A Mandate

The Popular Vote:
The GOP: 56,088,419
The Democrats: 63,432,250

It is finished. And it has begun. I think it's time for us to remember now that we all want the same things. We might disagree with each other on how to reach our goals, but we can only reach them together. We have to respect our differences if we are going to find a way past them. Race is not a blunt weapon; neither is religion; nor is abortion.

We should all want all of us to do well. If, individually, we are doing well, but people on the streets of our cities are homeless, or working two jobs to try to raise children alone, or denied access to adequate healthcare or education, then we are not doing as well as we think. We need to acknowledge this, and then make changes.

When some of us suffer, we all suffer.

This is not Socialism.

This is kindness.

Bottling my Ginger Beer

For the last week, I've been feeding my ginger beer every day. First you start off with what's called the plant, which I made last week. Every day, you add one teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon of finely-cut ginger. I've been liberal with the ginger, though, because I want to make sure it really tastes gingery.

Then, today, I zested a couple of lemons, and cut up another big chunk of ginger, strained my plant and added the lemon zest, the ginger, and the juice of three lemons to the strained plant. I boiled about 1-pound of sugar in 1-liter of water. Added it all together and added another 3-liters of water.

I've bottled these 4-liters. They're supposed to sit for a week.

They might explode.

They're in the basement.

In a box.

Great Lines From Great Books #1

Taken from Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, an account of the violent and turbulent 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, I thought this line was great and wanted to share it.

Mailer was writing about himself in the third person (only Mailer could do that) when he wrote: "Just as he had known for one instant at the Republican Gala in Miami Beach that Nelson Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination, so he knew now on this cool gray Sunday afternoon in August, chill in the air like the chill of the pale and the bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat, that trouble was coming, serious trouble."

Violence followed at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat. Martin Luther King had been killed the previous April. Robert Kennedy had been killed in June. On the other side of the world, in Vietnam, we were killing people who didn't look like us. In Chicago: Tear gas. Cops clubbing demonstrators and journalists. Riots in the streets. Violence in the cities. In other words: trouble, serious trouble. This book should be read in a locked room with the curtains closed, to minimize the effects of the thick fear and paranoia that drip from the page.

Get somewhere dark, warm and safe. Stay there.

Until it's over.

Labor Day

Monday was Labor Day or, as they call it here in New Zealand, Labour Day. We got up late, went to the beach, ate excessively large breakfasts, and watched all the surfers bobbing up and down on the rolling breakers, among the kelp, trying to catch a good wave.

Mmmm. Kelp. Next weekend we're attending a class on how to use local seaweed as food. We're looking forward to it. Yeah. Eating kelp.

Ginger Beer

Today, and for the next couple of weeks, I'll be attempting to make my own homemade ginger beer. This is my second attempt. The first attempt didn't taste quite right. It didn't even taste good, actually. Or gingery. But it didn't kill me, either. There's definitely room for improvement though. My long-term goal, in the distant future, is to make my own rum and to make my own ginger beer and then mix the two together. Rum is much more difficult to make than ginger beer, so I thought I'd start with the ginger beer and work my way up.

Day One:
400ml of warm water
2 teaspoons of sugar
2 teaspoons of freshly cut ginger (I used a LOT more ... I mean, why else call it ginger beer, right?)
10 grams of yeast (our scales aren't very sensitive, so I had to guess. If I've used too much yeast there's a chance my potion will explode next week).

Tips for Expectant Fathers

Don't excitedly tell your pregnant wife in the morning that she looks just like the letter 'D' in profile.

And don't try to make things better by saying that you've changed your mind and she looks more like the letter 'P' instead.

And definitely don't remind her that at least she doesn't look like the letter 'B.'

Do, immediately, what I did, eventually, and tell her that, from behind, she looks exactly like the letter 'I.'

Bungyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

We were fortunate enough to enjoy a visit from friends last week. Mary and Julie got on a plane in Cincinnati, bounced over to San Francisco, then to Auckland, and then finally to our new home: Dunedin, gloomy and gray, sitting solidly at the edge of the rainy green plains of Otago. Dunners! And there they were at the airport, fresh-faced, eager and ready to go at 9am on a bright and sunny Sunday morning, like visitors from another planet, or a past life.

We've been here nearly 8-months and we've adapted to our new lives here.

But it was very nice to see familiar faces. Friends, standing here in the fields of Dunedin, among the sheep and cows. Not mispronouncing all their vowels. Wearing shoes. It's like an optical illusion.

And you know what? They said it wasn't even really all that painful. All that was really expected of them was that they sit quite still for several hours in a big metal tube. And they arrived. We showed them all around Dunedin, all our favorite places, all our new haunts. That took care of the first afternoon. Kidding. Sort of.

We had lots of fun while they were here and even managed to fit in a weekend driving through the vineyards and orchards of central Otago to the mountains and the deep glacial lakes of Queenstown. And so to the meat of this blog entry: Mary's bungy jump. On Saturday afternoon, we pulled over and parked near the Kawarua gorge to watch crazy tourists jumping off a bridge, falling like rocks, 43-meters, to the churning glacier-fed Kawarua River, cold and aerated after its steep journey down from the mountains of the southern Alps.

Skinny ones.

Young ones.

Asian Ones.

Fat ones.

Falling.

F
a
l
l
i
n
g.

And then the next day, Mary announced, quite matter-of-factly, that she wanted to throw herself -- her own body -- off a bridge. Were we supposed to facilitate this? What are the legal ramifications? Falling through all that air. Was she angry about something? Did she not like New Zealand? Or perhaps she just really liked falling? Who knows? She signed some paperwork. She got weighed. She walked onto the bridge and got strapped up. She stood on the edge of a platform, looking out over the river and the canyon walls that form the gorge. She looked a little pale. She fake-jumped a couple of times -- an indication that her knees were more sensible than her brain. And then she jumped. And fell. And bounced. And fell again. And bounced again. And survived.

It was a good day.

(Click on the images if you want a close-up view of what batpoop crazy looks like).