4-15, Monday

I am excited.  This last week I received the first year of Hawaii Five-0 on DVD.  Wasn’t I just complaining about the mid-brow movies out there and unfavorably comparing Disturbia and Rear Window?

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I quote to restore my literary creds.

I always enjoyed the opening credits.

The opening credits were no small part of the show’s popularity. The show would begin with a “teaser” or prelude suggesting the sinister plot for the night’s program. Cut to the big ocean wave (“Hawaii Five-O”) and the start of the show’s dynamic theme song. Fast-zoom-in to the top balcony of the Ilikai Hotel, where McGarrett would turn to face the camera (“Starring Jack Lord”) followed by many quick-cuts and freeze-frames of Hawaiian scenery (including, memorably, a grass-skirted hula dancer from the pilot “Cocoon”) and of the supporting players, thus setting the mood for the show, and then ending with a flashing blue light on a police motorcycle racing through a Honolulu street.

At the conclusion of the action-packed, suspense-filled episode, after the obligatory “Book ‘em Danno!”, Jack Lord would narrate a teaser for the next week’s episode, often emphasizing the “guest villain”, especially if it was a perennial such as Khigh Dheigh, Hume Cronyn, etc, then closing the preview by saying “be here…aloha!” Unfortunately, these next episode teasers would be removed from the syndicated episodes, since most stations do not show the episodes in order of original network broadcast.

But I am not addicted to it.  I can quit anytime I want.  Just not today.

4-14 and 4-15, Saturday and Sunday

Saturday

After our usual 1.5 hour walk this morning — in the wind presaging a cold front, Marian had a salad and I had a half Fandango salad and half Sierra Turkey (although I have just looked at the calorie count for the sandwich and I will reconsider future choices of this sandwich) lunch at Panera. What a great franchise. Tasty food quickly prepared at a very reasonable price. We would have sat outside with the birds but the wind was a little much.

Movie We Saw

Slim pickings for movies worth seeing. Hollywood distributes more than 400 movies each year and we probably see 40-45 of these. Our tastes are hardly so elitist that we shun all but highbrow movies. I mean — Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, the plot of which is

A galactic exercise machine threatens Frylock (Carey Means) and his friends.

Or Pathfinders

American Indians adopt a Viking boy that was left behind during a skirmish with his people.

Vikings from the 10th century that only made it as far south as Labrador? Why not include Aztecs from the dawn of time and some dinosaurs thrown in as well?

Or Redline, that

Features the personal exotic car collection of the producer, real estate investor Daniel Sadek.

Sure, I’m just an old fart complaining about these young’uns and their crummy preferences.

We did see Disturbia which is promoted as a modern Rear Window.

It certainly is not a modern Rear Window but we enjoyed it. David Morse is the Raymond Burr character and he does a wonderful job with his quiet menace — a character feature in which he has seemed to refine into a career. The James Stewart and Grace Kelly stand ins are entirely different from Rear Window but are adequate for the movie. Disturbia has none of the complexity of the original, where the residents that all share the square Stewart looks out on all reflect some element of the Stewart/Kelly relationship.

This movie spends too much time on teenage angst. Of course, I’m a little beyond this kind of angst and appreciated the time Hitchcock spent developing the other characters through Stewart’s eyes. None of that in Disturbia, where almost everyone is dismissed as part of suburban mediocrity. All the more time to spend on lingering over her body.

Sure — young, slim, pretty. But I prefer complex characters. Yes, I am an old fart.

Sharon Olds describes the shock of finding one’s self suddenly aged — not aging but already there. And the shock of contrast with the young. Perhaps that is my real objection to the movie.

35/10 — from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, by Sharon Olds

Brushing out our daughter’s brown

silken hair before the mirror

I see the grey gleaming on my head,

the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it

just as we begin to go

they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck

clarifying as the fine bones of her

hips sharpen? As my skin shows

its dry pitting, she opens like a moist

precise flower on the tip of a cactus;

as my last chances to bear a child

are falling through my body, the duds among them,

her full purse of eggs, round and

firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about

to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled

fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old

story—the oldest we have on our planet—

the story of replacement.

Sunday

Rain and wind finally clearing late in the day. The low tonight is 50 degrees cooler than the high on Saturday. We rarely see such dramatic temperature changes. Too much moisture in the air to accommodate that kind of temperature change.

4-13, Friday, Back Home

Well, yes, I did travel on Friday the 13th. If this conjunction keeps some travelers away then all the better.

Once again, a lovely sunrise but cold!!!!  23 degrees.  I was going to leave my heavy jacket here but I’m wearing it on my trip to the airport.

You can see why these mountains were called named the Blue Ridge.  My trip back was uneventful, I’m happy to say, and there were enough empty seats to avoid feeling too squeezed.  But I notice the airport I departed from has not very carefully thought out the design of the security area.  Well, not thought it out at all.  They appear to have just plonked the machines in the people in this corridor and mashed it all together to make it fit.  Not very sophisticated and makes one doubt about corporate commitment to airport security.

4-12, Thursday

I awoke to a lovely but chilly sunrise this morning.

I’ll finish the trim this morning and then take some more unused stuff down to the local Christian Outreach Center.  They recycle discarded items and sell them for a nominal price to those who cannot afford paying full price for new items.  Once you get beyond the resort areas or populations around universities here people generally sit at the lower end of the SES distribution.  With the collapse of the furniture and textile industries here it is difficult to find a job that would sustain a middle-class budget.

We hire local people to do whatever work we can’t or don’t want to do ourselves up here and I’m happy to contribute to the local economy.  I have found generally that the local people are honest and want to give a day’s work for a day’s pay.  We make sure that what they are paid matches the quality and difficulty of their work.

Emerging From the Paint Cocoon

It was a little like that, spending so much time staring at ceilings and window frames, emerging from a cocoon.  But I walked out on a brilliant, lovely day.

This is the view out our front door.  Lands rises steeply from here.  The house in the distance is probably 100 feet elevation above our place.  No leaves on the trees yet.  The rain from last night washed away the last of the snow but snow is forecast again for Sunday night.

I took that stuff down to the thrift store and across the street in this tiny mountain town is a park created and maintained by the local fire department.  The picture doesn’t do it justice. If you climb up above these three falls you find yourself in this lovely meadow, about 300 feet above the roadway this park fronts.

I forgot to take a picture of the meadow.  Lovely, though and the temperature was a little warmer at 3,500 feet elevation.

After dinner tonight I took a little walk and saw a fiery red sunset.  This picture taken on my phone just doesn’t do the colors justice.

4-10 and 4-11, Tuesday and Wednesday

On the mountain, painting and getting estimates on refinishing the staircase steps and landing.  Outside by Wednesday the weather has turned nasty from very nice days on Monday and Tuesday.  Nevertheless, the dark-eyed junkos show up for the seed I put out.  Sometimes as many as seven at a time eating up the seed.  These are really tough birds.

Winds have picked up and the meterologists are forecasting gusts to 50mph by Thursday afternoon.  Nothing less will thwart these junkos and maybe not even gale force winds.

4-9, Monday

Sardines on a Plane

Took a trip to the mountains today. Which required spending a half-hour in the security line, an hour in a tiny seat after transiting a narrow aisle to the seat, followed by standing at the Atlanta gate because passengers waiting far exceeded available seats, followed by more time in a narrow seat reached via a narrow aisle, followed by a 3.5 hour drive to the mountains.

A good trip.

Snow

Snow everywhere on the mountain. Over the weekend my area got 6-8 inches of new snow. If only they had gotten snowfalls like this during skiing season.  But the roads were dry and I only had to look at the lovely scenes of snow on hills, silhouetting ridges and the bas relief of mountain rock outcropping.

Back To Painting 

Tomorrow I move from bas relief to painting the ceiling beams.

Cold

As I write this it is 50 degrees colder outside than inside.  Nice to observe and know that I can head back to more rational temps whenever I wish.

4-8, Sunday. Easter

Generally an uneventful Easter. Originally we planned to go out for Easter dinner but our usual place didn’t return my calls, another that we had gone to in the past had no idea what I was talking about when I wanted to make reservations, and another just said show up and take your chances.  It is a very popular restaurant so we knew it would be a madhouse.  We hate madhouses.

The NWS recorded 32 this morning but it was 43 at our house.  Unusually cold temps.  But late spring will bring unrelenting 90s until October so I’m not complaining.

An incredible piece in the New York Times today.   A long front-page article on the risk of heart attacks.  It focuses on one person who had done all the right things — lost weight, exercised, watched his diet.  But then had a heart attack just before he was to see his cardiologist for his regularly scheduled visit.  The article goes on to discuss the importance of getting to the hospital quickly– within the first hour — and to get to a hospital that has a skilled cardiac team.

A sidebar discusses the causes of heart attacks.  Here is a surprise….

The overwhelming majority of heart disease could be prevented by controlling blood pressure, cholesterol and cigarette smoking. About 85 percent of people who had fatal heart attacks had at least one of these risk factors.

Another fascinating sidebar describes how cholesterol leads to placque in the veins which leads to heart attack.  But the mechanics are nothing like you would imagine.

Most think cholesterol silts into arteries, blocking them like a clogged pipe. When, one day, an artery gets completely blocked, a heart attack occurs — no blood is getting through to the heart.

But the plumbing image is not only mistaken, cardiologists say. It can also lead patients to make disastrous errors in trying to protect themselves from a heart attack.

And then goes on to explain how it really happens.  Fascinating.

This article offers another very sobering statistic regarding the risk factors of smoking, cholesterol, and high blood pressure….

Excess cholesterol gets stuck in artery walls. The wall becomes inflamed with white blood cells of the immune system. Those white blood cells in turn spew out highly active molecules that change the biology of the artery wall, leading to plaque.

With high blood pressure, the very molecules, angiotensin II, that raise blood pressure also bring the release of the damaging small molecules that inflame arteries and set off the growth of plaque. Smoking, Dr. Libby added, appears to cause heart attacks for a different reason: it makes blood more likely to clot.

And it turns out that controlling these humdrum risk factors can nearly prevent heart attacks, said Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Study, a federal study of heart disease in the population of Framingham, Mass.

Dr. Levy explains: Suppose a 50-year-old man does not have diabetes and does not smoke and keeps his cholesterol and blood pressure in the range recommended by national guidelines. Over the next 45 years, his chance of ever having a heart attack or symptoms of heart disease, like chest pain, is just 5 percent. The same goes for a 50-year-old woman with those risk factors under control. Her chance of symptomatic heart disease is 8 percent, slightly higher than the man’s because women live longer.

But only 5 percent of 50-year-olds have those risk factors under control. And give that man just one major risk factor, for example a high cholesterol level, and his chance of having symptomatic heart disease rises to 50 percent. The woman’s chance rises to 39 percent.

Only a third of people with high blood pressure have it under control, Dr. Levy said, even though there are dozens of effective drugs.

Luckily, my blood pressure is low normal, my cholesterol is under control with drugs, and I don’t smoke.  All that is left is my gut.