MONDAY READING

Gads, it’s been nine months since I’ve posted and March last year since I’ve done a book. That was the month I got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and my whole life skewed. Today I’m stabilized with permanent heart irregularity but no real symptoms other than way less energy and stamina. Two heart meds and a hefty aspirin a day keep my heart rate and blood pressure down to what the doctor thinks is reasonable. My great luck was having been so healthy when it happened. I’ve worked hard at that for years and it paid off. I probably own more self-help health books than your local bookstore shelf. So I’ve continued on with the retirement that began in 2006 and thank my lucky stars each day to have all this time to do as I please basically after years of suiting up and showing up. And one of the things I continue to do is read. My childhood was before TV and VCRs and DVDs so the habit was seriously formed early in contrast to my 18-year-old grandson who is about to start college and can’t even be paid to read a book that he doesn’t have to. It breaks my heart and I can only hope something in college will give him an epiphany. So one of the authors I just discovered is Temple Grandin, who wrote this book with Catherine Johnson, a PhD specializing in the brain and neuropsychiatry with two autistic children in her family. Temple Grandin is autistic herself with a PhD in animal science and is the author of several books explaining how animals think and feel to humans. She is especially famous for a “hug machine” used to alleviate anxiety by autistic people worldwide. She also focuses on reform of quality of life and humaneness of death for farm animals in the U.S. and Canada. You can see her lay down in the middle of a herd of cows in this Youtube, The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow. Here is a quote from the last page of this book: “..I’m writing this book because I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I think we owe them that.” If you want a fascinating read about all kinds of animals and what we can learn about them and do for them, this is a must.

SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

Thank god that’s over. For now anyway. There’s still two more months of winter to get through. They kept calling it the Arctic Blast here in Portland, Oregon and it hit my life the Sunday before Christmas. Twice a nearby friend got me to the store to get yet more supplies I didn’t predict I’d need but the rest of the time I sat in my house alone with my 4 cats crossing our fingers the power wouldn’t go out. It did early on for half an hour and I discovered the electric company has a dandy computerized system that told me right away how many homes in my area were hit and that they were working on finding the source and expected to have it back on within the hour. After that I bought little battery-operated lights you can tack to your walls and press when the lights go out so you don’t have to worry about setting your house on fire with candles. They were even cheap. Many times I crunched out to the bird and squirrel feeders in knee deep drifts during those 5-6 days. I pictured them huddling in tiny crevices somewhere when they weren’t foodseeking. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were solitary except for a neighbor who brought a plate of cookies by. Family time had to wait till Monday the 29th for my daughter whose highway was shut down in between our cities and New Year’s Eve day for my son and grandchildren. Altogether we had 18.9 inches last month, the most in 40 years. In fact, the previous record for snow on the ground on Christmas Day in Portland was only an inch. All the counties around me, including mine, declared emegencies. The airport was a zoo. By the time the snow began to melt, I had pretty much achieved meltdown too. It taught me a lot. About preparation, about patience, about fear, about my physical limits, and about love. Yes, love. Holidays are always Love Tests anyway. By the time my family finally reached me, each of them brought gifts of the spirit that were unique and irreplaceable. We held hands around the table briefly before we ate our meal, a few tears were shed, and once again a New Year beckoned.

Deep Thought: “Many people do not realize that the snowshoe can be used for a great many things besides walking on snow. For instance, it can be used to carry pancakes from the stove to the breakfast table. Also, it can be used to carry uneaten pancakes from the table to the garbage. Finally, it can be used as a kind of strainer, where you force pancakes through the strings to see if a piece of gold got in a pancake somehow.”
Today I am grateful for: The times I feel safe.
Guess the Movie: “The report read “Routine retirement of a replicant.” That didn’t make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back. “  Winner:  buddhacat.  Movie:  Blade Runner, 1982.
Thousands Join March to Protest Against Israeli Action
by Tracy McVeigh and Ben Quinn
Protests against the Israeli offensive in Gaza became heated last night when up to 5,000 people gathered outside the country’s London embassy. (Rest of article here.)

TUESDAY POLITICS
It’s 2:53 pm on the West Coast and way too early to see any final results by state. We did know by midnight last night that Dixville Notch, New Hampshire voted: Obama: 15, McCain: 6. Dixville Notch is traditionally Republican. All of them vote at midnight and have been the first vote counted in America since 1948. As for the rest of us, you can feel the excitement in the air if you step out in your local neighborhood. Here in Oregon we have mail-in votes, so I voted days ago, but there were folks out in the front of my library branch today with ballot boxes and people were still dropping them in and honking when they drove by. In my family, we have a special reason for voting for Barack Obama. Three of our members are biracial – my son and two grandchildren. Being biracial is a whole special minority of its own, familiar with the “one-drop rule” that brands them black regardless of their being 50% black/50% white. Obama is referred to as African-American frequently by the media. This may be a nitpicking point to many white voters, but not to my son. Oregon has long been a Blue State, so we don’t get as many visits at the last minute as some. We have a very tight race with our Republican Senator, Gordon Smith vs. Democrat, Jeff Merkley. In their 12 years in the Senate together, Smith has actually been fairly cooperative with Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat. Unfortunately, he has been even more cooperative with the Bush administration and it looks like he may pay for that today. I’m going to be fascinated to see what the next President will do in the weeks between today and January 1. This will be when all the staff around him are chosen – and who knows what world and national events will require his urgent attention. I learned after the vote when the Democrats gained a majority in Congress and Nancy Pelosi began her reign to “believe it when I see it.” And I’m waiting now. I’ve been very impressed with Obama’s demeanor throughout the campaign and his obvious intelligence. It is afterward, if he wins (and it looks pretty damned likely), that we’ll learn how well he can withstand the incredible forces of special interests that will come to bear on him. It’s now 3:23 pm in Portland, Oregon and we won’t have to hold our breaths much longer.

THURSDAY WHATEVER

On March 11, 2008, I presented at my PCP’s office for my annual physical not feeling that well. I’d been dizzy for days and fighting off what I thought was a minor sinus infection. I’d been through a course of Augmentin for 2 weeks with no major improvement and then was handed a scrip for Avelox, an antibiotic in the fluorquinolone family like Cipro, which had made me deathly ill with faintness, gastritis, nausea, vomiting, and which I had stopped after three days. The dizziness I thought might be due to BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo), which I’d had a bout of two years previously and had been told might return one day. I thought I was going to ask for an Epley maneuver which is a positioning movement that jars loose the little crystals in the ear canals that cause BPPV. Instead, after the usual listen to my heart that comes with all physical exams, they trotted out the EKG machine and hooked me up. My heart was racing over 100 bpm and I was told I now had atrial fibrillation, the “most common” of all heart irregularities. Apparently, an allergic reaction to Avelox was the culprit. To make a long story short, I was immediately put on a beta blocker (medication to reduce the heart rate) and Coumadin (a blood thinner – used for rat poison too I found out later) to keep me from forming a blood clot that might cause a stroke. Referred to a cardiologist for an echocardiogram, nuclear stress testing, and 48-hour Holter monitor, I learned that my heart was otherwise healthy and recommended to have a cardioversion (procedure to shock the heart back into normal rhythm). I transferred my care to a different cardiologist trained in electrophysiology, because he specializes in Afib. He did the cardioversion on June 6 (it took that long to get my blood thinned to the proper range so I wouldn’t throw a clot during the procedure). For one whole weekend I remembered how it felt to be in normal rhythm and then on Monday morning woke to find I was back in Afib, apparently for good. In the 7 months since the first shock of going from excellent health to a future of dealing with this condition permanently, I’ve learned more than I ever wished to know about the heart and stroke and major lifestyle changes. Afib is an electrical aberration in the heart. The two top chambers go haywire, firing off in random patterns so that the usual blood flow of the heart is disrupted and tends to pool in the lower part of the heart, thereby threatening clot formation. The one great luck for me in all this is that I had no other risks like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc. But on the flip side, I’m in the smaller portion of Afib patients who go immediately into persistent fibrillation, instead of going in and out of normal rhythm like most folks do. Recently, the news has mentioned that both Dick Cheney and Joe Biden have “paroxysmal” Afib. Those people go on to try other procedures and surgeries and anti-arrhythmic drugs that sometimes bring long-term cures, but mostly not. In my case, after the one failed cardioversion my EP says the risk of those other options is more than it’s worth for me since I’m as healthy as I am and relatively asymptomatic. (After a month of dizziness and a month of chest pain, I mainly have less energy than I used to.) Therefore, the plan is for me to stay on “rate control” with the beta blocker and thank god go off the Coumadin (which makes one an easy bleeder) to use 325 mg aspirin/day. Forever. Unless there are miraculous developments in the coming years. So that’s where I’ve been dear xangans who still show up at my page or arrive in the future. Life on life’s terms. Once I got over the Major Shock in the beginning, I began to dig out – using therapy, acupuncture, relaxation tapes, online support forums, and big improvements in diet and exercise. It hasn’t been a fun ride, but it could be so very much worse. Onward.

MONDAY READING

The Wild Trees
by Richard Preston

This is a love story – a passionate love story – of people for trees.  Not just any trees – we’re talking the tallest and biggest trees in the world.  We’re talking redwoods that reach 35 stories above ground and grow mainly in one area of the world – southern Oregon and northern California near the sea.  But I wouldn’t have read almost to the end by now if it had just been details about the trees, fascinating as they are.  Richard Preston, a climber himself, has captured the wonderful society of tall tree climbing fanatics who find, name, climb, study, and fiercely protect these trees.  The two in the photo – Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine – are seriously famous in their world today, like gods.  Their story is told from their childhoods until they meet and merge their lives.  We also meet their delightful friends and colleagues, who all find life in the forest canopy high above earth the very best place to be.  Thanks to them what little remains of our old growth forests is loved and guarded for the future.  Where I’m reading now, the author himself has taught his children to climb and taken the whole family to Scotland to climb some rare trees there.  Here is one paragraph about his daughter:

“Laura said she wanted to learn more, so I took her to the tree-climbing school, where she learned how to skywalk and, at thirteen, became the youngest certified tree climber in the history of the sport.  With the instructor Tim Kovar, we climbed a giant tulip poplar tree in the mountains of north Georgia that has a cave inside it.  The mouth of the tree cave opens ninety feet above the ground.  Laura climbed in through the mouth and rappelled down twenty feet through the center of the tree.  She came out into a room inside the tree, where a hole looked out into the canopy, like a round window.  ‘I kind of thought it needed a bell and a sign that said THE WOLERY,’ she remarked (referring to Owl’s house in Winnie-the-Pooh).”

For more photos and facts, visit here .  I’ve been having this fantasy that I would like to videotape myself reading this book with my children and grandchildren, chapter by chapter, as a memento for them to keep all their lives.  It would be the perfect choice.

MONDAY READING

Fieldwork
by Mischa Berlinski

My current book is a novel that at first I didn’t think I’d take to, but it’s grown on me and now I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. The narrator is a journalist who gets swept up into doing what is called “fieldwork” to discover why a female anthropologist who was herself doing fieldwork in an obscure Thai hill tribe has committed suicide in a Thai prison where she was sentenced for murder. His own fieldwork consists of backtracking through all the people in her life and following the trail from her birth to her death to unravel the mystery of how it all went down. Here are a couple of sentences from the page I’m on now:

After lunch, the villagers dozed. The pigs rooted in the mud and then, having dug themselves comfortable wet beds, stretched out; the dogs found quiet places under the houses and lay their flea-bitten heads on their worn paws; the chickens pecked industriously at slow-moving  bugs; lazy clouds gathered together slowly in preparation for the afternoon rainstorm; the bullocks were tethered and dozed in their traces; water slithered down the bamboo pipes and dripped into the ceramic cisterns; the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer petered out; the last woman pounding rice or grinding corn stretched her arms out, yawned, balanced her basket on her hip, and wandered home. This was Martiya’s favorite time of the day.

The author is 35, studied classics at UC Berkeley, and has been a journalist in Thailand like the narrator in this, his first, novel. I’m totally impressed with his eye for detail and character description.

TUESDAY POLITICS

This economy thing is making me nervous. For one thing, I haven’t spent much of my life studying things like interest rates and sub-prime mortgages and the stock market and such. There are lots of folks out there with more money (and some with less) than I have who do though, and they must be nervous too. Just got my year-end statements from my two tiny investments (a 403B and a tax-deferred annuity). This year they only earned about 2% each and lost money this last quarter (they’d been doing much better in previous years). That’s worse than having the money in a simple savings account at the bank. I thank my lucky stars that when I bought the one and only house of my life in 1994 I picked fixed interest rate, not variable, because that’s apparently where lots of home-owners screwed up. So I keep hearing now that Bush has some fancy big stimulus package he’s proposing, but if you think that means that in April or May you’ll get $800 in tax rebates, think again. Workload issues at the IRS would prevent the mailing of rebate checks until after the peak tax filing in late May or early June. And then it could take 8 to 10 weeks to distribute the checks so we’re talking late summer. And even then, I’m totally suspicious that this incentive plan is really about making more bucks for his rich corporate friends. Not that I won’t love to have any amount of $ he wants to send me. Maybe it will help me pay my oil bill that month (which just increased from $70/month to $129/month). Or maybe my health insurance which just increased by 37.5%. Meanwhile my pension and social security income cost-of-living increases this year amounted to a whopping $56/month between them. So I’m scrutinizing my miniature budget more than ever before and hoping this is all a bad dream I’ll wake up from. Voluntary simplicity is a grand idea, I just didn’t want to be rushed.

TUESDAY POLITICS

Wait, there’s no crying in primaries! Yesterday, I was mystified to see Hillary Clinton tear up when asked about her reasons for trying to be President. I totally had a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I could instantly imagine what delight her opponents would have with such ammunition. Major sexist attack fodder. On the other hand, for a minute she seemed like one of us, a human. I’m one of those undecided voters who is still watching and hoping for something underlined and in bold to happen that will flip my switch. I’m sure I’ll vote for whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be, but in the meantime I’m not convinced yet – no, not even with the popular Obama and his wonderful speeches. I’m so cynical I could even imagine those tears being planned. But I hope they weren’t. I’d like to see a few on some of those male candidates’ faces, in fact. Not bloody likely though. Not in public anyway. On to South Carolina.

MONDAY READING

Saturday was the first day of Winter, today is the eve of Christ’s birth, and tomorrow my two children and two grandchildren will be in my house, all together for a few hours for the first time in months. I wish you and them a peaceful holiday and new year. My own spirituality is a mix of insights and values found in all religions. Like our bodies are made up of cells, I believe I am one cell in the body of god and all the answers are within me if I can listen carefully enough.

Here is a quote from Fra Giovanni, a 16th century Italian monk:

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not;
but there is much, that, while I cannot give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

WEDNESDAY MOVIE

No Country for Old Men

Gads, I’m getting scarce around here lately. Can’t help it, but I’m going to see if I can’t free up a little more creativity time in my schedule again. And this is the first movie I’ve mentioned since The Queen back in December of last year.  Movies are my drug. Between the cineplex and Netflix I see pretty much Everything. Anyway…..Having recently seen Tommy Lee Jones in the very fine movie, In the Valley of Elah, it was almost too much pleasure to see him again in this snap-crackle-and-pop thriller from a Cormac McCarthy novel. I’ve read some McCarthy and thought the writing was nifty but didn’t remember it having this much  humor. Of course, it’s the wild-ass Coen brothers who wrote the screenplay so that probably explains it. Remember their Fargo? This is Texas-Mexican border Fargo. Plot: Vietnam vet Josh Brolin stumbles on a drug deal gone bad while hunting in the desert and makes off with 2 mill in a suitcase (and this is one of his best roles ever). The folks that lost the money send sociopathic killer Javier Bardem in a superbad haircut after the money. He’s as relentless as the Terminator and you just know the only way to slow him down would be with some kind of megaexplosion. Hunting spree ensues. Tommy Lee Jones as an almost-retired sheriff gets involved, as well as Woody Harrelson in a great bit part. Behind it all is that gorgeous West Texas scenery. It’s so good you might even forget to eat your popcorn. Have fun.