imPermanence: snow melts and tempus fugit

Permanent: n. continuing or enduring without fundamental or marked change

Impermanence:  n. an essential element of Buddhism – that everything is changing, inconstant, in flux. Because things are impermanent, attachment to them is futile, and leads to suffering.

The Portland area was blanketed in nearly a foot of snow for most of the week up until Christmas. My grandkids –  Elliott who’s 4 and Alexander who is 7, were beyond thrilled to be able to enjoy a white Christmas with their two super-fun uncles, who are young at heart at 25 and 37.  (Their parents – my daughter and her husband – were not so thrilled to have to drive up here from sunny California in such nasty weather, but they picked the only 12-hour window in a week to make it through!).

The joint was jumpin’ for six days – the boys of all ages seemed more excited by the snow and playing Pokeman (a P post for another day) than the prospect of presents.  Gifts were pretty sparse anyway, giving us the chance to focus more on hanging out together.

Here are my two sons and Alexander, after inserting the snowman’s carrot nose, and clapping a hat on his head:

Starting Christmas night the temperature began rising. The snowman began shrinking. This is how he looked this morning, right after the Californians left for home:

He was only about 15″ high then; a few hours later he’s just a tiny snowball.

And now the house is totally quiet again.  The holiday came and went as fast as the snow, and I feel a lot like our snowman. Quite deflated and a little soggy.

One of our snowed-in activities (which turned out to be much more fun than my older two first thought) was going through the many boxes of their’ memorabilia which I’ve stored in one garage or another since they left for college eons ago.  “Whatever stuff you want to keep,” I said, “is going to henceforth be living with you, so choose wisely.”

Heather had only one box left here, but Ethan had six – packed to the gills. To keep him company I brought out a couple of boxes of my own written memorabilia to sort through. I have to hand it to him; he carefully plowed through a couple of boxes every day, examining each item (mostly artwork, homework, book reports, photos and letters), tossing about half of it, but savoring and repacking the rest.  Already in middle school you could see hints of who he would become – the fascination with edgy design – the originality of his ideas – and his writing skill, which I’d just taken for granted until he began writing for HuffPo last month.

The process was a powerful reminder of how many lives we each have lived through, in what seems like the blink of an eye. Friends, passions, projects… developing, ripening, disappearing. Many forgotten until a picture or letter brings it back.

My own journals and letters are voluminous. I’ve got them going back to college and it will take a long time to sort through them. The triviality of most of my concerns appalls me, but it’s all there – bringing the past temporarily back to life.

If I hadn’t recorded all those experiences they’d otherwise be gone gone gone – melted away like our snowman.

Update 1/4/09: Blogfriend Splodge forwarded this cartoon… too good not to append.

Plum Pudding: flaming family favorite

Plum pudding: n. also known as Christmas pudding, because (surprise!) it’s traditionally eaten on Christmas Day. It’s a dark dense rich sweet mixture of dried fruits, nuts, suet, bread crumbs and egg which is steamed in a mold over simmering water for several hours.  Although it took its final form in Victorian England, the pudding’s origins can be traced back well before that. According to Wikipedia, it emerged not as a confection or a dessert at all, but as a way of preserving meat at the end of the season.  The meat was then kept in a pastry case along with dried fruits acting as a preservative – mince pies, actually – which plum pudding tastes a lot like.  The chief ancestor of the modern pudding, however, was the pottage, a meat and vegetable concoction originating in Roman times. This was prepared in a large cauldron, the ingredients being slow cooked, with dried fruits, sugar and spices added.

All you can see in this picture is the blue flame from the warm brandy my daughter just poured over our Christmas dessert.

The recipe I’ve been making for thirty years is from James Beard, and requires drenching the fruits and nuts in brandy or rum, a quarter cup every day for several days, till all is plump and drunken. The chopping of all the fruits was a sticky family affair which the kids really got into.  (I got into the brandy…)  The rest of the ingredients are added just before steaming. Well wrapped, it keeps well for a couple of years (in the frig) – which is nice because it means you only have to go through the fuss every other year.

Beard used to call it “Ten-Day Plum Pudding” when I found it in Gourmet Magazine so long ago. Now it’s “Five DayPlum Pudding...”   Sign of the times that even plum pudding making has a speedy version.  It’s not quite the same as my recipe, but I’m sure it’s excellent.

A few years ago I turned my molds over to my daughter, who is now our pudding maker.

She does it beautifully and we still love the stuff, but we all agreed that we’re ready for a different flaming Christmas dessert next year.

Pause…

Pause: n. a temporary stop, a brief suspension of the voice (or fingers on the keyboard)

This prolific poster is on holiday break in order to enjoy the onslaught of family from afar, snow from the heavens, and plenty of good food and drink.

Safe, healthy and happy holidays to all. See you in a few days.

Joy

Poodle pix: coiffure as costume

A friend sent me the link to a series of photos from a gal who does “creative grooming.”

My poor Molly was overcome with jealousy when she saw these because her hair is black – a poor canvass for such artistry. I mean, who wouldn’t want to look like a chicken:

or a peacock:

(This is the cut, sans feathers… see the whole deal at the link)

And how about Ninja Turtle poodle:

Precipitation #2, squared!

Precipitation: a deposit on the earth of hail, mist, rain, sleet, or snow; the quantity of water deposited.

I wrote about our Pacific Northwest weather on April 30, but that was actually wussy weather. This time the combination of snow (8″) and freezing rain (1/2″) has the Portland metro area at a standstill. More snow and freezing rain are expected.

In fact the whole I-5 corridor, from the California border to Seattle, is an icy snowy precipitous mess and is supposed to remain so for the better part of a week. This bodes well for a white Christmas and poorly for a visit from my children and grandchildren, who were planning to drive up I-5 from the Bay Area for the holiday week with us.

My own car, which normally snuggles cozily in my garage, sits abandoned at the bottom of the hill on which I live. Yesterday morning, just before the weather made driving impossible, my son went to fetch our Christmas tree, and simply slid down the hill past our driveway and couldn’t get unstuck. The car is now blanketed in snow and sealed with a substantial layer of ice.

As is my entire yard, and my driveway.  Very photogenic, but treacherous.

Until yesterday I didn’t really understand the weather terminology that describes what we’re now experiencing. So here’s a primer.

Precipitation comes in three forms:

• liquid (drizzle, rain – our usual PNW fare);
• freezing (freezing drizzle and freezing rain); and
• frozen (snow, snow grains, ice pellets/sleet, hail, snow pellets, ice crystals).

Snow begins in the clouds as water condenses into a tiny droplet. The droplet grows as more and more water vapor condenses onto its surface, then cold air freezes it into an ice crystal. As long as the air temperature remains at or below freezing the snow will reach the ground.

Freezing rain happens when it’s cold (below freezing) on the ground and in the upper atmosphere but there’s a warm air mass in the middle (temperature inversion). Snow formed up in the clouds melts when it passes through the warm layer then freezes when it hits the cold ground (roadways, trees, wires, shrubs, airplane wings) glazing them with ice. Freezing rain is notorious for causing travel problems on roadways, breaking tree limbs, and downing power lines.

Sleet also happens when snow melts as it travels through a warm layer of air, but because the warm air layer is thinner or higher, the thawed snow refreezes before it hits ground, so it looks like small hail and doesn’t glaze surfaces unless, as sometimes happens, it’s combined with freezing rain.

So I’ll carpe diem and catch up on household chores. Could be worse.

The Ponzi plot: a perennial plague

Ponzi: adj. referring to Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who bilked thousands out of their money in the early 20th century using the investment scam that is now named after him – a “Ponzi Scheme.”

Plot: n. a secret plan for accomplishing a usually evil or unlawful end

Perennial: adj. persistent, enduring, present at all seasons of the year

Plague: n. : a disastrous evil or affliction

Staying on yesterday’s theme of “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” we turn our attention to the Ponzi scheme, which has returned again to the headlines.

In a Ponzi scheme, potential investors are wooed with promises of unusually large returns, usually attributed to the investment manager’s savvy, skill or some other secret sauce.

The returns are repaid, at least for a time, out of new investors’ principal, not from profits. This can continue as long as new investors line up with cash, and old investors don’t try to withdraw too much of their money at once.

Ponzi schemes are also known as pyramid schemes, from the shape of any chart that reflects their basic premise — that ever-growing layers of new recruits are needed to provide gains to the smaller, earlier cohorts.

And from Wikipedia:

The catch is that at some point one of three things will happen:

1. the promoters will vanish, taking all the investment money (less payouts) with them;
2. the scheme will collapse under its own weight, as investment slows and the promoters start having problems paying out the promised returns (and when they start having problems, the word spreads and more people start asking for their money, similar to a bank run);
3. the scheme is exposed, because when legal authorities begin examining accounting records of the so-called enterprise they find that many of the “assets” that should exist do not.

This time, in keeping with the American way of doing things Bigger, More Brilliantly and More Audaciously than has ever been done before, we have Bernie Madoff – who has managed to bilk his wealthy investors out of 50 BILLION dollars. Charles Ponzi must be salivating in his grave!

It was in many ways (almost) a perfect crime. Madoff had stellar bonafides: he had been the head of the NASDAQ, for God’s sake! If the head of an enormous stock exchange didn’t know investing, who did??  He preyed on only the wealthiest, who fought to get in his good enough graces so they could have the PRIVILEGE of giving him their money.

Despite many tips to the SEC over the past few years, Madoff managed to carry on until we had an economic meltdown; too many investors wanted to get their money out and it all came unglued.

I keep thinking that Madoff is just the easiest target to vilify, when really, wasn’t Enron a Ponzi scheme? What about the mortgage industry, the banking industry, the insurance industry?

Jonathan Weil writes at Bloomberg.com:

It’s unclear why the SEC failed to stop Madoff, whether because of corruption, a lack of smarts, a dearth of interest, or some combination. We can say with confidence, though, that many other huge frauds are still operating freely today — and that the government might not be inclined to intervene, even when it knows all about them.

After all, Madoff’s scheme — at least in spirit, if not in its nefarious intent — wasn’t much different than the business models at some of the nation’s largest failed financial institutions.

Back in May, four months before it collapsed, American International Group Inc. increased its dividend at the same time it unveiled plans to raise $12.5 billion in capital. Later, when its cash ran out, AIG got a government bailout, the size of which has expanded to about $150 billion.

Whether you call that a Ponzi scheme or something less sinister, AIG was paying old investors with money raised from new investors. The same could be said of many banks that blew through billions of dollars in freshly raised capital the past couple of years, continuing to pay large dividends even as their balance sheets quietly imploded.

Kind of makes me want to go back to the days of bartering, when you dealt face to face with the maker/grower of the goods you were trading: a cow for pile of blankets. What you see is what you get.

Update 12/19:  Paul Krugman asks:

How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole? ….

… while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else? [emphasis mine]

Read the whole column. Krugman hit a nerve – hundreds of readers responded – and the top dozen or so add further depth.

POS Purse: don’t buy a Buxton Bag!

POS: adj  “piece of shit” abbrev. (slang) – used to describe a shoddy product or service.

Purse: n. a receptacle (as a pocketbook) for carrying money and often other small objects

To get straight to the point before recounting my story… the Buxton bag (“As Seen on TV”) is a piece of shit. And the company selling them is as bad as their product. Avoid both.

My old purse was near death and I had to get a new one.

Now, I’ve never been a handbag hysteric. (The mind boggles at  shelling out $150 a week just to rent one that carries Kate Spade’s name. Quite apart from the expense, who wants to schlep all their stuff from purse to purse to purse?   And how does the frequent bag renter keep straight into which crevice her keys have crept?)

My purse use is strictly utilitarian -a place for everything and everything in its place.  I like them small – with slots for credit-type cards and money because I don’t carry a wallet.  Unfortunately, Perlina, who made my last purse, is now into mini- mini-bags, so the saleswoman at Nordstrom suggested I check out the Buxton bag which she’d seen in an info-mercial.

I was dubious about the info-mercial aspect, but I had fond memories of earlier Buxton products… I think my first wallet was a “Lady Buxton.” And Nordstrom sales people are usually trustworthy.

So I found the Buxton website (I refuse to link to it) and figured why not try it; the bag was really inexpensive ($19.95. Woo-hoo, eat your heart out Kate Spade!).

What WAS I thinking??? I know that from painful experience that anything that is  too cheap to be true  is too cheap to be good. Anyway, I went for the “deluxe” upgrade – price $29.95 . Plus $8.95 shipping.

I went further and added the FREE pocket memo recorder (just add $6.95 more for shipping). I placed my order on November 25.

After 3 weeks had passed and there was no sign of the charge on my card or the purse on my doorstep, I went back to the website.  There on the customer service page (not on any of the pages during the purchase process) it said the order might take 2 to 6 weeks to process.

Now they tell me.  Like they’re custom-making a bag for me???

If I’d known what a swiz this might be, I’d have googled “Buxton complaints” because I discovered a buttload.

[Try googling it yourself. You’ll find that some of  the complainers had waited as long as 3 months to get their POS purse. Others discovered it was ugly, poorly made, smelled bad and the dye bled on everything. Those who got past this initial shock and began using it discovered that it almost immediately began to disintegrate….  But I digress.]

I called Buxton customer service yesterday and said I wanted to cancel. The gal said, “Uh… you can’t. It’s already shipped.”  But she couldn’t tell me when it had shipped or by what method.

I smelled fish.

“You can always send it back to us if you don’t like it and we’ll give you back the $29.95,” she said, “but you’ll have to pay the shipping charges.”  (The complaint site made it clear that most folks return the bag and suck up the shipping charges.)

Evidently they don’t actually start the shipment procedure until you call to cancel – then they say “Sorry, too late; it shipped.” Then they institute the shipping process.

The shipping scam: the purse is sent from Reno in a light plastic bag using the cheapest possible postal rate (less than $5) via horse-drawn buggy.  Since they charged you $15 they net $10.

Now I get it: they’re actually a shipping company with just a dozen bags in stock. They keep these in constant rotation: as soon as a buyer receives a bag and realizes what a POS it is, she ships it back (at her expense). No need for an expensive warehouse and lots of inventory.

Buxton slaps a new label on the tired package and out it goes again.This might explain why the complainers often report that the bag looked shopworn.

I finally got the guy in customer service to agree to refund the shipping charges – after he conferred with his supervisor. I was pissed.

Especially at my own stupidty.

Update 12/19: Stronger smell of fish. After calling Customer Service on 12.16 and they said “Uh…it’s shipped – too late to cancel”, I kept checking my credit card online to see when they would charge me, since normally businesses hit your charge card as soon as possible – like the instant they ship. The charge didn’t show up till today, dated 12/18 – two full days after I was told it was shipped. In other words it was bullshit that it had shipped earlier.

Update 1/5/09: Bag finally arrived in my mailbox – six weeks after I ordered it. I refused it and sent it back.  Called Buxton and said I wanted the FULL amount refunded, including shipping. I finally got to a supervisor who agreed they would refund it all.

Update 2/8/09: A credit showed up on my charge card… for $29.95. Not the shipping.  I called again – had to get to a supervisor.  They said they’d refund the rest of it. We’ll see.

Poem: “Purpose of time” by X.J. Kennedy

Poetry/picture interlude for a miserable winter day.

Cotoneaster’s last leaves and berries on my fence (12/4/08).

The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once
by X.J. Kennedy, from The Lords of Misrule.

Suppose your life a folded telescope
Durationless, collapsed in just a flash
As from your mother’s womb you, bawling, drop
Into a nursing home. Suppose you crash
Your car, your marriage—toddler laying waste
A field of daisies, schoolkid, zit-faced teen
With lover zipping up your pants in haste
Hearing your parents’ tread downstairs—all one.

Einstein was right. That would be too intense.
You need a chance to preen, to give a dull
Recital before an indifferent audience
Equally slow in jeering you and clapping.
Time takes its time unraveling. But, still,
You’ll wonder when your life ends: Huh? What happened?

Progeny Pride: my son the blogging designer

Progeny: n. children, descendants, offspring

Pride:  n. the quality or state of being proud, holding in high esteem.

My son just put up his second essay at Huffington Post (in the Style section) and he’s a damn fine writer, that boy is. Better than I was at his age, thatsa fo’ sure.  So much talent in one package… but then, the other ingredient he has in spades is perseverance (perennial favorite issue for me – just check the tag cloud for samples).

His first post was about how the recession could provide new opportunities for connection. His topic today is slow living… from slow food to slow blogging to slow sex.

As a person without a partner, I can’t speak much about slow sex these days. But I will be looking into slow blogging – one of these days.

Slow blogging theory says that if it’s worth saying, it’s worth taking the time to say it well – to think it through, to explore the nooks and crannies of the question. It says:

Slow Blogging is a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time, switching between banality, crushing heartbreak and end-of-the-world psychotic glee in the mere space between headlines. The thing you wished you said in the moment last week can be said next month, or next year, and you’ll only look all the smarter.

Dang it.  (Conservatively) 75% of my posts would probably have been better left unwritten.

But quality was never my goal. The purpose of this blog was to create a daily writing practice – quantity – to crank out words in the hopes that with practice, quality would be more frequent.

There’s an old Yiddish story about a tailor who was a shoddy workman, but cheap. When customers would complain about a jacket he’d just made, he’d say, “Never mind the quality, feel the width.” (Later it was the title of a 1970s British sitcom.)

This is my 280th post since I started in April.   Feel the width!

Best Buddies won’t desert Obama

Best: adj. superlative of good, excelling all others

Buddy: n. companion, friend, partner

[Quick update/apology: I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this yesterday. Neither Best nor Buddies begins with P. I guess I’ve been in an alliterative frame of mind and mistook B for P. Oh well. I’m leaving it up because I like the sentiment.]

My heart warmed to read today that the Obamas have a group of Chicago friends that they’ve been close to for years – friends who were neighbors, parenting buddies, friends to hang out with regularly, to play scrabble with, eat with, take vacations with – and most recently to be campaign helpers.  These friends will be stuck in Chicago when the Obamas leave, and they’re trying to figure out how to maintain the connections at such distance.

It made me wonder why we never heard about the Bush’s friends. Did they have any? (I mean social, not politicos like Karl Rove). For that matter, did they have much of a relationship with their twin daughters?  Maybe Laura did, but I had no sense of that with GW.

You learn a lot about a person by looking at his social circle, such as it is.

Last summer Maureen Dowd wrote a great column about Father Pat Connor who’s been  giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” – to high school seniors for about 40 years. I picked out some of Connor’s points because Obama embodies them in many ways.

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? …

“Does he use money responsibly? Is he stingy? Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card.

“Don’t marry a problem character thinking you will change him. He’s a heavy drinker, or some other kind of addict, but if he marries a good woman, he’ll settle down. People are the same after marriage as before, only more so.

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women.  Is there … an atmosphere of racism, sexism or prejudice in his home? Are his goals and deepest beliefs worthy and similar to yours? …

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?”

It strikes me that a good choice for president would do well to start here. Obviously too few of us gave GW Bush the test.