wino.... er, wineaux

in other news, the east bay express has introduced a column on wine. they've tried to coin the term wineaux, to describe people who have decent taste don't want to spend a lot of money. i guess we'll see if it sticks. being a spendthrift myself, i hem and haw over any bottle more than $10. yes, some more expensive bottles are better, but frankly, i don't want to spend that much on wine.

the column also seeks wines that are readily available (did you know costco is now the #1 wine cellar?) including at albertson's, safeway, and bev mo. i'm dissappointed they didn't at least mention oddlots - after all, it's a local paper, and at oddlots, virtually every bottle is around $10 or less. that, and the fact that they called 2-$ chuck drinkable brings a little suspicion to my mind. cheap as it is, i do not really consider that wine worth the $2!

time to pimp fall

i felt the whisper of fall last week as i was walking in the berkeley hills. today, i'm sure of it - fall is here. i wonder what triggers the knowledge - is the light just oblique enough for me to sense? or perhaps it's that heat in the air, twinged with a cool breeze. i can almost taste the pumpkin lying orange in the golden fields.

and, of course, there are the stores, already pimping fall. ryan often laments this. they lure us in with halloween. once you buy into that, of course you ahve to continue with thanksgiving, then christmas, then new years. it even drags on to valentine's day. now, ive noticed more general, harvest themed decorations in the stores already. when will it end? i'm surprised hallmark hasnt devised some "happy harvest!" cards that we're all supposed to send out! harumph.

i do celebrate the autumn equinox, however, with a special feast. i forget what i did last year... probably nothing, since i was in school in santa cruz. this year will be something special, if i can manage it!

I remember you

"God never calls us to do what we are capable of doing on our own. He calls us to do the impossible."
~ TMP, March 1946 - August 26, 2003

crack!

i think i experienced something of a breakthrough in yoga the other day. i'd been suffering from a tightness in the upper vertebrae of my back (something i inherited from my father). there's one stretch that we do where we lean forward, interlace our fingers, and bring our arms over our heads. well, i could only move mine a few inches above my back without experience a great deal of resistence. i kept at it, and then a few days ago, i tried it, and crack! i could feel my back crack, four times in a row. when i straightened i felt taller, the tightness was gone.

sadly, back cracking is addictive. though it's still much looser than it was, i feel i have to crack it every day now for it to feel right. but damn, it feels good!

a little help here, universe!

a few crucial things have fallen apart for me recently, nothing serious or dire, but things i've relied upon more than i at first realized. i've cast out my fishing lines for more opportunities, but they've come back empty, the lures untouched. i suppose lulls in life are to be expected, but it's frustrating, when you feel as if you're putting the energy out there and it's just dissapating into thin air.

back and to the left, back and to the left, back...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Scienists cite new evidence to challenge the "single bullet theory" in the assassination of JFK, according to Betsy Mason's article in the Contra Costa Times.

trouble with time

i swear the space time continuum is bubbling and warping around me... last night i made popovers, set the timer to bake according to the recipe i've used time and time again. well, they were nearly burned well before the time passed on my timer (and yes, i set both the oven temp and timer correctly).

now, today, time. is. so. f-ing. slow!

ryan tate, anglophile

a witty commentary from ryan tate on his new favorite paper, the financial times (at least, the weekend edition).

i love it when all my mussels open

yesterday i made one of ryan's and my favorite dishes - pasta with mussels and white wine with parsley and garlic. it's such a simple dish, but i love the aroma that wafts into your face when you open the lid of the pan and take in that delicious ocean smell. and last night, perfectly, every singld mussel had opened.

ads

i'm sorry, i absolutely love the new milk commercials featuring the aliens and Da Iry. corny, i know, but it never fails to get a chuckle out of me.

on the other hand, the ford? gm? commercial where the man is singing some terrible song on a light up stage is just so pathetic (i'm not even going to try to find an on line version of that). leave it up to jetta, who recognize their market tends towards young and hip, to burst out of the pack with their startling crash commercials. I personally don't like these commercials - the last thing we need is sensationalization of ads - but i do appreciate their shock value.

not sure breakfast helps

having heard, ad nauseum, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, i've made it a point to eat some before i leave the house. usually cereal and fruit or yogurt and granola and fruit.

i'm not sure it really helps. in fact, i think it makes me even hungrier. the cereal i eat is whole grain, hippie cereal, so i don't think it's a blood sugar spike issue. but not it's 10:30, i ate about 2 hours ago, and i'm so famished i feel as if i could eat my fist!

at least two more hours until lunch... sigh...

harumph

i thought macs were supposed to be more stable than pcs. well, this is the second os-x mac to crash on me.

okay, mac bashing will end now. i promise.

lessons learned

1. i do much better with deadlines. in fact, i'm almost worthless without them.

2. i really do not like macs. sorry, mac loving friends (you know who you are!)

see, high energy physics are good for something

here's a neat project from slac (oh, sorry, did i go all acronym? it's the stanford linear accelerator): the stanford synchotron radiation lab is using x-ray beams to decipher archimedes's ancient writings.

apparently, archimedes's works had been vandalized:

In the 10th century, an anonymous scribe copied Archimedes' treatises in the original Greek onto the parchment. But three centuries later, a monk "palimpsested" the parchment: he scraped away the Archimedes text, cut the pages in half, turned them sideways, and copied Greek Orthodox prayers onto the recycled pages. Adding further injury, forgers in the early 20th century painted religious imagery on several pages in an attempt to elevate the manuscript’s value. The result was the near obliteration of Archimedes' work, except for the faintest traces of ink still embedded in the parchment.

inheritance

my father was a fanatic about clean fingernails. he'd inspect them at dinner time and if they weren't clean enough, he'd send us back to the bathroom. i remember one time he pinned me down by the sink and took a nail brush to my nails, scrubing them to his satisfaction. clean fingernails commanded respect. dirty fingernails signaled a degenerate personality.

consequently, i'm super concious of my nails. the thing is, they get dirty so quickly. i usually clip them very short to avoid having the white parts get dirty or stained. i remember one time i used fresh tumeric for a recipe and was so ashamed of my nails i kept my hands in my pocket or my fingers tucked in whenever i could.

i guess i'd be a good candidate for a french manicure, if i could tolerate someone else fiddling with my nails (to me that's almost as bad as squeaking styrofoam). today, i'm wishing i'd given them a good scrub before i left the house. or trimmed them a little more. but a good nail brush is hard to find. my dad used boar bristles, but he had some sort of heirloom. boar bristles aren't so common any more - at least i've not managed to find one. most modern nail brushes are too soft or too stiff.

hopelessness

people tell me everything will be okay but i just can't see it. day after day, it's such a struggle, putting words together, putting the little steps together to form life. i've heard it a thousand times before, take it one step at a time, focus on just the next thing that needs to happen. but if we lose sight of the whole, what then? there's got to be something to work towards,right? something whole and worthy and good and not just a composite of all the little things day to day that we struggle to do. somehow i thought when i turned thirty i would be okay. but there's no guarantee of anything. there's no guarantee anything, ever, will be okay. when i should be reaching out i find myself simply retreating further and further away.

focus, focus

(obviously, i'm having problems today)

i sincerely believe anything is possible if we focus. focus is both a product of and an aggregator of will power (creating a positive feedback loop). the more will power we have, the stronger it is, the more we can exert that will power onto the world (through prayer, magic, whatever you choose to call it) and affect events.

but it all comes down to focus. i've got to learn how to discipline my mind. exercise is good for that. so is yoga. and meditation.

save yourselves!

normally, i'm not a doomsayer. i didn't stockpile duct tape and plastic or whatever we were supposed to have. we've only recently started a collection of "apocalypse food." but a recent conference, summarized in oakland tribune article, concerns me. regardless of the chances of bird flu arriving in the unites states (and depending on who you talk to its either a remote possibility or a sure thing) the take home message is the same: we are on our own. the goverment will not help us. and after the disaster in new orleans, i'm not sure we would want their assistance.

i'm not advocating panic or paranoia. i'm still skeptical as to whether the virus will be a problem or not. but it's a matter of analyzing the costs and benefits. though the chances might be slim, the outcome could be pretty devastating, preparation is a minimal investment, so better to be safe than sorry.

...

"and every day you gaze upon the sunset
with such love and intensity
it's almost...it's almost as if
if you could only crack the code
then you'd finally understand what this all means

but if you could...do you think you would
trade in all the pain and suffering?
ah, but then you'd miss
the beauty of the light upon this earth
and the sweetness of the leaving."

~ Jane Siberry