The Long and Winding Road

Not all who are lost wander …

The few people who frequent this blog might have noticed a lack of activity lately. That’s primarily because Pat and I have been on the road for most of the past three weeks. For a detailed travelogue, including pictures, you can look at Pat’s blog, Desert Sea, where he’s gradually putting up posts about the journey. I’ll just touch on highlights here.

The trip seemed to have two major themes: barbeque and detours. Just about every day, we had at least one great barbeque experience – when I travel, I want to sample the best of the local food, and we kept stumbling on great barbeque places. And just about every day, sometimes multiple times in a day, we ended up someplace we didn’t intend to be, sometimes because of road construction, sometimes because of our unfamiliarity with the territory, and sometimes because of a little of both.

Barbeque, May 2: OK, this doesn’t officially count as part of the journey, but we had lunch at JR’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque with the guy who was helping his buddy sell the fifth-wheel trailer we just bought, and exchanged a check for the title to the trailer.

Detour, May 2: Not a really big deal, but our favorite motel in Gallup had no non-smoking rooms available, so we had to spring for a suite.

Barbeque, May 3: Big Belly’s BBQ in Tempe, run by former ASU and KC Chiefs defensive tackle Bryan Proby, serves up massive portions of KC style barbeque. I didn’t have enough appetite for it this trip, but I’ve been told the giant potato is an experience I should have at least once in my lifetime.

Detour, May 6: This one was on purpose. On our way to the cruise on Saguaro Lake, we went to Arizona Cactus Sales to see what we might want to put into the landscaping if we buy a house in the Phoenix area – many of the properties we’ve been looking at have been bank-owned or otherwise neglected, and so the landscape is pretty much dead. We’d want to put in water-conserving landscaping, rather than recreating Scottish golf courses in the desert. We learned a lot about cacti and how to take care of them – which mostly means leaving them alone and absolutely not watering them or planting them anywhere water is likely to drain.

Barbeque, May 7: Right near our motel in Bakersfield was The Grill Hut. The menu is extremely limited (beef tri-tip or chicken breast, plus sauces and sides), but what they do, they do very well.

Detour, May 8: Trying to get from the Nimitz Freeway to Alameda Island is insane. The bridges that go to the island are not lined up with the roads the freeway exits lead to, and there’s road construction that makes things really “interesting” – such as semi-trucks turning left from an extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall into another extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall, during the extremely brief green-light interval of the temporary traffic light suspended from flimsy cables above the intersection, such that one truck takes three cycles of the light to complete its turn because of all of the other drivers who try to get around the behemoth and end up getting in its way, so it has to halt until they figure out that they have to back up to get out of its way. Apparently, “reverse” is not a setting that exists on the shift levers of most Californians’ cars.

Detour, May 10: Visited a friend on his boat in Marina Bay in Richmond, and then sort of got lost on the way out. Found the cheapest gas in the East Bay area, and also the mini-mart that was featured in the movie “True Crime.” Didn’t go in to see whether the potato-chip display had been moved.

Detour, May 11: Needed to do some financial transactions involving our credit union, so we used the credit-union branch-sharing network to find a participating CU in Berkeley. Google Maps got us there, but not back. We ended up taking a scenic tour of Berkeley and Oakland, including Chinatown, that we hadn’t intended.

Barbeque, May 11: We had already looked at our schedule for our time in the Bay Area and saw that the best time for us to hook up with family was Wednesday evening. My brother had the suggestion that maybe we could meet at Sam’s Bar-B-Que in San Jose, where our cousin often plays with a bluegrass band, Dark Hollow. As it turns out, the band was playing there that night, so my cousin saved us a table and we had a great time. The band played “Detour,” written by Paul Westmoreland and played by Spade Cooley, then subsequently by Patti Page and Willie Nelson, among others.

Detour, May 12: We had a coupon. We were hungry. We wanted seafood. Gerald’s Droid told us that Panama Joe’s atmosphere was “boisterous” but the noise level was “moderate.” I guess it depends what you mean by “moderate”; it was college night.

Barbeque, May 13: OK, we didn’t get to eat this, but our motel room was suffused with the aroma. We were right around the corner from the laundry room, which was also the housekeeping staff’s lunch room. Beneath the open window, they had set up a little electric grill, and the bulgogi smelled heavenly.

Barbeque, May 14: Free hot dogs and beer at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club open house. Those folks are really proud of their new elevator, which is done up inside like a fine yacht, with wood paneling and cabin sole. We’ve been told that Black Magic used to be part of the Etchells fleet there.

Detour, May 14: Met Silver Girl and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, then took an extended side trip to the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach.

Detour, May 15: Sunday Brunch on the Queen Mary, followed by wandering all over the ship for several hours. We only got lost a couple of times …

Detour, May 16: Dropped Gerald off with the ASU sailing team for several days’ training at the US Sailing Center in Long Beach and made it out of the LA area with only one or two wrong turns along the way. Made it to Tempe, dropped off a couple of things and picked up a couple of things at Gerald’s apartment.

Detour, May 17: Less than an hour from home, we saw smoke rising and lots of red flashing lights up ahead. We got off the freeway onto Old Route 66 and meandered through the village of Paraje before getting back onto the freeway, which we then had all to ourselves until we got to the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Detour, May 18-20: You thought we were done traveling? Nope. First, Pat went to Los Alamos to pick up Dulce, who had been getting royal spa treatment at my folks’ house (dinner whenever she wanted it, an electric blanket to sleep on at night, and other general spoiling). Then we took the big truck (Enterprise) south to pick up the fifth-wheel trailer and learn how it works.

Detour, May 21: I had been scheduled to teach only one class during the summer term, but I was given the opportunity Friday to add another – this one on the West Side campus, where I haven’t taught before. Pat and I took a scenic drive to assess the layout of the place, and man, is it far away!

Today: No detours, but maybe some barbeque – chicken “wings” from JJ’s (they’re actually thighs, and therefore really meaty) should go well with the hockey game. Now I’m getting hungry!

Judi Dench - "Send In the Clowns" from Hey, Mr. Producer!

November approaches

Prepare to do without me for a while

Those of you who know me know that I participate in National Novel Writing Month every year. This is an exercise in simply cranking out the words – 50,000 of them in 30 days.

I have been participating in NaNo since 2004. Since 2005, I have written a murder mystery every year, focusing on Hannah Montgomery, a community college English instructor who has a Jessica Fletcher-like habit of stumbling upon dead bodies everywhere she goes. The series’ inspiration was an unusually stubborn malfunctioning photocopier in the faculty workroom at the community college where I teach. It gave me the idea to write a mystery using a photocopier as a murder weapon, and presto, Murder at the Community College was born! In that mystery, a particularly unlikeable faculty member was offed by a booby trap set at the point in the copier’s paper path that always jammed.

Since then, Hannah has solved murders at the yacht club (vice commodore killed by an unusual subspecies of venomous snake), a family reunion (obnoxious great-aunt stabbed with a Sikh knife at Hannah’s fiancé’s family’s lake house), the little theater (the actor playing Sir Lionel in Camelot didn’t come back to life the way he was supposed to after the joust), and the sports desk of the local newspaper (an intrusive photographer clobbered to death with a hockey stick). Along the way, Hannah has fallen in love with a police detective, suffered a traumatic brain injury, been involved in a race riot, developed a fascination with racing sailboats, performed on a low-budget recording that went viral on the Internet, been raped, and met all sorts of interesting people.

So what’s next for Hannah? As she and fiancé Harry O’Malley plan their upcoming wedding, where will the next body turn up? I’m open to suggestions.

Poetry Corner: Tom Jones

Some great performers are never forgotten …

The guy who does the weather on the noon television news that I often watch has a holiday for every day of the year. It was through his broadcast that I first heard of National Cat Herders Day, the official holiday of Five O'Clock Somewhere.

So today I was watching the weather report, and learned that today is Remember September Day. Nice.

I'm sure this holiday was inspired by the song "Try to Remember" from the musical The Fantasticks. The original singer of this song was Jerry Orbach, whom most people knew as the wisecracking Detective Lenny Briscoe on the television series Law & Order. But long before that show ever hit the airwaves, Orbach had a successful career on Broadway. The Fantasticks premiered on May 3, 1960, with Orbach in a leading role.

Here are the lyrics for the song, written by Tom Jones:

TRY TO REMEMBER Lyrics

Music: Harvey Schmidt
Lyrics: Tom Jones
Book: Tom Jones
Premiere: Tuesday, May 3, 1960

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And follow.

Thanks to STL Lyrics for the words.

You want oleanders? You got oleanders!

Sometimes something in the blogosphere just demands a response ...

For O Docker and everybody else who's talking about oleanders, here's a video of the song that those of us in a certain generation think of the instant somebody mentions them. What I find interesting is that these guys looked really nerdy back in the '70s, but they're way cool now, even with the silver hair.

Poetry Corner: Tom Lehrer

One more echo from the class reunion

I grew up in an extremely odd place. In many ways, it was like a military base, since just about everybody there came from someplace else, and to a certain extent, it was metaphorically distant from the surrounding communities. Many areas are not open to the public, and even away from the lab, what was formerly military-base-style housing is readily visible in many parts of the town.

But then, there were other ways in which it was not so much like a military base. For one thing, the place has, I have been told, the highest per capita ratio of PhDs of any community in the world. For a while, there was a Nobel physics laureate living across the street from me. The high school's football and basketball teams were perpetually struggling, but our chess team, soccer team, and band always brought home the trophies. The graduating class prior to mine had 11 National Merit finalists, which seems impressive until one learns that my own graduating class had 36.

I am talking, of course, about Los Alamos.

Once upon a time, the satirist/songwriter Tom Lehrer worked at Los Alamos. As he had previously done at Harvard, he ended up writing a song about the place, in the style of a classic cowboy ballad: "The Wild West is Where I Want to Be." This song is soon to be given new life, as the Los Alamos barbershop group, of which my dad is a member, is preparing a barbershop version of it – Lehrer himself has given permission to create the new arrangement and might – just maybe – show up at the performance of the premiere.

Here is Lehrer's own introduction to the piece, and its lyrics, courtesy of sing365.com:

The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be Lyrics
Artist(Band):Tom Lehrer

Now if I may indulge in a bit of personal history, a few years ago I worked for a while at the Los Alamos scientific laboratory in New Mexico. I had a job there as a spy. No, I guess you know that the staff out there at that time was composed almost exclusively of spies... of one persuasion or another. And, while I was out there, I came to realize how much the Wild West had changed since the good old days of Wyatt Earp and Home on the Range, and here then is a modern cowboy ballad commemorating that delightful metamorphosis called The Wild West Is Where I Wanna Be.

Along the trail you'll find me lopin'
Where the spaces are wide open,
In the land of the old A.E.C. (yea-hah!)
Where the scenery's attractive,
And the air is radioactive,
Oh, the wild west is where I wanna be.

Mid the sagebrush and the cactus,
I'll watch the fellas practice
Droppin' bombs through the clean desert breeze.
I'll have on my sombrero,
And of course I'll wear a pair o'
Levis over my lead B.V.D.'s.

Ah will leave the city's rush,
Leave the fancy and the plush,
Leave the snow and leave the slush
And the crowds.
Ah will seek the desert's hush,
Where the scenery is lush,
How I long to see the mush-
room clouds.

'Mid the yuccas and the thistles
I'll watch the guided missiles,
While the old F.B.I. watches me. (yea-hah!)
Yes, I'll soon make my appearance
(Soon as I can get my clearance),
'Cause the wild west is where I wanna be.

Now I need to get back to grading those papers …

Poetry Corner: Rick Evans

The only song to be a one-hit wonder in both the U.S. and the U.K.

In 1969, the United States put a man on the moon. The United States was also mired in a war in Vietnam, the purpose of which almost nobody understood -- and which even today is unclear.

On the day that a human first walked on the surface of the moon, the top hit on the Billboard chart was "In the Year 2525," the only hit ever recorded by the duo Zager and Evans.

It captures the pessimism of the times, the worry that humans might be on a course where technology changes all that is human about them -- robots, genetic engineering, ideas that were science fiction in 1969.

I would hope that today we have moved beyond that sort of vision, although certainly some of the technologies envisioned have come true far sooner than the song lyrics predicted.

In The Year 2525 lyrics

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today

In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today ....(fading...) 

Thanks to elyrics.net for the words.

Sending the Old Man Home

While this song may be about a sailor rather than a soldier, the sentiment is the same ...

We laid the Old Soldier to rest this morning. It was a simple ceremony, the way he wanted it -- no fancy church service or procession to the cemetery, just a graveside service with no frills. Thanks to the American Legion, he had an honor guard of other old soldiers to fire a 21-gun salute and blow Taps on a bugle for him.

We shared stories of his adventures during the war, and generally remembered him and the way he was -- he went through the Great Depression and World War II, and he never considered anything after that to be anything important. He just went about his way.

In honor of the Old Soldier, let us remember all of the veterans of that war.

Sending the old man home

By: Jimmy Buffett

1979

They're sendin' the old man home

Back where the buffalo roam

Out in the Pacific, they say he was the best

Now he's in his "civies", headin' home like all the rest

He'll never forget Rosa Lee

Or sleepless nights he fought upon the sea

He'll only have the memories

Or great books by James Jones

'cause they're sendin' the old man home

Faraway (faraway)

Faraway (faraway)

Another life so very far away

They'll tear down the officers clubs

And write off the overdue subs

So let's drink to their memories

Our heroes and our pals

To those crazy navy flyers

To those swell Hawaiian gals

The sailors will dance in the street

Then they'll mothball the whole damn fleet

We'll only have the picture books

Of land, and sea, and foam

'cause they're sendin' the old man home

He'll only have his memories

Or great books by James Jones

'cause they're sendin' the old man home

(Thanks to metrolyrics.com for the words.)

If cats ran Broadway

I thought about waiting until National Cat Herders Day to run this, but then I decided I just couldn't wait ...

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

FOCS best of 2009

Nothing stands out, but there were a few posts that were okay

Captain JP has issued, not a challenge, but at least a suggestion to his fellow bloggers. While he's digesting the surfeit of holiday foods (especially the mince pies), he'd like to read the best of what we have written over the past year.

I will have to admit, 2009 didn't have the same sorts of high points that 2008 did. Instead, the year started on a low note, with somebody deciding to celebrate the New Year by vandalizing our truck, and it got lower from there. The first post of the year, I started with a tagline "I sure hope 2009 is better than 2008 was," but that didn't happen. Instead, it was worse.

There was my major computer crash in January that caused me to lose just about everything, since the backup files had somehow become corrupted and wouldn't load. There were Internet access problems caused by a squabble between my ISP and the bigger telecom company from which it bought services. There was the flu that I caught in March, which left me with a lingering cough that just wouldn't go away – I'm pretty sure I was one of the first people in the country to get H1N1, which hadn't even been identified yet but which is characterized by a horrible cough. Pat's dad in South Texas has been in deteriorating health, and so Pat has been dealing with a lot of headaches trying to take care of him from a distance. My work obligations kept us from being able to go on the solar eclipse cruise that most of the rest of the family took to celebrate my parents' 50^th wedding anniversary. We've had issues with vehicles needing repairs that we can't afford. And our home in Albuquerque got burglarized again, a near repeat of the 2007 incident, except that these burglars didn't take anything of great sentimental value – the previous burglars took care of that. Finally, there are some other issues that we don't want to go into detail on in the blog, but that have made life miserable.

Still, there were some blog posts that seem worth noting, so here I offer my top 10 blog posts for the year, in the order they appeared on the blog:

1. We started the year with two great days on the water.
   
2. I had fun with a little bit of fiction titled "This is Awkward," which became the inspiration for a writing project.
   
3. Tillerman issued a writing challenge to write a list, and I came up with ten lame or not-so-lame excuses not to get to the lake, triggered by a fit of pique at Zorro for letting me down the previous weekend.
   
4. I converted one of my better classroom lectures, on logical fallacies, into a blog post.
   
5. I issued a writing challenge to readers to come up with light bulb jokes about sailors, and the results were great.
   
6. In response to another Tillerman writing challenge, I wrote a review of the short film Pirates of the White Sand, a fun romp from the Duke City Shootout film festival.
   
7. I had another sailing experience with Zorro, involving moonlight under spinnaker and other such excitement.
   
8. Then, during National Novel Writing Month, I got to write a scene that recreated my first experience of an Etchells racing sailboat.
   
9. I noted a bit of irony over Thanksgiving weekend in Arizona.
   
10. I let my scholarly side out for a discussion of Plato's "Phaedrus."
    

So there you have it: the best of Five O'Clock Somewhere for 2009. Maybe next year there will be more fun things to choose from, and less gloom and doom.

Poetry Corner: Ralph Blane

Maybe I should stop calling this Poetry Corner and start calling it Song Lyrics Corner …

This year has not been a good one for our family. Some of the setbacks have been covered on this blog, such as the burglary just before Thanksgiving (I just realized that one of the DVDs the burglars stole was How the Grinch Stole Christmas; how's that for irony?). Other disasters have been of a nature not suitable to share here. Suffice it to say we have had annus horribilis, but without the public scrutiny that Buckingham Palace has to endure.

So my iTunes played Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," from the 1944 movie Meet Me In St. Louis. It's not just the song itself; it's the way she sings it, with a sort of pleading, desperate hope that next year will be better. "We'll have to muddle through somehow." When Frank Sinatra later recorded the song, he changed that line to something more optimistic, and that became the words everybody knows. But Garland just seemed to be singing to me directly, and her words and her delivery are all the more meaningful.

It was hard to find the original (as Garland sang them) lyrics online … I finally found them at sing365.com. Actually, these aren't the true original lyrics; the song was written the year before for soldiers fighting in World War II, and those lyrics had a reference to maybe not even living until next year. Garland insisted on changing that line for the movie. She was, after all, singing comforting words to a distressed 7-year-old.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Ralph Blane

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be
out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yule-tide gay
Next year all our troubles will be
miles away
Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us once more
Someday soon, we all will be together
If the Fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Thanksgiving with flippy floppies

Not your traditional weather …

So Pat and I have taken a trip to Arizona to have Thanksgiving with Gerald. While we were driving through the mountains of eastern Arizona last night, the temperature did get down to 34 degrees, according to the thermometer in our truck. However, now we’re in Tempe, in the Valley of the Sun, and the temperature is somewhere in the vicinity of 80 degrees.

Pat discovered that he had forgotten something in his packing, leaving him short of pants. No problem, we found that one clothing store in the outlet mall was open special Thanksgiving hours. This shopping center has one of the very trendy sound systems that plays music in all of the outdoor areas. It’s playing holiday tunes.

There was something incongruous, however, about what was playing as we were walking from the truck to the store: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Poetry Corner: Frank Churchill

Thinking about the offspring

Lately, Gerald has had a rough time. Some things he has mentioned on his blog, such as his encounter with a seriously out-of-line driver while he was riding his bicycle after returning to Tempe from a regatta in Santa Barbara – a return that was delayed by a tire blowout in California on the way.

He’s had to deal with a lot of other stresses as well, financial, automotive, academic, and health-related. It hasn’t helped that Pat and I haven’t been able to get out there to visit him, or that we haven’t even been able to send him green chile to ease his troubles. He recently Twittered, “Odd thoughts flowing through/ thinking about the people/ I want to be with.”

Here’s one for Gerald, the lullaby “Baby Mine” from the movie Dumbo. It just seems right for right now. (Thanks to Distant Melody for the lyrics.) It’s strange … when he actually was little, I wasn’t capable of this kind of caring, either because of depression or –much more likely – because the anti-depressant medications I was on kept me from feeling anything. In fact, I have almost no memory of his first two years of life. My memory begins when I got so fed up with the side effects of the anti-depressants that I quit taking them.

So maybe I feel a little bit guilty about having abandoned him back then, and now I want to make it right. I can’t sing a lullaby to him right now, but I can blog it to him.

Baby Mine

Baby mine, don't you cry
Baby mine, dry your eyes
Rest your head close to my heart
Never to part, baby of mine

Little one when you play
Don't you mind what they say
Let those eyes sparkle and shine
Never a tear, baby of mine

If they knew sweet little you
They'd end up loving you too
All those same people who scold you
What they'd give just for
The right to hold you

From your head to your toes
You're so sweet, goodness knows
But you're so precious to me
Cute as can be, baby of mine

Sunset, moonlight, Sunrise Regatta

Not much time to write; will try to keep this brief

This past weekend was the Rio Grande Sailing Club's Sunrise Regatta, consisting of four fleets: 10-mile, 25-mile spinnaker, 25-mile non-spinnaker, and 50-mile. The regatta gets its name because if the winds are light, sunrise is about when the 50-milers finish.

Pat and I got to the lake Friday afternoon, so he could take the club's motorboat out and put flashing lights on the navigation buoys that were to be used as turning marks during the race, so sailors could see them after dark. Before going to get the boat, Pat dropped me off at the Rock Canyon Marina, where I was to meet Zorro to sail with him. When I got there, he was already out sailing on the lake, but after about a half hour, he came to pick me up.

The wind was brisk, and so I had to hop on board Constellation from the dock while the boat was moving fairly fast. In order to make the jump easier, and since it was only going to be a short sail, I left almost everything in my gear bag, which I stowed on Windependent, Twinkle Toes' boat, on which Zorro and I and a few other people would be sailing in the 25-mile spinnaker fleet Saturday. Thus, when Zorro and I set sail, I was wearing my hat, sunglasses, and PFD, but I didn't have my non-sun glasses, my lip balm, or my cell phone with me. Well, we weren't going to be out long, so I wouldn't need those things – or so I thought.

It was late afternoon, but the wind was good, so Zorro decided to make a reconnaissance trip to the southernmost of the turning marks, to verify exactly where it was so we wouldn't have to hunt for it Saturday. As we arrived at that mark, the wind began to fade. On our way back to the marina, as the sun was going down, so was the wind. Then, when we were about halfway back, the wind went away completely. If I had had my cell phone, I could have called Pat to bring the motorboat and give us a tow in, but, well, I didn't have it. As it turned out, Pat had tried to phone me to ask what was up, but when he didn't get an answer, he figured that Zorro and I were simply enjoying our time on the water.

At this point, well, we didn't have much choice but to sit there and enjoy the sunset and try to find at least a little bit of a hint of a puff of wind. So we did. The sunset was glorious – but I didn't have a camera, or even a cell phone, to take a picture of it, so readers will have to take my word on that.

It was about this point that some song lyrics started humming through my head … and Zorro's too. I ended up with "Slow Boat to China" stuck in my brain for the whole weekend, and then some – it's still floating around my synapses. Zorro admitted that he, too, thought of the same song, although I was thinking of Jimmy Buffett's version, and he was thinking of Bette Midler's.

Just about as the sun set, we picked up just a hint of wind, and then a little more, and the boat was again moving, although not all that fast. The light was fading from the sky, and I realized I wouldn't be able to see all that well in the dark with my sunglasses on, but I didn't have my other glasses to change into. I tried going without any glasses on, but I'm so nearsighted, I couldn't see a thing – dark glasses were better than no glasses. Zorro admitted that his own night vision wasn't so great, either.

Meanwhile, in the east, the full moon was rising. So was the wind. Constellation picked up speed. We put up a spinnaker to get back to the marina more quickly. The wind built. And then it built some more. We were flying along, keeping pace with the waves, as the silvery moonlight reflected off the water like a million diamonds and gave us just barely enough light to see what we were doing. It was an awesome feeling, surfing the waves, the wind in my face, ripping along in the glow of the moon.

When we arrived at the marina, we found the harbor entrance almost by accident, and when we came to the dock, a fisherman on the shore facing the marina had a spotlight that provided enough light to allow us to get into the slip without incident.

I have in the past blogged about a peak
experience
with Team Zorro … this was another peak experience.

Saturday was the Sunrise Regatta. On board Windependent were boat owner Twinkle Toes, Zorro, Blondie, Blondie's boyfriend, and a friend of Zorro's from Belize who now lives in the U.S. and has his own boat. Zorro was at the helm, Twinkle Toes on main trim, Boyfriend and Belize on jib trim, Blondie tailing, and I wherever there was a hole that needed filling. Winds were stiff, and they gradually got stiffer as the day went on, but they never got to the really insane levels that they sometimes get. For the first half of the race, in particular, they were in the range that was great for a Hunter 34, enough to make such a big and clumsy boat move smartly. Later, they got to a level at which reefing the sails would have been good, but this boat's not rigged for easy reefing, so we kept full sail up and just pressed on.

One of the rules of thumb about racing on Windependent is that something ALWAYS breaks. That is especially true in rougher conditions. But this time around, we got lucky. There were two things that broke, neither of them a serious problem. On the first upwind leg, because of the stiff winds, we didn't raise a full-size spinnaker; instead, we used an old Etchells spinnaker that Zorro had donated to the cause. It did the trick, bringing the boat up to the maximum hull speed for a Hunter 34. It also looked very silly, just a little handkerchief high up and out in front of the mast. As we were approaching a narrow channel leading to the northern part of the lake, Zorro was talking about how we were going to take that sail down in order to zigzag through the channel – and then there was a major wind shift and we broached. The spinnaker was ripped to shreds in the incident.

The second thing that broke was the nail on my right pinkie. That's OK; I don't think I've ever had a worthwhile sail on which I didn't break a nail or two. If there were no broken nails, it was probably not fun. Maybe whenever Windependent races, I should be on board so what gets broken is one of my nails, and nothing important.

In our fleet, we were second over the finish line behind the J/24 Hot Flash, but we beat her on corrected time.

Oh, yeah, that song … Consider this a lengthy intro to a Poetry Corner – another one on Frank Loesser, whom I've featured before. This is the version that Buffett sings, adapted from Lyrics Depot.

On A Slow Boat To China
By: Frank Loesser
1948

I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone

Get you and keep you
In my arms ever more
Leave all your lovers
Weepin' on a far away shore

Out on the briny
With the moon big and shiny
Melting your heart of stone
Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All by myself alone

(instrumental)

I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone
A twist in the rudder
And a rip in the sails
Driftin' and dreamin'
Honey throw the compass over the rail

Out on the ocean
Far from all the commotion
Melting your heart of stone
Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All by myself alone

Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone

A new Olympic sport

And it will increase spectator interest, too

Conan O'Brien Tuesday evening was a rerun, but I hadn't seen the full show before – I'd stuck around for the monologue last time, but missed the rest. This time, I watched the whole thing, including the final act, which was a performance by the world champion pole dancer, supported by some of her cast-mates from Cirque de Soleil, Zumanitye.

It was an awesome performance, impressively athletic as well as stunningly beautiful. This lady is nimble, strong, graceful, and very, very sexy. She wasn't simply shimmying against the pole; she was climbing it, bending around it at seemingly impossible angles, and even vaulting up onto it, twelve feet in the air.

As I was watching, it occurred to me: This should be an Olympic sport. The latest decisions by the Olympic powers-that-be have shortchanged women's sailing, but this could be a venue where women can expand their influence. Pole dancing is certainly more athletic than, say, rhythmic gymnastics or ice dancing. It combines the rhythm of music with the athleticism and gracefulness that are valued in traditional gymnastics. And a pole is a lot more substantial than those silly hoops or ribbon-on-a-stick thingies.

Plus, with the changes in the past couple of decades that have allowed professional athletes to compete in the Olympics, pole dancing opens the games up to a really broad spectrum of new talents who otherwise would be relegated to obscurity. What more could anyone want?

Playing for Change

Yeah, I know I said I don't fall for "inspiring" messages, but this one was truly inspiring – without the quote marks

A few months ago, Adam Turinas put up a video on his blog. I was lucky enough to have a high-speed Internet connection that weekend, and so I was able to view it. The song was "Stand By Me," and it was produced by a project called Playing for Change.

The video features dozens of musicians, mostly street performers, but some other groups as well, intercut with each other, all performing seamlessly together, in spite of being thousands of miles apart, from Santa Monica to New Orleans to Amsterdam to Moscow to Congo to Katmandu, and even a group of Native American drummers from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. The power of this video is that so many people, from so many different places on Earth, could produce music in harmony without even meeting each other. That's how unifying music is.

The project's name operates on multiple levels. Sure, playing for change is what street musicians do – they rely on the change that passersby toss into their hat or instrument case. But this project is also looking at changing the world, as the title of the program that I watched Monday evening on my local PBS affiliate indicates: "Playing for Change: Peace Through Music."

The program showed how music can be a unifying and healing force in such places as Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. It can be a motivation for change in places like South Africa. It brings people together, and it does so in a way that transcends language or religion or ethnicity.

In the early 1980s, there was a trend toward using music to help disadvantaged people, starting with Live Aid's "We Are The World," and continuing with several other such projects, such as Farm Aid. But those projects, while they gained a whole lot of attention for a short while, didn't really have any lasting impact. They were started by celebrities, run by celebrities, very glitzy, and they just didn't have the to-the-gut honesty that Playing for Change has. Live Aid doesn't have Grandpa Elliott, a street musician in New Orleans who lost not only his home but his whole neighborhood to Hurricane Katrina but who has no thought of leaving – as he puts it, not even a "bulldoozer" can take him away.

I am not on a high-speed connection at the moment, so I can't embed the video in this post, but I can give you a link to "Stand By Me." Watch it.

Things to do in (or near) Northern Rio Arriba County

In New Mexico, we're not just about desert

Since I sail in two different primary venues, that means I have two different areas to promote. In the previous blog post, I covered 25 things to do in Sierra County, near Elephant Butte Lake, and now it's time to cover things to do in Northern Rio Arriba County, near Heron Lake. Since the lake is practically on the Colorado border, some of these adventures go beyond the county, but they're all close enough to the lake to take as a day trip.

1. Get a feel for the region with a visit to the Ghost Ranch Piedra Lumbre Education and Visitor Center, outside Abiquiu. While the center no longer has the live native animals that it had back when it was a living museum, it still has exhibits on the geology, ecology, history, and culture of the region.
   
2. Visit the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, where you can still see bullet marks in the walls from the raid led on the courthouse by civil-rights activist Reies López Tijerina in 1967.
   
3. Take a whitewater rafting tour down the Rio Chama Wild and Scenic River. Plan to get wet and also to see spectacular canyon scenery as the river plunges between colorful sandstone canyon walls.
   
4. Hit the Central United Methodist and Humane Society thrift shops in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The Methodists are especially good for clothing, while the Humane Society is big on furniture, appliances, and housewares. Both carry a substantial selection of books.
   
5. Take a hot mineral bath in Pagosa Springs. As in Truth or Consequences, there are a variety of prices and styles of baths available.
   
6. Go lake fishing. Because of its high altitude, Heron Lake abounds in cold-water fish that don't usually live this far south, such as lake trout and kokanee salmon. Fish from the bank, bring your own boat (taking precautions against mussels, of course), or hire a guide. Clients of our favorite, Don Wolfley of Stone House Lodge, regularly show up in the "Catches of the Week" section of the Albuquerque Journal's fishing reports.
   
7. Take a ride on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad. This narrow-gauge train takes all day to cover 63 miles of twisting track that crosses the New Mexico-Colorado state line 11 times along the way while carrying passengers through spectacular scenery that can't bee seen from the highway. The fall colors are especially awesome at the end of September and the beginning of October (exactly when the trees turn depends on the weather each year).
   
8. Go for a retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. This community of Benedictines believes in simplicity and quiet. Visitors don't have to be Catholic; they should, however, be interested in peace and solitude for meditative thought. If you don't want to drive 13 miles down a dirt road to get there, but you want to experience some of the calm, you can buy the monks' CD of Gregorian chants in many gift shops in the area. Their Monks' Ale (yes, they have a microbrewery) is also available at many supermarkets and liquor stores in New Mexico.
   
9. Visit Wolf Creek Pass, way up on the Great Divide. Just be sure, if you happen to have a truckload of Rhode Island Reds, that you haven't stacked them taller than the snow sheds on the other side, and check to see that your brakes work.
   
10. In late summer, attend Chama Days, the village's annual fiesta. It's a small-town fair with a Northern New Mexico flair; the parade includes units from a dozen different area volunteer fire departments, as well as some super-decked-out lowriders.
    
11. Speaking of lowriders, Española bills itself as the lowrider capital of the world. In July, as part of the Española Fiesta, you can attend a lowrider rally, with hundreds of stunning vehicles.
    
12. Go fly fishing in the Rio Chama, the Rio de los Brazos, or many other smaller local streams. It's more challenging than fishing in a lake, but for fly-fishermen, I've noticed it's the art of casting and outwitting the fish that keeps them happy.
    
13. Dine at the High Country Restaurant and Saloon. This is the finest eatery in Northern Rio Arriba County, where people go for special occasions. The food is great, and prices are reasonable. The bar stocks a good array of micro-brews on tap. Sunday brunch is an event, with a buffet, plus an egg station where the chef will construct a custom omelet or cook up your eggs exactly the way you want them – even over-easy.
    
14. During holiday season, take a drive through the village of Los Ojos, where on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the streets are lined with luminarias, a Northern New Mexico holiday tradition. Originally, small bonfires were lit along the road to light the way for the Christ Child; the bonfires have been replaced by votive candles in paper bags. On a windy night, it's definitely a labor of love to keep those candles lit.
    
15. Shop at the Chama Valley Supermarket. In early 2008, the old market's roof caved in under a heavy snow load; the rebuilt market is bigger and better, but it still keeps the needs of a small, rural, mountain community in mind. It carries a little bit of everything, from staples for low-income locals to gourmet fare for tourists who arrive in quarter-million-dollar RVs; from gardening supplies to tractors; from gourmet cat food to cattle feed; from toasters to entertainment centers.
    
16. Take a hike. The Friends of Heron and El Vado State Parks have been working on a trail around Heron Lake, plus there are trails on Forest Service land all over the area.
    
17. Go birdwatching. In one of the great conservation success stories, the osprey has made a recovery to the extent that there are several nesting pairs who return to Heron Lake every summer to raise their young, plus a few other pairs elsewhere in the region. In early July, the state park sponsors an Osprey Fest to celebrate the birds. But osprey aren't the only birds in the region worth watching; visitors to the park have a chance of seeing everything from broad-tailed hummingbirds to bald eagles.
    
18. Eat at Cookin' Books. No, this isn't an accounting firm; it's an eatery that serves a variety of creative deli-type foods, and it's also a bookstore that carries a fairly specialized selection of works by local authors, literary fare, and books with a spiritual theme. If the soup of the day is Hungarian mushroom, you're in for a treat.
    
19. Volunteer at the Chama Valley Humane Society. As is typical of small-town humane organizations, these folks could always use more help. If you can walk a dog or socialize kittens (also known as playing with them), the Humane Society can use your help. If you don't have time to spare, they could also use donations of money.
    
20. Go camping or RVing. In Chama, you can find a full-service RV park that is the northernmost member of the Texas Association of Campground Owners (Texas counts New Mexico as "Region 8"), as well as several others. If you're on a lower budget and/or don't need so many amenities, both Heron Lake and El Vado Lake state parks offer camping sites with full hookups for $14 a night and primitive sites for $10 a night.
    
21. Attend community events at Shroyer Center. About once a month (more often during the summer), there will be a breakfast or a dinner or an ice cream social or a chili cook-off or … something. Shroyer Center is the community center for the Laguna Vista community, and most of the events are fund-raisers for the center itself or the Laguna Vista Volunteer Fire Department. These events have two foci – food and fellowship. While Laguna Vista is a gated community, it's pretty easy to get invited in as a guest, especially if you mention to one of the real-estate agents who live there that you might be interested in buying a vacation property. Of course, if you're a friend of mine and Pat's, there's no problem on that front.
    
22. Go hunting. Pat and I don't hunt, but we have friends who do, and they say that this end of Rio Arriba County has some awesome game to shoot at – we have colossal elk, lots of deer, turkeys, and a lot of other game. Hunting is not allowed in Laguna Vista (unless you're a mountain lion) or in the state parks, and on the Jicarilla Apache reservation it's allowed only if you hire a guide and pay big bucks (the advantage is that these guides are really good), but there are other lands, both public and private, where it's easier to get permission to hunt.
    
23. Go off-roading on the backside of El Vado Lake. According to Gerald, it's hard to get to, there's nobody there, and it's fun. Plus there are great views at less cost than $600,000.
    
24. Paddle a kayak around Heron Lake. If there's not enough wind to go sailing, a kayak is just about the best way to get around. Heron is a no-wake lake, meaning that motorboats aren't allowed to go any faster than trolling speed. The upshot is that it's very quiet – everybody there is sailing, fishing, or paddling.
    
25. Come to Five O'Clock Somewhere, where you can take a bath in the Jacuzzi tub (our well water is full of the same minerals that Pagosa Springs has), and finish the day with cocktails on the deck, which, like Tillerman's, is on the front of the house and faces the lake.
    

So there you have it: things to do near Five O'Clock Somewhere. You still have a few hours to make your own contribution to the project by writing about non-sailing activities near wherever it is that you sail … until midnight tonight (Samoa time).