Mooi Marin

I've been writing too much lately of the dangers of our new home.  Here's a reminder of its beauties:

Survival, part 2

The creek across the street from us came within a foot of "critical" this morning.

We saw it yesterday, too.  At that time Felix was not sure why I had dragged him out in the rain to see a creek that offered below-average rock throwing opportunities.  Today's massive roiling chocolate brown deluge, on the other hand, impressed even him.  (He still proposed wading across as opposed to taking the bridge however.)

I was hoping, somehow, to skip this part of disaster preparedness but I am beginning to suspect I'd better invest some time in sandbagging practice.  (Check the link:  don't you just love how the military writes?  I do, I truly do.)  Burlap sacks here I come.

Stuff and Water

You will rejoice with us, I am sure, upon hearing that we are Getting Organized. Yes, there are still stacks of boxes around, but the stacks are smaller, fewer in number, and move less often than they did even a week ago.  The situation is, in a word, manageable.

In fact, it's almost enjoyable. We open boxes now at our leisure, and are sometimes even able to take pleasure in what we find therein. We have unpacked a lifetime's supply of clothing, or enough for a year in any case, and so are cold no longer and can select the right shoe for the occasion. Our framed photos, the painting of the skaters congregating by the Magere Brug, a map of the Netherlands, Talia's grandmother's acrylics, and one or two other items adorn our walls--they are much the better for it. Our kitchen contains our kitchen goods; we are able now to begin cooking.

And then there are the little things. Literally. We all have them, tiny pieces we attract as time goes by, keeping them first for sentimental reasons, later as evidence of the deep influence inertia has upon our lives.  As I encounter them in various boxes I collect them into a single large plastic tub with the intention of storing it all away for another age or two. In goes a Swatch found on the shores of Lac Léman. Next a carved fetish given to me while a student at St. John's. Half a dozen Burning Man necklaces join them. A felt-and-pipe cleaner snake plucked from Rachel's hair one Halloween long ago pops up and is put away.  I am surprised to discover that I can, in fact, recall the provenance of most of these little treasures.

I am even more surprised to find that some of them are useful, and I will tell you here about two such. The first I discovered in a yellow Kinder Surprise. Shake it: no sound. Weigh it: no heft. Open it: no wonder--it contains a piece of Emperor Penguin chick down, collected for me by some Antarctic researcher friends of mine. It is infinitely light, warm to the touch, and without question the softest thing on earth, Felix's ass included. And its use? Felix's daycare is studying Antarctica at the moment, and so we bring it in to share. On the way home that afternoon I find the tiniest piece stuck to his eyebrow. I would cover him in it if I could.

The second piece brings us back to the title of this posting. I earlier blogged about our water and my concerns about it; generally legitimate, in point of fact likely misplaced. I promised, as you may recall, to test that water for lead, a promise I long delayed even after having found my lead testing kit. I am not by nature a procrastinator, but I feared what I would discover and so, cravenly, postponed its discovery. Still, one can live only so long a coward, and so I popped a piece into a spot of tap water the other morning and watched and waited. Nothing. The lead-pink/orange color completely failed to appear. It remained simply a sodden piece of paper. Relieved, I went to fetch a sample of the highly suspicious paint that covers the exterior of our house in a patina of what I have been assuming is flaked poison. Crumble, soak, test...nothing. Hmmm. The no-doubt-painted-with-lead ceramic church I found on the sidewalk the other day and brought home for Felix to play with? No reaction.

At this point I began to fear that my lead test kit had gone a bit queer and resolved to test the tester. But where does one find lead these days if not in the sinister but obvious places I had already been looking? And then it occurred to me: in my box of little things I had placed two ancient bullets plucked from a sand dune in Death Valley a decade or more ago. I had never tested them to see if they were lead, but they certainly suggest it, being dull, metallic, and surprisingly heavy. So I tested them. They are, and the rest of my stuff isn't. Now that's useful.

Calling

Emerson writes, in his essay "Spiritual Laws":

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.  Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation.

I read this piece most recently while eating lunch at the bank I was soon to leave, the bank in whose employ I was, in the Emersonian sense, lost.  It did not, as you might imagine, aid my digestion.  Bank work was not the first career into which I had fallen, but I do intend for it to be the last.  This time around I am intent on finding my vocation.

Except that's not the word I use.  I think of my current quest as the search for my calling.  I have settled on that description of what I am seeking because finding your calling surely means you must listen.  It is much harder for me to listen than it is for me to communicate.  Much harder.  And that's why I prefer to think of it this way:  if finding my calling was easy I would surely have done so by now.  So it has to be hard, and it is.

But then there's Emerson claiming that to find your vocation you need to vocalize.  So am I supposed to be listening or vocalizing?  I can't do both at once, can I?  Or is this one of those mildly irritating koans the point of which is that I should be listening to myself?

Even if the word has to come from my inner voice, I would appreciate hearing other voices while waiting.  Speak up, won't you?

Washing dishes

We rented our current apartment in some haste:  it was too good a deal to pass up.  But in our haste we failed to notice that the kitchen contained neither a dishwasher nor space to hold one.  Fortunately, I have a history of washing dishes by hand--five years in a primitively-equipped cooperative taught me to like it--and the kitchen sink is both capacious and well-situated, so really I have nothing to complain of.  (Well, almost nothing:  the sink is too low, along with the kitchen counter, as is inevitably the case in old houses.  Are we really descended from a race of dwarfs?)  In fact, it makes me feel powerfully virtuous somehow, and this despite the fact that even with care hand washing is more wasteful--of water, of soap, and especially of dishes, five of which I broke in one enormous smashup last night--than automatic.

A friend of mine informs me that his father has always refused to allow a dishwasher in the house on the grounds that the washing/drying process guarantees a time for conversation between parent/washer and child/dryer.  I think of this every time I do a sinkful, and I wonder.  Washing is noisy and yet peaceful, more contemplative than conversational.  I'm not sure I'd want to share it, nor the virtue that attends it.  And besides, with a sufficiently capacious drying rack, drying is simply make-work.

One thing is constant between the two methods:  for some reason, dishwasher or drying rack, I just can't stand emptying.

Road Trip!

Just back from our winter vacation road trip. As a child I was subjected to a good many such, albeit more usually in the range of 4000 miles than 400.  For this first such jaunt my little family decided to take it easy:  400 up, 400 back, and we split that first 400 right about in the middle.  Our itinerary is shown here.  In a nutshell, we drove through the hills of Marin into the flat farmland (rice, among other things, and not a terrace to be seen) up the Central Valley, stopped in Redding where the mountains start, then through the high (5000 feet+) country to Klamath Falls, Oregon, there to visit our good friend Shanna.  A few photos from the drive:

As amazing as was the natural beauty (actually the second photo above is as artificial as it comes), I was at least as impressed by this man made wonder:



I couldn't resist asking the tour guide if the Shasta Dam as a project completed on time.  No, she replied, it was finished ahead of schedule.  The second largest dam in the US, 6,270,000 cu yd of poured concrete, seven years:  almost restores my faith in project planning.  Felix, incidentally, was very impressed, and has repeatedly expressed his desire to work on raising the dam's height, a project currently under consideration and one which, I can't help but suspect, will run over schedule should it ever even begin.