Why we like trees

My in-laws received a fundraising letter disguised as a survey on trees and why people like them. So I started asking the people around me: why do you like trees, specifically, what are the top one or two reasons to have trees in a neighborhood, in the places you live and work and shop?

"Trees attract wildlife, lots of little critters live in and around trees." -a math teacher from Maryland

"Trees are a connection to the natural world, and a reminder that we are part of that world." -a naturalist from Oregon

"Trees provide shade." -a minister from California

"Trees help manage water." -a parent from California

"I like trees because they save the earth." -a mediator from Maryland

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: banana and toast
lunch: thai chicken soup
dinner: quesadillas

Happy grandmas

My grandmother lost her faculties of memory, reason, and recognition, over a long slow decade long slide of Alzheimer's. She was, for the most part, cheerfully demented. Towards the end, in the year or two before she lost the power of speech, her disease was tinged with bouts of panic and worry, about losing the baby or having friends over for dinner and not having anything to serve them. But for many years, when I would visit, long after she recognized me as a continuous being from previous visits let alone as her grandchild, she was, for many years of that slide, happy that this young stranger had come to chat with her. Before that, when it wasn't exactly obvious she couldn't track details of the conversation, she quite readily covered up for it by asking for little reminders, by changing the subject, by introducing her own observations or anecdotes, sometimes related to the topic at hand, sometimes not. Her short term memory faded far sooner than her long term, and conversations, by necessity, often centered around her recalling times past, as far back as her childhood.

I imagine her world, through this last stage of her life, as a mansion with the lights dimming. To someone else, this might have been frightening, a time for shadows to flicker to life malevolently stealing her memories, her intellect, but to her I believe it was a peaceful evening's twilight. She had a lifetime of training of forcing herself into social situations where she was not entirely comfortable and making herself pleasant and witty, and, the family's theory goes, that training, that disposition, when faced with a loss of memory, reacted in kind, assuming that the people around her meant well, that even if she didn't know how it was happening, her household was being maintained and all was going just fine.

I don't know enough about her, life and I can't recall her before her disease clearly enough, to say how accurate that assessment of her personality and her place in society really is. Nor do I know enough about Alzheimer's to know if personality and social and intellectual training early in life has an effect on the course of the disease, or if my linking of her self as and adult and her self in second childhood is anything less than wishful thinking. But in my magical thinking, I take from the story of the end of her life that I should train myself to see the best in the world around me. That I should force myself to rise above the vast irrational fears that are particularly incumbent on a parent. That I should decide to smile. That I should seek out kind and wise people in my life and look to them for guidance and solace, and avoid those who make me nervous, or angry, or frustrated.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes!
lunch: crepes!
dinner: quiche! and thai chicken soup, sort of

Consumption is the least of it

I've become taken with the zero-waste household. My own household is nowhere near that standard, and the few stabs in lowering our consumption and the creation of waste (recycling without fully researching what can and cannot be recycled, a compost bin that gets around a quarter of the kitchen scraps, competing with the garbage disposal and the trash can for whichever is most convenient in a given moment) are halfhearted at best. So my sense of moral superiority and self worth as a result of green living is more than a little tinged by my understanding of the minimal impact of my minimal actions.

And I have flown in excess of 20,000 miles this year. So it's not like my carbon footprint (what a lovely phrase that is) is in good shape.

There's a whole slew of carbon footprint calculators on the web. Set for US consumers, even if you eliminate all consumption, you still get a carbon footprint 2.5 times larger than the global average. If you don't fly at all, don't own a car, eat nothing (not just organic/local, literally nothing), buy no services or electricity or clothes or electronics, live in a house with zero square feet, just living in this country, supporting and being supported by its infrastructure, your carbon footprint is 2.5 times larger than the global average. Or some other number: the different calculators give different numbers.

A zero-waste household isn't the goal. A zero-waste civilization is the goal. And lowering the waste of a single household is morally superior, perhaps, but by itself ineffective compared to other ways of decreasing resource use (and maybe increasing resource efficiency at the same time). You could get involved in politics, on the retail or national level, with your time, money, and attention. You could organize your neighbors, and fellow church members, and PTA members, and choir members, communicate your best intentions and follow through with them. Zero-waste household the blog may be more effective at resource conservation than zero-waste household the household. Changes in the blog-reading audience are tough to measure, and the blog is much more effective for being the story of a real household. The other zero-waste households out there, though, the ones who don't blog, don't talk about their homes and their choices, don't try to convince others and to create, through government and education as well as their personal market choices, systemic changes for resource management, aren't doing half as much as they could for this thing that takes quite a bit of forethought and follow through.

Yesterday's flight destination: DC with the grandparents

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: french toast
lunch: salami and cheese and crackers
dinner: carbonara lite

Teapot miniature I

On a silver dome submerged form tiny bubbles, dissolved air being forced out. Layers of hot water slide across cool, mixing the two and diffracting light passing through the distinct densities. New bubbles form, this time of water vapor, forming and releasing. Surrounded by not quite boiling water they cool and shrink as they rise, leaving an effervescence to pop and fizz at the surface. The water warms nearly to a boil and each vapor bubble formed grows grand and irregular until the whole pot shivers and shakes as heat pours into it through the coil hidden beneath the dome from far distant coal and gas. The thermocouple pops, the connection is broken, the surrounding air warms, a bit of steam escapes the spout, and the roaring boil subsides. Time for tea.

Yesterday's run destination: Princeton and Santa Monica

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: quesadilla and PB&J
dinner: chickpeas and peppers

Those crazy kids

Hastings High School was more into Academic Challenge (i.e. quiz bowl) and Math Team than Science Olympiad, but we competed in that too, halfheartedly, once or twice. I tried to identify rocks and minerals. Others took tests on psychology or did tangram puzzles. We built a suboptimal mousetrap-powered car that only went a few feet, and watched while elegant, spindly cars built on vinyl record wheels slowly and inexorably moved forward the requisite ten yards, then stopped in exactly the right spot.

It was disorienting to be in someone else's high school, surrounded by hundreds of techy kids and hanging out with some of the best math/science students/friends of HHS and yet feel totally alienated and embarrassed, cut off by anonymity and lassoed by nervous ineptitude into watching the proceedings as if a spectator.

Contrast with my euphoria on the six hour bus ride to Penn State, playing frisbee on the quads, running through the rain to see Johnny Mnemonic at the commercial strip at the bottom of campus, and reasoning through the various tests of the Atlantic Regional Mathmatics League national championships along with the Westchester team. It's not that the questions put to us were easier at ARML, or that I got many right, quite the opposite, but that was entirely expected. The way the entire system was phrased, as math so over our heads that any engagement was success, took the pressure off, and left me (us?) free to enjoy the weekend. Not that that led to actually meeting any of the thousands of mathletes from across half the country here either.

Yesterday's run destination: it's raining.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and english muffin and tea
lunch: potato soup
dinner: fish tacos!
assorted bonus holiday cooking over the past few days: blueberry tart, oatmeal currant cookies, sugared nuts, popovers, cream puffs

It hardly ever rains in LA

We are in the middle of a once-a-decade weather system dumping day after day of rain on Los Angeles. It is familiar and a little comforting, particularly now, three or four days into it, when the other drivers seem to have remembered how to drive in the rain (turn on your lights, buddy, and try breaking a little earlier).

Tweets from the Disney Concert Hall

Looks like another grey morning in sunny Los Angeles. Is that rain? Thank god my steel is stainless.
about 23 hours ago via Twitterific


Another day, another thousand cars to swallow. Today's going to be an early lunch and prob skip dinner. I could really go for some Japanese.
about 23 hours ago via Twitterific


Hey, that tickles! I feel a song coming on, from somewhere, somewhere within me. 
about 22 hours ago via Twitterific


I can sing! Hooyah I'm on fire! Watch me go, bumbabumbabumbumbum. From my head down to my toes let the music get you going!
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Whoo. Need a little break. See you in 20.
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Another song coming on. We will rock you. Boy. Dorothy Chandler, you are going down. @musiccenterla
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Feel a little sick, like I'm going to throw up. Bleh.
about 19 hours ago via Twitterific


Whoop. There goes lunch. 
about 19 hours ago via Twitterific


I am so pretty. I am so interesting. Complex, really. And my neighbors are SOOO dumb. South parking lot, I will own you. Own you.
about 18 hours ago via web


Everyone's gone home, byebye.
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


Some sketchy folks around this neighborhood, know what I'm saying?
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


So bored
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


Hey, wanna see my organ? It's HUGE. A little crooked, maybe, but everyone tells me it is awesome.
about 8 hours ago via web