Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Food chain

A very interesting article in today's New York Times: Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

I'm a little curious, though...if the practice of adding melamine to vegetable glutens to fake a higher protein content has been going on for years, why this sudden spike in pet-food related problems in March? Did the pet food manufacturers just start importing from China? Did somebody go from kinda greedy to extraordinarily greedy and dump too much melamine in the March batch of gluten? Was some scrap melamine contaminated with some other chemical that is more toxic?

Same post, different day

I have a friend who uses the expression "How good is that?" all the time. A favorite song on the radio, perfectly spiced buffalo wings, a three-point shot at the buzzer...how good is that?

He is one of those guys who delights in many things.

He reminds me of another guy I knew from the neighborhood where I grew up. Anytime you saw him, asked how he was, he would tell you "Fantastic!" He might then, eventually, let on that he'd had a heart attack, but bad news was never his focus.

Positive thinkers, I guess they are.

I am not like that. Last week, for example, I got an e-mail at work that said "Nic--In regards to x, why did you do y?"

Oh man, I was pissed. First I was panicked, actually...whay was wrong with y? Then I was pissed. Why was he questioning my competence? I know how to do my damn job! I muttered and swore and made up several snarky, sarcastic responses before I finally replied "I did y because of a, b, and c."

Do you see where this is going?

I got back "Ok, thanks."

It was just a simple question. I got myself worked up for no reason, because I immediately jumped to imagine all of the negative possibilities. I do that. Train for ill and not for good...

I'm beginning to realize, when I think like that, it affects all my thinking.

Today I needed to work in the yard. I'm not much of a fan of gardening, but I wanted to get a tomato and a basil planted. I pulled weeds and rearranged pots for about two hours, and when I was done, I looked around and thought this place looks like shit.

I really need to rebuild the patio, because the bricks have heaved and sunk and it's no longer level. I need to rip out the honeysuckle. I should build up the garden wall with castlestones and put in mulch. The shed is in danger of falling down.

Disgusted, I went inside and made a sandwich and a glass of lemonade. Looking out the kitchen window I realized that the pots weren't in the best spot for sun, so I went back out to rearrange them, then I sat on a lawnchair and had lunch.

And it crept over me...the weather was really pretty. My lemonade was perfect. Now that I've cleaned up, there's room on the patio for a cookout. How good is that?

I've been doing this blog for almost four years, and this life is great/life sucks roller coaster is probably my over-arching theme.

That was the week that was

I think every night this week I have had a blog entry in mind, but never found the time or energy to type it up. It was one of those weeks.

We closed the audit at work. I have a few real pain in the ass things to fix, but overall it was less painful that I expected. The auditor said some very nice things about my program in front of my boss, too.

A bunch of people at work are about to have babies, and now that the basement is finished, I had room to do some tie dyes. Usually Victor does the real work and I just help, but this week he was busy so I did them solo. I was amazed at how well they turned out, and after I handed out the finished products, people were doing crazy things like offering to pay me to dye clothes for them.

I've felt horrible all week because of the pollen. I'm afraid to go outside, which seems like a waste of spring.

The baby rat died. I thought he was doing better, but he relapsed and died at the vet's on Wednesday.

A young woman I know just had her first experience with death. She was a wreck. I suspected that part of her grief was the realization of mortality in general and her own in particular. I gave her my Thich Nhat Hanh book and we talked, and yesterday she said she was doing better and that I had helped. Those who can't, teach, I guess.

Getting the vegetable garden at my mom's ready for planting, we discovered that our fall spinach actually wintered over. Fresh organic spinach already! Most of it has gone to the pets, though.

Regarding pet food, not quite as many of my friends are laughing at me for feeding organic dandelions to the guinea pig. The theory that the melamine in the pet food ingredients was added to fake a higher protein content actually makes sense. There was a front page article about China's lack of quality control in the Post on Wednesday...if the baby formula isn't safe (whether because of avarice or incompetence), how can you trust anything?

I guess if there is a silver lining (and if my dog had died, I doubt I'd be willing to look for a silver lining), it's that people are thinking about the links in the food chain.

In between, I listened to baseball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.

Lucky for me I'm not a bee

That much pollen would kill me.

Nic, this is stupid stuff

I've been quoting a lot of Housman lately.

Last week, I was all la-la-la, life is good; this week, I kept thinking

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.

I don't know.

I'm going to make a chocolate cake, and take it to a friend's house for dinner, and I expect that the few of us who go back that far will, at some point, talk about the weekends in Blacksburg...whether the burgers were better at Mike's or the Hokie House, or how much the football team has changed since those early Beamer years.

The mischief is, it will not last.

A very sad goodbye

I never even looked at the sports news today, because I've been grimly following what happened in Blacksburg. A little while ago, Victor came in to tell me to read CapsChick.

Former Capital Gaetan Duchesne died today.

As I've mentioned, because my dad worked for the team when I was a kid, we got to know some of the players, some better than others. Gaets was one of the ones we knew pretty well, because he and my father were friends.

In fact, when my father went up behind Gaetan at the game the other day, Gaets jumped up and gave dad a hug.

I really hated calling my parents to deliver this news.

When we had our seats at the Cap Center, the ticket holders next to us were French Canadians, and they used to cheer for him: Buddy Duchesne, they called him. And does anybody else remember the "Vas-y Gaetan!" sign that hung in the corner?

He was a fan favorite, as they say. Not just because of his play (although I still remember a game when we played Edmonton, and he stuck to Gretzky like glue; it was fabulous) but because he was such a nice, nice guy.

When I was a little junior-high twerp with a new camera, I used to take pictures of the players during warmups, then hound them for autographs when I got my prints back. Sometimes the guys were nice enough to compliment me on the pictures, and even write more than their names.

Analogy

Fresh mozzarella is to that shredded stuff in a plastic bag as the Stanley Cup playoffs is to Pong Hockey.

It isn't raining rain, you know, it's raining...

...well, actually, it is raining rain. A bitch of a lot of it at the moment, so so much for taking a day to shoot flower pictures. (I did see a good price on a waterproof camera the other day. I need another camera like I need a hole in the head, but wouldn't it be cool to take pictures under water? The fact that I won't go into water not withstanding...perhaps what I need is a waterproof camera to get me over my phobia.)

I am in a remarkably good mood for such a sunless day. Though I am bummed that the Nats game is rained out, I am cheered by signs of improvement in their play last week. I went to a baby shower for my cousin yesterday and saw a bunch of my family. My sick baby rat is on the mend. I have fresh mozzarella in the fridge (like, made yesterday fresh).

I can even breathe a wee bit better, probably since the rain has washed away some pollen.

Life is not a highway strewn with flowers
Still it holds a goodly share of bliss...

(This is really about baseball*)

Victor and I met the hockey blogger CapsChick at a game towards the end of the season. She's quite a good writer and knows her hockey. I did realize, though, when I found we didn't share the same bitter hatred of the Islanders, that she's much younger than I am.

Even though it was before her time, she has a great pair of posts this week about the good/bad old days: A Little Perspective, A Little History, where she interviews her dad.

My eyes got misty when he talked about Ryan Walter.

I've mentioned before than my thirty-some years of memory are suspect...but as I remember the last game of the '82 season, we had just missed the playoffs...I think it was even a situation where if another team had lost, we would have squeaked in. They were doing the usual fan appreciation thing, and when Ryan gave his "We'll get them next year" speech, his voice broke. And then I started to cry like a baby.

I was crushed by the trade. Ryan Walter was my brother's favorite player (my brother being all of six at the time) and I remember my father breaking the news to the whole family as if someone had died. I remember my mom saying "But he's the heart and soul of the team."

Of course, the Ryan Walter trade, better known as the Rod Langway trade, was the turning point for the Capitals. For years after, I didn't have to cry 'til our last playoff game, not our last regular-season game.

Another hockey story occurs to me. This makes more sense if you've seen me in person...I have really long hair. This will be relevant in a minute.

After we were beat up by the Islanders for many playoffs, Pittsburgh took over. In 1994, though, we beat the Penguins. I was sitting behind the bench that last game, and cheering with much more emotion than I usually show. I felt a tugging from behind me, but didn't really pay attention...we had beaten the cursed Penguins. The tugging got harder, and I finally turned around.

The woman behind me had been cheering, too. Cheering so hard that her gum had fallen out of her open mouth and into my hair...and in her attempts to retrieve it, it had gotten hopelessly stuck.

My then-husband took out his penknife and snipped off a good three-inch hunk of hair. The poor woman was mortified.

It really was ok, I assured her. "We just beat the Penguins," I said. "I'd be happy right now if you shaved me bald."

Yeah, winning, it does beat losing.

But if you haven't felt the low, does the high feel as good?

I really liked how CapsChick ended her interview with her dad:

It’s a great feat to stick by one team like the Capitals for 33 years of ups and downs (more downs than ups) – through trades, management changes, coaching changes, ownership changes, new jerseys, and countless, countless Penguins games. Yet it’s something I aspire to, to hold the love of one team long enough until it finally pays off, and then beyond.

My dad has been a season ticket holder since that first season and while his seats have gotten better and his hair has gotten thinner, the one thing that remains the same through all these years is the passion he feels for this team. Hearing him describe those dark days with as much love as one would use to speak of a great dynasty shows that being a fan means not noticing the numbers, the records, the punchlines – only the emblem on the jersey. It's a lesson I think we all could learn.

*I'm supposed to be coming up with a post for Ted about why the Nationals' future is not really none more black.

Sick day

The temperature changing from 80 degrees one day to 40 degrees the next will not make you sick.

So I guess I should look elsewhere. Perhaps it's the pollen that's kicking my ass around the block, or the lack of sleep and an over indulgence in junk food.

Or maybe I was hit by a truck and I just don't remember it.

Easter Eggs

I knew that there are white eggs and brown eggs, but until I started reading Rurality I didn't realize that hens lay an assortment of colors.

Yesterday I bought a dozen eggs from a new little organic grocer we found. The eggs are from a farm about 40 miles from here where they keep many different breeds of hen. I hadn't been considering coloring eggs this year, but when I opened the carton, I was delighted to see that I don't have to.

We were speaking metaphorically

That "cherry hung with snow" stuff? It wasn't meant to be literal.

It's hard to tell the snow from the blossoms, but it was there. If you don't believe me, the daffodil makes it more obvious.

We do feed the guinea pig organic dandelion

I have been keeping a close eye on the pet food recalls, and feeling increasingly disturbed.

We haven't used any of the implicated foods, and early on I double-checked all the pet food and treats for gluten. My logic was, if gluten was contaminated, I'm considering any gluten suspect and I'm taking no chances. I see that the manufacturers are using a similar line of reasoning: watch the voluntary recall list grow to include anything with gluten from the Chinese company Menu Foods used.

Gluten isn't disturbing me. Well, not true, I feel terrible for people who lost their pets. If that had been my dog, I expect I'd be inconsolable.

But what really concerns me is that this will be like liquid on airplanes, too narrow a focus. Stricter tests to make sure gluten doesn't have melamine! I'm not convinced that the broader issue of making sure that imported ingredients meet any health standards and good manufacturing practices will be addressed.

(Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure that the issue of good manufacturing and safety is adequately addressed for domestic food either. People or pets.)

And now that I think about that, I'm not super-comfortable with dog food. And I wonder about the processed convience food I'm eating...where's the plant where those ingredients came from? (E. coli and salmonella don't bother me as much as a chemical contaminant from processing, but that's because I have a functioning immune system. I'm not being flip. If I or someone in my family were immunocompromised, I'd worry about the organic nasties too.)

Ironically, you know what the safest food in our house probably is? Rat blocks. Seriously. The food for the rats comes from a huge lab supply company, the same place where drug companies and the like buy the food for the rodent studies. Because the (very expensive) studies can't be screwed up because of the food, you know exactly what's in those blocks to the ppm level, and because the studies last two years, the food is exactly the same from batch to batch to batch. The facility where the food is made is inspected and certified six ways from Sunday. The raw materials are tested before anybody starts mixing anything together.

It is rather bland, however.

Why I love baseball, part...some-teen

If I'm not going to blog about baseball, what am I going to blog about? Death? Bugs?

(Speaking of bugs...I have said that my house must be built on the biggest anthill on the east coast. I'm afraid that has been confirmed. Now that my basement is beige and light, instead of dark and black, the ants sneaking in from behind the molding really stand out. There must be a crack in the foundation. It's horrifying. I hate resorting to chemical warfare, but obviously I'm not giving over my nice new basement to the ants.)

Now, is that the sort of thing you want to read?

Baseball it is, then!

Sunday's Post had a nice essay, The Gal of Summer, about a woman's season-long experiment in becoming a baseball fan. Unlike the writer, I have been a sports fan since birth, but I can related to some of her baseball experience.

Like understanding that baseball means hope. Early in the article, her husband explains:

"Plus, baseball is a sport for optimists," he says. "It's a very long season with a lot of games, and there is always a reason for hope." That's the kind of baseball-as-metaphor talk that has always made me skeptical...

Me, too.

I got in the car and got the radio on this afternoon halfway through the ninth inning. Of course, I'd been following the game on the internet, so I knew that the Nats had gone down early (5-0 at the end of the third) but that Church had hit a 3-run home run in the sixth. Still, since we were coming up on the end of the batting order and I didn't know who was on the bench to hit, I wasn't especially sanguine.

Then of course, Belliard got a double, Fick singled, and when Hanley Ramirez (ha! take that, Mr. Rookie of the Year!) failed to field Kory Casto's grounder and Fick scored the tying run, I was banging on the steering wheel and cheering like I was there.

(I was stopped at a light. There was a cop in the next lane. I didn't get pulled over.)

After Jorge Julio walked Kerns I was sure the Marlins were going to make a pitching change, and I didn't breathe again until Young's hit. Then you could have heard me at RFK, if not all the way down to Miami.

What a game.

I have seen a few incredible comebacks in hockey, but somehow, it seems like baseball offers a better chance for last second drama, for redemption. More reason for hope.

From the essay:

Cliches are by definition unoriginal. But every now and then the simple truth of one -- like this thing about baseball and hope -- hits you as though someone had written it across the sky for your eyes alone.

Split screen

Another one of those nights: hockey on the one hand, baseball on the other. What is a fan to do?

Well, this fan has a boatload of chores, so I'll just switch radios on throughout the house and alternate.

Also, I'm remembering why I love sports so much, even with my losing teams. It's a great distraction from depressing real life shit.

Opening Day

I wa hoping to have a really happy post today about my joy at attending my first ever baseball opening day game.

Yeah. Not so much.

It wasn't the score...hell, I'm used to losing...I'm just still bent out of shape because, even though we were on the road at 10:20 a.m., we missed the whole pre-game hoopla, not to mention the actual first pitch, and in fact the first two batters.

It usually takes us, non-rush hour, 45 minutes or so to get to RFK. Rush hour, a bit more than an hour.

I didn't factor in the Maryland Department of Transportation shutting down the right lane of 270 and half the fucking Cabin John Bridge.

My blood pressure did not return to normal until the seventh inning stretch.

Next game I have tickets for is Friday. I am guessing I should be ok if I pack a bag and leave the middle of Thursday night.

You know it's bad when the high point of the day is watching the giant Teddy Roosevelt lose another Presidents' Race.