Lowline in Manhattan.

First there was New York's popular High Line. Now the city might get a Lowline. A park under the city. I'm such a pessimist (something I hope to change in 2015) that I have trouble imagining this working. Here's to me being wrong!

I'm sorry, but it's my opinion that they'll have to build a mighty strong fortress around these solar devices to keep them intact. They might as well have a sign that says "kick me, smash me." My son, no reservoir of optimism, disagrees with me. He says, basically, "if people aren't breaking windows on that street why would they break that?" So maybe he's right.

 

My happy African violets.

After years of neglecting a small collection of African violets I decided to start watering them on a regular basis. They rewarded me by getting healthy and blooming a lot. I'm also growing new plants all the time by rooting leaves. I have so many plants now that they are taking over one corner of the living room. I've given some away but I need to give even more away or stop growing them.

Note to anyone who comes into my house: ask me to give you one or two or three.

Only 2 more posts to go!

I ain't nothing but tired
Man I'm just tired and bored with myself
...
I check my look in the mirror
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
 
Springsteen lyrics (from Dancing in the Dark) that keep going through my head. It's an exaggeration of course, but not entirely. 

I like weeding in Maryland, but maybe Norway has really special weeds.

I wonder if everyone who tries this "post every day in November" thing whines at the end about not having anything to say? I know one other blogger who does (just a smidge). I confess that I didn't visit many other NaBloPoMo bloggers during the month (I don't like that acronym, and also NaNoWriMo -- they sound like parodies of neighborhoods in lower New York City). Maybe now that the pressure (ha!) is off about daily posting I'll explore the other participants.

You are so right Mr. President. It IS puzzling.

"It is a little puzzling that I do this every year, but .... it's nice once in a while just to say, 'Happy Thanksgiving.'" About pardoning a big turkey at the White House.

Those poor teenagers. Mr. O, it's time to let them avoid this kind of thing. One reporter said there were some subtle eye-rolls, as if to say "daaaaaaad, pleeeeeeaaaase let us out of here." Another reporter said: "When asked if she wanted to pet the pardoned turkey, Malia simply said, “Nah.”

-----------------
Update: 12/2/2014: Little did I know last week that the Obama girls would inspire TurkeyGate. In case you've avoided Internet "news" lately you might not know that a lame Congressional staffer had to quit her job over a mean-spirited Facebook comment.

"Dear Sasha and Malia, I get your both in those awful teen years but you're a part of the First Family. Try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play. Then again, your mother and father don't respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I'm guessing you're coming up a little short in the 'good role model' department.

"Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot in a bar."

Presidential daughter in 2004, age 23. Addressing the press.

There is so much about that comment that makes me angry. First, attacking two young girls, 13 and 16. Second, assuming that they are having "awful teen years." And third, libeling their parents by saying they don't respect their jobs or their country. I predict that Fox News is already courting Eliz Lauten for a spot on their channel. She's just their type. Mean and stupid.

Snow, sorta.

It was heavy enough to smush down the ornamental grasses, but they'll bounce back in a few days. There was more snow on the ground and road earlier in the day. It was a nice snow, the first of what I hope will be many this winter. I could tell you that the pole on the right was constructed/installed for Festivus. But I won't.

My official shoes. For the duration.

These are my relatively new Skechers. I have a second pair, in grey canvas with white soles, and a third pair (chocolate with black soles) on the way. It's possible that I will wear only this style of shoe for the rest of my life.

After I bought the first pair of Skechers I noticed the marketing on the box:

"GOimpulse™ sensors move together and independently to provide sensory feedback to the brain."

The sensors are those dots, especially the black one. I thought: that's a pretty meaningless phrase -- "...provide sensory feedback to the brain." (That's what I do a lot these days: think snarky things about marketing copy. Such a huge waste of time and mental energy.)

So I did what anyone with too much time on her hands does and I checked out more of Skechers marketing on these miraculous GoSensors. I found this:
   
Mid-foot Strike
Patented SmartShoe™ technology positions the body for an efficient mid-foot strike. This gets the foot off the ground faster and reduces the impact of heel striking. (It’s the way you’re supposed to run).
GOimpulse Sensors
Innovative placement allows the sensors on the outsole to move together and independently as they provide sensory feedback to the brain. Runners are able to more easily feel with precision, react to the ground, and adjust their stride. This dynamic interaction leads to a more natural and responsive run. Selected sensors at strike points also feature high-abrasion rubber for extra stability and traction control.
4mm Heel Drop
This low heel drop brings Skechers GOrun 66 percent closer to the ground than traditional running or training shoes to replicate a natural barefoot experience. A roomier forefoot adds to this feeling by allowing extra space for toes to spread, grip and push off.


Do I believe all that? It's tempting. They truly are comfortable shoes, and I'm quickly becoming addicted to them. But I'm suspicious."...low heel drop brings Skechers GOrun 66 percent closer to the ground ..to replicate a natural barefoot experience."
Is that a good thing, "replicating the natural barefoot experience"? I thought Earth Shoes had been debunked. Or am I so old that they were debunked and then re-bunked?

[Only a few more days of this daily blogging. I feel stupider as each day rolls by. Tired of hearing my own voice I think.]

My worm family.

Here you see my three bins of worms and my one bin (under the green concrete leaf--thanks Susan) of mostly castings ready to be spread wherever...my so-called vegetable garden I guess. I have an almost dormant blog about my worms, mylovelyworms.blogspot.com.

I have really neglected them recently, meaning the last couple of years. I guess I feed them enough (fruit and vegetable waste, coffee grounds, bills and junk mail). I just don't check often enough about moisture levels, carbon to nitrogen ratio, heat, that sort of stuff. But they are tolerant, and their population quietly rises and falls in response to my attentions/neglect. Worms have a lot of dignity. And they ask so little of me.

The first solo glove of the very long lost-glove season.

I lose gloves on a regular basis, especially gloves that were a gift or gloves I paid more than 20 bucks for. Gloves that I find in the backs of closets or buy for $5 from a street vendor are never lost. I bought this glove and his missing partner a few weeks ago and only used them twice. The missing glove is, or was, probably in a parking lot at the corner of Rts 108 and 650 in Ashton, MD.

I'll save this glove for a long, long time. I have other singles that I can mate with it, and in a weirdo mind game I play, I imagine that I'll actually find another single that matches it. What happens to all these solo gloves? I can't be the only person who loses singles. Should I attach a long cord to each glove and snake it through the arms of my coat so they're impossible to lose? I'd love to start a website for missing gloves. A kind of shelter for the singles where people can find near-matches.

UPDATE:
Ohforgodssake, what made me think a thousand others haven't done something about the missing glove phenomenon? Including Tom Hanks.
http://www.lostgloves.org/
http://onecoldhand.com/
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/tom-hanks-is-on-a-mission-to-find-every-lost-glove-in-new-yo

Saint Stephen.

A few years ago St. Stephen spent a day working beside migrant workers picking beans and corn. He then testified before Congress on behalf of migrant workers and their deplorable working conditions. At the beginning of this short clip, Congresswoman Chu asks "why are you interested in this subject?" Here's Stephen's reply. 

 

I have a long history of being enchanted, sometimes obsessed, by late-night TV hosts. I remember as a teenager doing homework in front of the TV and watching Johnny Carson. I had a very long Letterman phase  -- in the 80s and early 90s mostly -- when my office was a shrine to him. David Brenner had a short-lived quirky late-night show in the 80s, and between 1988 and 1994 Bob Costas had a very good interview show. Then there was Tom Synder, also in the 90s. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and John Oliver are my current main sources of news. And entertainment.

Yes, I'm going to complain again about Stephen being tapped as David's replacement on CBS. Only 12 more shows for Stephen; Dave's contract runs out in August 2015. I'll miss The Colbert Report, I'll miss Dave's Top 10 List, but I'll adjust. It's not reality. Or is it? Sometimes it feels more real than the so-called straight news.

Marmite. I just iClicked 4.4 oz of this stuff.

I learned about Marmite a year or so ago and it's been on my to-try list ever since. Just now I ordered a jar of it. It's [from Wikipedia] "made from yeast extract, a by-product of beer brewing. Other similar products include the Australian Vegemite (saltier in taste), the Swiss Cenovis and the German Vitam-R. The British version of the product is a sticky, dark brown food paste with a distinctive, powerful flavour, which is extremely salty. This distinctive taste is reflected in the British company's marketing slogan: 'Love it or hate it.' "


I like anchovies. I like salt bagels. I like pickles. My weakness is The Salty rather than The Sweet. So I may love Marmite. I'm thinking on toast.

Fungi and moss.

 

[Boy, I really phoned it in yesterday, didn't I? Blogging about a day-glo Polish statue of Lenin taking a leak.]

The mushrooms at the top were in my backyard a week or so ago. I love when they turn black--so beautiful. The other three pictures are from the Patuxent Wildlife Center in September. The book I just finished, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, has some wonderful passages about moss. I wanted to put one here, but unfortunately, I read an electronic library copy of the book and it's no longer on my Kindle. Another mark against electronic books (which I'll continue to read anyway because it's just so easy, and I'm all about easy).

"Polish town erects statue of a urinating Lenin"

If you find yourself traveling in the Polish town of Nowa Huta don't miss it. 

Did I need to know this?

I just finished eating this chicken for dinner. My grocery store helpfully told me about my dinner's childhood. His or her life started out on a good note: born and raised in Canada. Sounds kinda nice, right?  Then....slaughtered. Thanks for reminding me.

Fall is the most beautiful month.

I think that's a fact, not an opinion--speaking only for the area surrounding my house of course. Spring is light green, summer is green, winter is gray and brown.

I'm so sorry to report, to those who don't already know, that Estorbo, a NYC cat who had his own blog, died yesterday. This was a sweet, funny blog, with Estorbo's human mother interpreting (channeling?) the "beeg blad Dominican cad."

Three months into the no-shampoo experiment.

I'm not sure what to conclude about this hair experiment--no commercial shampoo, just baking soda and vinegar once a week. The picture above was taken yesterday in the same location and at the same approximate time of day as the picture I posted in mid-Oct -- although it's with a different camera.  Here's my hair in late July (yet a third camera) before I stopped using shampoo completely; my hair looks almost red in that photo and it's decidedly not red--maybe it's a reflection from my shirt and life preserver.

About a week ago, my hair felt very dry so I impulsively put some Neem oil on it one night, just a tiny bit. I combed it through my hair, and then thoroughly rinsed my hair the next morning in the shower. The hair above is about 3 days after that rinsing. It's also gotten very cold so dry hair would be expected.

After 3 months, I'm beginning to think that my hair looks basically the same whether or not I use shampoo. I'll probably continue to avoid it just because I'd like to get in a full year using just baking soda and vinegar.

I stubbornly want this no-shampoo experiment to work, meaning I want to learn for sure that shampoos are worthless. I'll confess why: I like to be right about things, and I'd love to find out that something we've been trained to do for decades is pointless. I should be ashamed to feel that way. Maybe I am. It's some sort of power thing maybe, or maybe it's about wanting to feel superior or smarter than...who? Anyone? Everyone? Will have to think about that.

I'm vain enough that if I begin to think my hair would look better using shampoo, I'll go back to it. My need to be right isn't as strong as my vanity. That might change though, as time marches on. I hope I don't lose my sense of vanity completely but I know I've lost a lot of it. You should see how I dress when I go grocery shopping. One step up from going in my nightgown and bathrobe.

Fascinating stuff, huh? Only 14 more days of daily blogging. I wonder if I'll continue in December?

Big coincidences and little coincidences.

I'm reading both of these right now; actually I'm listening to the Dylan book. Yesterday, I came across a mention of De Materia Medica, a book written between 50 and 70 AD by Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanist. It's an encyclopedia of medicinal herbs and plants. I wasn't aware of this book until I read about it twice yesterday. I think that's at least a medium coincidence.

A page from De Materia Medica.

Burning Bush?

Anyone know what this shrub is? Maybe Burning Bush (Euonymus alata)? There is a small grouping of them in the park next to my house and a neighbor wants me to try to grow one for her (she likes the shape and the shortness). I'll give it a try. Or maybe I can find a tiny seedling to liberate from the park. I know BB is invasive and serious gardeners and landscapers probably hate them. One plant isn't going to make much difference. Flawed thinking no doubt.

Lunch with my buds at the Silver Spring Diner.

We are five women who met at work in the early 90s at the National Institutes of Health. Three of us are now retired but we join up with the two still-working young ladies every month or so to have lunch, or breakfast, at the diner. Always a good time.

Is it geeky to like stamps?

 

I use them for the few bills I still pay through the mail. And for books I send to others through paperbackswap.com. Maybe the Postal Service should start charging a few pennies more for these commemoratives. I'd pay the extra, especially if it helped keep  small post offices open in rural towns.

A few thoughts about words.

Three times today, in three different contexts, I encountered the word "spangle" (or "spangling" or "spangled"). Isn't it a great word? Spangle.

The first occasion was in a book review by Meghan O'Rourke.
Since those days much has changed; you can’t go out to the Fort Greene Greenmarket on Saturday without running into a spangle of fiction writers.

The second occasion was in the book I'm reading for my book group meeting (Gold by Chris Cleave):  
The day of her birthday was hot. ...The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it.

I like the way the word sounds in both those instances, although the first use -- "spangle" as a collective noun -- seems to deviate a lot from all the definitions I can find for the word.

And of course we all know "spangled" from the National Anthem, as in star-spangled banner. My third encounter with a spangly word today was during the HBO Veterans Day TV thing. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and the Zac Brown Band doing "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty.

Yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord

Interesting song choice for a Veterans Day event. They were great.

The following sentence, also from the novel Gold, made me grind my teeth: 

Me and Zoe have to see Tom ....

I know it's just a novel, but I hear that kind of sentence ...."Me and Bob are going to ...." far, far too often. I'm flexible, I'm willing to change with the times. But I am not, nor will I ever be, ready to accept "me" as the subject of a sentence. Me won't!!

Finally, I've given up caring about the use of "between you and I." I think even grammarians have given up. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on the subject, including this over-the-top sentence:

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English."

My cantaloupe. About the size of a cat's brain.

I'm not much of a food grower. I do better with flowers.

It's the season to collect seeds.

 

 

These Purple Hyacinth Beans are so easy to grow, and with enough sun and something to climb they'll get huge and be pretty all summer. I still have a couple of blooms (not the above). When the bright purple beans shrink and turn almost black the beans are ready to harvest. I especially like the inside of the pods after the seeds are removed. Those pale white lines must come from the white edge on each bean. I'd like some wall paper in that exact color and design.

 

Does Google control it all?

If this link works for you, you will see Internet intrusiveness at its most benign, although some might argue that it's not really that benign.

The link takes you to an automatically generated photo album, called Saturday in New York, A Story by Pam Jones. I had nothing to do with the creation of this Story, which was generated by my Google+ account using a recent post about a trip to NYC. Maybe the number of pictures in the post triggered some program that compiled the Story, as Google calls them. The photo album just popped up one day in front of me when I logged into Google. Basically the whole thing creeps me out. 


The Wall Street Journal says of the feature:
"Google will automatically sort through your pictures and turn them into stories based on when they were taken."
From here.

Always something new in the Big Wide World of The Interwebs.

Sometimes I read a book just because the title makes me snicker.

 

The above book isn't as snicker-inducing as I'd hoped. But I'm not finished yet. Meanwhile, Doug is reading Richard Ford's latest novel, Let Me Be Frank With You, featuring the NJ real estate agent Frank Bascombe. Doug alerted me to this snicker-inducing snippet from the novel:

 

Protagonist walking down a street sees a couple walking toward him;  he doesn't want to talk to them.

I'd rather jump in my watery basement hole than talk to them...How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, .. have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second? All because (1) We don't want to; (2) There's too much unsaid that doesn't need to be said--a Chinese wall of words that would fall on top of us and we'd die; and (3) We know others feel the very same way about us.  We're, most of us, the last person anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.

That's a five- or six-snicker paragraph for me. I hope to read the book soon. But first I have to finish Gold by Chris Cleave for my book/dinner group next week. So far, I give it a meh. I hang in there with this group of seven nice women, even though I'm still annoyed, irritated?, that the book is usually discussed for only about 10 or 15 minutes. They talk mostly about food and cooking, their kids and parents, travel, work (just a little), health (ugh). I want to talk about the damn book. Excuse me.

The Great Dreary.

 

I've been listening to this book on CD since April. Glory hallelujah I'm done! It's an excellent book, especially for readers who have a high tolerance for wallowing in misery. I'm apparently drawn to depressing books, especially in nonfiction. I have a special love of disasters. Of this I am not proud. And I recognize that it's not good for my mental health but I can't stop myself.

This book needs no description: the subtitle says it all. Although I think I would insert the word "suffering" somewhere in that subtitle: I came away with a very, very full picture of just how awful the aftermath of that storm was for the residents. And the saddest part is that it will happen again.

And while I'm discussing my sick obsession with disasters, here are some observations from an oceanographer who was on the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday. The discussion was all that plastic that's out there in our oceans. (Diane is no slouch in the disaster area herself.)

According to Charles Moore:

You know, we're driven by an economic paradigm that requires us to be wasteful. We produce waste in order to drive the economic system. But there's a wide range of possible scenarios in which attractive economic, social and environmental outcomes are possible without relying on economic growth. We need a steady state economy. We need -- all these ideas about recycling, that's really about a steady state economy, where you take back as much as you produce. And in order to do that, we need a change in the economic paradigm. And the 11th commandment can't be thou shalt grow the economy, but that's the only way a politician can get elected.

I feel that we're being driven into a barbaric situation by this push to constantly grow the economy. We've got to reign in the productive monster. You can't have unlimited growth on finite resources. It just defies logic. And that is a radical change that would deal with the climate crisis as well as the plastic pollution crisis. But we need radicals. Radicals drive change, and that's why I'm an activist.

I'm not an activist or a radical. I'm just a doomsayer. But I do recycle and I no longer buy shampoo so that's something.