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). 

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

Buffalos and Nazis (11/24/2023)

We have been watching Ken Burn’s special intitled: “The American Buffalo.” What struck me (or better us), was that the millions of buffalo that were killed almost to extinction, were part of a sinister plan to eradicate the native American population, or what we call the Indians. Of course the killing was for the hide, but when there was a call for a moratorium, of sorts, it was decided to continue with the ulterior motive in mind. Interesting how killing buffalos would amount in genocide in actuality. The scheme was proposed by people (scientists) who while claiming to be conservationists, were racist or even people who believed in eugenics.

The other night I hear tRump telling the audience that we need to round up all foreign nationals (illegal immigrants), claiming that they are bad for our country’s blood. If that is not a huge dog whistle, I don’t know what is. I am sure he was talking to the white supremacist who want to keep the white race clean. The icing on the cake was that he wants to build concentration camps and round up all the illegal aliens and stick them in them. Unbelievable. He proposes the same things that Adolf Hitler proposed and implemented in the mid-1930s and 40s.

Let me remind you, I immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s around the time that we celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary with my wife who is a (U.S. born) citizen. Being originally from the Netherlands, I was frequently (if not almost daily) reminded of the second world war and the atrocities that happened under the Nazi regime. An uncle of mine died in a concentration camp in Germany, and my father was in an interment camp in the Netherlands waiting to get shipped to Germany. I was raised as, what I have heard described, a second-generation victim, or maybe someone who has second hand PSTD (post-traumatic stress disorder). While I do not understand the complete dynamics, my father was very reluctant to talk about what happened to him. If you are a regular reader, you know we had some harrowing experiences in Uganda, and I sometimes feel that my father’s experience was all piled on top of that.

I am somewhat debating whether to retell my father’s Second World War stories or just bitch about the genocide I am recognizing all around me. However, this all brings my childhood back to me and the few stories told by my father. Naturally, my father and the Indian population of the mid 1800s have absolutely nothing in common, but the buffalos got me thinking (I once wrote a post about my crazy brain and thought process <here>).

It seems that my father was on the resistance. At one point he tried to flee the German occupied area and flee to Sweden. I have pictures of Latvia and Finland where he spent a winter. One story was at a soup kitchen in Latvia (I think it was near Riga). He told us that he was sitting across an old man with one of the Jew stars sewed on to his coat. My dad told us that he passed the obviously depressed guy his plate and underneath he passed him his identification card. Now, I ran into my last name online and this was a medical researcher in Latvia. Excitedly I contacted her wondering whether she was related to this older man. “No” she told me, my last name was common in Latvia and translated meant something like young deer. Here I thought my name was French.

Early in 1940 or 41 my father worked in northern France (near the towns of Beauvais and Conchy Les Post), where he was building something on an airport. I have photographs of my 18- or 19-year-old father on a roofing job. He told me that as a young lad he lived in a whorehouse and was well taken care off.

Eventually, he was arrested when he returned from his failed foray to get to Sweden. He was placed in an internment camp in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. He told us that isingle-handedly was involved in sabotage and was singlehandedly responsible for the derailment of a train that carried sand to the camp which was used for the filling of sandbags. He was punished and forced to stand for 48 hours in what was called “the Rose Garden.” The Rose Garden was a small plot surrounded by barbed wire that was guarded by soldiers who had the order to shoot when the prisoner moved. I am still surprised why the Germans did not plainly executed him for his deeds. Later in camp he got typhoid fever and was kept alive by his Russian guard who smuggled opium into his cell to keep him alive.

He was shipped to Germany by train and somehow, he did not end up in a cattle car but in a regular train car. My dad tells me he had a private guard. This guard was overwhelmed by the Dutch resistance and the threw him out of the train. The resistance took him to a nunnery in Belgium where he remained in coma for 10 days (I assume from the typhoid fever). My dad told me numerous times that he saw “the light.” The light that people see at the time of dying.

By the end of the war (1945) he had recovered and briefly joined the Canadian army when they freed the Netherlands. He tells a story where they were in a barn in the eastern part of the country, when a bomb came through the thatched roof and just hung there. He and the Canadians were looking at the bomb just hanging there. Eventually, one of the guys got on a chair and defused the bomb just hanging there in the ceiling.

These are some of the stories I heard at home and my father’s hatred of the German people his age and older. He had sleepless nights when there was a story on TV that dealt with the war. But then there was one TV show he loved and that was Combat. This series detailed the progression of the US army in France after D-day. I cannot check my dad’s stories for their voracity, truth or anything else; however, they have stayed with me for the rest of my life. Well, there things came flooding back to me after the buffalo movie and hearing what our criminal ex-president intents to do if he gets a next term (emulate Hitler).

My dad working on a roof in Beauvais, France at what appears to be an airstrip (1942)

My dad is the guy shaving (1941).  I think the town is actually called Conchy les Post.  I wonder if the ladies in the picture are the prostitutes my dad lived with.

Change of seasons but no changes in the world (11/3/2023)

It has been a depressing week for a person with liberal leanings like me. We witnessed a brutal fight in the Middle East, where it seems Israel has no regard for humanity; we had a mass shooting in Maine; the monster hurricane that hit Acapulco; reports in the Post on the horrible climatic situation in Hodeida in Yemen; and a Republican speaker of the house who is probably more dangerous than Jim Jordan. But let’s start at the beginning. Yes, what Hamas did was unconscionable. However, starting a full-fledged war and killing so many more people than what Hamas did, is not sitting well with me, it is unconscionable as well. I have always considered myself a pacifist, although this stance of mine has weekend substantially after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. I am trying to follow that fighting and I am secretly rejoicing when Ukrainian forced manage to claim victory or that they managed to kill a substantial number of Russian soldiers. This softening around my pacifist edges in itself is somewhat depressing to me, where are my convictions, morals, ethics and empathy that I had in younger years? It seems that I have no dog in this fight in Gaza. I morn the deaths on both sides. However, neither in Ukraine, interesting, isn’t it?

If you are a regular reader, you all know my stance on gun control, or tighter management of weapons. I think I have written a post about every mass killing that occurred these past 10 years, and I will continue doing so. These assault type weapons need to be outlawed and shipped to Ukraine to fight the damn Russians. Maybe we need to ship the owners of these assault weapons as well; they seem to be itching for a good fight, otherwise why buy one of these weapons.

Concerning the climate, the news was not very favorable. Climate change really seems to have hit home, and I wonder if we reached a point of no-return. Something must be seriously awry, for a tropical storm to form and blow up into the strongest Category 5 hurricane ever to hit Mexico. Couple that to reports that Hodeida in Yemen will soon become unlivable for long stretches of the year, shows that we are reaching the tip of the iceberg (figuratively or climatologically speaking). In full disclosure, I used to live in Yemen and spent quite some time on the coastal plains, including Hodeida. Regular readers know that my posts on climate change go back many years and it is not about Yemen or elsewhere, but our future generations.

Lastly the new speaker of the house, the third in-line to the crown (or is it called the presidency). This dude is dangerous. He seems to be an authentic bible thumper, a Christian Nationalist, who is definitely against the rights of women to choose what happens to their own body. Moreover, he was the leader in congress trying to nullify the election and he still does not recognize Joe Biden as president. This guy invokes God in everything he does but does not care about the little guy. He is smooth and absolutely dangerous.

In my eyes, all these items are eerily connected. We can all bring them back to the conservative trend or movement in this country. The Maga Speaker does not believe in global warming; he and the republicans are against all form of gun control (while being against birth control, an interesting contradiction in itself); of course, they are anti-Muslimism; you get the idea.

So now you are updated about my state-of-mind. What do I do about it, drink myself to oblivion? The problem there lies in that this solution is dangerous to my health and personal relations at home. Well, this blog is one of my outlets; I hope to inform and educate you, my readers; I even may be able to entertain or anger one or two. This past week I split a huge amount of wood to be used in our woodburning stove this coming and next winter. Physical exercise is good for the mind, soul and body. It was warm, high 70s or 25 to 28 degrees centigrade for the rest of the world. I did not get much time for my bonsai, but that changed when the weather folks told us that we were getting very cold temperatures. I needed to bring my tropicals inside or into the greenhouse. This occupied almost an entire day. Somehow the power cord that supplies electricity to the greenhouse had a short in it and I needed to replace it so that I could run a heater. All is good, the plants are safely tucked away and ready for the cold temperatures of the next few months.

What else do I do now we are not traveling and exploring? I try to spend as much time as possible in the outdoors. Spending time in nature, forest bathing, hiking gives me the solace I need. We try to get out and walk in the woods behind our home and in the area. Believe it or not, but with every step I take out there the beauty of nature reveals itself, again and again. Beauty in a fragile and threatened world.

The seasons are changing, and it was time for a 5+mile hike in our area. 

They are all tucked in and safe.

Am I really color blind? (10/25/2023)

As everyone that blogs should and it is something I haven’t yet, is speak out about the latest happenings in the Middle East. In the past I was somewhat neutral about what was going on; however, the attack by Hamas nudged my neutrality of kilter, a bit. Having lived in the Arabic/Islamic world for two years, I was somewhat sympathetic with their plight; I really believed that the Palestinians had an equal right to a country of their own as the Israelis (or in other words, Jews). While this opinion has not changed, the Hamas attack was horrific and I condemn it. However, in my opinion, retaliation by Israel will just worsen the divide. Yes, Israel wants to eliminate Hamas but the collateral killing will just harden the lines between the Islamic world and the Jews. Both groups are at fault in my eyes and actually, I am not sure if I see a way out. And I haven’t written about the plight of the hostages.

Now I have always claimed to be neutral in this case (but who actually cares about what I think). You can almost say I am colorblind when it comes to this case. It is this word colorblind that I really want to write about. The Washington Post (10/19/2023) had an article about the wish to abolish the idea of race designations the upcoming census. The article tells us that we human beings have 99.9% of our DNA in common with each other. In other words, we are so similar that race seems to be an artificial construct to claim superiority (especially by folks who have a white skin color). I have always argued in the genetics classes that I teach that the African population is evolutionary more advanced than the European folks, since the African folks have a lot more variability in their Ribosomal DNA than the other groups on earth. This shows that they have been in the evolutionary process much longer and all other ethnic groups originate from them. In other words, I don’t think I discriminate and I used to consider myself color blind.

From the Washington Post I learned that calling myself colorblind is actually discriminatory and that got me thinking. Is my neutrality with and consideration of the Middle East conflict as a conflict between Palestinian and Jews, me telling you that I am colorblind in this conflict, discriminatory? Interesting to think about. Here I am dividing the waring parties into two distinct groups, instead of just calling them plain human beings. It seems to me that a lot of warring and fighting comes from pigeon holing people into one group or another, whether it is religion, race, political belief, and so on. No folks, we are just human beings with what seems to be a lot of faults and weaknesses. Privately I wonder if strife would disappear if we consider ourselves equal human beings.

A lot of my readers will know that I was born in the depths of Africa, the Congo. I grew up in the Caribbean and was partially raised by a black maid, had black friends who I often played with or went fishing with after school. Somewhat tongue in cheek I used to tell my employers that they should classify me as African American to show how diverse their hiring practices are. Moreover, I sometimes tell black folks here that I am more African American that they are, having been born in Africa. Folks tell me that I do not have the correct skin color to be considered African American (I wasn’t born in what was at that time racist South Africa, but I am not count as a strike for or against calling myself African American) . However, I now feel emboldened by the article in the Post about colorblindness. I am human and no different than anyone else out there; however, I was born in Africa and have US citizenship!

Honestly, have no firm opinion about all this, but it got me thinking. I am contemplating about any solution to racial, ethnic and all other forms of discrimination. I honestly wish that all folks of different religions, skin color, country, sexual orientation, political persuasion would agree that they are human and no different than someone who is different than the. That they treat them with respect. Yes, I still wish for world peace!

Walking in the woods gives me time to contemplate things like this.  I am actually slightly color blind and often have a difficult time distinguishing between the leaves and a red bird, kike a cardinal.