Category: Life Experiences

More Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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The day after tomorrow, I’ll be on my way home. I’ve been in Eden nearly a week and am used to it. I no longer hear the waves every minute, even though Calle Calle Bay is close by. I’m used to the lack of birdsong and the fact that there are so many dogs that barking is an ordinary part of the soundscape. Where I live, in Canberra, I’m woken up by magpies and kookaburras and there are so many other birds that sing, but I have to walk at least as far as the beach is from me right now to hear any dogs barking. I know how to pronounce most of the local names, and the one I had most wrong was Calle Calle (which is Caul Caul). I have talked to many locals and written many words. The biggest thing is that I have proven what I needed to prove: that one of the reasons I’m so il in Canberra is the climate there. I’m not suddenly well in Eden, but I am in far less pain and I can do more walking. In a half hour, in fact, I will be walking to the community market, which is about 1 km away. There and back will be all I can do in a day, but I can only walk that far in Canberra on really good day and here, there was only one day I could not.

I cannot afford to move down to the coast, but at least I know that if I save enough I can go to a seaside town once or twice a year and get writing done. I need more internet than I have access to here, however. I am saving all my writing for when I get home, when I will edit it and upload it and … things would have been a lot simpler if I could have finished all that here. The problem is only partly that wifi is spotty. It’s also my computer, which worked splendidly in Perth and doesn’t even connect enough in Eden to use the university’s online system of access to my word processing.

I could use my computer more readily in regional Germany than in regional Australia. I chat with locals about things like this and we swap the realisation that Sydney has far more of small everyday luxuries than places like Eden. Groceries are more expensive here, for instance, because Eden has the same distribution system that Canberra had when I first moved there, and so there are the storage and transport costs to Sydney to be factored into, say, the price of tomatoes. Even cheese is not cheap, which is ironic, because Eden is part of the shire of Bega and Bega is one of the most important cheese-making regions of Australia.

I was going to write you a romantic post about Eden the place, or an historical post about the whaling industry, or a post with pictures of gardens and I was going to ask you which was the real garden of Eden, but… I wanted to talk about the price of tomatoes. Maybe another time…

Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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At the moment this post goes online, I’m probably asleep in Eden, which is a town in coastal NSW. If the bus doesn’t break down en route, if nothing goes wrong, if… if…

I have to write much now that my thesis has been submitted for examination, and it’s cold in Canberra, and Eden is in the middle of whale season. Three excellent reasons to catch a bus and visit the Sapphire Coast. I’m not going for long. When I’m back I might tell you about some of the work I did there. I don’t want to jinx my writing by promising vast amounts of it.

I’ve been through Eden a couple of times. I’ve written Eden into a short story (“After Eden”) and into a novel (Borderlanders). I might see if I have the courage to tell the owner of the pub from Borderlanders that one of their staff members is in a novel. I haven’t told anyone in Robertson (further north, in the mountains) that the whole town is in both story and novel so… maybe not. We will see,

I’ve never spent more than an hour in Eden, because I’ve always been there on the way to somewhere else. It’s on one of the most spectacular roads in the country, Highway #1, that goes (mostly) right around the coast. I’ve dreamed of travelling the whole way round, but can’t see how to make that happen. I can, however, go to Eden.

Eden is one of those places that’s not well known but is rather special. First, whales. Also, tourist-watching, though I suspect it’s the wrong season for the giant boats. Eden is, in fact, probably the Australian equivalent of Nantucket, if the whalers from Nantucket worked with orcas.

Mostly, the town is a lovely place where I can walk down to the sea even on a bad day and it’s not nearly as cold as Canberra. We’ve been warned that the wind straight from the Antarctic is coming again, from tomorrow. Canberra will be bitter-cold for up to a week. In Canberra, as I love saying but don’t love experiencing, that Antarctic wind travels directly over the biggest snowfields in the country and collects cold from the coldest mountains in the country and Canberra is its first city after all that collected cold… Canberra has a very solid wind chill factor on Antarctic days.

The Sapphire Coast and its hinterland has complex and fascinating history, lovely cheese (best grassland in mainland Australia, around Bega), and is part of an overland trail that dates back thousands of years. I can’t walk the trail, and I doubt I can get to Montague Island to greet penguins, but Eden contains enough architecture and history and whales and museums and a good local library so that when I get mental cramps from writing, I will not be bored. I will take pictures and research later fiction. Or I will walk five minutes to the nearest beach and watch for whales.

If all has gone well, this is where I am right now, while you’re reading. Maybe at the beach, looking at Twofold Bay or out over the Pacific. If you’re reading from California, wave at me, just in case.

The Latest Texas Floods

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Even though I was born in Houston and grew up in a small town near there, my Texas heart is in the Hill Country, so the recent flash flood disaster hit close to home.

I have family in New Braunfels, which is a little southeast of the disaster in Hunt, but also on the Guadalupe River. A year ago, we rented a place near Hunt to see the eclipse and spent much of our time downhill from that place floating in tubes on the river. It was a peaceful time and we enjoyed hanging out with relatives for several days.

I assume that the place where we stayed survived the damage (it was across a road and uphill from the river) but I’m sure the steps down to the river and the facilities there are gone. The worst loss there would be a bathroom and some tubes for floating. Fortunately, no one built homes too close to the river at that location.

Flash floods are a fact of life in that part of the world. In fact, the saying “turn around, don’t drown” was started by Hector Guerrero, a warning meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Angelo, Texas, which is about 150 miles northwest of Hunt and also experienced flash floods in the latest storm.

While the Guadalupe River and other rivers in the Hill Country flood regularly, this event was particularly bad given the extreme amount of rain that fell quickly — about 15 inches in a few hours, which is about half the yearly average rainfall.

I listened to weather expert Daniel Swain’s discussion of the disaster on Monday morning and learned that one of the reasons the Hill Country is at great risk for erratic rainfalls like this one is because the Gulf of Mexico is so warm.

I knew the Gulf was warm, since I spent so much of my childhood at the beach playing in that water and was surprised when I moved to the East Coast and discovered that the Atlantic is not as warm, even in summer. (Much less the Pacific.) And of course, with climate change, the Gulf is getting warmer, which is why there is now greater risk from hurricanes.

But I didn’t realize how much affect such warm water has. In fact, the warmth of the Gulf and the winds and storms that it produces also are a cause of tornado weather all the way north to Canada. Different weather patterns crashing into each other – and that’s not the scientific explanation, just my grasp of it – cause a lot of problems.

Some of the flooding was also related to a tropical storm in the Gulf that hit Mexico and moved north, just as an example.

I was not surprised by the flash floods, because I know the area. I used to drive my father around the area west of New Braunfels since he liked to look at the wildlife. We would stop as we crossed every creek, to see if there was any water in it. Many of the creeks and even some of the rivers are mostly dry or close to it, except when it rains. Continue reading “The Latest Texas Floods”…

Handling things

personby Gillian Polack
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This week I don’t want to write at length. I’m still dealing with a bunch of nasty stuff done in Australia on Friday night. It struck me, though, that most readers of this blog are also dealing with bad things. We are not having an easy time of it, any of us.

What I would love to know is how we all handle things.

My best approach (and the most difficult) is to think everything through and understand. Twenty years ago I could take that understanding and share it with activists I knew and we’d find ways fo helping people and moving past the logjam that the impossible creates. Right now, most of those people aren’t talking to me because I’m too Jewish, but I still delve deeply and understand, and when someone asks, I can help them reach the stage where they can identify the hate and the slogans and the dark alliances and make their own decisions for their lives. I really miss teaching – I don’t get to explore ideas with many people and certainly don’t get simple solutions. This was once the best approach, but now makes me feel helpless. Also, I find it exhausting. It’s especially exhausting when friends tell me “The group I marched with was not at all antisemitic. You are imagining things.” Perfectly good people can march alongside vile bigots and as long as the bigots are polite in their presence and the good people accept the rhetoic unquestioningly or don’t know the dowhistles then those good people do not know what is being done in their name.

Solitaire is not the best way to deal, I have discovered. I start playing when things get too much and then cannot stop.

Cooking was a great support (because I love cooking) when there were friends around who could eat my food, but, between COVID and our charming new present, not many people eat my coking and so all I have is too much food and… my freezer is full.

Last time there was a wave of antisemitism (the Molotov cocktail years) I did a lot of walking and enormous amounts of dancing. They were so good for me. I cannot walk far these days and I can only dace for maybe 2 minutes. I am so proud that I can now dance for two minutes, it’s like life returning. I needed 2 hours of dancing back then, to give me a break from everything. I would lose myself in the music and my feet would replace my brain in ruling my life and over time, my body forgot the burdens it carried and life was wonderful. If my illnesses would go into abeyance, I would dance again, but, right now, dancing has a Jew has its own aches. Walking doesn’t. I will work on improving my walking.

Superhero movies and TV and K-drama help a lot. They’re not my everyday and I can take a break from my everyday when I’m watching them. Crime dramas and sad stories of sorrow… less good. A couple of friends suggested I watch things to do with the Holocaust, or one of the documentaries about October 7. If I want to sleepwalk, I promise, I will watch those things.

These are a few of the things I’ve tried.

We all live different lives and we all have different approaches to turning the impossible into something we can handle everyday. The impossible for someone in the US is quite different to the impossible for someone in Australia. I’d love to know some of your ways of dealing.

The 4th of July

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Black t-shirt with the words Mundus Sine Caesaribus on it.

I grew up with Fourth of July celebrations, though the ones I remember were not particularly patriotic – I don’t recall any speeches, much less any on the topic of loving one’s country – but rather an excuse for a community gathering.

In Friendswood, the then tiny town outside of Houston where I grew up, there was a parade every 4th followed by a barbecue and small rodeo in the community park. My sister and I rode horses in the parade most years, sometimes accompanied by our parents (depended on the number of horses we had available at the time).

I recall participating in the rodeo a few times, doing barrel racing and pole-bending on my horse Sue, who was quite good at those things, having been trained as a cutting horse. However, we never practiced enough, plus Sue was part Mustang, which gave her short legs. We never won anything.

In high school I remember marching with my high school band in a nearby town for the parade and even playing in a half-assed band for that town’s rodeo.

Much later on, when I lived in Washington, DC, I went down to the Capitol grounds for the symphony concert and watched the excellent fireworks display on the mall from there. No speeches at that event, either. I recall singing “This Land Is Your Land,” though. Reagan was president and most of the people at the concert were not big fans.

So my thoughts on the 4th of July have more to do with horses and parades and barbecue and music than they do with patriotism. Which is a good thing, because this 4th I am fresh out of patriotism. The regime in charge of our government is busy undermining almost everything I hold dear about the United States of America and bringing back all the worst aspects of our country. Continue reading “The 4th of July”…

Concerning the Life and Times of Mr Busket

personby Gillian Polack
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This week my thoughts are on a certain Mr Busket.

I gave a paper on him at the International Robin Hood Conference on Friday and he’s still nagging me. There’s a vast and deep discrepancy about what we know about his life from documents of the time and the rather fun story written about him after his death. Why did I give a paper about Mr Busket at a Robin Hood conference? Eustace Busket, who was most commonly known as Eustace the Monk, was quite possibly a source of a series of Robin Hood anecdotes. It was very cold the day of the conference, and, although I was at my computer, my brain kept turning “Eustace” into “Useless.” This is hilariously wrong. Eustace was a bunch of things but useless was not one of them.

I described him in my paper as “not merely a once-a-monk. He was also Eustace the pirate or Eustace the traitor or Eustace the genius sailor and courtier and leader of men or Eustace the much-hated.” He lived from around 1170 and died in 1217.

Eustace knew John when John was king of England, and John’s rivals across the channel. He worked for one and then the other and then he swung back again. His moment of greatest glory was probably when he controlled the English Channel through residence on the isle of Sark, and his moment of least glory was when he died. It wasn’t just that he died, you see. A contemporary chronicler explains that he was found hiding in the bilges. Normally one did not execute rich and noble folk captured in battle (one ransomed them for money) but Eustace was not well-loved and it’s quite possible his executioner bore him a personal grudge.

Eustace lived story and his thirteenth century biography doesn’t echo this at all. Historians talk about him as a colourful character, but only a couple have looked into his work at sea. Those few have pointed that that he was an extraordinarily important and skilled naval officer. He was the person Louis (son of the French king) employed for an attempt to invade England.

Understanding Eustace helps me understand two things. One is the nature of politics in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and how the volatility and sometimes sheer craziness of those politics worked. The other is my usual area of how stories told about someone tell us a great deal about the nature of stories and how they work in a given place and time. While this latter statement is true of any story, Eustace’s is special. Because of the fascinating discrepancies between Eustace’s life and the story told about him after his death, and because Eustace faded from popular story when Robin Hood came on the scene, Eustace tells me more than most. In his story he was a trickster, like Merlin and an outlaw, like his contemporary Fulk Fitz-warin. This points to one thing that the real Eustace and the fictional Eustace had in common: they undermined and disrupted others’ lives.

I’m giving my Patreon folk my whole conference paper to cogitate upon, but this is, I suspect not the end of my adventure with Eustace. I don’t have time now, but I will return to him one day.

Treading Lightly – Glass

personby Pati Nagle
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Treading Lightly is a blog series on ways to lighten our carbon footprint.

So in 2022, I wrote a Treading Lightly post about cheese. Recently I realized that one of the photos in that post needs an update. It’s this one:

Still grating my own cheese and loving it, but I no longer keep it in plastic. I am working to eliminate as much plastic as possible from my life. Single-use plastic for sure. I recycle as much packaging as possible and I prefer to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic (or made from plastic).

Regarding this obsolete photo, I have also been ditching things like my massive collection of Tupperware, some of which is pictured here. I did not do this lightly! I spent years and a ton of money building a Tupperware collection that served my every need. I was even a Tupperware sales person for a while. (That didn’t last long; not my scene.)

Recently, with growing awareness about the health problems caused by microplastics, I began to want to minimize my physical contact with plastics. Does Tupperware shed microplastics into the food it contains? Does it shed them into the water that’s used to wash it? Into the food that’s (Ghu forbid) cooked in it? I have my suspicions, and I’m definitely more comfortable storing my food in glass.

Enter my new collection of glass jars. It took a while to move everything out of the Tupperware or the original plastic packaging and into this array of canning jars. I love them! I can see the contents better, and they have this lovely gleaming glass aesthetic going on. Shiny, kinda old-fashioned and homey.

For stuff that I’d been keeping in its original plastic packaging, I discovered that not only could I see it better, the jars are more efficient for storage than the plastic bags. Case in point: brown sugar.

Stored in the “resealable” plastic bag, my brown sugar would always dry out. Even if I cleaned all the sugar out of the seal, and then folded it down and clamped it shut with a binder clip, it dried out. I tried adding a little clay thing that you soak in water, no go. The sugar dried out. As soon as I put it in a glass jar, it stayed moist without any fuss.

Even better, it’s easier to get stuff out of the jars without spilling it than to get it out of plastic packages. That brown sugar, when I tried spooning it out of the plastic bag, would end up all over the counter. With the jar, I spoon it out and rarely lose a grain.

That goes for the cheese, too. Here’s the updated photo:

The cheese looks prettier in this glass! (The cheddar is white cheddar, btw.) The jars are easier to open and close. Measuring from them is a breeze. They fill the shelves more efficiently. And they cost a fraction of what Tupperware costs.

I absolutely love keeping my staples in glass.

Give it a try! At least for the brown sugar – you will love that.

The Real and the Fake

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My current morning book is Jenny Odell’s Saving Time. It follows well on Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, since both are critical assessments of how we approach time, but while Burkeman focused on undermining the self-help time management industry, Odell is going after modern ideas of time and how to live in a more political fashion.

Both are philosophical books and good examples of critical thinking about time, though very different from Carlo Rovelli’s equally fascinating book The Order of Time, which was my first morning book.

In an early chapter, Odell writes about the commodification of leisure time, which includes various businesses set up to give us manufactured “experiences.” Reading about not just theme parks, but businesses tricked out as theme parks in Saving Time made me remember a business trip I once took to Las Vegas.

I tell many stories about that trip, which was to a three-day conference on class actions. I lived in Washington, DC, at the time, so I flew out early and went to San Diego to visit a friend, and then went back to Las Vegas. It was February, and when I flew out of Baltimore there was about a foot of snow on the ground. (I’d had to struggle through snow drifts on my small and unplowed street to get to a corner where a shuttle could pick me up for the airport.)

It was glorious in San Diego and my friend lived in a place east of the city where we could sit on her balcony and just stare at the hills and trees. The weather was still glorious in Las Vegas, but the hotel was on The Strip.

It was, in fact, the New York New York hotel. When you entered, you had to navigate across a casino floor to get to the front desk. It was smoky, too — I think smoking was still allowed in such places in Nevada.

The room was fine, but to get a meal you went down to the main floor where, in addition to the casino, there was an area styled as Greenwich Village with cafes. It even had fake steam coming up around fake manholes.

I hated it. First of all, while I used to play a bit of poker, I’m not a serious gambler, so the casino held no attraction for me, particularly since it was just table after table of people playing games, plus slot machines. No character at all.

Secondly, it was all so plastic, particularly the fake Greenwich Village.

I remember talking to a friend about how much I hated Las Vegas and he said, “Most people like the energy.”

And I said, “It’s fake energy.”

I mean, I’ve been to Greenwich Village many times, starting the the 1970s — so back when it was much less gentrified than now. It has always had wonderful big city energy. Continue reading “The Real and the Fake”…

Small Lives in Winter

personby Gillian Polack
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The title makes my life sound like an elegant painting. It is not, alas. It’s not nicely synchronised in colour, time, or any kind of harmony. In fact, this post is late because last night was midwinter being midwinter being midwinter. It was 4 degrees (39.2 for all those who prefer Fahrenheit) at 6 pm and I’m just warming up now. Me heater is on and I’ve moved from the night-time down dressing gown to the daytime oodie* and I will write this afternoon. I was supposed to run messages. A friend was going out and got the urgent things for me (paid in very fine chocolate and coffee) because today’s warmest was riddled with wind from the snow, which makes walking very difficult for those of us with arthritic joints. I can’t catch a bus because the nearest bus stop is too far away on days like this and I have been eating junk food. It’s one way of dealing. Not the most sensible, but it got me through last night and this morning. Tonight I’m back to being sensible. Between now and then, I must write some novel. This is my atonement for eating junk food. If I eat garbage I must produce good words, to keep the world in balance.

The novel is a vampire novel (of sorts) and my characters, too, will be eating junk food. What is junk food to a vampire/werewolf cross? I still have to work that out. I have ten minutes…

 

  • Spellcheck tells me I intended to write ‘foodie’. Given my recent eating habits, I fail at foodiedom and defy Spellcheck.

Creating Habits

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m fascinated to discover how many of the books I’ve chosen for my morning reading practice have turned out to be about time. I started with Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, just finished Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and have just started Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Live Beyond the Clock.

None of these books is about how to be more productive, which is good because my morning reading is not remotely about efficiency and productivity. It is, even though I’m reading words and writing down some of the ones that strike me as important, a kind of meditative practice.

It started out as a practical thing. I like to do some movement when I first get up – some physical therapy exercises that keep my body moving right along with my Tai Chi form – but I also want to keep an eye on my blood pressure. It’s best to check blood pressure when you’re relaxed, so I started reading for about 15 minutes before I dug out my cuff.

Reading quickly became important in its own right, and over the six months I’ve been doing this, I’ve figured out how to get the most out of it.

First of all, the ideal books are ones best read for a few minutes at a time. Rovelli’s on time was an excellent starting place, since it addressed time as approached by physicists with a philosophical bent and required me to think rather deeply about it when I read.

Books of essays are also good – I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest collection No Straight Road Takes You There before I started on Burkeman. Basically, any book in which reading a few pages gives you something to think about works.

And interestingly, most of the books I’ve ended up really appreciating in this practice are ones I’ve had for some time, but hadn’t read much of, because in truth they are books best read in small doses. If you keep reading to finish the book – as I am prone to do with novels or with nonfiction that’s more reportorial – you miss a lot of the point.

While I’ve been a serious reader all my life – I not only cannot remember not knowing how to read, I do not have any idea how I learned to read except that I already knew how when I started school – I’ve never read this way before.

I might have read school assignments a bit at a time and even taken some notes, but that was for a completely different purpose. In general, I’ve always been the person who buried her nose in a book and kept it there until the end or until interrupted. And I hated being interrupted.

I still read that way, but not first thing in the morning.

And among the things I have learned – especially as I read about time – is that doing this particular bit of reading every day is an incredibly important way to spend my time. Continue reading “Creating Habits”…