DO AS I SAY, not as I do?

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

Why is it that I do not feel better when my country is doing it instead of some other country doing it? Isn’t that what we are all supposed to have learned in Kindergarten?

“ ‘A nation that willfully destroys another country’s heritage would be no better than the criminals who have destroyed irreplaceable sites in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in recent years,’ Sara C. Bronin, a lawyer and specialist in historic preservation, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in response to Trump’s threats to target cultural sites in Iran.

“ ‘Targeting civilians and cultural sites is what terrorists do. It’s a war crime,’ tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Japanese tourists visit Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz, in May 2002. (Vahid Salemi/AP)
Japanese tourists visit Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz, in May 2002. (Vahid Salemi/AP)

“In Britain, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson cautioned that ‘there are international conventions in place which prevent the destruction of cultural heritage.’ ”

“In March 2017 — only weeks after Trump’s inauguration — the U.N. Security Council, with the United States as a permanent member, unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the “unlawful destruction of cultural heritage, inter alia destruction of religious sites and artefacts” in armed conflicts. …

“According to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, warring parties should take all possible steps “to protect cultural property,” which includes “monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular,” among other examples.”

These standards of ordinary decency have been confirmed throughout the civilized world from the Geneva Convention (1949 and 1977) to the recently International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1992) and Mali (2012). NPR has a lot to say about this including direct quotes from U.S.Military law.

Trump has threatened to destroy cultural sites in Iran—his way of countering potential repercussions. Despite the fact that we have consistently supported respecting such sites. Leaders as diverse as Germany’s Merkel and Russia’s Putin have vowed to do whatever they can to prevent this outrage. Consider the last time significant civilian and heritage structures were targeted. Yes, consider 9/11. Imagine if the Statue of Liberty and Golden Gate Bridge, Bunker Hill and the Grand Canyon were— threatened because one of our leaders were killed in a foreign country. No, wait: Imagine we assassinated military leaders of two countries in a country we occupied for going-on twenty years. No, wait . . .

not a YEAR END REVIEW

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I just reread my year-end reports from 2018. (I have some work to do.) One of those posts was about what I had read. One of them had to do with paying for college. My mother was famous as a worrier, which was not great but did result in a daughter who was careful about money.

My husband and I have managed full retirement quite well financially. We are maintaining a small reserve in the bank, taking a day now and again to travel nearby and stay the night, and thinking ahead to what we need for the future. We need a new roof and some other major repairs. Our wood-burning stove needs replacing—it’s necessary in a location where the power routinely goes out in the winter, usually for a day at a time, but sometimes for a week. All of this means we have decided to budget more tightly in 2020 in anticipation of these expenses. We got through college without debt and entirely under our own steam because we had cheap habits and careful spending. Some of that is still true. We still do not smoke or use drugs. We drink good coffee and cheap wine. We have not eaten most meat for decades, not because we disliked meat, but because it felt morally wrong the way animals are raised, and increasingly dangerous to our health and the health of the planet. We eat organic food but plan to be completely vegetarian for the rest of this new year, abstaining from our habit of seafood once or twice a week. We’ll see how that goes. But cheese. We both think we will always have cheese.

This past couple of days we had our children and their children here for a visit. The the tea party for the kids was a bust, but we walked the beach and I knit with Ruby. There was a scavenger search around the house with written clues (thank you, Emily), The Family Stone (thank you, Kerris), and eleven for dinner last night. There was a lot of food. My baking and cooking plan included a detailed timeline for chili verde, sautéing mushrooms and onions, roasting various vegetables, poaching salmon, putting together frittatas, frying latkes, Waldorf salad, pumpkin custards, cranberry bread and also orange-cranberry sauce, wild rice, and rugelach. I made vegetable stock. I cooked like a crazy person. Saturday morning, I baked two loaves of bread—which was not even on the list!

We managed. Everyone is gone now because of work tomorrow, and I would be feeling pretty great about now but did not sleep last night.

You do your best, and the best is never perfect, not even close. But you hope that the people you love most in the entire world understand you are imperfect but trying hard.

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GATHERING

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

We gather trash and treasures from the beach most mornings: plastic twine and bits of flattened plastic foam the size of a dime. We look for agates and glass worn smooth in the rocks and sand. In and out the ocean throws its skirts up on shore. The twice-daily wash of water tumbles the basalt, lifts and shifts sand into a new landscape each day.

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There is a bit of polystyrene foam a couple of inches in front of my shoe. I picked it up and also six more bits of plastic shown in this photo. The green is seaweed.

Continue reading →

SNEAKER WAVE

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During heavy surf, the ocean pounds up sea foam. “Sea foam, ocean foam, beach foam, or spume is a type of foam created by the agitation of seawater, particularly when it contains higher concentrations of dissolved organic matter derived from sources such as the offshore breakdown of algal blooms.”

During our walk yesterday, a wave swept up a hundred yards over the sand and another ten yards into the rocks. This was nothing unusual. We pay attention, so we knew to move higher onshore and are rarely caught. We are particularly careful where there is no place to escape should a wave sweep all the way up to the green line. We work our way along searching for trash and treasures, but always with one eye on the surf line. Continue reading →

A SENSE OF HUMOR

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Monica Hesse in the Washington Post has a tongue-in-cheek article about men she’s talked to who are afraid to see Little Women alone: “The Little Women Men feel slightly nervous about going to see the movie without a female chaperone, for the same reason that some men have told me they are nervous about attending a yoga class solo, or assisting a lost toddler in the supermarket: because our society still — still! — gets confused by men displaying traits of nurturing or sentimentality, and these kindly men don’t want to creep anyone out.” I laughed.  Continue reading →

“Greta Who?”

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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The year is ending and to most people’s manner of thinking, so is the decade. (Yes, I know that the third decade of this century begins in 2021, but all logic aside, that is not how most human beings view the calendar, and the calendar is a human construct after all, so there we are.)

We walked for nearly three hours the other day, gathering a great many tiny pieces of plastic, mostly foam this week. It takes a lot of crushed bits of plastic the size of my thumbnail to add up to twenty pounds in a month. Collecting trash is an ongoing goal. More happened and will happen in the coming year.  Continue reading →

GOOD FENCES…

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You go girl! A friend just sent this to me. Isn’t it wonderful! This must have been originally published by a knitting or UK journal. No mainstream American newspaper or magazine would mention the 23 stitch repeat.

 

I was right about the source. It seems to track back to a Scottish blog post from 2012. This is the source of the photographs and excerpted text. KDD and Co. (Kate Davies Designs) sells yarns, patterns, knitting kits. I have actually purchased things from them: little wooden animals meant to be wound with yarn. The striped Datham pullover is a stunner, and the baffies (Scottish house slipper) kit is decidedly tempting—I ordered it.

LATKES

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The last sweet potato latke, with cranberry sauce on a Rainbow Gate plate.

We have family coming for dinner next week, and I am test-driving family recipes and trying out a couple of new things. I hope to serve Waldorf salad (without nuts or brown sugar), cold poached salmon with sauces no one is allergic to, the mushroom-and-wild-rice casserole (without flour or butter or cream), Brussel’s sprouts, and “the chocolate thing” I used always to make for my college classes (without dairy or refined sugars or nuts). And latkes for Sunday breakfast.

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CLEARING AWAY

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No, water is not supposed to be running down these stairs in “Sally’s Alley”. This is just up the beach beside the massive concrete bulkhead that used to contain a swimming pool. Gary calls this a “water feature” suggesting we have seen too many British gardening shows.

Heavy rain. Hard blow. High tides. The holidays. And knitting.

We went to bed too early last night and we are awake too early. Continue reading →

HAPPY HOLIDAY

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from A New Zealand Prayer Book:

“It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.”

Find time to not do a thing but notice.

Last evening my husband and I watched The West Wing episode, “In Excelsis Deo.” I showed it each year to my students. (Though I struggled to show it this past December because the internet rarely worked in the college building and the projector was often down.) I would hand out a page identifying the characters and I used to pause the episode several times to provide information: The story of the gay teenager beaten to death was true, homelessness is disproportionately high among veterans of every war, and the man threatening to out Leo is shut down by members of his own party. In those days there were a lot of Republicans who also had moral standards, who were determined to “act like it.”

I miss that. If you have never watched the series, I urge you to find it on Netflix. It is a reminder of how governing is supposed to work.