Gettin’ edjicated

Been on the receiving end of a lot of schooling lately …

I just had a really odd dream. I dreamed that the community college where I teach and the university just up the road got together to provide a workshop for instructors working to prepare students for careers in film production, not just instructors in the film programs, but those teaching such things as English (e.g., script writing) and accounting (production budgeting, etc.). It was a really intense workshop, a week long, and it involved not only classroom work but field work as well; participants were picked up from their campuses by bus and taken to each day’s lesson site. One day involved going out on the water in boats – the one I was assigned to was a nasty green aluminum runabout that seemed designed to make sure its occupants ended up soaking wet and very cold.

At the end of each day of study, there were gatherings to dine and socialize in a large banquet hall at the university. At the end of the final day of the program, spouses were invited, and all went well until Pat tried to hog all of the bread in the bread basket on the table. Then he was told he had to pay for the bread.

As the gathering broke up, many of the participants said they would be looking forward to the next year’s program, but the folks running the show said there would be no repeat – this had cost too much money and was too much hassle to put on.

As Pat and I were hiking out to where he had parked the car, it was uphill. And then it was even more steeply uphill. And I was tired, and getting more and more tired, and my muscles were aching. And the path kept getting steeper, and I kept getting more tired, until finally, I couldn’t stand up anymore, and I was crawling toward the car, which kept getting farther and farther away.

I woke up, and I was still aching. Ugh.

But the whole idea of a workshop like the one I dreamed about really seems like a good idea, since New Mexico is trying to encourage the film industry to produce more movies in-state. We already have good programs in place to train support personnel, and it would be great to have more higher-level personnel close to home.

In real life, Pat and I have been spending a lot of time lately in classes, although these classes are related much more to sailboat racing than film production.

In early November, we headed up to Denver, where we took two workshops over the weekend, one on race management, and one on race judging. Our time there coincided with the first snowstorm of the season, small by Colorado standards, but still enough to ice things over. One of the highlights of that weekend was meeting people from regional and national organizations, including a bit of information about changes in the rules that will be taking place in the new year. We also enjoyed the company of some of our classmates, such as the commodore of the Aspen Yacht Club (yes, there IS a yacht club in Aspen!), and some people we’d already worked with at regattas in Colorado. Part of the idea is to get people doing race management in places other than their immediate home waters, in order to get regional race management certification.

Later in November, we came to Arizona for another workshop. This one was put on by the Arizona Yacht Club, and it featured Dick Rose, who is one of the people who actually wrote the new rules. It was great to learn not only what the major changes in the rules are, but also why those changes were implemented. For example, there is a new rule (although I suspect the vast majority of sailors were already abiding by the practice) that bans intentionally putting trash in the water. There are some adjustments to rule changes made four years ago, for example, fine-tuning the rules about outside assistance.

Once my fall teaching was over, it was back to Arizona for a long-term stay and another training session, this time in handling powerboats and in operating such boats in support of a sailing regatta. There were two four-hour classroom sessions, and then there was a day out on the water, in order to learn hands-on how to operate a powerboat, and in particular how to operate the boats that belong to the Arizona Yacht Club – after a couple of incidents, the club decided to make a rule that those who wish to serve on race committee duty must learn how to operate the boats. The classroom sessions went well – they covered a lot of material, very quickly, since the people attending the class were already reasonably familiar with boats and the water.

The on-the-water session, however, was another story. It was cloudy and rainy, and although the forecast said the weather would be clearing out by midday, it never did. We worked on low-speed maneuvers, and we began to do the capsized-boat recovery, but by that time, it was raining heavily, and it was breezy as well. I was on the first team to attempt the recovery, on a nasty green aluminum runabout that seemed designed to make sure its occupants ended up soaking wet and very cold. The 14-foot boat that we were to recover didn’t just capsize; it turned all the way upside down, making the recovery even harder. One of my classmates on the boat commented that the instructor had certainly arranged realistic conditions, unlike the videos we had seen in the classroom, shot in calm water and clear weather. The instructor decided to declare a break, go to the marina restaurant to dry off, warm up, and decide what to do next. Eventually, the decision was made to finish the training at a later date, with better weather.

Every year, I get a performance evaluation at work, and one of the things I am supposed to do is show how I plan to improve as an instructor in the coming year or two. Continuing education is one potential way to do that. I’m not sure, however, that my supervisors would count dreaming of an intensive film program workshop or taking sailing race-management courses toward that requirement. I guess I’ll have to find something else.

Oh, and one more thing. … I did participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, and as usual, I did get to 50,000 words, with “Murder at the Wedding.” I got to bring back some of the colorful characters from the family reunion a few years back, and various confusions, including a couple of neo-Nazi skinheads who were attempting to assassinate a cat, only to find out that the feline was more than their match. Even worse, the skinheads were the last people (other than the murderer) to see the murder victim alive, so they really didn’t have a good day.

And yes, I did, as usual, participate in National Cat Herders Day, although I was so busy herding cats that I didn’t get a chance to put up my usual post.

Saturday sailing at the Butte

It's been a long time ...

At long last, I got in my first sail of the year. Pat had managed to sneak off to the lake a couple of times to go sailing with Zorro, but often it was mid-week, which meant I had to work. The one previous time I had gotten to the lake, the wind was just too fierce -- if the temperature had been warmer, it might have been good exciting sailing, but that day was just too cold.

Saturday, however, was much less windy. In fact, when we got to the lake, there was barely any wind at all. We joined Zorro and set sail on Constellation, hoping that perhaps some wind would fill in.

We had been drifting for about an hour when the wind did, finally, show up. It wasn't much, maxing out at probably 7 or 8 knots, but that's enough to make an Etchells go. Zorro had his handheld GPS, and we got up to 6.2 knots upwind and even faster downwind with the spinnaker up.

Pat was in charge of the spinnaker. He kept the trim up, and he's getting good at gybing the pole smoothly; that's something he and Zorro apparently practiced a lot the last time they were out.

Overall, it was a good couple of hours on the water.

We sailed until near sunset.

There weren't many other boats out. One friend had gone out earlier but gave up on waiting for wind and came in (his wife had chores for him to do anyway). Another came out late in the day. You can tell he's from Michigan; he was sailing in shirt sleeves!

Maybe, in between things like taking care of Pat's dad's estate and working on repairs (both boat and house) and various other tasks, we will have more time to sail this year.

A foodie dream

It's a good thing that in dreams one never gets full ...

I had a dream, in which my high school classmates were celebrating a reunion. Yeah, you know this is going to be fun with the classmates I have!

The high point of the reunion was a progressive dinner in the finer restaurants in old Santa Fe -- apparently the planners of the reunion couldn't decide on one, so they picked four: one for appetizers, one for soup and salad, one for the main course, and one for dessert. So we were a couple of hundred people traipsing around the narrow streets from one gourmet haven to another.

The appetizer course was a buffet with lots of tasty tidbits, mostly seafood-themed.

The soup-and-salad course featured French onion soup, with gobs of gooey cheese on top.

The main course was cabrito, slow-simmered birria-style, with spicy seasonings.

Dessert was another buffet, with plenty of yummy bites of this and that, some sweet, some tangy, some chocolaty, some creamy, some crunchy, some chewy, but -- ooh-la-la! -- one dish stole the show: mascarpone and raspberry filled ravioli with white chocolate sauce. Now, I've never heard of a restaurant here in New Mexico (or anywhere else either, for that matter) serving mascarpone and raspberry filled ravioli with white chocolate sauce, but it does sound like something the trendy, upscale restaurants in old Santa Fe would come up with.

When I woke up, the big toe joint on my right foot was aching, as if I actually had been on a walking tour of Santa Fe (or the way it aches when the weather is about to change), and I was drooling.

(And, no, these aren't actual pictures of the food I dreamed, just the closest approximations I could find on the Internet. The cabrito is very similar to the dream, but I couldn't find exactly the right ravioli picture.)

European road trip

For nearly thirty years, I have wanted to go back …

Those who know me know that I have wanted a Mercedes-Benz for a very, very long time, since I was in primary school. I especially love the ones with the diesel engine, not just for the fuel economy but also for the way they run, not like the brutish American trucks, but ticking smoothly along like a European taxi cab. Someday, I hope, I may have one.

The company offers a wonderful package for people who have a lot of money. The customer can order a custom-built car through a dealer in the U.S. Then the customer can travel to Germany, take delivery of the car at the factory, and drive around Europe for a month or so. Once the vacation is over, the customer flies home and the car is put on a boat back to the U.S.

This arrangement, of course, is suited to people who have both the time and the money for an extended European vacation, as well as the money to order a custom-built Mercedes. It isn’t exactly something ordinary Americans can do.

Besides, I’m not so interested in a brand-new Mercedes. I like the older ones, with the distinctive classic lines. The newer ones have become more streamlined, and they’ve lost that unique Benz look. I’m also not so interested in racing around on the autobahns. I like traveling on the little roads and visiting the small places. The experience of a country is much more authentic when one gets away from the standard places the tourists go.

So my car-buying journey would be lower-budget and less flashy. I’d fly over to Europe, find a nice used Mercedes for sale in a village somewhere, wander around the countryside for a while, and then put myself and the car on a boat home – not a cruise ship, but a freighter; many have accommodations for a few passengers, not fancy, but nice enough.

The year after I graduated from high school, I spent a year in England with my family; my dad exchanged jobs, houses, and cars with a scientist at the Rutherford-Harwell scientific laboratories. We were in a Victorian stone cottage in a small village that consisted of about sixty houses, three pubs, and one church. That was a very authentic experience.

While we were there, of course, we took some road trips in the car – a Citroen, not a Benz, but overall a nice car. We journeyed to Scotland on one trip, Wales on another. For spring break, which in Europe is typically two weeks rather than the usual American one week, we headed over to the continent. There was no tunnel back then, so we began the trip by driving to Portsmouth and taking a ferry to Cherbourg.

Our first stop was a country inn in a small village along the Seine, somewhere near Rouen. The owner was a Cordon Bleu chef, as well as a friend of the travel agent in England who had helped us plan the journey. It made a great base for driving around the countryside, and, as to be expected, the food was heavenly. One day, I was not feeling well, so I stayed in the room to rest while the rest of the family went touring. The staff of the inn were very attentive and frequently checked how I was doing; at lunch time they brought me a bowl of hot beef broth. At first, I didn’t think I wanted it, but then I caught the aroma of it and decided I’d take it after all. It was wonderfully restorative; by the time I finished it, I was feeling much better.

In Paris, we were in a small hotel owned by another friend of the travel agent. We left the car parked in the hotel parking garage and either walked or took the Metro wherever we wanted to go – a sensible way to get around, given the city’s serious traffic congestion. One evening as we were wandering around in search of a place to eat supper, we ran across a wonderful Italian restaurant. (Yes, an Italian restaurant in Paris!) It was run by a pair of little old ladies, and most of the customers were clearly regulars, chatting and joking with each other and with the owners, and generally being cheerful. The little old ladies were especially taken with my kid brother, who was about 9 at the time, calling him “un petit choux” (no, they weren’t calling him a cabbage; that’s a French idiom that translates roughly as “sweetie” or “cutie”). The restaurant served up enormous bowls of spaghetti and meatballs; we did not leave hungry.

Another highlight of the trip was a visit to my French pen-pal, who lived in a small village outside of Strasbourg. She took us to one of her favorite spots, a ruined castle on a hill overlooking the village. From there, we could see into Switzerland and Germany, and the Black Forest spread out before us. This was not a touristy spot; except for us, the only people up there were a few locals.

At this point in the trip, I came down with laryngitis – not a good thing, as I was the only member of the family fluent in French. My pen-pal took us to a pharmacy, where the pharmacist took my temperature, looked at my throat, and determined that I had garden-variety tonsillitis rather than strep throat. He then prescribed some throat lozenges that restored my voice and killed the pain.

We continued the journey driving up into Germany, to Heidelberg and then to the Rhine. The drive along the river, in its steep valley, was stunningly beautiful. We stayed in a small inn right on the river, so close, in fact, that the owner was able to point out the high-water marks left on the walls by various floods over the years. On crags above the inn, facing each other across the narrow valley, were two castles; if I remember correctly, their names were Katz and Maus.

On the way back to the coast, we had a slight problem. From underneath the car there came a loud bang, and suddenly the noise of the engine was deafening and the car was filling with fumes. A piece of the car’s exhaust system had broken. We limped along into Belgium, in search of a Citroen repair shop, which we finally found in Bruges. As we came up the road toward the shop, the mechanic stepped out of the front door, holding up in his hand a replacement for the part that had broken – he had heard us coming, long before he had seen us, and he knew exactly what was wrong.

We finished our journey by heading to Calais, where we took a ferry to Dover. When we got home to our village, we discovered that it had snowed, something that almost never happens in that part of England, and there was still snow on the ground.

By the way, if you’re interested in the car in the photo above, there are some like it for sale. You can read about them at Mercedes Motoring.

A spat

Purely fiction. Purely. (Well, almost purely.)

Over at Proper Course, Tillerman has issued another writing challenge. This one is to produce a post exploring the relationship between Love and Sailing. He has graciously permitted this exploration to take the form of fiction. And he has invited readers to explore not merely the positive aspects but also the negative. Thus, I present this excerpt from my current National Novel Writing Month project, Murder on the Sports Desk.

Hannah Montgomery, our point-of-view character, has been recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Her fiancé, Harry O’Malley, has been taking care of her. Her friend, Flash Duran, has just taken her sailing on his high-performance racing yacht, Avenger, and Harry’s not too happy about that. In the aftermath of that argument, they have gone to bed.

She dreamed that she was sailing on Avenger, out on the ocean, far from the coast, which was just a hazy dark line along the horizon. She was at the helm, steering the boat and also trimming the mainsail and jib – pulling on those dozens of lines as if she knew exactly which one to pull when, and which one to ease when. The boat was cutting through the waves with great speed, and she was getting splashed with chilly, salty water. She thought she was alone.

Suddenly an arm reached around her from behind, startling her, and wrapped her up in a tight grip, so that she could barely breathe. She felt the sinewy strong arm of the man behind her as he pulled her to him, and she felt the hard muscles of his chest against her back. She started to scream, but the man clamped a hand over her mouth, so all that she was able to do was make a slight squeaking sound. She could feel hard calluses against her lips, and she could taste the man’s sweat, a mixture of salt and the sulfurous tang of gunpowder. She tried to twist herself out of his hold, but she could barely move; his arm was too strong.

Then the man gripped her arm in his other hand and turned her around to face him, wrenching her shoulder as he did so. She released the tiller, and the boat careened out of control, rounding upwind and stalling out, to be slapped sideways by the waves. She looked at her captor. Dressed in full pirate regalia, with ragged breeches, a sash at the waist into which a cutlass was thrust, a shirt open to show a bare chest, tricorn hat, eye patch, pencil thin mustache, was … Flash Duran.

He removed his hand from her mouth. “Flash?” she squeaked.

“Aye, wench,” he said. “Ye be on my boat, ye be my wench.” She looked down and realized that she, too, was dressed as a pirate, barefoot, with a ragged red skirt and a loose white blouse. He put his hand behind her head, lacing his fingers through her hair, and pulled her face toward his, his mouth open to kiss hers. She could feel his hot breath, and smell it – he must have had liverwurst or something like it for lunch, and then smoked his cigarettes afterward. He slipped a hand inside her blouse and she realized she wasn’t wearing a bra; the calluses on his palm felt like sandpaper against her skin. She squirmed and pushed, but his other arm held her so tightly to him that she could barely move.

“Flash, no,” Hannah said as his face loomed in hers. “Flash!” Hannah felt herself spinning, and she wasn’t sure whether it was only the motion of the out of control boat, or also her own mind spinning, her head reeling. “Flash!” she screamed again.

She woke up with a jolt, bolting upright in the bed and gasping for breath. Harry was next to her, also awake, groggily sitting up. “That must have been some dream,” he said.

“It was, um, well, I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I don’t know what it was about.”

“It seemed pretty clear to me,” Harry said. “You were moving around like, well, like when we’re making love. And then, you scream out somebody else’s name instead of mine. Somebody you insist you don’t have anything more than friendship with.”

“It’s not like that,” Hannah said. “This dream was … frightening. He wasn’t a friend. He was … not … who he really is.”

“And how do you know who he really is?” Harry asked. “Could the dream be trying to tell you something?”

“No,” Hannah said. “Flash Duran may be a rogue, he may be self serving, he may have an ego the size of a house, he may be used to getting his way, but underneath, he’s a good person who cares about his friends, including me.”

“Honey,” Harry said, “I know you have a soft spot for the guy. But look at him, look at his reputation. He’s a pirate, and pirates are not nice people. Romantic imagery aside, even the pirates in the eighteenth century were ruthless, bloodthirsty criminals who took whatever they wanted without a care for whoever they might hurt in the process.”

How strange, Hannah thought, that Harry should bring up the pirate image, when she hadn’t mentioned anything about Flash being a pirate in her dream. “But Flash is not that way,” she said. “He would never hurt me.”

“Didn’t he hurt you this afternoon?” Harry asked. “He took you on his boat, his dangerous, demanding, brutal boat, and he had you trimming sheets and going on the foredeck, all the things you shouldn’t be doing until you’re fully recovered from your injury, and he brought you to the brink of collapse.”

“You don’t understand,” Hannah said. “That sail gave me much more than it took away. The feeling of that boat, it energized me and made me feel more alive than I have since before the injury.”

“You know, that’s what drug users say,” Harry said. “They take their uppers, and they get a charge out of the high, but really all the drugs are doing is robbing the users’ own energy reserves. Then they crash. When you got off that boat, you crashed.”

“That’s not how it was,” Hannah said. But then, she thought, was it? When she had stepped off the boat and set foot on the pier, she had no longer felt the energy flowing through her, and she had attributed that effect to the fact that she was no longer drawing energy from the boat. When Harry had hugged her, she had felt energy draining away, as if Harry was sapping her strength. But could it have been that the boat had been making her burn her own energy, and it was coincidence that the crash came when she left the boat and entered Harry’s arms?

“You’re having doubts, aren’t you?” Harry said. “I tell you, that man and that boat are dangerous.”

“I refuse to believe it,” Hannah said. “He’s saved my life often enough for me to know he does take my well being to heart.”

“He also takes his own desires to heart,” Harry said. “He wanted you on that boat more than he wanted you healthy. I don’t think you should sail with him again.”

“We’ve already been through this,” Hannah said. “Didn’t you agree that I could sail on Avenger if I’m just a passenger and don’t exert myself over anything?”

“I said I’d think about it,” Harry said. “Now, I’m not so sure I should even have said that.”

“You’re not going to take this away from me,” Hannah said. “I know you don’t like it, but the feeling of that boat, of being there on the water, the power of it, I can’t give it up.”

“But you have to,” Harry said. “Your health …”

“Is at least as much my business as it is yours,” Hannah said. “I can choose to take a risk if I wish, and in this case, the risk is not so big as you say it is, and the payoff is much too big to give up.”

Harry reached out and grabbed Hannah’s arm. “You can’t do it,” he said. “Think of me. Think how much I love you. Think how much it hurts me when you hurt. Don’t do something foolhardy that will cost me you.”

“Do you really want to not lose me?” Hannah said. “Then you’ll have to let me do this. If you really cared about me, you’d see that this is something I must do.” She pulled her arm out of Harry’s grasp, threw off the covers and got out of bed, reaching for her clothes, which she had tossed on a chair on the way to the bed earlier that evening.

“Don’t do it,” Harry said, getting up to follow her. “I only want what’s best for you.”

“What’s best for me is the freedom that I found going out on that boat,” Hannah said, pulling on her jeans and sweater, not bothering with a bra. “If you can’t allow me that, I can’t stay here.”

“Please, Hannah,” Harry said, putting his hands on her shoulders, “don’t go. I love you. You’re my life.”

“Well, you’re robbing me of mine,” Hannah said, pulling away from him again. “If you call that love, I don’t want to have to deal with it.” She dashed out of the room, grabbed her purse, laptop, papers and car keys, and was out the front door.

As she was unlocking her car, Harry appeared at the doorway, belting on his bathrobe. “Hannah, come back,” he said. “I take it back. You can go risk your life on that damn boat if you want. Just stay.”

“It’s too late for that now,” Hannah said. She climbed into her car, started it up, and drove off.

As I said, this is fiction.

This morning’s adventure

A pity it had to end

I was sailing. At first, I thought I was in one of the lakes where I often sail, but then I realized this was a bigger place; it was an ocean, albeit a very calm one, and instead of sailing in water that was surrounded by land, I was sailing on water that surrounded land, an island.

From time to time, I would come in to shore along the island, and at each port of call, there were a lot of flashing lights and loud music, and prominently displayed, a ladder of numbers, going from very small (something like $100) to a million dollars. Each time I made port, the next number up the ladder was lit up.

When I got to the $25,000 port, a man in an Elvis-type jumpsuit and carrying a microphone came up to me and said I'd qualified for the main round and asked me if I wanted to participate in it. Curious, I followed him up a hill that looked like it belonged in Tuscany, covered in vineyards, to a crumbling old tower.

When I went into the tower, I found myself on the set of a game show, similar to that of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, but with more audience participation. The stage was set up as a big kitchen, and I was to cook things; with each successful dish prepared, I would move up the ladder toward a million dollars. Members of the audience were invited to come up on the stage with me as sous-chefs. Even though I had gotten to the $25,000 level sailing, for the cooking round, I was to start off back at the bottom of the ladder.

The dishes I prepared started out simple, gradually gaining in sophistication as the numbers on the ladder were lit up higher and higher. At some point relatively early on, it was revealed that everything I cooked was somehow being multiplied by a couple of hundred and served up in a soup kitchen for homeless people.

I had just finished preparing a fettucine alfredo, topped with tender slices of herb-crusted grilled chicken breast, and I was thinking, "Wow, I've got $50,000. Nice. I can pay some bills!" I was looking forward to the next challenge.

Then the alarm clock rang. Bummer.

Disappointment for Team Zorro

Maybe the dream really was impossible …

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that Zorro and his crew have earned a slot in the men’s national sailing championship, the Mallory Cup, in San Francisco in September. We could stun the world, if a bunch of nuts from the desert showed up and actually did well.

We’ve been preparing. The Rio Grande Sailing Club pledged money to Team Zorro to help with registration and travel expenses. Zorro and Space Invader were working on lining up corporate sponsors to help with other expenses. Twinkle Toes’ wife lined up super-low-cost airline tickets – and apparently she was really looking forward to the trip, as she loves traveling to exciting places. I was hoping to get in on at least the last couple of days of the regatta, and I was planning on arranging time off from work to do that (I have a union contract that allows me some personal leave, but not enough to take the whole week off).

The problem is that Zorro has recently started a new job. When he hired on, he told his employers that he would need to take a week off in September to compete in the championship, and they said that was OK. But last week, they changed their tune and said that he would be fired if he took the week off.

Zorro can’t afford that. He may be unmarried, but he’s the sole support of a dog and a very large number of cats. He has to pay for canned food, kibbles, cat litter, vet visits, and more. Plus he has to pay a mortgage to keep a roof over all those critters’ heads, and he has to pay utilities to keep the space under that roof heated or air-conditioned for the animals’ health and comfort. So losing his job is not an option for him.

We looked into whether the rest of the team could still go to the championship without Zorro – Penzance could take the helm. But no, that’s not acceptable, since the helmsman is the focus of the championship. All of the rest of the team can be replaced with substitutes, but not the helm. So if Zorro can’t go, the team can’t go.

Part of the problem is the scheduling of the regatta – it starts in mid-week, and thus participants really do have to have the whole week free. That’s fine for people who are retired, or who have upper-level jobs in which they have freedom to schedule time off. It’s not fine for working stiffs who have very little control over their schedules. In addition to being nuts from the desert, many of the members of Team Zorro are working stiffs.

I hear complaints that sailing is unfairly labeled an “elitist” sport, and that it is open to anyone who is interested. But then I see sailboats priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars labeled “entry-level,” and I see regatta scheduling that prevents working stiffs from participating. Yeah, local clubs can run races that are open to anybody who can come up with a fairly nominal entry fee, but the higher levels of competition seem to assume a certain degree of freedom that isn’t available to working stiffs.

I suppose there’s still a chance that Team Zorro can get to San Francisco, but it’s remote. What would be necessary is an employer who won’t fire Zorro for going to San Francisco, so he can keep taking care of the critters and paying the bills. That sort of employer probably doesn’t exist in El Paso.

A very strange dream

Yeah, I’ve been accused of believing Zorro walks on water, but …

I had a dream. In this dream, I was sailing around in a small marina that had only a few boats in it. It wasn’t at Heron, since this marina had a large mooring field outside it that had a goodly number of boats in it. And it wasn’t at Elephant Butte, because the terrain near the marina was greener and had trees. The sky was overcast, and the water was relatively calm.

As I sailed out of the marina, I saw Zorro sitting in the mooring field. Yes, that’s right, he was sitting there, no boat, just sitting cross-legged on top of the water. He threw something toward me that I thought was a spit-wad. And then he threw something else, a ping-pong ball that bounced off one of the few boats in the marina and then over my head. And then he kept throwing ping-pong balls.

No, I’m not going to even try to figure out what it means.

A nightmare

Thank heaven it was just a dream

I had a dream. In this dream, my students and I were wandering around in a subterranean world, lit by yellowy smoking torches. There were a lot of underground caverns, and even an underground marina with underground sailboats.

This dream’s plot went like that of a modern horror movie, or at least like what I’ve been told a modern horror movie’s plot is like. One by one, the victims, in this case my students, were knocked off, in increasingly gruesome fashion.

Throughout the plot, I was powerless to prevent what was happening. I was able only to watch in anguish as yet another promising life was snuffed out.

Those who know me know that my students are my life. Yes, I make them work hard, but that’s because I want them to do the very best that they can do. I hold them to a high standard, and I am proud of them when they live up to it, especially when they come back to me and tell me that I have made a difference in their lives. I cannot imagine any career other than teaching in this community college, and even if I were to win the lottery and be set for life, I could not imagine not teaching here. I would do it even if I were not paid for it. The very worst possible nightmare that I could ever dream would be for my students to be killed. And that’s the nightmare that I had.

I’m sure some psychologist somewhere can say that maybe I have a secret wish to be rid of my students. But I don’t think it’s that. More likely, something has hit my subconscious and led me to fear that my students’ futures are in danger. But I’m damned if I can think what that might be.

“Call Sid!”

Say what? Who?

I didn’t have any crew this weekend, and neither did Zorro, and the skipper for whom Gerald intends to be crew this spring wasn’t participating in this weekend’s regatta. So Gerald and I signed on as crew for Zorro Saturday. The winds were stiff, but not dangerously so, and we had a wonderful time. Unfortunately, I over-exerted myself, given that I haven’t yet fully recovered from the flu, so Saturday night was miserable. The cough that had been plaguing me attacked with a vengeance, and what sleep I got was far from restful.

Through the night, I had a series of bizarre dreams, at best only vaguely remembered. But when I first woke up Sunday morning, there was a particularly vivid bit of dream remnant echoing in my head, a voice, I couldn’t tell whether male or female, yelling frantically, “Call Sid!”

Through my befuzzed brain, questions wandered: Who the heck is Sid? And why is it so urgent to call him (or her – it could have been Cyd)? I mumbled to Pat, “Do we know anybody named Sid?”

I dozed off again, and the next time I woke up, I had no memory of the dream, except that some information had been filled in – Sid was a white German Shepherd dog. I still have no idea why it was so important to call him.

Chile vs. chili

A New Mexico semantic distinction

In New Mexico, we make a careful distinction of terms that isn’t followed in most other places.

Chile, when capitalized, is the name of a South American country. But when chile, with an e at the end, is not capitalized, it refers to the fruit of the capsicum plant, the peppers that come in red and green colors, in varying degrees of hotness. In most of the rest of the world, such fruit is referred to as chili peppers, or just chilis, but in New Mexico, they are chiles.

In New Mexico, the term chili, with an i at the end, refers to a hearty stew, usually based on ground or finely diced beef or pork, made using chiles, usually in dried flaked or powdered form, as a primary seasoning. Other ingredients are up for debate, especially beans. Some chili fans will say that real chili doesn’t have beans, while others say beans are a necessity, and among the bean supporters, there’s debate about what sort of beans are acceptable.

I had a dream. The early part of the dream was hazy – it was about getting backward Americans to understand the concept of the British roundabout, a traffic circle that, in the original British concept, allows traffic to flow smoothly without the need for traffic lights. In many American cities, roundabouts have been installed to have the opposite effect, to slow traffic down in neighborhoods where the powers-that-be want to discourage reckless driving and drive-by shootings.

After the seminar, there was a meal. There was a lot of good food. But the climax of the meal was some really, really good chili. When I woke up, I was drooling. And I was HUNGRY, for the first time in days, maybe even weeks. I knew I needed to have chili for supper.

It’s a simple recipe, and since it only uses one pot, the cleanup is easy. First, I chop up one medium sized onion and mince two or three cloves of garlic. Then, I brown about a pound (more if it has a lot of fat) of ground beef or pork in a big pot with the onion and garlic. My favorite is the coarse-ground pork, but this time, I just had basic ground beef. While the meat is browning, I open a can of tomatoes (coarse-diced, or if they’re halves or whole tomatoes, I swish a knife through the can a few times to cut them down to size) and a can of beans (I like kidneys, although chili purists cringe at the thought of anything other than pintos). I dump the beans into another container.

Next, I use a turkey baster to suck as much of the fat as I can out of the pot and into the can that originally held the beans. I set the fat aside to cool – I’ll dump it in the trash once it isn’t so hot that it will melt the trash bag in the kitchen trash can.

Now, I put the remaining ingredients into the pot: the beans, the tomatoes, a half-can or half-bottle of hearty beer (light beer WILL NOT do), a major slug (wild guess, about 2 tablespoons) of chile powder (avoid store brands or national brands; my favorite is Chimayo medium, which is primarily available in New Mexico; Gebhart’s from Texas is pretty good and more widely available), a half slug of comino (also known as cumin), a half slug of celery seed, a quarter slug of mustard powder, and twenty or thirty cranks of fresh-ground pepper (if you don’t have a pepper grinder, maybe a quarter teaspoon or so).

Stir everything together, then bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat as low as your stove will go, and simmer for at least an hour. The longer you simmer, the richer the flavor gets. This is a great recipe for when you don’t know exactly when everybody is going to arrive for supper, because you can keep it simmering for 6 hours and it will still be good, especially if your stove has an extra-low heat setting, or you have a heat dissipater you can put between the pot and the stove burner, to keep the beans at the bottom of the pot from burning. (I have an electric Chef Pot that has a low setting, and that saves me from having to heat up the kitchen by firing up the stove in the first place.)

I serve the chili in bowls, with grated cheese to sprinkle on top – Longhorn Colby and Monterey Jack are both good. Flour tortillas and/or saltine crackers complete the meal.

Opals are bad luck, right?

May they bring such luck on those who most deserve it

I had a dream about my jewelry, the jewelry that got stolen. Most important in the dream was a necklace, an opal, set in an elegant gold filigree pendant, that my Irish grandmother had given me on my 16^th birthday, and that I wore to my senior prom.

I was on a ski lift, going up. At the top, I was given the pendant, along with some of the other items. I was told I couldn’t go down the mountain unless I was wearing the jewelry, especially that pendant.

I don’t ski. I have no idea what the necklace and skiing have to do with anything. But when I woke up from the dream, I was crying.

According to folklore, opals are bad luck, ill-fated gems that bring nothing but grief, except to those who were born in October and therefore have the opal as their birthstone. And woe betide any who should steal an opal – that is an especially powerful form of evil luck.

I put together a list of the items that were stolen, and I was astonished to realize that I had so many items of opal jewelry: necklaces, earrings, stick-pins, and more. Whoever swiped my jewelry chest reaped a mountain of bad luck.

The police rookie (so much of a rookie that he didn’t even have his own business cards, but crossed out the name and badge number on someone else’s and wrote in his own information) who came in response to our call about the burglary didn’t even make a list of the items that were stolen. He talked to us for about 20 minutes and then declared the case “closed,” explaining that we had very little chance of seeing our stuff ever again.

But we’ve been told by a reliable source that if we do some of our own detective work and check out pawnshops in the area, we might well find at least some of what we’ve lost, and then the police will have to re-open the case. So Pat and I will be looking for my opals and everything else. Maybe, just maybe, my opals will be the downfall of these low-lifes. THAT would be poetic justice.

Why I don’t like mind-control drugs

As I said in the last post, I’d rather deal with the occasional nightmare than not have dreams at all

One of the problems with American attitudes toward medicine is the eagerness of people to say, “Oh, let’s find a pill you can take to fix it.” Yes, if you have a bacterial infection, it makes sense to take a round of pills and get rid of it. But now, it seems that so many other conditions that weren’t considered serious problems now are – toenail fungus, male performance issues, and a host of mental conditions.

Yes, some cases are severe, but it’s only been recently that such things as extreme shyness were seen as pathological conditions to be fixed with a pill. Many children, especially boys, are diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and put on medications to get them under control, when the behavior that is now seen as pathological would just have been “boys being boys” a generation ago and treated with stern discipline. Among the younger students I see in the college courses I teach, I often get one who says, “I have ADD. Therefore I’m not capable of behaving myself.” What I have discovered is that these students are indeed capable of behaving themselves if they’re engaged in challenging coursework that they find meaningful. The trick is getting them out of the mindset that they’re doomed by brain chemistry to misbehave.

In my own case, I spent some years on anti-depressants, and those were the worst years of my life. Sure, the drugs got rid of the lows. But they also got rid of the highs. I wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t laugh either. I didn’t have nightmares, but I didn’t have dreams either.

This morning I had not one, but two dreams that made me glad I could have them.

The second one was influenced by the very wet weather we have had lately. I was in Los Alamos, and needed to drive to Pojoaque along with some family members, and there had been so much rain that Cochiti Lake was overfilled and flooded the road between Los Alamos and Pojoaque, so we had to take a detour. Then at Pojoaque, we arrived at the sparkling-new international airport (no, in real life, Pojoaque doesn’t have an airport), apparently built to complement the casino. It was a spectacular airport, beautifully designed, with art of all sorts, soft lighting, and just a wonderfully pleasant atmosphere, much like a fine restaurant.

The security checkpoint had all sorts of fancy electronic devices and gates to go through, courtesy of the scientific lab at Los Alamos. The attendant looked up at me and said, “I remember you from last year. You’re going to Geneva, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said. “Lucerne, actually.” After getting through security, I went to the boarding gate, which really resembled a nice restaurant, with candlelit tables and everything. There was even a pastry cart, and I selected some sort of blueberry-covered cake. Then when I got my cake, I discovered it wasn’t cake, but rather something like marzipan, and it was a Native American sculpture of a blue horse.

The earlier dream had a Star Wars theme to it. I was camped out in the desert on Tatooine, in a pop-up tent trailer, much bigger than the one that I had borrowed to camp in for dockmaster duty. I went sailing, which seemed odd, because who ever heard of sailing in the desert? How could there possibly be sailing on Tatooine? Then I returned to the camper, and I discovered that I would need to seek out a great Jedi master.

The Jedi master lived in a rock outcropping a ways across the desert. I traveled via speeder to the outcropping, and then to get into the rocks, I needed to go up stairs, through tunnels, up elevators and escalators, on a levitating sailboat, and around rocky paths. Some jawas showed up to help lead me. Finally, I reached the entrance to the Jedi master’s cave, and as I looked in, I saw a mother cat and two kittens walking across the front part of the cave. I recognized the cat and immediately knew who the master was, even before I heard the jawa behind me say, “Oh, the master always has cats.”