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Did you vote this past Tuesday? I did, and I’m feeling pretty virtuous after looking up the info on our recent primary election here in California this morning. This came about after reading a Salon article that talked about the clueless statements made by Carla Fiorina and other primary election campaign embarrassments. I found out that voter turnout in California this past week was the lowest in 96 years – since 1914 (less than 26%)!! Admittedly it wasn’t much of a choice if you were voting Democrat as most of the major office candidates were running unopposed, or close to it. But there were some propositions on the ballot, and many judges to choose. Hey folks, get off your butts next time and make the (very small) effort to cast your vote! Otherwise we could end up getting some Hollywood actor as our governor. 
On a related note, I also read the following shocking statistics: PG&E spent $46 million to convince voter to vote yes on Prop 16!! (It failed.) Meg Whitman spent $90 per vote in the primary (for a total of $80 million) versus Jerry Brown’s 20 CENTS (thanks Calbuzz for the info).
Hey, here’s an idea!! What if all of the big spenders took all of the money they throw away so casually on stupid campaign propaganda and contributed it all to a fund to pay down California’s deficit (currently in the $20 billion neighborhood)? Okay, even if you combine all of the spending (somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million) that would make only a dent – but maybe some teachers could get their jobs back, some libraries could stay open, some highways could get repaved.
Just saying.
Chuck received this in the mail today:
It came with a very nice, tasteful letter telling him why he needs to make his plans today, using the special code reserved JUST for him! At the bottom, in fine print, it reads:
Please accept our apologies if this letter has reached you at a time of serious illness or death in your family.
I think we should buy a raffle ticket today!
 Arthur L. Flick In honor of the many men and women who have fought and died for our country, I thought I’d tell my Dad’s story. He was a Captain in the Air Force, a bomber pilot in World War II.
He was a guy who first and foremost loved to fly. I think he learned to fly in the 1920′s, then joined the Army Air Corps in the 1930′s and was an instructor for several years. When the war started he continued to teach young men to fly, but by 1943 he couldn’t bear the thought of all of those young men he trained going overseas to fight and die so he volunteered to go overseas himself. He was in his thirties at the time, married with two children and was considered the old man of his batallion. He flew bomber missions in North Africa and Europe. Of the pilots who went overseas with him, only a handful returned. After the war he got a job, had two more kids (my brother and me), and almost never talked about the war or what he did. If it was mentioned, he’d joke and say he was a cook. I don’t think any of us ever really thought about the fact that he had fought in a war, that he could have been killed, that he watched men die. We certainly never thought about the huge adjustment he must have had to make in coming home. He went from being an officer who held the lives of other men in his hands to being an L.A. Department of Water and Power worker. He never whined about any of it; he got on with his life. I never had a chance to know him; he left the family when I was six, and I saw him only intermittently in the years that followed. He died in 1996 and I hadn’t seen him in 15 years.
A few years ago my stepmother sent my brother a box of memorabilia that my father had saved. In the box were letters from the young men my father had taught to fly. They thanked him for saving their lives, for giving them the skills that helped them make it back home. My father was a hero to those men. He did what he considered his duty and he never bragged about it or glorified it. This man who gave me life could have so easily been one of the ones who didn’t make it home, buried beneath a white cross in a foreign cemetery. He carried the burden of his survival around with him for 50 years. I think it must have haunted him, the fact that he had survived when so many hadn’t. He drank too much and had a hard time controlling his temper. I suppose in today’s parlance he suffered from PTSD. He, like so many veterans, was damaged by war: by what he had to do and what he saw. By the time I was old enough to grasp what it meant to have a father who was a veteran, I no longer had any contact with him. I’m sorry for that now. I should have tried harder to stay in touch with him, to maybe get a chance to hear his story from his own lips, to understand the impact the war had on him.
My father will always be one of the big “what ifs” in my life. So my way of thanking him now is to tell his story on this Memorial Day.
 Race Director Chuck Chuck’s annual race, the El Prieto Handicap, happened this past Saturday. He’s been running this race (as in, he’s the race director and official handicapper) for nearly 20 years (this was year 17). The course varies from year to year: one year it’s uphill, the next downhill. It runs along the the Arroyo near the Jet Propulsion Labratory then up into the San Gabriel Mountains up (or down, depending on the year) a well known trail called El Prieto. Nothing too surprising there, but this year it was a very different race than last year’s. See, there was this little event called the Station Fire this past November that rampaged through the area where the race ran and completely wiped it out. Here are pics from last year’s race, and here’s the area now. Here are some more pics of the devastation.
So this year, we moved the course to the south Arroyo area not too far from the Rose Bowl. Since it was a downhill year, the course was cumulatively downhill, but it wasn’t nearly as life-threatening challenging. The trail was in good shape, there were terrifying drop-offs along the trail, stuff like that. Chuck is hoping next year the El Prieto trail area will be open (in some form, although the topography will no doubt be dramatically changed). The rest of us who ran it this year, sort of hope it will still be closed and we’ll have another year of a shiny happy 4.1 mile race. No pics yet, as I didn’t carry a camera this year, and we haven’t gotten images from the folks who did.
Sunday we participated for the second year in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Memorial Torch Relay honoring fallen officers. We used it to kick off our triathlon training since due to the Station Fire, they had to change the course this year and incorporated bicycle legs. So we biked ten miles then ran 5 miles. It was really fun as we had a police (well sheriff, actually) escort the entire way who stopped traffic whenever necessary and provided water as needed. Sweet!
By Sunday night I was ready to a)get a massage and/or b)soak in a hot tub. We ended up just watching part of the series finale of Lost and falling asleep.
Good times!
When we went on our volcanically extended trip to Europe last month, both Chuck and I signed up for international data roaming with at&t so we could use our iPhones (and boy, did we use them!). We also signed up for the service that reduced the per minute phone charges to 99 cents. We actually made relatively few calls (except for those madcap days when we had to adjust all of our flight and hotel arrangements due to the volcano). The data plans were pretty clearly laid out:
- $24.99/month: 20 MB Data Global Add-On gives you 20 MB of usage within more than 90 countries
- $59.99/month: 50 MB Data Global Add-On gives you 50 MB of usage within more than 90 countries
- $119.99/month: 100 MB Data Global Add-On gives you 100 MB of usage within more than 90 countries
- $199.99/month: 200 MB Data Global Add-On gives you 200 MB of usage within more than 90 countries
- Overage rate is $0.005/KB within the more than 90 discounted countries
We opted for the $60 for 50MB of data. They told us to cancel when we got back to the US. Cool! So my new billing month started on Apr 20, and I kept international data roaming active until Apr 27 when we got home. My bill came today and when I looked at data roaming, they started charging me per kilobyte for international data on Apr 20. My total bill: $421.50. Snap!
When I called customer service (after having printed out my entire bill – sorry trees!), they said that since I hadn’t kept international data roaming active for the ENTIRE billing month, they started charging me a prorated amount per kilobyte from the start of my new billing cycle on Apr 20. I stood firm, and said that we had not been told this when we signed up for international data roaming (and if you read about the package here you will see no mention of prorating or early cancellation). End result: they extended the international data roaming to the end of the month for $40, and forgave me the overage charges, reducing my bill to $283. at&t was quite nice about all of this, but guys – if you had better documentation you wouldn’t have so many peeved customers.
Moral of the story: if you sign up for international data roaming packages, keep them in effect for the entire billing month you’re traveling even if you are only gone one week of the month. If you don’t you may be in for a surprise at the end of the month.
From an article in People.com:
Bristol Palin recently told People that being a single mother was financially difficult for her. Well, this should help a little. Palin, 19, the daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, is set to join the speaker circuit and stands to make between $15,000 and $30,000 per speech, RadarOnline reports. Palin became an teen-abstinence advocate after giving birth to a son, Tripp, 16 months ago. “Her teen pregnancy and the birth of her son Tripp resulted in millions of Americans discussing the issues surrounding teen pregnancy,” reads her bio at Single Source Speakers.
You know world, I have LOTS of wisdom to share, and would be happy to do so for $30,000 a pop. But hey, why stop there? Want to get REALLY depressed? Her mom’s average speaking fee is $100,000. Hey tea party people: you should ask her for some loans! Or your donations back. Can you say “emperor’s new clothes?”
I am back in northern California today – I was up here last weekend too with Chuck, then we drove down to southern California, and he dropped me off at my niece’s house, and then she and I drove back up here yesterday. We drive back to So Cal tomorrow. My butt says ow!
My niece (who was just accepted in a graduate school program at CSUN – shoutout to Marjorie – you rock!) and I are staying at the Land of Medicine Buddha Center in Santa Cruz. It’s actually in Soquel. It’s actually in the woods outside of Soquel. As in it’s pretty remote. But pretty. Anyway, they warned us before we arrived that there was no cell reception and it was implied that the whole computer/Internet thing wouldn’t work either. Still my niece (trained by me, I might add) and I are very much techno geeks, both in love with bright shiny objects. So we took our chances and we brought our bright shiny objects. Sure enough the cell reception sucks BUT there’s an open wireless network available. God bless the Buddhists (can you do that? is it okay to do that?).
We’re only here for last night, today and tomorrow morning, so really we just needed to be able to rent some movies for entertainment – basic meditative stuff. Last night I went on iTunes and rented 300, which I think is an aweome movie and my niece had never seen. I forgot how that movie is basically two hours of death and destruction. At high volume. And did I mention that we had to sign a waiver when we arrived that we would adhere to Buddhist practices of peaceful living and not kill insects or each other? Whoa.
About halfway through the movie, Marjorie says, “Uh, maybe we should turn the volume down.” And I realized it was 10:30 at night and the only sound in the whole place was coming out of my laptop and it was emitting at high volume the screams and groans and the slashing sound of skin being stabbed or speared. Oops!
It appears that I make a very crappy Buddhist.
We’ve been on the road this week. We drove up to northern California on Sunday so we could visit my aunt who just lost her husband Harry (he died, she didn’t misplace him). Then we headed off to San Jose to spend late Monday and Tuesday working. On Wednesday we drove down to San Jose to pick up Harry’s “cremains” at the mortuary and deliver them to my aunt. This was a learning experience for me. First: they’re called “cremains.” Who knew? Second: you need a permit to have human ashes. Again, who knew?
Harry was a man of few words and fewer complaints, a World War II vet who only toward the end of his life ever shared the details of his life altering battle experiences in New Guinea. He was a simple man of simple pleasures, but one of those pleasures was the occasional glass of Scotch. In the last two years of his life he was in a convalescent home and let’s just say there was no bar there so he never had a chance to enjoy one last drink. So when he passed, Chuck and I thought it would be a fitting tribute to a good guy to order him one last Scotch. We did this last night, in Paso Robles. We ordered the Scotch, toasted Harry, and then left it at an empty place at our table.
Here’s to you, Harry. You’ll be missed.
My brother called me this past weekend and started off the conversation with, “Do you remember that red sweater you had when you were three or four? I think Mom knitted it for you, or maybe Grandmother.” Uh-huh. Of all the things I’d remember from when I was three, a red sweater is not one of them unless I had, say, sliced my arm open and bled all over the sweater. I might remember that. But no, I didn’t remember a red sweater. I did remember that my mother and grandmother never knitted a thing in their entire lives (a tradition that I have proudly continued into a new generation). I pointed this out to my brother who conceded that our mother never knitted and then he allowed, “I don’t really remember anything from my childhood.” This, I think, is his way of coping with the more unfortunate facts of his and my youth. Our mother developed a brain tumor when I was five and he was fifteen (it killed her about five years later). Our dad left the following year when I was six. Not a lot of good stuff to remember, really.
But back to the red sweater. Somehow this red sweater made it into my brother’s box of keepsakes and was worn by two of his daughters, and all these years later is still in his possession. He was looking to offload it on me. He even offered to frame this treasure from my youth. No way was I going to let that happen! “Tom, I have no memory of this sweater and you can’t palm it off on me with this lame story!” He kept up his efforts for a bit longer but eventually gave in to the fact that I was unwilling to take on the sweater or the memory.
The conversation did make me think about memory, and the how and why of what we remember, and what we don’t remember. Tom’s claim to have no memory of his childhood is not, of course, completely true. I know that. But my memories, or what I like to think are my memories are shaped as much by the things other people have told me as by what I actually remember – or in some cases even experienced. I mean, my mother died when I was ten, and my father was gone by the time I was six. What do I really remember of them? And of the things I remember, how do I know it’s actually my memory, or an apocryphal story that’s been told to me so often I have taken it on as my memory? Take that red sweater – it turns out the reason Tom thought that my grandmother or mother knitted it was because our older sister told him so and he bought into the myth and made it his own. As it happened, it wasn’t his memory at all. I have lots of memories like that. I treasure them and I want them to be mine, and over time, they have come to be mine. How about the time when I spilled cereal at my aunt’s house when I was three or four (was I wearing the red sweater, perhaps?) and cried, “Son of a bitch, I ‘pilled the cereal!” Sure, I remember that like it was yesterday – NOT! But it was my aunt’s favorite story about me and she told it so often in my hearing, I eventually felt like I could hear a much younger me actually saying the words.
As I get older, I find this myth of memory to become even more true. But now it’s not other people who embellish the event, it’s me. The true facts of a thing lose their sharp edges and over time take on a sepia-toned pleasant fuzziness where once there was cold, hard truth. I think now that it’s a kindness, that the harshness of reality over time becomes softened, gentler, by our minds. The outright bad stuff isn’t necessarily forgotten but it is relegated to the dark corners where it is much less frequently accessed than the shiny happy stuff.
All that being said, I guess if my brother wants to send me the red sweater I should let him, and then let him think that I have lovingly put it away somewhere safe. I don’t need to tell him about how I immediately gave it to the Goodwill. I’ll leave him to the myth of his memories.
I had to remind myself that we were on our way home more than once over the course of today’s trip home. American Airlines managed to schedule our flights from Paris to Dallas then from Dallas to LA so close together that it was a mad scramble trying to to get through customs then get our bags rechecked go back through security and still make it to our flight to LA. Memo to American Airlines: you really need more than an hour to accomplish all of that at Dallas Fort Worth (or be in marathon shape, which it so happens we were!). Anyway, we made it with about five minutes to spare. Our bags may be another question but at this point they are full of mostly dirty laundry, so who cares?
We bid a bittersweet farewell to Paris this morning. It was a crazy week certainly, but it was also a lot of fun. We really enjoyed staying in Roissy, and having those extra days did allow us to pack in more fun adventures and generally soak up the ambiance that is Paris. It always strikes me how our reentry to the real world is so jarring: you go from mellow vacation-mode into high hysteria travel-mode so quickly that your head spins, and international travel just adds a whole extra headache to the process. Travel right now is extra bad – so many people are still trying to get back from wherever they were when the volcano erupted that the airports are just that much crazier than usual. We saw that everywhere today. So it goes. On the flight from Paris to Dallas, we had decent seats in the back of the plane, next to each other. Our seats from Dallas to LA are middle seats with Chuck one row ahead of me (extra punishment apparently from the volcano gods). The good news is he doesn’t have to worry about anybody kicking the back of his seat on the flight and I don’t have to worry about the jackass in front of me putting their seat back for the entire flight (this happened for the ENTIRE ten hour flight from Paris to both of us – a mother and daughter were the offenders. Grrrrr. I have a theory that they need to fix the economy seats in upright positions only – no reclining. Don’t like it? Don’t fly!).
We have decided for our next trip to go to Tahiti – just the two of us – for our tenth anniversary. But here’s a weird fact to ponder: Chuck has a funky track record. Of the five times he’s been to Europe, two times involved extraordinary events. He was in Paris on 9/11, and again was overseas when the volcano erupted. 2012, which will be our tenth anniversary is also the year the Mayan purportedly claims the world will end. I’m just saying.
I’m typing this coda to our European volcanic tour on the plane from Dallas to LA, using the GoGo wifi service. It’s $12.95 for the duration of the flight – not cheap but what the hell, it’s pretty fun and it’s the end of the trip.
So here’s to our 13 day trip to Europe that turned into 19 days.
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