Peeking into the rock

I finished Longbourn.I liked it a lot, though I was kind of dissatisfied with the ending. But I often am. I know some of you people care deeply about spoilers, so suffice it to say that the ending felt a wee bit rushed and forced to me. But the main thing is that here is a richly detailed working class romance where the resolution isn't "take the porotagonist out of the working class." Also, it's a great antidote for the whole (in my opinion) corrupt Regency Romance thing. I think I understand why so many people love that genre, but my response is usually "I hate these people and I want someone to expropriate everything they own and distribute it to the workers," Not exactly conducive to enjoying a lighthearted read. Longbourn is not, by the way, lighthearted.

I also read a chapbook of Karen Joy Fowler's (The Science of Herself)and now I want to call her up. She lives in my town! She actually went to school with the nice fellow, and sweetgly contacted me after he died--she didn't know he lived her until she saw his obituary.

Right this minute, I have no reading agenda, I am editing a thing for submission and I want it done byu next week, so I can do the next thing, etc. I want to get these old things cleaned upo and ready to send away, and then clear the decks so I can go back to not-Poland after surgery.

I finally got a cost estimate on the surgery and it's a relief: I do not have to cancel after all. This is of course a terrible crime against men of property and Congress would like to put a stop to it.

The other good medical news is I rode my bike to physical therapy and back: maybe three miles altogether? I'm not sure. And it was fine, though I expect to wake up tonight with the screamies. I did walk my bike up the one substantial hill, but the physicfal therapist says with my knees, I really, really should. She approved of the venture in general, though.

Yesterday I was thinking it looked like I am in a period where I can have more function or less pain, but not both, and that I seem to have chosen more function for now. Today it looks like I can have somewhat less pain if I persist in  going for more function. That's also reassuring. That's how it was until about a year ago. More exercise relieved pain as well as providing more function, bu just not right away.

Oh, and on another front: aside from the rain giving up on us and retreating, we do seem to have entered early spring, by the particular flowers blooming (quince) and the busy behavior of the birds. Also, I can tell there is more light, and both dog and I are more ambitious. She and I went for a long walk at the Yacht Harbor yesterday. She had some trouble coming back up the stairs, barely enough to call trouble.

Not of general interest.
( seriously, only read the next bit if you're interested in osteoarthritis and old lady health )

On another front, it rained and rained last night. On my laundry, but I note this more as a note of humor than a true complaint, because hey, it rained and rained! We love rain.

I decided not to buy and install a rain barrel this year (they are only 45 dollars from the city water department) because there wasn't any rain.

I believe that today I could have filled the whole thing.

I am filling what I can, but I won't be able to save it for long.

So I'm writing along, minding my own business, trying to get some stuff in there to prevent everything happening at once and still have no pointless filler, when this fellow steps out of the crowd and bumps into my Yanek who is exploring the capital on his own. I'm trying to figure out who he is and he insists that he is the same soldier Yanek's supposed to meet two years (and a chapter or so) later. What the hell? And the conversation they're having is kind of creepy: it sounds like he's flirting with Yanek, which might make sense in two years when they're actually supposed to meet, but just now it's really creepy, as Yanek is sixteen and very, very small for his age and people still confuse him with a child.

I am going to have to fix this next writing session but for now I have to go to work early today. One way or another: either to go with the creepy and what the hell does that mean for the story? Or throw out the scene and do something else with the rest of this chapter.

It occurs to me that the appearance of this soldier might only just signify that I'm worrying about the wrong things and maybe I need to find an economical way to skip ahead to the events two years in the future and not worry about everything happening at once. Or he could be foreshadowng the creepiness of Yanek's army life.

On another front, the physical therapist is of course making magical things happen and I am in fact walking around and riding the bike as a bike now. If the rain ever returns I will have to return it to the stand in my bedroom. It is way too long since the last rain but the last few years have had divided rainy seasons, with big dry spells in the middle, and we've had normal-to-wet years anyway. A dry year will happen eventually, though, it could be now.

I feel like an overprivileged brat for the second time today writing about this, but it's tropical out there.  Warm and muggy and very windy, with that weird light that comes from a certain kind of cloud cover -- like we're going to have sunshowers or even a full-bore rainstorm with the sun glaring through.  It's not very cloudy, but the clouds that are there are heavy looking.  Did I mention the wind?  It's not dropping palm fronds on my car, but it feels like it will.

This is possibly my first of these since the nice fellow died. Maybe not. I'm not up to checking.

Here are my favorite headlines from today's Sentinel:

They've posted a corrected phone number for Fish and Game so you can report mountain lion sightings. (I was going to insert a link to James Thurber's "After the Steppe Cat, what?" from Let Your Mind Alone but Thurber's writing is not available online)


This fellow, Charles Storey, has been charged with felony vandalism and misdemeanor trespassing. He built himself a 5,000 square foot house on 8 ridgetop acres in Scotts Valley and thought that it would be no big deal to cut up or cut down 49 of his neighbor's mature trees to get a clearer view of the ocean (leaving a horrible mess behind -- treetops dangling, slash all over the ground). He's the kind of person that buys property like that at 275,000 and builds a ridiculous house -- "a three-car garage, five potential bedrooms, three fireplaces and a gathering room with 20-foot ceilings and 18-foot-tall gothic arches," which he then tries to sell for almost two million dollars, partly on the basis of views he got by felonious means. (not that the views the house would have had anyway wouldn't have been fine: I just don't get these people, who can't relate to a piece of land for what it actually is)

The neighbor is the kind to elicit sympathy around here: he's a local, a retired fisherman who uses his two acres to hike and picnic, hoping someday to get it together to build properly. He says it will cost 15 thousand dollars to clean it up. The government arborist says there's been 20 thousand dollars in damage.

Everybody already knows, but we pretty much expect rain for the foreseeable future. Now, it's not odd to have a lot of rain at this time of year -- it's when we get it -- but the weather people are modelling on big storm after another without any letup for weeks, and they're worried.

There is somethiong wrong when it is news that the largest school district in the county, serving many of the poorest students, is going to apply for a state school breakfast program that's been in operation for years. I think what is wrong is that the reporter didn't understand what was being said, or didn't express it well: both Pajaro Valley and Santa Cruz school districts are speaking of "expansion grants," to cover students who weren't already in the program. But why weren't they? Was there a rules change? Are students newly poor? Did the state apply some of the stimulus money to breakfast programs (which wowuld only mnakes sense as a use of stimulus money if the money was used to hire local workers to prepare the food, and locally-grown food for them to prepare).

PZ Meyer is coming to town next week: (from Pharyngula Blog
7:00 - 8:30 pm, Bay Tree Building, Third Floor, Cervantez and Velasquez Room. Admission is free and open to the public.

I intend to go, because Frank can't!

The second map in this posting at Strange Maps says it all.

Four inches in a day, maybe a half an inch since then. To put this in perspective: until now, we had five inches in the whole rain year (since July, but the season really starts in late October or early November), and we get thirty in a normal year. So two days takes us from one-sixth of our normal total to one-third, and also takes us from certain drought to possible drought (we have four months left to make the total). We're expecting rain for the next week.

But the spectacular thing about the storm system was the wind. It was hard enough to knock out the power lines for a million and a half people from Oregon to the Mexican border. Power at our house was out for about twenty-six hours, but we take that in stride. The thrilling thing was being at work and waiting for the last parents to come and get their children. We announced at twelve we were going to close by four, but one mother was stuck over the hill and southbound Highway 17 was closed by a landslide "somewhere between the Cats and Bear Creek Road" which makes us sound pretty remote and rustic, doesn't it? It's not the only way to get into the county, though, so she drove the long way round, south and through Watsonville and then back, and she got there by four-thirty, which isn't so bad. An older brother of one of the babies said "Well, why are you the last person?" And I said, "Somebody has to be." And that's the simple truth.

So our power was out so long because a major transformer blew. This happens a lot in high winds around here. Downtown got its power back by mid-late afternoon, so we went to the bookstore and wandered around some. I think our own little chunk of neighborhood must have also had a piece of tree on a line, which also happens a lot around here. PG&E (the power company, for nonlocals) had said "westside Santa Cruz" would have its power back hours later than we really did. Which begs the question of "what do they mean when they say Westside Santa Cruz?" Because sometimes that means everything west of the river, and sometimes that means everything south of Laurel Street, and sometimes it just means everything west of Bay Street. For reasons best known to themselves, the Google maps people have a map that obscures how west and south could be used interchangeably in our town, but the Mapquest map shows you what I mean. Anyway. So we got our power back maybe six hours before we were expecting it.

About thirty years ago it was all the thing to talk about undergrounding power lines, but it never happened here. I guess new modern subdivisions get underground power, but if you've got old-fashioned tarred wood power poles in your neighborhood already, that's what you've got for the foreseeable future. And power outages in high winds.

On another front, I was bitterly displeased to discover I had the horrible cough coming back Thursday so I went to the doctor on Friday morning and got a review of reactive airway -- which is apparently what they're calling my used-to-be idiopathic asthma now -- and doubled prescriptions on my inhalers. Also, it's not an "emergency" inhaler to be used only when I think something terrible is about to happen, but a "short-acting" inhaler I should be using pre-emptively whenever I'm not pleased with the feel of my breathing.

And -- it's working. mainly. I don't see how an inhaler is going to last me a month like this, but I feel like I'm walking around in a redwood forest -- I mean, my airways feel delicious. I still get the cough now and then, but the spooky icky "how can I possibly be getting enough oxygen when I feel like this?" thing is gone.

Unfortunately, it's way too wet to test my stamina in Lost Camp, but we're going to the Hakone Gardens in Saratoga tomorrow, always assuming that Highway 17 is open (or 9, which is a more wretched road but for somereason doesn't seem to slide as much).

( pictures from today )

So I already noted that salmon season opened on April 1, which is not an unusual day. The discussion still rages as to how long the season ought to be, and the local paper (the Santa Cruz County Sentinel, frequently referred to as the Senile for good reason) has been munching the story as badly as they can: I do believe that at least unconsciously they're trying to magnify the antagonism between fish conservationists and sport and commercial fishermen. They keep portraying the salmon season closure issue as one of "blaming the fishermen" for the problems of the Klamath River population, which it most definitely is not: the issues are, will a shorter fishing season help the Klamath River population hang in there until the Klamath River is allowed to become healthy again? Is there any point in trying to save the Klamath River population? These issues don't interest the newspaper, though, at least not as much as the prospect of angry salmon fishermen feeling oppressed by the people who are working to preserve the fish they depend on.

On another front, there's a couple in Live Oak who are possibly going to be charged with a crime because they picked a baby harbor seal up off Main Beach and took it home. Main Beach is kind of in the middle of town -- it's where the Boardwalk is and where the San Lorenzo River ends up. It's also a minor nursery spot for harbor seals, which fact is potentially a weapon in dealing with the Boardwalk's appetite for expansion. The baby seal is dead, of course: they're really quite fragile and need to be treated exactly as mommy would treat them, which does in fact include being left on the beach for periods of time while the mommy goes and gets food. What is really galling is that the people tried to keep the volunteer rescuer from finding the baby seal which they had deposited in a crate in their back yard. If they had been idiots who had just picked up the seal pup because they thought it had been abandoned, don't you think they would have welcomed somebody who knew something about keeping the thing alive? And even though they hadn't had it much longer than it takes to drive from Main Beach to their house just out of town, the seal was already visibly faltering when the rescuer picked it up and took it to the Marine Mammal Center. This is pone of those things coastal people should just know.

One last marine life bit: I think I mentioned that amazing numbers of sea otters have been sheltering in Elkhorn Slough during the storms. This is not because the sea otter population is growing, it's because they like to go in the slough and eat fat innkeepers and clams. Fat innkeepers are a kind of inverterbate whose burrows are inhabited by a lot of other species, but I couldn't resist writing "eat fat innkeepers" up there. Now the Coast Guard is investigating an incident where a guy drove his motorboat right through a raft of otters and was caught on video by the Friends of the Sea Otters. No otters seem to have been harmed, though they were visibly alarmed.

On May Day, there's going to be another "Day Without Mexicans." This is kind of an ethnically-defined general strike, which has been done before when the state legislature failed to reinstate drivers' licenses for undocumented residents. The ironic thing about that whole drivers' license thing is that before the Davis administration there were no restrictions on documented status, and the identification requirements to get a license were negligible. The thing that got the Republicans up in arms was a new law that required identification of some sort from the applicant's original country -- that is, a tightening of earlier law, though it was portrayed as a loosening of law. Anyway, the upcoming strike is going to be about the immigration "reform" discussion going on.

If you've seen Time magazine (last week?) you'll have seen the cover blurb: "Who gets to be an American?" But that's not the question at all. There are several questions. One of them is what does globalization mean? NAFTA threw millions of Mexicans off the land as it removed maize protection rules and ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland and so on could take over the market. Where are these people supposed to go, and what are they supposed to do? They go looking for work. At the same time, in the US, industry, agriculture, and service companies are working to dismantle the protections that US workers have had since the forties -- and a cheap, competent, and disposable workforce suits them fine. But it also suits them fine to have a scapegoat handy, and an excuse to further abrogate civil rights and liberties. The fact that there is an identifiable Mexican look is useful to -- you can unleash the wrath of racists. And you can get these workers' natural allies, who are their natural competitors as well, to see them as "other" and prevent them from noticing that steps taken to isolate and persecute undocumented workers are also steps to disenfranchise them.

However, this cheap workforce, so easily scapegoated and isolated and accustomed to bad wages and working conditions, is also a cohesive group, with fifty years of social and labor organizing experience. When they call a strike, they strike. I'm expecting this to be a really interesting May Day.

For years I've been looking for the housing bubble to burst. I have a vindictive streak and I want the real estate agents, second-home buyers, house flippers, luxury home spec developers, and investors in general to suffer a lot. They've driven housing costs up so much that the shabby little highwater bungalow across the street was put on the market for $780,000 (ours is apparently an "up-and-coming" neighborhood, more's the pity). They've priced the working class out of the county. Well -- there's something happening. Not the dramatic, disastrous crash I would like (I said I was vindictive), but a general slowing down. Asking prices for houses continue to rise but sales have slowed dramatically. Last month, 37 houses were sold in the county (comparing with a couple hundred houses for March in boom years, and I'd be more precise about that if my source was).

It didn't rain much the last couple of days and Wednesday was totally rain free (so I finally got my plants in the ground -- a tall-form rosemary, a culinary sage, and two bachelor's buttons). However what we expect for the forseeable future is more rain. Highway 152 (one of three ways out of the county) has been shut for the duration because a 25-foot chunk of it fell over. More slides on other mountain roads, but not 17, which has been lined with great cement walls on all the scary cuts.