En route to the UK.

I am currently flying at 30,000ft somewhere over Hudson’s Bay and I have never used an Internet connection on an airline before so, even though I don’t have much to say, I am posting this just because I can. I also happen to have a lot of time on my hands (still 7 hours to go) and the films are pretty bad (Fun with Dick and Jane with Jim Carrey).

So far the trip has not been entirely without problems. I started off with the hope of flying from Sacramento to Chicago to Manchester. Alas, bad weather in Chicago forced a re-routing through LA (not exactly the right direction) to Frankfurt (we actually will fly over Manchester) and back to Manchester. Just another 4 hours more – what’s 4 hours when you are traveling that far?

The whole process for rebooking my ticket in Sacramento this morning turned into quite an event – it literally took 35 minutes of the airline agent’s time to complete the transaction. Don’t ask me why. When I walked away from the counter I got a standing ovation from the crowd in line behind me (yes there was only one agent working the International check-ins in Sacramento). I also got an escort to the plane which was being held just for me. How about that!

Glass Blowing

Last Sunday I took a glass blowing class here in Sacramento. It was pretty cool stuff and I think I would like to do some more of that. Actually it was not cool at all, it was pretty darned hot.- lots of furnaces and flames and blobs of molten glass and it was a hot day anyway.

The whole process was quite fascinating – a chance to work with a lump of molten glass on the end of a metal rod – sliding it into a furnace, bringing it out and working with it, adding color, heating it back up again in the furnace, working with it some more.

I got to produce three things – a paper weight (not much blowing there), a vase and a bowl. I didn’t actually produce them entirely by myself; it was more very close supervision by someone who knew what they were doing and who would wrest control of the project from me whenever we got to some particularly tricky maneuver (of which there were a few).


The whole experience was quite rewarding and the end results were not that bad - for a beginner anyway.

Moving the bees....

I moved my beehive this week over to my friend Doug’s house. I have been moving towards getting some work done on my back yard and no one wants to do any work with a beehive in residence.

So I learned a bit about moving bees this week. My first naïve attempt consisted of nailing a simple board over the entryway early in the morning (before the bees get active) and then attempting to load the bees on a trolley to roll to the front of the house and the awaiting truck. This did not go so well, the loading of the hive on the trolley caused a bit of flexing in the whole hive structure and the understandably excited bees started to leak out of various newly created openings. I was equipped for such events with my veil and gloves on, but alas my friend Brian was not so equipped and got stung (sorry about that Brian). Anyway, the whole thing turned into a disaster with me trying to nail on additional strips of wood to better close off the hive and more and more bees getting excited and escaping. Time to leave things for another day and some more careful thought.

I went to the bee shop and consulted with the owner who saw the humor in my naïve attempts, and who sold me a purpose built closure that closes the entry with a mesh structure – thereby still allowing the bees to breathe – good idea that.

So last Monday, I fitted the closure, and I added my own touch of copious amounts of duct tape. The tape just gave me the confidence that no other openings would appear from flexing of the hive tower. It then was a smooth operation of rolling the bees to the front of the house, lifting them into Brian’s truck bed and carefully driving to their new residence (commercial bee keepers do this all the time, but there was something worrisome about driving the streets with a hive of bees in the back of the truck – I was imagining the newspaper headlines the next day – Amateur Beekeeper loses control of hive outside Kindergarten – lawsuits to follow).

The bees are now happily installed about a mile or so away and seem to be well, though a few bees returned to my back yard and gathered on the fence where the hive was located. I guess they didn’t quite re-program their directional finding senses. I thought they would either disperse or die of exposure in the night, but some 6 days later they are still there (see below) – huddled on the fence. I feel bad for them, but not much I can do about that.

The Reno Marathon

Since I had recently run a 50 mile race, and since I am in training for the Stockholm Marathon in June, I thought I could easily just throw in another marathon without much trouble. At least that was how I felt last week when I made a last minute entry into the Reno Marathon. I am a little chastened today after struggling through another less than perfect run. It was the same old story, everything was great up to mile 18 then I had nothing left and it was a walk run deal to the finish (with a lot more walking than running).

The race was the inaugural Reno Cinco de Mayo Marathon and it was perhaps the most disorganized race I have ever been in. The start was postponed half an hour, many of the mile markers were missing, a majority of mile markers that were in place were incorrect, many of the aid stations were non-existent, un-manned, or only had water (no electrolytes). Other than that the Marathon was great – Reno is not the prettiest of cities (at least downtown isn’t, but we were quickly out of that area) but the course was very nice indeed, with great views of the snow capped Sierras.

English Middle Aged White people are heathier than Americans!

It was interesting and very surprising to hear that a recent study has shown that White middle-aged Americans (I might resemble one of those) are significantly less healthy than their English counterparts. That is less healthy as measured by the incidence of diabetes, lung cancer, high blood pressure, etc – the serious stuff. And it wasn’t by a small amount either, for example diabetes was twice as prevalent in the US population.

I think most people would expect that the health of middle-aged White people would be similar in England and America. In fact I would have said that with America having twice the per capita spending on healthcare compared to England then Americans should be healthier. Not to mention the effects of the English diet (Fish and Chips and fried everything) and the large quantities of beer being consumed over there.

So how can this be? The researchers were baffled too. Could it be the early exposure to junk food (the English didn’t get into that until much later) so obesity has been an issue in America for a longer time and all those chubby kids are now hitting their 50s and 60s.

One factor that might be an issue is the stress level of American life. Americans do tend to work harder and longer than the average European and in general have a much more stressful environment.

Its all very baffling to me – maybe it’s just over here on the West Coast where we are relaxed and laid back and where we eat healthy. Perhaps the remainder of the US are the unhealthy ones.

The study did mention that expatriate Brits living in America (that would be me) would tend to assume the health conditions of their adopted nation if they were in the US for any considerable time (the damage is done in my case). However, they recommended rather than escaping to the UK to increase the odds of a healthier (and longer) life, the damage is done and at least in the US they are likely to spend more money keeping you alive through your middle-age and beyond.

A quiet time...

A quiet time in the old neighbourhood these days. Not much of any interest going on lately and even the neighbours didn’t spice things up with an inflatable rabbit on the roof for Easter.

I did make a trip to Houston the other week. That’s always good. It is nice to see old friends there, but the best thing about visiting Houston, for me at least, is that it makes me so grateful that I don’t live in Houston (I came close to taking up residence there in the 1980s, but I managed to escape). As they say, the sweetest sound in the world is the sound of the door closing as your flight prepares to leave George Bush Intercontinental Airport on its way back to wherever. (OK so I made a lot of friends with that statement I know, but I just never have thought a lot of Houston – sorry.)

I did also go to see David Wilcox in Winters last week too - a very fine performer with some excellent songs. I had known of him for some time (I have his Greatest Hits CD – highly recommended), but had never had the opportunity to see him until last week. He is on a 2 year tour around the US in his Airstream Trailer towed by his bio-diesel truck. I suppose that is being somewhat environmentally sound.