December 24, 2009

Peace on Earth, at home, anyway

It's Christmas Eve again already, and here is my annual Christmas blog . . .

Finding Peace

“Peace on Earth” this Christmas?

Don’t think so. So many Christmas cards I’ve mailed, promising “Peace on
Earth.” Hasn’t happened in my lifetime. I have seen Christmas cards in family
scrapbooks from the 1940s, including 1943, the year I was born. They promised
“Peace on Earth,” in the middle of World War II, with the first tactical atomic
explosion at Hiroshima still two years away. I haven’t and wouldn’t be able to
document it, but I’ll bet Earth has not had a moment of peace since then.

Maybe if we narrowed it down. “Peace in the Christian World.” Nope. “Peace in
America.” Daily murders, violence and crime, in streets, in movies and on TV.
“Peace in California.” Road rage capital of the world. “Peace in San Diego.” Har
de har har. Corruption City. “Peace in La Mesa.” La Mesa is where I live, and
we do have our quiet moments, but why would I offer that as your Christmas
wish? “Peace at my house.” Now we’re getting close, as long as we don’t watch
the news, but peace at my house doesn’t do you much good, and your good is
my wish.

No, once again this Christmas, peace anywhere on Earth has to be portable, and
that peace is achievable. Insurance follows the car, and peace follows the
person. “Peace in your mind” is totally possible this Christmas Day, or if not this
Christmas (it takes a little work), then by next Christmas. If peace follows all the
people who come to sit down at your Christmas dinner, then you will have
“Peace at the Christmas dinner table.”

At many Christmas dinner tables, though, including many in my past, you might
as well ask for “Peace on Earth.”

So many people go through life wired with buttons to be pushed. Such buttons
can be pushed from a range of a thousand miles. All it takes is the right word
traveling through the air. Get a dozen button-wired people at a Christmas dinner
table, and watch out.

The buttons can be unwired. All you have to do is take back the power you have
given to some other person to push it. These can be very important and powerful
people: mothers, fathers, etc. But it isn’t their power they use to push your
buttons. It is yours. You gave it to them years ago, probably starting in
childhood. With that power, they can push your buttons at any time and make
you feel small, cheap, insignificant, selfish, ungrateful, undesirable, inferior, a
lifelong waster of every opportunity you ever had at achieving the greatness that
you were born for, if you had only listened to the person leaning with all his or her
weight against the thumb pressing your button.

You gave that person that power and weight, and you can take it back. All it
takes is forgiveness. Appropriate, at the Christmas season, and the figure it
celebrates, that the route to peace involves forgiveness. But it works. I don’t
know exactly how it works, and it takes some work and willingness to get there,
but when you forgive, you take power back, and peace is there waiting.
Forgiveness, power, surrender, peace and freedom are all different spellings of the same
human condition: happiness.

When you are ready, and it very well could require some professional guidance,
you come to a point where you simply say in your mind to a person: “I forgive
you.” At that instant, the button becomes unwired. The person may say the
same things as before, words that for years you felt as sandpaper in your ears or
an arrow through your heart. But now the words pass right through you and out
into space. Left behind is a feeling of liberation you have known only in your
dreams.

You haven’t said a word to the person about forgiveness. The person knows
something has happened, though, because the button doesn’t work anymore.
So he or she quits pushing, and it is a relief. It was your power, but it required
their energy to keep their thumbs on your buttons all those years, and at some
point, inside themselves, they will feel relieved.

But this Christmas story about reachable peace is not about them; it is about you.
It is a true story.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:32 AM | | Comments

December 23, 2009

Snoopy season



Our house is directly below the approach path that various aircraft follow when doing a flyover at Qualcomm Stadium, about nine miles to the northwest. In 1998, when San Diego hosted a Super Bowl, I walked outside about five minutes before kickoff and saw a black speck southeast of us. The speck grew rapidly into a Stealth Bomber, about 1,000 feet above me, streaking toward the stadium. Too late to run for the camera, but before bowl games now I never go outside without it. Tonight, the Poinsettia Bowl is being played at Qualcomm. At 3:30, in the vicinity of our house, Snoopy was warming up. Click on the images for a close-up.

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December 12, 2009

With some sun peeking through


Click on the images for a closer view.

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November 23, 2009

Under Treatment

Last Friday was a bizarre day.

I had had a cold all week, but still looking forward to going to Denver. Tyler had 50-yard-line tickets to the Chargers-Broncos game and had asked me to come visit him and Kathleen and go to the game. Friday morning, getting up and getting ready to go to the airport, I actually felt better. But as Karen drove me down, I felt some real congestion starting up.

She let me out, I got into a curbside line, but was coughing so hard I had to step out of line twice. I couldn't get my breath and felt like I might throw up. I started to feel totally isolated, alone in a crowd. I got upstairs and through security, but on the concourse it really hit me. It felt like I had a column of warm, salty water, bubbling in my windpipe, and it was coming up to drown me. Coughing did no good. The water was right there, bubbling just beneath my throat, and I couldn't breathe.

I stopped and sat down. I envied the people passing by, completely unconcerned with their health or immediate future. I had my boarding pass in my pocket but realized that I was not going to get on the airplane. My seat was 25A, and I could see one of these futile coughing fits starting up as the plane left the gate, and I could not get up to go the restroom and put my head between my legs to let the mucus drain and get some air.

I took my pass up to the gate and handed it to the boarding agent. "I am sick and can't go on your airplane today." I called Karen to come get me. "You're kidding!" she said, knowing how I had looked forward to this trip. Tyler and I had been figuring menus all week, and he had asked me for a recipe for elk chili. I made one up and sent it to him, without any confidence it would be edible.

An hour later Karen and I were on the phone to Kaiser, begging to see my primary care physician. When I told the screening nurse what had happened, she referred me straight to the emergency room. I felt so bad for Karen; she had been looking forward to some quiet time, and now this. Talking to the registration nurse, I could barely breathe. Half an hour later, in Bed 13 of Module D in the emergency area, a nice, engaging doctor named Chiang confirmed I had pneumonia. "But I had a pneumonia shot last year," I said. He shrugged. "There are different types of pneumonia."

He and a wonderful nurse named Rhonda took care of me, getting xrays, studying histories, taking blood cultures out of one arm and feeding antibiotics into the other. I told her I had really wanted to be on an airplane on this particular morning, but the way I felt, this emergency room, under her care, was really the place for me to be. And then I had an epiphany. Money is the combat issue in the health care debate, but to anyone in a situation like mine, there are two words that are priceless: "under treatment." Until those two words are available, on any given day, to any given citizen, this country is not prioritizing correctly.

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October 03, 2009

A weather worthy weekend


Click on the images for a close-up.

It looks like we won't have an Acorn Fever season at all, this autumn in Southern California. Now it is Oct. 2, and we have yet to experience that first cool snap that triggers the Fever. That snap is forecast to begin later today, with the arrival of a cold front coming down the coast from the Gulf of Alaska. If the weather bureau is right, tomorrow will be cloudy, cool and rainy at our house. Given the late date of this cool snap, it has a chance to endure for three or four days before temperatures warm again. This is key. When a snap like this hits in early September, it may be only 24 hours before the temperatures have gone back up into the 90s, trapping Southern Californians in the flannels they pulled on in the gray, cool dawn.

Now, in early October, we may have a few days to adjust. We can enjoy the warmth of our flannels, long enough to be willing to put them away, this time in the front of the closet, when temperatures climb again, into the 80s or 90s, by Thursday or Friday.

Meanwhile, as the weather forecasters focused on the north, a tropical storm named Olaf spun up off the southwestern tip of Baja California, and then headed north, straight for us. I pray for such events, but they are exceedingly rare, when tropical storms - what we call monsoon moisture - reach us from the south and east. As a weather freak, I was ticked off when the weather bureau said Olaf would be steered east, away from us, by the very system that was promising to bring us our first cool, rainy experience of the season on Saturday and Sunday.

It turns out that Olaf had some swagger, and sent streams of clouds into our area before the front from the north could do its steering work. By noon yesterday, there was talk of sprinkles. By 3 p.m., light showers were possible, and by 4, there was a mention of thunderstorms. At our house, east of downtown San Diego, all this talk amounted to about 47 wet dots where raindrops hit our flagstone. The sky, on the other hand, was alive with Olaf. The showers didn't hit the ground, but they were up there. "Virga" is what the weather people call showers that don't reach the ground.

These showers do unique things, however, with sunlight. I have lived at Alta Mira since 1992, and I have seen some amazing scenery in the sky. Yesterday, though, brought something entirely new, that Karen, who snapped these images, called "sun showers." I hope I am lucky enough to see something like this again, someday, in the skies west of our house. And this weekend, we still have a rainy Sunday to look forward to.

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August 27, 2009

Staring at a new world beyond the windows

We are doing a lot of gazing out the window these days. A guy named Greg Rubin lifted up our house this summer and plunked it down in the middle of the most amazing desert garden. He and his crew finished their work two weeks ago, but still we gaze, and try to understand. I could have sworn there was an ancient, cracked, concrete patio out there, and hideous, stamped pavers – some of them scalloped! – set on their edges and used as a low retaining wall, and below the french doors a wide step I made myself, out of concrete brick and two-by-twelves of which any trailer park landlord would be proud.

Now, from the living room couch, I swear we see a curvy design of pale flagstone terrace and walkways, gravel areas, mulch beds, tiny (for the moment) native plants, and dry-stacked stone walls, a landscape such as tourists might encounter when renting premium villas in Palm Springs and Scottsdale. For a few days, Gulliver would have none of it. He would creep gingerly halfway down the new stone walk meandering through mulch beds along the side of the house, then make a decision: “This is not where I live.” And retire to the indoors, which he still recognized.

Actually we wish his confusion had carried on a little longer. Now he feels quite regal in his new environment and never returns to the house within bringing in a few strands of mulch clinging to his Sheltie feathers, which mulch, it turns out, loves.

The terrace tableau carries around the corner to the glider porch, with space expanding several new feet out from the porch to the lip of a retaining wall that gives a crisp frame to the view. Beyond the front door, with its new flagstone stoop, the flagstone transitions to the meandering stone walk and a long slope of mulch studded with a variety of native plants. The walk passes a new garden setting on the left, at the back of the house, and on the right, a bubbling fountain at the point where wide stone steps cascade down to the garage and street. The transition from the old back to the new back is even more startling than the change around on the patio side.

The term, “native plant” refers to plants that are native to the deserts, both high and low, that are so typical of Southern California and much of the Southwest. Our house is 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean, which we can see – when we remember to look, these days – from the new terrace. Yet we are lucky to get 12 inches of rain a year. Someday the water SoCal imports from the north and east will run out, but for now there is enough to support all types of lush, grassy landscaping, but many Californians dote on the native plant option. In fact there is a “Native Plant Society.”

Native plants love our natural semi-arid circumstances, and once they take hold, they grow into a palette of sizes, shapes, textures, and flowery color. Around our house, Greg, the owner of CalOwn, and his crew set in 16 varieties of native plants, and a couple of types of trees. We are already seeing tiny flowers of blue, purple, yellow, and red.
The work took a hard-working crew five weeks, and it was the kind of hard work that goes with landscaping a house that has, as they say in the trade, “difficult access.” I won’t tell you what it cost, but it was ungodly reasonable, given the result. I have never in my life seen an equivalent bang for the buck.

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August 08, 2009

Waking up to an Acorn Fever scare

Yesterday morning dawned cloudy, breezy, and suspiciously cool. Not just our run-of-the-mill coastal Southern California "marine layer" clouds, either. These clouds had some heft. I checked the calendar: August 7. A chill rose on the back of my neck. Acorn Fever. We have never had a breakout of Acorn Fever this early. The weather records show that we have had occurrences in August, but always late August, with enough proximity to September to allow us to think it could happen any day now.

But Aug. 7 would catch us totally unprepared. I pulled on my sweatshirt – DON'T BE ALARMED, I have been wearing it indoors as we have kept the A/C running to combat our recent hot days – and went outside to sniff the wind. It was brisk, out of the southwest, coming off the ocean. It was unusually cool, and it almost, but not quite, had a bite. It's normally this bite that sets off the Fever, so I felt good about that. The low, thick clouds were also starting to burn off, another good sign, but above them were high streaks of cirrus with scattered cumulus below. It looked like a November sky. It would bear watching.

The cause of all of this was a low pressure system, "unseasonably strong," the Weather Bureau said. It was moving off the ocean into Central California. Trailing off it, into our territory, was a windy front that was prompting wind advisories in the mountains and deserts to our east. For us, it meant the arrival of this breeze I was sniffing, and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than earlier in the week. The clouds, the actual temperature drop, and, most critically, the Saturday morning weather, would determine the actions of the populace.

It was this populace, the Southern California locals, to whom my reassuring DON'T BE ALARMED, above, was directed. These are Acorn Fever veterans, and they know the symptoms: a feeling of coziness, an urge to pull on sweat clothes, the need to build a fire, to rake leaves, to cook a pot of chili, to drive to the mountains with the car heater on to buy jugs of apple cider.. I assumed the duty, three decades ago, of Acorn Fever sentinel in our area, advising readers in my San Diego Union column of the conditions and what we might expect as each Fever season approached. People still approach me in supermarkets, saying, "What kind of Acorn Fever season do you think we will have this year?"

Well, this year, I am glad the harbinger happened on a Friday. Saturday being a holiday for most will naturally minimize the number of workers who might otherwise have gone to work in woolens and pashminas this morning. The number of homeowners pulling on Pendletons, swilling hot chocolate, raking nonexistent leaves (the Fever and what it does to humans can truly be pitiful to watch) and building roaring fires will be increased, of course, on a Saturday morning, but these victims will be closer to safety when the temperature hits 90 by noon. That is the typical Acorn Fever pattern in Southern California: a cool snap arriving overnight, a cloudy, breezy morning with temperatures in the 60s – or, in severe episodes, in the 50s – and then the temperature rebounding to 90 by noon, trapping victims far from home, spilling out of office buildings onto steamy sidewalks under a stark blue sky, leaving silent rescue crews to collect soggy piles of autumn outfits where humans, melted alive by the Fever had stood, nothing now but the DNA in their sweat to identify them.

Yesterday remained on the cool side – high 70s – through the afternoon. So far so good. We would know the rest at Saturday daybreak. When it arrived, I pulled on my sweater, got coffee, went outside and sat on the glider. There were clouds, but not heavy, more marine-layerish. No breeze. Just cool enough to feel bare skin draw up, but only slightly. I scanned the neighborhood for chimney smoke; there was none. Good sign. After 20 minutes I went back to the kitchen and waited for the urge to make waffles and chili. It didn't come. I think we dodged a bullet.

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July 22, 2009

A few words from Big Dog's favorite talking animal


Believe me, I am not going to be taking over this blog. I only have a brain the size of a lime, and my people have brains the size of cauliflowers. So I can't compete with that. I have them where I want them anyway. It's not every dog that can talk his human blogger into giving him some space, but mine does. He calls me Gulliver. I call him Big Dog. He wears a blue t-shirt sometimes that says right on it: "Big Dog." It makes me proud.

His job is media, and he knows how important animals are to media. He says: "Can animals talk?" "Yes!" I say. He says: "Who's the most famous talking animal in the world today?" I say: "Snoopy!" Can you imagine "Peanuts" without Snoopy? I can't. He is even on some of the blimps that fly through my sky yard. (If you click on the picture once, then twice, you can see Snoopy flying the blimp!) No, Big Dog says, Snoopy is pretty famous, but not this famous. What is the answer? Mickey Mouse! A mouse! A brain the size of a lentil! But Mickey presides over a multi-billion-dollar international entertainment corporation. It goes to show you, brain size doesn't always matter.

Then Big Dog says: "You know who my favorite talking animal is?" I shake my head. "You!" he says, and scratches me just below my ear, where I like it. Last week, when Bo, the First Dog, got an op-ed in The New York Times, Big Dog agreed that I should have some blog time, too. Now my dog brothers and sisters suddenly seem to be all over the papers, and on TV. Maybe they were always there and I just didn't notice.

The Times really seems to be going to the dogs. I don't say that as a bad thing. On Monday, they introduced a new feature, "The Puppy Diaries: Taking the Plunge With a New Dog." Is that cool, or what? This morning, Wednesday, two days later, that story is still No. 2 on the Times' "Most Popular Email" list. Dogs rule! Dog stories got legs! I bet you I could live to be two hundred and never see a story like that about cats.

The star of that story is Scout, who is a golden retriever. The story says Scout's breeder thoroughly checked out the people who wanted to take her home. The writer of the story, Jill Abramson, was tickled, but didn't seem to mind, because she knows that dogs are worth it. She is going to write every Monday about what it is like, "raising a puppy through its first year of life." Scout, just go on the paper and you've got it made. Jill says: "Somehow I had forgotten how much having a new puppy is like having a new baby." It brings a tear to my eye. I had to go over to Big Dog and give him a nostalgic tap on the leg with my muzzle.

There was another big story, happening right here in San Diego, but it made the national news. This one was about playing tapes of dogs barking, to chase the seals out of Children's Cove, down in La Jolla. They are ready to spend $700,000 on the project. That's a lot of Science Diet! I hereby notify the City of San Diego that I will do the job, in person, for only $350,000. Contact Big Dog.

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July 17, 2009

A few thoughts from Gulliver


If the President's dog, Bo, can write an op-ed piece and get it published in this morning's New York Times, I can certainly have some fun with the occasional blog of my own. My name is Gulliver. "Gully" for short. To my human readers, Happy Friday! To my dog brothers and sisters, Happy Dog Day!

Dogs are certainly coming up in the world. First there is Bo's column (well written! You should read it), and then on the "Today" show (I nap through most of it) this morning, a story about Pet Airways. You wouldn't get me on one of those things, but now dogs (and yes, cats) can fly out of cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, and not in the baggage hold, like in times prior, but right up in the passengers' cabin (all the people stuff has been taken out).

I’m a stay-at-home dog. You can barely get me into the car to go to the vet. Plenty of excitement here. We live on the side of a hill, and I watch the street down there for people and dogs, and when I see them, my ears and tail go up and I bark like crazy until I can't see them anymore. The hill is so steep that the telephone poles along the street are actually below my eye level, and I am all the time looking down at birds flying past. It does interesting things to dog instincts. Barkeley – Dog, I miss her – told me that when your yard is open space that you start to want to chase things like airplanes and blimps when they are flying low through your "yard." I have seen pictures of her barking and chasing a Sanyo blimp that came by pretty low one day.

I was a big puppy when they brought me home 10 years ago, obviously destined, when I grew up, to be bigger than Barkeley, who was average size for a Sheltie. That's why they call me Gulliver. Barkeley was great, a real lady, and very kind, but also a lot of fun. We had great chases, even if she was faster than I was. She was beautiful, but she had funny ears. They didn't flop over. She died a couple of Christmases ago, and I still miss her. I hear talk around here of getting another puppy, but it hasn't happened yet.

Don't get me wrong. Life is good. My people love me, and I think they even understand me a little bit. They don't mind when I run right past them to my food bowl. They just look at me and say, "Food first, people second," so they know basic dog philosophy. They also tell me I am beautiful, but I don't pay much attention to that. I am not a dog to put on airs. Give me the simple life, a good ear scratch, a shady hallway. At Alta Mira, every day is a dog's life. Bo, my friend, you can have the spotlight. I wonder if he is on Facebook.

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July 04, 2009

Alta Mira Gallery


Some Alta Mira fireworks for the Fourth . . .
Click on the image for a close-up.

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June 05, 2009

Recorded

1:27 p.m., Friday, June 5, 2009

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June 03, 2009

A break in the June Gloom

Clouds are not a curiosity in Southern California. We have low clouds all the time. In fact, we are in our season of what we call May Gray, proceeding now into what we call June Gloom. We sit next to the Pacific Ocean, and it interacts with the atmosphere this time of year to create a "marine layer" which is a deck of fog-level clouds that sit over us from dawn to midday and sometimes longer.

But rarely, like today, we get a distant weather feature called an offshore low, that can bring us clouds like these. Today's low was sitting off the coast, 600 miles west of San Francisco, with no jet stream to guide it anywhere. Rotating around this low were bands of moisture and instability that actually brought rain, wind, thunder and lightning to parts of Southern California today. The local news opened with a five-minute story on this weather. We saw none at our house, however. I have a long reputation as a reverse Joe Btfsplk, the Li'l Abner character who always had a storm cloud over his head. Wherever I travel, even in summer in Tornado Alley, and how much I hope for stormy weather, clear skies always follow me.


But these clouds were fine. After general clouds all day, these thoroughbreds showed up about 5 p.m. They were gorgeous.


And a few seconds after I snapped this last image, I felt a drop of rain on my left forearm. Only one.

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May 17, 2009

Sunset, Alta Mira, May 17, 2009


Click on the image for a close-up.

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May 13, 2009

Getting her feet wet in Ancillary Dilemmas

The highlight reel advances from the ceiling fan last week to the kitchen yesterday morning, where Karen is calling to me: “Michael, can you come in here for a minute?”

I am in the bedroom, dressing, in a bit of a hurry. But her tone is beckoning. Not alarmed, or hysterical, so I know it’s not a spider or a snake. It says, “No need to call 911, but there’s something in here that you really need to see, right now.” I drop my pants, walk down the hall and into the kitchen and there is Karen, standing over a dishwasher that is about one-third full of soap suds. Tongues of suds have trickled out at the corners and are spreading alluvially onto the floor. It looks like a dishwasher with rabies.

I hate this. I have had some success as a handyman in my homeowning history, but sick dishwashers are unapproachable by amateurs. You put dishes and soap in, close the door, turn it on, and behind the closed door things of unimaginable wisdom occur until the hissing stops, you open the door, and the dishes are clean. There is only one thing I know to do, before we call the appliance people. “It could be the drain is blocked,” I say.

She tells me that in fact she had found a cap loose in the bottom of the washer. It is the cap that screws into the opening of a reservoir in the door that holds a kind of rinsing product. Years ago I poured some of this rinsing product, called Jet Dry, into the reservoir and have not thought about it again since. Karen has now screwed the cap back into the opening, but the machine is not draining. I have another thought. “You were washing pots and pans in the sink while the machine was running,” I say, starting to glow with brilliance. “Maybe the volume was too much for the drain.” Karen closes the door, starts the machine, soap pours out. I shrug.

“Call the plumber,” I say, and head off up the hall. Then Karen says, “Oh no!” in a stricken sort of way that brings me back. She is standing in front of the open sink cabinet, a bottle of Dawn Dishwashing Soap in one hand, a bottle of Jet Dry in the other. They are very similar. She doesn’t have to speak; I can reconstruct the truth. Loading the washer, she finds the cap, decides to fill the reservoir, but instead of Jet Dry she has poured in a three-month supply of Dawn Dishwashing Soap. I ache with empathy for her. This is what I call an Ancillary Dilemma, when an act meant to correct some situation in fact turns it into a completely different situation that is geometrically more complex than the original. I have dozens of Ancillary Dilemmas in my handyman record. Once again, as with the ceiling fan, I feel a bit of pride stirring, this time for Karen standing there with the two bottles in her hands. As Ancillary Dilemmas go, this one is pretty good.

So good, in fact, that it resists Googling. “Wrong soap in dishwasher” yields 1,270,000 results, so common as to be plebian. From the dishwasher manual (which I recommended), she discovers that the reservoir is called simply the “rinse agent.” For historical purposes, I undertake this search myself. “Wrong soap in rinse agent” yields no results at all, but invites a further search of wrong soap in rinse agents “without quotes.” That search yields 234,000 results, with this caveat at the bottom of the first page: “Tip: these results do not include the word ‘wrong.’ Show results that include ‘wrong’.” That search yields 12,000 results, including a link to WikiAnswers, which provides this solution:

“Take the door apart and remove the jet dry reservoir. Thoroughly rinse out the reservoir, then put everything back together.” Right. This is the same as a recipe for hamburgers that begins, “Go out and kill a cow.” The appliance repair people are coming tomorrow. Though you would think that a human who can navigate himself through Google to get to a WikiAnswer for “Wrong soap in rinse agent” should be able to find his way through a dishwasher door. There are some truths that just don’t make sense.

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April 28, 2009

Hello 911? A ceiling fan killed my husband

We have a handsome new ceiling fan in the living room. The five blades are thick, dark-reddish wood, extending out 62 inches from a dark bronze hub, and beautifully concave. Mark, our electrician, installed it this morning then turned it on. Compared to the old fan, the blades’ rotation was lazy.

“Turn it up to high,” Karen said. Mark looked at the remote control. “It is on high,” he said. We checked the remote, and, sure enough it was on high. “It’s moving a lot of air,” Mark said. “If it turned any faster than that,” I said, eying the prodigious blades, “the house would take off.”

It is a vast improvement over the old fan, which had 52-inch blades with the wicker-look inserts, but did not hold its proportional weight in the space, which features a vaulted ceiling and a massive ridgepole beam spanning the width of the room. This new fan reminds me of the noxious commercial where the cool couple sits across the desk from the mega-cool designer, who asks, “And what can I do for you?” And the woman, who was either highly paid or had no idea how idiotic this made her look, sets a faucet fixture on the desk and says, “Design a house around this.”

You could have designed our living room around this new ceiling fan. But we didn’t exactly go looking for it. The old fan would still be with us if I hadn’t single-handedly destroyed it last week. That fan had a pull chain that I had used successfully for years to change its speed. It had three speeds: low, medium, high. It was on medium, and Karen, on a warm evening, asked me to change it to high. “Three clicks,” I said. “Low, off, high.” I reached up and pulled the chain.

I don’t exactly know what happened next. I felt the chain knob slip free of my fingers. That has happened before. The chain, freed, arced upward. That has happened before. Then something happened. The motor housing, above the blades, started turning with the blades. The entire unit was rotating. Karen yelled, “It’s unscrewing at the top!” “What?” I yelled, transfixed by the rotating motor housing. “Unscrewing! At the top!” She yelled something about what I should do, but I yelled back, “Shut up!” I shouldn’t have done that, but I needed time to think. I ran to get a dining chair, climbed on it, and tried to stop the fan turning. I looked up at the beam and saw that the drop rod had become completely unscrewed from the beam housing. The fan had dropped about a foot and was hanging suspended only by its wiring.

I stared at the wiring and wondered if my death would come from electrocution, or fan blade blows, or falling off the chair, or telling Karen to shut up. Then the fan stopped. I let it go. I climbed off the chair. Karen spared me. Probably not 60 seconds had passed. It seemed like an eternity.

In the aftermath, I surmised that the chain must have arced just high enough to be caught by the blade hub, around which it wrapped, jamming into the clearance between the hub and the motor housing. And then the motor housing started to turn. There was no way to intervene. Before I was finished thinking about it, I had developed a bit of pride in myself, in the sense of contributing to a highlight reel. It was like the time I almost drowned when my water ski tips got pointed down, just as the towrope handle got trapped between my legs. That was a long time ago. But you remember.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 2:16 PM | | Comments

April 22, 2009

A first-rate mockingbird

Every morning, for the last several mornings, on a telephone pole down the hill from us, sits a mockingbird I wish Atticus Finch could see.

Atticus is, of course, the memorable lead character, memorably played by Gregory Peck, in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A scene comes where Atticus is explaining to his children, Jem and Scout, his way with guns. He says: “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
“Why?” says Jem.
“Well,” Atticus says, “I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”

This singer down on the telephone pole, he is pure mockingbird. He chirps, tweets, trills, imitates motors, makes a noise like a cane stick dragged across a washboard. Singing his heart out. When it gets too much for him, which is about once a minute, he leaps into the air, rising several feet on a fluttering of his wings with their distinctive white chevron markings and then settles back to his perch, never missing a beat.

Some Texan from the past had the good sense to claim the mockingbird as the State Bird of Texas. Things have felt very much like Texas around our house the past few days, with the breeze already warm even before sunup, the Texas privet in bloom, and the mockingbird partying down on the telephone pole. He seems to like it there. Lots of bird types perch on that pole – hawks, crows, sparrows, finches. But they come and go. Our mockingbird has occupied the pole exclusively since last weekend. Once a couple of sparrows approached, landing on braces below the beam where the mockingbird was singing away. I got the impression that the sparrows wanted him to shut up, and were going to team up on him. They advanced upward, but the mockingbird turned to meet them, and away they flew, either intimidated or unable to stand the decibel level.

Of course at night, the mockingbird becomes a party animal. Sometimes a mockingbird will take a midnight shine to the bottlebrush tree at the corner of the house and sing the night away. A person trying to sleep can become sparrowish toward such behavior. This has not happened since Karen and I have been married, but she recalls times when she would go outside at 2 a.m. and heave rocks into trees toward the music. I don’t object to this – I don’t think Gregory Peck could kill a mockingbird with a rock in the middle of the night – but it’s not something I would do. I hold a fondness for a bird that would stay up and sing all night. It wouldn’t be a sin, but maybe, for me, a transgression, to diss a mockingbird.

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April 19, 2009

A privet space

In my brain exists a neural pathway, created at the instant I got a whiff of Texas privet. Since I was born in March, I would have been two months old. We had privet in the front yard, and its blossoms open in April and May. I imagine I was nestled in somebody's lap on the front porch when it happened. I wonder what I did. I would have hated mashed bananas by then; probably I took the scent of privet as something from the opposite pole of this strange new world, placed there by God as an apology for the banana. So I would have smiled.


I still smile. Every time. Same way. Here is something special about life. When I leaned to sniff these blossoms this morning, I was transported to a specific place in space and time, where it is morning in May, about 10 o'clock, 80 degrees, a hint of breeze. I go to that exact same space, every time. So far we have only two clusters, this and one other, that have bloomed, but the cluster on the left above will pop this week. They only bloom in late April and May, and the rest of the time it's a hedge. So these weeks are dear, and transporting.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 12:34 PM | | Comments

April 09, 2009

Sunset, moonrise

A couple of times a year, the sun sets at Alta Mira, and the moon rises, almost at the same time. But only every two or three years, if we are lucky, does the sun set and the moon rise in a way that forces us to make a choice. Last night was such a night. The sun and moon were both so compelling, in their departure and arrival, that you had to choose your compulsion. As you did, you had to turn your back on the other. No way to have both at the same time. These events represent proof of something my grandmother Susie always said. "You can't have it all." I don't know if she learned that by watching sunsets and moonrises in her native Alabama, or adopted Texas, but I can speak to her from Southern California and tell her what she said was true.

Actually, I missed the best shot of all. I was watching events from the glider when I looked at the clouds in the east and thought I saw something huge and white. I wasn't looking for it, so its size shocked me. I realized it was the moon, emerging. I ran for the camera and got the image above, which isn't half as dramatic as what I had seen seconds before. But it wasn't bad. Then I turned my back on the moon and shot the sun. Moon and sun, looming through clouds and trees.

And back to the moon, starting to emerge. The moon plays optical tricks, depending on what it is near. Here, it does not appear nearly so large as when I first saw it. At that moment, it looked as big as a planet.


And up she came.



Another evening like this will be along again in a couple of years. Maybe sooner. The planet, in presenting its grandeur, always likes it to be a surprise.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:21 AM | | Comments

March 30, 2009

Spouse one-ups husband on rat quick-thinking

We don’t live out in the country, but we do live on a hillside with sufficient open space around to encourage owls to nest, coyotes to prowl, and wood rats to multiply.

The owls do flybys of our porch, at eye level, at deepest twilight. The coyotes come and go, sometimes within 20 feet of the house, and we know when they are in the area by their pre-dawn chattering. Nothing we can do about any of that, but then the wood rats took a liking to the crawl space beneath the house.

They come up the slope, more than the owls care to catch, to the edge of the deck, through a little stand of hibiscus, then tear across to the house and down the access to the crawlspace. They are pretty big, and lightning fast. If one ran into your leg at full throttle, it might break your ankle. We saw them in the evening, at a predictable time when the light had been fading for about half an hour. We might be in the living room, watching television, with the French doors open to let in the breeze, and we would glimpse a darting movement – several darting movements, spaced a minute or so apart – from the access back to the hibiscus and over the slope.

Weekend before last, we decided it was time. We got rat poison at Dixieline and plotted our strategy. We didn’t want the critters dying under the house, so we set a tray in amongst the hibiscus just as the sun hit the horizon. Then we closed the doors so Gulliver couldn’t get outside and possibly find the tray. I put a rubber band around my wrist, to remind me to bring in the tray after about an hour and a half, when it was dark.

The first night, there was barely a nibble gone out of the tray. The second night, we couldn’t even find the tray. The third night we found the tray, and it was empty. Hee hee. I don’t like killing anything anymore, even spiders, but neither do I want wood rats to muscle up under the joists one night and carry the house down the slope.

Karen read on the box it took three days for the poison to work. I reasoned they would get sick sooner than that, too sick to get back to the crawlspace the next day. Meantime, the evening track meet disappeared. We entered a period of waiting. Saturday morning, we were sitting in the nook, drinking coffee, reading the papers, minding our own business. The dishwasher was running. From the direction of the dishwasher there came a small click. I didn’t hear it at first, but Karen did. For living things in the house other than ourselves, she has radar like a bat. “Did you hear that?” she said. “No,” I said. Then it came again. Again.

A series of clicks, like water dripping. It was coming from inside the wall, at eye level above the sink. I walked around to the other side of the wall, by the front door, and heard the clicks. They were spaced about 20 seconds apart. Then they stopped. It was Karen, several minutes later, who said in a low voice, “A rat in his death throes.” I wished bitterly that I had said it first. It sounded possible: the hind leg of the rat, jerking in the rhythm of the death spiral, kicking against the interior of the wall.

We should know by the weekend, if we’ll be drinking coffee out on the glider.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 4:30 PM | | Comments

March 22, 2009

Killer Storm Looms!

I know, it is not easy being a weathercaster in Southern California, a desert next to a mammoth ocean with a cold current running offshore the length of the entire Pacific Coast. As a native Texan weather freak, I try to keep that in mind on mornings like these. For the last four days, the weather burons have advertised "a quick return to winter weather," with a vigorous trough racing southward bringing high winds and some rain, maybe half an inch, starting Saturday night and continuing through Sunday. This morning at 2 I awoke and listened for rain hitting the roof. Didn't hear any. I was disappointed. Texas weather freaks gear up for a promise of storminess the same way 11-year-old girls gear up for a Hannah Montana concert. It is goofy, I know, but it is just within us to go outside with the thunder booming and grin into the gale. We take great pleasure in anticipating same. Frequently, however, in Southern California, a Texan's hopes are dashed. It is idiotic to feel disappointment with the sort of weather I got to view when I went outside this morning. On the other hand, we get to see this almost every day.

The weather burons online insist the front will race through today. Or maybe it has already raced through so fast that no one saw it, not even the Doppler Radar. Now it is March 22, and this event most certainly would have been the last of our rainy season. The Southern California weather freaks can put their hopes away, the same way Easterners store their snowshoes. If you want a closer look at how nice it was this morning, click on the image, then click the Back arrow to return here.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:33 AM | | Comments

March 20, 2009

Look! It's the spring equinox!

Here is the moment of sunrise this morning, March 20, marking the first day of spring.


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March 19, 2009

Damn near the spring equinox

This is the morning of March 19, a day before the spring equinox, and I thought I better get pictures because the weather bureau says there is a good chance it will be cloudy tomorrow morning. I took this image before the real sunrise began because of the fog plopped into the valley and because of the contrails left by early morning flights.

I don't know if it is airliner Grand Central Station out there every morning, but the contrails show that kind of traffic present today. These flights are headed east, north, and south.

Here is the moment when the sun for several seconds is like a diamond on the rim of the world. You can see it is about to transit a horizon feature that we call Dolly's Right One at Five. I hope I can show you exactly where it comes up tomorrow, the actual equinox, but there may be clouds, you know.

And here is the almost-equinox moment of sunrise on the left, showing the distance across the horizon the sun has traveled since Dec. 21, when it rose out of Tut's eye, at the far right. As always, click on the image for a closer view. Then click the Back arrow to return here.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 6:00 PM | | Comments

March 08, 2009

The March Moon, almost full



Click on the images for an up-close look. What a planet we have.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:07 PM | | Comments

February 16, 2009

Universe again neglects needs of human photo taker

I am always on the watch for what I call the "proscenium effect" after a rainstorm. You have seen a proscenium effect ("proscenium" means the wall that separates the stage from the audience and makes an arch over it) if you have ever sat in a theater with darkness overhead and darkness below and a wonderful slash of light coming from the stage. Tonight looked like a good bet. The back edge of the storm was moving inland from the ocean just as the sun was dropping into position to light up the eastern horizon. But then the overhead lighting director fell asleep and let the black ceiling break into clouds and sky. Imagine if the sky above the house in this photo was a black ceiling. That would put the house into the proscenium effect I keep watching for.

It didn't happen, but I can't complain too much about the result. Below, I cheated some with a tight shot to take out the blue sky, and it gives an idea what a good proscenium effect might look like. You can only do so much with the timing of these things.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 5:44 PM | | Comments

February 13, 2009

And on the gazillionth day, God created digital cameras


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February 12, 2009

Lighting up Dolly's Right One

This is from yesterday morning, Feb. 11. That line of cloud is the contrail of a jetliner, headed for Los Angeles from South America. Every morning, that contrail appears and provides me a terrific lift before my day even begins. I am so happy not to be on that airplane.


Earlier this week, the Sun began its transit of Dolly's Right One, which is the most prominent feature in the Alta Mira Calendar. Through binoculars or a telephoto lens, the Sun, just as it begins to appear, lights up the distant ridgeline as if it had caught fire. On some mornings you can see the silhouettes of individual trees outlined for an instant against the brilliance. The sequence below offers a glimpse of that presence. In the top photo, you can just see the first speck of Sun, then the ridge catches fire, and then the Sun appears. The last photo is pulled back to show Tut on the right as a reference of where we are on the calendar. This morning, the Sun would have transited the summit of Dolly's Right One, but it was cloudy, darn it. For a closer look, you can click on the photos to expand them.






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Posted by Michael Grant at 8:15 AM | | Comments

February 09, 2009

The weather dreamers were right this time

I can’t bitch about the weather this week. In my last post, Saturday morning, the weather dreamers had forecast rain and possible thunderstorms. All the thunderstorms in Southern California are “isolated,” so you have to be near that isolation to notice any effect. At noon on Saturday an isolated thunderstorm approached from the southwest and found our house. We had rain, lightning, thunder and hail. I turned the rocker around toward the windows and watched it for almost an hour.

It was not a thunderstorm in the biblical sense. Coincidentally, on Saturday, both my children, Jessie and Tyler, were in San Diego, not at our house, but close enough (Jamul) to share this storm and possibly comment on it. When they were little, we were together on a visit to Abilene when they encountered, and remember, the kind of thunderstorm that I admire. It was summertime, a perfectly still day with stunning humidity. They were at my grandmother’s house, and I was watching my uncle play in a golf tournament.

At about 2:30, north of us, thunderheads shot into the sky as if launched from the earth. By 3, the base of those clouds was black and reached to the ground. I judged I had maybe 15 minutes to get home before it hit. I was a couple of minutes late. Our block was a black box shaking with thunder, lightning, rain and wind when I piled through the screen door onto the porch. I yelled to Jessie and Tyler to come out to the porch and watch. But they were inside, on the floor behind the couch. Trying to crawl UNDER the couch.

By comparison, the storm on Saturday was a polite cough. But still it set a record for me as a Californian. Never in 35 years’ residency here had I been in a storm that lasted an hour. The lightning, all cloud-to-cloud, stayed directly overhead and gave instant thunder. It HAILED. Nothing you would report to the paper. “BB-sized hail pummels La Mesa residence.” The pellets were tiny and jumped in a darting fashion, like ice fleas, as they hit the ground. It was hail, all the same. I have pictures, and I will post them when I get a minute. I am writing this from my office at school.

Jessie and Tyler were here on a sad weekend, after the death of their stepfather. He was a builder, and loved the outdoors, and the avocado groves he brought to life on the slopes below their house. I hope the storm brought significance to his family and their memories and stories of him. I know it was ironic that Jessie and Tyler should be close, all these years after that Abilene afternoon, at the time a storm set a record for me in San Diego.

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February 01, 2009

The month of purple flowers dawns

On the Alta Mira Calendar, on the morning of Feb. 1, the sun rises out of the top of the head of the Bust of George Washington. Below you see our old friend, the Mummy of King Tut, at the right side of the photo: his head, then his folded arms, then his feet poking up. His feet are pointing at the Bust of George Washington, whose head is at the left edge of the photo, and then his torso.


On Dec. 21, the morning of the Winter Solstice, the sun rose out of Tut's eye, below, and then began its long trek northward across the planet's face and, as we see it from the porch, across the features of the Alta Mira Calendar.



This morning, we reached Feb. 1 on that trek, and the sun rose out of the head of the Bust of George Washington. I can hear you thinking, why do I give a rat's patoot where the sun comes up from the porch of a doofus living in California? Well, I too wish the Alta Mira Calendar had some sort of Stonehengian oompf, that the sunrise on Feb. 1 lined up with something eerie or important. But it doesn't. At least as far as I know. I do think it is cool that the Alta Mira Calendar has been accurate for millions of years, patiently waiting for a doofus with a camera to come along and prove it to a waiting world. Something else I think is cool. When the sun first peeks over the ridge, for a long instant or two, you can look straight at it and note its brilliance. It looks exactly like a blazing, bazillion-carat diamond. I see it as a diamond on the rim of the world, connoting the marriage of the sun and the earth, together about to create another day and all the life that goes with it on this tiny dot in the universe.


Among those creations, around here anyway, are streams of purple flowers, a variety of iceplant or succulent that goes nuts in February, cascading like bridal trains across our hillsides and highways. It is the Southern California version of the Texas bluebonnets, which will be hiding from the icy northern winds for another six weeks or so. These are outside our front door. I wanted to get Gulliver in the shot, but you know about dogs and holding still.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:05 AM | | Comments

January 25, 2009

Sunset stages

Saturday night, 5:15 . . .

Saturday night, 5:35 . . .
Saturday night, 5:40.


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January 14, 2009

A better butter sunset




The Sun in California has its particular ways of setting into the ocean. From our house, it provides us this treat for about a third of the year. In the lower photo, see the dark mass arrowing into the Pacific from the right? That is Point Loma. The Sun in a few more weeks will transit Point Loma, and until late in the fall, all our sunsets will be over land. I always watch for the Point Loma transit, because it is so cool to watch, but it can be hard to catch. I hope I can post a transit photo when the time comes.

In the meantime, what we have here, from last night, is the maximum butter puddle effect. I have never seen one like this. On some evenings the Sun gives the appearance of a cool ball of butter spreading out into the warm ocean. The actual facts are the opposite, a hot Sun contacting a very cold ocean, thanks to a cold and deep Alaskan current that protects San Diego from the summer and fall Pacific hurricanes that move northward from the Mexican coasts until they hit that current and fall apart. I have mixed feelings about this. I would love three or four tropical storms a year, but they never get here.

But I never argue with the ways Nature chooses to present beauty to me, and every way unique. If Nature can cause a hot Sun to puddle like butter into a cold ocean, hooray. I have been watching sunsets from this location for 20 years, no two alike. This is the first butter puddle effect that sustained itself so long. And that doesn't count the melting of the ball into the puddle. The effect you see, which looks for all the world like a bright city on the horizon, was in sight for almost two minutes. If you want a closer look, click on the photos and they will expand.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 1:25 PM | | Comments

January 12, 2009

Sunstorms rage, people get to work anyway



I am so glad I have another week off from work, because San Diego is getting ripped with a brutal series of sunstorms right now, and it looks like they won't let up until at least Friday. I take my coffee outside at 7 a.m. and sit on the glider in shorts and t-shirt and grieve for those people in their cars down on the freeway, plowing grimly through a bitterly balmy morning toward the office. I see neighbors down the hillside stepping into their driveways. For a long minute, they look up at the eggshell-blue sky, searching for a cloud to take the edge off. They stand there, hands on hips, looking around as if trying to make up their minds about something. Finally they grimly pull open a car door, step inside, and drive slowly down the street.

I'll have to join them in another week. Oh, sunstorms blast us all winter long, from December into March. All it takes is a bit of a high pressure system forming over what we call "the great basin," up Utah way. Winds rotate clockwise around the system, get dried out over Nevada, Utah and Arizona, then blast into our mountain passes and foothills at speeds up to 60 miles an hour. In summer and fall, these are the winds that whip tiny blazes into gargantuan firestorms. The Cedar Fire, in October of 2003, raced from the back country down into eastern San Diego at a speed of 6,000 acres an hour.

Sunstorms are different. They hit during the rainy season, when the fire threat is minimal. Outside with my iced tea an hour ago, the hillsides were all a soft green. The January winds serve mainly to blow out all pollution, send humidity plunging, temperatures roaring into the 70s by sunrise, and burying Southern Calfornia beneath blue skies you can see Hawaii through.

Against this, humans have to get up as usual, drag themselves out of bed, shuffle through breezes as soft as a baby's breath to get the paper, and somehow get to work because they know that schools and businesses are not going to close. In 36 winters in Southern California, I have never known of schools and businesses ever closing, not even once.

I'm not asking for pity. People who move to Southern California learn very quickly what they've gotten into. It only takes two years to become a sunstorm veteran. I remember grumbling about it in those early days, because we never got any credit. The Midwest and East have been battling snowstorms for the last week. It was all over the media. Brave Americans doing their best to get to work and school through horrific whiteouts and sheets of ice on the streets. They didn't want to, but it could get so bad that authorities would close schools and businesses and urge everyone to stay home, out of danger. The economy could wait.

Did we see or hear a word about brave Southern Californians, windows rolled down, navigating through hideous lightouts, fighting off hallucinations of lawn chairs and tall cool pitchers of refreshment? Not that I saw or heard. I feel guilty, because I can stay home this week. This cry for equal treatment is not for me. It's for them. They deserve at least a few paragraphs of coverage.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 5:04 PM | | Comments

January 10, 2009

On the move this morning



I'm sitting outside on a Sunday morning, enjoying dawn events at a time when the world appears most perfectly still.

Then I go inside and read in the paper that astronomers have made a new discovery that has changed the way they must think about the universe. I would hate to be an astronomer. They work their tails off for five or six years, trying to understand the universe as it now appears. It is reported to be very hard work, bordering on the unfathomable. They keep at it, because that is what they do. Then comes a "new discovery" that, overnight, forces them to change the way they think about the universe. What kind of life is that?

The new discovery this time is the speed at which our solar system – the Sun and planets – orbits the center of the Milky Way. Before, they thought that speed was about half a million miles an hour. Now they believe it to be nearer 600,000 miles an hour, and not only that, the Milky Way apparently is actually broader and has 50 per cent more mass than was previously believed. The Milky Way has been up there for millions of years, and scientists have been looking at it hard for at least 100 years, and until now they didn't know any better than this how fast it was spinning, how big it was, and how dense it was.

But that's another story. My immediate interest is in going back outside to the glider, sitting perfectly still, feeling a bit of breeze, seeing only a couple of cars on the freeway in the distance. But now the story has reminded me of something scientific that I heard decades ago, that the Earth is moving in nine different directions at once. Therefore, so am I. I am remembering this at the moment the Sun rises (now below Tut's folded hands). Of course the Sun only appears to rise. What has actually happened is that the Earth is spinning from west to east, and it has just spun east far enough to let me see the Sun.

The Earth is 24,000 miles, roughly, in diameter. That means in 24 hours, the planet has rotated from where it was at yesterday's dawn, full circle to this dawn. It is rotating from west to east at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour, and me along with it. Sitting here perfectly still on the glider, I am riding a Tilt-a-Whirl going 1,000 miles an hour.

And of course the Earth is moving around the sun, giving us seasons, and the Winter Solstice at Tut's eye, and so forth. I know it takes 365 days (plus a fraction) for the Earth to circle the Sun, but I don't know how far it is. For this, I need Google.

Google takes me to the Astronomy Café, operated by Dr. Sten Odenwald, whom I take the liberty of quoting:

"The speed of the Earth in its orbit around the sun is 29.79 kilometers per second. The Sun and the solar system are, in turn, in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The orbit takes about 225 million years and currently the direction of this motion is in the general direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra The Harp. The speed of this motion relative to stars near the Sun is 19.7 kilometers per second, however, the Sun and Vega along with other local stars are orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a speed of 225 kilometers per second. The entire Milky Way is, in turn, in orbit around the Virgo cluster of galaxies located 19 million parsecs away. The speed of this motion is about 365 kilometers per second."

I have yet to make the intellectual shift from miles to kilometers, so I ask Google to provide me a converter from kph to mph, and compliance is, of course, instant. Thus: The Earth is orbiting the Sun at 66,638 mph. I skipped the "speed of this motion relative to stars near the Sun" because I didn't understand a word of it. Then we come to the speed of our solar system around the center of the galaxy, which translates in Dr. Odenwald's reckoning to 502,311 mph, but of course that is an old figure replaced this morning by the new reckoning of about 600,000 mph. Then the entire Milky Way is in orbit around "the Virgo cluster" at a speed of 816,482 mph.

So in my dawn repose on the glider, I am simultaneously moving at speeds of 1,000 mph, 66,638 mph, 600,000 mph, and 816,482 mph, in directions unknown to me except for east. Not accounted for is the speed at which "the Virgo cluster" is orbiting something, and what that something is orbiting, but that's okay because my head is spinning much too fast to care.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 1:27 PM | | Comments

January 05, 2009

Flight paths

On Jan. 25, 1998, the Super Bowl was played at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego (Broncos 31, Packers 24). I heard fireworks in the distance just before kickoff and ran out onto the patio and looked west in the direction of the stadium. Couldn't see the fireworks.


But then I turned around and glanced at the eastern horizon and saw a black slot in the sky, like a slot you would slide an ATM card into to get money. I was not drunk or anything. The slot was moving toward me, getting bigger. It was too late to run for the camera, or to run, period. In seconds, the slot turned into a black Stealth bomber. It flew directly overhead, not even a thousand feet off the ground, huge, blocking out sky like the ship in "Independence Day." It was aimed right for the stadium. I ran back inside and you should have heard the roar from the stadium as it approached and did its stadium flyby. God, I wish I had a picture of that thing going over.


Alta Mira is directly underneath the flight path for stadium flybys. Only once was it the Stealth. Other times it has been four jet fighters. We hear their engines first, then run out and see them in a wide loop to the east, trailing white smoke. Then they straighten out, jack up the thunder, and go over the house toward the stadium at 500 miles an hour.


Last week, it was a blimp, maneuvering before the Holiday Bowl at the stadium. I saw him far to the south, then he turned north, still considerably east of us. But close enough to hope. I ran for the camera and got him just as he was overflying a horizon feature that we call Dolly's Right One.


"Turn left," I whispered at him. I wanted him to take a path that would go right in front of the house. It would be a great picture, and I wanted to see what Gully would do. I do, from years ago, have an ancient print photo of the late, great, Barkeley vigorously warning a Sanyo blimp, that I could have hit with a BB gun, not to come an inch closer. The things puppies get to bark at, when they have the sky for a yard. But the blimp's captain, determined to aggravate puppies to the north of us, stayed on that course until he disappeared behind the bottlebrush tree.

But he did do me the favor of reminding me it was Holiday Bowl day, so 15 minutes before kickoff I was outside with the camera, watching. No jets this time, but there did appear a couple of other aviators. One of them headed for me as if he had it in mind to fly through the front door into our living room. That happens sometimes, with sparrows and finches and hummingbirds, who are relatively easy to corner and scoop up and return to the outdoors. This guy, though, I wasn't so sure.




On he came, magnificent in his control of the air. Then he gave a little left-turn twitch of his tailfeathers, and a slight change in pitch of the pinfeathers at the tips of his wings (maybe for stabilization, maybe just to show off, like jet pilots cutting in afterburners), and he sailed past close enough to rattle me into cutting off the tip of a wing. For a flyby, it wasn't bad.


The sky did give us one little supersonic shot before sundown, a ray finding a Christmas tree ornament and blasting color onto the kitchen ceiling. A promise of flybys to come, I figured.


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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:06 PM | | Comments

January 04, 2009

A tardy Happy New Year



Happy New Year! I have been trying to post these images since early New Year's Day, but it must be that the folks at Blogger took several days off. I hope we are now back in contact.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 12:39 PM | | Comments

December 29, 2008

Getting an Irish leap on New Year's

Hooley's is an Irish pub about two miles from here.

Before he moved to Nashville five years ago, my son Tyler was in a band that played a couple of New Year's Day gigs at Hooley's. Only it wasn't Jan. 1. It was Dec. 31.

And that's how the Irish New Year's tradition got started at Alta Mira. Friends would be invited and we would meet at Hooley's about 3 p.m. to drink and listen to Tyler's band while we awaited midnight in Dublin, which was 4 p.m. in San Diego. The big countdown would come, New Year's would arrive in Ireland, and at Hooley's everybody would yell "Happy New Year!" and go into a crazed state for several minutes.

About 4:15, we would depart the tumult and go back to Alta Mira for more toasting and to eat our black-eyed peas and roast pork. Then Tyler moved to Nashville. We went back to Hooley's for the next Irish New Year, even though Tyler was gone. The place was jammed as usual, which is more fun when you are 30 than it is when you reach 60. The following year, we had the bright idea to leave Hooley's to the younger howlers and keep our whole part of the party at Alta Mira. And so Wednesday, revelers will arrive at 3:30, we will drink and keep the watch for midnight to arrive in Ireland, we will yell like crazy when it does, then have a nice dinner starring black-eyed peas.

Guests generally leave around 7, and if they choose, they can find a place to stay up until midnight and yell in the San Diego New Year, or if they can't keep their eyes open until midnight, they can be in bed and asleep by 9 or 10, knowing they have already rung the New Year in. You feel a lot better on New Year's morning that way, and you get to eat black-eyes for luck twice.

Tyler, meanwhile, has a bigger gig than Hooley's this New Year's Eve. He will be playing bass and guitar for the Emmitt/Nershi Band, which is opening for The Del McCoury Band, headliners at the New Year's Eve performance of The Grand Ole Opry, on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. That, I would stay up for.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:30 PM | | Comments

December 28, 2008

Summer is way off to the left, there


Above is the solstice sunrise on Dec. 21, when the sun rose out of Tut's eye. Just to the left of the sun, you see Tut's cute little upturned nose, way too upturned, some might say, for a mummy, but we had nothing to say about it.



Now here is this morning's sunrise, Dec. 28, one week after the solstice, and the sun rose right on the bridge of Tut's nose. Imagine you were looking at this picture on this morning one million years ago, and how happy you would feel. The sun is coming back! It will be swimsuit season in no time.






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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:24 AM | | Comments

December 24, 2008

Some art is hard to plan for


In the 1990s, when the kitchen nook was being built, I should have caught the carpenters at work installing a light switch in the wrong place. I should have said, "Listen, on Christmas Eve, 2008, the sun is going to rise at just the right moment, and at a certain particular angle, that will cast a silhouette of Karen working on a crossword puzzle on the wall opposite the nook table. If you put the switch there, it will cut off part of her head."

But I didn't.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 7:49 AM | | Comments

December 21, 2008

Sun of Tut comes through again





At 4:04 this morning, Pacific Standard Time, a perfectly vertical ray of sunlight touched, just for an instant, a point on the Earth 23.5 degrees of latitude south of the Equator. This was the Winter Solstice. In the next instant, the tilted Earth continued on its rotation around the Sun. The Sun's falling rays left 23.5 South Latitude and started to track north.

In the primitive world, this was cause for whooping and hollering. This great big hot ball in the sky that you couldn't look at was all that made the Earth tolerably warm from time to time. If that big hot ball went out for whatever reason, like what we now call nightfall, then on Earth it was freezerville. Even worse, in the Cradle of Civilization, there came a stretch of days when it looked like the Sun was leaving the Earth altogether, tired of warming this rock and drifting way down in the sky – what we would call south – as if it just might leave altogether.

It never did. Just when the days were starting to get really cold, even in the middle of the day, a day arrived when the Sun looked like it had decided not to leave after all, and started back toward the huddled primitives in time to make the days reasonably bearable again by what we call April. But then maybe the primitives celebrated too much, enjoyed the green, stopped praying to the Sun, prayed to the Rain instead, to the point that the Sun became dissed and said, "I'm out of here," and started wandering off again. Who knows what kind of horror stories the primitive brain could launch, about an object as important as the Sun?

So the Sun, in its fickle winter fancy, developed a nice pagan crowd of celebrants on that crucial day when it decided not to leave, tens of thousands of years before more scientific minds came along and decided that the Earth didn't orbit the Sun at all, but just the other way around.

Thousands of years more passed, and one day at Alta Mira I noticed that at the dawn of the day of the Winter Solstice, the Sun rose out of King Tut's eye. I thought that was very cool. Within me rose an ancient, visceral sigh of relief and a voice whispered, "You and me, Tut." I showed you Tut a few blogs ago. Here he is this morning with the Sun rising out of his eye. Tomorrow, it will rise to the left, a sliver closer to his nose. Then in a week, his mouth, then his chin, his throat, his folded hands, after which April is not far behind. Makes me feel good, I'll tell you.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 8:40 AM | | Comments

December 18, 2008

Getting around to answering comments


I have made an executive decision about my blog. I will always read all of the comments to any specific blog, but I won't reply to them via another comment to that specific blog.

There are three reasons for this. One, the blog software won't let me post my comment without a username and password, and I refuse those terms for posting a comment to my OWN BLOG.

Second, the software refuses my password when I attempt to post the comment, and it is the same password with which I log in to Blogger. Long short stories, novels, movies, sitcoms and docudramas are written about this level of insanity.

Third, a blog starts to age the instant it is posted. I don't know why a reader should be asked to check an old blog for new comments. Part of this is my newspaper background, in which all news shortly after dawn becomes fishwrap, and part is my aversion to asking readers to go into the stacks to find responses to their comments.

There is a fourth factor. Blogger sends copies of comments to my personal email, but WON'T LET ME RESPOND TO THE EMAIL. Do you see a pattern here? If you do, please let me know what it is.

These things being so, I have decided to respond to comments in new posts. Like this one. Ray, I don't know how many draws we ate to at Lavender's, but every one was competitive, fair, cheap, filling, and fulfilling. I wish we could do it again, give you one last chance to win, but I know I would be full after one chicken-fried steak, a few potatoes, some green beans, and one roll. Hell yes, I have all the Elvis 45s. I do remember nearly ripping a stitch at the Paramount, and I still play the guitar, sort of, and sing, REALLY sort of, but if you want to hear a Grant play the guitar, listen to Tyler, as you already know. He is arriving tonight for the holidays, and I imagine in the next day or two he will bring his guitar over and we will play the same songs I was playing in 1959. Did I already mention he is the 2008 National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America? I did?

Jen, you said you were still interested in the sunset story. I would like to tell you more. What are you interested in? Jessie, my daughter, will be here next week for Christmas, and she promises to show me how to insert photos into stories where they should go, and not where Blogger puts them by default. Just for the heck of it, at the top of this blog, is a photo of the dawn after all the rain we had. There is in that photo, and in many others, evidence of living suspended between earth and space, which is a big part of the ongoing sunset story. I'll be blogging soon about the business of living between earth and space. It has been my address since 1992.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 4:19 PM | | Comments

December 13, 2008

Sunset stages, the story

Sunsets proceed in stages. Maybe you know about that. I didn't discover it until I was in like the 40th grade (I am in the 60th now), which surprises me a little. I have looked closely at quite a few sunsets in my time, starting with the gorgeous West Texas sunsets when I was a kid in Abilene.

But it was a long time before I noticed the stages. You have to reach a point in your life where you are willing to hang around for the whole thing. Mostly, people will take a minute to look at a spectacular sunset, then go do something else. To see the stages, you have to give it a half-hour, or at least 20 minutes. When it happened to me, I was watching a sunset and saw the shimmering, bright‑gold veil of light pass through its moment of peak radiancy, then fade as usual to something grayer. Several minutes later, I thought I saw the luminosity increasing once more. It did increase, and peak, and fade to something grayer still. I waited and watched. The luminosity returned a third time.

"Hey," I said. Since that night I have watched for the stages. The most I have ever seen is six. They are easiest to see when clouds are present. The sunset last night was perfect for stage‑watching. We had clouds coming off the ocean yesterday in advance of what the weathermen are advertising as a good series of storms coming down to us from Alaska. Karen saw it first and went out and took these photos. In the first, you are looking at the tip of Point Loma jutting into the Pacific. The second shows the silhouette of shorefront condos in Coronado and the ocean beyond.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTOS 1 AND 2 HERE (SEE PREVIOUS POST)

But the show, of course, is in the sky. This is the second or third stage of a sunset, still in the gray and gold registers. On the clock it was about 5 p.m. Then Karen had to leave for a meeting. I was in the back of the house. Five minutes after she left, I came to the front, looked out the windows, and ran for the camera.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTOS 3 AND 4 HERE

I got the fifth and sixth stages. The stages arrive in luminosity waves. The light changes in color and intensity each time but there is always an increase, a peak and a fade. The colors go from bright gold to gold‑trimmed peach to rose to dusky rose to the very lowest register of red to charcoal to pearl. It seems as if the clouds might simply be swapping colors with the sky behind them. When the sky was peach, the clouds were rose. When the sky turned rose, the clouds became peach. As the sky moved from pearl to charcoal, the clouds moved from charcoal to pearl.

But I'm not sure. It would need more study. I have thought occasionally to make a more formal study of these sunset stages, but then the sunset arrives and I forget about it. I would not be a good one to record notes during a sunset. Someone, however, should. Possibly someone already has. As an issue of physics, the stages of sunsets must be a fairly interesting matter of angles, declinations and refractions, the purely mathematical interplay of sunlight with Earth boundaries. Maybe someone out there knows exactly how many stages there are, and of what duration, and how far apart.

I watched a little longer, then took one last photo.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTO 5 HERE.

I didn't know if there would be enough light, and I don't have photographer skills to go adjusting apertures for this sort of thing. But the shutter gave a sharp "click," so I figured I had it. It wasn't another 10 seconds before this sunset's final fade began. I like it that sunsets have stages. It makes them like a rainbow for the day, acknowledging a present beautiful moment and promising more to come.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:59 AM | | Comments

December 12, 2008

Sunset stages











There is a story that goes with this succession of photos, that shows the stages of the San Diego sunset last night. But I am too ticked to mess with it anymore. For the last hour and a half, I have tried to post the story with the photos INTERSPERSED IN THE STORY AT APPROPRIATE POINTS. Instead, every time and every way I tried it, Blogger put the photos at the TOP. And INVERTED from the order in which I POSTED them. So the hell with it. If that's where Blogger wants them, that's where they shall be. For the time being. Blogger is put on notice that I will figure out how to put the photos where I WANT THEM TO BE. Sometime in my lifetime I will have the satisfaction of knowing that in their command posts deep below the Rocky Mountains, Blogger controllers will bash their foreheads into their polished steel desktops because someone up there put his pictures where they were SUPPOSED TO BE. Meantime, it's martini hour. I'll post the story tomorrow.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 4:29 PM | | Comments

December 06, 2008

The grass is greener in December


We got our first soaking rain of the season on the day before Thanksgiving. Then we started watching the hillsides. We didn't have to watch long. By Monday after Thanksgiving, there it was: grass.

Well, not grass, really. In Southern California, wherever a hillside is brown on Thanksgiving and a fuzzy, deceptively adorable (like lion cubs) green four days later, what you are viewing is the birth of weeds. Cute now, but wait till they grow up.

The weeds have been down there for months below the brown surface, meeting in their seed communities and grumbling about the long wait. If there is any living thing who looks forward to a nice rain more than I do, it is a Southern California weed seed. When November arrives, you can put your ear to the ground and hear them rumbling down there, desperate in their instinctive drive to come roaring out of the ground.

And now here they are, in the first week of December, loosed upon us, giving the landscape a green sheen that regular human beings associate with a spring month like April. Intruding into our dreamy considerations of cozy fires and Christmas scents and togetherness is a Scroogian voice whose annual mission is to nag us until we go down to the garage with a broom and sweep the cobwebs off the weedwhacker.

I have lived now in Southern California for 36 years and I have yet to digest the idea of pulling out the weedwacker in December. From Texas, where seasons are normal, I moved into an upside-down world, where December is the busiest month for the lawnmower repair man.

Actually, I moved into a coastal desert next to a cold-water ocean. It is not a fruitful combination for rainmaking. For rain to fall in Southern California, mammoth weather systems have to be spawned over Alaska at just the right moment to catch a ride on the jet stream when it decides to sag southward. Even in our rainy season November to March, rain is a chancy event. Ours is a culture that stirs like cattle at the low thunder issuing from the Weather Bureau warning that this next storm is likely to be a killer. There is never a stampede. We know in our collective brain herd that there's no storm out there. The No. 1 parody headline in Southern California newspapers is: "Killer Storm Looms."

But the quarter-inch the clouds do manage to squeeze onto us is enough to create chaos on the freeways and bring the weeds roaring out of the ground. If you think nothing grows in the desert, just put a little water on it. In a week, you'll have a golf course. Or a hillside of baby weeds. By the Rose Bowl, they'll be waist-high. I'll pull out the weedwacker when I pull out the Christmas decorations.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 2:41 PM | | Comments

The solstice is nigh


What you see here is King Tut, who lies at the extreme southern end of that part of the horizon we call the Alta Mira Calendar. The Calendar extends 46 degrees from its south to north limits, where the winter and summer solstices are marked, and if we were that anal, we could create a chart showing exactly where the sun came up each day of the year. This morning the sun rose with a bang near Tut's throat. You see his feet on the left, then his arms folded across his chest, and his head and mummy's headdress at the right. On the winter solstice, the sun will rise out of Tut's eye, then the next day begin its long journey north. That the sun rises out of his eye gives the solstice a nice pagan ceremonial feel, and so we toast it with strong water. Even when it's cloudy.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 2:41 PM | | Comments

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About me

  • I am a journalist, educator, writing consultant and author, living in La Mesa, CA. I am a native of Texas, which shows in most of my work. I believe that anything is possible. When I was 35, I realized that the ideal life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. I can still get to the imagination (as you can, simply by cutting away all the data you’ve learned from first grade on) and I now possess the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Being 65 can be unsettling – too late to plant trees and enjoy the shade – but the wisdom that comes with it is terrific compensation. I learned in 50th grade that, no matter how bad things get, there is always compensation. Now I am in the 60th grade, and I am learning things that I didn’t know in 59th. This September, I’ll start 61st grade, and learn things I don’t know now. To find what grade you’re in, start with the year you started 12th grade, and count up. My newest book is “Warbirds – How They Played the Game.” My new company is The Write Outsource, quality media writing on deadline, at www.writeoutsource.com. I am working on a book about the media, and I am about to revise my cookbook about home cooking on a tight budget, such as so many of us face at this time.
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