Red-Handed Jill

Recently, upon skimming the local news, I read about a local aquarium that recently celebrated the birth of some rather rare sharks. I found this rather fascinating, until I got to the part of the article that mentioned the curator of husbandry. I knew this woman. And recalling her brought back lots of memories around why I changed careers from marine biology to tech.

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I spent my birthday weekend in the back woods of Calaveras County at a black powder rendezvous. Essentially, this involves re-creating a historic event: back in the day, mountain men (and women) lived fairly isolated lives but they were a vital part of the local economies. In order to facilitate trade, rendezvous were organized so that they could buy, trade or sell goods, as well as catch up with folks they otherwise wouldn't get to see.
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... or at least it does for some people.

To the person who posted that anonymous and ignorant comment - did you know that there are scientific organizations that, if you send them a sample of your DNA, will help you discover all sorts of surprising things about your family history? I'd say it's a good bet that you didn't know anything about that. You might want to give knowledge a try rather than automatically posting anonymous snarky remarks that do nothing but expose your ignorance.

What was it they said about the best laid plans of mice and men? We HAD planned on sailing yesterday but our boat had other plans.

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Happy Mardi Gras!

Laissez le bon temps rouler!

Jack just made me very happy.

He actually made an appointment to see the doctor this week. He's been talking about going for three years and although it's not in my nature to nag, I did hint at it from time to time. And he's finally going. Did I mention it's been ten years since he's been to the doctor? And that it was for emergency surgery?

I don't know what the deal is about men and their reluctance to seek medical help. Is the underlying reason the same one that prevents men from asking directions?

Last night, the Bloody Scupper Plunder Club had its first public gig after a year and a half hiatus. We sounded pretty decent, considering how rusty we were - it's not as though we had stopped playing, but we hadn't really done any performing and there were some songs that we hadn't played in a long while.

Last night was also my singing debut. Drummers tend to avoid singing as they can get pretty damn winded playing the drums and it's tough to coordinate keeping a fairly complex and changing beat going and concentrate on singing at least reasonably well. But, since we voted the fourth member out of the band and she was the harmony singer, someone had to fill the void. So I girded my loins and decided to give it a shot. I didn't see anyone wince last night - perhaps they were being kind...

The upshot is that we did well enough that we were hired as part of the regular Thursday evening entertainment schedule - every second Thursday in the month. And we picked up another gig as well - traveling musicians at the Tartan Day gathering in April. So it looks like we're back in the music business.

I want one of these:



Jack and I are celebrating Chinese New Year with friends of ours next weekend and crowds permitting, maybe I'll find something like it.

Well, it looks like I'm back to being a professional musician. The Bloody Scupper Plunder Club was invited to play at Ye Olde Royal Oak on Thursdays, for some pay and free grub and drinks! We took a break for awhile to regroup and haven't performed in public for awhile but we've been practicing. So when the time comes, we'll put on a pretty decent show. I'm fairly excited because I'll be playing my ukulele as well as my usual bodhran (not at the same time, mind you...)

It seems to me that many people don't realise that economics is a social science, based on human behavior and reactions. The CEOs of companies who are laying off employees right and left certainly don't get it. Part of the reason we are in our current mess - besides greed - is short-sighted thinking by people who have been making decisions that affect the lives of so many others. If I were in a position to dictate how companies were run, I'd make these two changes:

Companies would be a lot smarter about cutting costs. In particular, rather than laying off a chunk of their employees, they should allow the employees to vote whether they would be willing to take a pay cut rather than potentially lose their jobs. I'll bet the vote would be for the pay cut. And the cuts would be higher for those employees in the higher ranks, since they can afford pay cuts more readily than those at the lowest echelons. That way, since folks wouldn't be so worried about losing their jobs, they wouldn't be so paranoid about making new purchases. They might buy less but the economy would dip slightly, rather than crash, and I suspect would rebound much more quickly.

A second rule I'd make is that CEOs can only make a certain number of times what the least-paid employee makes. No more of the CEO making $25,000,000 a year and folks on the manufacturing floor making $25,000. If the CEO wanted more money, he or she would have to raise everyone's pay, within certain parameters. Companies would not only save money (so they could sock it away for tough times), but this would also promote more solidarity and give folks the sense that they weren't just a cog in the wheel.

But of course, most folks at the higher echelons in companies didn't get there by being either pragmatic or altruistic, so I don't see either of these things happening, sorry to say...

Blessed rain! The land was starting to get parched, which is so odd for this time of year. A couple of years ago, Northern California experienced forty days where only three out of them didn't rain or snow That was much more typical, but with the recent climate wackiness all bets are off.

A friend in Calaveras isn't looking forward to the snow, since he lives too far away from services such as road clearing, but we truly need it. Sorry Patt, but I'm hoping for a lot more rain. Keep a shovel handy.

Our soon-to-be president Obama has asked that we make today a day of volunteer service. However, a lot of folks don't get the Martin Luther King holiday off from work to do volunteer projects. But there are lots of ways we can help our communities even if we're at our desks or out at lunch such as:

*Make an on-line donation to your favorite charity
*Give the homeless guy on the corner a buck
*Drop off canned food at your local food bank
*Donate pet food to your local animal shelter

Even the smallest efforts add up, so anything you can do will make a difference!

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, Dubya!

Okay - this is Jack. (We don't have many pics of us not in piratical garb - this is the most recent pic I have of him...)

Yesterday was Jack's and my sixth anniversary and we celebrated by going out to dinner at CreoLa Bistro. Special occasions oftentimes find us at this restaurant. Jack finds the need for a Louisiana food fix every once in awhile and I just enjoy eating there.

If you ever get to the San Francisco area, get yourself to this restaurant! The food is amazing - they even have something for vegetarians, although you have to ask for it (it's the wasabi-crusted portabella mushroom - sublime!) Jack was able to get his catfish fix, which came with the most amazing mashed potatoes in existence. And since it was a really special occasion, we went against our usual custom and ordered dessert, which was a combo peanut butter mousse and french silk pie. It was incredibly light and fluffy and soooo tasty.

And the service is equally amazing; they make you feel important without being obsequious about it. And they are very observant, so things just happen without you needing to ask.

http://www.creolabistro.com/

Pain tolerance:

Apparently, I have a pain tolerance that borders on the freakish. I'm a total and complete wimp when it comes to anticipating pain but once it happens, I function abnormally well.

Case in point: a number of years back I had epic-sized kidney stones. One of them was large enough that it got stuck and I had to have surgery. When the folks in the doctor's office first x-rayed me, they were amazed and appalled.

They explained that people (mostly men) who brag about three or four millimeter kidney stones are only talking about the length. In almost all cases, the kidney stones are very thin in girth - maybe 1/2 or so millimeters in diameter, at most. One of my larger ones (and there were several) was four millimeters long and over three in diameter. In terms of blockage, it's like comparing a pencil to a basketball and apparently it's the amount of blockage that determines the level of pain.

So what surprised them was that I was still conscious. They explained that pretty much everyone they had ever seen with kidney stones even approaching mine generally passed out from the pain right away and were kept sedated until it passed. I thanked them and asked if they could validate my parking, since I had driven there.


Joints:

I've had arthritis since I was a young kid. I started really noticing when I was around eleven but when I think back, it must have started before then. When I'd go to the movies, everyone else would jump up and scamper out of their seat afterwards. I couldn't understand how they could do that - I was way too stiff after being immobile that long and moved as though I were in my 80's. I had some x-rays done of my back and wrists in my 20's and the doctors asked, "Hey - did you know you have arthritis?"

It's osteo and pretty much everywhere, although some years are worse than others for certain joints. Although MSM does help quite a bit.


Menopause:

Apparently, even though the "change of life" can happen any time after thirty-five, an abnormally young age for it to begin is forty-one. I started at thirty-nine. And without getting into too many details, the last symptom that women usually get at the tail end (unless they delay menopause with HRT) was the very first symptom I got, because I'm just too darn freaky.

I seem to be on the ten year plan, which means I should be wrapped up before I'm fifty, since I'm going the non-HRT route. My mum was on HRT until recently, when her doctors told her she had to stop taking it. So now she and I are going through it at the same time, which is kind of unusual. Actually, I started before she did so if she's on the same ten-year plan as me, I'll be post-menopausal before she is, which is REALLY weird. It would have been nice to sail through my forties like most women, but I suppose there is an advantage to getting it over with while I'm still relatively young.


Medications and such:

I think that part of my freakyness stems from having an abnormal body makeup and chemistry. When I had my hips operated on it was discovered that the proportion of muscle in my body is abnormally high, even though I don't look very muscular and don't bulk up. Also, I don't react to some medications like other people. For example, nitrous oxide has no effect on me whatsoever. None. Ditto with Valium; I could swallow an entire bottle and then go out and operate heavy machinery. And when I pass kidney stones and sometimes get a bladder infection, I can't just take a light dosage of antibiotics for three days - I have to take horse pills for two weeks. And some local anesthetics actually make me more sensitive to pain (yes, I did learn this the hard way...)


So, now that you've read my freaky tales, do you have any?

Adventures in fasting:

When I was seventeen, I stopped eating for a week. Actually, I stopped ingesting anything. I simply lost the desire to eat or drink. To this day I don't know what caused this. What is particularly weird about this is that I am hypoglycemic - if I don't eat regularly, I get headaches and start shaking. But for some reason, I was fine the whole week. Same thing with not drinking; I should have been dehydrated after a day or two but I felt just fine. I went to school, work and the rest of my day the same way I always did; I just didn't eat or drink anything.

Another really weird aspect of this was my parents; they didn't put any pressure on me to eat. This is particularly odd because they were extremely controlling; very little of my life was actually within my own control, so I was shocked when I walked by the dinner table with no intention of sitting down to eat and wasn't told that I had better get my butt to the table and start eating or else. After a week, my mother plied me with one of my favourite foods, an artichoke, and afterward I was able to start eating again. However, I only did it to humour her and know that I could have gone even longer.


Migraines

From seventeen to eighteen I had a migraine that lasted eight months (this was several months after the fasting incident...) There was never a moment during that time that I didn't have a headache. Yes, that is correct - eight MONTHS.

I had a plethora of tests done but none of them produced any tangible reason for this migraine. I had been experiencing migraines since I was a small child but they never lasted longer than a day or so. Finally, one of my doctors talked to me alone and after asking me a few questions, ascertained that stress was causing this. He discussed this with my parents and suggested that we start treating the migraine. Medications didn't work so he suggested biofeedback training. It worked (best thing since sliced bread, sez I.) Eventually, the headaches reduced and then went away. I still get migraines and can catch most of them with biofeedback techniques.


Wonder Woman

In height and build I take after my mum's side of the family. However, I get my freakish strength from my father's side. Before the car accident that totaled my back, neck, hips and wrists, I used to squat 500 pounds. I weighed 110. And I'm sure I could have gone higher - 500 pounds was just a nice, round number. And if I had to, I could lift and move more than 1,000 pounds, but not for very long. I used to work at a health club and walked past the girls proudly doing bicep curls with ten pound barbels - to the 45 pound barbels for MY bicep curls. And I wasn't bulky - more like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. I'm convinced that being in such good shape is why I was able to walk after that accident.

I recently read about how hourglass-shaped women were more at a disadvantage evolution-wise, because apple-bodied women were supposedly stronger due to being shaped like men and having more male hormones. I have to say that this is total bunk. Most of those girls I passed with their wee weights were apple-bodied and they were at the apex of their strength. And most of the hourglass and pear-shaped women I observed were noticeably stronger than similarly-sized apple-bodied women. Also, the same female hormones that give hourglass and pear-shaped women their shape also give them a greater ability to handle physical stress and pain, as well as greater stamina, which, in the long run, is much more important in terms of ultimate species survival. So whoever wrote that article was, quite frankly, talking out of their butt.

Over the years I've been told that I'm a freak of nature and quite frankly I can't argue with that. Some friends have asked me to share my freakiness so here it is. Yes, these are all true - I am this weird.


Hair:

There are a couple of areas where my hair is highly unusual. The first is in the texture. My hair is extremely fine in texture. Course hair is 120 or more microns in diameter. Average is around 100 microns. Fine is below 80. Baby fine is around 60. Mine is 40 microns in diameter - I think I'm in the realm of rabbit or chinchilla hair or something. What saves me from having wispy, flyaway hair is the thickness (fine or course is the hair diameter; thick or thin is a function of the number of follicles.) I have A LOT of hair follicles. Most folks with really fine hair have ponytails the thickness of their baby finger - and it isn't even as fine as mine. Mine is the thickness of several fingers.

Another oddity about my hair is how fast it grows. Friends and acquaintances complain about how long it takes them to grow their hair out. One said it took her two years for her hair to grow from shoulder length to the top of her shoulder blades. For me, that would take around two months. The fastest hair growth recorded for me was two inches in five weeks (and this was recorded by my hairdresser - she kept very precise records and was pretty darn amazed.) This has its good and bad aspects: I enjoy the fact that my hair grows very quickly, but when I used to perm my hair I had to have it done every other month and it still looked scraggly pretty quickly and dyeing my hair is not an option. Same goes for shaving - five o'clock shadow? That happens before noon. So I epilate.

And I have almost no grey hair - apparently I take after my mum; she's in her late 60's and her hair is still mostly brown. I'm well into my forties and I have only a few. Most of my similarly-aged friends are either considerably grey or completely grey. But, when I start going grey, I won't be able to dye my hair - I'd have grey roots within a day.


Hands:

I never realised how long my hands were until I got older and found a hard time fitting into gloves. I tried on some women's weight lifting gloves and couldn't get my hands into even the queen size. Whenever I remarked on this, someone would always say, "Your hands aren't THAT big" and then put their hands against mine to prove their point. It proved my point: with few exceptions, my hands would be noticeably longer than theirs. They really don't look that big, but I can span an octave on a piano, something that most women my size can't do. My friend Claire can, but she's almost six feet tall and wears men's size large gloves (I wear a men's medium.) When we spread our fingers out width-wise, our pinkies and thumbs meet equally. So, apparently I have abnormally long hands.


Mind over matter:

When I was four years old, I decided that I didn't like the way my fingertips wrinkled when I spent time in the water so that had to stop. So it did. For years, my fingertips remained unwrinkled as I spent countless hours in the water. This puzzled and amused my friends to no end and I became known as the girl with the weird fingers.

However, when I was ten, I started to question this and my fingertips started wrinkling again. Strange but true.

Last night, Jack and I went to a relatively new pub - Ye Olde Royal Oak - to see a friend perform. This place used to be one of those "down-home" kind of restaurants where you could get chicken fried steak, grits, that sort of thing. Now it's pasties, bangers and mash and ale. And, as of last night, good music, courtesy of Peter Daldry. Check out his site: http://www.peterdaldry.com/ - he's a terrific singer/songwriter from Scotland and a damn funny guy to boot (although the humour isn't apparent from his website.)

Some other friends filtered in and we all had a terrific time catching up and listening to Peter. We were asked a few times if we'd be playing that evening, but we hadn't planned on it so we didn't. I learned that this was the new "Celtic Thursday" site.

As a bit of history, a number of folk musicians used to play weekly at a pub called Duke of Edinburgh. Word got around and it became quite the event, packing the pub on Thursday nights. Jack's and my band became the primary draw and we found ourselves there every Thursday night. This would have been a good deal except that we were never paid - never even got a break on our food. And the owner of the bar used to stand over us - while we were eating the food WE paid for - and demand to know when we were going to start playing. This got pretty old and we asked if we could at least get some of our refreshments comped and perhaps some money. He told us that he didn't want to set a precedent or other musicians might want to be paid or get free meals, even if they were the reason for bringing in at least half of his business over the course of the evening. So we left and his pub became quite empty on Thursdays. Folks tried to re-create "Celtic Thursdays" at another pub, but Jack and I stopped doing them. Not bitter or anything, just too busy.

At any rate, apparently they are trying to start them up again at this pub and the owners seem to be pretty amenable to them. We're not sure if we'll perform (the accoustics in this place are very strange) but we'll see what happens.

As an amusing side note: over the course of the evening I looked around at the decor and noticed something very familiar: one of the targes I built and painted for the Highlander Warrior guild was hanging on one of the walls. (A targe is a round shield, usually made out of wood. This particular one has some nailheads hammered around it, leather padding and thistles painted on it.) I made a whole series of painted targes for that guild - it was odd to see one of them hanging in a restaurant, though.

While the weather was still warm, Jack and I picked up a couple of bottles of an inexpensive white zinfandel called "Beam Me Up". We've had it before and it was pretty good.

So we opened up a bottle - it smelled mouldy. Since oftentimes wine will smell very different than it tastes we decided to hazard a small sip - it tasted mouldy as well. We definitely had gotten a bad batch of this wine. I looked at the label and it said that the wine was a product of a winery called Chateau Diana in Healdsburg, California (in the Napa area.)

So I went to their website and sent them a message, essentially letting them know that some of their wine was mouldy and that perhaps they should look into this so that other people won't have to experience this. Here's the reply I received (misspellings intact):

"Thanks for your email on Beam Me Up White Zinfandel. I am sure that your experiance was an isolated one as we have bottled thousnads of cases of this wine. This wine is no longer being carried by our winery. We do take all concerns seriously and appreciate your concern.

Dawn Manning"

Okay - does anyone else see what is wrong with this reply? She says that they take all concerns seriously, but the first part of the message dismisses the issue as unimportant since possibly only a few people were affected and then she attempts to avoid any accountability for distributing undrinkable wine. Yeah - I can really tell that you're concerned. So, rather than letting this pass, I decided to let her have it (I held back considerably):

"Hmmm.... the last sentence in your reply does not match the rest of the message.

If you do take all concerns seriously, you wouldn't have attempted to absolve yourself of accountability in this matter. It doesn't matter that you no longer carry that wine. The fact is, your company name was on those bottles and the wine was moldy and undrinkable - and it's irrelevant whether just a few or many. The responsibility is yours. But in no part of your reply was there any sort of apology for distributing moldy wine or acceptance of responsibility.

I'm normally not one to castigate but we're in the middle of a bad situation, economy-wise and I don't think you can afford to be this cavalier about customer service. I didn't expect two new bottles of wine or an engraved apology, but your response was disappointing."

I haven't heard back from them.

Bottom line: avoid wines from Chateau Diana - they could be mouldy and quite frankly, they couldn't care less. If they continue with this attitude, they'll be out of business, which, after this glimpse of how they conduct business, wouldn't really be a bad thing.