Geezing

A humorist once wrote that the word was first used by Chaucer who said that (of some obscure Danish king) "he geezeth", which meant he was dishing out stupid and unwanted advice and annoying eveyone. Thus older people often are called "geezers" and this book (given anonymously to me by some family member whom I will deal with later) shares some hilarious ways we geezers can get even with the young whippersnappers who call us that.

For example one chapter is called "How to mess with the minds of younger people" and offers tips like a) ask the same questions and tell the same stories and anecdotes over and over again, or b) pretend to fall asleep in mid-sentence and watch their reaction.

The reason the author makes the title a question is that geezing is not for everyone. Here are some qualifying test questions:
1. can you engineer every conversation into a description of your last surgery?
2. can you nap three times each day and still fall asleep during dinner?
3. can you get up three or four times a night to go to the bathroom and still keep awake after breakfast until your morning nap?
4. can you get good fragments of conversations by reading lips and body language?

Another venue is to capitalize on the infamous memory loss that is associated with old age by using it to free yourself from the humdrum obligations of people who actually DO remember what they promise to do. Say you'll of course be happy to go to a Tupperware party and then go golfing instead. Oops! I forgot! Or when you see yourself getting into a rant and about to put your foot in your mouth just stop mid-sentence and claim you forgot what you were about to say. They you can pretend to remember and go off in a completely different direction avoiding the faux pas.

People ask "when will I know I am old enough to geeze?" and the author has a perfect answer; when the government names things after you. However since this requires two additional ingredients beyond age namely, fame and wealth this makes it hard to qualify. To dodge this pitfall just name things after yourself. By yourself. For example the corridor to the bathroom in our home is tasefully called the Batchelder Hallway. Soon you can graduate to whole buildings and even mountain ranges.

Like most books, the back cover is filled with praise: "I'm buying this book to help support his wife Robyn. She deserves it after all she's had to put up with while being married to him all these years." And "My hope is that if enough of us buy this book he will retire and quit writing this drivel."

It's a smallish paperback from Apricot Press whose motto reads "Working hard to get big enough for the government to bail us out". My kind of book.

The Medicare Paperwork Avalanche

Those of us fortunate enough to be in Medicare have for the last several months been assaulted with reams and pounds of paperwork all of which is intended to explain our choices for the open enrollment period that happens each year. This is the time when the health care companies can change their plans, moving drugs here and there on the price ladder, adding deductibles, increasing premiums, and so forth.

They get to do this only once a year and they have to stick with the changes for the next 12 months. So we get the same window to review what changes there are and if we need to move to a different plan.

Frankly, you would have to be an idiot savant who specializes in bureaucratic double-speak in order to plow through all the mailings and come up with any clear idea of what the heck it is all about. I mean it's almost impossible. It is so overwhelming that I cannot escape the suspicion that it is almost intentional. Yes, I know, dark isn't it? But don't you also suspect they want us to just give up and stay in the plan you're already in? You know, the one that doubled the cost of your most expensive (and necessary) brand med and hiked the premium at the same time the revealing of which is buried on page 1,985 of the material you just tossed into the garbage?

But there is hope. HICAP, the independent volunteer agency that counsels seniors (it stands for Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program), has experts trained to understand all the gobblegook in most towns here and what's more, you can get this valuable advice free.

Sally and I did that today, with a remarkable advisor named Marcia Smith in Mt. Shasta. I learned that my drug plan was okay as is, I'm going to cap out at the $2,800 "donut" hole come October of next year but if I can get my doctor to switch my Lipitor to a generic I might avoid the limit. I hope I can ___ if you hit the donut you pay full price for your drugs and Lipitor is around $400 a month.

But Sally hit the jackpot; Marcia found her a better plan with Humana that will save us almost $700 a year and she will never even get close to the donut.

Worth a call, people. Deadline for open enrollment is Dec. 31 so there are only a few days left. Marcia's phone is 926-148 and tell her we sent you.

The Carbon Bathtub

This is the illustration on page 26 of December's National Geographic. It accompanies a short 3 page article and I am taking excerpts from it for this post. I doubt anyone can read the notes on the graphic so here is the story:

Almost twice as much CO2 (9.1 billion metric tons per year) is being poured into the tub (atmosphere) than the drain can let out (5 billion) so the level in the tub is rising. The "drain" is where the CO2 naturally goes.....absorbed by plants (30%) and oceans (25%). 45% as you see is unaccounted for, the amount that is building up in the atmosphere.

The focus of the story is a concern by an MIT professor: the public seems convinced if we slow down the growth of emissions we'll solve the problem. CO2 currently measures 350 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere and growing at the rate of 2 or 3 ppm per year. Even if we somehow stop the increase, stop the invisible hand that keeps opening the tap more and more, the tub is going to overflow because more is flowing in than draining out even if we quit opening the tap more each year.

The oldest air bubbles in Antarctic ice samples show that the atmosphere has not had this much CO2 for at least 800,000 years and probably a million. Before the Industrial Revolution (roughly at the time of America's independence in 1775) CO2 levels stood at 271 ppm using the same ice cores, so CO2 levels have increased 42% in 234 years, about 2 ppm per year. To cap the level at 450 ppm, a level most scientists consider dangerously high, we would have to cut emissions by roughly 80% by 2050.

Once again the source of confusion, not cutting the RATE of increase, cutting the flow from the tap by 80%. THAT is the challenge; getting the public and the politicians to realize how dramatic that is.

For the full story go to http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/05/carbon-bath. There is even an interactive site where you can play around with the effects of different emissions at ngm.com/bigideas.

Holiday Homecoming Concert

Celebrate the season with a mid-winter musical interlude with the “Holiday Homecoming” concert on Sunday, December 27th at 3:00 pm, at the Yreka Community Theater, presented by the Red Scarf Society for the Performing Arts. Three talented musicians are returning to Yreka to perform a varied repertory of wonderful selections. A champagne reception to follow.

Performing will be two favorite sons, Yreka born Kevin McKee on the trumpet and honorary Yrekan, Jacek Mysinski on the piano. Former Yrekan and talented soprano, Karen Berryhill Barrett, will be lending her voice to the occasion.

Tickets are $20 each for adults and $5 each for students. They can be purchased at Nature’s Kitchen, Yreka Chamber of Commerce, Surroundings, Village Books in Mt. Shasta and Scott Valley Drug. For further information call 842-4656.

Comfort Food

Winter is the perfect time for this kind of food and in fact we own a crock pot for this purpose . . . something is leaking that mom's-cooking aroma into the house all day long. There are endless choices but my call (after mac and cheese) is a chicken pot pie.

Which is of course bad for you in multiple ways ___ the pastry crust alone is probably illegal in some countries ___ but anything that tastes this good just defies the definition of 'bad'.

I mean look at England where the idea started. Their meat pies are world-renown and for good reason. When the weather is cold and drippy who wants avocado and sprouts in a sandwich? Or in a salad for that matter. Give me a break.

You can even buy microwavable pot pies in the grocery for as little as a buck. Now, in these hard times shouldn't we perhaps cut a little slack with the nutrition obsession thing? I mean, where can you get a hot meal with meat, veggies, cereal grains, and gravy of uncertain origin for a measly buck?

And even more importantly, factor in how neat it smells and feels on a cold winter day! Yes, my loyal readers, Swanson should rank right up there with Pasteur and Edison, for we have at last a portable, affordable tummy-warmer to ward off the uncertainties and chill of winter days. Not to mention the uncertain economy.

(Chicken soup is good, too. Costco makes it out of their unsold rotisserie chicken for $9 something a quart (maybe more, not sure). It'll feed you for a week.)

Posted by a hopelessly lazy cook.

Bestseller; The Ghost Map

I remember book reports. We all dreaded them. The teacher would sweep her gaze across the room and you would immediately need to tie your shoelaces. Having to give one at the time felt like a worse alternative to detention because you'd be on stage, in front of all your snickering classmates. Worse, you had to follow some arcane who, what, where, why format the teacher had devised which was truly to be feared because you hated the book and skimmed it to get the five main points or whatever they were, covered.

Not to worry, this one will be disorganized and scattered. You may finish up not even knowing what the book is about. My revenge on high school English.

I enjoy history and non-fiction and especially the type that blends them with fiction. A novelist takes a few liberties with the gaps between known things and weaves a captivating story. For me, this genre is more attractive than fiction because nobody had to make it up, it really happened. Like they say, truth really is more facinating than fiction. And sometimes stranger, too.

The Ghost Map is about the cholera epidemic that swept the Soho district of London in September of 1854. Johnson describes slum life with vivid details of daily life such as an entire class of people who acted as a very effective recycling organism for the polluted city: toshers who combed the banks of the Thames for rags and scraps of wood; the night-soil men who cleaned out cesspools; the pure collectors who gathered animal dung; the bone-pickers who collected all manner of them. Mud larks were young toshers, often the tosher's children, and to better find the flotsam at low tide they would hold lanterns under their upheld cloaks making them seem like floating ghosts on the mudflats of the river. Details like that.

Each of these was very specialized and many spent their entire lives in the trade. And it was a trade; each recovered item was resold; the rags went to rag collectors who turned them into paper and felt; the sewage went in barrels on carts to farmers outside the city as fertilizer; the bones went to rendering plants where they were boiled down to make glue and other products; animal dung went to the tanners who had soaked hides in lime to get rid of the hair and the manure neutralized the solution so the hides could be worked into leather.

The author points out that there were not industrial districts then, all these noxious practices were side by side with tenements, shops, and restaurants which gave the slum areas legendary smells. But grim as this was it allowed the city to function. Without these people London would have drowned in its own waste. And that becomes the central theme of the story.

Johnson tells it from the perspective of an epidemiologist; someone who traces the spread of disease. He recounts how two residents of the Golden Square area in the Soho, John Snow and Reverend Whitehead, independently ran down where the cholera came from. In the process Johnson depicts the struggle they endured trying to disprove majority opinion which held that "miasma" or foul odors transmitted disease. Not airborne contagion as we now think of it but if there is stench, the air is full of disease. The toshers and night-soil men became one of rebuttals for the miasmists in fact because they rarely caught cholera despite spending their lives breathing foul air.

Water for city dwellers came from shallow wells which were scattered about the city. Homes in that era did not have plumbed water and waste was either tossed into the street or collected in horrid pits in the basement of many tenements called cesspools. The entire epidemic came from a well pump on Broad Street which had been contaminated by a cracked cesspool just under three feet away.

(Background note; city health officials finally installed sewers after recognizing what evil cesspools posed. These dumped directly into the Thames, doubling the pollution even further when water closets were invented and distributed. Since many water companies pumped drinking water from the river this just made the threat of contagion worse. Johnson notes how similar this was to the bright idea officials in the 1500's had to stop the plague; they thought dogs and cats carried it so all the animals in the entire city were ordered destroyed. They of course were the main predators of rats which carried the disease in their fleas.)

Proving the microbe was waterborne was the task and Snow finally persuaded the officials to remove the Broad Street pump handle thus ending the crisis. It is as much a story of overcoming public opinion as it is remarkable medical sleuthing and if you visit London today you can find the John Snow Pub just a few yards away from the site of the pump on (now) Broadwick Street in Golden Square.

There, you see what happens when you don't follow the book report format? If I hadn't run out of coffee you could have read the book itself by now.

"Stak Blocks"; From Bio-Waste to Building Material

Two inventors in Goleta (outside Santa Barbara, California) are developing what sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true concepts in eco-friendly building materials; Lego-like blocks of rice straw. The company, Oryzatech (oryza is Greek for rice straw) is a start-up, struggling to raise funds for mass production of the product which presently costs too much . .. about $30 per block.

California grows a lot of rice but the silica-rich straw (about a ton and a half of it for each ton of rice grown) is considered a waste product; too hard to gather for composting and not suited for animal feed, farmers burn thousands of acres of it each year, creating dangerous air pollution in the Sacramento Valley and other rice-growing regions of the state.

But, compressed into molds at 300 degrees and mixed with a formaldehyde-free glue the waste product becomes an ideal building block material for housing construction. Rice straw blocks have many advantages over stud wall framing; as tested by Cal Poly the 12" thick blocks have 3 times the insulation value of a 2 x 6 stud wall, are fire and sound proof, and much faster to assemble.

As you can see in the picture above they stack and interlock just like Lego blocks (each is 12" thick, 12" wide, and 24" long which makes them very easy to use) and threaded rebar rods anchor them in place from the top plate (wood member on top of walls that rafters and trusses rest on) down to the foundation for seismic strength. Wood framing is used for windows and doors but the blocks themselves are as workable as wood; sheetrock can be directly attached for example so new construction tools and methods do not need to be developed in order to use the product.

On the ecology side of things the material is almost carbon-neutral, coming as it does from sustainable, organic rice crops. This means it will likely qualify for LEED points (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the green building rating system that certifies buildings as responsible, green construction). This may lead to tax credits or other monetary incentives for builders, I'm not sure as I have not researched this yet.

And one final, sensible note; the product can (and should) be manufactured on or near the rice farms themselves, right at the source. Production is scalable, big factories operate just as a garage-size one does, so any farmer could also become a producer, using his main crop waste as an added income stream.

For more information go to www.oryzatech.com. They're looking for investors!
They are stacked

Village Green Motel in Cottage Grove, OR

Many of us do the Seattle run and the 9 to 10 hour drive can be hard. We fell into this place on our way home on one of those tiring drives and feel it is worth a recommend.

Ask for the Escape Package. Depending on availability you get dinner for two, a bottle of wine, and a garden suite with a fireplace, microwave, and refrig for. Hold your breath. 89 bucks. But WAIT, it gets better! Weekdays it can get as low as $69!

Too good to be true you ask? No, it really is there. For example, I had filet mignon with baked potato and veggies while Sally had a 12 oz. prime rib. Along with a bottle of their (private label) chardonnay. The creme brule was extra but the coffe was included.

800-343-7666 will get you there. About 3-1/2 hours north and five south from Seattle. They have golf, gardening, and fly fishing packages, too.