What’s Shakin’?

We just received a little shake as we were getting ready to think about loading the car for the trip to the airport.  Here’s the USGS site that describes what we just experienced: http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/118-34.htm (this link is now outdated – but still interesting, however the earthquake was determined to be a 5.4 – not big by California standards).

It shook a few things off of the shelves and we are now wondering if this is a precursor to the BIG ONE.  If so, we might come home to rubble (but not Barney, Betty, or Bam Bam).  (It’s now a week later, so obviously not the BIG ONE).

Fish, Flea, Culture – Quite a Week Ahead

Our kids (10 and 12) have planned their “once in a lifetime” events and we are on our way to Hawaii.  They are planning to learn to surf, visit the USS Arizona Memorial, visit the Polynesian Cultural Center, swim, hula, snorkel (my nightmares are recurring… meaningful, if you read an earlier post about swimming with the fish) and visit the flea market.  We are hoping to cram in tons of relaxation between rushing from event to event.

I’ll report back next week.

http://www.hawaiipictures.com/pictures/oahu.html

http://www.hawaiipictures.com/pictures/oahu.html

Building Community in Costa Rica

I had an opportunity to travel to Costa Rica with some high school kids from my church to refurbish a community center.  Each of the communities around San Jose (the capital city) has a community center, but many of them had been taken over by drug dealers and were unsafe for kids.  The particular community center we were to take care of was in serious disrepair.  It had been abandoned for several years and it took two days just to clean up the yard and make repairs to the building (including adding an interior wall to cordon off one end for a police outpost).

As we worked on the yards and made repairs, some of our kids walked through the neighborhood meeting people and telling them we were reclaiming the community center from the drug dealers.  We set up a couple of tables and some games as kids started spilling in from the neighborhood.  While we painted the building, kids played in the freshly cleaned yard and/or colored pictures at the tables.  Neighbors brought food and we ate together – it was great!

The person who set this up for us was a kind of renegade missionary – not really affiliated with an organization, just trying to make a difference among people who need an advocate.  He took us to a local government meeting one evening (with the mayor and city council) and made a pitch for them to hire people to run after-school programs at the community center.  They were very kind and told us they would consider the request (we found out later that they had some people in place within just a few weeks).

By the end of the week our work was complete and the police were in place in their new office, so we were free to do some sightseeing.  One of my goals had been to hike in a rainforest, and I had convinced the rest of the group to take a short hike.  We found some tour guides to take us into the rainforest (but off the touristy, beaten path).  It started raining about five minutes after we stepped out of the vans, rained for the next two hours while we hiked, and stopped raining just as we were getting back into the vans.  It was a fantastic experience as we hiked through lush jungle, along beautiful streams, and past small waterfalls.  This was the only time it rained while we were on this trip and it just seemed fitting that it was while we were in a rainforest (I don’t think anyone was upset about getting wet). 

Following our hike, we toured a butterfly farm and I bought a blue morph.  The farm only boxes butterflies that have died, so no butterfly was harmed in the making of my memories.  The one funny line from the staff, however, was that butterflies are not sold to be pets – they are sold to be food.  How odd.

A couple of goals met, time spent with some great kids, many new friends, a sense of accomplishment… good times – great trip.

I’ve added some photos – not mine, but they look just like my memories.  Thank you to http://www.monteverdeinfo.com/photo_gallery.htm

Costa Rica Jungle http://monteverdeinfo.com

Blue Morph http://monteverdeinfo.com

Marriage, Mortality, Relationships, and Work

I went to a friend’s wedding today.  She married, for the first time, in her early fifties.  I was in my very early twenties when I married (if I knew then what I know now… and all).  But that’s the point – I didn’t know anything and, being a guy, still don’t.  It just made me wonder if I would be interested in marrying for the first time at fifty.  Don’t get me wrong, I am so in love with my wife that sometimes even I can’t stand me.

Thoughts on mortality kick in here…

My wife and I used to spend each Valentine’s day with several other couples.  Unfortunately, two of the women in our group passed away two years ago (about four months apart).  One was kind of expected (kidney failure), but the other was a total surprise (outpatient surgery complications).  The husband of the first has still not recovered and is struggling through life.  The husband of the second is getting remarried next week to a college friend and widow of another life-long friend.

And, the work involved in relationships…

I get so set in my ways.  After twenty-six years of marriage, I can’t imagine not being married.  Yet, when my wife asked me recently if I would remarry if she were to die, I said no.  She asked me why and my first and only thought was that relationships are too much work.  She seemed kind of offended (after 26 years I’m beginning to notice some of the signs).  I explained that although love is work, she makes it easy (nice out).  However, the work involved in a relationship (at least for me) is about making the changes in myself to make me a better person to be around.  With me, that’s a lot of work.

Who I want to Become and Another “Bucket Lister”

I happened across Doug, another “bucket lister” http://douggeivett.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/my-bucket-list/ and found his post interesting.  He responed to yesterday’s post with this thought:

There are several ways to go about this business of working on a bucket list. One is simply to make a list of things I feel especially compelled to do before “kicking the bucket,” and tick them off as each is done. But it could be useful to ask why those particular things are on my list. What does my list say about me? And is that the kind of person I want to be when I’ve finished my business here on earth? An alternative is to think strictly in terms of what sort of person I wish to become, then get busy becoming that sort of person. But how do you do that?

Good questions.

As I think about the kind of person I (still) hope to be, I am struck by the words of Michelangelo when he was asked how he could turn a block of stone into a beautiful angelic statue.  He responded with something to this effect: “I see the angel inside the block of stone and remove everything that doesn’t belong.”  That is (more or less) what my list has become for me – a vision of who I want to become and a chipping away of what doesn’t belong. 

It became much easier after my kids were born.  I wanted to be the kind of person who could be patient with them as they grew up and developed into the kind of people who could be patient with me as I grew old.

Why Create a Bucket List?

I thought I might add a bit more detail about why I created a “bucket list” almost 20 years ago.

When I turned 30, my wife threw a surprise birthday party for me, which was a big deal as the two of us are about as unsentimental as a couple can get (we didn’t even have a camera until our kids were born – 14 years after we married).  I hadn’t thought about my age for almost ten years.  I was suddenly doing a lot of thinking – and was instantly depressed.  My generation didn’t trust anyone over 30 and I had just become untrustworthy.  As a matter of fact, all I could think of was that my life was all but over (I had strange thoughts about mortality at 30) and I had nothing to show for it.  I felt that I had made no real impact on the world and that I was not living up to my potential.

I languished in this semi-depression for almost a year before I decided to do something about it.  This is when I created what we today call a “bucket list”.  My list consisted of fifty things I wanted to accomplish before I died.  Fast-forward almost twenty years and I find myself with an almost completed list (two items left).  I guess it’s time to either make a new list or die (I’m thinking I’ll go with the first).

Although I won’t bore you with my first list, my categories were:

1. Self-improvement

2. Investment in others

3. Family

4. Travel

5. Professional life

I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve met some of these goals and, although I included a section on self-improvement, I now wish I had paid closer attention to who I wanted to be rather than what I wanted to accomplish.  However, I feel I am getting closer to the person I should be and want to be in spite of myself.  All in all, it’s been an enjoyable journey – and much more satisfying than just wandering through life.

McTaco

I mentioned visiting McTaco a few posts ago and thought I still had a photo – I did (and do… look below).  I don’t know if it still exists, but we found it in Ensenada, Mexico (south on Highway 2) about 20 years ago.  We haven’t been back to Mexico for a few years, but we loved McTaco.

So, there you go.

The 110 Best Books or How to Start a Fight with Readers

I love book lists, thus I was happy to discover another list of book lists.  This one from Britain’s Telegraph back in April.  The article is entitled 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library.  I could not discover who wrote the article, and think I know why after reading the comments from readers at the end of the article.  The comments are as entertaining (to me) as the lists themselves.  The article could easily have been entitled, “How to Start a Fight with Readers.”

The lists in the article include: CLASSICS, POETRY, LITERARY FICTION, ROMANTIC FICTION, CHILDREN’S BOOKS, SCI-FI, CRIME, BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD, HISTORY, and LIVES.  I’ve listed a couple of lists as samples:

CLASSICS

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (Leisure Guy should be delighted)

The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Stacy should be thrilled)

War and Peace by Tolstoy

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Middlemarch by George Eliot

LITERARY FICTION

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust

Ulysses by James Joyce

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Rabbit series by John Updike

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Babar by Jean de Brunhoff

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne (Not When We Were Young, but Chartroose should be happy)

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

ROMANTIC FICTION

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault

Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Literate Housewife should be pleased)

Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Plantagenet Saga by Jean Plaidy

Reading Heaven: A List of Booklists

I’m in heaven – I really like lists (have I mentioned this?), especially when they are about books.  I found several at http://www.englishcompanion.com/Readings/booklists/ihar.html

 

The lists are from I Hear America Reading: Why We Read – What We Read by Jim Burke (Heinemann, 1999).  The lists run the gamut, from Ten Books for People Who Think the World is Absurd to Ten Books in Search of the Truth.  The lists are a compilation of those listed on surveys.

 

I discovered: Ten Books about Books, Ten Books of Booklists, Ten Recommendations for The Great American Novel (I can’t believe A Prayer for Owen Meany was not on this list), Ten Books to Make You Laugh Out Loud (At least Owen Meany made this list – and at #1), and Ten Books You Plan to Read When You Retire (But Probably Won’t).

 

Here are those lists:

 

Ten Books about Books

1. A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

2. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman

3. Genesis: As It Is Written, David Rosenberg

4. Great Books, David Denby

5. How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen

6. Imagining Characters, A.S. Byatt and Iris Sordre

7. Ruined by Reading, Lynne Schwartz

8. The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, Gomes

9. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts

10. The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading, Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald

Ten Books of Booklists

1. 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide, Erica Bauermeister, et al.

2. The Book Group Book, Ellen Slezak

3. Books for a Small Planet: A Multicultural-Intercultural Bibliography for Young English Language Learners, Dorothy S. Brown

4. Great Books for Girls: More than 600 Books to Inspire Today’s Girls and Tomorrow’s Women, Kathleen Odean

5. A Lifetime Reading Plan, Clifton Fadiman

6. New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, ed. E Diefendorf

7. The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today, Martin Seymour-Smith

8. The Reading Group Book: The Complete Guide to Starting and Sustaining a Reading Group, With Annotated Lists of 250 Titles for Provocative Discussion, Davis Laskin and Holly Hughes

9. Strong Souls Singing: African American Books for Our Daughters and Our Sisters and Spirited Minds: African American Books for Our Sons and Our Brothers, edited by Archie Givens.

10. The Western Canon, Harold Bloom

Ten Recommendations for The Great American Novel
(Note: Everyone who nominated a title said “The Great American Novel” has yet to be written.)

1. Absalom! Absalom! William Faulkner

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

3. Beloved, Toni Morrison

4. Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

5. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

6. The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

7. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

8. Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

9. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

10. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ten Books to Make You Laugh Out Loud

1. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

2. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

3. Chicana Falsa, Michelle Serros

4. Heartburn, Nora Ephron

5. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Annie Lamott

6. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Camelia O. Skinner and Emily Kimborough

7. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

8. Seinlanguage, Jerry Seinfeld

9. The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, Woody Allen

10. The Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4, by Sue Townsend

Ten Books You Plan to Read When You Retire (But Probably Won’t)

1. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

2. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

3. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

4. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

5. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

6. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, T.E. Lawrence

7. The Bible

8. The Collected Dialogues of Plato

9. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

10. War and Peace, Tolstoy

A Debt Free Life and the Value of Relationships

One of the “bucket list” goals that I set at 30 was to be debt free within ten years.  It was an interesting goal (at least to me), and one I could never hope to accomplish alone.  In reality, my wife was the one who did most of the work to make this goal a reality.

We had just moved from Tucson, Arizona to Sacramento, CA when we turned 30.  This was in the late 1980s, just after the Keating Savings and Loan debacle, so we moved back to California with virtually no assets and seriously in debt.  When we determined to be debt free (well, actually we expected to still have a mortgage) we discovered a couple of basic principles about successful debt reduction: 1. Create a budget; 2. Commit to pay down debt; 3. Pay cash for most expenses; 4. Don’t spend more than your (after taxes) income; 5. Don’t try to impress anyone with possessions.

These principles seem basic (they are) and easily discovered (they are), but seem to elude many young couples – they eluded us for several years.

We began by setting a budget, then began paying down our debt that carried the highest interest and/or had the shortest pay off.  We stopped impulse buying and used cash for virtually everything we chose to purchase (including cars – eventually).  We began to live well within our means (in order to buy down our debt more quickly) and purchased a fixer upper home in a nice neighborhood (more on that in a later post).  We bought cars we could afford and quit buying a new car every six months or so (embarrassingly true).

If this all seems simple to do, it’s not.  It required a commitment to not buy every shiny thing we saw.  It also required a commitment to quit caring if our home or cars were as big, or fancy, or modern as those of our friends, but we also decided to love what we could afford and celebrate with our friends when they made their purchases.  In short, without realizing it, we really were committing to live pretty stress free lives.  My wife and I grew closer together and we were able to be virtually (still have a small mortgage) debt free within about five years.  This has given us freedom to move when we have wanted to do so, change jobs when we feel like it, spend more time together, depend on each other rather than things, and make donations to charities when it’s needed – investing in the lives of others rather than in stuff that will rust – without fear of not being able to pay for the stuff we have accumulated.

Accomplishing this goal was easily the most satisfying and brought with it a realization of the value of relationships over possessions.  Not a bad lesson to discover while doing something so basic.