Monday, May 20, 2013

Only five more numbers to go




I admit it.  I bought a Powerball ticket.  When my husband mentioned the gigantic pot which by now everybody knows was over $600M, I didn't tell him that I'd actually put $2.00 down at the local 7-11 until he said he was in two pools at work and had purchased a couple more in one of the area's 'lucky' stores.  Then we sheepishly had the 'what if' conversation.

Turns out I actually had one number this Saturday's drawing, one more than I usually have.  Perhaps I should publish a 'do not pick these numbers list' as a warning to others if they are going to insist on playing regularly, which I do not.  My Powerball ticket was worth absolutely nothing but it does remind me of the time my sisters and I bought a ticket in the Lake Huron beach town of Southampton years ago when we were vacationing together.  We had four of the six numbers and when I called my sister, who was holding the ticket, to find our what our windfall was she gave me the good news: $2.00.  Are you kidding?  The Ontario lottery sucks eggs.  And that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

I have purchased a few lottery tickets over the years but I never expect to win and four of six numbers is as close as I'm ever likely to get.  I just like thinking about what I would do if I became an overnight half-billionaire.  It's a good exercise that one hopes would be actualized if the numbers did fall into place.  I've heard so many sad  stories about lottery winners who ran through their riches in months or years and ended up exactly where they'd been before, except worse for the hangover.  But I know there are many others out there who have done something useful with the money, and I don't mean buying a Masarati or taking early retirement and touring the world.  The kind of money that this mysterious (and so far intelligently anonymous) person in small-town Florida just won isn't just the kind of wealth that sustains a lifestyle, it can change entire landscapes, fund cloning research, create a superpac for the NRA, get Jesus or an Imam in the White House.  Frightening possibilities if you happen to be on the other idealogical side of this newest Forbes 500 member.  At this point I am hoping the winner just buys a really big house in the Bayou and sends all his friends and relatives' kids to college.

For my part, I like to think about what this kind of money could do and it's an interesting exercise in challenging thinking and the complexities of real social change, something no amount of money can magically force .  When I start thinking this big, I realize that politicians usually start out this way and then hit a wall pretty quickly.  No, too frustrating....

I have pretty much everything I want already so thoughts inevitably turn to how I could support change in small, manageable increments especially when it comes to my neighborhood. The problem with most wealthy activists is they have no idea how to start small.  My plan in three or four parts: First I would offer the guy down the street with the two crummy, neglected and weedy houses with 10 cats lying around on the front porch, enough money to make him go someplace else.  And then I'd tear the boxes down and put up two enticing little cottages for urban pioneers who just might turn up at the Neighborhood Watch meetings and shop local.  Now that the one hair in my soup is dealt with, on with more lofty goals:  I could put together a fund to give a grant to anyone willing to convert their San Pedro lawn to drought tolerant landscape and then pay for 20 years of maintenance. This could significantly reduce water usage in our area and create habitats for butterflies, honey bees and birds.  Having a drought-tolerant yard may be easy for the first two years but it takes work to maintain it and without help it could, over time, devolve into a weedy mess. I know because we've managed ours without a gardener and it's not as easy as it looks.  Along those same lines I'd fund a program for backyard organic farming, paying experts  who already exist in this business space to come in and build gardens, plant fruit trees, then maintain them and share the bounty with the homeowners. I'd also fund a solar paneling program for households to get them off the grid.  Although there are a couple of companies offering to install paneling at a very low up-front cost, it's attached to the main DWP power grid (the idea being the solar power feeds in and DWP pays it back) so it only reduces costs for the consumer and keeps them dependent.  This conversion would also include a maintenance program to ensure householders are secure.  Even if the fund brought in a few hundred new people, that would be enough to make a difference.

I would buy the big empty lot up the street that used to belong to the old ice-house, build a theatre and bring in world-class entertainment for subsidized neighborhood prices, along with workshops to empower kids and build confidence.  And I would fund scholarships, not just for university, but for technical schools and trade apprenticeships and/or schools.  I believe too many kids who have no aptitude or interest are being told they must to college and as a result we don't value all the other skills that make our communities run smoothly.

The idea of having that much cash I didn't earn (and therefore feel in some ways will always be the peoples' money) is just that: an idea.  For those of us who buy tickets, even as rarely as I do,  I don't regret the mental canoodling this buys me.

I just hope the person who is now $600M richer does something good with their gain.  A very practical postscript to a very impractical purchase.


Monday, May 13, 2013

Mum's gone cuckoo





Mother's Day is a day when you get to stay in bed until someone kicks you out or you get a cramp in your foot and have to walk it off. Or smell the french toast cooking and decide that watching Lark Rise to Candleford on BBC America is as much culture you can take before noon.
     I loved getting the flowers, snapdragons and big gerber daisies, and the socks.  I love getting socks because for some reason I can never find the ones I like but Sweetpea has an eye for them and roots them out for every suitable occasion.  But the best part about Mother's Day are the handmade cards, and the sentiments in the one you get from the man who knows you became a much better person the day our daughter arrived.  Sweetpea is getting quite funny in her advanced age of nine, and I like to think it came from me but I know it came from her father so she better have some good jokes ready when his day arrives in June.  Payback time for the plastic faces, bad puns, and general goofiness that comes from his end of the table every dinnertime.  It may come as a surprise to those who think my husband is a reserved and mysterious person.  Take it from me, he's not.  He just loves a good audience and a toddler got him started eight years ago and he's never stopped.

Yes, I was pampered all day and given a break from laundry, but I still had to water the strawberry plants, and the blueberries, and the avocado tree and the.....well you get the idea.  It was bloomin' hot yesterday and life goes on. But the best part of the day was learning how to prepare and can peach jam.  One of my presents was a six pack of canning jars (tactfully accompanied by a coupon for a facial and peppermint foot scrub) because we had a bumper crop of peaches this year.  Since I missed most of them last year when I was in Ireland I was determined to a) not let one of them go bad on the tree, and b) deny the snails one more juicy meal.
     Did I mention how much I hate snails?  It was difficult to explain to Sweetpea because she has two of them  as pets in a turtle terrarium (thanks, Spongebob), and she can't understand why I want to kill every one of them I find.  But when the peaches began to ripen she finally understood.  The snails, despite various anti-snail methods including ground eggshells, lids filled with beer, and tiny spikes around the trunk, manage to slime their way up the tree and insert their tiny jagged teeth into the bottom of almost every peach....just as it has reached ripened perfection. In case you are wondering, snails can live as long as 5 years, 15 in captivity. I bet you didn't know snails had teeth, either.  Believe me, after watching them decimate a carrot in Sweetpea's terrarium and then shit it out in record time, I am a believer.  They also love to wait until the strawberries are one second away from being ready to pick to strike.  They come in the dead of night and then slime away before we get up.  It's not a fair fight.
     I denuded the tree on Saturday and on Sunday pitted 50 small peaches to make what turned out to be a mere four jars of jam.  Four little jars, I might add.  Pure gold.  I used the freezer method because while I received the canning jars, I did not get the canner, which apparently is necessary for boiling the jam-filled jars.  But freezer jam tastes better anyway because the peaches are not cooked, so I'm looking forward to eating a bit of the tree's bounty over the next few months and thumbing my nose at the snails.

Finally, there is the cuckoo clock now installed in the kitchen.  It was my official mother's day present - and it arrived from Germany in time to chirp the hours on my special day.  For those of you who want a quick, zen-like break from your busy day, just watch the video above and, if you follow the pendulum back and forth long enough and ignore the dancers marking out the minutes, you may actually lower your blood pressure. Please remember it took me two long hours to pick this one out and it cuckoos every hour on the hour whether we like it or not.

It was a glorious day, as I'm sure it was for all mothers who have children, or who love nieces, nephews, honorary children, etc.  It's a great job.  However, there is a postscript to the festivities. Mother's Day actually ended this morning because I got a sheepish phone call from my husband who said he forgot that Sweetpea had put a special notice in the local newspaper for me.
     "But it's in the trash!" I wailed.
Oh well, I spent the next hour in the blinding 90 degree sun rifling madly through a very stinky garbage pail out back looking for the paper until I finally found it stuck to a pizza box.  The page my husband had me look for is now tacked to the bulletin board in the laundry room while it dries out, but I can make out the words very clearly:

I love you Mum.

You just can't hear that enough, no matter how hard it may be to get to it.

Happy Mothers Day to everyone.  Just for fun pretend the day lasts all year long.


Wednesday, May 08, 2013

I'm in love with a Celebrity

Celebrity Solstice Solarium  lounge

Yes, it is true.  I thought I would never get there, but photos don't lie - I'm a groupie now and it will take a while before I realize that I'm back on dry land.

Yup, I've been lucky enough as part of the San Pedro Convention and Visitors' Bureau (SPCVB) to have the opportunity to board cruise ships as part of a welcome delegation and I've seen some amazing ships, though with more glitzy chrome and bling than I felt I could take for more than a day  After many tries, today I finally fell in love with a ship making its first ever port of call here in San Pedro.  Hello Celebrity Solstice!

Not that the benefits of meeting the various ship captains and enjoying their extraordinary chef offerings on all the many cruise lines that have welcomed us hasn't been a privlege. This experience, along with many others like this one, was made possible by the Grays, who once owned a nautical antiques shop and now are the owners of the SPCVB, a small but steadily significant tourist organization in San Pedro.  They love ships, and they made it their business to get in touch with the cruise lines - Princess, Costa, Norwegian Star, and many others who make San Pedro a port of call.  Apparently the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau has not yet realized that a hundred years ago San Pedrans (much to their regret) opted to be annexed by the City of Los Angeles in order for them to control the new port that was certainly going to become the lifeline of the West Coast.  They behave as if we fell off into the ocean decades ago, or perhaps they believe the misconceptions they hear from other people who have never been here.

San Pedro gets so many bad raps from so many quarters of the Southland it has become the punchline of a flat joke.  It may have been true back in the day when cruising along the once-industrial Harbor Boulevard with nothing more than cranes and container ships might not have been classically touristy, but if anyone wants to really experience San Pedro it's easy enough to just......go anywhere else in town.  Then you will experience the pristine and nearly deserted beaches, the beautiful marina filled with luxury boats, soaring cliffs leading to hidden coves and places for children to search among the tidepools for starfish and crabs.  Neighborhoods filled with fabulous ocean views, Catalina in the distance, whales passing by on their way north and south each year. There is a wonderful marine aquarium with a world-class research and aqua-nursery, winding seaside drives, destroyers and merchant ships to explore, fresh fish to grill overlooking the channels, and so much more.

But then you have to actually come here.

For years we have been chafing at the apparent inability of the people we pay at the LACVB to get in their cars and actually come down here to do their jobs and promote us as part of Los Angeles.  We are the city's only waterfront, chock full of activities, from artist galleries, quaint shops, places to hang out, lobsters to eat, and hidden treasures to explore.  We hope the next mayor will be revamping the work of this outdated bureau and finally giving back some of the millions of dollars we've poured into it over the decades.  In the meantime The Grays, and their nascent tourist bureau are putting the multi-million dollar bureaucrats up there in City Hall to shame.  It's us the Cruise Lines and their thousands of passengers remember as the friendly face of the town where they are docked.

The cruise ships docked here weekly, pristine white against the skyline, in front of dancing, musical fountains and the old fashioned red car street car cruising up along the boulevard are just some of the sights that make this town unique, and now that I've finally found one that is as beautiful inside as I imagined they should be (instead of the 90's style casino interiors that seemed to dominate the industry for many years), I finally want to go on a cruise.  In fact after visiting the Solstice I wanted to go home, pack our bags, and get back on for the rest of the trip to Alaska.

My sister, Deb and I have been talking about a sibling cruise and I now have a focus for that idea.  Celebrity is luxury cruising, but once a year they do a re-positioning route from Ensenada to Alaska (this is a one way trip) and the reduced prices are a great deal.  They stop in several West Coast cities, including San Diego, San Pedro, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver.  True, it's a bit older crowd, but after my disasterous experience aboard the Carnival where children multiplied in the pools like gremlins and ran screaming along the halls until 2 a.m., where there was no shady peace to relax and read on the entire ship, and only the clang, clang of gaming machines in the sub-zero interior, I was off, off, off the idea of getting on another boat until the Solstice came along.

I'm in love!

Solstice has all the amenities you'd expect on a ship this size (too large to go through the Panama Canal)  Shops, a casino, performance theaters, discos, outdoor activities, many different restaurants, clubs, and a variety of places to swim, soak, and relax.  This ship was built in Germany in 2008 and the decor is distinctly Soho modern with a retro nod to the days when trans-atlantic crossings were in comfort and style.


 Simple and elegant - no contrasting patterns, crazy colors and refreshing absence of fake wood


Berthed in the new dock overlooking Cabrillo Beach


 The dining room - retro cool


 One of the many clubs - note private rooms along the windows


 Sunny Pool Deck (there is a shady pool deck too, along with a spa and salon)




This library is the kind of intimate space you'll find all over the ship



The Lawn Club


Michaels Lounge


Michaels lounge





View from the croquet lawn to San Pedro