R Blog

Hiatus

R Blog is on temporary hiatus due to the fact that he is outside too much to blog. Check back once in awhile to see if he's come inside yet.

Baby Sign Language

Our newest grand baby, not yet a year old, is talking to us. Well, communicating. Using his hands and face instead of words. Making signs that mean things like: dog, flower, water, food, bath, light, tree, car, bird, etc. He doesn’t know too many signs yet, but enough so that we can connect. It proves that preverbal babies can understand quite a bit before they are able to form words. It’s clear evidence they want to communicate. This baby signing thing has apparently been going on for about ten years. Who knew? We didn’t. There are, of course, books and web sites. (Google “baby sign language.”) According to this recent news article, “Teaching sign language to a baby reduces frustration for both parent and child, increases a child's language development and strengthens the parent-infant bond...Infants who learn sign language also begin speaking earlier and have advanced language skills for their age...”
It’s fun to talk to the baby and have him answer back in sign. He recognizes the sign but also clearly recognizes words. So what if he thinks deer are dogs. What other word does he have to use? They kind of look like dogs. He was close. And, isn’t it interesting that he makes up signs of his own? What does it mean when he jabs his index finger into the opposite palm?  And, if he doesn’t make the sign exactly right, we figure it out. It’s baby talk after all. It’s handy for him to tell you he wants food (fingers to the lips) or water (finger in the mouth) or that he concurs that it is bath time (hands rubbing the chest). It’s always amusing to talk about dogs because you have to stick your tongue out and pant, or flowers which requires sniffing. According to this baby sign web site http://www.babysign-academy.com/ “In just the past 10 years, a growing number of parents worldwide have discovered the joys of using simple sign language with their preverbal babies. Babies can gain control of their hands long before they develop the oral motor skills necessary for speech, so signs allow little ones to express their thoughts and needs without crying or whining - a bonus for both babies and parents.”
No good thing can go unmarketed. “Sign2Me® is a highly respected, established company based in Seattle, Washington. Our primary focus is the development, production, publication, and distribution of print, video, and multimedia resources to help establish two-way communication between hearing parents and their hearing children through the use of American Sign Language signs. Each of our products has been carefully developed with the common goal of leaving the world better than we found it.”
Plus there’s seminars and classes. Who can exist without seminars and classes? Easier is to to buy the America Sign Language Dictionary and teach your babe a few signs and start talking. Dogs is one of our favorite topics.

Swimming in Puget Sound

Puget Sound is not known as a good place to swim. The water is cold. Fifty to fifty-five degrees in the summer. Most people do not like to immerse in cold water. Really cold water can be painful. For a guy, Puget Sound water can actually cause discomfort in the nether regions plus, as George Costanza would say, “Serious shrinkage.” Prolonged exposure to Puget Sound water without a survival suit can result in hypothermia, then death. Yet there is pleasure and possible health benefits from a cold, brisk swim. There is the old story about Paul Newman who reportedly plunges his face into a tub of ice water each morning to keep his skin tight and give it a healthy glow. And we all know how good Paul looks on that salad dressing label. The naturopaths wax poetic on the subject of hydrotherapy, that is—repeated applications of cold, then hot which pumps blood and lymph. Fifty degree water is unarguably cold. Very cold. Yet, one can swim in it with gratification. Actually, boatwashington.org suggests that survival time in fifty degree water is around two hours. So, a twenty minute swim in Puget Sound is not an unreasonable undertaking. It’s probably easier for a fatter person to tolerate the cold and this might be the answer to why in recent years I can enter cold mountain lakes, fast running streams and Puget Sound. It helps if it’s very hot outside because your mental attitude is important. All this is a too long introduction to the report that I’ve taken a couple of Puget Sound swims this week. Both were enjoyable, refreshing and invigorating. And, each time I stayed in the water paddling around on my back like a happy otter for ten to fifteen minutes. The view from the water is good. It’s the same view of the seal, gull or Orca. I like the briny smell and don’t mind pushing some seaweed aside. From the moment you enter the water your body’s core temperature begins to drop. Stay twenty minutes and you’ll be cool the rest of the day. You start, of course, on a normal day with a body temp of 98.6 degrees and aren’t in trouble until you drop to 90 degrees. We don’t stay in that long. It will take two hours to kill you. And, like they say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Puget Sound swimming. Highly recommended.

Barn Swallows

Photo from the Richard Smith collection http://lummiphotos.blogspot.com/

There’s a swallow’s nest on a ledge above our deck at Lummi Island. For a dozen years or so (including the four that we’ve been here), a pair of barn swallows have arrived in late spring, encamped, freshened the mud-daubed shelter, then birthed, fed and trained two broods of four to five babies. The Sibley Guide gives us a few interesting facts about the swallow. They are monogamous and our swallows (we like to think the same pair returns year after year) are an amazing team of parents. They could write a book. They work together getting the nest ready and feeding the little ones. They are always on the same page. If dad flies in and feeds #1 and #2 somehow mom, when she arrives knows to pass the bug to #3, then #4. There are lots of questions that Sibley doesn’t answer. We know, for example, that swallows migrate but we don’t know where our group flies off to in the fall. Right now we can tell that they are getting ready to leave. The second brood is out of the nest and in flight, wheeling and juking like tiny fighter jets, pulling eight G turns. They fly so fast and turn so quickly that we can’t count the number of birds in the air at one time. The fly at the house like a Kamikaze, make a sharp turn and flutter into the nest. Incredible pilots. The first brood, kicked out weeks ago sleeps somewhere else but shows up from time to time for what must be physical training. Getting ready for the winged migration. They all take off, making tight turns in and around the yard then disappear all day, returning to the nest at night. On a bike ride today we noticed eleven barn swallows resting on the telephone lines up the road a piece. Eleven is just about the right number for the parents and two broods. There was one timid bird who didn’t want to fly. He hung onto the nest for two days after his siblings had flown off on maneuvers. Mom and dad would coax him onto the adjoining down spouts and tease him with bugs. We never saw him fly. There should have been twelve birds on that wire. Perhaps the chicken swallow didn’t make it. What do barn swallows do to a weak sister? I don’t know and neither does Sibley. But the gang is getting ready to head south. One morning we’ll get up and they’ll be gone. My guess is that some winter day in let’s say Guatemala, one of our barn swallows will be talking to an acquaintance and, sort of like I do say, “Yeah, we’ve got a little place up on Lummi Island. We’ll be heading up there again this summer. What!? Oh... It’s near Bellingham.”

Mini-storage

If only I had had the vision to invest in the mini-storage business. Storage units are a phenomenon of our time (along with garage sales where mini-storage junk is transferred from one person’s unit to another's). Yesterday, we sat and watched for several hours as our kids stuff was unloaded from an eighteen wheeler into three ten by fifteen units in an industrial park in Bellingham. It wasn’t easy finding a space available. Many people need the mini-storage. I had time to walk around the facility and compute that the gross annual take from this acre or so of land with it’s flimsy metal studded, metal clad buildings was about $180,000. Not a bad haul. $180m will amortize a building loan at a rapid rate. Personally, I feel very resentful about mini-storage since I’ve been paying rent on a unit since 1992. The total amount paid is more than the value of the stuff stored. I could have almost built my own. I flatter myself on traveling light and I can attest that inside our storage unit there is very little that can be blamed on me. I pretty much stay away from the place since it reminds me of the $125 per month that, in my opinion, is going down the drain. Obviously, this is an argument that I’ve lost. We’ve had the mini-storage unit so long that we are the senior customer of this facility, rewarded at Christmas time by a small box of Goodies Chocolates. Granted, Goodies are just about the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten. But the price is too high. Certainly, there are treasures to be found in a storage unit. But, it’s as if a pile of secondary memories, not important enough to be kept in the house, have been compressed into a rectangular bale like old wrecked cars that we used to love. Once, after a quick trip to our storage unit I was moved to poetry, to wit:

A QUICK TRIP TO MINI-STORAGE

With due solemnity
I entered our consecrated cave
Head down
Picking my way carefully
Past the icons
My torch casting jagged patterns
On the metallic wall
Checking the manifest
Of the High Priestess
Which indicated the desired relic.

Around me stacked high
Was proof of our country’s genius—
Creations of a nation.
Suddenly enfeebled
By the weight of remembrance—
Sparked by the shapes, smells & colors
Of this small temple—
I slumped into a wing-back chair
Surrounded by irrefutable confirmation
Of a people’s ability to
Ferment  a need and desire
For just about anything—
Chuckling, almost silently,
As memories leaped holographically
About the sacred preserve
Narrating a surfeit of retail covenants.

I wished I could take each item
From its special place
Unwrap it,
Stare at it in wonder,
Estimate its value,
Accumulate the total
And report to our children
The vested value of their endowment.
Thus calmed by such pleasant visions
Of our success and with infinite awe,
I cradled the chosen ark in my embrace
And backed out carefully
Rolling the metaphorical rock
To lock the door

Driving quickly away
As instructed by the High Priestess
Overwhelmed with pride
As the low silhouette of The sacred caves,
Pilgrimage place of the Empire,
Was reflected in  my viewing glass.
          Copyright 1993, RMSmith

Changes

We have been in the Everett area for a week and a half and each day has been sunny and perfect, not like it used to be in summer.  But now, high seventies to low eighties with a light, cool breeze. This could be a cyclical weather pattern or the result of global warming. All we know is that when we were kids here it was overcast most of the time and Seattle’s reputation for drizzly rain was well-deserved and kept people from moving here. That, apparently, is all over.  We spent our first summer in Everett in 1955 playing in the drizzle, blowing up slugs with firecrackers. There was no freeway to Seattle. (There’ve been some changes made). The freeway, completed in 1961 in time for the Seattle World’s Fair, is now jammed no matter how many lanes they add, and it takes more time than you want to go anywhere. Across the Everett Jetty there is something new as well—kite surfers. Late in the afternoon an offshore breeze creates perfect conditions for this sail surfing sport and through binoculars we can see the sailors go airborne as they make their turns to race back and forth across the narrow sandbar. Swing the binoculars to the left and the massive aircraft carrier USS Lincoln sits at its multimillion dollar dock near where I had a college summer job working for the Office of Civil Defense. OCD was something like Homeland Security although it involved fall out shelters and preparedness. We didn’t inspect luggage. Just encouraged folks to maintain a supply of food and water in the event of nuclear attack. Lincoln, armed with nukes, waits for the Preznit to call her forth to battle once again. She’s had lots of work lately. Fortunately, so far, none of it nuclear.
Next door, in my mother’s bucolic neighborhood we are wondering if the people are on meth. Lots of comings and goings involving many different folks most of whom look kind of strung out. The neighborhood is aghast and ringing the mayor’s phone off the hook. We are expecting the swat team any minute. 1955=beer. 2005=crystal meth. That’s a change.
Out in Mulketeo, Taylor’s Landing is now an Ivars; the old Seahorse Restaurant is replaced as well. Big, grand new homes are going up just a few feet from the boulevard. The hillside is already covered. At the top of the hill Boeing is changing from bust back to boom.
Downtown Everett is actually pretty. A surprising change. No one had ever accused Everett of being pretty. We were known for the pulp mill odor that greeted all travelers. Now, magnificent flower baskets are everywhere and sculpture, as in “art”, abounds.
The Everett Herald just released its compilation of the Top 50 athletes in Snohomish County History. None of my classmates were on the list, a gross omission when you consider Jim Lambright was left off. All-Coast defensive end. Husky coach. Who would have thought he’d be forgotten already? Maybe I’ll see him at our 45th reunion later this month. We’ll talk about changes...if we recognize each other.
Lot’s of changes and one has to try and keep up. Nothing stays the same. I have resorted to a pulsing magnetic blanket. http://www.quantronmedicine.com/products/qrs_101.htm  
We need all the help we can get when we’re old and gray.  I’m feeling some changes. I think it might be working.

    For there's a change in the weather
    There's a change in the sea
    So from now on there'll be a change in me
    My walk will be diff'rent my talk and my name
    Nothin' about me is goin' to be the same,
    I'm goin' to change my way of livin' if that ain't enough,   
    Then I'll change the way that I strut my stuff,
    ‘cause nobody wants you when you're old and gray
    Ther'll be some change made.
        There’ll Be Some Changes Made, lyrics by Benny Goodman