The Vacation That Wasn't

Vacation was aborted. Weather turned suddenly ultra-foul. Storms on the coast, snow in the hills, and deluges of rain everywhere else, as far south as San Diego. Nowhere to go within a reasonable drive to get away from it, sooo…we packed up camp and headed home. Rather sit in front of my warm pellet stove in my own cozy family room than be holed up in an 8 x 16 foot trailer with husband and dog. Dog is pissed. She KNOWS we promised her the beach. We did get ONE DAY of decent vacation on Saturday. Will post story and pix later this evening…

Let's Just DO It...

AOL News Reports:

Cheneys Angered by Kerry Mention of Daughter

Should Family be Off Limits?

Oh, absolutely. As long as it’s the family of the incumbents. And as long as the incumbents are Republicans.

 

 

Is anybody else REALLY ready to vote and get this mess over with?

 

 

 

Hide the Volcano

So, this is a picture of what you can see of Mt. St. Helens' volcanic activity from up in the hills high above Scappoose.  Pretty exciting, eh?  NOT.

Ever since we moved here three and a half years ago, I've fantasized about how cool it would be if St. Helens started to rumble again.  I figured we had front row seats.  Well, that just shows you how much I know.  Our view of Mt. St. Helens is of the back side of the mountain.  The outside of the highest edge of the crater wall.  Which hides from our view all the cool stuff that is going on inside.  On the best days, this is what we see...a kind of smudgy cloud trailing away from the top of the mountain. How bummed am I?

Tomorrow afternoon we leave on our camping sojourn into the wilds of Western Oregon.  I hope to have some great pictures to share when we get back.  More exciting than this one, anyway!

 

 

             

Is it an Imperial Storm Trooper?  Is it a preview of "Ghostbusters:  The Final Chapter?"  Is it Jason, posing with his new weapon of choice (a Swiffer)? 

No...it's the husband decked out for his latest foray into the dining room door project... 

Still Kickin'...

No, I didn’t go throw myself off the neighbors’ roof to protest his tree-massacre—in case you were wondering. We had an event this past weekend—the "Newport Microbrew Festival." Newport is on the coast, about 140 miles south of here. The weather was NOT nice on Friday…even had some lightning and thunder, which always elicits "oohs" and "ahs" from a crowd in Western Oregon. We don’t get a whole lot of that kind of violent weather in the valleys. Fortunately, WE were inside under a big tent, thumbing our noses at the weather gods. After feeling like drowned rats at a couple of our most recent events, we were ecstatic about being under cover.

Business was not great, once again, but decent enough that we will  return to that event next year. Our product was well-received, for the most part. I had a couple of people walk up to the counter and wise-crack, "Oh, and this stuff is really low-carb, isn’t it?" I couldn’t resist firing back, "Yeah, just like that beer you’ve got in your hand…!" We were approached by a couple of folks who invited us to other venues next season, so the weekend had "networking" value, if nothing else.

Since things were slow, I tried to write a journal entry while sitting waiting for customers. I didn’t bring my laptop with me to the booth, because I don’t like to take the chance of it getting bounced around so much. So, I sat down with a pen and a spiral notebook and tried to write…and I made a discovery: I just HATE writing by hand anymore. It’s slow, it’s labor intensive, it’s impossible to edit. I actually DID write a poem on Friday night…but it took me about three hours, and a dozen sheets of paper to get through the first umpteen drafts, until I finally came up with something I liked. (The poem is about the trees, so I won’t share it here. I think I’ve beaten THAT dead horse quite enough!)

I now have a six-week lay-off until my next event. This is a good thing. We’re having my cousins in from out of town at the end of October, so I’ll have to spend at least a week fussing around the house and yard to get ready for that. And husband and I will be off for a week’s vacation starting October 16th, which also happens to be our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary (OMG…HOW many years is that again?) We’ve scheduled another romantic camping trip…this time at a place called "Silver Falls" for the first weekend, and then out to our favorite hang-out on the coast for the remainder of the time. We hope the weather will cooperate. I’m going to pack the new digital camera I just bought…hope to get some great "Autumn in Oregon" shots to share with you all here. Nowhere to connect to the internet in State Park campgrounds, so I will be MIA from j-land for a week or so. I’m sure you could all use a break from me, anyway!

Trees

 

Thank you all for your sympathy about the trees.  Many of you suggested that I just plant my own row of trees.  Believe me, I would have been out yesterday doing exactly that, if I could.  Here is a crude drawing of how the three properties, ours and our two "backyard" neighbors', line up to one another:

You can see, only ONE of that entire row of trees actually bordered OUR property.  The rest of them ran the length of the fence between the other two neighbors.  My hot tub is about 36" away from the fence...there's nowhere to plant any trees, unless we move the hot tub to some other place in the yard.  AND I only have about 4 or 5 feet between the edge of my deck and the back fence.  Hardly enough room to plant anything that would grow tall enough to replace those lovely trees.  So, basically, there's not a whole lot I can do to fix the situation without absolutely ripping apart my whole back yard and starting all over again.  I would do it, too, if I had the money.  If I won the lottery tonight, the first thing I'd be doing tomorrow morning is lining up a landscape architect.

I STILL hate my neighbors...

All Gone...

I am so sad this morning, I can hardly get out of bed. Earlier this year, we had new neighbors move into the home that borders the side/back of our property. (Our house is situated on our weird lot in such a way that we really have no "next door" neighbors…except dead ones in the cemetery.) The original owners of that house had planted a windbreak of poplar trees along their entire back fence. Poplars are fast-growing trees…while they couldn’t have been more than eight or ten years old, they were easily thirty feet tall. In this "new construction" neighborhood, they were a welcome tall, green presence. They were always full of birdsong and chattering. A whole community bustling with life. The trees were only a few feet from my upstairs bedroom window. I could gaze out my window and pretend I lived in a treehouse.

Yesterday, Mr. Neighbor and his dad cut down the whole lot of those trees. Every single last leaf and twig. Every scream of the chainsaw, every crash of great trunk hitting the ground, was like a knife in my soul. Husband came home from work yesterday afternoon to find me staring out my bedroom window in horror, my hands pressed to my mouth. He walked in the room and I turned into his arms and just sobbed.

This morning, I feel the heaviness of death in my heart. I’m sure a lot of people would think me certifiable for getting this upset about the demise of a bunch of trees. I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I wonder how long it will be before I will be able to look outside my back windows without welling up with sorrow, anger, and frustration. Today, I just HATE neighbors!

And the Number One Reason to Vote...

There was a time when I truly believed that the person who sat behind the desk in the Oval Office held the fate of the world in his hand. I think I must have absorbed the grim panic of my parents, teachers, and other adults during the Cuban Missile crisis, an incident that could have indeed meant the end of the human race…even though I was too young to understand what was going on at the time. I remember being physically afraid when Richard Nixon stepped down in disgrace…wondering whether this meant the end of civilization as we knew it.

As years went by, and the world neither ended nor raced forward toward Utopia with the change of Chief Executives, I adopted a more laissez faire attitude toward the presidency. I had seen a truly good man become an absolute disaster of a president. I had held my breath as a washed-up Hollywood actor was handed the reins of the republic, but the world still turned in spite of eight years of that insanity. I watched as an over-achieving, mostly amiable Southern politician took over the post; and was hounded practically from the moment the first oath of office was out of his mouth, by the opposing political party that could not accede to the will of the people and let him BE the president. To the point of nearly having him removed from the office via what amounted to a legalistic coup d’etat. By the 2000 election, I figured that if all this intrigue could be going on at the highest levels in Washington, and I could wake up in the morning, look out the window and see the world still standing, it wasn’t really of earth-shattering import who ended up with their hand on the bible on the morning of January 20, 2001.

And then came George W. Bush. Over the last 3 ½ years, we Americans have been treated to a taste of the havoc that can be wreaked, on our own shores and across the globe, by a truly bad president. I would never have thought it possible that one man could be the force behind so much horrible policy. And that those policies would have so altered our standing among the nations of the world, our ability to voice and appreciate opposing political viewpoints, our tolerance for the diversity that is part of our national heritage, that we truly ARE teetering on the brink of disaster in this country. This is what happens when an affable, academically average, "down-home" millionaire--the front man for a network of power-hungry politicos and business executives—is given (or, more accurately, siezes) the power of the leadership of the free world. All of the people out there who are saying, "This is the most important presidential election of our time" are not just providing a melodramatic sound byte. They are seeing these exact things, and having the same head-slap experience that I am having. We became too complacent. We all believed somewhere in the back of our minds that the matter of who sat behind the desk in the Oval Office was not, in the end, going to affect the world all that much. How wrong we all were, and now we’re paying for it. The world is paying for it. And I am back to feeling that old physical panic, only to the tenth power, about whether the world will still be standing after the votes are counted.

Something Worth Reading

I didn’t write what I’m posting in this entry. I wish I had. I received it in an email forward this morning. I hate myself that I only read this kind of stuff when it is crammed right under my nose.

This is a piece written by novelist E.L. Doctorow.
It first appeared in the September 9th issue of the Easthampton Star.

"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

"On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

"But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

"How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

"Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything.

"You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

"But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world whomarched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

"The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."

E.L. Doctorow

Who Will Uncover "Iraq-Gate"?

I came upon this in an AOL article that showcased a panel discussion at The New Yorker Festival, starring Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather---the "Network News Triumvirate."  Seems that Jennings and Brokaw rallied behind Rather following his "Bush National Guard Documents" blunder:

Rather said he did not ask enough questions before the war or conduct enough follow-up reporting.

"If the country is in dire peril, as the president of the United States says it is ... I want to be a patriotic journalist," he said.

"You know that the role of the patriotic journalist is to put your fear aside, stand up, look them in the eye, ask the rough questions. But you also know that when you do that, you're going to get hammered..." Rather said. "So what happens is you just say ... maybe tomorrow."

I have been wondering, in my heart of hearts, why the press has been so LAME during the events leading up to, and the subsequent obvious disaster of, the war in Iraq. I am anything BUT the most politically savvy or worldly-wise human being in the world. Yet even I could perceive, in the lead-up to the war, the hijinx that the administration was pulling. Inflicting their war on a shell-shocked and angry nation. Using "9/11 fervor" as a basis to challenge the patriotism of anyone who questioned their agenda. The Congress rolled over for them. And so did the press. Up to and including "embedding" reporters with the military invaders of Iraq. What sane human being would post a negative story about the very people who are protecting that reporter’s life in a war zone? The whole scenario seemed like the death knell for the impartial, unbiased reporting we needed to depend upon in this situation.

I’ve been waiting for the 21st-century version of Bernstein and Woodward to mount their white chargers, wield a battery of incontrovertible evidence consisting of White House leaks and Washington insider information, and blow the cover off this malarkey as high as ever they blew the Watergate break-in scandal. But I have been sorely and utterly disappointed. In today’s climate of ten-second sound bytes and instant gratification, no reporter has risen to the challenge of the dogged, long-term dedication to the truth that it would take to construct an important, history-making story. Even when the head of the trail to the story is obvious to your average Joe on any street corner in America.

The above quote from Dan Rather finally shed some light on the problem for me. The old reporters---the ones of the Viet Nam era and the decade following—are all…OLD. Tired. No longer up to the challenge. And there has been no new generation to step into their shoes. No one to take the risks. The media don’t take that kind of risks anymore.

You know, in the old days, I used to HATE Dan Rather. His reporting was SO liberally biased, it was more like preaching than journalism. I could watch him for about five minutes before I began to gag on his self-righteous, holier-than-thou broadcasts, and change the channel. But now…now I wish someone had apprenticed at Rather’s elbow, and been ready to don the mantle when it slid off old Dan’s shoulders. It’s SAD to see a once fiery liberal media figure knuckle under to the pressure of the ever-increasing conservative bias of the day. I can almost see this debacle of the forged Bush military documents as Rather’s last feeble reach toward a story that might have been a glorious, possibly administration-toppling finale to a remarkable career. Unfortunately, he went about it in the impatient, short-cut 21st-century way that spelled certain doom for the story, and perhaps his career as well.

I can only hope that "tomorrow," some young reporter, somehow, somewhere, is inspired to put fear aside, "stand up, look them in the eye, [and] ask the rough questions." Before it’s too late.