Morning Fail

I was trying to get myself out of bed this morning to walk the dogs and go to the gym when I remembered that Gold's cancelled my Friday morning step class for the summer. I did not succeed in getting up and going to the gym anyway.

I got up and had some breakfast and plunged into the black hole of the computer. (So many good YouTubes of Michael Jackson. At 11 he was already just amazing. It's difficult to think that his father's mistreatment may have been a part of why he was so good.) But fortunately I was on the laptop and untethered from the power cord, so after a couple hours the battery died. (The same thing happened last night, I am sorry to admit.). So the laptop is a good thing.

Finally at 10:30 the dogs and I made it outside for a walk, and it turned out that it was a glorious beautiful sunny day. I *ought* to have put a chaise lounge out in the backyard under a tree and spent the day just smiling and enjoying it. But I had a shower and got dressed and drove to work. Hopefully I will make good on my promise to spend some time at church doing data entry for the Dignity Center later this afternoon.

And Now Over to Joel

In lieu of writing a blog post myself tonight, I will just refer you to Joel Achenbach's lovely Summer Groove from last Tuesday. Please follow the link and enjoy.

In a small milestone of sorts my last post got a comment from someone I don't know. I have the blog set up to email me in the event that a comment is made, so, with some trepidation I opened the email to find out what this unknown person had to say. (It was a post about ducks and marshmallows--not, I thought, particularly controversial subject matter.) It turned out to be some sort of blogger spam encouraging me to make my blog pay and giving me a link to follow. He noted that he found my blog via a google request, and discovered that my blog was "popular"--both obvious fictions that pointed to spam boilerplate. Anyway, I expect to hit the big-time any moment now.

Dells, Ducks, and Marshmallows

One of the things about the new age of instant international information, it seems a little strange to just go on with your life when things like the unrest in Iran are happening. Andrew Sullivan's site has given over almost completely to being a twitter feed for Iranian demonstration information.

We had a day of vacation today in the Wisconsin Dells. The weather was absolutely perfect. (I can say that because during the hot sunny part of the afternoon I was napping in the camper.)

This morning we rode an Original Wisconsin Duck and saw at least one dell. (I had several ideas of what a dell might be, and all of them were nowhere close. Turns out to be a rock formation where a glacial lake emptied and the rushing water carved gorges into the soft sandstone. The dell is a space between sandstone walls or cliffs, and they have trees overgrowing them so that they are cool spaces where ferns and so forth grow.) The Ducks are amphibious vehicles developed for landing on beaches in WWII. Tom was amazed that they had so many still in service today. The controls for operating one looked pretty forbidding. But the dogs got to come along so that was a bonus.

We hung out at the campsite until after dinner (well, Tom went into town and found things to fix the front legs of the camper and the exhaust pipe for the truck), then we went and played Adventure Mini-Golf, walked into town for some fudge, and came back and had a campfire followed by roasted marshmallows. We achieved toasted marshmallow perfection tonight the likes of which I'm not sure when I've seen. Crunchy toasted on the outside but barely browned, a layer of hot melty marshmallow inside, and a nub of firm chewiness in the center. (Tom was going for brown and carmelized on the outside, and puffed up to twice their normal size.)

Hiking in the Smokies

We had such a fun and exciting day, and the evening is turning out to be just as exciting.

We started out leisurely this morning, getting up rather late and making French toast for breakfast. Then we decided to go back into the park and see more in the mountains. Elizabeth said she'd like to hike to a waterfall, and that she'd like to do a strenuous hike. (The hikes come in easy, moderate, and strenuous.)

Yesterday we drove halfway up Newfound Gap road to the Clingman's Dome trail. We parked at the end and took the paved trail up to the observation deck, which was marked "moderate". It was very steep, and although it was only half a mile it took us quite awhile to get up there and it was really tough going. We stopped to rest several times and the sweat was pouring off by the time we reached the top. (You get to the top of the paved trail, only to be met by a curlicue going farther up like a pedestrian overpass to the observation deck.) Fortunately it was so high up it was very cool and lovely up there.

So, today's trail was 2.7 miles of "strenuous" to Rainbow Falls, and I was thinking that the dogs and I might not make it all the way. But strenuous turned out to be not as bad as Clingman's Dome. It was steep, but not as steep, and it was not paved which is I think why they mark it more difficult. I actually preferred it because you walk more slowly when you have to pick out your steps.

(Technically, dogs are not allowed on the trails in the park, except for two which are right next to visitor centers. There is no explanation for why this is, although we think it is because of the bears. No need for trouble because your dog decided to pick a fight with a bear. We took the dogs up Clingman's Dome yesterday, and we did see other dogs. Today we decided to take the dogs along, and although we saw other dogs in the parking lot, we didn't see any other dogs on the trail. Fortunately we didn't see any bears either.)

Anyway, it was absolutely beautiful. Walked along a stream which tumbled down moss-covered boulders and fallen trees, amidst a beautiful forest with rhododendrons growing all around. This hike wound up taking us five hours to go up and back down again, although we stopped quite a bit to rest or to clamber on the rocks and play in the water. Took a long, long time to get to the falls, and not as long to get down but our "going down" muscles were just as tired at the bottom as our "going up" muscles were at the top. (This trail kept going for another three miles to the top of the third highest peak in the Appalachians, and we met a few people who had been all the way up. One guy with two smaller children had hiked up the day before, camped up there, and were on their way down with their packs on their backs.)

All the way down the kids were fantasizing about what they wanted to eat for dinner. We decided we would go back to the Old Mill restaurant, which we had eaten at on Monday night, because it was so good. For $16.99 to $18.99 you get fritters, corn chowder, salad, an enormous entree, mashed potatoes, green beans, dinner rolls, and dessert. On Monday I ordered a rainbow trout, expecting a reasonable sized meal, and instead got a mutant fish that (split in half) filled an entire plate. All the food is so good--the corn chowder a tasty concoction with red peppers and potatoes, the fritters are amazingly crunchy on the outside and soft and caky inside (with whipped maple butter). They specialize in southern cooked comfort food--ribs, meat loaf, chicken fried steak, pot roast, ham, etc., although they have a pretty well-rounded menu. The building is an old mill, which I gather is still actually operational. I wish I'd had my camera along to get some photos of it. (Well I had my camera along, but my batteries were dead.)

We put the dogs in the camper, and they flopped on the bed like dead things that weren't planning to move the whole time we were gone. As we pulled into the parking lot of the Old Mill, a storm was whipping up. This had happened the night before, but last night it blew a little bit and then ended. Tonight it kept blowing, and then started raining. We put our names in and went to the general store to shop while we waited for a table. In the store the radio was playing, talking about what counties had tornado warnings, and callers were reporting where there was hail and rain. When they called our name we dashed through the downpour to the restaurant, and when we sat down we could see the trees whipping around. I thought about the dogs back in the camper by themselves. We stuffed ourselves silly and enjoyed dinner, and the weather calmed down although it was raining pretty hard still when we left.

Driving home the traffic through Pigeon Forge was particularly nasty, and it turned out that the traffic light where we needed to turn off was closed, and traffic on our side routed over to the other side of the road, because two power poles were snapped in the middle and a roof of some building was puddled in front of a hotel at the corner. We got back to the campground, which had loose leaves and branches laying on the streets. Our campsites are on the edge of the campground, next to a little creek. The creek was quite a bit fuller than it had been, and for the next several hours we were moving the kids' tent, talking with other campers, watching the creek rise, and deciding whether to move to a different campsite or hope the water wouldn't rise too much more. The owner says that the water from the mountains takes several hours to get down here, and that they had our whole area under water a few years back when they had had hardly a drizzle here in town. We decided not to move, but we did unplug since our power outlet is only about a foot off the ground. I guess we'll see what's true in the morning.

We Have Found Summer

We are in Cincinnati today, and I just want to let all our friends back in Minnesota know that we have rediscovered summer here. It is hot. And muggy. And the wind is not blowing a gale, in fact it is barely blowing at all. We walked around Lake Winton and got sweaty. When we got back to the camper, we turned on the air conditioning--mostly for the dogs, because we went downtown and ate dinner at an outside table. Now it is evening and we are sitting outside at our campsite enjoying a lovely evening. To some these things sound normal, but so far they have not occurred yet this year in Minnesota.

Catching Up On This Week

Today we embarked on a 10-day camping trip to the Smokies via Cincinnati, and I have been very busy getting ready to go, so I haven't had time to write. But there were several really good items this week that I wanted to highlight, so I apologize for being a few days behind.

Nick Kristof had a great column on Thursday that you ought to go read. It has a story of an American woman who lives in Canada for a time an compares health care experiences there and here. In fact, she now feels she can't move back to the U.S. because of the health care she needs. I've read several pieces indicating that the insurance industry has gotten several Democratic senators to go along with effectively gutting the public option of the new health care reform legislation. It is vitally important that a viable public option is part of this program.

The other moving story I read was posted on Andrew Sullivan's web site (he reposted it from elsewhere). It is the story of a poor Iranian woman who (was) going out to join the demonstrations for Mr. Mousavi because she is able to dance and shout alongside wealthier boys who treat her respectfully as a peer because she is joining their demonstration. Her writing is so personal, it reads almost as a poem. She does not actually support Mr. Mousavi, she prefers Ahmadinejad, and does not even plan to vote. She fully expects on Saturday to return to being treated as an inferior.

I am anxiously awaiting stories of the transition to digital TV. I noticed an item a week or so ago about what things people are cutting back on during the recession, and cable TV was the thing that people were least likely to cut back on. (We are TV snobs. Or maybe TV cheapskates. We do have one, and we do watch quite a bit, but we do not have cable.) As many people shake their heads over the things that the American public does not seem to get excited about, I am thinking that not being able to get TV might be the thing that could lead to rioting in the streets.

Hammer Pants Dance

Very busy getting ready for big camping trip to Ohio/Tennessee/Wisconsin. Rainy and cold today, but we have to be excited about the rain because it is so unbelievably dry here. Back to the trip, trying to decide if I have enough clothes to last 10 days without doing laundry. Especially since when I'm camping, I seem to wear three outfits a day. Not sure why that is.

Anyway, friend Sheila posted this on her Facebook site and I have to share. Hopefully you've already seen some of these ads where they send a mob of trained dancers into train stations and airports to start dancing. (If you haven't, you need to. Some of the most fun and uplifting video you're likely to see. It's like what people say about musicals, that people don't just burst into highly choreographed song in the middle of real life. In these videos, it's as if they do. And the effect on the onlookers is quite something. It almost makes you think there should be non-profit groups all over that just do this everywhere. Life would be so much better, it really would be a public service.) Here's one of a group of guys doing Can't Touch This in Hammer pants at a trendy clothing store. Really funny.

Enjoy your Saturday!

[Tiny postscript: if you want a little more uplift, catch this column today by Bob Herbert in the New York Times about a wildly successful new school system in North Carolina with a lot of low income kids. Their first year of seniors are graduating, and 100% of them (48 kids) are all going to college, having been accepted by at least two colleges each.]

Stories we should all know

The I'm-sensing-a-theme-here theme for this weekend has been: there are stories that we need to share more, so that they become familiar--woven into the fabric of the culture. Things that we can't afford to have recede into the background. We all get very busy with the little mundane details of the day-to-day, which we know aren't very earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things but nevertheless they are the things in the forefront, so to speak, the immediate. Then you read about something important and think, OK, this needs to get a little more play.

There's a guy who writes for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Friday he responded to something someone else wrote about the flying fur surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. This person wrote that the nomination was exacerbating tensions between Latinos and African Americans, who he said "could be as violently distrustful of each other as blacks and whites were." Coates (who is African American) begged to differ, saying, essentially, that there is no comparison:

One must be clear about what constituted "violent" distrust "between" blacks and whites in the 20th century. It meant thousands of whites, in Atlanta, in 1906, assembling on the streets to randomly murder black people. In Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, it meant whites pillaging a Jewish businesses for arms, and then proceeding to the black side of town, attacking black business and black homes, and thousands of black people fleeing for their lives. It meant whites--across the nation--in 1910 assembling in mobs and murdering random black people (On the 4th of July!). The cause? Jack Johnson had the temerity to win the championship. It meant whites in East St. Louis, in 1918, perpetrating a pogrom against the city's black population, and killing over 100 black people because, "southern niggers need a lynching."

I have not known Latinos in the 20th Century to perpetrate a Red Summer. I have not known blacks to lynch Latino veterans, returning from war, in their uniforms. The fact is that there was no violent distrust between blacks and whites in the 20th century. Rather there was a one-sided war waged against black people by white terrorists, which government, in the best cases, failed to prevent, in many cases, stood idly by, and in the worst cases actually aided and abetted. I'm sorry but comparing that to whatever's happening between blacks and Latinos, is a slander against both those groups, and an amazingly naive take on the history of white America in regards to race.

(I googled Jack Johnson for us, he was a boxer.) I read this passage and kind of had my breath taken away. Yes, I know there was slavery. Yes, I know there were lynchings and marches and shootings and the four girls killed in their church. I listened to the NPR series on the civil rights era. I know that in addition to wingnuts in KKK costumes there were a lot of other people who were angry or scared or who just remained silent.

I think it was Coates' recitation of these very specific actions--places, dates, circumstances--we should all know this history. I did not know any of these incidents. These are just a few specifics of an ugly history that most of us are only very casually aware of. My reaction was that we all need to hear these things. There are other bits of our history that get repeated all the time, on anniversaries and when related events occur. These are not things that we should close the book on and look away from, these are things we cannot afford to forget. To forget them is to have the sort of silly dialogues that occur today about subjects such as the wisdom of affirmative action. (And affirmative action is by no means necessarily good, and it merits serious discussion, but it's silly to suggest that a Puerto Rican girl growing up in New York City with a single mother was somehow privileged.) We know the heros--Rosa Parks, Dr. King--(or do we?) but we need to know the other side as well.

Then I began reading email sent to Andrew Sullivan about women who had had late-term abortions. Stories prompted, of course, by the killing of Dr. Tiller. We hear "late-term abortion" and we mentally cluck our tongues. Irresponsible. Except that I didn't know any of the stories behind why women have late-term abortions--but because of Dr. Tiller's death I suspect that many of us will know some of these stories. They are heartbreaking. Here is one example:

At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.

A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we'd had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery.

He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

Our priest came away from that experience feeling that this world-renowned children’s hospital was basically experimenting on babies. He saw their futile suffering and likened it to being crucified. The family he had gone there to support later told him that if they had only known what their baby would be forced to go through before dying, they would never have chosen surgery. Our priest told us that he believed we were not choosing our son’s death, only choosing the timing of his death in order to spare him a great deal of suffering. Something he said that brought us great comfort was “God knows what is in your hearts.” God knows our choice was based on mercy and compassion. Who would better understand our hearts than God, who made the choice for His own Son to die?

See this article for several stories, including one very frightening one at the end about a woman whose baby had died, and she had begun bleeding but was not in labor, and could not get a doctor or hospital to allow her to come in for treatment. Here is a roundup of some of the reader email stories on Andrew's blog today.

Finally, there have been a number of stories lately about the continuing travesty of sexual assault going on around the world. Nick Kristof of the New York Times is a frequent commenter, and he had a recent piece on the continuing suffering of women in Darfur in refugee camps. On the way home tonight, I heard a heartrending story on The World where they interviewed a number of these Darfuri women. I don't know the statistics, but the commonness of this crime and the fact that we accept it and are not walking, running, fundraising, and filling the Sunday morning talk show airwaves for it is completely unacceptable.

A facebook group went up today calling on bloggers to talk about this subject (it is called Silence Is the Enemy if you'd like to join). I reach about three people with this blog (and that's assuming they've read this very long post!), but I think the point is that we all need to do what we can.

For a good time...

... go read this post of Joel Achenbach's. The whole thing is quite entertaining, although subject-wise, it does wander just a bit.

Just to give you a few tastes:

Our precious immune system becomes a potentially lethal agent in the aging heart. Our brains are awash in chemicals telling us to eat more fatty foods, but these chemicals never anticipated the existence of a middle-aged body. The brilliant trick of cell division increasingly turns into a life-threatening hazard. ...

The only sure way to prolong life, the only proven way, is caloric restriction. Food is death. Also most beverages. Also oxygen. That's about one part in five of the Earth's atmosphere, and it will rip your cells from limb to limb. Sunshine is another killer. And water: A universal solvent.

OK those snippets sounded depressing, not funny. I guess you'd have to trust me and read the whole thing. It's actually about gardening. And this is the light-hearted post of the day, if I ever get around to writing the one I've been planning since Friday.