Left Coast Cowboys

Checked into Mighty Girl, a blog I tune into occasionally, and Maggie Mason had posted a sidebar full of witty “To Dos”, her “Mighty List”. She challenged readers to do the same, so I’m taking that challenge.

So my to do list, like hers will be posted as a sidebar and you can cheer with me as I cross completed things off the list or goad me as I take too long to complete them. Some goals are big, some are small. Some seem achievable this month. Some may be just wishful thinking.

My Bucket List

Learn to play the guitar I bought with my babysitting money when I was 15

Nurture an organic garden.

Gather at least 70% of my meals from that garden for at least one 8-month period

Eat on the 100 Mile Diet for one year.

Can and preserve fruit from my own orchard

Complete a walking marathon (I know my limits!)

Reduce my carbon footprint

Spend a week on a dude ranch

Become proficient in simple conversational Spanish

Wear a size 4 again

Attend the Olympics

Travel to India, Laos and Vietnam

See Haiga Sophia in Turkey

Master photography and Andy’s Nikon D80

Retrace the path of Chief Joseph’s retreat — preferably on horseback

Follow the Long Walk of the Navajos — preferably with a Navajo

Learn to ride my Vespa

Take a winemaking course at UC Davis

Trek through the Outback and camp at Uluru (Ayers Rock)

Successfully cook one recipe from the French Laundry Cookbook

Go on safari in Africa (with a camera)

Take my 12th road trip across America — but this time by the Northern route.

See wolves in Yellowstone Park

Keep chickens

Make a kick-ass Cabernet

Take our place in Sonoma completely off the grid

Master composting

Travel the length of the Nile

See the terra cotta warriers in China

Make a difference in a child’s life

Learn not to sweat the small stuff

That’s it for now. And I’m sure I’ll be adding a lot more items than I manage to cross off. Anyone got any suggestions?

Let me first make an admission. I’m frightened of falling behind in tech literacy. It has something to do with the fact that, on my mother’s side, I come from a long line of Luddites. My grandmother had just barely came to grips with the dial telephone in her Eighties. And she never was able to overcome the fear that she MUST answer it every time it rang. Of course, she had no answering machine, but you also couldn’t tell her that she didn’t need to leap out of a bathtub to answer the phone. If it was a telemarketer, it wasn’t worth the risk of a broken hip. If it was a friend, they’d call back until they reached her. In spite of sixty million lessons, my mother still can’t operate her TV remote. We’re not talking the VCR. I mean the remote that just turns the TV on and off.

Unlike my mother and grandmother, I had a good head start to tech literacy and I’ve been striving to keep ahead of the curve. I’ve done well until recently.

I’m probably one of the few people my age who has used the Internet since age 18. Back in the Stone Age, when I was in college, the Interweb consisted largely of connections between Defense agencies. One of its first expansions was throughout the Ivy League and Seven Sister College network — thanks to Dr. Kemeny of Dartmouth. So we had free access to terminals in the computer lab. Sure we used it mostly to secure dates with Harvard boys for the weekend. But still.

Then I got one of the first Macs to roll off the assembly line. Seriously. Mine has such a low serial number, the inside is signed by all the Apple team including Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Oh yes, I’ve done my part.

But I’ve been slipping in recent years. I’ve only been on Flickr for a year. My blogging career is newborn. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the shock at a recent party where everyone, I mean EVERYONE, was talking about their Facebook pages and friends.

“Facebook. I thought that was for teens.”

“No way,” said my friend Julian, a highly placed Cisco executive. “We use it for networking. I travel extensively and I set up meetings and lunches around the world with it.”

I looked around incredulously and scores of lawyers, executives, doctors and other professionals all nodded. It was the look of pity in their eyes that got to me.

“Poor woman. She’s out of the tech loop. Must be her age.”

So I got me a Facebook account. Which is not much of an accomplishment since I haven’t gotten around to figuring out what I can do with it. Or even built my profile. But I’ve got one. And two people have signed up to be my friends. I have two friends. Great.

Which brings me to Twitter. Now, as the villain in Babes in Toyland said, “This little device could have some veerrrrry interesting uses.” Twitter lets you — in tiny bite-sized info-bits — update your entire fanbase of millions as to what you are doing at any particular moment. You can update by web or by mobile phone. I’ve got my updates going to both my blogs. Just imagine the possibilities! I’m not always good about updating my blogs, but now I can do it on the fly. From anywhere. At anytime.

Let’s say I’m hiking on our land in Sonoma. With my cell phone. And our resident Mountain Lion appears sailing through the air aiming for a bite to my cervical vertibrae. I could fire off a text message to my blogs: “About to be killed by Mt. Lion”. Actually, I couldn’t. If you’ve ever seen me text message, you know it takes me about 15 minutes to get my stubby fingers to tap out “Gt ur msg”.

But I have the technology. That’s what matters.

The last day of my Photography class was yesterday. (For the scant few of you who aren’t avid readers of this blog, I’ve been taking Beginning Photography at City College of San Francisco.) All I can say about the experience is that I got my $85 worth. Seriously. This course set me back only $85. Plus Muni fare once a week. If you are one of those who have snobbishly looked at community colleges as “hobby schools” (and *hangs head in shame* I was one of them), let me disabuse you of that notion. Let me not only disabuse you, let me beat it into your thick skull. Community college — at least San Francisco’s — is the deal of the century.

Forthwith, my impressions of my community college experience. And if this blog post doesn’t make you sign up for classes immediately, I’ll stop posting. Actually, no, I won’t. But you need to up your reading comprehension.

Before I get into the merits of this class, let me say this course may have saved me from early-onset geezerhood. After traveling on a cross-country roadtrip with my 24 year old niece, I was appalled that someone who graduated Magna Cum Laude (okay, from University of Maine Farmington, but still) had only the most tenuous grasp of history, US geography, and anything not associated with American Idol. Perhaps the most shocking thing was, from my perspective, her inability to become a traveler. Those of us of a certain age — and we know who we are — have fond and not so fond memories of car trips on family vacation. Sure we played our share of car bingo, but eventually we resorted to looking out the window and wondering about the things we were passing. Sometimes our parents took us to roadside attractions. We bumped into new foods. We felt like we were having an adventure. We slowly morphed into travelers. After watching my niece text inane messages (”How R U”) non-stop across three thousand miles, I began to wonder if she’d actually SEEN anything. Does she have any recollection of the Grand Canyon? Or does she just remember the fifteen people she texted about it?

But I digress. My point was, this experience brought me to that dangerous point where I was muttering “These kids today. . .” under my breath at inopportune moments. The words, “You kids keep off the grass” were almost leaving my lips. Then I remembered I live in San Francisco and have no lawn.

The first day of class, I looked around and identified one student who was possibly older than me and three who might have been in their thirties. The rest, well, let’s just say they would have been very, very, very young when I graduated from college.

That was the first day of class. By the second or third day of class, I realized I was not, by virtue of my advanced years, going to be the smartest person in class. Not by a long shot. These kids were smart. And creative. And ambitious. There were more than a few with English as a second language. Lots who were working their own way through college. And an embarassing number who I realized I would have to rely on to explain the homework assignments.

Now to the course, sure there were frustrations. Like many institutions, CCSF has its politics. For the entire semester, the expensive printers and output devices were off the network in the computer lab. Seems the administration was still arguing about how effectively to charge us for their use. It was all I could do not to storm the Provost’s office screaming, “Hey, bud. I’ve got news for you. I’ve paid property tax for 23 years in this city and business taxes for 15. I’ve ALREADY paid for those printers. But here’s a tenner and a pack of printer paper. Now get the damn things hooked up.”

But that glitch was offset by the quality of the teaching. Really good teaching. Inspirational and uncompromising. Our professor never acted as if we were “just Community College students.” (Not that there weren’t times I wished she would.) She approached us as if we had the capability to be the next Lee Friedlander or Ansel Adams — and we’d better meet that bar of expectation.

The last day of class, and the presentation of our final projects, confirmed that some of us (probably not me) had met that challenge. The projects were uniformly good. Many moved us to tears. All showed real vision. How do you teach vision? Did these kids have it and, miraculously, all gravitate to this one class? Or did Professor Perry bring it out in us? Did CCSF somehow foster an environment where vision thrived and grew? Whew. In any case, it was a pretty big payoff for $85.

When class ended, I accepted a ride from John, the other oldster and my sometime lab partner. As we got in his truck, we looked at each other and spontaneously, with our best head-bangin’ Alice Cooper attitude, started singing:

“School’s out for the summer.

School’s out FOR EVVVVVVEER.”

Forgive me for a Senior Moment, but there are some things “kids today” still can’t possibly understand.

By the way, if you want to look at a PDF of my final project (cover shown above), you can download it here: homepage.mac.com/atweed/FileSharing6.html

Not only has the Mountain Lion been sighted recently on our land. But now one of the workmen has seen not one, but two bobcats hanging around our front gate. We’re becoming the Hip Happenin’ Spot for Western Wildlife.

I’ve got one foot in Sonoma, but this is why I still love San Francisco. From living in other major cities when I was a kid (NYC, LA, Washington DC, etc.) I came to associate heat waves with three things: 1) firemen would open a hydrant or two so kids could play in the water 2) some idiot would fry an egg on the sidewalk and the local news crew would film it and 3) riots. It always seemed like some part of the city would go up in flames if we had an extended hot spell.

Well, here I am in San Francisco, sweltering in the fourth day of a week-long heat wave (with record breaking temps.) I’m rushing to class, but not for the air conditioning — there’s no air conditioning in San Francisco because, well, we never need it do we? Besides with the current State fiscal crisis, Arnold would make us turn it off anyway.

Anyway, I’m thinking about riots and I’m glancing nervously around me to see who is most likely to “go postal” and set one off.

But things are different in San Francisco. It gets hot and people start to dance. Or make music. Specifically these Samoan kids who set up an impromptu dance out in front of the Arts Building. And one guy is so cool, he’s keeping his socks and sneakers on.

So this has to be my new association for heat now. Not hydrants or fried eggs or riots. But chanting, dancing Samoans.

Thanks guys, you really lifted my wilted spirits.

And, by the way, in one of the rooms of the Art Building, a Mariachi band was practicing. Just to complete my “It’s a Small World, After All” moment.