Want a Puppy?

A lot has happened this summer. School has started and I have to admit that I don't think I've ever been so excited for all that's should be happening this school year. I've not (as usual) been very good at keeping up with the blog.  It's been a busy summer and now it's pretty crazy with  bees, grapes, garden, AnetA and school.  Perhaps one of the main events of the summer has been Nikki's fulfilling the measure of her creation, overfilling.  A couple of weeks after I returned from France I was playing with Nikki and she rolled onto her back.  To my surprise she had sprouted . . . nozzles and within two weeks she delivered 11 puppies.  One died but the remaining 10 are thriving and are now ready to find their own homes. Nikki is the best behaved dog I've ever owned and I hear that her sister is the same way.  I imagine the puppies will be just as loyal, playful and obedient as their mother and aunt. Nikki is a black lab and terrier mix and the puppies look like the father was a St Bernard though I doubt they'll get to be that big.  They're seeking good homes full of love and affection.  Honestly, we're not sure about Papa.   There are  5 male and 5 female puppies and here are their mug shots as well as some wider angled images.

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France 2012

Last year it was Japan and this year it's France.  What a great time I have had, up until I injured my foot running in the 5-finger shoes.  I feel pretty dumb because it has colored the entire last week of my stay. In fact, today I'm in my daughter's appartment alone, catching up on emails and such.

Anyway, if a picture's worth a thousand words, this will be a jam-packed posting.  Hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves.  The ocean will be the main attraction since it's so important to me.  I'm in awe of its power and majesty.

These pictures are of Hossegor on the western shore of France just north of the Pyrenees.  It was incredible.

 Hossegor has a very nice port but is famous for its surfing.  I'll put some films of surfers on the next post.

 Benoit and I rode to this little resort city just north of Hossegor.  It was as charming as it could be.  The  lake behind me is actually just an inlet from the Atlantic but there's a boardwalk and all kinds of nice homes and multiple-occupancy dwellings, expensive, around.

This is Gilbert cooking up muscles.  He taught me how to do it and I'm going to fix them at home for whoever will eat them.  We ate so well but the muscles were a highlight.

I Love Spring

I just went outside this morning and started taking pictures. I truly love Spring...It's my favorite. There will be water issues this year, the opposite from last year, not enough. It's been such a mild and dry winter that I believe that there have only been two weeks this entire school year that I haven't ridden my bicycle to school at least once. I've ridden every day many weeks. In November I actually went 10 days without driving a motor vehicle.

Anyway, I'll talk about the pictures and then ramble on about other things, time permitting. I'm never sure how the pictures will appear order or location-wise when I post so I'll guess and hope the explanations match up.

The first picture is a shot from the driveway toward the southwest. The prune and peach blossoms don't show up very well, but you can see the blossoming half of the cherry tree. All of the grape plants survived the winter and the little vineyard that looks so barren now will soon be flush with foliage and perhaps an enormous crop of grapes in the late summer and fall.

The second and third pictures are of grape buds. the one with the fence is two cabernet savignoners from a vine that I planted three years ago from a dry root plant that was about 12" long from tip to root when I put it into the ground. It's so gratifying to see them grow and mature every season, the trunk getting rough and crustier, just like me, with age. The other one is a close-up shot of a pinot noir that I put into the ground yesterday. Looking at the picture, I'm thinking that I may need to replant. The graft needs to be closer to the ground. I imagine this vine is 2-3 years old. I'm taking a risk with these zone 7 varieties but the cab-savs have made it through the past three winters and 2010-2011 was a cold snowy one.

The next one is of Principessa (Princess) on one of her thrones, our wood pile. I'm not a cat fan for the most part, but she's gotten to me.

Finally, I am adding more vines along the fence where the goats used to be and putting all my bee hives back next to the goat shed. I lost 6 of 7 hives this past year and I'm thinking my last hive is not going to make it. I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm getting 5 new colonies in a few weeks. So I've been tearing down old fence and using the horse corral fence to support new vines. It will be some of the most expensive trellis out there but it's what I have, so it's free :-) the wagging tail in the bottom right corner is Nikki, except she's not a Husky.

I think that's it for now. I was just reading my last post, predictions and feelings about the primary elections and such, and I wa pretty close in my predictions about Romney and Santorum. Guess there are some advantages to having lived long enough to have observed a few things.

Religion and Politics

I remember growing up when there seemed to be so much time between presidential elctions. Kennedy was elected when I was in 3rd Grade, Johnson in 7th and Nixon in 11th...eons of time between elections. Now it seems that candidates are running for president continually.

I've found myself voting for various candidates from various parties all across the politcal spectrum, from Gus Hall to Bo Gritz, knowing that my vote or non-vote in Utah will make little difference in the big picture. I've also voted for John Anderson and Ralph Nader.

The other day I received a group emailing about how weird it is that the Republicans can support Newt Gingrich, who cheated on his wife. The following is my response:

Ah, the conundrums of the far right and far left, where ideas become ideologies and where fear and hate flourish and dictate actions, REactions and votes. If there were an adulterous democratic challenger to the left of Obama, he or she might win a primary run-off because of all the times our "Uncle-Tom President" has "caved."

Just curious how many of you would vote for a monogamous democrat over a polyamorous republican? :-) I wonder how many people in Utah would support Romney if he were not LDS, given the perception that he is a moderate.

We really don't vote on issues, do we? It's basically emotion, fear of Mormons, fear of minorities, communists, fear of terrorists (which means they win). We are moved by a need to blame and mistrust groups, the media, the government, corporations, Jews, Muslims, unions (especially teacher unions) or anything that offers alternatives to our ideology, which possesses and identifies us: liberal, conservative, tea party, occupier. Are there any people left out there who exist independent of their self labels or the labels we tag onto them?

Gingrich's second wife's interview gave him the chance to attack the media, tap into that mistrust and need to blame the messenger. If we can discredit the media then we are free to believe whatever we want to believe... neat trick, eh? I don't have TV and am curious how Fox covered the ABC interview. The lady may have been vindictive, delusional or whatever. For sure she's opening up her life to all kinds of scrutiny.

Here are a few of my predictions, based on my narrow perspective and having been alive during the past 11 administrations and having seen a few elections. If Santorum stays in the race, he will be Romney's main opponent. He may not because of $, but the Cain, Edwards...infidelity thingy should catch up with Gingrich. Of course, he's a good communicator, clintonesque, and may get by it, but I think his ex has some fire in her belly and is willing to take it to the next level. Romney should win the nomination. The commercial media would have us believe that every primary or caucus is a king maker-breaker (stay tuned after a word from our sponsors) I'm not as confident as I was before of Romney being able to beat Obama because he doesn't have the emotional appeal that would get the ultra-christian conservatives to the polls, especially as he moves to the center to appeal to more voters after the primaries. Plus, if the economy is swinging up come the summer there are a few who would rather vote for a left-of-center Christian than a right-of-center...whatever Mormons are. Gotta love religion and politics.Save Now

Update Jan 2012

I thought I'd include some random photos from 2011, up to Christmas. The first shot is from Silver Lake Reservoir, kind of a retake of an earlier shot, perhaps from my first entry in here. It's just 5 years later and such a great picture.

Others are of Christmas this year. Every year we have a Shepherds Supper where we eat Mediterranean foods on Christmas Eve. We play games and pig out on figs, melons and

other anti-pasto dishes. People in the pictures include Kristina, Anthony and his wife, Catherine and Rebekah (red coat) who is my baby. Anyway, 2011 was a great year in which I learned soooo much and watched diverse strands of my life and such emerge and interweave, taking me in directions I may not have been able to

imagine earlier.

So much has happened over the past year, Landmark, Community Garden, Japan and on and on. I'm not sure if it's a factor of aging or reverse aging or what. I hear people talk about this time of life as when people slow down and time speeds up. Time is definitely clipping along but life, projects, school, ideas just keep coming, and I'm loving it...actually.

I wish I could keep up with myself. I wonder if just doing a lot of things, fingers in a lot of pots, is an obsession or just an excuse to not do anything well. I am energized by so many things. I love school and am in the midst of many projects and am enjoying being suffocated in the excitement.

Perhaps the thing that's most on my mind, at the moment, is ANETA. That's the acronym for the academy that I'm involved with...not exactly an academy yet. That's the point though: all sorts of ideas, models and excitement. It's truly something on which I could focus in my quest to "save the world."

I sold the goats, grrr...sigh. I miss them but I wasn't able to take care of them, especially when I had to rely on others if I was out of town. So it's bees and grapes for now.

The Secret

Three years ago I got a MacBook Pro for making and editing documentary movies for my classes. One of my aides whose mother is from Taiwan uploaded a picture of an incredibly beautiful Buddist temple. I always assumed that it was in Taiwan, since he visits there often.

Last night I slept in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto and visited two others today. The second one was the same one I've had on my desktop for almost 3 years. Kinda reminds one of the movie,"The Secret" where the guy buys the house he had in the collage on his wall. The pic on the top is the original desktop. The others are ones I took today. Crazy stuff, eh? I wept openly when I rounded the corner of the little lake and got my first glimpse.