Left Coast Cowboys

Sometimes the most valuable advice you can follow is your own. How many times have you given sound instructions to others, but not followed it yourself. My resolution after this trip is to pay more attention to my own advice. Here’s what I learned about travel, not necessarily by doing but by not doing and wishing I had:

1) If you are traveling through time zones – no matter how tired you are – stay up and on schedule with the time at your destination. I had great plans, when we arrived at 7AM after an overnight flight in early morning London, to go to the hotel gym, then walk around Bloomsbury. But the prospect of staying awake until at least 10PM London time (including a dinner with my in-laws) was not something I thought I could do after a sleepless night on the plane. I took a nap and that was fatal. I never got myself on London time, but spent an odd several days waking up in the middle of the night and falling asleep during the day on the Tube.

2) Backpacks are essential. Okay, no matter how chicly you are dressed, a backpack makes you look like Helga the Finnish Exchange Student. But as you wind through miles of aisles in the V&A, climb up stair after stair in St. Paul’s and mind the gap on the Tube, it’s great to have both hands free. Okay, this was one piece of advice I followed, although be forewarned, security guards are much more likely to suspect a stowed a bomb in a backpack than in a purse, so be prepared for extra scrutiny and searches at museum entrances. Still, worth the hassle.

3) Tours and audio tours are not for losers. I used to despise guided tours. I assumed the real scholars would research where they were traveling and know more than they would ever learn from an underpaid, bored tour guide. But a tour doesn’t mean you have to be herded around by an umbrella-wielding guide. If you invest in the kind of tours led by retired history professors or unique tours such as London Walks, you’ll learn more than you could ever research. If you can’t find a good tour, invest in the audio guide. The one in St. Paul’s was narrated by Jeremy Irons and allowed you to pause the tour, sit down and listen to choral music by the St. Paul’s Boy’s Choir. This was my 7th trip to St. Pauls and, as an Art History and English major, I thought my research had made me the world’s foremost visiting authority. Jeremy told me more in one hour than I’d learned in years of reading up on Christopher Wren’s masterpiece.

4) Always get up before dawn and watch the City wake up. I did this on the advice of my latest Photography book that cautioned that the best light is before dawn to half an hour after (ditto for dusk and sunset), But wandering through London at that hour allowed me to see the City without the crowds. Not that the streets were empty. Cops, street cleaning crews and delivery people were everywhere, especially congregating in cafes and hot beverage stands. It gave the City sort of an “Eliza Doolittle when she was still selling flowers at Covent Garden” feeling. I almost expected someone to break into “All I Want is a Room Somewhere…”

5) See a show or a musical program even if you have to book one you know nothing about. In fact, sometimes the ones you just wander into are the best. Luckily this is a piece of advice we always follow. In Prague, we made a habit of wandering into any church that had a handlettered sign saying “Concert Today”. Most of them were music students, all of them were very good. As a student in London, when student tickets to any show were less than a Pound, I used to go to at least two plays a week. I always found something to enjoy while I was there, even if it ended up being a play I forgot upon walking out of the theater. In many cases, the “young and untried” actors I saw have gone on to illustrious careers: like Alan Rickman, Kenneth Brannagh and Gary Oldman. I saw them when they were still visibly nervous and occasionally flubbing their lines. Well, this isn’t exactly the advice we followed this time. We went to see Spamalot, which of course is based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This is a comedy that has so entered the Western consciousness that we, and most of the audience, were able to sing along many of the songs and parrot many of the lines. Okay, so you can’t go wrong with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser if you aren’t feeling adventurous.

So that’s what I learned on my trip to London. Or rather it’s what I rediscovered that I already knew. Do me a favor, next time I say I’m going on a trip, someone email me a link back to this blog entry. I’d like to be reminded to follow my own good advice.

NOTE: Still climbing out of this flu, so enjoy this golden oldie from the Archives.

Still suffering from what must be the worst flu ever — headache, earache, sore throat, fever and chills — so this post will be short and nonsensical. Then padded out with lots of pictures.

I’m basing my planting schedule on the progress of the Fava Beans I’ve planted in my three raised beds. My plan was to harvest some and plow some under as green fertilizer after they’ve fixed nitrogen back into the soil. This is especially important in the middle bed where I was growing corn which is what farmers call a “heavy feeder”. That means corn sucks all the nutrients out of the soil. So here’s where I need Fava Magic the most. You can guess which bed the foxes decided to raid. My gardening books says I can tell if my Favas have fixed their nitrogen by “scraping the root nodules and looking for pink”.

Don't know about you, but I don't see any nodules, let alone any pink.

The foxes stole all the Fava Beans out of the planter where I really needed them. Guess I'll just liberally douse it with that "compost tea" I picked up at Santa Cruz Hydroponics.

I planted one lonely tomato in that middle bed just to feel I'd done something.

Meanwhile, on the part of the property that doesn’t rely on my intervention, things are going just fine, thank you very much. Makes me feel extraneous.

The Redbuds are in bloom!

And so is the one varietal that is determined to be the Two Terriers High Achiever: the Mourvedre.

Then there are the Fox Terriers, who haven’t done a thing to harass those garden-thieving foxes. 

But the Fence Lizards better watch out!

In fact, Oscar and Lucy are getting decidedly wolf-y and pack-y.

Which makes me think of Rudyard Kipling’s Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack, the song Mowgli’s wolf brothers sang as they stalked through the jungle.

As the dawn was breaking the Wolf Pack yelled
           Once, twice and again!
       Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!

       Eyes that can see in the dark--the dark!
       Tongue--give tongue to it!  Hark!  O hark!
           Once, twice and again!

Except Oscar and Lucy have never caught anything. Or killed anything. Or hunted anything successfully…other than squeeky toys.

In fact, this is Oscar’s idea of hunting:

Sitting at the table hoping someone will serve him a full Cowboy Breakfast.

You’ve heard that today is Earth Hour. All across the world, from Antarctica to Egypt, cities and people committed to turning off their lights for one hour starting at 8:30PM their time. I watched on the Internet as Big Ben dimmed. But things are very different in the big city. All those people with flashlights and battery powered lanterns and candles actually light up a lot.

Here in Sonoma, out in the country, when you turn out the lights. Well, the lights go out. In a big way. Especially when the moon is just a sliver as it was tonight.

A glass of Scotch and a natural beeswax candle for light.

Andy and I were walking around with those miner’s head light things and lighting candles, but it was still pretty spooky with coyotes howling and all the tree frogs chirping. Not to mention the unidentified growls. Mountain Lions? Big Foot? Chupacabra?

Andy and Oscar are not looking happy about all the animal sounds closing in now that it's pitch black.

Now Andy's checking his watch to see how much longer he has to put up with this.

We've already got no TV, just well water and no heat but a woodstove, so with the lights out, we were pretty far off the grid.

It didn’t take long before Andy was lobbying for Earth Minute. Needless to say, we didn’t last the whole hour. But we’re pretty far off the grid here, so we figured that was acceptable.

Happy Earth Hour, everyone!

Boy, that sounds like something a Republican would say. But I’m getting madder and madder at the retailers who are hopping on the organic bandwagon without a true social conscience. (Whole Foods, I’m talking to you.) Then there are the Food Nazis who are all holier-than-thou about buying organic, but are missing the big picture. Both these groups are what put a big smile on the face of the guy above (find out more about him here).

What’s made me acutely aware of the fallacy of “Organic Tunnel Vision” is “The Hundred Mile Diet” where you attempt to source as much of your food as possible from within a 100 mile radius of where you live. (Ideal Bite has a good article on the program here.) The premise is — and many environmentalists support this — that eating seasonally and locally is much better for the earth than just blindly buying organic. 1) You reduce oil use by not buying, say asparagus out of season and shipped up from Chile, 2) you keep your dollars in your community, and 3) if you are buying locally and in season, chances are, you are going to end up with mostly organic anyway.

But it’s not as easy a message to get across as you would think. As I found out today at Whole Foods. Granted I never should have gone to what we affectionately call “Whole Paycheck”, but it’s bigger than the small shops I usually go to, so I thought I’d have a better chance of finding all the stuff I needed for a dinner party. Big mistake. Sure, there were miles of aisles, but as I pushed my cart past them, it seemed every other selection of produce was cutely labeled “Conventionally Grown”. As in: “not organic, grown with pesticides, probably from the same source Safeway uses.” But the prices still reflected the “three times normal prices at least” Whole Paycheck mark up. Even when I found the organic versions, they were largely labeled “Product of South America”. Brussels Sprouts from South America? When Watsonville just 60 miles to the south of us has miles and miles of brussels sprouts pumped out at the rate of three harvests a year? (And surely some of them are organic.) Definitely not fitting my 100 mile criteria.

How do they get away with this? Because even the hard core OrgaNazis are buying into the Whole Foods hype — “Damn the transportation costs and Organic Uber Alles.”

This became painfully clear at the sugar aisle where, as I worked my way down the many choices of sugar, I saw that my way was eventually going to be blocked by a Radical Vegan. You know the kind you can recognize from fifty paces by the wooly vaguely ethnic hat and the pinched, disapproving mouth. (And what a Vegan was doing planted in the sugar aisle is still something I’m puzzling over.)

So there I was going down the aisled picking up every sugar choice and finding it didn’t fit my 100 mile criteria. There was Demara Sugar from the Dominican Republic, beet sugar from Minnesota and, worst of all, something called “Vegan Sugar” shipped all the way from The Republic of Malawi. (That’s Africa, by the way, and probably represents the furthest point you could get from San Francisco other than Inner Mongolia.) Finally, blocked by the Vegan, I spotted C&H sugar. I know C&H stands for “California and Hawaii”, but the refinery is 25 miles away in Richmond, so I thought I’d better check that label. I stood patiently for about five minutes waiting for the Vegan to move, but she showed no intentions of allowing me by. Finally, I politely asked, “May I reach past you to that sugar.”

She fixed me with a beady stare: “That’s CANE sugar. There’s vegan sugar further up the aisle.” It was clear, she had positioned herself here to stop the uninitiated from making the politically incorrect sugar choice.

So I made the cardinal error. I tried to explain my own political correctness. “Yes, I saw it. But it’s from The Republic of Malawi which is thousands of miles away. I’m trying to reduce my carbon footprint by buying locally.”

“Do you NOT understand that there is Vegan Sugar up the aisles?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to be responsible for the oil it takes to bring sugar from Africa when I can buy local sugar from Richmond 25 miles away.”

By the way, she was still barring the aisles, arms crossed.

“I only put Vegan products in my body and you should, too.”

“Well, I’m not interested in leaving a trail of Saudi oil from Africa to here to be politically correct. Can I get by you and have a packet of that locally produced white poison please?”

I’ll never win this war. But I think I aquitted myself well in the latest battle.

Moral of the story: Read labels. Buy local. Buy seasonally. Most of the rest will take care of itself. And if you are a Radical Vegan, you shouldn’t be eating sugar anyway.

This post is a Golden Oldie from 2008. Due to a bad case of flu, and in keeping with my eco consciousness, I’m recycling. Yeah, it works for blogging, too.

Let me first tell you something that may surprise long-time readers. I did not grow up in a Country music loving family. My parents’ extensive record collection was filled mostly with Classical records, soundtracks from the Broadway musicals they saw every chance they got and the obligatory Herb Alpert and Martin Denny exotica that was the standard soundtrack for cocktail parties in the Sixties. The only brushes we had with Country were two albums: Marty Robbins Sings Gunfighter Ballads and The Little Cowpoke’s Big Roundup of Songs. But that was really cowboy music, which we saw as something quite different from Country. Then one summer, it all changed. My father, a career military officer, was sent for a few months to some base in the South, maybe Texas, for some sort of short-term maneuvers or training thing. He came back with a suitcase full of Charlie Pride, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash albums. Things were never the same around our house again.

As my mother waged a losing battle to keep Burt Bacharach and Mozart front and center in the collection, my brother and I were increasingly influenced by the older kids in school. We were listening to  Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.

Get this DVD set! You can buy it on Amazon.

But for some reason, when Johnny Cash got a variety music show on ABC in the Summer of 1969, everyone in the family would gather round the set. I don’t think my brother and I even saw Cash as Country. Now that I’ve seen The Best of The Johnny Cash TV Show double DVD set that I ordered from Amazon, I see why. You can’t imagine the ecclectic line-up of guests Johnny managed to get up on Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium stage. You couldn’t do it today. He mixed old and new Country stars with artists of all types from Jazz great Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles, Neil Diamond and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Famously on his first show, he hosted Bob Dylan. Perhaps my favorite surprise is seeing Eric Clapton — with his then band Derek and the Dominos — wailing out an old R&B standard. Then Johnny joins them, brings in Carl Perkins, and one of the best all-time guitar jams commences. Surprisingly, the very young Eric Clapton looks completely starstruck and a little intimidated. 

Another thing I’d forgotten or probably never even realized about the show, how controversial it was in subject matter. Johnny held forth on issues such as Indian rights and his Evangelical Christian beliefs. He demanded to include controversial folkie and Leftie Pete Seeger fresh off his infamous trip to North Vietnam and his anti-war bit on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. And as the war was raging, My Lai was uncovered and youth rebellion was at its height, he took part of the show to college campuses where he spoke honestly with students about drugs and politics. In fact, he wrote Man in Black after one of those campus forays.

How do I know that last little tid-bit? Because this 2-DVD set is filled with fascinating commentary by Johnny’s son, Kris Kristofferson, and some of the musicians, staff and the producer of the show. For instance, there’s that story told by the hairdresser and wardrobe person about when a very young Linda Ronstadt showed up for rehearsal without any underwear. I’ll only tell you that June Carter Cash took matters in hand. Get the DVD to learn the details.

Seriously, get this DVD set. One of the best things about it: you can skip through it chapter by chapter or song by song. So if you only want to show your Rocker or Blues loving friends how Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash wipe the floor with Eric Clapton, you can skip to that. Or you can replay that Linda Ronstadt song over and over and watch, as she struggles with an extremely skimpy mini-dress, and wonder if this was before or after June took over.

Okay, I know you don’t believe me about that Eric Clapton bit, so here it is:

Now go get this DVD set and rediscover The Man in Black yourself.

NOTE: Round these parts, we have a special version of one of Cash’s greatest hits:

I fell into a burning ring of terriers

I went down down down

And the terriers got scarier

And it burns burns burns

The ring of terriers

The ring of terriers