofline of the building we are in, casting a shadow-theatre of landing and shuffling birds (on the roof above us), elongated and cartoonish, over the pavement and parked cars just outside the window next to me. It creates a constant sense of movement in my right peripheral vision, pulling my glance out the window and onto the not-very-distant Cascade mountain peaks limned in golden light. "Remember," it quietly but persistently whispers, "why you are here."

The coffee shop allows my wife and I to get a little necessary work done by tapping into both their caffeine and their wireless bandwidth, the latter being almost non-existent at the place we are staying. You can pretty well predict what you will find at any hotel or resort that advertises "complimentary wireless" in guest rooms: the meanest hint of a wireless router located someplace just on the fringe of your device's range, flickering in and out of reach. Or, if the router is within reach, it will deliver the sort of bandwidth that feels like an occasional quarter-teaspoon of crawling access. It doesn't help that cellular data service in the area is just as bad.

At a large bustling urban hotel I can almost understand this, what with the rapid explosion of bandwidth-hogging mobile devices and the threadbare profit margins of the hospitality industry. But we're staying in a rambling estate of a resort with small cabin clusters and (if our count is correct) a total of three other parties besides ourselves. The "complimentary wireless" should hardly be taxed. Maybe our cabin's router is located a couple of clusters down the path? After quite a bit of experimentation, I discovered that sitting on the toilet allows me to pick up just enough wireless access to sl.....o.....o.....o.....ly pull up a couple of web pages to check on local attractions.

Still, this is the only disappointment in our destination, which is otherwise charming, beautiful, and tranquil. It makes for a perfect short getaway destination, and offers the chance to restfully recalibrate our internal compasses, if only for a couple of days.

After this brief coffee-shop work break we will do a little more top-down canyon carving (and probably find the magic source of Aplets and Cotlets) before coming back to our temporary resort, with it's tantalizingly teasing "complimentary wireless," to walk the trails along the river, find a warm chair or rock from which to catch up on reading, or to just sit and talk.

And, really, how much bandwidth do we need, under these circumstances, anyway?

- Posted via Hermes.

Not a turning-fifty post

Beautiful sun-draped early morning Thursday and the top was down on the Miata all the way in. Heater was cranked, though, to combat the low 40's (about 6° C) — I'm not that crazy. Bird song was in evidence everywhere along my casual short commute.

Thursday is the great pretender, trying to trick us into believing the weekend is almost here. When he robes himself in golden sunlight he is even more plausible. I can almost taste the weekend, with it's promised mid-seventies (mid-20's) sunny weather. So nice to look at a weather app and see only sun globes for a change.


There is a Board meeting this evening, where I will present our budget for next year, for first consideration. This will be the first year since I have been in this position that the legislature hasn't applied new cuts to our state funding. There are still the cuts for this coming year that were doled out at the start of the biennium, so we still see a further reduction in our state allocation, but at least it doesn't get compounded with more new cuts. [Here I shout a weak hurrah!] Our college has had our state allocation reduced over 30% in the last four years, so stitching a budget together that allows us to continue to serve our mission in our community remains a challenge. We have slid a long way down this bank, and there will be many years of climbing back up to do, assuming this still-fragile economic recovery holds.

Earlier this week I suppose I should have written a post on turning fifty, some short bit on the accumulated wisdom of my ages or something, but I didn't feel any urge to do so. Like calendars crossing century lines, turning fifty is one of those supposedly-meaningful boundaries. And maybe it is, when you eye it from afar and on the lower end perspective of the number line. It must seem impossibly old and far away. I don't remember. To those on the higher end of the number line it probably looks, peering back, as insignificant as any other mile post once you have walked past it a few more miles. I'm not really a calendars-as-significance sort of person, though. Calendars are for scheduling things that must be scheduled to keep track of, not for anticipating or recording major events. Take the calendar away and there is no significance to turning fifty (or any other age). So this paragraph is as close to a turning-fifty post as I intend to offer. I did get an offer from AARP in yesterday's mail, though.

I've been in a Sigur Rós playlist mood again lately, maybe because I am anticipating the release of their new album later this month. Good music to write to, build a budget and budget presentation to, or just to quietly turn fifty to.

Today's playlist (all Sigur Rós or Jonsi):
- Syndir Guös (opinberun frelsarans)
- Ba Ba
- Saint Naive - Live (Jonsi)
- Svefn-G-Englar


- Posted via Hermes.

Anything I care to pull out of my tickle trunk

Ahhhh. The first sip of a piping hot yerba mate latte on a quiet Sunday morning. I have travelled a-couple-of-weeks-shy-of-fifty-years through life to get to this point: able to enjoy a quiet morning when I can snatch one.


Bands of early morning sunlight stripe across the chairs next to me and suffuse the room with amber tones. Birds declare their business outside; Twitter in its original and purest format. Every tweet is short and compressed with content, informative and yet melodic beyond the range of human comprehension.

Sunday yawns in front of me as the rare uncommitted day. There is nothing I am intent on doing, nothing scheduled, nothing of the sort that passes for the illusion of certain we usually operate under.

This Sunday could be the Mr. Dressup of my childhood.


Growing up near the Canadian border in the days before cable television, we used to get Canadian programming more reliably than anything coming out of Seattle. Mr. Dressup (think early Mr. Rogers) would dive, at some point in each episode, into his "tickle trunk" and pull out a costume for himself or for the two puppet regulars, Casey and Finnigan. The costume would become the story of that show.


Today is like that. It can be anything I happen to pull out of my tickle trunk, whenever I decide to look. Probably it will include some about-the-house/yard chores, and likely it will include time to read, rocking on the back deck in the promised beautiful weather today. If I'm really good, I will ignore email today, too. We'll see.

Mary Makofske's poem Planting The Meadow catches this mood beautifully:

I leave the formal garden of schedules
where hours hedge me, clip the errant sprigs
of thought, and day after day, a boxwood
topiary hunt chases a green fox
never caught. No voice calls me to order
as I enter a dream of meadow, kneel
to earth and, moving east to west, second
the motion only of the sun. I plant
frail seedlings in the unplowed field, trusting
the wildness hidden in their hearts. Spring light
sprawls across false indigo and hyssop,
daisies, flax. Clouds form, dissolve, withhold
or promise rain. In time, outside of time,
the unkempt afternoons fill up with flowers.

My mate latte is almost gone, time to decide what today will be. And then again...

Today's full playlist: TBD

- Posted via Hermes.

Cynicism and the tollbooth

What a beautiful weekend! Here in the Pacific Northwet we are currently in that long-running stage of the seasons where a day of sunshine is worth so much, and we got most of two sunny days, three if you count Friday. What larks!

Monday morning, alas, brings the return of the grey and wet. The forecast calls for a redundancy of weather icons as far forward as the forecast reaches. Sure enough, a fine mist materializes on the windshield as I drive in this morning, wipers occasionally pushing the tiny drops into a merged stream running away to my vision's periphery.

This morning's commute shuffle-playlist is smoothly varied. It switches gears from a lively piano jazz rhumba to Rod Steward trying to croon, from R&B in both Spanish and English to Booker T. Jone's Crazy.

Listening to the latter, a series of thoughts/connections dash through my head (the commute is slow moving, traffic is heavy, lots of waiting at traffic lights, time for part of the mind to wander). Crazy; crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result; heading into the campus again on a Monday morning; working to effect change; "Why," as Bruce Cockburn sings, "does history take such a long, long time?"

Cynicism! Fresh on a Monday morning after a beautiful and satisfyingly productive weekend, cynicism. Really? So readily to hand? This brings me up short and causes me to take a quick mental inventory.

Hmmmm... I don't feel cynical about my life, my work, my commute, the college I am commuting to. So why did a simple train of thoughts deliver me so quickly to that spot? Maybe because cynicism is the low-hanging fruit of intellectual reasoning. It is like the Island of Conclusions in Norton Juster's wonderful children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth. You reach it’s stranding shores simply by making a mental jump (thus the phrase, jumping to conclusions). Cynicism works much the same way, and is dangerously easy to fall into.

And cynicism begets more cynicism. Worse, sometimes it seems witty and even smart, which makes it acceptable in polite society as an entertaining substitute for a bad attitude. But, a monkey in silk, a sow's-ear purse, or, to use the variant that saw more recent political usage, so much lipstick on a pig.

Cynicism also fails to present either a real vision of the world or a meaningful path forward. It often creates a justification for doing nothing and going nowhere. It could be the subject of this passage from The Phantom Tollbooth: "...if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones." And as Juster also points out in the same book, "The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."

By now, the Weepies are singing, startlingly presciently:

Guess I'm getting old wandering this way
Wondering what's wrong and right
You try to move along but the traffic holds you still
Or did I lose the will to fight?

Monday come like Tuesday
You were something else, I will admit
I remember what you told me
Only I wish I could forget
Only I wish I could forget

[I tell you, somedays I swear there is something sentient about the iPod's shuffle of music.]

I purpose, then, to forget to be cynical, to focus instead on the reasons I do the many things I do each day, and to be thankful for the opportunity to do them. I purpose to walk with my eyes open and to ignore the things best seen through closed eyes. It takes very little more effort to do.

As one of the Tollbooth's characters points, out, "...it's not just learning that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn the things that matter."

Today's full playlist:
- Michael Camilo: Armando's Rhumba
- Rod Stewart: The Way You Look Tonight
- Raymond Castellon: Tu No Me Quieres Na
- Traveling Wilburys: Cool Dry Place
- Booker T. Jones: Crazy
- The Weepies: Wish I Could Forget


- Posted via Hermes.

Small victories

Sunshine yesterday afternoon, top down drive home, whoop! The top was still down this morning, though the skies were decidedly glowering. Still, it tosses back up quickly enough if necessary, so I braved the drive in leaving it down. The closer I got to the college to the more it looked like I'd be reaching back to quickly pull the top up over my shoulder, but I made it top-down all the way in! This feels like a small victory against another record-set tingly wet recent few weeks. Why must climate change only emphasize the worst weather characteristics of any given region?

Take a look at the near-term forecast and you will see why these small victories matter. I think pretty much all of these lines are trending in the wrong direction (screen shot from Seasonality Go for the iPad) :



The other sunshine in my life returned yesterday, too, though. My wife had taken the oldest grandson with her for a short visit to her sister's place in eastern Oregon, and I had to fly solo for a few days. I find I have a very different routine when I am on my own. I take comfort in keeping busy even more so when the alternative is talking only with myself. Oh sure, I also talk to the dogs, but they just cock their heads and look at me trying to figure out what kind of treat or exciting activity I must be offering them.

So, between the lousy weekend weather and the increased need to stay busy, I managed to bake four loaves of bread (yerba mate shredded wheat loaves), two batches of the ginger-citrus soda referenced here a couple days ago, and enough really good pizza dough to set six dough balls into the freezer for quick thaw-and-bake use later, among lots of other lessor accomplishments. Didn't get the lawn mowed, funnily enough.

Music for today's drive in was all Belle & Sebastian, from a mix of their albums (good stuff!):

- I Took a Long Hard Look
- For the Price of a Cup of Tea
- Your Secrets
- A Space Boy Dream
- Mornington Crescent

- Posted via Hermes

Ginger-Citrus Soda (a recipe)

A while back I came across a recipe on a food blog. It was one of several versions of essentially the same recipe, which probably means there is an original version out there somewhere, but it is hard to tell which is the original and which is a copy.


I have modified the recipe (upped the citrus, toned down the ginger, cut the sugar substantially). Here is my rendition (photo taken during preparation, just because it was so colorful!):





Ginger-Citrus Soda (non-alchoholic)


Ingredients:
3-4 ounces fresh ginger, coarsely chopped-no need to peel
2 limes, zest and juice
1 large blood orange, zest and juice
1/2 cup raw sugar
4 cups boiling water



Directions:
In the bowl of a food processor, process ginger until grated. Remove to a large heatproof pitcher or measuring cup. Add both lime and orange zest and juices, and sugar. Add 4 cups boiling water, then stir until the sugar dissolves. Cool, strain, then chill.


To serve, half-fill glasses with the ginger beer and top off with the soda, tonic water or sparkling mineral water.


If you have an Isi beverage carbonation thingie (http://amzn.to/HdeNdB) you can carbonate this recipe for a delicious fizzy soda.


- Posted via Hermes.