The Wonder Of Our Times

My internet connection was frustratingly sporadic again yesterday. The bad connection caused me to reflect once again on how totally dependent I have become on this means of communication. Far from atomizing the world I live in and making me feel like an individual dispersed and floating free in the ether, I feel more bound to the world in just about every way by this screen and this keyboard than I would ever have imagined possible even 15 years ago. What in the world did I do without it?

I'm not so much a partaker in that other communications revolution, cell phone technology. I use my cell phone for emergencies and when there is absolutely no other way to connect with someone. For Steve's part, he spends so much time on the phone at work that he rarely even answers it here at home. As for myself, though I can talk a blue streak if you hit the right buttons, writing is my preferred means of communication, so for better or worse I've taken to the internet as a natural extension of my brain and fingers. Email enables my immediate and previously unimagined connection to friends old and new. (Google, literally a creation of this technology, helps me find those old friends in the first place.) This blog has brought me an entire community of like-minded souls spread around the world who have opened doors to me that I didn't even know existed.

Music has been an enormous part of this revelation. I've been exposed to more new and exciting music in the past nine months than I had been in the previous 40 years, during which time I despaired that creativity had withered to oblivion. And this process of discovery has extended past new music to re-kindled acquaintance with artists who have been working their magic for years but who for one reason or another I previously paid no attention to. All this musical exploration has made my 80-gig ipod, yet another tool made possible by the internet, a godsend. It's about half full now with music practically endless in its variety. I can carry it with me wherever I go, set it on "shuffle," plug it into speakers, and share my musical wealth with anyone. We'll never hear the same song twice unless we want to.

Of course, all blessings have their potential for abuse. We've all heard of people who spend entire days in front of the computer, and I know a couple of people like that personally. They may be hooked on a game, or maybe they're doing the same sort of follow-where-it-leads exploration of knowledge that I enjoy, but they do it to the exclusion of what I've come to call the flesh-and-blood world. I find I can't sit in front of a television for more than two hours, and if my computer were not next to a window on the f&b world I would probably spend less time here, as well. As much as I enjoy everything about this morning ritual, choosing my music and forming my sentences takes just about all the time at the computer I'm willing to spend in one session.

Thanks to various beeps and chimes I know when one of you has sent me a message or has updated your blog. All I need to do is turn up the volume on my computer and head out to other things. But whatever those other things may be, they're done in the knowledge that my little outreach via cables and modems is keeping you near and able to tell me what's on your mind at a moment's notice. I'm tethered to my world and yours in a way previous generations of humankind never even thought of.

Who'd have ever dreamed....?

Things are looking up......

When I'm done here I will go out and start on some yard work. One of the constant gifts of the silver maple in the back is twigs. Big twigs, little twigs, entire stout branches--in a good wind it will slough off a good bit of itself, much as we constantly shed skin and hair to make room for new. This maple detritus makes excellent kindling, so instead of throwing it away I gather it up into fireplace-size bundles--faggots. I imagine Martha Stewart would do such a thing, or at least hire some underling like myself to do it. So I call them my Martha Stewart faggots.

If you get the joke, you're allowed to laugh.

House progress: We have jumped off a cliff and applied for a construction loan. This will commit us to starting work on the Delaware property no later than December; the work will be in the form of trailer demolition, lot clearance and installation of the septic system. Yes, this is before we know how Steve's job situation will evolve, and before we sell this house and know how much we will be able to contribute to the final real estate fund. But our finance person gave us a call while we were in North Carolina alerting us to interest rate moves and telling us we should strike while the iron is hot, and we decided to do it. A construction loan is an interest-only line of credit; you pay only on the amount you've drawn. If worse comes to worst and the entire scheme falls down, we will only be out the cost of the land clearance. If we see we can't get enough for the house and decide to wait a year to build, it means we will not have the trailer to stay in next summer--it'll be in a landfill someplace. But right now it's feeling like that won't happen. I think we've set ourselves on a path now and it will take a huge catastrophe to get us off it, and a catastrophe seems less likely now, because:

Steve's company finally submitted its plan to the Transporation Security Administration for the transition to the new contractor. The plan envisions the company needing until July 2009 to complete the transition properly. This is more than enough time for Steve to get his vestment in the company, it gives us plenty of wiggle room for the economy to do whatever it's going to do (improve, we hope, over that long a time); we are even pretty sure that if we go ahead with the house plans and move to Delaware, the company would allow Steve to telecommute, as it does everyone else on the project.

Bureaucratic inefficiency! How could we live without it?

Why do I eat that lime-flavored Tostito chip?

Because it's there! So ends another Week Of Eating Dangerously at Nags Head. Among so many other things, the week at Nags Head means food, unlimited, delicious food, from the dinners (along with desserts mostly including ice cream) served by cooks nothing short of expert, to the ham and cheese biscuits thrown in as a lagniappe by somebody one morning for breakfast, to the Dagwood-style sandwiches we all indulge in every lunchtime (if not some pasta thing leftover from dinner the night before) to another lagniappe, huge oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies tossed out of the oven by somebody else, to cheese dips, humus, flatbreads, and chips of every description, and boiled Virginia peanuts, all just sitting there, meant only to be consumed. I stopped by a farm stand on the trip down and bought at least 10 pounds of beautiful tomatoes, totally oblivious to the fact that Tom and Rick always fly in from Toldeo with offerings from their own yearly bumper crop. We ended up with at least 30 pounds of tomatoes--and we went through them! Folks got creative and every dinner featured tomatoes in some form, and lunch sandwiches weren't considered complete without at least a slice. By the time Thursday rolled around I made some comment to the effect that it will be interesting to feel hungry again, if I ever do, and everyone else chuckled in understanding. This group gives the song "Food, Glorious Food!" a whole new meaning.

Otherwise, we were blessed with the same matchless September weather that we always have, despite the fact that we are at hurricane central and always fearing the worst. Hanna started raining on the Outer Banks literally the moment our tires hit the beach road on Friday at about 1 pm, and we had high winds but only light rain the rest of Friday and about half of Saturday. By 5 pm Saturday we were sitting on the beach as if there had never been any disturbance. Also by that time, we knew that the next hurricane, Ike, had decided to head west, not north. Right from the start, we knew we were home free. (Sorry, Galveston!)

This is the traditional start of the new year for us. The Nags Head trip serves as the cap to summer; the cooling weather turns our attention to concerns and activities of the new season and we start planning for them. For me it means more outdoor work, in the form of staying ahead of the everloving maple leaves out back (the silver maple--the gift that keeps on giving), cutting back the foliage on perennials now that they have nourished their bulbs for as long as the weather will allow and, eventually, bringing in all the plants from the deck. Soon the Thanksgiving cactuses will be setting buds for their yearly spectacle, which I will share with you.

Thanks to you die-hards who checked in faithfully even when there was nothing new to look at. I've got a project ahead of me, trying to retrieve those lost posts from the google archive. With the clarity of hindsight I discovered that the loss was my fault, not blogger's. Life goes on.

If you're curious, here are a few more Nags Head pictures.

QUICK PASTA, SAUSAGE AND SALAD GREENS

This is an all-time favorite of ours that I've been making at least twice a month for years. It's a variation on a recipe I originally found on Epicurious.com, even before the bags of pre-torn lettuce had become so ubiquitous and handy on grocery shelves.

The heat of the pasta wilts the lettuce just enough to soften it yet still retain a crunch. The sweet toothiness of the lettuce combined with the pasta and meat make a delicious combination, and it cqan be thrown together in half an hour.

1 lb. Italian sausage, sweet or hot

1 bag prepared torn hearts of romaine

4 to 5 large fresh garlic cloves, crushed and peeled

1 shallot or small red boiling onion

¼ cup lemon juice½ cup olive oil

1 tsp. salt

12 oz. uncooked spaghetti

Parmesan cheese

Tabasco Sauce (optional)

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

Cook spaghetti according to package directions.

Into a food processor with the blade running, drop onion and then garlic and mince fine. Stop processor, scrape onion and garlic pieces down into processor bowl. Pour lemon juice into measuring cup, add salt and stir to dissolve. Add olive oil. (Salt won’t dissolve in the oil, so stir it in before adding oil.) Stir all to mix well. Turn on processor and with blade running add lemon juice-olive oil mixture. Scrape all into a small container, making sure to get all pieces of garlic and onion, and set aside.

Place salad greens in large serving bowl.

Spray a baking pan with cooking spray, place sausages in a single layer in pan and prick sausages in several places to release fat as it cooks. Roast at 500 degrees 10 minutes, turn, and roast on other side 7 minutes more.

When sausage is done, slice on the diagonal into 1/4-inch rounds and add to lettuce in bowl. The sausage will still be slightly pink, but that’s OK. It will continue to cook for a few minutes after cutting.When spaghetti is done, drain, but do not rinse. Add hot spaghetti directly to greens, pour dressing over, and toss to wilt greens and mix everything together. Serve with Parmesan cheese and optional Tabasco.

The best laid plans...

I had had a real brainstorm about filling this space for the next 10 days or so while we are away in Nags Head: republish some of my favorite posts about vacations and some of the memorable trips we have taken, complete with pictures and links to more. They were older posts, and many new readers hadn't seen them; this, I thought, was a perfect way to share my sense of being on vacation and bring everyone up to date at the same time. There would be no music because Hipcast doesn't yet have a "delayed publish" feature, but that would be the only difference.

I set about that task yesterday. Comcast was having one of the worst days I'd ever seen, up for sporadic seconds and then down for minutes, all day long. I slogged through it, finding the eleven posts (including good recipes) I deemed worthy of re-runs. Between bouts of sitting before a dead computer screen for interminable periods, I made a few changes in each entry and posted them with consecutive future dates, using blogger's delayed publishing feature. The whole production took a couple of hours. When I was done, I pressed "view blog"--and discovered all those posts had published yesterday. Blogger had ignored the consecutive future dates. Thinking I had made a mistake, I deleted all the incorrect posts to start all over again.

It was only at that point that I discovered that blogger didn't regard those re-worked posts as copies, but as new, stand-alone posts. I hadn't just deleted the incorrectly dated posts, but the originals, too! Australia, gone! New Zealand, gone! Cowan's Gap, Nags Head, gone, gone!!

OK, I think I've used enough exclamation points to describe my feelings yesterday. Between the damn ISP itself and blogger, I was not at my best. Finally, my friend Nan suggested I look into the Google cache, and some exploration there points to a way of salvaging the writings. I won't be able to restore them to the blog, but at least I can save them to my own drive and have them, which is something I've been meaning to do with all my posts, anyway.

So a word to my wise fellow bloggers: don't get too comfortable with this powerful tool we all use. When it wants to screw you, it can, and there's not a single human voice you can turn to. Be careful!

It'll be over and out after tomorrow--we'll be driving south, probably into Hurricane Hannah (sounds like a song) on Saturday, and I will be back at this computer on Tuesday September 16. I'll be checking in sporadically and leaving my ubiquitous comments you-know-where, so don't think you've heard the last of me! I'll be watching when I can, and I'll be full of stories and pictures when I get back.

Bye!

Uninvited Guests

Poor little Ivy cat is being tormented by fleas. It happens at this time of year, more often than not, in Delaware, where living is much closer to the outside. A colony of feral cats lived under the trailer back in the days before we came and reclaimed the interior for human habitation. The cats are long gone but progeny of their fellow travelers remain in the dirt all around. As we people go about our outdoors business, the fleas hitch rides on our clothes and come inside with us, where they jump off and eventually hit a furry little black and white jackpot. Of course, Nicky the yellow cat is there, too, but the fleas don't seem so interested in his offerings--maybe because he's fatter, so his blood is harder to get at?

Anyway, both cats are wearing smelly flea collars now and the problem should abate in a few days, but it's hard to see Ivy awakend from a slumber to scratch, lick, or bite some spot that a flea has drawn his attention to. Of course, I have no inkling how a cat manages to deal with any of this. I'm like most normal humans in that feeling tiny things crawling over me would drive me over the edge. But cats, and for that matter many other creatures, just seem to be able to put up with it, or maybe not even be aware of it until a major bite occurs. Even some humans, forced by extraordinary circumstances to life in extremis outdoors, seem to be blessed with this de-sensitization. I guess sentient organisms can become too sentient and defensively get used to anything when they have to.

Malaria is endemic in Ghana, as it is in most of the tropical countries where the Peace Corps works. We Peace Corps folk, volunteers and staff alike, were required to take a drug called Aralen to suppress any parasites we may have been exposed to by random mosquito bites. (More modern drugs are used now.) The thing about this weekly Aralen dose was that there is still something called a "malaria breakthrough," which could happen if you were exposed to more mosquitoes than normal and the malaria parasites become numerous enough to overcome the prophylactic effect of the drug. If that were to happen and we should find ourselves felled by a sudden, raging fever, a specific parasite-destroying regimen was printed right on the Aralen bottles we all carried with us.

I was as idiotically assured of my own immortality as any other kid of 24, and couldn't see any sense in "poisoning" myself with a drug a) whose prophylactic effect could be overcome by sufficient exposure to the malaria parasite and b) could beat back even an OD of parasites with a specific regimen anyway. So I didn't take my weekly Aralen (the only Peace Corps rule I ever broke), and I did get a fever.

It happened on a late Saturday morning as a group of us were gathering for the curry lunch at Kumasi's City Hotel--an occasional treat we'd indulge in if enough folks were in town to form a party. My temperature rose dramatically within minutes; I could do nothing more than sit on the curb, and I was hard-pressed to find the strength to remain upright even to that degree. My friends rushed me with them to Michele's house, where I was bundled into a bed to trip out on fever dreams. Somebody had my unused Aralen bottle and dosed me with the prescribed amounts at the prescribed intervals. I do remember realizing that I had provided an excuse for an early start to the party that would have taken place at Michele's place after lunch anyway. Some part of me wanted to be there, but I couldn't move.

The drug did its work. After just a few hours, the fever broke as suddenly as it had begun, and I was able to join my friends in the next room, decidedly worse for the wear, but grateful to be among the welcoming, smiling faces . At the end of the day I went home and crashed. It was about a week before I felt completely normal again.

When my Peace Corps service was over and I was back in the States, I related this episode to my doctor and asked for a blood test to see if I had indeed had malaria and if there were any parasites left--could I expect a relapse? I tested negative for the parasite. Either my body had sloughed it off, or I had simply succumbed to some random tropical fever that happened to respond to Aralen. To this day the story has no horror in it for me. Malaria was simply one of the myriad risks I had accepted as part of doing business in the Peace Corps. Whatever that fever was, I survived it; the Aralen and my body danced together as intended, and here I am telling the tale. In my much wiser dotage now, of course, simply crossing a street can engender shaky, white-knuckle fright. I'm honestly not sure which is better: the caution of age or the blissful ignorance of the young. Then again, maybe you become cautious in direct proportion to how dumb you were before. Given my risk-averse life now, I must have been really good and stupid. I'm so glad!

A Short Week

I couldn't resist sharing another example of the ever-changing spectacle right off our dock. This picture of the morning fog is taken from the same place and position as the sunrise picture at the top of the blog. The scene out there is just like that famous box of chocolates.

We had a very pleasant yet productive weekend. The holiday traffic horrors caused by emergency repairs on the Bay Bridge were so well predicted that potential travelers were frightened away; the backups never materialized. Friend Chris made the trip in record time early Saturday morning, at less than 2 1/2 hours. As for the building project, we did accomplish what we hoped we would: applied for the variance to accommodate a deck (our personal appearance before the zoning board will take place within the next two months), and signed a contract with a builder to take us as far as final design preferences and permits. Once we have plans and permits in hand, we will be able to shop them around to other builders to see if we can get a better price. When we're through that process and decide on a builder, we'll slow down on construction plans until the spring, when we have a better idea of what we can get for this house. But we'll still be looking at storage costs, movers, final "staging" of the house, and of course....painting! I'll no doubt have plenty to entertain you with in the coming months.

I have much to do here in Arlington before we take off Thursday for about two weeks to Nags Head, with stops at the Delaware place bracketing the start and finish of the trip. The Outer Banks are beautiful during this "shoulder" season. The air is still summer-warm, but the days have shortened a bit, making the nights comfortably cool, and the crowds have finished their vacations, leaving the beach and the local roads relatively serene for us to enjoy. But there is one obvious drawback to September: hurricanes. We're watching Hannah, Ike, and Josephine as they develop and follow the wind currents west, hoping they will turn away from where we will be. I have to say we've had extremely good luck in the thirty years we've been making this trip. We've had some heavy rain, but never for a full week, and we've only been required to evacuate two times. As long as all the friends we go with want to stick with September, we'll keep going at this time.

Outdoor work beckons this truncated week. Happy New Work Year!