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11 Things Learned in June

My list for June was quite short and I was about to make an excuse; then I gave it all another think, and here is the longest one in awhile.

  1. For the very first time in my entire 61 years, I attended an open casket funeral, where the deceased was visible. It wasn’t one of those deals where the attendees file past if they are so inclined – he was fully visible from every place in the chapel. “Disconcerted” might be the best word for how I felt.
  2. I described A House in the Sky to my hiking buddy, a memoir about a woman’s experience of a 460 day kidnapping situation. Her husband asked me why I would want to read such a disturbing tale, which made me think. My conclusion is that it was interesting, and it caused me to be very very very thankful for my life. (Maybe 4 verys, or even 5).
  3. Live oaks are dying all around my neighborhood. Drought? Maybe, maybe not. The native trees are “designed” to live in our climate, which historically has droughts (or dry years) every 5-6 years, as learned by studying the rings on Giant Sequoia trees. 
  4. As I dithered on whether or not to get my 25 year old car painted, it occurred to me that I could spend the equivalent amount of money on looking better myself, something that would probably only last for 3 months, as opposed to the car looking good for the rest of its life. (No decision has been reached.)
  5. Leaky canoes at Hume Lake seem to be a normal thing. Oh well. It was nice on the lake regardless.
  6. This site is fun and helpful: Everyday Cheapskate 
  7. Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter is an education about what happens to all the stuff in the world when we are finished with it. It can be put in a landfill, incinerated, taken apart for recycling, dismantled for parts, or used by other people. Poor countries import massive amounts and use it in all these ways; of particular interest to me was the innovative ways our junk gets used to build useful items. (Remember, “Junk is the stuff we get rid of; stuff is the junk we keep”.) Some countries have laws against importing secondhand items; other countries have laws against exporting them. Those laws cause a problem for the economies that depend on secondhand products. The planned obsolescence is also causing problems. Having replaced our water heater, washing machine, refrigerator, and the A/C in my studio within the past year, I can relate to this. But then how do I get my broken things to Ghana or Nigeria so they can use the parts??
  8. Some friends shared some new peppers from their garden, called “Padrone”. Green, wrinkled, and not hot. I wonder if they would grow in Three Rivers. . . maybe I can save a few seeds.*
  9. A farmer friend told me the way to understand climate and weather is to look up something called “degree days”. I haven’t studied it, but according to my friend, there are going to be a certain number of hot and cold days every year. He gave these examples: if there is a cool spring, it will be a hot summer; if it is mild summer, it will last a long time. I would like to understand it in terms of weather, but it is used mostly to predict energy usage to heat and cool. Here is the explanation from the National Weather Service.
  10. Big box stores are inefficient, overstaffed with incompetent employees, disorganized, dependent on computers for inventory which waste the customers’ time and prove to be unreliable. I’m talking about Home Depot. Good Grief Charlie Brown. Nope, not going on social media to badmouth them; just hoping I can always plan ahead enough to have Three Rivers Mercantile order what is needed to avoid future aggravation of HD.
  11. You might be able to have a say in the redistricting of California that happens every 10 years. Why bother? A good example is that Three Rivers is lumped with Bakersfield, Ridgecrest and Lancaster, where no one goes, instead of being with Woodlake, Exeter, and Visalia, where most people work, shop (HEY! We have a great hardware store in Three Rivers!), go to school, go to church (HEY! We have churches in Three Rivers too!) access county and state offices. The site is DrawMyCACommunity.org I say “might” because I don’t have a lot of confidence in governmental requests for public participation. I couldn’t find the already drawn community called “Three Rivers-Visalia COI” to “endorse” it, as the newspaper article suggested. Everything is complicated.

Let’s rest our minds with something less complicated.

*Never mind. Just found a hot one. Burned my mouth.

 

 

3 Comments

  1. A few counter-thoughts.
    1. The first funeral I ever attended was open casket when I was in college for a professor who was the conductor for the choir in which I sang. This 18-year-old pert near freaked out. It was years before I attended any kind of memorial service after that.
    4. I vote for you! Who cares what a vehicle looks like on the outside, as long as it transports you from Point A to Point B successfully?
    10. I always make it a point to shop local at independent businesses, even if it costs a few bucks more. They deserve our support!
    11. The way I figure it, one small, conservative voice in this ultra-blue, farfarfar left state of millions matters as much as tossing one grain of salt in Eagle Lake. So I live my life as best I can with that which the Good Lord has blessed me, and leave the rest up to Him. Naive, you say? Maybe. But life is sure more peaceful that way!

    • Sharon, I am so baffled as to why an open casket is a good idea – “closure”, perhaps, except isn’t the absence of the person final enough to truly understand?
      About the car I keep things for extraordinarily long times and want them to be the best they can. (Bought a Coach purse in 1995 and it remains my only purse.)
      I think that the redistricting thing is more about having a representative who knows us and whose office is accessible than red or blue topics because people on both sides of the aisle are wanting Three Rivers to be with Visalia in Congress. (You are right with the analogy of a single grain of salt in Eagle Lake.)

      • Maybe family & friends want to see their loved one “one more time” as if he is simply asleep? Or deny that he’s really gone? It would just make me sadder.
        The HVAC system I just replaced was 34 years old. I tend to keep things a long time, too. Or send the parts to Ghana or Nigeria.
        It would be much more logical to pair Three Rivers with Visalia, Lemon Cove, Woodlake, Lindsay, and the rest of the San Joaquin Valley. But government doesn’t work on logical. (P.S. I know a few people who live in Lancaster. They’re very nice. The rest are meth-heads. J.K. Sort of.)

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