Left Coast Cowboys

Made it! NaBloPoMo done. Thirty posts in thirty days. And I’m thinking of signing up for December’s challenge, now that NaBloPoMo stroked my ego in the last week by naming Left Coast Cowboys “Blog of the Week”. I’d hoped I’d have some profound insight for this last post of the program, but today was just too full of random things. Starting with a morning that was fogged in like the background of a Da Vinci painting.

Sonoma as seen by Leonardo.

Which was appropriate since we had another Italian style harvest to contend with. You may have thought we were done with harvesting now that all of our grapes have been processed and most are safely in oak where they’ll wait out the better part of a year. Nope, we’ve still got olives to contend with. They were picked Saturday and Sunday, we went down to the community olive press. Even though the Olive Press is at a flashy new winery, Jacuzzi Family Winery, it has the feeling of something from a village in Tuscany from hundreds of years ago. Unless you have a yield of over 500 pounds, your olives go into a community vat. So people from all over Sonoma are trucking their olives down — in trash cans, in pails and even in small tupperware containers — to get a piece of the community press.

You don't need more than one tree's worth to participate in the Community Pressing.

If you've got less than 500 pounds of olives, yours go in with the community batch! Some of these are ours.

The olives are crushed by the high-tech, new fangled olive press.

The low tech one is just for show.

Then it was time to replant my small kitchen garden. Which isn’t as easy as you’d think. I have The Garden That Does Not Know It is Autumn. In other words, my melons, my cucumbers and my tomatoes, which should be dying out now, are still producing like mad. I finally forced things with the melons and cucumbers, ripped them up and planted fava beans.

If I'd known an old overripe melon was such a fun dog toy, I could have saved hundreds of dollars at the pet store.

Of course melons don't exactly perform like store-bought toys. They shatter and then there are terrier tears.

The brussels sprouts are almost ready. The tomatoes just won't quit.

Last item of business was a barrel tasting to see how our wines are coming along.

The good news: a barrel tasting is showing our Mourvedre, Cinsault and Grenache are coming along excellently. Beautiful fruit flavor and starting to get oaky.

The bad news: one of the steel tanks of Mourvedre had its sealed top come loose. Herds of potentially contaminating fruit flies were hovering. Only time will tell if they had an effect.

So that’s it. No grand conclusions. Just more of the same 30 days later. But I’ve signed up for Decembers NaBloPoMo. So stick around and see what develops.

Here we are one day from the end of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month.) Over 10,000 of us around the world committed to blogging every day on the day (no writing five posts on the weekends and storing them) for the month of November. And it looks like, barring getting hit by a truck or breaking all my typing fingers, I’ve made it. I think there are some prizes involved, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I wanted to see if I could do it, if it would up my readership and if it was sustainable. Check, check and maybe check on all counts.

My problem with blogging is, silly me, I’ve always thought I can’t really post unless I have something to say. Something other than what I had for breakfast or my projected TV viewing schedule was. I could spew out the longest post if I had a subject, but sometimes, I think, I let a potential good post slip by because I wasn’t sure it was different or important enough to post about. Can’t worry about that when you HAVE to post every day. I think the exercise pushed me through that barrier. I found myself on a schedule and in a rhythm that kept posting fun and more consistent.

Amazingly the results were immediate. Readership went up by 105% (according to Google Analytics) and those readers started returning every day. Snooping in on my readers was one of the best parts of this exercise, made possible by my great Secret Squirrel Spyware I wrote about here. TraceMyIP definitely lets me see my imaginary friends!

Which brings me to Ryan Lochte. When I started this blog, I knew I wouldn’t always stay on topic. The point was to document our Green Acres transition from City Kids to Farmers and Vintners. I realized I’d veer off track into politics, musings and various topics, but mostly the posts would be about Sonoma, composting, grape stomping and other exciting rural things. So you’d think most of my readership would be searching for farm and wine related topics. Well, some.

Turns out the largest traffic driver is Google which sends people from all over the world to my site (I’ve got readers from Bulgaria, lots from Finland, Croatia and several from South Africa.) But the biggest all time Google search that sends the most people here?

“Ryan Lochte Naked”

You remember Ryan Lochte? He was the greatest American swimmer this year who wasn’t Michael Phelps. I saw one of his time trials and blogged about it when we attended the Olympics. He wasn’t naked. I’m not sure where that word came in. But go ahead, Google “Ryan Lochte Naked”. About the third choice down: Left Coast Cowboys.

Never let it be said I don’t cater to my readers’ needs. So here, after my own extensive Google search is the most naked picture I could find of Ryan Lochte.

Thanks Google Images and The Insider for the Beefcake.

Or how about this?

If you can get your minds out of the gutter, you might want to try some of the other searches that get you here. Some are directly related to posts I’ve done. Like my compendium of Christmas Cocktail Songs, World’s Best Unknown Christmas Songs, my countdown of the Top Ten Cowboy Songs of All Time or my suggestion that Obama get a Smooth Fox Terrier for the White House.

People reach these pages through searches such as: “famous cowboys songs yippee”, “what’s the best christmas song you ever heard” or even the genre-bending “cowboy christmas cocktail party”. Sometimes the searches are straight-forward and I can guess what post is being referenced. Sometimes they defy logic. How about these recent searches that brought people here: “nerdy romper”, “Autodidact shop stewards” and “problems finding a good Black church in San Francisco”. Or the searches that break my heart: “Why I don’t want a Smooth Fox Terrier”. That search should CERTAINLY not be getting you here.

So as NaBloPoMo ends, I hope I’ll be keeping this up. And I’ll certainly have my Romper Room Magic Mirror tuned up so I can spy on the strange and circuitous routes my readers take, usually via Google, to get here.

Remember, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

A while ago, I posted about my brother’s amazing success with a home-made cholesterol cure. Today, less than two years later, the results continue to impress.

A little background: my brother (often called by his childhood nickname: Schrid. Don’t ask.) visited his doctor in February 2007. At that time, his cholesterol was charted: LDL (bad) cholesterol at 187 and HDL (good) cholesterol was 47. This was high enough — combined with the fact that my parents had high cholesterol and that Schrid is near Fifty — that his doctor wanted to put him on Lipitor immediately. (Confused about what’s normal and what’s not? Here’s a good quick article.) Basically, your total cholesterol is your good cholesterol plus your bad cholesterol number. And it’s important what the ratio is. Obviously, you want the good to outweigh the bad. Or at least be a healthy balance.

Anyway, Schrid’s always been a do-it-yourself kind of guy and doesn’t like overdoing medication. So he asked if he could try to get his cholesterol down on his own. The doctor said he had three months and, if it wasn’t down significantly, onto Lipitor he would go.

Schrid read and Googled everything he could and devised The Schrid Cure. It worked. I mean, it REALLY worked.

His total cholesterol went down BY THIRTY FOUR POINTS in less than three months.

Here’s how he did it:

1. NO FAST FOOD. None. Nada. Not even the so-called healthy salads. By the way, Steve’s work takes him on the road every day, so if he could avoid this one, anyone can.

2. No meat on Wednesday and Friday. On these days, his dinners of choice included pasta with vegetables or Atlantic haddock or salmon.

3. Every other NIGHT (I guess this is a snack) a big bowl of cereal with roasted wheat germ and about two tablespoons ground flax seeds. (He gets organic flax seeds and grinds them in a coffee grinder.)

4. No eggs. Egg beaters were used in recipes that would be ruined without eggs.

5. Organic skim milk.

6. Niacin. As much as you can handle, up to 500mg per day. Steve’s doctor recommended this, but be aware that some people are sensitive. Steve had pins and needles and dizziness, so he substituted a B-complex vitamin with fewer mg of the niacin.

7. Fish oil tablets once a day. The trick is to find oil from fish that is low on the food chain and from cold waters like Norway or Iceland.

8. Green tea. Schrid started drinking green tea lattes with non-fat milk to replace morning coffee. Note that with hot green tea, don’t pour boiling water on it. You’ll kill the good stuff. Just steep it in boiled water that has cooled for about five minutes.

9. Wheat grass once a week. If you live in San Francisco, you can buy shots of this on most any commercial strip. Steven lives in a Boston suburb without such California-y things, so he got the powder and mixed a tablespoon in a glass of water. Yeah. It’s like drinking grass, but just pretend you are a cow. So if you can, drink it even more than once a day.

10. No butter. Substitute Olivio for spread and olive oil for every other instance where you’d use butter or shortening.

11. Lots of whole grains. Most of Steve’s breakfasts were Rainforest Granola and real oatmeal. (Just check the ingredient panels. There are a lot of pretenders.)

12. Try to eat non-processed foods wherever possible. (Say an apple instead of a fruit leather.) But check labels religiously for saturated fat, salt, cholesterol and sugar.

That’s it. Pretty simple. Especially when you realize that my brother did this without huge outlays of cash and as a working stiff. (In other words, no spa visits, busy work days, lots of time on Massachusetts turnpikes.) If he could fit this into his lifestyle, so could you. And he doesn’t have all the access to the year-round organic produce that we do in California.

His Cholesterol Continues to Plummet

Less than two years later, new numbers are in on his latest cholesterol check up. Remember, in Feb 2007 his LDL (bad) cholesterol was 187 and HDL (good) was 47. Now in Nov 2008 his LDL 125 and HDL 58.

He’s done it mostly with his regimen that gave the first dramatic results, although he’s relaxed it a little bit.

He still eats mostly mostly organic food and still works the flax seed. He’s added eggs and bacon (organic of course) back in for sometime weekend treats.  He tends to avoid pork because he can’t find lean, organic pork very easily.

He’s still finding that lunch is one of the hardest meals to get right. He tries to brown bag with organic as much as possible.

He’s spending a little more on food these days but quality has replaced quantity, so he’s not feeling deprived. His real caution is to read labels very very carefully on anything packaged. Even the so-called healthy granola can be full of stuff you can’t pronounce that you know isn’t good for you.

For quick morning get-aways, he’s perfected the Schrid Fruit Smoothie:

1 cup yogurt

1 cup orange juice

2 cups various fruit

2 cups crushed ice (experiment with your favorite fruits)

Blend untill smooth 

Schrid's dirty little secret. He smokes!

Now here’s the really amazing part: Steven smokes. Yeah, he tries to hide it from the family. But he smokes a lot. And he still got these amazing results. Imagine what the program could do for you without that giant risk factor.

Try the Schrid Plan! And let me know your results.

And Steven, STOP SMOKING!

Having been a young child in the Sixties, it’s an instinctive fear, every time I’m in a dinner situation where everyone contributes, that someone will show up with some sort of vegetable baked in Cream of Mushroom Soup. Maybe topped by those horrible chrome yellow crunchy things. (What were those? Onions? Potato sticks?)

In the Sixties, somebody’s mother always made this dish. And it haunts a certain generation to this day.

My friends are all gourmet cooks who tend to buy organic and local.

But still the fear persists.

These are those yellow crunchy things. A Google search tells me they are canned French fried onions.

Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving is Campbell’s Soup-Less!

Watching the Barbara Walters interview with Barack and Michelle Obama, a relative, in town for Thanksgiving, piped up: “Well, I’m just going to admit it. I had a hard time voting for him because, well you know, the whole Black thing.”

“Uh, what Black thing would that be?”

“Well, you know, I know he’s smart and everything and will probably be a good President. But it was tough to vote for a Black man.”

The mind just boggles. I was so depressed by this admission I didn’t pursue it further.

I sort of didn’t want to know the answer to the obvious first question: “So you are presented with someone you think is smart and qualified, you like his views on the issues, but Race is a complete deal breaker?”

Or should I be encouraged that she eventually overcame whatever repulsion she felt for Obama’s race, actually voted for him and now thinks he’s going to be a great president?

Can I just set the record straight here that this relative did not grow up in a trailer park in Alabama.

She’s a University-educated New Englander.

Even worse, her husband was a career Army officer. You know, the US Army as in one of the FIRST institutions in America to be fully integrated. Back when the Civil Rights Movement was trying to guarantee African-Americans their rights to vote, her husband was serving beside and was friends with Black officers in the Army. He even went to West Point with African Americans. In other words, this couple, almost before most White Americans, had Black colleagues with whom they shared professional and social spheres.

So sorry, Obama, I know we’ve made progress, but I don’t think, as you said to Barbara, we’ve gotten beyond Race.