Off to Patagonia...

Tomorrow I am off on a hastily arranged trip to Patagonia. I have always been in awe of the granite spires of the Torres Del Paine so, if all goes well, next week I will be hiking around the base of them. Nothing technical, just gentle hiking (I hope). Then after 9 days in Southern Chile I am heading off into the Northern part and the Atacama Desert. I am not sure what I will find in that area, nothing quite as dramatic as the Torres Del Paine I am sure, but there’s something about the name that has had some allure for me since my grammar school geography lessons. We will find out if there was anything to be allured about in a couple of weeks time.

If I get near a computer in the next couple of weeks I will try and post something - if not I will catch up when I return.

Things are looking a bit brighter...

After 7 years of voting in the US elections, finally last night's election was one where I could feel pleased about the outcome. Of course my first US election was the Bush v Gore debacle of 2000 so that took a little bit of getting over, but last night it looks like the tide has started to swing the other way. Hopefully it will be a slow progressive swing that doesn't turn around too soon.

I read a post somewhere from a Brit commenting on the aftermath of yesterday's election stating that "the average American has no idea how hated the US has become since President Bush came to power". I agree entirely - as a nation there is not much love lost for us these days. All those sympathies and good will generated towards us after 9/11 have been squandered by Mr Bush's actions in these last few years. Hopefully we may be able to move towards repairing the damage done, but that will be a long slow road.

By the way, any of you fellow Brits who want to know how a real democracy works (or doesn't) check out the California Voter Information Guide - some 192 pages of information. Voting in this country is hard work and we get to vote on just about everything especially here in California.

Janis Ian

I went to see Janis Ian perform the other night. I hadn’t kept up with her music since the 70’s when I bought her classic Between the Lines LP. Now some 30 or more years later, there she was still singing many of those old songs (I wonder how many times in her career she has performed “At Seventeen”). Her voice was great – it has hardly changed in all these years, but I wasn’t prepared for how she looked. Her hair is completely white now and she is no longer the waif like folk singer from my youth. Probably what irks me more is that I also am not the same as I was in the 70’s and at least Janis has hair even if it is white.

Anyway, she did a wonderful show, highly recommended. And she's been working all these years - there's like 25 albums out there.

What a strange world this is...

I have been reading Richard Dawkin's book – The God Delusion lately. I must admit I wasn’t familiar with Professor Dawkins but I am finding the book reassures me about a lot of things with respect to religion and atheism. Professor Dawkins by the way holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University – all software developers who use the Hungarian notation are indebted to Mr Simonyi.

Anyway digging around on the web for Richard Dawkins leads you to a lot of videos on You Tube, in particular the ones from his program on Channel 4 TV – “The Root of All Evil”. There is one clip where he interviews Ted Haggard from the New Life Church in Colorado and the leader of tje National Association of Evangelicals in the USA.

So anyway, just as I am reading the chapter about whether Religion is necessary for us to be “moral” individuals (it’s not by the way), it comes out that Reverend Ted has been accused of all sorts un-evangelical things by a male prostitute and, at least for now, is stepping away from his leadership role in the church.

The scary thing is that Reverend Ted has, or at least had until this week, a close relationship to President Bush with weekly conference calls to the White House!

I find it quite inexplicable that the America and the UK are so far apart when it comes to religion. I could not imagine a television program about religion called “The Root of All Evil” getting any sponsorship in the USA – there would be protests, boycotts and all manner of things going on. Then, I couldn’t imagine the USA putting Charles Darwin on its bank notes either, but in the UK the 10 Pound Note has Charles Darwin on one side and the Queen, “the Defender of the Faith” on the other side.

A quiet time...

Nothing much to report lately, I have had my mother staying with me so we have been taking things easy. Lots of home-cooked meals by yours truly, lots of slow walks around the neighbourhood, and endless cups of tea (not that I am complaining – I like tea).

We head back to England on Tuesday, where I will stay for a week or so - time for a visit with friends and family, a quick business trip to Aberdeen and then back to California in time for the election.

Whose blood is this anyway?

So as part of my annual physical I had my blood tested the other day. I am waiting for them to come and stick me, when a lady approaches the nurse and asks why they haven’t taken her blood yet. They search around for her paperwork which turns out to be back in the lab attached to a sample of blood (someone else’s not hers). So that is perhaps some cause for concern, but they decide that at least they can take her blood now, which they do. Unfortunately, there is cause for more concern because the nurse now has two samples of blood both with her name on them and the patient, at least, is not sure which is which. So they carefully dispose of the two samples blood before taking yet another sample from her. Oh the confusion - and someone else has just had a sample drawn and the results are never going to arrive.

To add to the drama, a young girl next to me faints after watching blood drawn from her mother.

Wedding Crashers...

While my mother is over staying with me things have slowed down a little and we are taking things easy. In the absence of anything like a backyard to sit in at the house, we have been visiting some of the local parks to sit in and relax. (The back yard renovation at home is perhaps a story for another time, but it has been a project from hell to date - so full of expense, poor workmanship and missed promises that I just don’t want to talk about it). Anyway, our favorite place is, of course, the Rose Garden in McKinley Park which, even this late in the season, is still quite beautiful.

Yesterday we were sitting there and as more and more smartly dressed people arrived we realized we were in the middle of a wedding. We were joined on our seat by a friend of the bride and pretty soon we had got the low down on the couple getting married – apparently another case of a smart young woman marrying a less than stellar young man – “throwing her life away” – at least in the view of our new “friend”.

As more and more people arrived, they would walk past us and greet us as if we were invited guests. It would have been so easy to just mingle in with the crowd and we could have slipped along to the reception (at a nearby house).

Of course witnessing a wedding is not something you can usually do in the UK, and Mum was quite interested to see the bride in all her finery. So we stayed around for the ceremony (discretely positioned away from the main crowd) and critiqued everyone’s dress. We decided to pass on the reception however - we had dinner plans at IKEA anyway.

More Bee Adventures

The last time I wrote about the bees, I had recovered from the loss of my bees by accidentally getting another swarm to take up residence in the hive. Alas, those bees did not last too long, and they succumbed to those pesky wax moths and departed. So I was again left without bees.

After my first loss, I had put my name on a list of beekeepers who are prepared to retrieve bee swarms from around town whenever they were reported. I must admit I did not particularly think through all the issues involved with this and I had pretty much forgotten about it until I got a call on Tuesday from a lady in my neighborhood who had a swarm of bees in her backyard. So, not really knowing what I was up for, I went over to her house with a hive box and all my gear (gloves, veil, smoker - all the stuff that makes me look like a pro).

The bees were all massed on the edge of the roof, in the gutter and under the eaves. Not the nice tidy ball of bees that I had read about in books that hang from a tree and are easily dislodged into an awaiting hive. So there I was precariously perched on the top of a step ladder holding a hive box in one hand and a bee brush in the other trying to sweep the bees off the roof into my box. It could have been quite the disaster but, despite my inexperience, it turned out uneventful. Some of the bees made it into the box while others just flew around haphazardly and then went back on the roof. I had about three attempts to dislodge more bees from the roof into the box, and then decided to leave the box on top of the ladder close enough to the roof so that hopefully they would be enticed into the more salubrious surroundings of my hive.

I left things like that overnight and the next morning returned to find the majority of bees had indeed taken up residence in the hive and over the next day I was able to lure nearly everyone else into the hive.

All in all things went quite well – for the first time I have captured a roaming swarm of bees and I was pretty pleased about that. Now all I have to do is keep them alive until next Spring when the nectar flow starts again.

The lady of the house with the swarm was quite thankful and showed great interest in the whole process (a candidate for her own hive in the future no doubt). Many thanks to my step-brother Howard (another candidate for a beekeeper) who went with me to watch the pending disaster, and to my friend Brian who came to the rescue with his taller step ladder. Howard was the only one who got stung (sorry about that) – it was just bad luck.

Mum returns to the U.S. of A.

It's that time of year again and once more my mum has made the trip from England to visit me here in California. She is now 87 years of age and being game enough to make the trip at that age is pretty impressive, I think.

So here we are on the night of her arrival out on the town dining at Ernesto's one of our local Mexican Restaurants. Note the Margarita - not a particularly small one - which she proceeded to consume and then professed that it was better than her usual orange juice.

I can only hope I got some of her longevity genes.

Chalk It Up

Labour Day Weekend is the annual Chalk It Up Festival in Sacramento where the sidewalks of a downtown square are adorned with pavement drawings. The event is a fund raiser for childrens's art education and the funds being raised by renting a square of pavement for your drawing.

The quality of drawings is all across the board from the most primitive to works of excellent quality.


This one was the most technically accomplished. The skin tones were quite wonderful.


President Allende was being remembered - apparently 9/11 was the date of his death.


Another interesting subject with the pencils jumping out of the pavement.


Many local vendors had works on show like this one from Noah's Bagels. What I couldn't understand was the one from a local tattoo parlour that was just not very good at all. If they can't get the artwork right in chalk on the sidewalk, then why would anyone want to let them dabble in permanent ink on their skin.