two years into retirement

siskiyou summit

two years ago we arrived at our new home in wa state after a two day trip from santa cruz ca in a big u-haul truck towing a trailer carrying my pickup truck, during a heat wave. robin's twin bro and his wife quite graciously volunteered to drive our car, bringing the cat. the truck had to be the oldest in the entire u-haul fleet. an ancient cornbinder (international harvester, what kinda name for a truck is that?) with lap only seat belts, no radio, and of course no a/c. the truck was crammed full. the pickup truck was crammed full, including the cab. the whole shebang would cruise along nicely at 60 mph on level ground, but lose speed rapidly on hills, requiring much downshifting of the manual transmission. the highest pass on i5 is siskiyou summit at 4310 feet above sea level. the road ascends for about 8 miles (i'm guessing here, and choosing 8 to make the later math easier) and most autos can cruise on up at 60 mph, tho many go faster. now the math. (8/60)x60=number of minutes to go 8 miles@60mph. alternatively, 60 mph = 1 mile/minute. okay. 8 minutes to drive up that hill in a car. our truck slowed down to 8 mph, which would mean that it took us, yes, one hour to attain the summit. big semis passed us.

in the fullness of time, as the cliche goes, we arrived. we survived. the cat survived. our precious stuff survived. we have visited friends and family in ca twice since then, once by train and once by car. the train, as one might imagine, is more relaxing, but the schedule is rigid--always late--and the food is not nearly as good as that which we bring along in the car. while it was fun to see people there, we are not even remotely homesick for it. too many humans moving too fast.

moving on, as the talking heads say to cover a strange segue.

i don't work any more. well, not for money from other people. since we have retired and moved we have built a sauna, fenced a large chunk of our 2 and 1/2 acres, changed big chunks of the garden area, added a large veggie garden, moved a greenhouse, and we are currently partially through the rather large project of removing all the exterior siding and painted window trim on our house and replacing it with shingles and unpainted cedar trim. we have also taken up blogging, which does consume some time. it's not just that we (i bask in reflected glory from my darling robin) produce a post every weekday, we insist on reading many other blogs. my morning is not complete without checking on my blogging friends to see what nugget of wisdom or pearl of great price they have uncovered. no pressure there, you know who you are.

i have read of men, or women, who retire and realize that their entire being is wrapped up in a job, who are unable to fill the long hours of each day with some way to pass time. no hobbies. no intellectual curiousity to be slaked. no solace in relaxation. well. i'm no better at "relaxation" than i am at organized, intentional exercise, but my days are full. i must admit that i have slacked off on reading actual books lately, even tho my list of books-i-wanna-read keeps growing. but the bookends of my day are still reading, nowadays from the glowing screen. the rest of the day is filled with gardening, bird watching (we have two eagle nests, swallows nesting in a birdhouse, and house finches nesting in a cedar in the yard to check on), home improvement projects, walking, exploring our newly adopted state, housework (i do toilets, showers, and garbage. we share the rest, tho robin is always ahead of me about laundry), cooking and eating. we have agreed that it would be marvelous for our health to do a half hour of yoga every morning. so far, nada. too much other stuff to do.

Pale Beauty

Pale Beauty (Campaea perlata)

Roger found this moth on the side of our house. You know what happens after the photographs? The online search begins for identification. I find it very hard to identify moths. There are so many, and really, so many look alike. For this one, though, I actually got pretty close. I narrowed it down to the right family. I found the Emerald Moth from Geometridae family, the Geometrini tribe. It looked right, it's green! But all of the descriptions said how large the wings were. Our little moth was only about an inch and a half, the Emerald is nearly two and a half inches. A nice green moth, but no match.

Emerald Moth (Geometra papilionari)

So, I sent the photo to Bev over at Burning Silo, and she had an answer in just a few hours. I don't quite know how she does it, but she's an incredible authority on insects. She wrote to say our moth is called a Pale Beauty and is in the Geometridae family.

When we look at the moth, it occurs to us that could have named it ourselves. Anyone could have come up with that name after looking at those scallop-edged wings, and that soft pale green color. Pale Beauty, of course. The name just makes me think of all the other animals we see around our house that could be called pale beauties.
Like this moth that we never identified.
Or this bird that we think is the shy Swainson's Thrush, with a song that makes our hearts leap.
Or this White-crowned Sparrow enjoying a moment in the pond, splashing with joyous abandon.

We often see pale beauty everywhere, but now have seen the real thing, that Pale Beauty moth just waiting to be discovered.

Tis An Ill Wind That Blows No Minds

California poppies enjoying the heat

The hot winds are blowing in from the east. Off-shore winds are carrying the stifling high pressure temps west from the interior. We're a bit too far north for this to be radiating from the Great Basin, but that's just what it feels like. Sizzling, parched, dry and prickly as cactus. Relentless. We are hiding in the house with the shades drawn on the south-facing windows.

There are many reasons why we retired to the northwest. Some may find this hard to believe, but one of those reasons was the weather. We like it cool, and we don't mind it cloudy and gray. We'd take a 60 degree day over a 90 degree day, any day. Temperatures in the 90s make us lethargic. We struggle with the torpor. We don't get any work done, no shingling, no weeding. We just get out in the early morning to water what needs watering, and then back in the house. It's only been two days, but that's quite enough for us.

While spending all this time in the house, I've been reading about the projected population milestone the US is about to achieve some time this fall. An astonishing 300,000,000 people will be living here. It's hard to really grasp 300 million of anything. Years ago Roger and I read a book called Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences by John Allen Paulos. Quite an interesting read, and one of the things I recall from the book was that Paulos had this fantastic way to convey the difference between a million and a billion.

Think of it this way: One day has 24 hours. That's 1440 minutes, or 86400 seconds. It takes 12 days for one million seconds to pass. It takes 32 YEARS for one billion seconds to pass. I've always loved remembering that. It helps me to understand numbers like budget deficits when they are counted in the billions. When I think about 300 million people in the US, and try to actually comprehend that number, here's what I come up with: If I wanted to look at each of those faces for just one second, it would take me ten years (that's 24 hours a day non-stop). Of course I couldn't really just spend one second on each face, that would never be enough. If I spent five seconds, I would spend the rest of my life life (and then some, I'd be 104 when I was through).
So what I'm saying is it's getting a little crowded and hot here on earth. As an early-on proponent of Zero Population Growth (now called Population Connection), I consciously chose to be childfree. I am glad others are keeping the human race going, but for me, the population seems out of control. We're having a furnace of a day in Washington. Humans are heating up the planet. I feel like I'm in a very small elevator, a lot of people just got on with me, we're running out of air and water, and the doors have just banged shut. A little claustrophobia, anyone?

*Elevator photo borrowed without permission from the webpage of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

a rose by any other name.....

the first blog we ever read, in 2004, was pandagon. robin, in her guise of advisor to student media at ucsc, had some e-mail communication with ezra when he was a student there, though they never actually met. he sent an e-mail telling her about his blog with jesse, called pandagon (he has his own blog now). we were impressed with their informative, well-written posts on current politics. from there we found eschaton. reading the comments, we joined the discussion. many, if not most, of the commenters used aliases. it was the style. atrios, cervantes, konapelli (changed to woody guthrie's guitar, last i saw), watertiger, thersites! we chose goofy names. following blogrolls and homepage links in comments, we found blogs more about nature and science. blogs about gardening and birds and photography. by then we had "met" other people in comments and kinda "knew" each other, so when we began our own blog we kept our noms-de-blog.

so i mixed cimematic and literary themes, posting as dread pirate roberts on a blog called dharma bums. the pirate is from a movie, "the princess bride." the dharma bums from a novel by jack kerouac. my partner in life and this scheme, the blogger formerly known as rexroth's daughter, from a song by greg brown, has dropped her nom de blog and come out, as it were, and retaken her given names of robin andrea. if you go to the top of our blog and click on "dread pirate roberts" under contributors, and then click on "my birthday" you can learn more about me than you may want to know.

you will not find my given name there, but in some commenting systems i have an e-mail address of dread_pirate_roger@yahoo.com. aha! a clue. as dread_pirate_roberts was already taken as a yahoo mail name when i tried, i went for the closest thing, using my actual given name. no, not dread_pirate! roger! you may also have noticed my gravatar, which shows up in comments. who is that? i was part of a blog called plato's dialogue, intended to be a dialogue between, roughly speaking, believers and atheists. cervantes, of a very informative blog about public health called stayin' alive, and i were, are, the godless. it didn't work out. i found a picture of a bust of plato to use as my gravatar for that blog. i kept it as it reminded me of a dear friend.

now i'm roger at dharma bums. maybe a new gravatar later. oh. links to referenced blogs, songs, books, etc.? maybe later. this post is about me.

Friday Cat Blogging

We're just going with the flow and joining other Friday cat bloggers. Here Bonsai is giving us that look, the one that says "Don't use me as filler for your silly blog." Sorry, Bon.

Have a good weekend, friends. See you Monday.

Dinner with the Bums

It would be so nice if you had dinner with us some time. It's the time we sit and really talk. We talk about everything. Things that happen to us in the small sphere of our personal lives. Sometimes we read things out loud to each other. Wednesday night I read an op ed by Garrison Keillor that a dear friend had emailed to us. We listen to music. We almost always start with something we both love, and then put the iPod on shuffle. For the past few months we've been starting with the Silly Sisters singing Gray Funnel Line or Miles Davis's Flamenco Sketches. It's interesting how different from each other these pieces of music are, and yet they fit our lives perfectly. When we both worked, we talked about the day we'd had, mine at the office, his at the job site. But now that we don't have jobs away from home, we talk about even smaller things -- what we see, what the birds are doing, where to move the swallow's nest box next year (it's too close to the house and we upset them whenever we do anything), what to plant in the greenhouse and what to plant outside.
We talk about the raccoon that was in the yard at 9:00 in the morning, how it stood on its hind legs and tried to stare us down. I say I'm still disappointed that I couldn't focus the camera fast enough to get that shot, but I'm still happy with what I got. We always talk about the state of the world. How we can't believe the way Iraq reminds us of VietNam. How the premise of our invasion now seems so much like an even weirder domino theory. The middle east states would fall one by one to the lure of democracy because we are such happy role models. We remember when we were young and marched against the war. We talk about being older, and how gladly we'd do it again. By now, though, we're ready for dessert-- We're listening to Steve Earle's Transcendental Blues, we're up and dancing, and scaring the cat.

Say Nothing at All

I had an entirely different post written. It was all about my bones and osteoporosis. It had photographs of hummingbirds with their tiny perfect wings spread and beating. It had an elegiac lament about two young soldiers who were slaughtered mercilessly in Iraq.

I just couldn't post it. It seemed inadequate. There is nothing to be said that will change anything at the moment. So, instead here's a lovely bird that we think may be some kind of Scoter, perhaps a young Surf Scoter. We startled it on Monday as it napped under some branches at the shoreline. It took off into the water and stretched its beautiful wings.

Sometimes it's best to say nothing at all.