Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas! I hope you're not offended that I used the C-word, but in my defense, I am not a particularly religious holiday observer. I attend Christmas Eve church services when we are at one mother's house or another, but this holiday has always been about presents, decorations, family, and goodwill in my book. You show me a day when every store in America is closed,* and I will show you a secular holiday.

I suspect Christmas gains at least some of its power from its ties to the winter solstice and the beginning of a new year. Combining the message of peace and goodwill with the reflection and renewal of year's end creates a potent cocktail of emotion. Evergreen foliage, drinks made from eggs and cakes full of fruit, red, green and gold color scheme -- it's a Technicolor holiday for sure.

Life is a chain -- a line made of circles -- and this is the time when one link is closed and the next begun. Not coincidentally, December and January see more funerals than any other months of the year. (The most births are in August.)

There is comfort in the constancy of the seasons, and a reminder that history repeats, or at least rhymes.  Boxing up an old year and opening a shiny new one flavored with Christmas cheer brings a sense of relief and hopefulness, despite the fact that exactly nothing has changed except the date. Our traditions fortify these feelings.

I haven't written as much this year as some others, either professionally or here. I have always been a cyclical journalist, so I am neither particularly surprised nor distressed. Writing for me is inherently reflective, and I have been looking forward and outward this year, acting more than thinking.  My career change to academia inspired a great deal of self examination. I feel now like I am finding my identity, and steadily becoming a more competent professional me. My home life is as pleasant and stable as it has been at any time in my life. In short, I am currently too happy and boring to have much to write about.

But life is change, and this year is likely to see its share. A number of potential disruptions are floating about, personally and professionally. Career opportunities, home projects, unexplained rashes. I may buy a new car. And there will be the unexpected gifts from the fates. The quiet times never last forever, partially because I get bored. I try to savor the constancy while it lasts.

I hope you have a great holiday season and a wonderful 2015. Let's be careful out there.

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* With the exception of Asian restaurants and movie theaters, of course.

The melting pot

It's been a pretty good New Year's holiday, considering I'm still intermittently clocking a hundred point something fever, and if I cough one more time I'm afraid the top of my head will come off. But at least I don't feel like my skin is icy-hot anymore, or that I'm going to need a double hip replacement before the day is out.  And my sense of taste is coming back, though that can be a mixed blessing with the stuff that's being manufactured in my head and chest. Hopefully, I'm also making a little more sense. The weekend is a bit of a blur, but I would be willing to bet that little of what I said was worth writing down.

Once again faced with the biennial 1500 mile Christmas tour, Biscuit and I decided that longer stays weren't going to make the drive any shorter, so we scheduled two nights at each homestead for a total of five days away. It ended up being only four.

All went pretty much as expected at Biscuit's parents' house. Many treats and goodies were eaten, relatives' health issues discussed, Christmas Eve candlelight service was attended, and the latest project presented for consideration. Biscuit's father is a tinkerer on a scale which typically only mad scientists approach, and a visit to the shop out back is a high point of every visit. It was sometime Monday afternoon when the weather entered my consciousness.

I had checked the forecast around 700 times before we left, because I'm a middle-aged man and that's what we do. Apart from some possible light showers on our Christmas Day drive from Biscuit's homestead to my mother's house, it seemed like clear sailing, and even a little milder than usual. But by Christmas Eve, a monster storm had appeared from nowhere and was predicted to cross our path the next day*. Luckily, it looked like we would be driving well ahead of the storm, and safely at my mother's before we saw more than cold drizzle, whatever was going to happen.

Well, "whatever" turned out to be the largest snowfall since I was in elementary school**, over a foundation of a daylong rain and an inch or so of ice. We arrived at my mother's in plenty of time for Christmas dinner, since they were predictably two hours late (and losing ground) on preparations when we arrived at mealtime. We had a lovely meal, my mother gave her annual tearful speech on how special it was to have the whole family together, and everyone got home (just barely) before the roads became impassable.

Many people in my hometown are rethinking the whole "dreaming of a white Christmas" idea. The trees on the right are normally taller than the house, but are bent almost flat by the snow load.  Everyone in my family got power back on the fourth day, which is quite good by hurricane standards. Of course, after a hurricane we typically don't have to worry about freezing to death.

Little Rock is a city of steep hills and many trees. On Boxing Day morning it was also a city largely without electricity, nine inches of snow and ice on the streets, and exactly four snow plows. Since only one of my siblings had electricity (and heat), and since his house has four fewer than the six bedrooms required to put up the family, we decided that home was the better part of valor, arranged for my brother to fetch my mother, and we set off for our own blessedly electrified house. We had to shovel our way out of my mother's cul de sac, but after that we had no real problems getting home.

We observed another tradition of this trip, which is that one of us bring home a cold or the flu. This year was my turn. Probably because I dared to enter a church. I started to feel that nagging rawness at the back of my throat on the drive home on Wednesday, and by Thursday night I was feverish and unable to sleep. I've spent most of the last week tossing and turning on various horizontal surfaces around the house, coughing, and browsing for things on the Internet that I immediately forget having seen. But one or two things have managed to stick in my frying brain.

The diversity of New Year's traditions listed by my FB friends over the last couple of days reminded me that the American Culture many of us were raised to believe in is a myth, or at least a subculture made up of a dwindling -- if influential -- minority. Television would have us believe that we all party hearty on the Eve, and then watch football and make resolutions all the next day. I know millions of people do that -- I have been one on occasion -- but it may not be as common as some people at Disney or NewsCorp would have us think. I know a lot of people with different ideas on how to commemorate the turning of the year. Many African Americans pile into churches on New Year's Eve to hear the Emancipation Proclamation read aloud -- a tradition considerably older than college bowl games. Most Southerners that I know share the tradition of eating black-eyed peas for luck on New Year's Day, but the details of the meal vary widely from region to region, and even family to family. (We had black-eyed pea hummus (my first attempt), coleslaw with Greek salad dressing, and Mediterranean pork tenderloin.***)

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here, except that when I was a kid we heard a lot about America as the melting pot of different cultures and traditions. We celebrated the diversity of our origins, but assumed that all of the pieces would merge into some homogeneous American fondue. A great many people still believe in this vision, and more than a few of them think we have enough different flavors already. In truth, I think the United States is more of a stew pot. The flavors blend, but individual chunks remain. It's the partial blending that gives the dish its richness. Damn, now I want stew.

In any case, Happy New Year Internet Friends, however you celebrate. And whatever your hopes and dreams may be for this year, I hope enough of them come true to make this your best year yet.

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* I'm not sure when was the last time I saw local television weather-casters so confused by a storm. They had essentially predicted somewhere between zero and ten inches of snow for Biscuit's parents, with the promise that they would have a better idea "tomorrow", which was of course the day the storm arrived.

** When we still didn't know what the Moon was made of.

*** In Southern Louisiana the tradition tends to go black-eyed peas for luck, cabbage for money, and pork for good health.

Fathers Day

When I get angry, or a find some significant piece of my world view collapsing around me, I work. I can't help it, it's one of those things I got from my father. We're passive-aggressive white protestants, what can I say? So, when on this fine Father's Day I found myself ready to tackle a serious project, I headed outside and my gaze landed on the plastic pond that the old man had given me several years ago. Like much of what I've gotten from him, I didn't ask for it, didn't particularly want it, but didn't seem to be able to leave it behind anywhere.

The "pond," two plastic basins and a box of pumpy stuff, has been with us for about a decade, stuffed in the corner of the shed for most of that time, more recently leaned against the fence. After Hurricane Gustav I noticed that the larger piece was a fair fit for a hole left by the uprooted gum tree that took out the old shed, and I dragged it up there to check. I even dug around a little at one point, but mostly it's just been sitting there, a big black vinyl reminder of my endless to-do list.

I thought I might dig around for a few minutes and make a little progress before going on to other things. There is very little that is more grounding than digging a hole. It is both physically demanding and undeniably objective. There are no shades of grey -- just a growing cavity and a matching pile of dirt.

So a few minutes turned into all day, and at the end of it both basins were (more or less) in the ground, filled with water, and the pump assembly was miraculously complete and working, despite having knocked around in an open box for ten years. There is, of course, much more to do. Landscaping and rock work, plants, and maybe a goldfish or two. I've actually made my to-do list longer by crossing off one thing. But it's a thing, and sometimes doing a thing has to be enough.

It will look better with some plants and stones. 

Hey, is that a tomato pergola in the background there?

The strangest thing about the whole episode is that I was out there at least four hours before it ever occurred to me that there might be a link between the day and my choice of project. I would be tempted to dismiss it as coincidence, but the tie is so clear that it's hard to buy. Fathers Day has been a strange sort of occasion for me since my father passed away, and I'm apparently still finding my way through this. Minds are awfully strange things, and I often suspect mine of being stranger than most.

That's a wrap!

Is it just me, or has it been a strange year? Of course it has. Most years are strange when you look back on them, because we live in a weird world. Maybe I'm just getting more attuned to the oddity of it all.

For us, the big news for the year was the BP oil spill, which now seems to have faded from the collective consciousness. Not quite as big of a bust as the last visit of Halley's comet, but I got the distinct impression that newspeople and environmentalists* were really hoping for more oil-covered birds and blackened beaches. Given our national addiction to oil, they will have to content themselves with unknown long-term environmental damage, and the chance for a repeat as we continue to push aggressively into deeper water. Maybe we will eventually awaken Godzilla.

Only slightly less believable than the twists and turns of the BP story was the New Orleans Saints winning Super Bowl XXIV. Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still a shadow of its former self, and the character of the (non French Quarter) city has probably changed forever, but that silly football game was probably more significant for the residents than any sporting event since the Miracle on Ice in 1980,

Politics seemed to get even stranger, if that's possible. The nation's ability to believe things for which there is considerable counter-evidence continues to increase, as evidenced by the fact that our most influential politician is a belligerently ignorant housewife/governor/reality star who two-thirds of the population believes to be either dangerously unqualified or some sort of sinister media mastermind. Delaware came very close to electing a witch to congress. Okay, not a witch (I saw the commercial), but I'm sure Christine O'Donnell was one of those crazy drama majors in the dorm who burned incense all the time, held seances, and probably wore a cape.

I'm currently reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and it has taught me two things. First, the issues in politics haven't changed at all in a hundred years. In 1910, the big issues of the day were Arab nationalists blowing things up, and giant corporations taking over the government. But if the issues haven't changed, the people in politics certainly have.  Roosevelt wrote around eighteen books (most in several volumes), not just about himself. He was an avid naturalist, historian, and pursuer of "the strenuous life." He led a cavalry charge and earned a brown belt in judo after he detached a retina and had to give up boxing. He was shot in the chest in an assassination attempt and still gave the speech he was scheduled to deliver. He had beliefs, and didn't care who knew them. He would never get elected today.

But I digress. Biscuit and I had a pretty good year overall. We managed to stay hurricane-free, and actually made up some ground on our home improvement project backlog. I am very close to finishing the never-ending bathroom remodel. The cats stayed healthy, I finally finished Moby Dick, we saw Buddy Guy in concert, and we got to see a shuttle launch.

We did lose an old and dear family friend a week before Christmas, but that seems to be part of my life now. My parents' generation is on the far side of the current expected lifespan, and very few months go by without another one passing on to what my grandfather termed "whatever is next."

Oh, I totally spaced on Movie Sunday last week. My excuse is that I was driving all day, traveling from the wine-fueled chaos that is my family Christmas to a more sedate late holiday celebration at the in-laws. I'll be back at it this week, but in the meantime you can enjoy Amy's review of True Grit. It's better than anything I could have written, anyway.

Anyway, it's been a good year, is the point. And I hope you have at least as good a year in 2011 as I had in 2010.

Happy New Year, everybody!

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* I'm a huge advocate of preserving nature, the importance of biodiversity, etc., and probably maintain more extreme views of the importance of environment vs. economic development than many Sierra Club members. But I am wary of organized movements. It seems the successful ones always end up with money as their primary goal, and the rest usually fall under the control of a small group of zealots.

A Christmas wish

So maybe it hasn't been our most festive Christmas season ever. It's the second year in row we've had a Christmas week funeral, and we have both had quite a bit of stress from various quarters. We have managed almost no decorations, or shopping, or baking, or any of the other things that tend to put one in the spirit.

But sometimes the hard years are just what it takes to remind us of how delicate and fleeting it all is, and how special this time of year. The nadir of the year, the time when it is always darkest, brings with it the promise of the dawn. There is nothing that encourages us in quite the same way as singing in the graveyard. The Joy that can be had from being with family (no matter how aggravating), exchanging gifts that no one wants, eating and drinking way too much, and reflecting on the turning of the years and the promise of Christmas, just cannot be had at any other time of the year.

So on this holiest of days for Christians and retailers, we wanted to let our favorite holiday decoration deliver our message for the season. I'm not sure where young Frostie was programmed, but I suspect it's a country where English is not commonly spoken. I'm not sure what a coin top pipe is, but I'm sure they are nice.

Watch the video. You know you want to.

So from Biscuit, the cats, and me, here's wishing you a very lively I don't know. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Home improvement

I haven't really felt bloggy much lately. For one thing, I'm writing pretty seriously for work at the moment, and it takes most of my mental focus. That is, when I'm not drinking wine and watching movies. There's also a fairly traumatic family thing going on these days. I started to write about that, but I don't think I will.

About the only creative thing I've managed to do lately is to make up a word during a most awesome movie we watched the other night. The word is "eurotard." Yeah, I was pretty proud of it, myself.* If I had any patience I would wait for a suitable situation to use it, instead of just tossing it out there like a sweaty black turtleneck. But I don't. So I did.

Things might be looking up, though. This weekend, the wife and I are planning to replace some really large, really old windows in the house. I'm thinking we may get some pictures of serious destruction, and maybe even have a story of a trip to the emergency room. Or two.

Happy Independence Day!

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* I know I'm not the first person to think of it. I can google like everyone else. Better than some. But I'm pretty sure I haven't heard it before, so I'm keeping it. Also, I think it's brilliant that there is a line of dance clothing with that name.

Christmas Blessings

It wasn't the best Christmas week on record. It included 1400 miles of driving, most of it in weather ranging from bad to "oh my god we're all going to die." Most of the clan (myself included) had trouble finding inspiration for gifts this year,* leaving those who really worked at it feeling somewhat taken advantage of. And the schedule was tight enough that there was only one day in seven that didn't include planned activities, and I was tagged to cook most of that day.

There was also the Christmas Eve Wine-and-Philosophy Slam, which led directly to The Hangover That Ruined Christmas. This was not my hangover, which was impressive in its own right. This particular prize goes to one of my relatives, who was already Christmas cheerful on the 24th when we arrived after an eight hour drive through Noah's flood. After getting me a glass of wine to calm my nerves, he continued to open giant bottles long after anyone with an iota of sense had gone to bed. My brother and I, not wanting to be rude, kept him company. I was the only one in the group that was up both before and after noon.

We spent the day after Christmas at an impromptu family reunion, which was both welcomed and ill-timed. I saw relatives I had not seen in years, and some I had yet to meet. I'm sure it will be the last time I see some of them in person. But it was clear that virtually everyone in the room was exhausted, and we struggled to do much more than smile at each other.

The second half of the week was spent at a combined Christmas and 50th wedding anniversary celebration with the in-law clan. The Wife found a great big house on a lake to rent in hopes that we could all spread out enough that we might not try to kill each other. Her plan was largely successful.

Throughout the week there were the inevitable slights, snubs, snide comments and bruised feelings that are part and parcel of family gatherings. Someone said a couple of weeks ago that our families are hard-wired to get on our nerves,** and this year was more evidence in support of this theory. Each holiday together features incidents or comments that are so bizarre or surreal that I wonder if they really happened at all, and immediately begin convincing myself that I must have misremembered or misinterpreted. These people are so like me in so many ways that normal social conventions and defenses don't work. But they are so different and "other" that sometimes it feels like they (or I) might be from another planet.

We drove home yesterday through light snow and then heavy rain, and The Wife is already showing signs of coming down with something. I won't even talk about the thing with the cat-sitter.*** It is easy at such times to swear never again and try to put the whole thing behind us. But someone way smarter than I am said once that life is too short to live in a way that makes us wish it were shorter, so I try to find some value and enjoyment in every experience.

My late father's best friend, and practically a second father to me, never saw this Christmas, and his wife and children spent the holiday mourning the loss of their patriarch. Another dear and lifelong friend spent most of the week in the hospital after her husband's surprise emergency surgery. They face tremendous challenges this coming year. We took group pictures at the family reunion, and the first shot was of my parents' generation. When my mother looked at the picture she said, "Surely there are more of us left than that."

The end of the year is a time for looking forward, but for me it is also a time to savor the fullness -- and yes, the bitterness -- of life. Every holiday season is an opportunity that will not be repeated, and I will try not to waste a single one. Time I spend with my relatives helps me understand them -- and myself -- better, and somehow makes me feel less alone. I learned things. I played in snow. I beat my brother-in-law at pool. I got an electric wine opener. It's all good.

Happy New Year, everyone. Say goodbye to the twenty-oh's. I predict this next year is going to be interesting.

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* Think brightly colored carabiners and LED flashlights.

** I think it was Dr. Drew on GMA. I am very discriminating about where I obtain my medical information.
*** The cats are fine.

It's beginning to look smell a lot like Christmas

I walked into a major department store the other day and immediately noticed that the melange of perfumes typical of such establishments had blended with the holiday scents of candles and other items to produce the aroma of ... well ... vomit. It was more than a little disgusting, though faint, and the smell faded as I walked through the store. I had just begun to convince myself that I had imagined it, or that some poor unfortunate customer or employee had been having a worse day than me, when I walked into another store and was greeted by exactly the same scent. Actually it was worse, possibly because I was entering next to the cosmetics area.

You would think that someone would have noticed this unfortunate combination of scents, but maybe it's one of those things to which people quickly grow accustomed, in the same way that you can't smell the bar on your clothes until the next morning. And even if they notice, I'm not sure what can be done. I choose to think of it as a preview of New Year's Eve.

Oh, well. 'Tis the season, I suppose. Happy Holidays!

Free Spirit!

I've been fascinated by the Mars rovers ever since the Number Five-looking things made it through Martian Civil Defense and landed on the red planet. I know the word "hero" gets tossed around a lot these days, but if these little robots aren't heroes then neither is the person who calls 911 when they see someone in danger.

The nerds at JPL couldn't be any happier than I am that the rovers have lasted this long, or more worried about little Spirit getting stuck. So I've been following the effort to free the little guy for the last couple of months, keeping up with the rovers on Twitter, and generally irritating the crap out of my wife by telling her how much the right front wheel rotated on the last test, or making her look at pictures of what look like random areas of New Mexico or Utah.

So, does she ignore me, or tell me to grow up or get aggravated because I spend so much of my attention focused literally millions of miles away? Well, maybe a little. Can you blame her? But mostly she listens patiently, and looks at the stupid pictures, and then buys me this for Christmas.

So boys and girls, my Christmas wish for you is that you have (or find) someone who will give you things that make you happy, even when they know that they will have to look at (if not step on) the little pieces all over the house for months afterward. That's a real hero. Did I mention that she bought me a telescope as an engagement present to reciprocate for her ring? To be fair, I think my ex-wife gave me potholders or something the last Christmas we were together, and I gave her an emerald ring. I guess things average out.

Merry Christmas to me! Oh, and to the rest of you too, I guess.

Oktoberfest on the North Shore

New Orleans once boasted a number of large breweries, and was well known around the region for its beer. Falstaff, Jax, Dixie and Regal were the best known brands. But beermaking in New Orleans went the way of beermaking in most cities, and only Dixie survived, holding on as a local sentimental favorite.

Beer-making in earnest returned to the area in the 1990's, in the form of Abita Brewing Co., which started as a brew pub in the 80's and is now something of a regional powerhouse. Abita Springs (where Abita is located) is north of Lake Pontchartrain, an area known locally as "the north shore." During the 90's and the first part of this decade, other small breweries sprung up around New Orleans and the north shore, and beermaking looked to be on the verge of a comeback.


Map from Google Maps

Hurricane Katrina sealed the fates of most of the new breweries, and the fate of the north shore in a different way. The 50 miles or so between the I-12 junction with I-55 and its eastern junction with I-10/59 has been growing fairly rapidly for at least 20 years, but the population of the area has exploded since the hurricane. I know a lot of people who evacuated from the New Orleans area to one of the communities there and never went back, and more who returned to New Orleans and then relocated to the north shore a year or two later.


Image from here

One of the breweries that opened without much fanfare around the turn of the millennium was Heiner Brau in Covington. Started by a German brew master named Henryk "Heiner" Orlik, the brewery has supplemented its own brands by brewing "store brand" beers for some well known area restaurants. They even brewed some Dixie beer in the aftermath of the hurricane. Over the last few years, the brand has really started to take off, and is available in a large number of local groceries and watering holes.

Being German, Heiner probably feels compelled to put on an Oktoberfest celebration, if for no other reason so that he and his family can attend one. The Wife first learned of the brewery because of the involvement of the brother of her BFF from childhood, so the BFF often comes down from the midwest and we roll over there for the party.


Image from here

This year's celebration is this coming Saturday. Munich it's not, but fun it definitely is. There is a 5K in the morning (no thank you), some family and shopping time in the middle of the day, and around 2 pm the oompah band starts up in the big tent, and the beer and brats start to flow. That's usually when we show up. The crowd's not too big, and the beer's not too expensive, and it's the only Oktoberfest for hundreds of miles that I know of. And if you hang around and look interested, you might get a tour of the brewery. It's small, but it's spunky. Oh, and did I mention the beer is excellent?

So if you find yourself within 100 miles of Covington, LA this Saturday and you feel like a polka*, you should drop by. Maybe we'll see you there.
_________________________________
*That's what she said.

Eight(y) is Enough

The last things I thought I would be talking about when I started this blog were death and old age and other depressing shit like that. But that's what's been happening in my life, so there you go and there you have it and there you are. Anyway, if you're not depressed enough by the post-holiday-economic-meltdown-seasonal-affective blues, let's see what we can do about that.

I sent my father's widow (I've never been able to call her my stepmother, since I was in my 30's when they married) a Christmas card, and got this message in reply:

I hope this is still your correct email address. Merry Christmas to you and (wifey)! I appreciate your remembering me this year. My life is very quiet now and I don't drive very much anymore, so I stay home a lot. Some of my friends cannot even do that. Enjoy each other and do all the things that you wish to do while you and young and able.
Love,

I mean, Holy Shit! What am I supposed to do with that, besides everything in my power to make sure I don't live that long? After sitting alone in the dark for a couple of weeks with a bottle of Jack and a loaded handgun, I decided that the only thing any of us can do is to take her advice. My father went through several careers and started a number of companies, the last when he was 79. He used to say that when a door closed on our lives (NO! Not the window thing!) it was time to pick up whatever we had left and head on down the road. (Whew! Close one.) My father was full of crap about a lot of stuff, but I think he had this one right.

Life is too short, people. And to paraphrase someone smarter than I, it's definitely too short to live it in a way that makes us wish it were shorter. It's also too precious to spend it beating ourselves up because we're too fat or we don't make enough money or our job sucks or we already broke our resolution or our loser <pick one> left us for some <pick again>. I can go on...no?... you get the idea?... good, because we were about to go blue.

So be happy today. Do something you've always wanted to do. Or watch reruns and eat a whole box of Cheeze-its. And if you end up never visiting the Parthenon, don't beat yourself up about it. The thing we can never do later is live our life the way we wanted to live it at the time.

If I weren't so lazy/busy, I would go find one of those Bon Jovi smiley face things to put here. You will have to use your imagination.

Happy Holidays

The years that it's good, Christmas is hard to beat.



I think it's the quiet. Happy Happy, y'all.