Fog Lake, Ocean, Guest Bed

You'll probably have to click on this one to see it's a lake of fog, seen from Highway 1 as Tom and I drove to the Sea Ranch. (You can tell a really good photographer by how she always has to say, "You probably can't tell this from the photo itself, but it's a picture of ...") We were above the fog!



















The Pacific Ocean as seen from Ann and Mac's guest bedroom; the hummingbird feeder seemed to have a hovering visitor about ninety percent of the time.















Ah, and this! The bed where I spent so many happy, happy hours, complete with lucid dreaming book and my lucky outfit.

Most Pampered Water on Earth

In the homemade bread department, I did try using a food processor, which required doing the initial preparation of one loaf’s worth of dough at a time, which was slightly inconvenient, and the dough rose even more slowly than usual. The end product seems just fine, as always—yum, homemade bread!—but I have since learned that you need to chill the water before you put it in the food processor, because the processing heats up the water and can thus potentially kill the yeast. I probably at least disheartened my little yeast specks without realizing it.

But since I heat the water on purpose to activate the yeast, does that mean I have to HEAT the water and subsequently COOL the water? Isn’t that more special treatment than your basic cup of water really has coming? My mother said to get instant yeast. That doesn’t sound like the way they did it in the Stone Age to me.

My next idea was to get a stand mixer, which is what certain highly esteemed bread bakers of my personal acquaintance use, and rightly so, after decades of laborious hand kneading. I went so far as to clear a spot for this prospective stand mixer by balancing my blender and food processor on top of my toolbox on the floor.

I do feel I have an appliance coming , since I didn't end up getting a grain mill to grind wheat with, somewhat of a miracle, as I really kind of had my heart set on it and very nearly went ahead with that purchase. Now I’m glad I didn’t, in part because I don’t always use whole-wheat flour, and the bulk flours at Rainbow are good enough.

Choosing a stand mixer is not as simple as one might hope. My mother has helped with the research, since she has a Cook’s Illustrated subscription and can access their website.
(There was a chilling moment on day two or three when Cook’s Illustrated proved to conflict with reviews at Amazon’s website—isn’t Cook’s Illustrated utterly infallible? I had always believed this to be true, even though I am not a subscriber and don’t aim to be; its concerns probably overlap with my vegetarian/vegan concerns only intermittently.

It seems that a lot of stand mixers these days aren’t actually powerful enough for kneading bread dough, because the cost-conscious/crafty makers of same know that hardly anyone bakes her own bread these days, so they don’t bother to produce machines that are equal to the task.

One person at Amazon's website said he had to return five of a certain KitchenAid stand mixer in a row, though he said they were perfectly nice about it; Cuisinart’s customer service is apparently lousy.

Now we have a new wrinkle, however, in that my cranial-sacral practitioner all but convinced me yesterday evening that bread is evil (i.e., gluten is); he said gluten is the one thing on earth he avoids without fail. For what it’s worth, both he and his partner look absolutely fabulous—utterly radiant, all the years I’ve known them, so I thought I might look into a period of gluten freeness just to see.

Note from my mother earlier this week: “I have discovered that my newly re-covered chair is a tad firm, so you will be welcome to sit in it whenever neither I nor the turd is occupying it.” She added, “I can sit in it but it's not as comfy as it was or as my recliner is. It needs breaking in, and that's where houseguests can help!”

Finally, a chance to use my major talent: sitting around.

Later in the week, I sent my mother this note:

“I'm sorry I was distracted when you called. I had gotten stressed out by something at work and so my life forces were gathered to eating chocolate-covered almonds as a healing measure.”

During the conversation in question, she was sitting on the deck off the kitchen of their new house pounding in errant nails, and she answered my email by saying, “That's OK. I was a busy deck repairman anyway,” which I thought was cute.

I didn’t want to tell her what stressed me out, but I’ll tell YOU: a bomb scare. I was sitting in my cube at work eating lunch when this came over the P.A. system:

“Attention, attention. We have an emergency situation on the 12th floor. Please activate relocation procedures for the 12th floor.” (I sit on the 4th floor; the building has twelve floors.)

Then: “Attention, attention. We are investigating a bomb on the 12th floor.”

Then: “Attention, attention. We have an emergency situation on floors ten, eleven and twelve. Please activate relocation procedures for floors ten, eleven and twelve. DO NOT USE THE ELEVATORS.”

“All right,” I said to myself, “I’m going to have to put on my hat,” but about two minutes later, we received an all clear. It was probably someone’s bag lunch that overshot the trash container, but I did feel slightly rattled, hence the chocolate-covered almonds.

I hope now that my mother knows how close I came to being vaporized at work, she’ll forgive me for the stand mixer research that might never be used. (Or had she already forgotten and I shouldn’t have mentioned it again?)

Sea Ranch Sunset and Tom with Sophia

That's the Pacific Ocean underneath the sunset.



















Doesn't Tom look particularly handsome in this picture? There's nothing like a little dog to bring out that quality.

And Bad is the New Good

Last weekend, Tom and I took Friday off, rented a car, and went up to see Ann and Mac at the Sea Ranch, always a treat for these Mission neighborhood dwellers. We stopped at Toast in Novato for lunch on Friday, and did the same thing on Sunday. (French fries with blue cheese melted over them: very fine idea.)

It wasn’t particularly sunny up there. In fact, it was overcast and a bit brisk, which is my new favorite weather: Lousy is the new sunny. It is too damn hot in San Francisco now, and it is too damn humid. When I wake up and see it’s grey and forbidding out, I’m delighted, because cycling in hot, humid weather is yucky and disgusting, not so much during, but definitely after.

Grey weather also makes for excellent napping conditions, so while Tom strode up and down the trail along the water’s edge—he did that both Saturday and Sunday; very odd—I reposed peacefully in the guest room upon my bed next to the open window. Sleeping at night with the sound of the ocean wind and its cool touch on my face was also splendid.

On Sunday afternoon, right after we got back, I went to see A. at the hospice. To me, he looked noticeably worse. In fact, for a moment or two there, I wasn’t sure he wasn’t dead. His eyes were open but unseeing. The only thing he said was to ask for a damp towel, which he used to wipe his face with. Then he kind of went to sleep and I kind of sat there, until I began to feel I was somehow derelict in my duties, and held his hand for a bit.

When he next briefly awoke, he seemed mildly surprised to find his hand being held and casually moved it out of reach, so then I just sat with him, and after an hour, I walked home, buying a bunch of asters on the way.

I initially signed up to do vigil, which is sitting with people who are expected to die imminently, in hopes no one will die alone. I now think that may be rather strange, in that I likely won’t have met the person beforehand, so I will be meeting almost-a-corpse, and we likely won’t talk, though in training it was stressed that hearing is the last sense to go, so it is very appropriate to talk to someone who is dying—but what to say, exactly?

I was thinking of perhaps reading some Mary Oliver poems, but what if the person is thinking, “I can’t move, I can’t talk, I can’t even see you and I have no idea who you are, but I CAN still hear, and that isn’t my idea of poetry, mister! Don’t you have the Old Testament?”

Or do I say “Everything is OK” to someone who, for all I know, is in a panic, thus making me a liar, or do I say “There is nothing to be afraid of; you are perfectly safe” to someone who hadn’t until that moment thought there WAS anything to be afraid of?

I guess I will learn as I go along.

I’m going to wrap up by explaining the use of capital letters in this blog: It’s due to my lousy memory, to wit: I draft a post and know which words I want to emphasize, but when I paste the entry into Blogger, formatting such as italics gets wiped out, and likely in the intervening two minutes I will have forgotten which words were meant to be emphasized, but if I put them all in caps to begin with, that is retained in Blogger.

I could at that point change to italics, but I also keep soft and hard copies of every post, just in case, and when I paste from the web into a Word document, again the formatting gets wiped out, and I’m too lazy to look back at the actual post to see which words were italicized, and that’s why the caps.

Labor Day

The Most Incompetently Laid Plans of Mice and Men

It’s ended up being kind of a strange weekend. Saturday was fine—I visited A. at the medical facility, and didn’t do much else. A perfect day! And I got irises. Things began to veer off course on Sunday.

One of LaBerge’s suggestions for learning to have lucid dreams is to wake up one hour earlier than usual, stay awake for 30 to 60 minutes, then go back to sleep. Since more is always more, I woke up TWO hours earlier than usual, and then stayed up for about SIX hours.

Then I was determined to get those two hours of sleep I felt I still had coming, and lay in bed for some hours hoping to fall asleep, but never did. Finally I gave up and proceeded with my day, but by then it was pretty much four p.m.

Tom came over in the evening and we watched Sean Penn’s movie Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer of the same name, a true story about a young man, Chris McCandless, who breaks free from his family and privileged life just after he graduates from college. He starts by contributing his entire law school fund—$24,000—to a charity. Then he abandons his car, burns his paper money, and embarks on a series of exhilarating and brave adventures, ending up in Alaska, where he dies, unable to cross back over the river that is now a rushing flood, so different from the tame aspect it displayed when the young man easily crossed it months earlier.

(I read the book, and if I recall correctly, there was actually a bridge not far off, but this isn’t mentioned in the movie.)

I was wondering how Penn was going to sustain our interest over two and a half hours or more in a story that basically has one character, but he did it brilliantly. It’s a wonderful movie, and Emile Hirsch is perfectly cast in the lead role. The scenery is gorgeous, too. Songs by Eddie Vedder.

I’m not one hundred percent sure I think it was so great of McCandless to leave his family to worry about him for so long, only to get the most heartbreaking of news in the end. I think a person who wants to be a free spirit and have a genuine experience might also have found a smidgen of compassion for people he knew must be frantic over his whereabouts and to have put their minds at ease, even if they weren’t great parents.

While watching the movie, I ate a sufficient number of chocolate-covered almonds to make it impossible to go to sleep until three or four a.m. Plus, LaBerge’s MILD technique, which I was practicing faithfully, can tend to wake me up. I’ll get the hang of it. It’s a process. (Though I did have, for the third time in four days, a dream that pertained to flying, so it was worth it.)

By the way, he (you know which he) mentions in passing that once you learn to be lucid while dreaming, you might be able to be lucid while NOT dreaming, but asleep, a state that is supposed to be akin to a very deep meditative state.

He also points out more than once—he makes a point of this in all three of his books that I have read or am reading—that even our waking lives are constructed by our brains out of the sensory input we receive, just as our dreams are constructed out of a much more restricted cache of sensory inspiration.

We create our waking lives out of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, other physical sensations, and mental factors—memories, thoughts, wishes, etc. When we dream, we do the same, minus nearly every kind of raw material other than mental factors. That’s why dreams are so unstable. They are not drawing on objective reality.

But while waking life does draw on objective reality, it is not itself objective reality per se. We make it with our minds, and could potentially wake up from our waking lives the same way we “wake” from our dreams into lucidity. A lucid dream is to a non-lucid dream as (what?) is to our waking lives. One reason people meditate is to try to have a direct experience of that what.

I had meant to go to Rainbow yesterday, but since I got up so late, I didn’t have time and had to defer that trip to today—Labor Day. You can’t go to Rainbow on Labor Day, nor on Gay Pride Day. (You can go on Independence Day, if you want.)

Well, that isn’t quite correct: You can finalize your shopping list, assemble your empty bulk food containers (for spinach, strawberries, carob chips, beans, walnuts), get your second sturdy Jandd grocery pannier out of the closet (after removing the spare helmet that lives in it), take out the trash and compost and recycling for that clean slate feeling, wash any dishes that may be in the sink, sharpen the big knife, sharpen the little knife, check your bike tires for pieces of embedded glass, pump up the same bike tires, meditate, get dressed, put on face sunblock, put on arm sunblock, close and latch the various windows, put on your helmet and bike gloves, and pedal over to Rainbow—you may certainly do all of that, and I did, but on Labor Day, you may not enter Rainbow and buy groceries.

I considered proceeding to Whole Foods, but just didn’t feel like it, so I must now think of a Plan B. In any event, I’m going to make bread, but my kneading career, such as it was—I can't say I had really mastered the technique—is over. I think shoulder arthritis or something is upon me, and the last time I kneaded, it hurt quite severely, so I’m going to let the food processor handle that part.

It’s a beautiful, idyllic, sunny day today. With so many people out of town, it almost seemed there were more cyclists than motorists in the Mission today.

Irises

Artificial Poo Deters Pushy Houseguest

OK, I’m back. I was going to post this immediately after the last post, but I got a long email from my lucid dreaming buddy, and had to send her a long email back. Now that we’re temporarily on the subject of dreams again (how did that happen?), I’ll mention that three nights ago, I dreamed of flying as a passenger on a commercial jet through a fairly dense forest. Right outside the windows were tree branches. “This pilot must be very familiar with this route,” I rationalized.

The next night, I dreamed I’d been tapped to fly a one-person plane to try to break a speed record. I left the three-day orientation in the middle of the second day, however, after I remembered I don’t know how to fly a plane. If I’d realized I was dreaming, I would have said, “Heck, yeah, I’ll fly that plane!”

Flying in lucid dreams is very common. I think these two dreams were a hint that I’ll be flying one of these days, without a plane (and without LSD), though I’m sure my waking-life experience of being in a little plane not long ago contributed.

My mother tells me she has lately had the green leather chair that once was Grandma Helen’s refinished, and that I’m not allowed to sit on it ever again. Then, perhaps realizing that the alert listener might have perceived a subtle inhospitable tone, she said she was thinking of getting a plastic turd to put on the chair when she herself isn’t sitting on it. When she wishes to sit on the chair, she can just put the plastic turd in her pocket.

And there you have the difference between the impeccable hostess and the rest of us: she gets the point across tactfully, without hurting anyone’s feelings.

One recent day at work, after reviewing some important information about “K-Fed — Eating for Two?” along with the contextual material “Fat After Fame (see photos),” I went over to Whole Foods to get some vegetarian sushi, a vegan brownie, and a Bumble Bar. Before I went in, I asked the homeless guy outside if he wanted anything and this negotiation ensued:

“Some water would be great. Just a plastic bottle of water.”

“Mmm. I can’t buy anything that comes in a plastic bottle. Those things are environmental disasters. How about an Orangina?”

“Nooooo. I don’t really drink soda.”

“What about water in a glass bottle? It might be carbonated,” I cautioned.

“I don’t know if carbonated is so good. Non-carbonated would be better. Oh, also, it would really be good if it was kosher. You know? Have you ever noticed that little K?”

“Right, I’ll see what I can do.”

We were both pleased when I returned with Whole Foods brand kosher “Italian” still mineral water in a glass bottle. Since then, every time I pass that guy, I ask him what he wants and get it for him: a jar of peanut butter, water, Clif Bars. His name is Arnim and he has quite the affable, urbane manner. He’s often to be seen in his socks, which appear to be cleaner than my socks, despite my socks being inside my shoes.

I’ve begun my hospice volunteering career as of yesterday. The place I went to is billed as having a homey atmosphere, and before going there, I read reviews online that said it is lovely, tranquil, beautiful. It is not, unless one is comparing it to a grim hospital ward; then it is. I found it fairly shabby and depressing, though it’s obvious the intention is for it to be homelike, and I know much money and care went into trying to achieve that. It is a medical setting, full of the necessary equipment. Walking down the halls, you can see the ends of hospital beds and the emaciated limbs of those hours, days, no more than weeks from death.

I liked my guy right away. (I’ll call him A. The next person I visit will be B.) The hardest part was understanding what he was saying. I confess I was employing the technique of nodding and saying “Uh huh,” until he said, “You didn’t understand what I just said, did you?” That was embarrassing. I said, “No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” and then I closed his door partway to block the sound of whirring medical devices, and moved my chair so I could look straight at him and so he wouldn’t have to move his head to see me, and then I just concentrated as hard as I could, and got most of everything he was saying.

After a while, I noticed I was feeling some physical strain from leaning forward and tried to breathe and relax. Down the hall, I could hear someone who works there scolding another patient, “Mami, you pee-peed in the bed!” At that moment, I completely bonded with A.: I am on your side no matter what.

If someone who is dying pees in the bed, isn’t that more the responsibility of whoever is supposed to put on, monitor, and change diapers? Let’s hope those two people actually have a warm relationship and that it’s a running joke between them or something.

It made me think of the place where P. lives, which is staffed by a group of tiny Filipino ladies who speak almost no English, and who are always calm. They aren’t warm and gushy, necessarily, but they seem entirely peaceful and friendly, and I have never seen any of them even remotely irritated, even despite the woman who shrieks obscenities hour after hour. P. confirms that. He says they never get mad. (We still talk on the phone now and then, but he is no longer inclined to engage much, and our conversations are fairly brief, though he is always the one to call me.) He lucked out, ending up there.

I was only with A. for 40 minutes, because he got tired and wanted to rest. I was honored to be able to hear what is on the mind of someone who has so little time left, and I was also utterly weary by the time I departed. I pass two nice flower stores walking to this place, so I bought myself some flowers on the way home, irises, which I love, and my very favorite, pink and white carnations. What a nice smell they have. Tom and I were going to watch a DVD in the evening, but I was too exhausted.

Millennium Tower

This is my favorite building in San Francisco. It's not hugely unlike my favorite building in Seattle. It's at the corner of Fremont and Mission St. It's the fourth-tallest building here. You can open the windows.

Chicken Weather

My lucid dreaming project continues. That’s what I’m doing up at this ungoshly hour on a Sunday: per the experts, lucid dreams often result from waking up an hour or two early, staying up for a while, and going back to sleep.

So far, in the course of a month, I’ve had three lucid, or briefly lucid, or semi-lucid dreams.

LaBerge says (many of my sentences begin that way now) that it’s easier to notice anomalies that might inspire lucidity if you are mindful in your dreams. He writes that many people spontaneously develop the ability to be lucid in their dreams as a byproduct of meditation practice—being consciously attentive during the day makes it easier to see clearly while asleep. My meditation practice, alas, has not produced any such result. Could it be that I'm, ahem, not quite as mindful when I'm awake as I think I am? Surely not!

He says the three requirements for learning lucid dreaming are motivation, which I have; excellent dream recall, which I have; and “correct practice of effective techniques.” I’m doing that, aren’t I? Well, I’ll just have to keep at it. I have a lucid dreaming buddy online, and we are corresponding at great length about the matter.

The other night, I dreamed Frank Manahan came to visit me and I hugged him for so long that we started to lose our balance and he said, “Oh, dear lord,” just the way he would in real life, and then he said, “I’m reading this book on conscious dreaming. Interesting stuff!” I said to him, “Hey, me, too! Look!” and I showed him the lucid dreaming website up on my monitor at that very moment. All that without it ever crossing my mind that I was dreaming.

I still think living in San Francisco is making this more difficult, as waking life is decidedly stranger than my dreams. In a dream, I walk to the corner and mail a letter. Yawn. In real life, here comes a man wearing a dress made out of marbles and yelling, “Chicken weather! Chicken weather!” (Or is he saying “whether”?)

Using a string and a little piece of laminated cardboard with a hole punched in it, I've made myself a dream necklace that says "AM I DREAMING? (WHAT IF I WERE?)" It provides some text to use for state testing (which means I don’t have to get a tattoo).



I already wear my work badge on a string around my neck, and I basically wear my pajamas every day, so I don’t have to worry about looking like a dork—I’m afraid it's several decades too late for that.

Last weekend Tom and I had dinner at a Mexican place on Steuart St. with his friends Jeff and Rhonda, and then we all went to see In the Loop, a satire about the British government at the beginning of the Iraq war. It was quite witty. The bit that has stayed with me is where one man says in a sprightly tone that something or other is going to be “easy peasy lemon breezy.” The person he’s talking to says with a glare, “No. It won’t. It will be DIFFICULT DIFFICULT LEMON DIFFICULT.”

I recently asked a co-worker of mine if he's a griller; I confess that if he said he was, I was going to think, “Figures.” But instead, sorry to say, he told me that his wife has cancer, and while they did indeed used to grill all the time, once they found out from her doctors how unhealthy it is, particularly with lighter fluid, he not only got rid of their grill, he came straight home from the hospital and destroyed it in a rage. Very sad story.

Hammett is finally collared and tagged. I told him, “This is your ticket home,” when I put it on him, as a cat without a collar is very unlikely to be reunited with his mother if he accidentally ends up outside, perhaps due to a careless repairperson or earthquake or fire. Hammett has a chip, but there is no guarantee that whoever might find him in such a circumstance would think to have him scanned, or would have the means and willingness to do it, so it’s best to have both a chip and a collar.

I ended up getting him a breakaway collar—it should pull apart if it gets snagged on something and he’s dangling from it—from The Cozy Critter, one of their solid (“marble”) colors, and I got two tags from Boomerang Tags that lie along the collar itself instead of dangling down. One has Hammett’s name on it, his chip number and the phone number of the chip place (thus obviating the need for actual scanning of the chip), and the other has my name and phone number on it. (It wouldn’t all fit on one tag.)

He doesn’t seem to mind the collar too much. Actually, I think he kind of feels more important now, with his credentials there for all to see and admire.