Category: Family

Posted on

On and Off the Road

Friday morning, the four of us (Kate, Thom, Scout the Dog and I) drove up to Eugene to move one of us (Thom) into his house for the beginning of the school year. It’s his third year at the University of Oregon, and it’s kind of breathtaking how fast that time is going (for us, not him). We spent Saturday taking care of house errands with him, including tracking down a $38 couch at the Goodwill Superstore. Quite a buy, for the money. Sort of a tweedy looking brown fabric that kind of goes with the famous one-dollar chair we found at St. Vincent de Paul a couple years ago.

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today we ate breakfast at the favored spot, The Glenwood near campus, then drove home. It was an uneventful trip until we got to the Mount Shasta area. It’s my favorite part of the drive, the high valleys north of the mountain. My cellphone rang, and Kate answered. It was my brother John, with news: My dad had fallen at home yesterday and had broken his hip. I heard Kate say that much and had my usual calm reaction. We stopped so I could talk to John and my sister Ann, who actually took Dad to the hospital earlier today, and I got the details: He stumbled getting out of a chair sometime yesterday and fell. He picked himself up, though, apparently inventoried his injuries and decided he didn’t need to call anyone. He did pull my mom’s old walker out of the closet and was making his way around the apartment with that. But over time he realized he was dealing with more than just some bruises or sore muscles, and this morning he called Ann and asked her to come over. When she got there, he told her what had happened and agreed with her when she said he’d better get checked out at the emergency room. Ann and my brother-in-law Dan managed to get Dad up the stairs and into Ann’s car, and then they drove to the hospital in Evanston. As part of getting checked over, naturally, he was given an X-ray. One of his hips is fractured, though apparently not badly.

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that he needs to have surgery tomorrow. Apparently the planned operation is the least invasive procedure possible with this kind of injury. But still, we’re talking about an 86-year-old guy with what is now days called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD for short; one of the old-fashioned terms for it is emphysema, and that’s what you get when you have a pack-a-day minimum Pall Mall habit for a few decades). So tonight, back home in Berkeley, I’m thinking about Dad and the rest of the family and hoping everything goes well tomorrow and afterward.

And if you happen this way, your good wishes, however you’re in the habit of sending them, will be appreciated.

[Update: The news from my brother Chris was that the surgeon says that everything went as expected. Dad was in good spirits going into the operation and apparently stood up to it well. The issue now will be physical therapy and recovery.]

Posted on

Tuesday Notebook

Belatedly: Happy birthday, Dad. (And hey, this continues the celebration a day!)

My food bar has a blog: I was looking for low, low prices on Larabars (oops, I forgot the pretentious umlaut thing on the initial A), the very good and very simple and very vegan answer to PowerBar, ClifBar, Odwalla bars, Balance bars, and such. The first listing on Google is for the official and very Flash-y Lara site, and I went there. I noted immediately the presence of a blog; no big surprise there, as blogs have become official marketing tools for many blogs (the one I’d most like to see, if not read: a Preparation H blog (the butt-comfort product does not have a blog, but its site features brief video clips of three demographically representative adults shifting uncomfortably in their seats).

So what do you get on the Larabar blog? Right now, testimonials to the product in video form and tributes to fans of the product. Seeing this made me wonder whether any of the other bars have blogs. The rundown: PowerBar: no. ClifBar: yes. Balance: no. Odwalla: no.

As to the original quest for low-price Larabars. The product is interesting because each bar contains just a few ingredients, all stuff that you could buy at your local grocery (for instance, the ingredients list for the Pecan Pie flavor is dates, pecans, and almonds; no sugar and nothing like “soy protein isolate” or anything else emerging from a food lab somewhere). The drawback is the price: Andronico’s, the small, upscale Bay Area chain that doesn’t blush to put $10 tomato sauce on its shelves, sells Larabars for something like $1.90 to $2 a pop. Ridiculous. Other stores aren’t a lot better. So what kind of prices can you find online?

The Larabar site offers 16-unit boxes for $27 each; that’s about $1.69 each. REI sells Larabars online for $1.80 each, or $28.80 for 16 (REI stores used to give a 20 percent discount when you bought 12 or more food bars, but I think that’s no longer the case). With those numbers for comparison, here’s a non-encyclopedic spot check of online prices found through Google:

Vitacost.com: $18.83

FifFuel.com: $18.95

Drugstore.com: $20.99

Amazon.com: $22.35

Webvitamins: $23.90

VitaminShoppe: $24.95

VeganEssentials: $25.76

EdinaBike: $34.95

And of course: Buying online usually means you have to pay a shipping charge; some sites will charge tax, too.

Posted on

Food Moment

Redonion081207

Sunday night at Jan and Christian’s in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. In our trip across country, Kate and I just once stayed two nights in the same place. So we blew through Jan and Chris’s place, too. But in the afternoon and evening and morning we *were* there, there was lunch at a tacqueria, dessert, a bike ride, a dog walk, a great dinner (above, grilled red onions on a plate with grilled chicken), dessert, a meteor-viewing party (the Perseids, disappointing except for lying down on my back watching the sky, an op-ed published in the Washington Post (Chris’s, on the ongoing threat of lead poisoning), a meeting with a guidance counselor (Jan, at the local high school), breakfast, and that’s about it.

Posted on

Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, New York

Mcpherson080807

Here’s one issue in the Great North American Mostly Two-Lane Road Tour of 2007®: We finish our travels so late in the day that I’m kind of bushed by the time it comes to accounting for our whereabouts. To back up from today: We got to Tinley Park, in the Chicago suburbs, on Saturday, and spent the weekend in hometown environs. Then yesterday, Tuesday, we drove up to Milwaukee to meet some Berkeley friends who long ago removed to Ripon, Wisconsin (birthplace of the Republican Party and home of a small liberal arts college). In the evening, Kate and I took the new fast catamaran ferry across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, where we crashed in the decidedly oddball Shoreline Inn downtown. Today, we drove across the Lower Peninsula to Lake Huron, virtually all on state highways and back roads. We crossed the Bluewater Bridge from Port Huron, Michgan, to Sarnia, Ontario, experiencing for the first time a no doubt very mild form of the third-degree that travelers across international borders get in our new world (This from the Canadian immigration officer: “Do you have any weapons at home?”); then we drove across most of southwestern Ontario the same way, discovering a nice county-type road that went on forever and stayed close to the Lake Erie shore almost all the way over to Buffalo. After we recrossed the border there, we passed the minor-league ballpark downtown and decided to turn around and go to the game that appeared to be already in progress; the proceedings, between the Buffalo Bisons and the Ottawa Lynx, were already in the fifth inning when we sat down, but the price was right ($3 parking and $7 a seat) and the weather was perfect for a twilight game. The home side lost, and we headed south out of town on U.S. 219, headed for Salamanca and Allegheny State Park. We wound up in a big new chain motel in Ellicottville; tomorrow we’re headed for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So, that picture up there: Approaching the hamlet of Selford, Ontario, we passed a sign promising a historical marker related to the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I might not have given it a second thought except that Dad has told me that during the year or so he lived with his parents in Pasadena, they took him to see Sister Aimee preach in her Los Angeles temple. She was born in Selford in 1890 and was enough of a personage that her native province saw fit to commemorate her origins. We found two markers, actually: one was a plaque on a flagstone marker in front of the town school; the one above was hidden in some roadside trees; a local saw us wandering around and told us where to look — nice gesture.

In a way, the McPherson sighting was the second related to Dad and his parents today; I remembered as we drove out of Muskegon that they lived there nearly 100 years ago — Sjur Brekke was a Lutheran minister and had a parish somewhere in town sometime around 1910. I’ll get corrected on that if I’m wrong.

Mcpherson080807A

Posted on

Good Friday to You, Too

There was once a lad growing up in a godless university city much like the one in which I reside. His parents denied him the spiritual benefits of Bible tales, Original Sin coloring books, scary Satan stories, and other fundamental instruction in the local religion. Nonetheless, he picked up on one of the religion’s major symbols: the cross.

He wanted a cross himself, so his mom helped him build one. It was made of some left over pieces of cabinet molding. When it was done, He carried it over his shoulder up and down the block. Eventually, one of the neighbors said, “Hey, that’s a nice cross you’ve got there.”

“Thank you,” the boy said. “Now all I need is a little guy to hang on it.”

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Personal Day

The proprietor will be back tomorrow, one way or the other.

In the meantime, contemplate:

Moths in Berkeley. Along with the usual bats in the belfry.

Global warming could speed up Earth’s rotation. By .12 milliseconds in the next two centuries. We’ll have that much less time every day for “Seinfeld” reruns.

Born on this date: Dabbs Greer, actor. “He played the first person saved by Superman in the very first episode. …”

Also: Emile Zola, writer: “If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.”

Posted on

Random Xmas Moment

Overhead:

Voice A, reading aloud from a recently unwrapped book: “…’When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.’

[Pause]

True dat.”

Voice B: “True dat, Karl.”

Posted on

Haymarket Memorial

Foresthome112406

In Chicago post-Thanksgiving. Friday, as part of a ruse to keep my brother Chris out of the house while his surprise 50th birthday was in preparation, we wound up in Forest Home Cemetery just west of the city to visit the Haymarket memorial. More on that later–about Emma Goldman’s grave nearby and the ongoing interest in the site. For now, just the picture.