The Burrow

It's all been said and I agree with everything - NBA Commissioner Silver did an admirable job in sanctioning Clippers' owner Sterling whose racism was finally public enough to demand attention.  The larger question, why his predecessor did nothing about behaviors which were well-known if not as well-publicized, remains unaddressed. Isn't that the way of things, though?  We look for a quick fix to solve our immediate discomfort, and then we move on. ***** NPR told me that there are rudimentary oil-cans-filled-with-industrial chlorine-bombs being dumped on Syrians.  They don't need much technical skill to put together, so it's possible that the insurgents could be making them except they must be dropped by helicopters and the al Assad regime are the only players with those. Imagine it, as I am right now.  You look up to see what the noise is and discover it is destruction, fire, the wrath of your government. Every time I begin to lose hope in America, every ti...

It happened again.  I am at a loss to explain it and I'm beginning to think that might be the whole point.  In any event, I'm confused and at peace at the same time. Mindful Meditation is quite odd,  indeed. I scarfed lunch and met the fourth grade girls on the playground, just as I'd promised last Friday.  As requested, I brought girly-er stickers than these robot ones; my attempts to dissuade them from the notion that such things existed fell on deaf ears.  They are pink and bows and sparkles and there's just nothing I can do about it.  Being ten-ish comes with its own set of challenges; the least I can do is take the pink stickers from my GRIN box with me in the morning. We talked about how mean girls get in the fourth grade, and of their hope that it would be better in the fifth grade.  I told them that was up to them, since girls were notorious for being awful to one another and I for one did not know why it happened.  I thought that, l...

The Bride and The Pharmacist are parents.  LJ arrived late last week, with just a little bit of drama and a whole lot of love.  Everyone is fine and happy and roosting at home.  They are getting used to one another, just as I am getting used to the idea that my god-child has her own child.  The whole thing is very, very strange. She was a little ball of bonneted beauty when I first met her.  She was being dandled by her equally gorgeous mother in the shallow end of the swimming pool at the East Bank Club.  EBC was designed for Yuppies (Young Urban Professionals to those of you too young to remember) in the boom of the late 1970's.  Those Yuppies were interested in the track and the pool and the weights and the aerobic equipment and the racquetball courts and not at all in the nursing mothers.  There was controversy - is a nursing breast more of a distraction than a thong bikini? - and there were rule changes and there were meetings.  When t...

The Old Barrio is just that - old. Located just south of downtown, it held small and medium and large houses. It was a neighborhood. Then the Tucson Convention Center came to town and streets were razed. Houses were bulldozed.  The community was shattered.   After years of benign neglect, urban homesteaders returned and began to pretty the place up . Walking the streets on Easter Sunday, Brenda Starr and I found remnants of design elements gone by: like this slanted roof.  It's obviously not designed to help with snow removal.  Perhaps the monsoon rains needed assistance in reaching the ground? The lower end is barely 7' tall.  Small rules!!   We could see the ebb and flow of the years on many of the buildings. Efforts have been made to keep them standing, even if beauty was not the primary consideration for the repairs. I wonder why the bottom layers are changing color faster than those above. Sometimes it was hard to ...

An opportunity was presented to me.  I examined it from all angles. I decided not to try. There it is, bare bones. There is history behind each sentence.  I can judge every part.  I am surprised at myself and proud of myself and bemused at the situation as a whole.  Life just gets stranger and stranger, denizens.  I'm finding pieces of myself which continue to amuse and amaze me. I was asked if I could take this on by someone who never asks for anything.  She's always willing to step up to the plate, donating money and time and support and space and everything necessary to get things going.  Then, like any good creative type, she's on to the next piece, leaving the first in good hands.  I have to learn that lesson.  There was a grant available.  It required four pages of exposition.  The money could not be used for salaries. The winner agreed to pose for pictures with an oversized check. On the face of it, it was a no bra...

On Monday, I promised you more pictures. I tried to cull them, but I was powerless.    Today, I'll share the colors. On Friday, the old and new.   There was all this orange and blue. Some of it was newly washed old adobe, the paint the only concession to the 21st century.   I was looking for a blue house with orange trim, but I was disappointed. There was a faint whiff of Howard Johnson's about it all....that soon took on a retro aspect...   and then I forgot all about it because there was this a softer version that made me smile. Then, again, I'm a sucker for a functional porch. Especially for a purple porch.  I found the reverse a block or two further on. and this one which seemed to poke its finger in the eye of the beholder. With this one, I could see a blue house against a blue sky. Pea green would not be my first choice were I in charge. It was sensory overload at times when they came one ri...

First published on April 21, 2009  I like Earth Day. I was there at its creation, after all. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. Initially, it was a touchy-feely alternative to the harsher realities of the anti-Vietnam War protests. You wanted to do something, but war was such an uncomfortable subject and arguing against it made your parents wonder why they were spending tuition dollars while you were telling the lawfully elected President of the United States of America that you knew more than he did. With your picture in the crowd on the front page of the NY Times. At 18 years of age, no less. But planting trees? Recycling newspaper? Not littering? And all this in service to Mother Earth. Who could be aggravated about supporting Mother Earth? Earth Day had teach-in's. They were more fun than sit-in's, which invariably involved police and disciplinary action. They were less fun than be-in's, which owed more to Timothy Leary and The ...

Brenda Starr and I walked for fifty minutes on Easter Sunday. It would be more accurate to say that we were erect and not sitting for fifty minutes because we stopped quite often so that I could take pictures.    There were pictures of doors. Yes, they have saw blades on their door.  Recycling materials is common in The Old Barrio. This garage door looked like repurposed wood to us, and the tin fencing certainly seemed to have led another life before coming to rest alongside it. This was on a boarded up building. Again, reusing old materials makes for an interesting texture.     And there were pictures of windows. There was open space often in surprising places.  and there were fabulous places to sit.      Are you intrigued and amused and enticed by the colors? Come back on Wednesday and see the Houses, Old and New edition of our walking tour.

I have a link to help you  Make Your Voices Heard  just under the masthead of The Burrow.  I tweet @ABattheBurrow. I share posts on Facebook and I have these adorable MooCards which I hand out when the conversation turns toward taking action.  I call my elected officials, leaving scripted messages on voice mail.  I sign petitions which bring me spam emails but make me feel good in the moment.  Today, though, I think I made a difference. Pam Simon, an official Champion of Change according to the White House, sent an email to her Jan 8th cohort, exhorting us to call Governor Brewer's office.  Ever obedient, I dialed the number as I read the details.  Steam was soon pouring out of my ears.  All that meditation, the deep yoga breathing, lowering my shoulders as the biofeedback guru recommended .... none of it worked.  I was in the zone... the fury zone... the oh dear God how can this be true zone.... the just wait til I get someone ...

I follow Little Cuter's advice. I keep a low profile around the issue of sensible gun legislation.  I write to you, I've got a button on my purse, I post on Facebook and Twitter, but only those who are connected to me are in that loop. To the outside world, Pam Simon and Pat Maisch and Roxanna Green are the faces of January 8th, and that's just fine with me.  As Little Cuter's wisdom continues, there are crazy people on the other side of this issue... .and they have guns! It's a hard space to occupy, this niche between having something to say and keeping myself safe.  Although I laugh about feeling like the safest person on the planet (after all, what's the likelihood of some other disaster befalling one short Jewish girl from New York?), I cannot discount my child's discontent.... because what was the likelihood that I'd encounter bullets in front of a grocery store on that sunny Saturday morning? I lend my presence when I am feeling brave.  I s...

The leak still exists in the back planting bed.  I dug, I scraped, I pushed, I pulled and I managed to extricate the tubing from its space securely pinned beneath a tiny concrete ledge.  There's a goof plug which leaks and tubing-to-an-emitter which leaks and the simples thing is to replace the large tubing but the big roll I thought was living on the corner of the storage rack is nowhere to be found. I'll buy some more and fix the problem, but I really wonder where it has gone. ***** Big Cuter and I spent a very productive hour in his closet today.  Every box came down off the shelf or out from under the hanging clothes.  I consolidated and eliminated and labeled and smiled when he wondered if it was deja vu or if, in fact, we had done this once before.  I didn't tell him that we'd done it twice before.  Instead, I explained the serial nature of culling your possessions - multiple times poring through the stuff, being more and more ruthless with each...

Yes, I paid to have the irrigation system examined. Yes, they fixed the leaks they saw. Yes, they attached the containers to the main system even though they were only paid to work on the new system. And yes, I spent this morning repairing leaks. The small bed at the back of the pool was its own water feature this morning.  The main system, the one that waters everything except the containers, runs from 7-9am.  That's long enough to let the water soak down to the recommended 18" depth for mature, established shrubs and trees.  I take a cursory glance on watering days, making sure that there are no obvious leaks. This morning, I had to put my gym plans on hold; the shrubs in the back were become water-logged. I was too nervous to turn the system off and search for the leak right away.  I wasn't sure I could get it to restart.  The new timer is shiny and clean and almost exactly like the old one.  Still, it intimidates me.  I found that I had been le...

Catalina State Park's trails were beginning to feel familiar to me.  I could gauge how far I was from the parking lot, how much higher I could climb, where we could stop for lunch.  After bullets separated me from my hiking poles, I lost interest in the trails.  We were at Gabe Zimmerman's trailhead  earlier this year; I picnicked but didn't put a foot on the path. If I couldn't do it well, I wasn't going to do it at all. Miss Vicki took me out  a few times.  She was solicitous and thoughtful and we had fun but I wouldn't call it hiking.  Margo and I walked on flat surfaces  and had enough time to take dozens of photographs.  There was not a lot of sustained forward movement in either of those instances.  I'd walk a few hundred yards and then pause to catch my breath or massage my hip or loosen my neck or cover my need to stop by taking a picture.  I covered the ground, lumbering, groaning, but doing it.  It was all I cou...

Very very busy.  Mr 8 and I planted a garden at Amster's house over the last two days.  We battled dust and rocks and heavy lifting.  We sneezed. We sniffled.  We sweated.  We used tissues, the ones without Vicks infused in the fiber. The outside dogs used to live in the side yard.  That's where the planting beds are, too. The beasts dug and climbed and pawed and chewed through irrigation .  What was left was dirt covered with stones. Our first task was cleaning up the mess.  With brand new, colorful gloves, small enough for all four of our hands, we started at opposite ends of the first bed and began to remove the stones.  Tossing them onto the ground was as much fun as anything else we did. The new Staffordshire Terrier puppies were out with us for a while, but when the stone showers began they quickly retreated to the safety of the indoors. After stone removal came ground aeration. Using G'ma's trowel and the one that Amste...

She was insistent.  She was persistent.  She was annoying.  I couldn't hang up. She was calling from Windows Technical Support.  She'd noticed that I had been accessing sites which were dangerous and she was calling to fix the problem.  She didn't ask me for a password.  She gave me an American name through a thick but understandable accent.  And always, she insisted. Go to Control Panel  and after several more prompts she knew exactly what the code looked like on my screen.   CMI....that is very bad   and that's where it got dicey.  She gave me a string of letters and numbers to type into a box on my monitor.  That would allow her colleague to gain access to my machine remotely.  He would then fix the problem Alarm bells began to go off in my frazzled head. We screen our calls with Caller ID.  If it's an unknown number or a blocked number or a series of unrecognizable digits or the name of an institution to w...

She's everywhere today.  I don't know why.  I'm not complaining.  I'm merely stating the facts. I got through all the lights this morning on the way to Pilates.  I don't know why, but I thanked G'ma for the help. On my way to pick up the paper from the end of the driveway this morning, I noticed that the bunnies had eaten yet another zinnia; I'm down to 12 of the original 15 I planted in the ground last weekend. Peeved and grimacing, I made myself laugh by remembering G'ma's advice on avoiding mold on zinnias - don't plant them.  It took the edge off my angst. Little Cuter wants help hemming curtains.  My first response was "Where are G'ma and Bubba when we need them?!?"   I could drag out G'ma's sewing machine and try to make straight seams on her expensive fabric, but I demurred.  My heart was aching as I refused her request, but I'm really not good enough to create something she'll be looking at for the next...

I ended yesterday's post with my manicure.  That's where I'm starting today. They look as wonderful as I feel  was aspirational when I typed it.  The manicure was a day away.  Now, as my fingers fly over the keyboard, there are turquoise fingertips distracting me from anything meaningful I might have ventured to say. Turquoise.  Little Cuter's age cohort did this in middle school, I think.  I thought it was awful.  Yet, today, my eye chose this color without question, without much searching, with only the tiniest soupcon of doubt... doubt which was quickly assuaged by the woman in the pedicure chair across the aisle who announced, to no one in particular, that she lo-o-o-o-ved that color . Thiu, whose nails these are in the way that the my hip belongs to the orthopedic surgeon, thought the color was lovely, too.  I do not dare to disagree with her opinion; she's been tending to my nails since the first year we lived here... which makes her m...

It may not sound like much, but, to me, it was earth-shattering. No pun intended.  Really. The fact that I could lift the shovel out of the rack and carry it, without assistance, to the front of the house was remarkable in and of itself.  Last year, I used G'ma's transporter wheelchair as my garden cart and my ambulation assistive device.  I couldn't propel myself and the equipment I needed without a great deal of help.  Since humans were not always available, I used what was at hand. It was a measure of how far she'd fallen that G'ma didn't even chuckle when I described the scene to her last year. Trust me, it was both practical and very funny. This weekend, though, I was the picture of strength and ability.  I carried a twenty pound bag of approved-for-roses-soil to the first hole, in the back, and I only had to rest once.  By the time I'd amended the soil and added more to the filling in of the hole, I had lightened the load sufficiently to ena...