Friday, March 22, 2024

Desert and Walden (4/22/2024)

Last week I signed up for a workshop with Clay Jenkinson that will be held at a resort in Idaho in early January next year. I will need to fly into Missoula, MT and it is somewhat interesting to tell folks it is in Idaho, because it feels like it is in Montana. The workshop is a discussion of two books, somewhat like a book club. We will be discussing Theroux's “Walden" and Abbey's “Desert Solitaire.” Interestingly, I have both books and have read parts of both of them. While it is still nine months or more away, I started re-reading Desert Solitaire.

Desert Solitaire discusses Abbey's time working for the National Park Service at what is now Arches National Park. I spent time in the Moab, Canyon Lands area in 1980 and 81 during my graduate studies at Utah State University. We returned as tourists in 1991 when we lived in Gallup, NM. By training, I am an arid land (or desert) ecologist, or even better a plant-ecophysiologist or stress physiologist. Abbey's book is hitting close to home when he details the plants, animals and sights in the Moab area. His environmental views also align with mine, and I even think his cynicism. Naturally things have changed since the time he was there. I remember well that we felt terribly intimidated by the buff young mountain bikers during our 1991 visit, so we decided to just go for a hike in Arches and not rent bikes (and make fools of ourselves).

While reading Abbey's book I wondered about my desert experiences. Where have I seen them, encountered them and spent time in them? My first real encounter with a desert was that morning we woke up in the airplane that took us to our new job in Uganda. This was in 1978 and we were flying over the Sahara. I was in awe. Later in life I have set foot in what looked like a desert in the Turkana area of north-western Kenya; I spent a lot of time in the Four Corners Region of the US; on the dry Tibetan Plateau of Nepal; in the deserts of Yemen; Egypt; and in the Chihuahua in southern New Mexico. I also spent time in the Great Basin, the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of the U.S. I grew up on the Island of Curacao and lived there for 13 years and this island was pretty dry as well. The island was covered by cacti. This might explain my love for the desert.

One of these days I will try to describe some of my experiences in all these deserts. For right now I’ll start with some generalities about why I have this love for the desert. As I mentioned, I grew up in the Caribbean, and from my bedroom on the island I grew up on I could see for miles. I could see the main land of Venezuela on a clear day, and at night we often saw the lightning on the mainland. With every lightning bold you could see an outline of the mountains sixty some mile away. I often tell people that I need to see the horizon, or at least be able to see for miles and miles. The desert allows that. While as I am sure you are aware of, I love trees and forests; however, I need to get away from that and broaden my view. During our recent trip through the Dakotas I was in heaven as well, driving through the more arid short grass prairie and again being able to see the horizon.

Being an ecologist, desert survival of plants, animals and even people fascinate me. This is what I call stress physiology. Even when I was working on my bachelor’s degree in the Netherlands in pasture ecology and agriculture, I was spell bound by an article in (forgive me) the Readers Digest about reforestation in the Moroccan desert. I fascinated me so much that I requested a book by Evenari entitled “Negev the challenge of the desert.” The book detailed traditional (Bedouin) and modern ways of living and surviving in the desert. I read the book from cover to cover. This was before my Sahara flyover. Anyway, stay tuned and I'll write more some about my desert experience another day.

The high Arizona desert.   We are looking back at the mountain above Flagstaff.   I took this picture in September during our trip across country.


Wednesday, March 6, 2024

We finally can pee inside again (03/06/2024)

The powder room is completed; well, almost.  But darn it is usable and looks great!  It has been a long process.  Briefly after the memorial service for my father-in-law in March last year (I spoke about his passing <here>) we noticed that whenever we flushed the toilet water would come out underneath the toilet, in between the base and the floor.  We stopped using the toilet; we have two others anyway and the trees out back as well.  We eventually bit the bullet and decided to have things fixed professionally. 

I more or less knew what the issue was.  When they built our home in 1970, the plumbers of the time cut one of the beams in order to install the toilet drain.  The floor was sinking right under the toilet.  I had previously installed a few cheap jacks under it; however, I needed to crawl to the jacks every year or so to crank them up a bit.  Our homes were built in a swamp and the jacks were slowly sinking into the soft soil.  I was resting them on a brick.

Once we retired on June 1 it was time to contact folks to work on the crawlspace and fix things for good.  I am getting too old to crawl into the crawl space and crank on three jacks.  We decided to go for broke: have things fixed by installing two steel beams under the floor.  These beams are supported by jack placed on concrete pads. After that we had the crawlspace insulated and a dehumidifier put in.  Oh yes, we also found out that the chimney was separating from the house and needed to be jacked back up against the house.  Fun, fun!

We got bids from two companies and finally work started in August (I briefly mentioned it <here>).  We left on our road trip four days after the work was completed.  The plan was to start when we got back.   The work in August had gutted the entire powder room and we decided to upgrade it.  We needed new floor tile and vanity.  I wanted to put in a rustic wood wall behind the toilet and vanity.  While shopping around for tile we saw this tile product that looked like wood and we were sold.  A few days before we had decided on a vanity and it all seemed to match.  We ordered the materials and it was a waiting game.

All the sudden it appeared that our stove was broken.  The glass in the oven had cracked and we needed to do something about that.  I detailed some of the issues with purchasing a new stove <here>.   If you are a regular reader, you have seen some of the crawl space/powder room discussions there as well, but I could finally make a real start at the renovations around the beginning of December.  This was after I returned from my strange trip to the bonsai show in North Carolina, which I also detailed in that post.

It took me two months to finish the project, but I am somewhat done.  We still need to decide about the toilet paper roll hanger, install a dimmer, and replace a cover to our light switch.  A few minor details and that's it.  However, we are happy and it looks great.

A quick shout out to all the suppliers etc.  Of course we frequented Lowes; the crawlspace work was done by American Foundation Solutions; the vanity was ordered a Ferguson; and the tile came through Morris Tile.  Oh yes we got a Bidet toilet seat and light fixture through Amazon.  We are happy with the result and the number of trips that I make to the trees in our back yard have diminished.

The finished product!


 

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Life goes on (1/13/2024)

It has been a while and is time to give you all an update. Retirement is still going smoothly, but I am a busy beaver, that is for sure. So, let’s have a little bit of an update. What has been going on since the beginning of January (yes, I promise that I will write more frequently).

For one, my church (the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Peninsula or UUFP) has decided that we need to move in order to grow more (have more members). During the past years we have had discussions about growth and is so how to do that. It was decided that we needed to move to larger facilities since the decision was made that we wanted to increase our membership, and we could not do that at our current location. After an exhaustive search for over two years, we found a place. When I toured the place, it was obvious that there were flooding issues at the church. Guess what, the church has a stormwater expert, me. And that is where the bulk of my time went.

What was wrong? Somehow, it became evident that there were and probably still are engineers who still think that water can be made to flow uphill. It seems that the church expanded in the past and as a result created an alleyway or what we call a breezeway. Whatever the name is, this breezeway is located between two huge expanses of roofs which all drain into a gutter system that does not work. In other words, the breezeway floods. The problem is that this breezeway has no outlet or what is thought to be the outlet is higher in elevation than the breezeway itself. In other words, water must flow up hill to get out of the area. Well, good luck.

Here I came into the picture. I analyzed the problem, spent some time in the alleyway and the entire property during rainstorms, developed a conceptual idea on how to solve the issue, get an idea of how much a solution would cost, so we can use that in the negotiations with the seller, and finally present my findings to the church members. Maybe soon I will detail what my ideas are in this blog.

In addition to all this, I am working on the tiling of our powder room. It is almost done; I still need to do some grouting. Don’t worry, pictures will follow of my masterpiece. On top of all this, we are having work done on the gazebo. It desperately was in need of a gutter system as well, and this was done this past week. But I had to take the string lights off, put them back on and buy a rainbarrel.

I present a class at the end of February, and I need to finalize that course. In other words, it looks like retirement is busier than employed life.

Yes, we take it easy as well. We settled into a schedule of going to bed around 11:30 and waking at 7:45. No, we do not set an alarm. Coffee, breakfast and dog walking takes us to 11:30 and then life starts in earnest.

I have started an excel spreadsheet where I track all our expenses and income. Our financial advisor told us that in addition to our retirement check we needed a set amount of money from our savings to keep the standard of living we had before retirement. This amount would keep our nest egg intact, based on some assumptions. However, we have no idea what we were spending our money on and how much. In addition, we don’t even know if the assumptions are correct. As you can see retired life is exciting, but I would not want to miss it one bit.

This is a photograph of the breezeway.  The staining on the concrete shows the lowest point in the system.  The sandbags indicated to us that there were flooding issues.

Work in progress at home.


Monday, January 8, 2024

Happy 2024 (1/8/2024)

The first week of 2024 is already past us and I noticed I haven’t updated my blog in a month or so. I guess writing every other day during the month of September and now trying to develop a personal photo book on our travel (self-published and heavily critiqued by my wife) has exhausted my writing skills. However, I do owe you an update. Moreover, I tend to write a review of the past year and I have not done that yet. It is crazy how fast time goes.

It has been an eventful year, ranging from the death of my father-in-law in February, to our purchase of the camping van in April, to our retirement on June 1, our trip to the west coast in September, after all the foundation work in August. This was capped off by my solo-trip and camping in the Kannapolis area. Per my previous post, I visited the area to attend a bonsai show. The rest of the year was more or less on cruise control.

Getting older is interesting. I am increasingly becoming aware of my mortality. I mentioned before that I think that getting old sucks. The other day my wife and I could not figure out why the stove wasn’t working. We bought an induction stove and the frying pan we have regularly used on that stove wasn’t working any longer. After approximately 10 minutes of trying and diagnosing, I suddenly noticed that we were trying to turn on the wrong burner, which was why the stove was giving us an error message. We are getting dense! That entire day we joked with each other about our impending senility. Still, it bugged me.

It has been a decent year for us. Retirement is good. While it is a sign of getting older, it beats the alternative. I was made to feel really good during my “Jan’s big goodbye tour,” and that will always stay with me. The cards, hugs, compliments and even a lunch date with the staff of Virginia Beach all made me feel special and good. It seems that I did make an impact during my career. I hope that I can consider that my legacy; well together with maybe this blog (this blog turned 10 years old this past June) and what we can do for my daughter and the environment. Come to think of it, I need to look at my top 10 posts list and see how life has changed over the ten years. The top 10 list is posted on each page of my blog in a column on the right.

The number one cliché of retirement is that you will be busier than when you were employed. Darn it, they are correct, although we have finally settled into a routine. We go to bed around 11 to 11:30 and wake up between 7:30 and 8. It seems that after reading the newspaper, breakfast and walking the dogs we usually start our day around 11:30. At least our Fitbit shows that I have an average of 12,000 steps each day. In other words, we are no slouches; we are very physically active. September was the month with the fewest steps. That was because we sat in the van and drove back and forth across this great country.

My bonsai (my true hobby) survived my absence. I have a major spring replanting ahead of me, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. I have been doing some pruning and wiring these past few months in anticipation of this spring task. Only one tree died this year, and that was before we left. Plants looked healthy throughout the year. Based on some of the stuff I saw on Mirai (a learning platform I follow) I treated my plants with diatomaceous dust in spring, I fertilized too little perhaps, but treated all plants with bone meal right before we left on our trip in August. Mirai is finding that silica and calcium are two under-rated or under-used elements. Diatomaceous dust contains silica and also functions as an insecticide. Bone meal provides calcium. The plants reacted beautifully to the two treatments.

To conclude, I am looking forward to 2024 and really hope to continue my writing and thinking. I hope you all have a great, productive year.

My evergreen bonsais enjoying sunny, relatively warm weather (50 degrees). 


Thursday, December 7, 2023

Getting old sucks! (12/7/2023)

Getting old sucks! It really does! The past weeks have been menacing, period. Here I thought that retirement was easy street but forget it. I feel more stressed now than when I was working. Let me explain.

For one, multitasking is getting more difficult to do. Then there is making decisions, it seems that all the decisions I have made lately are rash decisions that come back to bite me in the behind; in other words, I seem to make the wrong ones or maybe costly ones. I feel more stressed out, compared to when I was working, and of late more anxious. Having read that anxiety may be an early warning sign of a pending heart attack does not help., it heightens the anxious feeling. Having joints that hurt more and more is another of my symptoms of getting old. Finally, there are the peeing issues at night when my full bladder wakes me up or first thing in the morning. It seems that I need to take the dogs for a walk (after coffee, the newspaper and breakfast) before the dam breaks. I can come up with a few more reasons why getting old sucks, we’ll find out by the end of this post (if I don’t croak from that heart attack first).

The details please! Except for the urinating issue, I have been detailed enough on that subject in the previous paragraph.

What happened in the past few weeks? It is mostly a combination of things. The news on things like the war in Israel; the state of our climate; the rating that our current president is getting even though he and his government are doing good work; we can go on. Reading the obituaries of famous people like Sandra Day O’Connor, Mel Brooks, or even Kissinger doesn’t help. These all contribute to my state-of-mind. Guess I am feeling my mortality. On top of that everything seems to go wrong in our home.

I mentioned that we had work done on our crawl space. We needed to get this done after we discovered that our toilet leaked all over our floor when we flushed. We had known that this would most likely happen since the builders of our home had made a huge structural mistake (in 1970). As part of this work, we had the entire powder room taken out and decided that we were going to put it back together by ourselves. This was going to be our first item of business when we returned from our trip in October. Deciding what materials to use and how to install everything took us some time, but I decided to work on it maybe an hour or two each day. Then we were able to borrow a wood splitter from friends to finally split the huge amount of wood that had been in our back yard since March. In other words, another week or so of no bathroom work. I think there is a saying about hell being paved over with good intentions.

In the meantime, we decided to throw a dinner party for friends and finally to make good on an item we sold at our church auction, a pizza dinner for four. We need to heat our pizza stone to 500 degrees (F) to successfully bake pizza in our stove. Lo and behold, here we notice that the glass in the interior of our stove had burst. Quick order a new glass so that this (YouTube) do-it-your-self guy can replace it. Once I got what I thought was the correct glass, we had problems. First the door did not come off the way YouTube told me it should. I found a work around, but then the glass did not fit, and we cannot find a replacement. Time to buy a new stove and postpone the party until the stove was delivered.

We decided that we wanted an induction stove to replace our gas stove. We had read that gas stoves fume off gases that are bad for the lungs, especially lungs of asthmatics. Well Donna is asthmatic and after some research we decided to check out LG. We found a nice one on sale at Lowes, or so we thought. After some good research we went for it; however, these rookie non-gas/glass top cooks bought an electric stove instead of an induction stove. We found that out after the installers had put it in and we briefly turned it on. We asked the installers to wait for us to figure it out, but they took off with our old stove, never to be seen again. Here we had a new stove we did not want. The weekend before we had bought some new steel pots and gave away some of our favorite aluminum pots and pans; aluminum does not work on induction. We spent almost the entire rest of the day wanting to return our new stove and looking for a replacement. Naturally we had already canceled the pizza dinner. We were now envisioning having to postpone the new date that we had agreed on since we expected to have to wait for the next stove.

It gets worse and worse, don’t worry. For a new stove to fit, I had to widen the opening in the countertop by maybe a half inch. I bought a diamond blade for my circular saw and went to work. I installed a guide for my saw, but halfway through it slipped and now my cut wasn’t even. Panic and disgust not only from me but also from the wife (“look what you have done to the resale value of our home” … honestly, I thought we were going to live here for at least another 10 years and by then the new owners would want a new countertop). We can and will fix that with spacers in between the top and the new stove. However, another week of powder room fix up lost. We finally received our induction stove, and we are happy for now.

For months I had planned a trip to the Winter Silhouette (bonsai) Show in Kannapolis, NC. Should I stay or should I go? I had booked a campsite in the Salisbury area. By Friday noon I got the assurance that it was OK for me to go on my solo trip even though Lowes was picking up the stove that we did not use as a return. I had a great time at the show on Saturday and around 5 pm I went to look for my spot.

Next issue. The camping was closed, gated up and what looked like, no way to get in. I had told them in my reservation that I would be late, especially since the website said that the office would close at 5. What to do, but to find a motel room. Finally, after checking in and dinner during a call with my wife she encouraged me to check my voice mail (about the stove removal). I had turned my phone off during the show. Well, there was also a message from the camping giving me the secret number to one of the padlocks on the gate (the gold one). Damn or better fuck, here I wasted another chunk of money on something I did not have to. I had my eyes on a bonsai that was for sale at the show, but it cost as much as my room and that Thai dinner I had (I was planning to make macaroni and cheese from a pack that night).

I went camping the next night and it was nice and relaxing. It brought down the anxiety level, but I just cannot look back at these days wanting to complain about old age. I know this is a long post, but as my wife tells me, I need to take time to relax and take it the way it comes (and express myself … sorry Madona).

Our busted stove

Enlarging the slide-in opening

Relaxed after a night of camping, ready to take on the world again

Best if show bonsai (American hornbeam)

Another favorite, a bald cypress