Skip to content

Year: 2008

Bona Fide!

October 27, 2008 • • 7 Comments

I’m not sure if I am a real American or a fake American. Sarah Palin’s recent floccinaucinihilipilification of the not so pro American parts of the country has got me thinking (and, yes, busting out the big words that any real American would never utter, by gosh wilikers!).

So, to take stock.

I live in Texas. Real America.

But I live in Austin. Fake America.

But I live in the part of Austin that’s in Williamson County. Real America with a capital A.

But I’m from Rhode Island. Fake America.

Well, that doesn’t help.

I have heard that trusty red Alabama might be considered real America. Let’s see what some of those hard-workin’ betcha by golly wow real Americans have to say about Barack Obama:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

[…]

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsville, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

[…]

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

[…]

“I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren – “it was really rough on me” – he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

Of course this all came from the New York Times, so take it with a grain of salt, I mean, the New York Times?!? talk about your fake America.

They did let me vote, though, and I voted for one of the pro-American candidates.

Every Day Is a Gift

October 22, 2008 • • 15 Comments

Thanks for reminding me of that, Fred.

The day we met Daphne her name was Fancy. She was huddled in a ball at a greyhound meet-n-greet. She was the smallest grey I’ve ever seen and with very little fur, she didn’t look particularly healthy. But the little neckerchief she wore said she needed a home. That was all it took.

Two weeks later we had a new dog. She was scared of everything, and she spent most of that summer hiding under an end table and sneaking to the bedroom at night. The first day, I had to pick her up and carry her outside when she needed to go out. I did that for a few days, but one night at about three in the morning, I heard her bouncing by my side of the bed, eyes shining and ears as up as they could go.

I took her outside, and she wanted to play. We ran around the yard under the stars and chased each other. Then she did her business and went in. After that she always told me when she needed to go out. And, for the past six years, I have gotten up at least once, sometimes twice, in the middle of the night to let her out. Every night.

One of my favorite things about leaving town is knowing that I will get to sleep through the night. But now… now, I know I will miss getting up.

I will miss watching Daphne tree the midnight possums and snap June bugs from the air as they swarm around the porch lights. I will miss hearing the midnight songs of unmated mockingbirds as they trill through the spring nights. I will miss the distant sound of trains that carries across the cool autumn air. I will miss the coyotes I sometimes hear howling in the distance.

If not for her, I’d have missed these things. That’s one things animals do for us: they fill our lives with the unexpected.

Over the years, Daphne grew a beautiful blue fawn brindle coat, thus saving us from having to have a mostly hairless dog. She grew to be playful, quirky, and the laziest animal I’ve ever known, but when she wanted attention or wanted to play, she would wrestle with me like no other dog I’ve had.

I don’t think I ever saw her walk. She preferred to run everywhere she went, glomping along with a footfall surprisingly loud for such a small greyhound. She made weird noises, and only barked at night when there was wildlife in the yard that needed a good treeing.

When Zephyr died, Daphne assumed her rightful role as the alpha dog, though she was a laid back alpha. She never learned to like walks or car rides or going anywhere for that matter, but in the house and in the yard, she was boss. She even overcame her fear of strangers, running to the door when people came over.

We just let her be the dog she wanted to be, and I think it made her happy.

Last Friday, we learned she had cancer. We brought her home for a few more of those precious days. She wouldn’t run anymore, instead walking slowly. She mostly just wanted to hop up on the couch and curl up beside us, resting her head in our laps as we read or watched TV. She still ate a little, but yesterday she took a sudden turn for the worse.

I left work early because I just had a feeling I should. When I got home, I found her on her bed with Simon the cat lying near her. She obviously wasn’t feeling well, and she’d thrown up a lot. Knowing it was time, I called the vet.

R came home shortly after, and we sat with Daphne on her bed while we waited for the vet. Joey and Phoebe and Simon even joined the vigil. When it was time, she passed peacefully in her home, on her bed, surrounded by her people.

We’ll miss our big Daph terribly, but as with the others who went before, I know it won’t be long before thinking about her makes us smile rather than cry.

And somewhere, at the great greyhound meet-n-greet in the sky, Zephyr is surely sniffing her old friend’s butt and saying, “Come on. The squirrels are this way…”

Thanks to y’all who sent well wishes.

Update: Thanks, Fred, for letting Daphne roam the marbled halls of Ironicus Maximus today.

[saveagrey]

Friday Hound Blogging: Sweet Daphne

October 17, 2008 • • 6 Comments

We found out today that Daphne has cancer. It’s pretty widespread, and there isn’t anything that can be done. Our vet says that this isn’t going to be painful (for her anyway) so we brought her home to spend her last few weeks eating whatever she wants – the hell with that nasty kidney diet food! – and getting lots of love while lounging on her couch.

[saveagrey]

Following the Angry Mob

October 16, 2008 • • 3 Comments

Several books I’ve read (can’t recall specific titles as I’ve seen it many places) suggest that following agitated Blue Jays and crows can often lead you to an owl or a hawk.

What’s going on in those cases is mobbing behavior, which is when a group of birds harass a predator, usually without directly attacking it, in order to annoy it into leaving.

I had never successfully managed to follow birds to the source of their ire until just a few weeks ago.

On a Saturday morning, I heard Blue Jays screeching in the trees and groups of them flying north along one of the nearby trails. This persisted through most of the morning and, finally, I decided to follow as it was a good morning for walking.

I walked down the trail in the general direction of the jays’ racket until I reached a clearing at the bottom of a hill. I couldn’t see any Blue Jays, but I could hear them in a stand of trees off the trail to the east so I followed their calls into a thick stand of cedar and live oak.

The jays calmed for a few minutes when I entered, but then resumed their cries. I saw flashes of blue in the trees while I tried to locate the object of their insults. Then I sensed movement, large and slow, directly above. I looked up to see a hawk swooping through the trees and angling upward and away, gaining speed with each beat of its wings. The hawk was gone before I got a great look, but by its banded tail, I suspect it was a Red-shouldered Hawk.

So, I thought to myself, I guess there’s something to this mobbing thing after all. It’s always oddly surprising to me when I read something and then later witness the very thing I’ve read about. I’m not sure why that is, except perhaps that there is a part of me that has to see something to really believe it.

Last week, I saw it again from my car. This time it was a small flock of crows chasing something – I couldn’t tell if it was a hawk or an owl – away from a stand of trees along Brushy Creek. I wanted to turn and follow to see what they were chasing, but I decided to head home and let the dogs out instead.

I have seen and believe what can happen if I fail to do that.

October Bird Observations Through Windows

October 14, 2008 • • Leave a comment

There are as many skeletons as bird feeders out now, and you can feel the changes. I notice for the first time the days shortening, shadows at six o’clock filling the house and from a more southern angle. The world is ticking back to fall and the birds know it.

Mainly due to allergies, I haven’t been out birding like I like to, but I’ve noticed some interesting things through the windows of the house and the car.

The House Sparrows are returning to the front flower bed. Last winter a small flock of 20 or so of these little birds took up residence in the thick bushes off the front porch. They dispersed in the spring, only a few pairs staying behind, but now that flocking season is here, they’re back. Every time I open the front door a burst of sparrows appears and hurries to the neighbor’s flowerbed.

The Cardinals and Blue Jays are still around. Last year, we went out of town in late July and when we came back they had gone, and I didn’t see them around again until March. This year when we left, we had the neighbor kids keep the feeders going and they’ve stuck around. I guess last year the feeders going empty right at the end of nesting season inspired them to move on.

The Chipping Sparrows aren’t back yet, but I don’t expect them for another month or so.

The Chickadees are back in force. They are occasional visitors to the feeders during the summer months, but they are much more common in the fall through spring.

The hummingbirds seem to have left, but I’ll keep the feeders up for a little while longer in the hope a Rufous Hummer will come by.

I’m suddenly seeing more Carolina Wrens than Bewick’s, though the Bewick’s are still here. I wonder if any are the ones I saw fledge back in June.

Around the neighborhood, I’ve noticed ducks starting to come back to the ponds while more hawks drift overhead.

Driving to work each morning, I look for the Scissor-tails. They’re still around, flocking up in preparation for their long journey to the Central American highlands. I thought they’d be gone by now, but each morning I see more and more sitting on the power lines, and I find I am grateful for each day that I get one more look at these favorite birds before they leave. I suspect that like many birds they’re waiting for the morning the light falls in just a certain way that will say to them, “fly.”

3 and Meta Thoughts

October 11, 2008 • • Leave a comment

I’ve been at this blogging business for 3 years now so I mark the day with a post linking back to my first one, which originally was, and still is, on Blogger with my original blue look and everything.

Thursday’s post on Zen and the Art of Blogging is probably a better reflection of the whole blogging experience so I won’t delve back into that today.

Mainly, I want to think about obligations and hobbies. Or how this blog tried to become a blogligation. It was the Weekend (and later Friday) Hound Bloggings, the Monday Movie Roundups, the Friday Random Tens, the Old Photo Fridays, the write ups of every book I read from the time I started this blog until I made a conscious decision to stop back in March of this year.

Each day, I had a to-do list and the only remedy seemed to be a to-don’t list. And so the hobby, which had been fun, became more of a chore. I posted because I had to, not necessarily because I wanted to.

The lesson here at three seems to be that unless you’re doing this for money, do it for fun. For me, obligations are not fun. It’s something I try to remember but sometimes forget. It’s why I think carefully about setting goals involving things I love.

I know several people who try to read x number of books per year. I could never do that. I would begin to feel I had to do what I originally wanted to do, thereby crossing the line from having hobbies to hobbies having me.

Perhaps that’s why this blog became more and more about birds over the past year. Birds are a reminder of freedom, and while their lives are full of their own have-tos and necessities, there is nothing about the act of birding that makes me feel I have to do anything. Or be anything. I suspect I enjoy birding for many of the same reasons fishermen fish. I may not see a single bird, but I never consider it a waste of time.

Birding and writing have a similar effect on me as well. When I am through for the day with either activity, I am always surprised by the time, how much of it has gone by. It is like waking from a dream, and I feel refreshed and at peace.

Back to the top, and I can see that this site was a hobby that became an obligation, but by stepping away from it for a while, and only using it to express another hobby, the obligation seems gone and now, at three, I’m back to one.

The Ugly

October 10, 2008 • • Leave a comment

This is awful.

Talk about never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups…

The celebration of ugliness, hate and stupidity that the Republican party has become under McCain and especially Palin really is breathtaking. I hope all we’re seeing are the last throes of a dying beast, but even if they are this is not good. John McCain, at least, should be better than this.

If Obama wins (please please please let that happen) these people will dog him with the line that he’s a terrorist, a socialist, unAmerican. Of course these are the people who still like Bush. The guy who’s bringing us closer to socialism than we’ve ever been, but still, that’s different, though I don’t see how.

Fortunately, a few Republicans still have a modicum of sanity left. David Brooks:

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

How did we become a society that so easily and willingly throws out the very idea of deliberation in favor of acting solely on impulse in the manner of teenagers?

McCain and Palin are running on nothing more than fear, feeding its flames with their insistence that there’s just something not quite American about Obama. Something insidious about the man who will most likely be our next president.

If Obama is elected he will have to face this over-the-top hatred the entire time he is in office. Should John McCain somehow win in this way, how in hell does he expect to bring the country together or get a Democratic congress to work with him?

Country first, indeed.

Lizard Blogging

October 9, 2008 • • Leave a comment

A lizard on the garage
A lizard on the garage

I saw this guy climbing along the house a few months back and happened to have my camera. Unfortunately, I cropped off most of his tail. Need to pay more attention to framing instead of thinking, “!Whoo hoo! A lizard!” That’s the trick of shooting animals, though. Slow down. Relax. Get the right shot.

Their tails do grow back, but I’m not sure it will show up in the picture.

Zen and the Art of Blog Maintenance

October 8, 2008 • • 4 Comments

I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His quest to understand Quality and his thoughts about the joy he finds in keeping his machine running have gotten me thinking about all kinds of things I do: writing, teaching, teaching writing, photography, blogging, and blog maintenance.

Mostly blog maintenance. First, I want to think about keeping it running as a piece of software on a machine as opposed to writing the content that appears on the screen.

Pirsig writes eloquently about the process of maintaining a motorcycle:

The thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind that does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.

[…]

Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

The difficulty lies in the various traps that Pirsig labels value traps, truth traps and muscle traps. Falling into these traps steers one away from Quality, the idea the book explores.

The more I read, the more I realized I actually understand most of what he writes about motorcycle maintenance, but not because I know anything about motorcycles – I don’t – still, I’ve been there and have intuitively come to similar conclusions. Doing the backend maintenance necessary to run a self-hosted blog or any website, I assume, is exactly like motorcycle maintenance.

A question I frequently ask myself, though, is why bother. There are so many blogging platforms out there where all I would have to do is write and put up my posts. Why go to the trouble to maintain the thing myself? Why deal with upgrades that don’t go as planned and potentially could screw up the database? Why mess with plugins that sometimes gum up the whole system? Why bother with themes that break?

I think the questions led me to the same issue Pirsig wrestles with. It has to do with Quality. With the relationship between the machine, the user and the process. Spending hours tinkering with the backend code and pieces of this blog are not really about the blog. It’s never even noticed by anyone reading it.

It’s about learning. It’s about growing.

Pirsig writes:

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

It all has to do with “living right.”

There is beauty and joy… life… to be discovered in doing things fully and completely. The more I approach life’s tasks with a quiet peaceful mind, the more fully, I think, I live.

Now I need to think of maintenance in the broader sense as it applies to this blog. Like Pirsig’s motorcycle, the blog is a machine with an engine that makes it go (the WordPress software), and it is a vehicle that takes me places, in this case the writing, which transports me into my head as I do it.

(I must admit I wish it would transport me physically to the Montana Rockies like Pirsig’s bike, but all good things must have their limits, I suppose.)

Maintaining (in both senses of the word, now) my blog suddenly seemed more important because I came to see that it is through this process that I can stay in tune with these lessons about right living. It is because of the hours spent working on it, that I have been able to relate so easily to what Pirsig writes.

Further, he reminds me that:

If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?

[…]

But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be as sloppy as the preceding six.

And so because maintaining a blog is two things – keeping it running and writing, I’m back.

For the backend aspect of maintenance, I upgraded to 2.6.2, which is why some things are a little off while I work through the kinks.

Because maintaining the blog also means writing, I am reminded that through writing here, I ensure that my thinking is at its sharpest and that I approach closer to true Quality whenever I write and especially when I am sitting down to focus on a manuscript.

I never really thought of this silly blog as a way of thinking about life, but as I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it is because of this blog that I know and understand exactly what Pirsig is talking about in his book.