Into The City

This, even on a Saturday afternoon

California Street
(If you click to enlarge the picture, you can spot the flock of pigeons in the air.)

Sneezing at the sun

This is a phenomenon from which I have suffered (?) all my life, and I only now learned that one out of every four people in the world is similarly afflicted. Here's what a doctor has to say about it:

Achoo Syndrome

Vancouver

Just returned to a milder Bay Area after having spent almost a week in below-freezing weather in Vancouver, B.C. We were there to celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday, and his grandson's christening. Vancouver's a nice city to visit, especially when you have relatives and friends there, but the middle of winter is not the time to go. At our time of life, the danger of slipping on icy sidewalks is something to be reckoned with, and driving on unfamiliar roads at night (never a pleasant experience in any event) becomes markedly less pleasant when road conditions are perverse. Powdery snowdrifts turn to slush and then to brittle ice, and your shoes tend to track all that stuff back indoors.

The security staff at Vancouver International airport, I regret to say, was notable for lacking professionalism in the performance of their duties, being extremely slow-moving while expending most of their limited energy chitchatting and bantering among themselves, and displaying not a whit of courtesy towards the passengers. I have been through many lousy U.S. airport security checkpoints (the one at Chicago O'Hare ranks close to the bottom in my estimation) but Vancouver was one of the worst I had experienced.

Well, so much for my gripes. It's great to be back home.

Travel blogs

An early start this morning. Enjoying a pleasant digression - reading other people's travel blogs. With pictures even. At the link below.
RealTravel

Wanchai, Hong Kong

Daly City, California

An Unfortunate Sneeze

A relative of mine ended up in the emergency room a couple of days ago after a very bad sneeze.

The violent sneeze threw his back out, and the resulting spasm of severe pain rendered him unconscious, and he collapsed on the floor. When he finally came to, it was all he could do to crawl to the phone and call the hospital, who advised him to dial 911 for an ambulance.

We visited him today at the rehab center where he is undergoing physical therapy. He doesn't know just what might trigger another incident, as even actions taken very gingerly might cause one.

Epiphany

Today marks the end of the Christmas season, or at least it does according to the traditions with which we grew up. It's the Feast of the Epiphany, or of The Three Wise Men, the Magi.

Here in Northern California, the skies are blue, the air is dry, and it's the perfect time to take down all the Christmas decorations. My first task is to get the boxes from the garage, so my wife can remove all the precious items handmade for the Christmas tree by her late mother, followed by each of the many shiny glass balls, and tasselled tinsel, and small, colorful wooden toys which have graced our tree every Yuletide season.

It never ceases to surprise me how much of the stuff we have managed to accumulate over the decades, and yet every December they appear to be as fresh as ever. We say we do it for the kids, but really we do it as much for ourselves.

As for the outdoor lights, my wife keeps adding to the collection year after year. They are draped or wrapped around the bushes in our front yard, there to offer a welcoming brilliance to the front of the house. These lights have all to be taken down carefully, so as not to damage the tiny bulbs, and to avoid getting the wires tangled or mangled.

Only after all these preliminary chores are accomplished can our artificial fir tree with its segmented trunk and built-in lights and folding branches be restored to its place of hibernation for the next eleven months.

Whew!

Remodeling

The overcast sky and the film of mist hugging the Bay as I drove over the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge made a fine subject for an arty photograph. Alas, there was no stopping on the freeway to give in to crazy creative impulses, thus no picture for today's posting.

The bathroom remodel in the condo is proceeding well. The new tub is in, and in short order the walls and floor will be ready for new tiles and mirrors. There's still a couple of weeks' work before we can put 'finis' to that project. And then more shopping around for the right furniture and flooring.

Party

Rang in the New Year at a dinner dance at a hotel near San Francisco International airport. We shared our table with some old friends and some new ones. The chemistry was right from the beginning, the dinner was good, and the conversation animated. We danced, chatted, and had fun. Two people at our table won door prizes. At midnight we made a lot of noise, sang "Auld Lang Syne" and then went around greeting everyone on the dance floor, some of them more than once. Fair to say that a pleasurable evening was enjoyed by the crowd of fourscore and seven, at this dress-up affair that at first we had some small misgivings about.

The family came over tonight to have dinner at our house. I had made a digital movie showing the granddaughters as they were thirteen years ago, when they were just five and three. Laughter and comments reassured me that the hours invested in the production were well spent.

Today the weather was fine and brisk, and tomorrow promises to be no different. The New Year is off to a promising start.

Hong Kong at Night

Best wishes to all my readers for a healthy, peaceful and prosperous 2007.

This picture was taken with a 3-year-old Nikon Coolpix 4500.

T'inking it t'rough

Overheard:

"You t'ink you are somebody; I t'ink I am somebody; ever'body t'ink they are somebody!"

Arguments

Before you get into an argument that might get out of hand, check out this article for some counsel. Here's the link:

Arguments

There's a bit of confusion in the text over the words 'defuse' and 'diffuse", and the spelling may be a bit haphazard, but the advice is generally sound.

This Morning's Composition

Service Station

Took my car in for the regular 3000 mile service today.

My car isn't the one on the left, nor is it the one on the right. It's inside the building, behind the door with the red panels, so you can't see it.

It was very windy today, though the main storm has already gone through and is probably in the Sierras by now, dumping the longed-for snow up there for the skiers.

We had several brief power outages today because of the wind, which must have caused some damage to the power lines. Having to reset all those digital clocks (bedside tables, desk, ovens, etc.) can be a pain depending on their age. For the older ones, if you do it too swiftly and happen to zip past the correct time, you have to cycle through another twenty-four hours. The newer ones have up-down or left-right buttons to make life easier.

Christmas

Last night we all went to Midnight Mass together — my wife, our son, and our two granddaughters.

While I admit to not being a regular churchgoer for most of the year, I have not missed a Midnight Mass for as long as I can remember. It is the one time in the year when I am especially moved by those who have strong religious convictions.

It's like when I watch a documentary about Lourdes, or Medjugorje, or Fatima on the travel channel. The candles, the voices raised in solemn song, the look on the faces of the faithful: some may regard these as overused or superficial signposts of religious faith, but they can have a certain effect upon one's Weltanschauung, despite the secular humanism that someone like me espouses.

Christmas is a time for family, and as I write this, I am awaiting the arrival at our house of some family members and friends. My wife is preparing a prime rib roast, and I have made a stew of bacalhau, or salt cod. There will be Christmas cake and Christmas pudding, baked sweet potatoes with marshmallows, a salad, and a variety of cakes and sweets.

I am grateful for what we have, especially for our health and wellbeing and the love of family and friends.

Peace on earth — we hope and pray for that.

The Blue of the Sky

The old bromide of a picture being worth a thousand words is correct. I plan in the future to post more pictures in the intervals when words won't easily come.

* * * * *

It's been quite cold around these parts, but the sky is so blue it takes one's breath away. From my front door I can see clear across the bay a good ten leagues east to the hills on the other side.

Windows of The City

Warm Greetings and City Views

Warmest greetings for the holidays, and to my friends and relatives my special thanks for the kind words they offered about recent postings to this blog.

In San Francisco yesterday it was lovely, a far cry from the foggy grisaille of December 14. click here My wife had a meeting to attend, and I was free to rediscover a part the city on foot.

A hike up Telegraph Hill gave me more than my daily quota of physical exercise. Some of the photos I took are reproduced below. (Click on the images to enlarge.)

Later we went with friends for dinner at a busy Chinese restaurant on Balboa Street, where the noise level certainly deserved the three bells in our local restaurant guide's rating system. But the food in our judgment would easily have earned three crysanthemums in the guide Michelin (were the editors of that much-respected European guide ever to sample the fare).

Do sleeping dogs lie?

Trolley cables

Family gathering in a park

Tiburon seen from Pacific Heights

More Images of Summer 2006

Dalmatian Coast

Alleyway in Dubrovnik

Olympia 1

Olympia 2

Olympia 3

2006 Summer Vacation

Corfu Windows

Dubrovnik Windows

Tiber & Dome

Valletta - Summer 2006

Santorini - Summer 2006

Ephesus - Summer 2006

Fog City

A New Clock

Here's a link to a different kind of clock.

http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf

Persimmons

If I were to be asked what my favorite fruit is, I'd probably have to say, the persimmon. For me there has always been something vaguely mysterious about the persimmon.

There are of course the different varieties of the fruit. The two main kinds we find in our markets are known by their Japanese names: fuyu (the firm-fleshed non-astringent variety, see photo), and hachiya (the kind with the soft meat that you eat with a spoon, like custard). I happen to like both kinds.

The shelf life of the fuyu may be longer than that of the hachiya. With the hachiya, it can be difficult to tell when it is exactly ready for eating. And herein lies the mystery. A hachiya persimmon may look from its color and feel as though it is already ripe, but when you cut it open, sink a spoon into it, and transfer the soft flesh to your mouth, you could be in for a surprise, and not a pleasant one at that.

If the hachiya isn't perfectly ripe to a jelly-like softness, it will make the inside of your mouth feel as though all your taste buds had been suddenly cauterized. It is a most unsettling sensation. But when it is fully ripe, the flesh of the hachiya can be heavenly.

The fuyu, on the other hand, can be eaten even when it has an apple-like firmness, though it is usually more delicious when you let it ripen and soften a bit.

Our Asian markets around this time of year have an abundance of persimmons, usually of the fuyu variety. The hachiya is not as common, and is more expensive, costing as much per piece as a whole pound of the fuyu.

Persimmons are good also in baked goods.

Ants

Never underestimate the intelligence of ants.

In the summer, when there is abundant food to be found in the wild, ants may be disinclined to invade our homes. Picnics are another matter. I mean, if we are going to spread food out in the open within marching distance of a nest of ants, we have only ourselves to blame.

It is a source of amazement to me that, in the wintertime, ants from the outside are able to make a bee-line (please excuse the metaphor) for sweet things inside the house.

Like today, for instance.

I took down from the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard a tin can (actually a former cookie container) in which I keep a stash of chocolates. Mostly the chocolates are in the form of bars, acquired at various times, but there are also the individual foil-wrapped chocolates, including some that the cabin steward on our last cruise had neatly placed on our pillows each night.

It has been said by those who study such things that a chocolate a day, especially a dark chocolate, is good for you. (Or maybe, sometimes, two.) I subscribe enthusiastically to that view. My daily chocolate is something I look forward to with keen anticipation.

Well, today, the ants invaded my tin can. They were not yet there in force, thank heaven. The ones that made it in were probably the scouts, the outriders whose job it is in the tightly-organized bureaucracy of anthood to find new sources of food, especially the high-energy sugary stuff. They had found my stash. How did they know it was there? And how did they get past all the obstacles to reach the inside of the can, which, though it was not airtight, had scant space even for an ant to penetrate?

The triangular cardboard box of the bar of Toblerone had been opened (probably by myself) and the foil had been carelessly, and hastily, folded back. There they were. A score or more of the little creatures, madly scurrying around upon being discovered. Some even ran up my arm.

These scout ants move faster than the worker ants who will follow later. Had I not chanced upon the invasion, I am convinced that the entire stash of chocolates would have been covered by a teeming horde of worker ants by the afternoon, each one of them carting off a tiny piece of chocolate to take back to the old queen in the hive.

My chocolate stash is now kept in ziploc plastic bags inside a plastic jar with a screw-on lid. I think the chocolates will be safe there. I have a feeling that the ants, intelligent though they are, have not yet been able to figure out a way to penetrate plastic. At least, I hope they have not. But, with evolution, who knows what the future holds.

The Unbidden Tune

'Sfunny how some days I wake up in the morning with a tune running through my head, a tune from a popular song of 'our time', the Fifties (Doris Day? Patti Page?), a catchy tune repeated over and over without surcease. If I try consciously to get the tune to stop, it may do so for a spell. And then suddenly it returns unbidden, sticking in my consciousness like a nettle. (Speaking of which reminds me now of how the guy invented the loop-and-hook configuration of the Velcro fastener from wondering how nettles would stick to his trouser leg.)

So here's today's tune. It happens to be The Birthday Song. It happens to be "Happy Birthday" sung in Portuguese. I recall that a large group of us were on a visit to Portugal in 1997 (after the first major surgery of my life), and we were all having fun in a restaurant in the town of Mealhada, which is famed for its roast suckling pig. We were singing all kinds of songs, from national anthems to Auld Lang Syne, and then we discovered it was someone's birthday, and so we sang:

Parabéns a você
Nesta data querida
Muitas felicidades
Muitos anos de vida!

Tenha tudo do bom
Do que a vida contém
Tenha muita saúde
E amigos também

Hoje é dia de festa
Cantam as nossas almas
Para o menino(a) "aniversariante"
Uma salva de palmas!

Some Thoughts

Whiteflies executing an intricate dance in the sunlight of a winter's afternoon.

A Chinese family of seven gathered around a circular table in a small suburban restaurant, saying grace before their meal.

Blue, green, and grey recycling boxes strewn across neighborhood driveways after the bi-weekly collection truck has come through.

A clear shot of the Bay all the way across to the eastern shore; and beyond, the bluish cone of Mount Diablo.

A cup of strong Earl Grey tea on this cold afternoon.

Balancing a checkbook on the first try.

The Christmas tree already set up in the living room, alongside the boxes of ornaments and lights waiting to adorn it.

Polite drivers at a four-way-stop intersection, beckoning to one another to proceed.

News of a new baby in the Canadian branch of the family.

A comfortable chair, a good book, and remembering where I put my reading glasses.

The City Below

Holidays

And so we end our Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Our granddaughter was home from college to spend some time with us, and her sister and dad. We had some great meals, and then the womenfolk did some holiday shopping to take advantage of the bargains. The weather was fine till today, when the first rain finally arrived.

Like most men, I do not much enjoy shopping. If I needed to buy something, I'd go to the store that sold it, buy it, and come right home. The thought of wandering from store to store looking at shoes, or apparel, or household items is enough to tax my equilibrium to the fullest. Nowadays, of course, we can buy almost anything online. But the women of my acquaintance seem not to like that alternative. They like to feel the cloth, try on the shoe, and check the shade or color of this fabric against that accessory. They are able to spend many hours doing stuff like this. They enjoy shopping, especially at this time of year, when there are bargains galore. Why, just in today's (Sunday's) newspaper the sales ads outweigh the news pages and other sections by a significant margin. What joy it must be for our shoppers to negotiate all those department store aisles in search of bargains!

* * * *

Many homes in our neighborhood are already decorated with lights for the holidays. Some are really very elaborate. Not all are in the best of taste. Well, chacun a son goût. What else can one say?

Labels

As we approach the end of another year, I find once again that I have more than enough free self-stick return address labels than I can possibly use in two lifetimes (assuming that I remain at my current address).

These labels come from charities and other donation seekers who seem to multiply with time.

Yes, I know they DO send one another the address lists of donors. Yes, I know they are run like businesses with an eye to the bottom line (we hope). Yes, they do make you feel guilty if you use the labels without sending in a contribution.

It's a good idea to check out the charity or donation seeker before sending money. Heaven knows we would not want our hard-earned dollars ending up in the wrong hands.

http://www.charitywatch.org/toprated.html

Pins

I'm wearing a new shirt for Thanksgiving. It has a checked pattern, button down collar, and, for a storebought shirt, it fits quite well. The label at the back of the neck has a well-known brand on it. But, as with most apparel these days (at least the kind that I'm likely to buy off the rack), it was made overseas. In this case, Cambodia. The label tells me this in English, and also in Spanish ("hecho en Camboya"), the latter, we may suppose, for the benefit of the many people in this country for whom the Spanish language is the preferred medium of communication.

One could go on at length about the marketing of apparel with well-known American brand names, about the transfer of manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor costs, about perceived corporate greed for higher profits and an improved bottom line. But one chooses not to enter that arena.

Let us instead examine the shirt itself. Quality of the material is very good. The sewing of the pockets and the collar and the buttonholes and the sleeves happens to be fair. There are some hanging threads here and there, which must be carefully trimmed away with my wife's nail scissors. Sometimes the buttons are not sewn as securely as one might have expected, but that failing is easily remedied with thread and needle.

The shirt as it comes is neatly folded. A cardboard insert keeps the whole thing stiff and easy to handle. The problem though is that there are a number of pins that hold the fabric so that it retains its tidy rectangular shape against the cardboard. Some pins pierce the fabric as well as the cardboard, others may pin a sleeve to a breast pocket, and still others are hidden in such a way that an unsuspecting person could easily prick a finger in trying to find out how they are attached. Care has to be exercised to avoid such occurrences.

Now, something about those pins. In a quality shirt, the pins are likely to have large round heads, so that they can easily be distinguished by clumsy male fingers from the sharp, pointed end. Cheaper shirts may have pins with old-style tiny heads. These are more dangerous.

On an average man's shirt, there may be as many as ten pins. In the past I have simply discarded the pins, including the large roundheaded ones, by dropping them in the wastebasket. Then one day my wife told me that she could use those pins, so now I collect them every time I open up a new shirt. I place them in an empty film canister (speaking of which, these are fast becoming a rarity with the demise of film as a photographic medium), and when enough of them are collected, the pins end up in the embroidered pin cushion (made in the shape of a colorful turtle) in her sewing box.

Here I will stop and wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving, as I put on my new shirt.

Election

This past weekend saw the election of my wife as the first woman president of our social club, which has nearly a thousand members. At first I had misgivings about her candidacy for the office, though I know full well that she is eminently qualified to undertake the responsibilties attached thereto. My concern had more to do with the extra demands in time and energy that will surely be required of her. She sought my approval and support before she accepted the job, and I, seeing that she was determined to give it her best shot in her inimitable fashion, offered both with a thumbs-up signal at a critical moment in the election process.

She assumes office on the first of the year, and is clearly pleased at the outpouring of warm encouragement from a significant portion of the association's membership.

Club politics can so often be a test of one's equanimity. Factions and cliques are common obstacles that have to be dealt with and opposing viewpoints must be given proper exposure with the grace and savoir faire of a skilled diplomat.

There is no question in my mind that the new president will fill the bill very nicely.

Fall in San Francisco

Conversation

The waiting room is small by the standards of an office with seven doctors' names on the door. There are about thirty steel chairs with fabric seats and backs, in color either black or blue, along with three plain black cube-shaped tables. Current issues of magazines are laid out in haphazard fashion on the tables. Some magazines occupy the chair seats where their readers have hastily left them upon being summoned into their examination rooms. The magazines to which the doctors subscribe may reveal as much about them as about their patients. There are the regulars: Time, Fortune, Business Week, US News and World Report, Sunset, Health, Sports Illustrated, Golf, which one tends to find in most doctors' waiting rooms. There are the ones that appeal to a younger readership: Wired, People, Entertainment Weekly, In Touch ("Who's Britney dating?'). Then there are the magazines aimed at a more affluent clientele: Vanity Fair, Esquire, Southern Accents, Cottage Living, Yachting. Powerboating.

The room is crowded when I first get there. I understand that Mondays are like that. Generally the patients are quietly reading, awaiting their summons. It's cold today, and most of them are warmly clothed.

Two women behind me are engaged in an animated, if one-sided, conversation. The subject is an accident involving a drunken teenager who had crashed into the parked car of a friend of one of the women. No one was hurt, but the car was totaled, and the young man was subsequently arrested. He had no insurance. What is odd about this conversation is that the woman telling it gets no chance to finish any sentence before her (supposedly) attentive listener cuts in with a request for elaboration, an unrelated question, a non sequitur, an inane aside, or some other meaningless interruption. Both women speak in loud tones, as if they were not sitting in a small quiet room, but outdoors on a park bench in the midst of traffic.

At first I do not risk a look in the direction of the conversing women. We are sitting back to back. But through the ruse of looking for another magazine, I get up and glance at them. The one telling about the accident is a large woman in her fifties, with black hair that is wild and frizzled and extends out to either side of her broad face like a woman in the Fusco Brothers comic strip. Her companion is perhaps a couple of decades older, stooped, with stringy blond hair and a beak of a nose. She is the Constant Interrupter.

The two do not appear to be related, except perhaps that the dark-haired one may have brought the older woman for her appointment at this office. By this time the conversation has transmogrified to a discussion about a television soap opera, and the new satellite TV service that the blond woman has just installed at her place, and about how the remote controls that used to work on her TV now no longer work. This is the Constant Interrupter speaking in a complaining tone, and it is the dark-haired woman's turn to interrupt her with 'Did you try doing this or that?' and 'Was it the black remote or the one with the yellow buttons?'

Finally the nurse calls out a name, the blond woman cackles once, rises, is followed by her companion through the door held open for them, and a deathly stillness descends again upon the waiting room.

Getting There

Our fall days here have been just glorious. I'm sure they are in other places as well. But the Bay Area is hard to beat. (So much for Chamber of Commerce promotion.)

* * *

The ol' back is still not one-hundred-percent, but I'll live.

* * *

Started reading 'Mysteries of the Middle Ages' by Thomas Cahill, subtitled 'The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe"'. An absolutely fascinating book. Scholarly yet light in tone, an eye-opener upon a period in history that most of us don't often read about.. The 4-color illustrations and pithy footnotes are delightful. Some years ago I read Cahill's `'Desire of the Everlasting Hills', a study of Jesus in a historical context that was another page-turner.

By the way, did I mention Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower — Al-Qaeda and the Path of 9/11'? Another must-read.

Pain in the Neck

Thanks to all who have looked in from time to time, and apologies for having left my blog unattended for a while. Truth is that I've been physically out of commission (and condition) the past couple of weeks, beginning with the virus I mentioned earlier. Now with antibiotics, the initial problem seems to have been taken care of. I say "seems" because I've yet to check in with the ENT guy following the ten-day course of medication he prescribed. I see him Monday.

How does one describe pain? Not easy, is it? Sometimes I think that the worst kind of pain is the kind that takes over your nervous system, which no positional adjustment can alleviate. Low back pain, the proverbial 'pain in the neck', joint pain, muscle pain. I'm not talking just average, plain vanilla, once-in-a-while pain. I'm talking serious, sharp, piercing, constant, can't-hold-your-head-up-because-your-head-feels-like-a-ripe-watermelon-about-to-be-separated-from-the
thin-vine-that-is-your-neck kind of pain.

So, what did I do? I visited this acupuncturist. Young guy from China, has a small store-front office on a shopping street not to far from where I live. Had seen him before for back pain. Had gotten some relief. Getting in and out of the car took some careful maneuvering. Two sessions with him. Four needles on the back of each hand, another couple on the instep of each foot. Twenty minutes lie-down. Needed help to get on and off the exam table.

Relief was brief. Pain returned not long after I got home. At the second session he tried to stretch and twist my neck. Mistake. I ain't going back to him no more. Or at least I don't think I will.

Finally I called my ENT guy to see if I could resume a medication that had previously been prescribed for pain relief. Thing called gabapentin, used for control of seizures and nerve pain. It's working so far.

This is the longest session I've spent at this keyboard in over a week. Better not overdo it.

Will try and check in later.

Virus

Inevitably it had to happen, I suppose. It wasn't the flu, although the season has already arrived. It was something else. It started with a sore throat and then mutated into something rather more alarming. Had difficulty swallowing, and overnight the side of my throat grew into a large, fleshy lump which was unsightly, to say the least. Threw the perfect symmetry of my countenance into a lopsided caricature of a double chin that seemed to be in the wrong place. Did I say it was alarming? Yes, all right, it was.

My E.N.T. doctor took a look and prescribed a course of antibiotics. Two days later, the thing has subsided a bit, and no longer looks quite so horrible. The doc did provide a modicum of assurance that he thought my deepest fears were unfounded, but he also said that he'll take another look when I finish taking the pills. We hear nowadays about people who get a virus, and in a very short time, it's curtains. Without the doctors even knowing what sort of virus it may have been. That's the world we live in nowadays. A world of nefarious and dangerous things sharing the air we breathe.

So this is my reason for not posting to this blog. You'd think that with all this sitting around at home, I'd think of something to post other than the foregoing. But so far I have not.

Stay tuned, though, won't you?