Spring is springing (3/26/2020)

Spring is springing and it is springing more crap than I had ever hoped for:

1. Yes, we have the regular allergies and pollen raining down. The world is slowly turning yellow. It is raining and our runoff leaves a yellow ring around the collar (or the high-water marks).
2. Of course, we are all impacted by the corona virus. Whatever you think about it, who’s fault it is, you name it. I have my biases and I may hint about them below (but then if you are a regular reader it should not surprise you). 
3. As part of the virus and my age, I am stuck at home, teleworking 5 days a week. This is a different experience. 
4. For a person my age, I have been sort of ordered form the Governor that I should shelter in place and not get out unless completely necessary. This brave person went out for the first time this past Saturday after 10 days “house arrest” and again the other morning to pick up medicine for Jake, who is still hanging on. 
5. And now for the kicker, word came down that we need to start using the hotel points that we accumulate during our travels for the state to book hotel stays for the state, instead of using for our own. 

It is this last point that has me bent out of shape today. It seems to be the result of a complaint by and unethical employee who was fired because of her unethical conduct. Now the State Inspector General seems to be changing the policy for all state employees because of the complaint by one unethical person who obviously had a grudge. Again, it seems to be a complaint filed by an anonymous employee as way to get even. She is as disgruntled employee; and remember to get fired from the state is difficult; you can murder someone and not get fired. 

So, I had to work on a spreadsheet detailing all the points I had accumulated over time. Moreover, now I am being issued a state credit card so I cannot even accumulate points for my travel on my personal credit card. 

Yes, I am sure there will be a lot of you who will be pulling out that tinny violin out for me and start playing it, telling me that if I don’t like it, to get the hell out off Dodge. When I was working for industry, I never had to do that; I was allowed, actually encouraged, to use my hotel points for private travel. And yes, I guess I should go back to industry and go from protecting the environment to not giving a damn or at least being cavalier about it; or maybe I should retire. Retirement would be great, were it not for a presidential mismanagement of a Corona virus pandemic; mismanagement that somehow screwed up my retirement plans. So, fuck you all, I’ll be occupying a job of some unemployed guy until me IRA is back to the level it was a month ago, unless the Corona virus gets me first. That is even though I don’t get free hotel stays any longer for being away from home night after night. 

One of the ponds behind our home.  You can see the yellow pollen ring around the the base of the trees growing in the water.

Well some spring it is. Although I am under “house arrest” I can go for walks in the abandoned woods in the back of our home. My outdoors bonsais have all been repotted, nature is awakening, fresh bread came out of the oven, I am teleworking, and I still have innovative ideas. I just need to make sure that I get credit for those new ideas (but more about that some other time). There still is a lot to celebrate in these anxious times. Let me know how you are doing! To all my readers, wash your hands, try to be positive, love thy neighbors, stay healthy, and be well.

My little quince cutting that I have been trying to grow is finally taking off and is flowering this spring.  Crazy but fun.

Hotels 2: Lynchburg (3/13/2020)

Another trip out into the hinterlands of Virginia. This time I graced Lynchburg with a visit. Lynchburg’s claim to fame of course is Liberty University which was started by the reverent Jerry Falwell. Passing by Lynchburg over the past 20 years has been an amazing sight; that university has grown by leaps and bounds and is now ready to enter the big league. 

From what I understand, the university has its religious quirks. I am not sure about it all, and I will not describe it here, but as I understand it there seems to have a fairly strict religious ethical code and people are required to go to general assembly and religious gatherings. It is really interesting and almost perversely sexy to visit the local Starbucks and watch all the young college girls studying or discussing the bible; something this atheist does not encounter in many Starbucks shops around the State; and let me tell you, I visit a lot of Starbucks stores. 

All the conservative (read Republican) presidential candidates with any ambition make sure to stop by Liberty University and give a speech. Old Jerry died and Jerry Jr. is now in charge of the University; but they still pay their respect to the president of Liberty University. Recently, Mr. Falwell was in the news when he did not like the newly democratic state legislature and in particular their stance on gun control. Mr. Falwell suggested that parts of Virginia that did not agree with their decisions should succeed and join West Virginia. This made him the laughingstock of the state. Oh well. 

I took this photograph during my walk through downtown Lynchburg.  They have a great elevated walk, almost like a boardwalk but without the beach and the boards that overlook the James River valley.  There are all kinds of warehouses along the trail that are being reclaimed for more useful purposes including restaurants, shops, offices and condos(?).  I took this picture to mock the succession talks and to show I was still in Virginia.

So here I had to spend two nights in Lynchburg. I always used to stay at the Holiday Inn downtown. It is not the best place, but it is ok. I really love the downtown of Lynchburg; it has character, great restaurants, and safe to walk. I got an email from Holiday Inn about a month before my visit that they had broken ties with that particular hotel and the hotel was no longer part of the Holiday Inn chain. Since I accumulate loyalty points I decided to look if there was a Hilton downtown, the other hotel chain that I use. 

Hilton had a hotel downtown, the Virginian. The hotel is part of the Curio chain, something I had never tried. Well, I was not disappointed! This was a great place to hang out and to stay. What luxury. The hotel has a nice breakfast (and lunch?) counter with a restaurant bar on the roof. There is a nice restaurant on the lower level. I only tried the breakfast area and enjoyed it. The rooms are luxurious. You even get a robe although I really did not need it. The bed was great and in one-word, things were good. Being in town in a taller building traffic noise was somewhat amplified but it was all very tolerable. 

My "Hopper shot" of the motel room at the Curio by Hilton that I was staying in.  Again, I was very happy and satisfied with my stay at the hotel and in Lynchburg. 

The room without me and a better view of the bed.

The first night I ate alone at Bootleggers. This was the second time I ate there, and the food was good. Thank goodness they had something else than burgers on the menu. Their beer selection was great. The Depot grill was on tap for my second night. I was joined by my friend and colleague Doug, who lives in Lynchburg.  I had been avoiding this place since a disappointing visit 6 years ago. Funny how you do that. Well, they redeemed themselves. Dinner was enjoyable and the waitstaff was great. In all, I had a good two day visit to Lynchburg. 

Now for some depressing news. This will be my last trip for 30 days. The department I work for has cancelled all classes (and trips) for the next 30 days as part of the state of emergency in the effort to slow down the spread of the Corona virus and the associated COVID-19. So, my young hotel series is going on a hiatus. I will continue blogging and hopefully will come out alive on the other end.

A bonsai weekend (3/2/2020)

I have had a busy weekend working on my bonsai trees this weekend. This includes re-potting, root pruning and just basic cleanup work of the shoots in some. My Siberian elms are starting to leaf out. This is not a surprise; they are usually the first anyway, but it has been a very warm winter. My flowering quince cutting was flowering in late January, which is really early for a year-old cutting that is only 4 inches tall. However, it was nice to see something like this on my bench. The quince in my yard, from which I took the cutting, was blooming as well in January. 

Not much to show for, but this is my flowering quince.  Yes, it was flowering a few weeks ago.  It is a cutting I took from a larger bush I have in my yard.  I am trying to develop it.  Nothing to show for yet! The two others here are my New Mexico privet and my crape myrtle.

This picture of me was taken two weeks ago.  I was working on my Siberian elm (not yet pruned) and now it has leafed out and it showing it first leaves.  In other words I did not do this too early.  Global warming is even affecting us; in fact if was in the low 70s that day.

Having more than 25 plants that I am working on, it was quite a task and this past Sunday I worked from around 10:30 until 3 pm on some of my trees. I started on one of my Japanese maples. I am playing with two that are the same age. They were seedlings I got from my neighbor Bob; he had dug them out from underneath his older tree. I am growing one of them in a small pot like a shohin (smaller plants that are less than 10 inches). My daughter bought the pot as a present for me in China. The other is growing in a regular flowerpot and twice the size already. Its trunk is thicker as well. I am experimenting with the two as a comparison the see the difference in growth when you restrict the roots. 

Maybe not the best picture, but this is the little maple in the Chinese pot just after repotting.  Hopefully it will do great this year.

I also worked on three pyracanthas that I have growing. All three came out of my father-in-laws yard. He has a hedge and somehow they had seeded out. We had pulled them out of the ground. Two of them barely had any roots and I just stuck them in a pot with some potting soil two years ago. They survived and it was time to do something with them. They will most likely become shohin bonsais. I do not think I will grow them like mames, which are less than 4 inches. 

One of my Pyracanthas, it has a great root system, but now it needs a canopy.  In the background you can see an azalea that I got from a friend (butchered to the max) and a nursery shrub) that I potted down in the hope to eventually bonsai. 

I also worked on two air layers of an azalea from my yard. Two branches were buried in the mulch and when I freed them, they had rooted. What to do but cut them off and stick them in a flowerpot with my regular bonsai mix. Two years later, it was time to split them and pot them up. They had a decent root system and branch structure. I will see what develops. 

I did many other plants, but my pride and joy was a crepe myrtle that I have been training for the past three to four years. This was the first repot, and I was amazed by the wonderful radial root system that this plant was developing. I am feeling much better letting it grow. I was keeping it at 6” but after yesterday, I think that I will let it grow a bit larger to a foot and a half to two feet. It has a root system that will be able to support it. This should also give it a much bigger diameter trunk and nebari (or exposed spreading surface roots). 

Concluding, I am not done yet, but it was fun being busy with my plant. I had little time to think about anything else. Things like the Corona virus, the upcoming primaries or other political crap. Coming back to work, it all came flooding back. Honestly, I cannot wait for the weekend to be back playing with my plants again.

Hotels 1: Fairfax (2/28/2020)

My travel season, or should I say travel year, has started. We usually have a slow January. Mine followed by six local workshops in late January and early February, and this week my travel started with a big bang: a three-day class in Fairfax. This meant three hotel nights and an almost five hour drive back home, last night. Now it is nose to the grindstone and teach my heart out.

Around president’s day my wife and I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. They had a Hopper exhibit. The exhibit dealt with Hopper’s vision of the American hotels, motels and guest houses. 

A photo of me in front of a vignette at the museum depicting a Hopper scene.  This is really the scene that gave me the idea of this series.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibit   Blue girl on black bed.  Not by Hopper, and sorry I did not write down the artist.

This gave me the idea of doing something similar to Hopper; take pictures in and of my motel room and maybe even describing the stay there. No, I do not want to make it a review. I have already done this at times when I wrote about the sounds next door while trying to go to sleep, and my fantasies about what happened in my room before I occupied it. If you search for the word travel in my blog, you find some other references, but these two are the clearest ones about motel room stays.

So this past visit to Fairfax was the first, and the Hilton Garden Inn where I stayed must have suspected something, because they rolled out the welcome mat for me. Something I do not deserve; I am only a minor member of their loyalty program. But the fridge was stocked with free goodies (darn, no beer) and there were plenty of fruit and candy bars for me to enjoy. Since I try to watch that elusive girlish figure of mine I did not touch it, although I did have an energy bar for breakfast one morning.

On my way up I had stopped by IKEA and in a weak moment I had bought one of their cheap bonsai trees ($14.94): a ginseng ficus. I brought the tree up to my room as my “emotional support plant.” I still wonder what the cleaning ladies thought of a customer who brought his own plant to his room, but I assume that they have seen stranger items in a room. I’ll refrain from speculating here.

Well, here I’ll post my first Hopper like picture. I already posted it on Instagram, but still for those of you who do not follow me there. Enjoy.

My version of a Hopper like view of my Hilton Garden Inn Hotel room in Fairfax.

A belated entry into 2020, but here I go (2/5/2020)

The guilt feelings are creeping up, I have not posted in almost two months. Why is that? Well, a minor case of depression has set in. In addition to it being a brand spanking new year, and relatively little daylight, we have currently been looking at a year started with record high temperatures. I put a positive spin on the temperatures, by telling folks on my Facebook page that it was wonderful that “Summer fell on the weekend this month.” But in fact, it is darn scary to have temperatures in the mid-70s or around 25 degrees Celsius in the middle of January and again this week, while Facebook was reminding us of the 10 inches of snow, we had two years ago. That is global warming for you. Or should we call it climate change? Still, a whole section of society does not seem to give a damn about what is happening to the earth.

At least the weather allowed me to work on the back deck a bit and on repotting a bonsai of mine. In addition, a friend of ours redid her yard and removed several azaleas and donated two to my bonsai selection. I really had to hack at the roots of these 25-year-old plants and now it is hoping they survive. 

This all somehow kept my mind away from the major issue at hand. Two days after the new year we got the message that my trusty old dog Jake was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of either the liver of pancreas. I have written a lot about my walks with my dogs, in particular Jake, in the woods behind my home. That news really hurt. We are now in doggy hospice, waiting for the inevitable. Yes, we adopted a new dog, Jasper, on November 17, and I am sure he will eventually fill the gap that Jake will leave, but this guy is special.

A photo of Jake take on February 1 this year.  He still looks in decent shape, although a month ago the vet said he had days of weeks to live.  I'll miss the old guy.

Jasper our new dog has made himself at home.  Being a hound he has to sleep in a pack and always need to be close to Jake.  I want to bet that he'll miss Jake as well.

Jake was adopted 11 years ago. We had gone to the Newport News SPCA to look at the border collie, but that dog was too crazy, jumped on kitchen counters and seemed like a piece of work. Then we saw Jake, cowering in his cage in a corner and somehow, we fell in love. In the beginning he was a runner, and we had to keep him under control, on the leash and we fenced in a small section of our yard. He has gotten much mellower and if he can help it and is not being pushed out of the way by Jasper, every morning he will site next to me for a back and head rub. 

Oh well, folks that is the issue with being an animal lover. Most animals have a shorter lifespan than us and it is something we are confronted with a number of times during our life. At least three times in my life did the dog we owned disappear and never returned. Our first one was old, and I suspect she walked off to die alone somewhere in the bush of Curacao, the island I grew up on. The second was a runner, and we never knew what happened to her. So was the third, Moses, and my parents found him dead, obviously hit by a car somewhere in the Netherlands where we lived at the time. All other dog we had to deal with mortality one way or another. 

The relationship between humans and their pets is a beautiful thing. I guess it is because the pets show something like unconditional love; a thing that does not happen much in human relationships. Pets become completely integrated into the household and act like they own the place. I was amazed last night when my wife told me about a colleague of hers whose son sent their young family pet to a trainer for two weeks to get obedience training. The trainer seems to do this with electroshocking and now the, in our eyes, poor young dog just shakes when being called or told to sit, in anticipation of getting a shock if he is not obeying. I cannot imagine taking all the spontaneity, love, and trust out of an animal like that.

In his book “The Empathic Civilization,” Jeremy Rifkin discusses how babies are born with unconditional love and empathy but somehow somewhere we lose it. A new form of empathic humans needs to evolve he argues for the human race and civilization to survive. I did not get a chance to finish the book completely, and I will, once I retire. One thing is for sure, we desperately need more empathy and compassion in this world. We seemed to have lost it judging from the callousness of our current politicians willing to stick children in cages and look the other way just to save their political skin. 

Having said all this, judging from the first month of the new year, 2020 is not going to be much more empathetic. To the contrary, it is showing to be worse, politically, humanity wise and even the climate is showing signs that it will have no mercy.