We Took a Breath; We Looked Around

We are still in Leisure World, Orange County. A retirement village of 18,000 units. Golf courses, tennis courts, and palm trees. Speed limit 25 mph, gated community, and club houses. Now that things have settled down a bit, still one more doctor's appointment Monday afternoon, we have started looking for the little bits of wildlife that seep through the cracks.
First we noticed a flock of Bushtits in the flowers and bushes outside our window.
Then we saw this crazy paperbark tree. We'd never seen anything like it. A little research reveals that it is from Australia, a Melaleuca quinquenervia. Cool to look at, but an invasive species in Florida and Hawaii.
Then, I went to get the mail and heard a familiar cry from the sky. I couldn't believe it. I brought the mail in, and could still hear it from inside the house. So, I grabbed the camera and ran to the parking lot to see where it might be. There it was, in the tree at the edge of the parking area. A wonderfully wild Red-shouldered Hawk. Like a good friend, a reminder of the world.

Thanks so much for all your kind comments and emails. My mother is recovering. Little things are still going wrong, but the big picture is looking good. We are hopeful.

From Toilet to Tap

One of the reasons Roger and I moved to Washington was for the water. Not that it had any profound properties like magic elixirs, just the very fact of it. It rains in Washington. There is no water shortage. But now that we are considering moving back to California we are facing the prospect of coming back to a state that has to provide water for a population of nearly 38 million people.

Water. There's simply not enough of it to go around. But this post isn't about the coming shortages, the environmental crises. Nope.

It's about reclamation. I think it is a remarkably good idea to reclaim sewage and treat it so that it can be used to water golf courses, flush toilets, even irrigate agriculture. But, I don't think it should ever be used for drinking water. It sounds like a profoundly uncivilized and vile idea taking effluence and turn it into drinking water. Sorry. That's just disgusting.

I've learned that such practices are well under way in parts of the world, and yesterday's LA Times informed me that Orange County will be unveiling a state of the art reclamation plant that will be providing drinking water in a year. Here's how they're doing it:

Basically, the facility takes treated sewage, which would have been discharged into the sea, and runs it through an advanced filtration system.
snip
The effluent is first pumped into the reclamation plant from the sanitation district's sewage treatment facility next door. The brackish water, which smells of deodorizer, flows into 26 holding basins equipped with 270 million micro-filters -- thin straws of porous material with holes no bigger than three-hundredths the thickness of a human hair.

From there, the water is forced under high pressure through a series of thin plastic membranes housed in rows of white cylinders. Next, it is dosed with hydrogen peroxide and bombarded with ultraviolet light to neutralize any remaining contaminants.

At this point, the water is free of bacteria, viruses, carcinogens, hormones, chemicals, toxic heavy metals, fertilizers, pesticides and dissolved pharmaceuticals.

Though it is good enough to drink, the scrubbing isn't finished. Once the state approves, up to 70 million gallons of treated water a day will be pumped into the county's giant underground aquifer. It will be cleansed further as it percolates through the earth to depths up to 1,000 feet.

"This is as advanced a reclamation system as you are going to get right now," said the director of regulatory affairs for the Assn. of California Water Agencies..."

Would you drink this? Is it just me, or does this seem insanely wrong?

Updates:
Impersonal- It looks like Obama and Huckabee took the Iowa caucus. I don't think either of them will wind up on the the top of the ticket. Neither of them are electable. I think perhaps Iowa has finally been rendered utterly meaningless. As it should be.

Personal: My mother had an appointment with her primary care physician on Thursday. His interpretation of lab results from her emergency room visit in mid-December and her recent hospital stay was rather shocking and eye-opening. We have been seriously mislead about her condition. She actually may be experiencing congestive heart failure and needs to see a cardiologist on Monday to determine the cause of the fluid around her heart. Lab results also show that she has 30% kidney function. None of this was EVER reported to us in the hospital. Ah, American Health Care, the proverbial envy of the freakin' world, a lot of money for useless crap, like everything else in our culture. Grrrr.

Have a great weekend, friends.

Photo borrowed without permission. Chairman of the sanitation district board sampling the final product.

Life: In and Out of our Hands

What do we have control of? Not very much, when you think about it, certainly not life, suffering, or death. Maybe a little bit, when you think about smaller things like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The balance we strike must be between these things, or not. What do I know? I'm no philosopher, just a daughter, just a wife, just a Democrat watching Iowa. We want John Edwards to win. We have no control, only desire.

Hospitals can be bruising. My mother continues to mend, slowly.

(Photo of my and my mother's hands at the dinner table.)

Sunday Morning

Thanks for all of your kind good wishes. My mom hasn't had a chance to read them yet, but she will be so delighted when she does. She is still in the hospital and hasn't responded quite as quickly to the antibiotics as we had all hoped. She was supposed to be released Saturday afternoon, but her fever returned. We are hoping she'll be able to come home today.

Roger and I had an uneventful journey down I-5. Red-tailed hawks on fence posts and power poles, a giant osprey nest along Pyramid Lake, cattle yards and feed lots. The central valley requires imagination to find its inherent beauty. I lacked that imagination on the way down. Lots of other cars barreling down the highway at 90 mph. We were the slowpokes at 75 mph.

Update: My sister and I brought our mom home Sunday at noon. She's in great spirits and hopefully on the mend. Thanks again to everyone for your good wishes. It really helps.

One thing I learned watching my sister in the hospital is how important it is to have a good advocate. She asked questions, wouldn't let anyone give medication without a complete and detailed explanation, and conveyed information to nurses after staff shift changes. I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to know that hospitals are rather quick to prescribe things that have bizarre side-effects. If you ever wind up in the hospital, bring an advocate.

The End of Day at the Edge of the World

Here the sun is sinking into the Pacific. At day's end, at land's edge we wonder where on earth there is peace? Has there ever been peace? Has the sun ever set on a day when no blood was shed in war or rage? Would we know ourselves in such a world?

**********
We may be away from these internets for a while. My mother was just diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. One of the reasons we came back to California is because our mothers are in their 80s, and both need our loving attention. We were supposed to see my mom for Thanksgiving, but Roger was ill and had to have emergency surgery on Thanksgiving Eve. This month my mom was supposed to come up to observe my father's birthday with us and scatter rose petals in the bay, but she had to cancel because she wasn't feeling well. Now, a week later, we know that she is really quite ill and had to be admitted to the hospital on Thursday. We came to California to help, and so help her we must. She actually does have a speedy wi-fi connection at her place (truly the fastest connection we've ever seen) so we won't be completely disconnected, but we may be completely pre-occupied.

Please keep my mother in your thoughts, friends. She reads the blog everyday. She loves you guys.

If You Want It

Single payer health care is yours
if you want it

Habeas Corpus is yours
if you want it

Senators and representatives who work for their constituents are yours
if you want it

A country that does not advocate torture is yours
if you want it

A president who does not claim instruction from god is yours
if you want it

Smart environmental policy is yours
if you want it

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is yours
if you want it

We want it.

What do you want for Christmas?

memories

this is our dining table, and the capitola wharf beyond.

i'm awash in memories here in capitola, from several eras of my life. this is the house in which i spent many summers when i was young. right out there is the beach where i played in the waves and the wharf from which i caught untold numbers of perch. i lived here briefly in 1970 with my first-born daughter when she was a baby. i remodeled a big chunk of the house in 1985. robin and i lived upstairs from 1989 to 1994. i rebuilt the garage in 1991.

it's fun and interesting to be here where we found each other. we're in the same two upstairs rooms we lived in for 5 years, about 370 square feet. through a BIG earthquake. we take the same walks we did back then. shop at the same stores. listen to the breaking waves at night lulling us asleep, as we did back then. we dined in the same restaurant, at the same table, where we dined on one of our first real dates, where we first professed our love for each other. of course, the restaurant has changed quite a bit in 18 years, but the food and service are still excellent, as is our love.

we drove up the coast to san francisco last weekend to see my youngest daughter and her boyfriend. i've spent time on almost every beach on that stretch of coastline. half moon bay is, well was back then, a 20 minute drive from where i lived in san mateo during high school. i spent many afternoons surf fishing and many nights drinking beer on those beaches.

robin has written about our tradition of remembering her father by throwing roses, this year rose petals, from the wharf where her family consigned his ashes to the sea. i always dedicate one rose, or petal, to my own father. his ashes, some anyway, were put into the ocean on his favorite island of maui. i figure it's all one ocean. this year as we were out there with our rose petals from port townsend i looked back down along the wharf and saw a collage of my own history. from a 6 year old me buying squid for bait and fishing thru the cracks in the planks to the stormy night robin and her sister, brothers, and mother scattered the ashes onto the water from the landing float which was pitching up and down at least 5 feet in the heavy surf.

the wharf has gone through many phases in my lifetime, as has the village of capitola. when i was young the wharf was a place for fishermen (fisherpeople?) and capitola was a slightly seedy vacation town. both the wharf and the village got seedier and more ragged around the edges in the late fifties and early sixties. now the wharf is a tourist attraction with mooring buoys where sailboats tie up in the summer and a wanna be chi chi restaurant. the village and surrounding bluffs are filling up with large, high-end mcmansions. the skiball and penny arcades of my youth are now tony restaurants and curio shops.

below is a picture of the house from outside on the same morning as the picture above, which looks out from the upstairs windows.