With all the recent fuss about the upcoming election, a fair amount of discussion has focused on that familiar refrain which seeks to focus upon women. Some of the discussion asserts that, like men, they're entitled to a set of cultural guidelines and [dare I say it] rights that are on par with those that have been afforded men since that one guy discovered he could make fire.
Making fire is a fine thing, especially when one's daily tasks include protecting the fairer sex from the persistent cold. Plus fire is a really helpful thing to provide so that the little lady can go about cooking. For the man.
A few days ago I was perusing the mainstream news - I do this online because we refuse to receive television broadcasts here in our home unless we're wearing our tinfoil hats, which have recently gone missing. And I make it a point to peruse mainstream news sources, because I want to know what the media are promoting in our best interests. I also scan through some of the lesser-respected sources when I want to know what's really going on, but because I've a keen interest in what we're supposed to think is important, I read the big name stuff too.
A lot of what's been in the news lately has been, understandibly, political in nature. We've got candidates and representatives of candidates asserting all kinds of different ways in which they're supportive of women and making promises based on their own opinions on what's best for women. I read these references to "women" as though they're something well outside the standard human.
Women are repeatedly mentioned in a tone that seems to imply "men junior children in need of guidance and direction."
Apparently the only thing these powerful men can agree upon is that the women among us are completely reliant on our sage insights to save them from... whatever the modern day equivalent to 'persistent cold' might be. One thing that's particularly bothersome, to me anyway, is that for the most part, these men are competing to see who among them will win the greatest level of legitimacy in the womens advocacy realm as viewed by society. Never mind that society - on a global scale - is under the control and influence of men.
Lest you think I'm sexist, I assure you (as would any man thusly accused) that I am not. Pshwhew! Now that we've got that out of the way, let's continue.
A few days ago I was looking at Yahoo! News. As I scanned across headlines fraught with sensationalist titles, I found a link to an article announcing that Honda, the carmaker, had introduced a model intended specifically for women. The article features a picture of the car, in pink, alongside a very happy young lady carrying flowers and obviously pleased to be wearing a cute skirt - short enough to demonstrate independence and a touch of sass while long enough to be respectable - and a broad smile. They label this car "She's," with a cute little heart in place of the apostrophe. If you don't want a pink one, you can get a brown one, in a lovely hue designed to match your eyeshadow.
Sound absurd? Click it:
http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/honda-fit-she-world-only-car-aimed-exclusively-205422886.html
For a car to be similarly marketed to someone like me, the color scheme would have to be something along the lines of "prestained with grease + four day old salt and pepper stubble and doesn't smell very good." I'd never buy a car like that. Gross.
Later, I was scouring my news feed on FaceBook, which is always a reliable source of unbiased information presented by my completely sensible and well informed friends network and I came across a link to a recent broadcast of the Ellen show. If we had TV in our house, I'm pretty sure I'd watch Ellen. Every day. She's brilliant and hilarious and has a terrific stage presence, and she delivers her message in a way that's memorable and funny without demeaning the topic nor those whose perspective differs from her own.
Ellen was talking about a fabulous new product: a pen, designed specifically for women. And while I'd love to share some of the hilarious points she made in her opening monlogue as well as the commercial she produced to promote this amazing new pen, I really do think that she's better at delivering her message by video than I will ever be by transcription.
If you could do with a laugh, please do have a gander: http://www.upworthy.com/boom-roasted-heres-why-you-dont-ask-a-feminist-to-hawk-your-sexist-product?g=2&ref=nf
Even the URL is funny. Ellen rocks.
This stuff sorta hits close to home for me. D, that awesome woman who fell into my trap and agreed to join me in jumping over the broom some 2+ years ago, works in an industry that's always trying to find new ways to market its wares. They have whole teams of people whose job it is to just find new ways to make people like you and me buy a newer version of the thing we already have even though we're only marginally making use of it anyway. These things are capable of more than we'll ever understand, and even so we can hardly wait for the new one to hit the market so that we can somehow rationalize dumping the old one and replacing it with the new. There's an ironic component to her being employed by such an industry. Very much so.
Not only that, but I was raised by a single Mom who never once bought into any kind of rhetoric that promoted any kind of gender superiority. She was pretty good about getting that understanding into my own little noggin.
Anyway, a couple years several months while ago, D was in a meeting where some of these smart people (men, by the way) were pitching their new idea on how to market laptop computers. Their idea: to create and offer a laptop for women.
In a room full of men, the sole woman - D - was the only one to offer a response.
What? Women? You're going to offer this to women?
Um, er...
This is absurd! What women? Professional women with college degrees? College student women? CEO CFO women? Women with children and part time jobs? Young women? Women in the military? Is it just for housewives? Is it going to be pink or have flowers on it, or what? What features can a laptop offer women that aren't already available in existing products and can't also be integrated into upcoming products?
Dell offered a laptop for women years ago. If you don't remember it, that's because it was an enormous failure and was pulled from the market after something like two hours.
Her point, which I really can't effectively convey, was that - perhaps like a ballpoint pen, or even an automobile - a laptop is a pretty adaptable thing and isn't bound by the gender of its user. It can already do a zillion things most of us will never bother to learn, and whether it's slate grey or gloss white doesn't necessarily speak to the aesthetic taste (or lack of same) of its human counterpart.
It's like growing an oak tree. For women.
I don't think that pens or cars or laptops really care what gender any of us got stuck with. I don't know why it still matters to us. What I do know is that in our own household, a standard issue consumer level laptop lasts me [the man] about four years and I replace it because I want the new thing; and that D [the woman] manages to fill her hard drive and overload her state-of-the-art super fancy extra cool laptops in a matter of months. So if we were shopping for a laptop for women, we'd need one with four gazillion terrabytes and sixty bazillion RAM things that can totally handle having four hundred programs running at the same time plus skype and that live meeting thing. Mine just needs word processing and web browsing. And a calculator.
The irony, I guess, is that these products were intended to promote the empowerment of women on some level. Someone thought that each of these things would foster strength for the fairer sex. The part that bugs me is that these industries, and society as a whole, continues to present insulting and demeaning products (and rhetoric) while asserting that this very presentation is exactly the opposite. It's like that really rotten insult: "Oh - you're a feminist? Isn't that cute?" But now that sentiment has gone mainstream in a way that it never was before, and it's become distorted to the point that the perpetrators don't even recognize that what they're doing is insulting.
I guess, given that we use the same pens in our house and that because she's only too eager to drive around in the nearly sixty year old cars we keep handy and that she uses a laptop more thoroughly than anyone else I've ever heard of, that we're not likely among the target market for these smart men who are inventing things like pens for the honeys or cars for the cuties.
And we're pretty happy to not fit the demographic.
Cameron
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
Already?
So D went in for another appointment yesterday. This was one of the 'typical' appointments, so I didn't go. Of course, when she got there, the typical part went out the window and it because a more bambino-centric visit. They did the ultrasound thing again, then did some other things, then gave D some instructions for she and I.
We're supposed to decide, apparently quite soon, whether we want to have our bambino circumcised.
We wondered how they were planning on going about such a procedure five months before he joins the rest of us out here in the cold harsh world. Then we started wondering if this decision is so loaded or emotional or complicated that people typically take five months to figure it out. It didn't seem complicated to either of us. Maybe everyone else knows something we don't. Or maybe we know something everyone else doesn't.
So I did what any smart fellow would do: I googled it, and then clicked on the first link that caught my eye. It was Men's Health article titled "Circumcision: Pros and Cons." This seemed like the kind of article that might have some key information that could influence our decision. As it turned out, though, this article didn't talk about health or cleanliness or how much it might hurt or the likelihood of infection but instead discussed how an unsnipped member compares to a snipped one when rolling in the hay with one's sexual partner. The bottom line, according to the experts at Men's Health, is that both circumcised and uncircumcised men are able to have satisfying sex lives; and that the pleasure of their partners doesn't hinge on this detail but is instead dictated by other factors.
This is not helpful information for the current scenario. We weren't thinking about the bambino's sex life quite yet. Of course now that I've read the article, I am thinking about it. Which is absurd. We're still not out of the woods with the whole preggo thing and I'm already rehearsing the "here's a box of condoms" conversation. Shouldn't I be thinking about teaching him the alphabet instead?
D is Italian, and over there in Italy the practice is a lot less common than it is over here. And over here, it's a lot less common than it used to be (like when I was a kid). So we're basing our choice, in part, on our own experience (which is essentially zero) and that of the people we know (which isn't much more than zero).
We don't have a cultural nor faith based attachment that tells us whether it's the right idea or the wrong one. Some people do, and we certainly support them in their beliefs. But we don't.
About exactly twenty years ago I lived in an Intentional Community, which was really just a dysfunctional attempt at what we'd have called a Commune twenty years prior - for me, this amounted to affordable housing while I was in school and for others it offered an arena for assigning men blame for everything nasty that had ever happened to anyone.
One of the fellows who lived there was going through some pretty heavy duty soul searching and had, at 26 years old, suddenly learned that the whole circumcision process is a terrible, painful method of abuse and he instantly became completely distraught that the parents he thought had loved him as a child would perpetrate such an awful act of violence against him at an age when he was helpless and vulnerable and completely reliant on them for everything. At the dinner table, he would suddenly burst into tears and disrupt whatever conversation had been going on, or we'd hear him wailing while he was in the shower. Jeez, dude.
I'm thinking that guy was out of his gourd. I don't think this is an abusive act. And I certainly don't think there's any sense in becoming upset and miserable over something that you can't remember anyway, especially when it was something that was very likely well advised and well intended, performed at a time when conventional wisdom asserted that it was a Smart Thing to do in favor of a male's lifelong overall health. Anyway, his mythical torturous experience has no bearing on our decision either. It's just that when the question came up, that's one of two things that popped into my mind.
The other thing that popped into my mind, which does have some bearing, is the experience of one of my childhood friends. Neither he nor his brother received "the procedure" when they were young. My friend (we'll call him J) got himself a hernia when he was about 20 years old. When he went to the doc to have the hernia fixed, he asked if they'd go ahead and circumcise him while they were poking around down there with their knives and scalpels. They did.
J woke up without any awareness of sensation related to the hernia operation because he was overwhelmed by the discomfort related to the foreskin bit. Said he'd never have done it if he'd known what the recovery would be like. I'm thinking, if that's true for him, it's probably an uncomfortable experience for everyone else, and even if they don't remember it later, if it isn't medically necessary nor culturally dictated, mabye we don't want to sign the bambino up for this unpleasantness. If he wants it later, it'll still be available to him. Then again, we haven't heard all of the compelling reasons to choose one thing over another so we'll probably keep asking around and checking out websites.
And when we do decide, I won't likely be making our decision known here.
Thanks --
Cameron
We're supposed to decide, apparently quite soon, whether we want to have our bambino circumcised.
We wondered how they were planning on going about such a procedure five months before he joins the rest of us out here in the cold harsh world. Then we started wondering if this decision is so loaded or emotional or complicated that people typically take five months to figure it out. It didn't seem complicated to either of us. Maybe everyone else knows something we don't. Or maybe we know something everyone else doesn't.
So I did what any smart fellow would do: I googled it, and then clicked on the first link that caught my eye. It was Men's Health article titled "Circumcision: Pros and Cons." This seemed like the kind of article that might have some key information that could influence our decision. As it turned out, though, this article didn't talk about health or cleanliness or how much it might hurt or the likelihood of infection but instead discussed how an unsnipped member compares to a snipped one when rolling in the hay with one's sexual partner. The bottom line, according to the experts at Men's Health, is that both circumcised and uncircumcised men are able to have satisfying sex lives; and that the pleasure of their partners doesn't hinge on this detail but is instead dictated by other factors.
This is not helpful information for the current scenario. We weren't thinking about the bambino's sex life quite yet. Of course now that I've read the article, I am thinking about it. Which is absurd. We're still not out of the woods with the whole preggo thing and I'm already rehearsing the "here's a box of condoms" conversation. Shouldn't I be thinking about teaching him the alphabet instead?
D is Italian, and over there in Italy the practice is a lot less common than it is over here. And over here, it's a lot less common than it used to be (like when I was a kid). So we're basing our choice, in part, on our own experience (which is essentially zero) and that of the people we know (which isn't much more than zero).
We don't have a cultural nor faith based attachment that tells us whether it's the right idea or the wrong one. Some people do, and we certainly support them in their beliefs. But we don't.
About exactly twenty years ago I lived in an Intentional Community, which was really just a dysfunctional attempt at what we'd have called a Commune twenty years prior - for me, this amounted to affordable housing while I was in school and for others it offered an arena for assigning men blame for everything nasty that had ever happened to anyone.
One of the fellows who lived there was going through some pretty heavy duty soul searching and had, at 26 years old, suddenly learned that the whole circumcision process is a terrible, painful method of abuse and he instantly became completely distraught that the parents he thought had loved him as a child would perpetrate such an awful act of violence against him at an age when he was helpless and vulnerable and completely reliant on them for everything. At the dinner table, he would suddenly burst into tears and disrupt whatever conversation had been going on, or we'd hear him wailing while he was in the shower. Jeez, dude.
I'm thinking that guy was out of his gourd. I don't think this is an abusive act. And I certainly don't think there's any sense in becoming upset and miserable over something that you can't remember anyway, especially when it was something that was very likely well advised and well intended, performed at a time when conventional wisdom asserted that it was a Smart Thing to do in favor of a male's lifelong overall health. Anyway, his mythical torturous experience has no bearing on our decision either. It's just that when the question came up, that's one of two things that popped into my mind.
The other thing that popped into my mind, which does have some bearing, is the experience of one of my childhood friends. Neither he nor his brother received "the procedure" when they were young. My friend (we'll call him J) got himself a hernia when he was about 20 years old. When he went to the doc to have the hernia fixed, he asked if they'd go ahead and circumcise him while they were poking around down there with their knives and scalpels. They did.
J woke up without any awareness of sensation related to the hernia operation because he was overwhelmed by the discomfort related to the foreskin bit. Said he'd never have done it if he'd known what the recovery would be like. I'm thinking, if that's true for him, it's probably an uncomfortable experience for everyone else, and even if they don't remember it later, if it isn't medically necessary nor culturally dictated, mabye we don't want to sign the bambino up for this unpleasantness. If he wants it later, it'll still be available to him. Then again, we haven't heard all of the compelling reasons to choose one thing over another so we'll probably keep asking around and checking out websites.
And when we do decide, I won't likely be making our decision known here.
Thanks --
Cameron
Thursday, October 11, 2012
It's The End Of The World As We Know It.
... well, almost.
This whole blog thing started off when D and I were sort of stuck in Italy (sounds rough, doesn't it?) tending to her mom's ungood health (this is how being stuck in Italy becomes not cool). Then I got really busy assembling an old car for D and though I thought that would make good fodder for the blog, I was too busy working on the thing to blog about the thing. More recent entries include me whining about my lousy back demons, which have now moved on to some other poor sod. My health is good, my life is good. Good.
I'm still working on a book (okay, two books... but only one of them is getting all the focus right now). 49,000 words and counting. Gulp.
D spent most of this past summer traveling for work, and when she swung through Italy, she grabbed her Mom and brought her over here to stay with us for 3 months. Unlike many gents, I'm not concerned about sharing a house and kitchen and bathroom with a Mom In Law. We can barely talk to one another, and each of us thinks the other is beyond great. We talk a little, then she cooks something that only an Italian could manage. And I gain weight, which is the only part that doesn't pretty much rock.
You'll recall from prior entries that D and I had ventured to one of our favorite places on Earth: Mexico. We'd each been there a few times but never together, and when she says "we should go on a vacation" I tend to go with it. For one, there's no arguing with my bride, and for another, disagreeing with the genius notion of taking a trip would to Mexico be foolish. While we were there, we ate terrific food and had lots of fun.
After we returned, and just about the time my back fuss was beginning, D mentioned something about monthly cycles not following the calendar and then said something about going to the drugstore. Just as there's no reason to disagree with a trip to Mexico, there's no reason to disagree with a trip to Rite-Aid. An hour later, she showed me this thing that looks like a toothbrush without the brush part and said "it's positive."
"Positive?!" We got a little teary.
Just to be sure, she went and got the other little toothbrush thing and peed on that one, too, and it gave the same indicator.
Given that we're a cautious lot, we then went to the doctor's office where they did a blood test and confirmed it. D was pregnant. We were terrified and delighted and worried and happy.
Then my back went out and I was a whiny fussy thing and she had to deal with all of that while enduring her "condition."
Then we had some more tests related to this pregnancy thing and all the results were excellent.
After all of this, D went on her international trip, where she avoided alcohol, coffee, cured meats (not easy in Italy), soft cheeses (also not easy in Italy), sushi (this one's pretty easy) and a bunch of other things that she'd have loved to eat and drink.
After she came home, we went in for more tests and those gave us more excellent results. It was time to go public.
We invited my parents - Mom, Dad and Stepmom - to the house on the pretense that we'd be hosting a birthday dinner. D's Mom was already here, and this was our best idea on how to announce the news to all the Nonni [Granparents] at the same time. Can't do anything that could be misconstrued as preferential, you know. It's unusual that we'd invite my parents to the same evening here at the house and we wondered if they'd get suspicious but they didn't. I'm really fortunate in that they all get along just fine and we really don't have any of that drama that plagues other families.
(We do have some family drama but fortunately it's well outside my immediate family. No reason to go into that here, however.)
Everyone showed up and we sat them down in the family room. No one noticed the video camera that would record their reactions to the news even though it was right next to the doorway they all had to walk through to find their places on the couch. We all had snacks and wine (except D) and nobody seemed to notice that, for the first time, our snacks didn't include any cured meats nor soft cheeses.
Finally, an appropriate moment arrived. We gave each guest an envelope and told them some story about how, in other cultures, the birthday party ritual included the hosts giving gifts to the guests. All the Americans asked "is that an Italian tradition?" to which we had to honestly reply "No." Truth is, we don't know whose tradition it might be and we were really making it all up as we went along.
Everyone tore into their envelopes at the same time. My Dad's envelope must not have been closed all that well, because while everyone else was still trying to get theirs open without destroying it, his had already unfolded itself and he found himself looking at an ultrasound picture.
"Oh. My. God. Are we. Serious?" He kind of froze.
Then Stepmom got hers open and said something like "Oh my God!"
Then Mom in Law got hers open, and her reaction was something in Italian along the lines of "Ah ha! I knew it!" She didn't know it but she acted like she had. For the last several weeks, she'd been telling D to lose some weight, and every time D had something to eat, G (her Mom) would say something about eating and gaining weight and going on a diet.
And there's my Mom. She saw the picture and leaned forward with her head in her hands. And she stayed that way for several moments. Hers was the most emotional reaction of the bunch and it took a minute or so for her to recover enough to stand up and trade hugs with everyone. I was, honestly, a little concerned because she wasn't breathing normally and I didn't want her to pass out.
As soon as we'd all calmed down enough that we weren't clamoring at the same time and we could again engage in a more normal conversation, the question of gender came up. We didn't yet know, but we had one more envelope that contained the answer. D opened this one, and inside was another ultrasound picture, with a post-it note stuck to it. On the note were the words "it's a boy!" with a hand drawn arrow pointing at... irrefutable evidence that it is, in fact, a boy.
We wanted family to learn the news all at the same time, and they did. And we wanted everyone to learn the gender at the same time that we learned it ourselves, and they did.
Then it was time for dinner, but none of us had much appetite. And that's probably a good thing given that the bbq ran out of propane before everything on it was fully cooked. But we made do, we ate well, and we all agreed that this was the best birthday party any of had attended for quite some time.
D can finally wear maternity clothes (and she kind of has to, actually). Yesterday she packed up all the things that are now too small and we stowed them in the shelves above the closet. And shortly after we tucked into bed, for the first time, she felt him move.
Our son. Wiggling around.
March 19 of next year should be quite a day. Of course it might just be another day and there's a good chance some other day shortly before or after will carry greater significance. I guess we'll find out when we find out.
All best,
Cameron
This whole blog thing started off when D and I were sort of stuck in Italy (sounds rough, doesn't it?) tending to her mom's ungood health (this is how being stuck in Italy becomes not cool). Then I got really busy assembling an old car for D and though I thought that would make good fodder for the blog, I was too busy working on the thing to blog about the thing. More recent entries include me whining about my lousy back demons, which have now moved on to some other poor sod. My health is good, my life is good. Good.
I'm still working on a book (okay, two books... but only one of them is getting all the focus right now). 49,000 words and counting. Gulp.
D spent most of this past summer traveling for work, and when she swung through Italy, she grabbed her Mom and brought her over here to stay with us for 3 months. Unlike many gents, I'm not concerned about sharing a house and kitchen and bathroom with a Mom In Law. We can barely talk to one another, and each of us thinks the other is beyond great. We talk a little, then she cooks something that only an Italian could manage. And I gain weight, which is the only part that doesn't pretty much rock.
You'll recall from prior entries that D and I had ventured to one of our favorite places on Earth: Mexico. We'd each been there a few times but never together, and when she says "we should go on a vacation" I tend to go with it. For one, there's no arguing with my bride, and for another, disagreeing with the genius notion of taking a trip would to Mexico be foolish. While we were there, we ate terrific food and had lots of fun.
After we returned, and just about the time my back fuss was beginning, D mentioned something about monthly cycles not following the calendar and then said something about going to the drugstore. Just as there's no reason to disagree with a trip to Mexico, there's no reason to disagree with a trip to Rite-Aid. An hour later, she showed me this thing that looks like a toothbrush without the brush part and said "it's positive."
"Positive?!" We got a little teary.
Just to be sure, she went and got the other little toothbrush thing and peed on that one, too, and it gave the same indicator.
Given that we're a cautious lot, we then went to the doctor's office where they did a blood test and confirmed it. D was pregnant. We were terrified and delighted and worried and happy.
Then my back went out and I was a whiny fussy thing and she had to deal with all of that while enduring her "condition."
Then we had some more tests related to this pregnancy thing and all the results were excellent.
After all of this, D went on her international trip, where she avoided alcohol, coffee, cured meats (not easy in Italy), soft cheeses (also not easy in Italy), sushi (this one's pretty easy) and a bunch of other things that she'd have loved to eat and drink.
After she came home, we went in for more tests and those gave us more excellent results. It was time to go public.
We invited my parents - Mom, Dad and Stepmom - to the house on the pretense that we'd be hosting a birthday dinner. D's Mom was already here, and this was our best idea on how to announce the news to all the Nonni [Granparents] at the same time. Can't do anything that could be misconstrued as preferential, you know. It's unusual that we'd invite my parents to the same evening here at the house and we wondered if they'd get suspicious but they didn't. I'm really fortunate in that they all get along just fine and we really don't have any of that drama that plagues other families.
(We do have some family drama but fortunately it's well outside my immediate family. No reason to go into that here, however.)
Everyone showed up and we sat them down in the family room. No one noticed the video camera that would record their reactions to the news even though it was right next to the doorway they all had to walk through to find their places on the couch. We all had snacks and wine (except D) and nobody seemed to notice that, for the first time, our snacks didn't include any cured meats nor soft cheeses.
Finally, an appropriate moment arrived. We gave each guest an envelope and told them some story about how, in other cultures, the birthday party ritual included the hosts giving gifts to the guests. All the Americans asked "is that an Italian tradition?" to which we had to honestly reply "No." Truth is, we don't know whose tradition it might be and we were really making it all up as we went along.
Everyone tore into their envelopes at the same time. My Dad's envelope must not have been closed all that well, because while everyone else was still trying to get theirs open without destroying it, his had already unfolded itself and he found himself looking at an ultrasound picture.
"Oh. My. God. Are we. Serious?" He kind of froze.
Then Stepmom got hers open and said something like "Oh my God!"
Then Mom in Law got hers open, and her reaction was something in Italian along the lines of "Ah ha! I knew it!" She didn't know it but she acted like she had. For the last several weeks, she'd been telling D to lose some weight, and every time D had something to eat, G (her Mom) would say something about eating and gaining weight and going on a diet.
And there's my Mom. She saw the picture and leaned forward with her head in her hands. And she stayed that way for several moments. Hers was the most emotional reaction of the bunch and it took a minute or so for her to recover enough to stand up and trade hugs with everyone. I was, honestly, a little concerned because she wasn't breathing normally and I didn't want her to pass out.
As soon as we'd all calmed down enough that we weren't clamoring at the same time and we could again engage in a more normal conversation, the question of gender came up. We didn't yet know, but we had one more envelope that contained the answer. D opened this one, and inside was another ultrasound picture, with a post-it note stuck to it. On the note were the words "it's a boy!" with a hand drawn arrow pointing at... irrefutable evidence that it is, in fact, a boy.
We wanted family to learn the news all at the same time, and they did. And we wanted everyone to learn the gender at the same time that we learned it ourselves, and they did.
Then it was time for dinner, but none of us had much appetite. And that's probably a good thing given that the bbq ran out of propane before everything on it was fully cooked. But we made do, we ate well, and we all agreed that this was the best birthday party any of had attended for quite some time.
D can finally wear maternity clothes (and she kind of has to, actually). Yesterday she packed up all the things that are now too small and we stowed them in the shelves above the closet. And shortly after we tucked into bed, for the first time, she felt him move.
Our son. Wiggling around.
March 19 of next year should be quite a day. Of course it might just be another day and there's a good chance some other day shortly before or after will carry greater significance. I guess we'll find out when we find out.
All best,
Cameron
Friday, August 10, 2012
Hiatus Redux
It's been a while since my last entry. Not because I've run out of things to say - as you know, my problem isn't finding thing to talk about, it's reminding myself to shut up every once in a while.
So, not that you're interested, here's a quick synopsis.
On July 13 I woke up but couldn't get out of bed. Back hurt, leg hurt. Two days later, went to the doc, who told me I had a slipped disk and gave me some codeine. It got worse until I ended up in the ER because I could no longer walk and was in a great deal of pain. The ER doc told me I had a herniated disc and gave me some oxycodone.
For the record: neither codeine nor oxycodone do anything whatsoever for nerve pain.
It got worse, until I could no longer sit in a chair, couldn't stand, and couldn't walk. I could lie on the floor with my calves resting on the seat of a chair. Like a sitting posture, only horizontal.
It got worse and I started thinking about who would help D liquidate what assets I have. I figured the Volvo locals would help with selling my cars, tools and collectibles. Dad is in real estate, so he could help sell our house in Southeast Portland, or get the deed into her name. I spent three days knowing - not wondering - that if this was what I was in for, that there was no quality of life and I wouldn't survive it. I was pretty scared, thinking that it wasn't going to get better. It was as bad as I could imagine, and then it got worse. Really not cool.
By this time I was crawling from the couch or my horizontal chair to the bathroom and back. Standing upright was out of the question and walking had become a fantasy. I could get into the shower and sit on the floor, but couldn't wash myself and when I was done rinsing off, couldn't dry myself. Once dry, couldn't put on my clothes myself. Humiliating.
And then it got worse. I couldn't sleep and remained awake for three days and nights before I was able to start napping. I'd thrash around all night, then have a breakfast smoothie and a cup of coffee, then fall asleep for a couple hours. The hallucinations were okay. I wished that I could just pass out from the pain - I'd heard that people do that sometimes and couldn't imagine how much more pain it would take before I could just slip into unconsciousness. I wished I could go to the hospital and have them induce a coma. Anything to get some rest and let the body either heal or shut down.
I got an MRI and we learned that I have a severely herniated disc that's been pinching my sciatic nerve. This explained why my left leg was in constant debilitating pain, why I'd lost the reflexes in my left leg, why my calf had gone numb, and why my foot was tingling. The MRI was terribly uncomfortable for my bum leg. My leg started shaking, and I couldn't get it to stop, so the first round of images was useless. We went back the following day and I took a coctail of oxycodone and a couple liquid valium to help me hold still. I was hoping that mix would put me into a happy state of confusion (they told me I'd really be feeling the effects) but about all I managed was to relax enough that I could just continue telling myself that the leg pain wouldn't get any worse and that I had to hold still no matter what.
See that grey thing in the middle? It's supposed to be contained like the other two and not squirting out the side toward the right of the pic.
Acupuncture has been the only thing to offer any relief from the discomfort. Drugs were useless. The acupuncture was as close to a miracle as anything I've ever experienced personally. D and I agree that anytime anything ever happens that makes either of us uncomfortable at all, we're going to see Dr Xiao. D is amazed at the medical attention I've received - in Italy, the very first thing they do when you have a slipped disc is get you into the MRI so that they can assess the damage. Over here, they give you painkillers that don't work and send you home with a book about stretching and ask you to come back in two weeks. Say what you will about socialized medicine. At least those docs aren't thinking about the financial bottom line.
I've now seen my regular doc [take these pills and stretch], the ER doc [take these other pills and stretch], the acupuncturist [complete effing miracle], a neurologist [you need surgery], an osteopath [you don't need surgery, you need steroids] and a neurosurgeon [you don't need surgery and you shouldn't have steroids]. The only consensus they've reached is that I ought to be able to heal without surgery (other than the neurologist, whose expertise isn't surgery), and I'm pretty pleased about that.
I got a cortisone shot and should feel some relief from that pretty soon. It takes a week to become effective and I've got a few days to go. My back is sore, but my leg is what's really bothering me. My left thigh has begun to atrophe and is now an inch smaller in circumference than the right; my hip joint still hurts, and my calf is still sore behind the shin and numb all over the front.
The good news is that I can walk unassisted for about 100 feet before I have to sit. The x rays and MRI scans show that I don't have any tumors in my spine, kidneys nor liver and that aside from this one offending disc that my spine is otherwise in fine shape.
I have no complaints. Other than this disc thing, life is good. I do wish I could get more sleep, though.
Cheers -
Cameron
So, not that you're interested, here's a quick synopsis.
On July 13 I woke up but couldn't get out of bed. Back hurt, leg hurt. Two days later, went to the doc, who told me I had a slipped disk and gave me some codeine. It got worse until I ended up in the ER because I could no longer walk and was in a great deal of pain. The ER doc told me I had a herniated disc and gave me some oxycodone.
For the record: neither codeine nor oxycodone do anything whatsoever for nerve pain.
It got worse, until I could no longer sit in a chair, couldn't stand, and couldn't walk. I could lie on the floor with my calves resting on the seat of a chair. Like a sitting posture, only horizontal.
It got worse and I started thinking about who would help D liquidate what assets I have. I figured the Volvo locals would help with selling my cars, tools and collectibles. Dad is in real estate, so he could help sell our house in Southeast Portland, or get the deed into her name. I spent three days knowing - not wondering - that if this was what I was in for, that there was no quality of life and I wouldn't survive it. I was pretty scared, thinking that it wasn't going to get better. It was as bad as I could imagine, and then it got worse. Really not cool.
By this time I was crawling from the couch or my horizontal chair to the bathroom and back. Standing upright was out of the question and walking had become a fantasy. I could get into the shower and sit on the floor, but couldn't wash myself and when I was done rinsing off, couldn't dry myself. Once dry, couldn't put on my clothes myself. Humiliating.
And then it got worse. I couldn't sleep and remained awake for three days and nights before I was able to start napping. I'd thrash around all night, then have a breakfast smoothie and a cup of coffee, then fall asleep for a couple hours. The hallucinations were okay. I wished that I could just pass out from the pain - I'd heard that people do that sometimes and couldn't imagine how much more pain it would take before I could just slip into unconsciousness. I wished I could go to the hospital and have them induce a coma. Anything to get some rest and let the body either heal or shut down.
I got an MRI and we learned that I have a severely herniated disc that's been pinching my sciatic nerve. This explained why my left leg was in constant debilitating pain, why I'd lost the reflexes in my left leg, why my calf had gone numb, and why my foot was tingling. The MRI was terribly uncomfortable for my bum leg. My leg started shaking, and I couldn't get it to stop, so the first round of images was useless. We went back the following day and I took a coctail of oxycodone and a couple liquid valium to help me hold still. I was hoping that mix would put me into a happy state of confusion (they told me I'd really be feeling the effects) but about all I managed was to relax enough that I could just continue telling myself that the leg pain wouldn't get any worse and that I had to hold still no matter what.
See that grey thing in the middle? It's supposed to be contained like the other two and not squirting out the side toward the right of the pic.
Acupuncture has been the only thing to offer any relief from the discomfort. Drugs were useless. The acupuncture was as close to a miracle as anything I've ever experienced personally. D and I agree that anytime anything ever happens that makes either of us uncomfortable at all, we're going to see Dr Xiao. D is amazed at the medical attention I've received - in Italy, the very first thing they do when you have a slipped disc is get you into the MRI so that they can assess the damage. Over here, they give you painkillers that don't work and send you home with a book about stretching and ask you to come back in two weeks. Say what you will about socialized medicine. At least those docs aren't thinking about the financial bottom line.
I've now seen my regular doc [take these pills and stretch], the ER doc [take these other pills and stretch], the acupuncturist [complete effing miracle], a neurologist [you need surgery], an osteopath [you don't need surgery, you need steroids] and a neurosurgeon [you don't need surgery and you shouldn't have steroids]. The only consensus they've reached is that I ought to be able to heal without surgery (other than the neurologist, whose expertise isn't surgery), and I'm pretty pleased about that.
I got a cortisone shot and should feel some relief from that pretty soon. It takes a week to become effective and I've got a few days to go. My back is sore, but my leg is what's really bothering me. My left thigh has begun to atrophe and is now an inch smaller in circumference than the right; my hip joint still hurts, and my calf is still sore behind the shin and numb all over the front.
The good news is that I can walk unassisted for about 100 feet before I have to sit. The x rays and MRI scans show that I don't have any tumors in my spine, kidneys nor liver and that aside from this one offending disc that my spine is otherwise in fine shape.
I have no complaints. Other than this disc thing, life is good. I do wish I could get more sleep, though.
Cheers -
Cameron
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Dogs
From the time that I was about ten years old until sometime during my thirteenth year, Mom and I lived on 32 acres of forest, in a rustic cabin nestled in a valley at the end of a mile-long driveway that was situated somewhere between the small Oregon towns of Yamhill and Gaston. Yamhill was a whopping metropolis with a single flashing red light at its largest intersection and boasted a population of 640 people. Gaston was a similar sized town but it was further away and we didn’t visit there all that often.
Our cabin in the woods lacked electricity and running water (though there was a faucet in the kitchen sink that did provide cold water from the stream further up the hill during the wet seasons) and was surrounded by even more forest that nobody was farming or logging or otherwise making use of. Our three dogs had full run of everything and enjoyed their country life without any understanding of things like leashes, fences or collars. When we’d moved from Dallas, Oregon to The Place (that’s what we called our new home), we brought along Ruby, who was a mutt we’d rescued from certain death when she showed up on our front porch. Someone had put a rubber band around her neck, and it was cutting its way through her tissue toward important things like her jugular, esophagus and spinal cord. We’d taken her to the vet, gotten her fixed up, and tried to find her owners. We didn’t find her owners, so we kept her and she was delighted to move out to the woods and spend her days romping through the brush with Farley and Whiskers.
Farley had been named after Farley Mowatt, the author who brought us some great reading, including The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and Never Cry Wolf. Farley’s parents had been German Shepherd and Canadian Timber Wolf on the dad’s side and St Bernard on the mom’s, which meant that he was an enormous lummox with long orangish fur and sometimes howled at the moon. He had a gentle, yet unstoppable, playful presence.
Whiskers was his polar opposite and was a Miniature Wire Haired Terrier, smaller than the average housecat. We had a cat, too, named Motorhead (this was before the band of the same name made Metal history). Motorhead would have been a black and white domestic shorthair, and his upper half was exactly that, but he always looked like someone had dipped his aft end into a vat of mange. Waist up, decent cat. Waist down, not so much. He earned his name because no matter whether you gave him a treat or tried to scoop him out of the way with your boot, he’d start purring and stay that way for a good half hour. Great thing about this cat was that he ate dog food, so we didn’t have to give him any special cat attention.
A hunter he was not. Though afforded ample available prey, Motorhead’s interest in catching mice or other rodents consisted of him crouching next to the entryway of some little critter’s burrow, his entire being focused on whatever mouse activity was taking place inside. The mouse would emerge and scamper off toward some other mouse hole in the ground a few feet away and Motorhead would – in full “cat about to pounce” posture – follow, his focus never deviating from the thing we all thought he should capture and devour. When the mouse vanished back into the ground, Motorhead would sit upright, seemingly wondering what had just happened, only vaguely aware that he’d missed any opportunity for a crunchy snack. Neighboring rodents had far more to fear from our dogs than this approximation of a cat.
Whiskers remains the toughest dog I’ve ever heard of. He was old and senile and would often try humping Ruby, which never went well. For one, Ruby had been spayed and was hostilely opposed to anything similar to the canine mating ritual. Aside from that, Whiskers was only about 7 inches tall, while Ruby was a mid-sized dog that could easily step right over him if he was in the way. The only opportunities for a union between them occurred when she was napping and he was, for a short moment, able to attempt to mount her. This always ended with a quick snarl and rapid disappearance of his engorged member, followed by a meek retreat.
Fortunately for Whiskers, Motorhead was not only a more appropriate size for sexual advances but he was also either unfazed or completely unaware of them. Every now and again, we’d see Whiskers grinding away at some part of the cat, getting his groove on, while the cat spaced out on something on the other side of the yard. They didn’t actually copulate… part of this was because Whiskers wasn’t completely clear on what part of the cat he should aim for… and part of it was likely because Motorhead was also male. Thus began my acceptance of interspecies and common gender bonding.
Whiskers had lost all the fur from his tail, so he looked a little like a big rat. Unlike the cat, he liked eating mice and frequently busied himself tearing what was left of the upholstery in our derelict cars apart as he sought his worthy prey. The result of this was an occasional meal of baby mice (the adults had plenty of time to flee) as well as a profound hernia. His lower abdomen was completely distended as he’d torn apart all the muscles previously tasked with keeping his guts inside. But his hide was tough and that he managed pretty well being all herniated like that.
Every now and again, the dogs would be gone for a couple days. We figured they were chasing coyotes or carousing with other dogs in the area, and they always came back. Usually they came back dirty or smelling like a skunk but otherwise healthy. Whiskers’ diminutive size was not to his advantage, unfortunately, and at one point he had an argument with Farley over a piece of cheese or some other dropped tidbit of human food. Farley picked Whiskers up in his mouth and shook him around for a bit; and in the excitement Whiskers bumped his head against the post that held our patio roof aloft. The patio was fine, but one of Whisker’s eyes popped right out of its socket and remained exposed to the elements until Jason (the other boy who lived in the woods with us) was able to carry him to the nearest neighbors – a half mile through the woods and across the field – to catch a ride to the vet. When they arrived, the vet determined that the eye had already quit working and gave Jason the choice of poking it back in so Whiskers would look like a normal two eyed dog, or tossing the eyeball out and sewing the lid closed. A dud eye would require cleaning and other attention that just seemed infeasible given Whisker’s active and outdoorsy lifestyle, so Jason made the smart choice and Whiskers came home with one eye sewn shut. It didn’t help that his remaining eye was heavily clouded with cataracts and his already poor concept of special relationships (recall attempts to mount a female three times taller than himself) suffered further.
During one of the dogs’ jaunts into the woods, Whiskers came home a day later than the others. It was clear that he’d been jumped by a band of wily coyotes and that they’d chewed on him a bit. What wasn’t clear was the method by which he’d made his escape. Certainly, he couldn’t outrun them. Bud, Jason’s Dad, figured he’d either sneaked into a hole where the coyotes couldn’t get to him or that he tasted awful and they abandoned any notion of making him into a quick snack.
And this dog knew the liberation that was reserved only for birds before the Wright Brothers changed the course of transportation. From any vantage other than the ground, he really did look like a big rodent. If you’re wondering: looking like a rodent in a landscape well patrolled by raptors is not the road to a long and healthy life. One day we came home and wondered where he might be. He wasn’t hanging out with the other dogs, and he wasn’t dry humping the cat. We called but he didn’t answer.
Three days later, one very uncomfortable, dazed and barely-able-to-walk Whiskers returned to The Place. On one side of his torso were two serious punctures, and on the other were several more. Bud said “Looks like a bird picked ‘eem up. Bet he was s’prised.” Seemed the bird had picked him up and at some point realized this wasn’t a snacky little rat suitable for family dining back at the nest – but was instead a nasty little dog full of piss and vinegar – and must have dropped him. Whiskers went to the vet, who explained that these talon punctures weren’t the kind of injuries that called for stitches, and he sent us home with a squeeze tube full of antibiotic ointment. I got a new level of understanding of how skin works when Bud squirted the ointment into the wound near Whisker’s hip and it oozed out all the other wounds, even the one all the way up on his neck above his shoulders. Whiskers soldiered on.
None of this was good and none of it was bad. This was how things were. The dogs got into arguments sometimes but generally got along really well. Most of what they accomplished was to ensure that we never saw any wildlife anywhere near the house. The woods were well populated with deer and other pretty animals that people like us would like to have seen once in a while, but long before any of those came into sight, the dogs saw/heard/smelled it and would suddenly erupt into a throng of hunters bent on giving respectable chase to Bambi and similar ilk. Farley and Ruby could really move with a quickness. Whiskers barked a lot and hobbled after them but usually they’d return from across the valley before he’d made it beyond our line of sight.
Being dogs, they sometimes practiced their predatory skills. One night we came home to find a very bloody – but still alive – possum near the house. There was no doubt but that the dogs had harassed and brutalized this dull creature. It could stand, but couldn’t really walk.
You might not know this, but the central nervous system that equips a possum is exactly like the one that you and I have. So if a couple dogs chew a possum to within inches of its life, that creepy tail hanging critter feels pain just like we would. The dogs got one of the only scolding sessions they’d ever know and we went inside the cabin. Bud went back outside to do something about this suffering possum and was back inside after a few minutes.
“Is it ok?” I asked. I worried over animals even if they’re creepy.
“No. Too far gone to save.”
“What did you do?”
“Killed it. Buried it.”
“How did you kill it?”
“Shovel.”
This wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It just was. The dogs did something we didn’t want them to do – but they were dogs and that’s how it is sometimes. Then Bud had to do something he didn’t want to do. He didn’t like it, but we lived in the woods and that how living in the woods is sometimes.
One summer day, the Yamhill County Animal Control fellow came by, waving dog treats to ensure a friendly reception. I think he hadn’t realized that dog treats were the best guarantee that our three dogs – each with a different reach – would instantly cover his entire outfit with muddy paw prints and lots of dog kisses. I wondered how he knew that it was safe to get out of the car and how many times he’d been bitten. After a short conversation with my Mom, he wrote us three tickets – one per dog for failing to license them.
I wondered why a dog would need a license. Cars need to be licensed, but firearms don’t and dogs were more like weapons than transportation. The possum told me so.
Mom went to court to argue our case before the judge, and I went along because I always went along for things like that. There isn’t really a “dog license violator” courtroom, so we joined everyone else who’d received a ticket for whatever infraction that required a court appearance. We listened to the other poor souls in court as they explained why they’d been driving without a license, or why they’d been arrested for the tenth time, or why they just couldn’t stop stealing cars or selling drugs. And then it was our turn to stand up in the front of the room to face the serious and unapologetic man in the black robe. First, he mispronounced our last name. Everyone does that.
“Loovray?”
“LoveRee.”
“Lohvreh?”
This game gets old quickly if you’re one of us, and all that really mattered was that they’d spelled it right when they wrote up the three infractions, so Mom gave up trying to teach a man of the bench all the nuances related to the pronunciation of an Americanized misspelling of what was a Norwegian name with ancient Germanic origins.
After a few rounds of the name game, he addressed my Mom.
“How do you plead?”
Mom had a plan. “Two thirds not guilty and one third guilty, your honor.”
The judge raised an eyebrow as giggles crept through the courtroom. “Two thirds?”
Mom continued, “We have tickets for each of three dogs. Two of the dogs don’t actually live there, and so they don’t need to be licensed in Yamhill county.”
“Okay, let’s just take these one at a time. Now… Whiskers. Is he guilty?”
Giggles gave way to open laughter. None of these car thieves and burglars had heard of a dog being charged with anything.
“Absolutely. Whiskers is guilty.”
“Okay, now Ruby Begonia?"
Laughter. A room full of laughter.
All our criminal peers were laughing. The recorder and the clerk and the bailiff and even the judge himself were clearly amused and barely stifling their own snickers. We’d managed to bring a bit of levity into this otherwise somber room, and everyone on both sides of the law seemed to really appreciate it.
“Ruby is innocent. She lives with us in Dallas, so she’s licensed there.” We still owned the house in Dallas, so we could sort of honestly make this assertion, and Mom had the foresight of getting Ruby’s license before we came to court.
“Okay, then… and where does Farley live when he and Ruby aren’t visiting Whiskers?”
Giggles.
“Portland. Farley lives in Portland.”
Mom paid the fine for having a single unlicensed dog in Yamhill county, then got Whiskers his proper tags and we went home without any inclination toward putting a collar, let alone a license, on any of the dogs. Bud had already explained that putting a collar on a dog that runs in the woods is a good way for the dog to hang itself, and we didn’t want any of that. Mom and Bud were happy enough to live unencumbered by clothing when it was warm enough, so that standard was certainly good enough for our canine companions. Besides, we didn’t really own them so it wasn’t up to us how they might dress. We fed them, we loved them, and they loved us. We were their people. They were our dogs.
From the time that I was about ten years old until sometime during my thirteenth year, Mom and I lived on 32 acres of forest, in a rustic cabin nestled in a valley at the end of a mile-long driveway that was situated somewhere between the small Oregon towns of Yamhill and Gaston. Yamhill was a whopping metropolis with a single flashing red light at its largest intersection and boasted a population of 640 people. Gaston was a similar sized town but it was further away and we didn’t visit there all that often.
Our cabin in the woods lacked electricity and running water (though there was a faucet in the kitchen sink that did provide cold water from the stream further up the hill during the wet seasons) and was surrounded by even more forest that nobody was farming or logging or otherwise making use of. Our three dogs had full run of everything and enjoyed their country life without any understanding of things like leashes, fences or collars. When we’d moved from Dallas, Oregon to The Place (that’s what we called our new home), we brought along Ruby, who was a mutt we’d rescued from certain death when she showed up on our front porch. Someone had put a rubber band around her neck, and it was cutting its way through her tissue toward important things like her jugular, esophagus and spinal cord. We’d taken her to the vet, gotten her fixed up, and tried to find her owners. We didn’t find her owners, so we kept her and she was delighted to move out to the woods and spend her days romping through the brush with Farley and Whiskers.
Farley had been named after Farley Mowatt, the author who brought us some great reading, including The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and Never Cry Wolf. Farley’s parents had been German Shepherd and Canadian Timber Wolf on the dad’s side and St Bernard on the mom’s, which meant that he was an enormous lummox with long orangish fur and sometimes howled at the moon. He had a gentle, yet unstoppable, playful presence.
Whiskers was his polar opposite and was a Miniature Wire Haired Terrier, smaller than the average housecat. We had a cat, too, named Motorhead (this was before the band of the same name made Metal history). Motorhead would have been a black and white domestic shorthair, and his upper half was exactly that, but he always looked like someone had dipped his aft end into a vat of mange. Waist up, decent cat. Waist down, not so much. He earned his name because no matter whether you gave him a treat or tried to scoop him out of the way with your boot, he’d start purring and stay that way for a good half hour. Great thing about this cat was that he ate dog food, so we didn’t have to give him any special cat attention.
A hunter he was not. Though afforded ample available prey, Motorhead’s interest in catching mice or other rodents consisted of him crouching next to the entryway of some little critter’s burrow, his entire being focused on whatever mouse activity was taking place inside. The mouse would emerge and scamper off toward some other mouse hole in the ground a few feet away and Motorhead would – in full “cat about to pounce” posture – follow, his focus never deviating from the thing we all thought he should capture and devour. When the mouse vanished back into the ground, Motorhead would sit upright, seemingly wondering what had just happened, only vaguely aware that he’d missed any opportunity for a crunchy snack. Neighboring rodents had far more to fear from our dogs than this approximation of a cat.
Whiskers remains the toughest dog I’ve ever heard of. He was old and senile and would often try humping Ruby, which never went well. For one, Ruby had been spayed and was hostilely opposed to anything similar to the canine mating ritual. Aside from that, Whiskers was only about 7 inches tall, while Ruby was a mid-sized dog that could easily step right over him if he was in the way. The only opportunities for a union between them occurred when she was napping and he was, for a short moment, able to attempt to mount her. This always ended with a quick snarl and rapid disappearance of his engorged member, followed by a meek retreat.
Fortunately for Whiskers, Motorhead was not only a more appropriate size for sexual advances but he was also either unfazed or completely unaware of them. Every now and again, we’d see Whiskers grinding away at some part of the cat, getting his groove on, while the cat spaced out on something on the other side of the yard. They didn’t actually copulate… part of this was because Whiskers wasn’t completely clear on what part of the cat he should aim for… and part of it was likely because Motorhead was also male. Thus began my acceptance of interspecies and common gender bonding.
Whiskers had lost all the fur from his tail, so he looked a little like a big rat. Unlike the cat, he liked eating mice and frequently busied himself tearing what was left of the upholstery in our derelict cars apart as he sought his worthy prey. The result of this was an occasional meal of baby mice (the adults had plenty of time to flee) as well as a profound hernia. His lower abdomen was completely distended as he’d torn apart all the muscles previously tasked with keeping his guts inside. But his hide was tough and that he managed pretty well being all herniated like that.
Every now and again, the dogs would be gone for a couple days. We figured they were chasing coyotes or carousing with other dogs in the area, and they always came back. Usually they came back dirty or smelling like a skunk but otherwise healthy. Whiskers’ diminutive size was not to his advantage, unfortunately, and at one point he had an argument with Farley over a piece of cheese or some other dropped tidbit of human food. Farley picked Whiskers up in his mouth and shook him around for a bit; and in the excitement Whiskers bumped his head against the post that held our patio roof aloft. The patio was fine, but one of Whisker’s eyes popped right out of its socket and remained exposed to the elements until Jason (the other boy who lived in the woods with us) was able to carry him to the nearest neighbors – a half mile through the woods and across the field – to catch a ride to the vet. When they arrived, the vet determined that the eye had already quit working and gave Jason the choice of poking it back in so Whiskers would look like a normal two eyed dog, or tossing the eyeball out and sewing the lid closed. A dud eye would require cleaning and other attention that just seemed infeasible given Whisker’s active and outdoorsy lifestyle, so Jason made the smart choice and Whiskers came home with one eye sewn shut. It didn’t help that his remaining eye was heavily clouded with cataracts and his already poor concept of special relationships (recall attempts to mount a female three times taller than himself) suffered further.
During one of the dogs’ jaunts into the woods, Whiskers came home a day later than the others. It was clear that he’d been jumped by a band of wily coyotes and that they’d chewed on him a bit. What wasn’t clear was the method by which he’d made his escape. Certainly, he couldn’t outrun them. Bud, Jason’s Dad, figured he’d either sneaked into a hole where the coyotes couldn’t get to him or that he tasted awful and they abandoned any notion of making him into a quick snack.
And this dog knew the liberation that was reserved only for birds before the Wright Brothers changed the course of transportation. From any vantage other than the ground, he really did look like a big rodent. If you’re wondering: looking like a rodent in a landscape well patrolled by raptors is not the road to a long and healthy life. One day we came home and wondered where he might be. He wasn’t hanging out with the other dogs, and he wasn’t dry humping the cat. We called but he didn’t answer.
Three days later, one very uncomfortable, dazed and barely-able-to-walk Whiskers returned to The Place. On one side of his torso were two serious punctures, and on the other were several more. Bud said “Looks like a bird picked ‘eem up. Bet he was s’prised.” Seemed the bird had picked him up and at some point realized this wasn’t a snacky little rat suitable for family dining back at the nest – but was instead a nasty little dog full of piss and vinegar – and must have dropped him. Whiskers went to the vet, who explained that these talon punctures weren’t the kind of injuries that called for stitches, and he sent us home with a squeeze tube full of antibiotic ointment. I got a new level of understanding of how skin works when Bud squirted the ointment into the wound near Whisker’s hip and it oozed out all the other wounds, even the one all the way up on his neck above his shoulders. Whiskers soldiered on.
None of this was good and none of it was bad. This was how things were. The dogs got into arguments sometimes but generally got along really well. Most of what they accomplished was to ensure that we never saw any wildlife anywhere near the house. The woods were well populated with deer and other pretty animals that people like us would like to have seen once in a while, but long before any of those came into sight, the dogs saw/heard/smelled it and would suddenly erupt into a throng of hunters bent on giving respectable chase to Bambi and similar ilk. Farley and Ruby could really move with a quickness. Whiskers barked a lot and hobbled after them but usually they’d return from across the valley before he’d made it beyond our line of sight.
Being dogs, they sometimes practiced their predatory skills. One night we came home to find a very bloody – but still alive – possum near the house. There was no doubt but that the dogs had harassed and brutalized this dull creature. It could stand, but couldn’t really walk.
You might not know this, but the central nervous system that equips a possum is exactly like the one that you and I have. So if a couple dogs chew a possum to within inches of its life, that creepy tail hanging critter feels pain just like we would. The dogs got one of the only scolding sessions they’d ever know and we went inside the cabin. Bud went back outside to do something about this suffering possum and was back inside after a few minutes.
“Is it ok?” I asked. I worried over animals even if they’re creepy.
“No. Too far gone to save.”
“What did you do?”
“Killed it. Buried it.”
“How did you kill it?”
“Shovel.”
This wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It just was. The dogs did something we didn’t want them to do – but they were dogs and that’s how it is sometimes. Then Bud had to do something he didn’t want to do. He didn’t like it, but we lived in the woods and that how living in the woods is sometimes.
One summer day, the Yamhill County Animal Control fellow came by, waving dog treats to ensure a friendly reception. I think he hadn’t realized that dog treats were the best guarantee that our three dogs – each with a different reach – would instantly cover his entire outfit with muddy paw prints and lots of dog kisses. I wondered how he knew that it was safe to get out of the car and how many times he’d been bitten. After a short conversation with my Mom, he wrote us three tickets – one per dog for failing to license them.
I wondered why a dog would need a license. Cars need to be licensed, but firearms don’t and dogs were more like weapons than transportation. The possum told me so.
Mom went to court to argue our case before the judge, and I went along because I always went along for things like that. There isn’t really a “dog license violator” courtroom, so we joined everyone else who’d received a ticket for whatever infraction that required a court appearance. We listened to the other poor souls in court as they explained why they’d been driving without a license, or why they’d been arrested for the tenth time, or why they just couldn’t stop stealing cars or selling drugs. And then it was our turn to stand up in the front of the room to face the serious and unapologetic man in the black robe. First, he mispronounced our last name. Everyone does that.
“Loovray?”
“LoveRee.”
“Lohvreh?”
This game gets old quickly if you’re one of us, and all that really mattered was that they’d spelled it right when they wrote up the three infractions, so Mom gave up trying to teach a man of the bench all the nuances related to the pronunciation of an Americanized misspelling of what was a Norwegian name with ancient Germanic origins.
After a few rounds of the name game, he addressed my Mom.
“How do you plead?”
Mom had a plan. “Two thirds not guilty and one third guilty, your honor.”
The judge raised an eyebrow as giggles crept through the courtroom. “Two thirds?”
Mom continued, “We have tickets for each of three dogs. Two of the dogs don’t actually live there, and so they don’t need to be licensed in Yamhill county.”
“Okay, let’s just take these one at a time. Now… Whiskers. Is he guilty?”
Giggles gave way to open laughter. None of these car thieves and burglars had heard of a dog being charged with anything.
“Absolutely. Whiskers is guilty.”
“Okay, now Ruby Begonia?"
Laughter. A room full of laughter.
All our criminal peers were laughing. The recorder and the clerk and the bailiff and even the judge himself were clearly amused and barely stifling their own snickers. We’d managed to bring a bit of levity into this otherwise somber room, and everyone on both sides of the law seemed to really appreciate it.
“Ruby is innocent. She lives with us in Dallas, so she’s licensed there.” We still owned the house in Dallas, so we could sort of honestly make this assertion, and Mom had the foresight of getting Ruby’s license before we came to court.
“Okay, then… and where does Farley live when he and Ruby aren’t visiting Whiskers?”
Giggles.
“Portland. Farley lives in Portland.”
Mom paid the fine for having a single unlicensed dog in Yamhill county, then got Whiskers his proper tags and we went home without any inclination toward putting a collar, let alone a license, on any of the dogs. Bud had already explained that putting a collar on a dog that runs in the woods is a good way for the dog to hang itself, and we didn’t want any of that. Mom and Bud were happy enough to live unencumbered by clothing when it was warm enough, so that standard was certainly good enough for our canine companions. Besides, we didn’t really own them so it wasn’t up to us how they might dress. We fed them, we loved them, and they loved us. We were their people. They were our dogs.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Boy Racers
If you know me, you know that for most of my life I've been interested in making old Volvos go fast. Faster than most old Volvos, anyway. "Volvo" and "fast" often don't fit into the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence... which is a large part of the reason that such a thing is among my aspirations. Something about the underdog appeal draws me in.
This last weekend I was fortunate to be included among a pit crew for one of the best known (among us Volvo folk, anyway) fast Volvos. Jim and Joy Perry own a 1962 Volvo P1800 that is among the most fully race prepared such cars, and they brought it out to Portland to participate in the Historic Races this last weekend.
My thinking was that if all went well, I'd enjoy my full access pass and sit around watching cars go fast; and that if something didn't go well I'd see if I could lend a hand toward whatever repairs might be called for.
The first day, Thursday, was "testing and tuning." This is the day when racers get their cars onto the track for some practice and (primarily) for fine tuning the car for the coming races. Different tracks, different elevations, barometric pressures, ambient temperatures, and available fuel each influence different variables. Jim's car had a couple minor tweaks we knew we'd want to look into, but before you can tune one of these things, it's best to give it a try as it is and then see what needs tweaking.
First, we unloaded the car by rolling it out of the trailer and onto the ground. Of course, my sensible shoes were in my duffel bag and as soon as I stepped onto the pavement with a fair amount of racecar pushing me backward, I slipped out of my sandals and peeled a callous right off the bottom of one of my feet. It was bleeding a lot, so I patched a square of duct tape over it.
The bad news is that this made me walk funny for the rest of the day; the good news was that my blood sacrifice for the car had been made early on and would, no doubt, ensure good fortune for the rest of the weekend.
We made a few initial checks, got the car started up, and I climbed in with Jim to head over to the tech inspection. Sitting on a square of foam (there isn't a passenger seat in this car), it was clear that the thing is built for speed. It's also clear that it's bolted together really securely and doesn't have any of the rubber bushings nor mounts that are found on street driven cars... which means that the engine, rear axle and exhaust each transfer some amount of vibration into the cockpit. Add to this the lack of insulation and very taut suspension, and the ride is a bit on the noisy side, a bit on the rough side. I loved it even though we didn't get out of 1st gear and kept it below 20mph.
Tech was a breeze, so we went about getting Jim suited up. He put on his fireproof undergarments, then a 'Cool Shirt,' which is a shirt that has tubes sewn all over it. These tubes connect to what's essentially an ice box and a pump, and they circulate cold water all around the driver's torso. This is a good idea given that it's hot outside, that race cars are hot, and that the driver is wearing several layers of warm clothes.
Jim went out for his first tuning run, which was to be 10 or 15 minutes and would, no doubt, give us some insight as far as what we might want to do about tuning the carbs or whatever other minor tweaks a car of this caliber might need.
During the first lap, the transmission made a very loud "bang" and Jim brought the car back in before he'd completed a single lap. It wouldn't go into gear properly and we quickly decided (mostly he decided, as I was there to follow the instructions given by those who know more than I do about things like this) to replace the transmission with a spare he'd brought along.
The transmission that came out is a fancy race piece that costs a lot of money and that you can't get parts for at the local Napa. You probably can't get parts for it anywhere in the US, really. The one we put in is an old gearbox taken from someone's broken down passenger car.
So Thursday, we were busy changing out transmissions and the clutch and we missed the second tuning run. By the time it was back together, the track was cold (meaning 'no more cars allowed').
We did make a couple changes to the carbs that we knew were good ideas. Our friend Phil knows these 48 Weber DCO carbs far better than most people, so he chose the bits to replace and we did that.
The next day, the car was running well with its meek transmission and Jim was getting the hang of the track. We watched his lap times get faster though we could tell the carbs weren't quite right. A couple more changes to the carbs would be helpful before getting back onto the track for the second practice run.
Unfortunately, my blood sacrifice was proved inadequate and Jim would have more issues with the car. Friday turned out well enough, but Saturday was less agreeable. Still plenty of fun and good times, but more wrenching.
On the first run, the temperature spiked and cooland overflowed from the overflow bottle and splattered on the windshield. After a couple quick checks, it was clear that the head gasket had blown. The only repair for this is replacement, so we quickly went about changing the head gasket and were happy to button everything up about a half hour before Jim's second qualifying run.
The second run was really fun. We watched Jim give one of the locals in a BMW a run for his money and finally pass him on the front straight. Unfortunately, something went a little wrong at the end of the straight, and the Volvo ended up going off the track, over a bump, and came to a stop on the track facing oncoming cars. Once those cars cleared, he was back to it, though the heat was nearly over. We made a few more changes to the carbs and looked under the car, happily finding that the only substantial contact with the ground had been taken up by structural (and not fragile) parts of the car's belly.
Overall, things were going well. Jim had moved from 23rd position up to 8th. 8 is less than 23, so things definately headed in the right direction for us.
Sunday was the "actual racing" day and we were pretty happy about the car, so we didn't do much other than watch. At the beginning of the first heat, some of the other cars got tangled up (and the drivers were, apparently, not happy with one another), so half of the heat was held under a yellow flag (this means: keep driving slowly and don't pass anyone). By the time the race was on, the race was over and we only got to see a couple minutes of anyone vying for position.
Ours was the final race of the day and was to be a 20 minute heat. After lots of fiddling around with broken stuff, the car was as ready as we could make it, so we had time to walk to the far end of the track for a good view. The cars came out - Lotus, BMW, Cortina, Alfa, Volvo and others - and got busy. The first half (or so) of the race was fun. Jim and the Volvo continued to pick up speed, passing several cars (and getting passed by a couple, but certainly doing well).
And then the Volvo seemed to be going slower. We weren't sure if the old transmission had given up for good, or what exactly. Brake fade? Funny noises inside the cabin?
After the race, we all went back to the pit where Jim explained that the temp had spiked yet again and showed us that coolant was spraying onto the windshield yet again. Checked the coolant and found it again contaminated with combustion byproducts, which means the fancy race quality head gasket had - again - blown.
Because the racing was over and there wasn't any urgency to replace the gasket, we put all the toys away and loaded up the car. Someone else will have to replace the gasket when the car returns to its native Wisconsin I suppose. Everyone went home for showers, then we headed over to Dean and Jayne's where we ate all of their food. Good times.
The carb tuning is the easy part in all of this as long as you have someone like Phil around. The problems associated with a 'dog box' race transmission that runs straight cut gears and super exotic are less so. Finding someone capable of rebuilding such a thing is tricky enough, let alone sourcing parts. When that 'box came out of the car, we opened it up expecting to find some broken thing, or some shards of broken thing... but it looked perfect. We don't know what went wrong with it. Maybe nothing's wrong with it and some strange fluke befell the car. When it comes to a $7000 transmission, though, it makes good sense to err on the side of caution.
The continually blowing gaskets is the other thing that doesn't yet make sense. Jim's been through a lot of those gaskets on his new race engine, which is unusual even on a machine of this caliber. While the head was off, we all looked at how it was prepared and how the engine builder had gone about some elements related to the basic design -- things like porting, shaping the combustion chambers, and decking the block. There are a couple things we hadn't seen done quite this way before and that we wondered about (a little bit of "why do you suppose they did this?" and "what do we think is the benefit of that?"). I know that people who build race engines have a lot of understanding that I myself do not. I don't question whether or not a given approach is smart, but I sure do spend a lot of time trying to guess why some of the builders do the things they do.
Just goes to remind me that I don't know nearly as much about design nor maximizing potential as I'd like. I'm not bad with a set of tools and can get things apart and back together pretty well, but there comes a point at which it's up to someone else to let me know what things to remove and replace. It's really humbling.
This was the most fun I've ever had at a race weekend. Also the most exhausting and the most informative. Met some really terrific people, got to play with a race car, caught up with friends I don't get to see nearly as often as I'd like. Perfect.
It also reminded me that there was a time that I really wanted to race. That urge has passed (though I do still want to participate in track days) and I find myself perfectly happy to be a member of the crew. Really happy.
After that, reality came back and on Monday I found myself mowing a long overdue lawn, pulling weeds, and doing all the everyday normal stuff I also thoroughly enjoy. Now I'm back to copywriting and editing, and trying to get on with another company as one of their freelance writers. I'm sure hoping that comes together, as will allow me to continue with this blog thing, keeping up with yardwork on two houses, as well as a book that's only about half done. 39,000 words and counting. More on that later.
All best,
Cameron
If you know me, you know that for most of my life I've been interested in making old Volvos go fast. Faster than most old Volvos, anyway. "Volvo" and "fast" often don't fit into the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence... which is a large part of the reason that such a thing is among my aspirations. Something about the underdog appeal draws me in.
This last weekend I was fortunate to be included among a pit crew for one of the best known (among us Volvo folk, anyway) fast Volvos. Jim and Joy Perry own a 1962 Volvo P1800 that is among the most fully race prepared such cars, and they brought it out to Portland to participate in the Historic Races this last weekend.
My thinking was that if all went well, I'd enjoy my full access pass and sit around watching cars go fast; and that if something didn't go well I'd see if I could lend a hand toward whatever repairs might be called for.
The first day, Thursday, was "testing and tuning." This is the day when racers get their cars onto the track for some practice and (primarily) for fine tuning the car for the coming races. Different tracks, different elevations, barometric pressures, ambient temperatures, and available fuel each influence different variables. Jim's car had a couple minor tweaks we knew we'd want to look into, but before you can tune one of these things, it's best to give it a try as it is and then see what needs tweaking.
First, we unloaded the car by rolling it out of the trailer and onto the ground. Of course, my sensible shoes were in my duffel bag and as soon as I stepped onto the pavement with a fair amount of racecar pushing me backward, I slipped out of my sandals and peeled a callous right off the bottom of one of my feet. It was bleeding a lot, so I patched a square of duct tape over it.
The bad news is that this made me walk funny for the rest of the day; the good news was that my blood sacrifice for the car had been made early on and would, no doubt, ensure good fortune for the rest of the weekend.
We made a few initial checks, got the car started up, and I climbed in with Jim to head over to the tech inspection. Sitting on a square of foam (there isn't a passenger seat in this car), it was clear that the thing is built for speed. It's also clear that it's bolted together really securely and doesn't have any of the rubber bushings nor mounts that are found on street driven cars... which means that the engine, rear axle and exhaust each transfer some amount of vibration into the cockpit. Add to this the lack of insulation and very taut suspension, and the ride is a bit on the noisy side, a bit on the rough side. I loved it even though we didn't get out of 1st gear and kept it below 20mph.
Tech was a breeze, so we went about getting Jim suited up. He put on his fireproof undergarments, then a 'Cool Shirt,' which is a shirt that has tubes sewn all over it. These tubes connect to what's essentially an ice box and a pump, and they circulate cold water all around the driver's torso. This is a good idea given that it's hot outside, that race cars are hot, and that the driver is wearing several layers of warm clothes.
Jim went out for his first tuning run, which was to be 10 or 15 minutes and would, no doubt, give us some insight as far as what we might want to do about tuning the carbs or whatever other minor tweaks a car of this caliber might need.
During the first lap, the transmission made a very loud "bang" and Jim brought the car back in before he'd completed a single lap. It wouldn't go into gear properly and we quickly decided (mostly he decided, as I was there to follow the instructions given by those who know more than I do about things like this) to replace the transmission with a spare he'd brought along.
The transmission that came out is a fancy race piece that costs a lot of money and that you can't get parts for at the local Napa. You probably can't get parts for it anywhere in the US, really. The one we put in is an old gearbox taken from someone's broken down passenger car.
So Thursday, we were busy changing out transmissions and the clutch and we missed the second tuning run. By the time it was back together, the track was cold (meaning 'no more cars allowed').
We did make a couple changes to the carbs that we knew were good ideas. Our friend Phil knows these 48 Weber DCO carbs far better than most people, so he chose the bits to replace and we did that.
The next day, the car was running well with its meek transmission and Jim was getting the hang of the track. We watched his lap times get faster though we could tell the carbs weren't quite right. A couple more changes to the carbs would be helpful before getting back onto the track for the second practice run.
Unfortunately, my blood sacrifice was proved inadequate and Jim would have more issues with the car. Friday turned out well enough, but Saturday was less agreeable. Still plenty of fun and good times, but more wrenching.
On the first run, the temperature spiked and cooland overflowed from the overflow bottle and splattered on the windshield. After a couple quick checks, it was clear that the head gasket had blown. The only repair for this is replacement, so we quickly went about changing the head gasket and were happy to button everything up about a half hour before Jim's second qualifying run.
The second run was really fun. We watched Jim give one of the locals in a BMW a run for his money and finally pass him on the front straight. Unfortunately, something went a little wrong at the end of the straight, and the Volvo ended up going off the track, over a bump, and came to a stop on the track facing oncoming cars. Once those cars cleared, he was back to it, though the heat was nearly over. We made a few more changes to the carbs and looked under the car, happily finding that the only substantial contact with the ground had been taken up by structural (and not fragile) parts of the car's belly.
Overall, things were going well. Jim had moved from 23rd position up to 8th. 8 is less than 23, so things definately headed in the right direction for us.
Sunday was the "actual racing" day and we were pretty happy about the car, so we didn't do much other than watch. At the beginning of the first heat, some of the other cars got tangled up (and the drivers were, apparently, not happy with one another), so half of the heat was held under a yellow flag (this means: keep driving slowly and don't pass anyone). By the time the race was on, the race was over and we only got to see a couple minutes of anyone vying for position.
Ours was the final race of the day and was to be a 20 minute heat. After lots of fiddling around with broken stuff, the car was as ready as we could make it, so we had time to walk to the far end of the track for a good view. The cars came out - Lotus, BMW, Cortina, Alfa, Volvo and others - and got busy. The first half (or so) of the race was fun. Jim and the Volvo continued to pick up speed, passing several cars (and getting passed by a couple, but certainly doing well).
And then the Volvo seemed to be going slower. We weren't sure if the old transmission had given up for good, or what exactly. Brake fade? Funny noises inside the cabin?
After the race, we all went back to the pit where Jim explained that the temp had spiked yet again and showed us that coolant was spraying onto the windshield yet again. Checked the coolant and found it again contaminated with combustion byproducts, which means the fancy race quality head gasket had - again - blown.
Because the racing was over and there wasn't any urgency to replace the gasket, we put all the toys away and loaded up the car. Someone else will have to replace the gasket when the car returns to its native Wisconsin I suppose. Everyone went home for showers, then we headed over to Dean and Jayne's where we ate all of their food. Good times.
The carb tuning is the easy part in all of this as long as you have someone like Phil around. The problems associated with a 'dog box' race transmission that runs straight cut gears and super exotic are less so. Finding someone capable of rebuilding such a thing is tricky enough, let alone sourcing parts. When that 'box came out of the car, we opened it up expecting to find some broken thing, or some shards of broken thing... but it looked perfect. We don't know what went wrong with it. Maybe nothing's wrong with it and some strange fluke befell the car. When it comes to a $7000 transmission, though, it makes good sense to err on the side of caution.
The continually blowing gaskets is the other thing that doesn't yet make sense. Jim's been through a lot of those gaskets on his new race engine, which is unusual even on a machine of this caliber. While the head was off, we all looked at how it was prepared and how the engine builder had gone about some elements related to the basic design -- things like porting, shaping the combustion chambers, and decking the block. There are a couple things we hadn't seen done quite this way before and that we wondered about (a little bit of "why do you suppose they did this?" and "what do we think is the benefit of that?"). I know that people who build race engines have a lot of understanding that I myself do not. I don't question whether or not a given approach is smart, but I sure do spend a lot of time trying to guess why some of the builders do the things they do.
Just goes to remind me that I don't know nearly as much about design nor maximizing potential as I'd like. I'm not bad with a set of tools and can get things apart and back together pretty well, but there comes a point at which it's up to someone else to let me know what things to remove and replace. It's really humbling.
This was the most fun I've ever had at a race weekend. Also the most exhausting and the most informative. Met some really terrific people, got to play with a race car, caught up with friends I don't get to see nearly as often as I'd like. Perfect.
It also reminded me that there was a time that I really wanted to race. That urge has passed (though I do still want to participate in track days) and I find myself perfectly happy to be a member of the crew. Really happy.
After that, reality came back and on Monday I found myself mowing a long overdue lawn, pulling weeds, and doing all the everyday normal stuff I also thoroughly enjoy. Now I'm back to copywriting and editing, and trying to get on with another company as one of their freelance writers. I'm sure hoping that comes together, as will allow me to continue with this blog thing, keeping up with yardwork on two houses, as well as a book that's only about half done. 39,000 words and counting. More on that later.
All best,
Cameron
Thursday, June 21, 2012
An Handsome Conveyance
Settling into vacation mode always takes a little longer
than I expect. Before the vacation begins, I start thinking that I’m going to
be in a hammock next to the water with a drink that has a little umbrella in it
the moment the plane lands. It’s never like that. As you know, from our last
action packed episode, we spent a lot of time walking around and riding in
different kinds of vans and buses for the first several hours of our arrival
here in BCS Mexico.
D is an amazing planner. She gets all our collective ducks
into neat rows and as long as everyone else can keep their act together,
whatever she has in mind goes off without a hitch. And this is how we like it –
I like things to go well because then everybody’s happy; and D like things to
go well so that she can do the thinking part ahead of time and not have to be
troubled with running around frantically while trying to sort things out at the
last minute in a language she can barely speak. I'm helpful with things like carrying luggage, but when it comes to trying to speak anything other than English I'm really no better than a pack mule.
One of the things she totally organized was a bus ride from
the airport to Todos Santos, which would be provided courtesy of EcoBaja Tours,
based here in Mexico. Their website made it easy to get set up with reserved
seats on their air conditioned bus that would take us directly from over there
to over here. The driver was probably super-hot and they probably served cocktails
en route while their burlesque troop wowed the passengers as we meandered up
the smooth-as-glass brand new highway.
That bit about the highway is true. Zero potholes. Probably
because it hasn’t rained here for more than three years.
Anyway, we had the flight snafu you already know about, so
we ended up having to do some of that mad scramble in a foreign language thing
that we were hoping to avoid. D is fluent in Italian and can understand Portuguese
pretty well, and though the Spanish they use in Spain isn’t so easy, she does
really very well with the Spanish they use here in Mexico. Far as I can tell, those are all Romance Languages other than French, which is the only thing that isn't English that I can manage at all. And French, if you're wondering, is useless in Mexico.
While we were between flights and hanging out in San
Francisco, D sent an email to Leonardo at Eco Baja Tours explaining what had
happened and asking if we could use our prepaid reservations on our return to
the airport, since we were going to be too late to catch one of their buses
with the super-hot driver and go-go dancers. He didn’t reply to the email by
the time we caught our next flight, so upon arrival we postponed the
hammock-by-the-water thing and instead walked (quickly) to the Eco Baja office,
conveniently located at the terminal that isn’t served by international
flights. We spoke with a woman there who was really not interested in anything
we had to say, but she did convey to us that we could visit the Eco Baja office in
Todos and that the helpful people there would be happy to apply our reservation
to the return trip.
When we stopped off at the local office in Todos Santos, the
woman we spoke to suggested that we call their main office – the one where
Leonardo answers the phone (but apparently not the email), and said that she
couldn’t do anything for us without our thirty-something digit reservation
number (which, alas, we couldn’t quite recall from memory). We returned to the
B&B and used their phone in an attempt to reach Leonardo.
Note: Eco Baja doesn’t have voicemail, so if no
one answers their phone during business hours, you also can’t leave a message asking them to please
read their email. They’re probably busy updating their website or something.
The next day, we went back to Eco Baja and talked to another
not very helpful young woman, who said that we should call or email their main
office, as there wasn’t really anything she could do for us. D explained that
we’d done each of those things more than once by now, and that the woman we’d
spoken to the day before told us to come back and bring our reservation number, which we were now happy to provide.
We had the number, and wrote it down for her. Then she (the woman behind the
counter) explained that she was only a reseller and that although she sells
tickets on behalf of Eco Baja, she isn’t employed by them. She also sells
tickets for other bus companies. Sort of a ground transport scalper.
Because
she doesn’t apparently work for anyone in particular, she finally gave us some
advice that was probably pretty sound: D and I should return to the airport and
speak directly to the official and bona-fide employees of Eco Baja tours. D
managed to convey the pure lunacy of us paying for, and then taking, a two hour bus ride bus to – and
then from – the airport in order that we could then secure a bus ride to the
airport a few days later, so she (the woman behind the counter) called (finally!)
the main office to get someone there to simply say “yes, you may issue the two
irritating foreigners a pair of return tickets, thanks for your help,” but no one at the
main office answered. I think they were updating their website.
That was yesterday. Today we returned (we’re not going to
surrender the money we’ve already paid without ensuring, at the very least,
that Eco Baja tours spends ten times the value of our prepaid tickets in labor
hours) and we were told a lot of the same things over again (now there were two
women behind the counter that didn’t work for the company whose logo is proudly
plastered across the front of the building in letters a meter tall, and each of
them had some ideas they wanted to share with us). They had the post-it with
our reservation number on it that we’d left last time we’d enjoyed the company
of their colleague, and it was stapled to another piece of paper that had
writing on it that, based on their enthusiasm, must be really helpful stuff for
us to use.
On that new piece of paper was a telephone number we could
call that would connect us to the Eco Baja main office, where a guy named Leonardo
worked. Right above that phone number was an email address that would allow us
to send a message directly to the main office, where it would arrive on a
computer screen right next to the phone that Leonardo sometimes isn’t very good
about answering.
D explained to the two women that we’d already made use of
this number and that email address, and she (D, I mean) was getting pretty
animated and stuff, so one of them finally picked up the phone and dialed the
number, and Leonardo answered.
Which totally means that he’s got caller ID and knows better
than to answer when a phone number from Oregon is ringing. D spoke to him, he finally
realized who she was, then said he’d see what he could do to switch our prepaid
tickets over to the return trip. Half an hour later he called her and asked
what email address she’d used last Saturday. She told him, and he confirmed
that it was the right one. A few minutes later, he called again and asked her
to confirm the email address again. She did.
I don’t know why it matters what email address she used last
Saturday – all we want to do is apply the dollars to a bus ticket. I think that
every individual we’ve talked to so far could have made this happen, but
everyone seems to be more interested in figuring out a way that someone else
will have to do it than they are in just getting it done. What no one seems to
realize is that if they’d just get it done, D and I would stop bothering them
so much.
D says it reminds her of Italy. This is how they roll there.
And though each of us has a lot of strong opinions about how things are handled
in the US, the priority given to customer service is not among our complaints.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Mexico!
D travels for work a lot – sometimes, anyway. She’ll be around for a few months, then suddenly her employer (and herself) come up with important things for her to do that can’t be done from Oregon, let alone from her home office. Home offices are pretty cool for those who like to attend meetings online or via conference call in their pajamas. The conference calls are even cooler, because they allow attendees to engage in important mulititasking.
Note: if you’re attending a phone meeting while weeding the garden, ensure that you don’t work hard enough that you start breathing heavily to the point that others ask if you’re ok.
Since the beginning of the year, D has been on a repeat whirlwind tour of Points East for some work related stuff. Those of you who use computers or laptops or televisions will enjoy the fruits of this labor in the next several months (and it’s no longer secret stuff, but it’s fun to pretend that it is). Anyway, she went to Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangalore – three stops in two weeks – three separate times. Gone for two weeks, back for two weeks. Lather rinse repeat.
The good thing about this kind of traveling is that D collected a shit-ton (that’s a technical airline term, I’m pretty sure) of frequent flier miles. She also racked up a bunch of compensation days (‘comp days’ to you among the uninformed). At my level of employment, given that everything I’ve ever done to create this mythical thing called a “career” has served only to push my FAIL button, Comp Days don’t exist in my world. You work and you get paid (sort of). If you work more than 40 hours a week, you get paid for more than 40 hours a week. Some places pay you more than the regular hourly rate (many, however, do not, even if you’re working for the family business). Working weekends (if you’re smart like D and work for a company like hers) gives you these Comp Days, so you get to take off a normal day for every weekend day you’ve worked.
D worked for 10 weekend days during her repeat whirlwind tour of the East, which pretty much sucked, but gave the cool result of 1) lots of days she could take off from work; 2) none of those days encroaching on any vacation time she’s accrued. Pretty cool.
After lots of work and long hours in foreign countries and then returning to Portland and its seemingly endless rainy season, D asserted (she’s good at this) that we’d be taking a trip to somewhere the sun shines and the beach is actually a beach instead of the cold clammy thing we Oregonians optimistically refer to as “the coast.” We looked at the Yucatan but it’s supposed to be hurricane season (I’m told this is worse than the rain we have in Portland) so we scratched that off the list. Then we looked at Hawai’i, which sounds great even though I still don’t think white people belong there given the circumstances under which they joined the Union of the United States. Not that the people of Hawai’i were treated any better than the people who lived in what we now call the North America part of the USA, but for Hawai’i, gaining-statehood-under-threat-of-war took place recently enough that I’d like to think we knew better by then, or that we'd have abandoned the whole expansion-through-imperialistic-brutality thing.
Then we looked again at Mexico. We love Mexico, love the climate, love the people, and especially for me, love the food. I could eat Mexican food every day for the rest of my life without any regret. I told my mother in law, G, that my two favorites are Mexican and Italian. G agreed, though she did express that Italian is just a teeny bit better. Makes sense – she’s Italian. But then again, she hardly ever eats anything, so I’m not sure how much she likes Italian food anyway. Maybe she just likes being Italian. Or maybe it’s because she’s never been to Mexico. One thing I do know: when we go to Italy, we gain weight. Kind of a lot of it. When I come to Mexico, I eat as much as I can and I don’t gain weight. Less formaggio and fewer carbs I think.
We decided we’d come to the Pacific side of Mexico to escape the hurricanes. La Paz is really nice, but more touristy than we wanted, and Cabo is nice but WAY too touristy for us. I’ve been there before and watched what happens when a cruise ship offloads 2500 heavyset arrogant loudmouthed American tourists who then flood the market, blocking walkways and thinking that if they just shout “DON’T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” louder than everyone else who’s already shouting it, that the person working the booth might suddenly begin to comprehend.
As you probably know, almost everyone in Cabo understands and speaks English anyway. But the American sloths still use the ‘insanely high volume’ approach to ensure that’s the case. Heaven forbid we use an inside voice and politely ask, in Spanish, if they might speak English.
So we chose Todos Santos, on Baja. Not so big, not so many tourists (we hoped), and it’s about halfway between Cabo and La Paz. Being the amazing trip planner that she is, D figured out our flights (Portland to San Francisco to Cabo) and the bus ride that would get us from Cabo to Todos Santos. We went out Friday night to a going away bbq party for a friend of ours who is leaving the country (the medical procedure she needs costs over $30K in the US but only 1000 quid in the UK – don’t get me started on the horrible scam that is the US health care system) so she has to either surrender her house, or sell everything and leave her dog behind while she heads overseas. Stupid privatized for-profit crap.
Anyway, we went home after the bbq (which was terrific, by the way), did the last of our packing, and went to bed around 11pm. At 4, the alarms woke us up and I was happy to realize I’d properly programmed the coffeepot and that the Go Juice was already brewing. We showered, had coffee, and were one foot out the door when each of our phones rang. Not good. The automated message explained that our flight had been canceled. D called the 800 number and talked to a friendly guy on another continent, who took up 15 minutes of our time before telling us he couldn’t do anything and we should head over to the airport to see if anyone there might be more useful than he was.
We agreed: next time, we’ll call from the car so we’re at least en route while someone is wasting our time being unhelpful.D drove us to the airport. I think it was the early hour that helped her not realize we were still in the US, as she was channeling her “this is how driving is done here in Italy” self. We made it to PDX in record time even though we drove right past the exit to the long term parking and had to flip a U turn right next to the big sign that says “no U turn.”
Inside the terminal, we found the lines at the United counter quite long despite the early hour. Happily, D is a ‘Platinum Gold Preferred Frequent Flier Goddess’ so we went to that line instead of the ‘normal people’ line. Unhappily, the people behind us were hustled up to the front of the line even though we’d been there a good 20 minutes longer than they had, and the ‘normal people’ line was getting a whole lot better service than our Goddess line. While we stood at the front of our line, we watched as the good people from United helped everyone in the other line. They cycled through that whole big long normal line fully twice while we stood in the preferred line, waiting to be treated preferentially. The long line that wasn’t ours snaked back and forth, and held between 40 and 50 people. I know this, because my passive aggressive score keeping self counted all of them several times over just in case anyone would ask my opinion on how well the staff at the ticket counter had handled this instance of a canceled flight. D was on the phone with the 800 number again and kept saying “we’re not going to make it” and “we’re going to be stuck here” and “it’s not going to work” while I kept saying things like “something will work out” and “it’s gonna be ok.” It’s unusual for me to be the voice of optimism and D to be that of skepticism and we don’t do so well when we get these roles switched around. After about the twentieth time D said “we’re not going to make it,” I finally abandoned my ill-assigned role of The Optimist (wasn’t working anyway) and said, loudly “Fine. If we’re so sure this isn’t going to work, let’s fucking go back home instead of wasting our time here.” All the nice people in earshot stopped talking and gave me a surprised look. I don’t know why, exactly, because none of them were using very nice words either. D gave me a “what’s wrong with you?” kind of look and went back to her 800 number phone call. And very suddenly, the person on the other end of the phone call managed to get us onto some other flights that would land us in Cabo just a couple hours later than we’d originally planned. Fabulous!
We scanned our credit cards and passports and ran for the boarding gate. This time, the Preferred Goddess line worked like it should and we skipped past the hundred or so Normal People in line, tossed our shoes and bags onto the x ray conveyer, stepped through the DNA scrambling scanner machine so the TSA people could carefully inspect our junk, and ran to the gate, arriving exactly two minutes before boarding.The airplane, as they called it, was a tiny little thing that took us on a bouncy and noisy jaunt up to SeaTac. I think the stewardess must have had a cabinet open by accident on some other flight, because she was slamming the carry on bins closed with extreme force. Lucky for me, the one that held whatever supplies stewardesses need on the flight from Portland to Seattle are kept in the cabinet above my assigned seat, so I got to listen to this thing slam shut about a million times. She’s a witty one, too – most of the occasions she’d slam the thing shut were timed exactly to match that special moment of peace we feel when we’re still awake enough to realize that we’re now finally drifting off to sleep. Then BANG! we’re not drifting off to sleep.
After flying north to Seattle, we then flew south to San Francisco, then south again to Cabo. By the time we landed, the bus on which we’d reserved (and paid for) seats had gone and the office was closed. There were a couple employees still there (when I get off work I like to go home, but whatever) so D asked one of them if we could either get a refund or use the tickets for our return to the airport at the end of our vacation. The woman said ‘yes’ in that special ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but I do know that saying Yes won’t annoy you as much as saying No so that’s what I’m going with for now’ way. Once that was handled we went back outside to find a way to the bus terminal in Cabo, where we’d catch a Normal People bus from there to Todos Santos. A nice guy set us up with a ride in a very air conditioned van that had super dark tinted windows that would cost US$10 each to get us to the bus terminal.We rode in the back of the van behind some Americans who were clearly eager to spend some time with like-minded Americans in that fabulous destination that is Cabo San Lucas, listening to their conversation as it bordered on offensive while they talked about how things work in Mexico. We sat in the back wondering what our driver, a Mexican who understands English, might think about these folks. Acting superior and en route to the very best wet t-shirt contests that the American owned bars in Mexico have to offer.
The ride was really interesting. The president (of Mexico, not Obama) was using the same road as us, and we could see the motorcade from our van. The presidential motorcade is lucky – they just cruised right through the checkpoints manned by Federal Policia dudes. I didn’t know there were so many police officers, nor so many machine guns in all of Mexico. They’ve got jeeps and black SUVs and helicopters with rocket launchers and airplanes too. Pretty cool.We arrived at the bus stop and the driver told us it wasn’t US$10 each. It was US$18. We told him we’d been told that it was ten, so he called someone on his phone and said some words in Spanish, then explained that it was ten bucks to go to San Jose del Cabo, not Cabo San Lucas. We were sure that isn’t what we’d agreed to, but there wasn’t any sense in arguing (and we really didn’t want to be considered as the same ilk as the others in the van) so we paid up. Walked inside, found the nice lady who sells tickets, bought tickets, and asked when the bus would be leaving. “Now!”
We ran out and onto the bus, they closed the door, and we were away.After an hour or two we arrived in Todos Santos. We knew we were at the right place, because at the prior stop D and I had each turned to the person(s) next to us and asked “Todos Santos?” The guy next to me said ‘no’ and the guy next to D said ‘si.’ So she jumped up with her bag in hand and headed for the front of the bus until everyone else nearby who’d heard us asking said ‘no no – Todos Santos blah blah’ and pointed further up the road. Of course, another Mexican fellow who spoke perfect English was there and he explained it all. Todos Santos was the next stop.
We could tell when we arrived at Todos Santos because all of our new friends looked at us, pointing out the windows in all directions saying “Todos Santos! Si si!” We got off the bus and walked in some direction that seemed promising, then turned right and went up some street that looked promising. We passed by the Hotel California made famous by The Eagles, then the Sushi Bar (we agreed: we are not eating sushi in Mexico. I don’t like sushi and I’m not going to waste a single meal that ought to be Mexican food on some other thing that I don’t want in the first place. I’ll eat Mexican food in Japan but I won’t eat Sushi in Mexico.) We stopped at some little taco bar and ate the best tacos we’ve ever had.By now it was dark, but D had a hand drawn map along that told us where we needed to go. Simple, really – the lady at the B&B had told us it was a 10-12 minute walk from town to our lodging. So off we went, feeling happy to have arrived and to have tummies full of Mexican Awesomeness. After we’d walked 10-12 minutes we realized that everyone here must walk really fast because we weren’t anywhere near anything other than a dirt road with a barbed wire fence on one side and a very confrontational barking pit bull on the other. About every fifty feet was a streetlamp but no one had thought to turn these things on, so we were really in the dark. I’m happy to say that the pit bull allowed us to pass and for whatever reason, didn’t venture out into the road to greet us up close.
After another 10-12 minutes (are we really walking half as fast as the locals, or did someone overpromote the convenience factor here?), we met up with a very friendly young woman who said something like “Buenos noches, blah blah Spanish asking question blah?” D responded “blah something Hotelito.” Hotelito is the name of the place we were going to stay. The nice young woman sighed, smiled, and said ‘ok,’ and began walking with us. Turned out she’s the caretaker at the place and had been waiting for us to arrive since well before we would have arrived if we’d been on the flights and buses we were supposed to be on. She was very sweet, and took plenty of time to show us to our room and explain where everything else we might need could be found.By now it was about 9pm and we were exhausted. We kicked back on the giant bed, promptly fell asleep, and didn’t wake for something like twelve hours. Our first day of vacation wasn’t as relaxing as we’d hoped, but the second certainly was.
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