Preoccupied with the vanishing celluloid crowds

I see dead people

OK, some people might feel like this post is a downer, but I have to be honest about where I'm at, which is somewhat reflective right now.

For those of you not there yet, I will tell you something:  Your 40th birthday is no big deal.  You're still good-looking, fit, and if you've taken care of yourself, still part of the "young" half of the planet.  You're a little (or a lot) wiser than you were at 20, and maybe you have a few gray hairs or a permanent slight mini-pouch from your pregnancies, but all in all, things still look pretty good.

50 is another story.

50 is different not because you necessarily feel any differently than you did at, say, 49, but because the number is significant.  It's half a freaking century, for heaven's sake.  And unless you are someone special (like my Uncle Earl, who passed peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of 104) there is every chance in the world that you are well past the halfway point of your life by the time the big 5-0 comes to call.

Your fifties are also the age when the generation that came right before you is on its way out.  My mother is still with us and still healthy, but she's 80 years old and is losing siblings and friends right, left and center.  My godmother has dementia and can no longer remember her grandchildren or what she had for breakfast today. My father's ashes were scattered at sea 25 years ago, and my grandparents are also long gone, relics from the bronze age at this point.

It's a sobering thing.

So here's how it hits me:  I watch old movies on television, and they get to me because, lets face it, if it's from the 1940's or even 1950's, almost everyone in them is dead.  That's right, while others see crowd scenes filled with hundreds of costumed extras and crowds of background performers, I see a crowd of....well....dead people.  Plus, depending on the film, dead horses, long dead dogs, and a way of life that is completely changed.  

Now lest you think I'm a total downer, I'm not.  In some ways, it's kind of fun seeing the phones that plug into the wall, the old automobiles, the bullet bras and the odd kitchen gadgets.  But the faces haunt me, because I know they're either gone or so old as to be unrecognizable. And I'm conscious that the things I remember from my own childhood are getting to the same obsolete place -- fast.

My friend Rod's mother, for instance, was a dancer on the stage and in film.  She was in the first stage company of "Oklahoma," was featured on the cover of "Life" magazine, and was a principal dancer in both the film of "Oklahoma" and the movie "Carousel."

My friend's mom, roof dancer on the far right

 I saw her on TCM last weekend and there she was, fresh, young and lovely, dancing her way across the locations and movie set of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic film.  In today's world, she is very old and stricken with dementia if I remember correctly.  But on my television screen she is young and vibrant, once again and forever.

And that's the thing about those of us who were born in the 20th century.  We are among the first generations who have ever been archived, documented and preserved so well for posterity -- on celluloid, on Kodak, and on readable disc.  But while the images of us that flicker across our screens will never change, we most certainly will.  And seeing the generation before mine begin to pass out of existence is a hugely sobering thing.

I try not to dwell on it in a depressed way, but rather to take note of it in a way that gives my life more meaning and makes the days more important.  When I realize that my entire generation is going to pass away along with me, I feel better, because I realize I have comrades in arms as we get ready to shoot the rapids into whatever comes next.  But to realize that we're next generation into the boats, it certainly gives me pause to reflect.  I see it in the mirror.  I see it in the faces of the crowds in the films, the crowds of people who are all gone now.  

And I see it in the world around me, which is now centered around the young adults of the next generation, as it should be.  As it was when I was their age.  And I turn my face towards those rapids, those most certain and unavoidable rapids where the generation before me is passing, and where we're headed next.  

And sometimes I look backward to what was with a little nostalgia, some sadness, and the realization that someday, my generation will be just like the crowds in the old movies I watch now -- long gone, us and our horses and our dogs and our gadgets. And it's a strange feeling, a feeling I wish someone would coin a term for, but they won't, ever, because we never coin terms for things we're too uncomfortable to acknowledge, however universal and inevitable they may be.

Cabinets and Cukes

In a few minutes, a truck will pull up and deliver our new kitchen cabinets.  Even though it's only the first step in the remodel, I can't wait to see those boxes.  I've been steadily emptying out the shelves in the old kitchen cabinets and stashing things in the spare room and our library, but as its been a slow burn I've had time to keep items stacked against the walls instead of underfoot.  But I still would not want anyone to visit our house right now, as it looks like we're moving or just auditioning for an episode of "Hoarders -- Buried Alive." My kitchen does not contain much junk, but with all the cooking, baking, canning and wine and soapmaking I do, I have managed to accumulate an impressive amount of equipment and supplies.

The vegetable garden is going like gangbusters, and this year its the cucumbers that have gone wild, to a point where I have many more times what I need (pickle and relish-making included!).  Luckily my friend Annette at the winery has offered to take my surplus, as she cans roughly 100 jars of pickles a year.  Sometime when we're not running around pouring wine I'm going to have to ask her what she uses that many pickles for.  Gifts? Potato salad? A giant decorative wall of pickle jars?  Those all sound good to me.

Now that's really hot

Apparently Paso Robles will be relocating to the surface of the sun on Saturday...just for the day, though.

Independence Day

I give you this today, a great and short article on the agrarian nature of our nation and its founders.  We'd be doing ourselves a huge favor if we all endeavored to get back to this kind of life, to either a large or small extent.

A Nation Founded By Farmers:

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/07/the-founding-fathers-on-farming/

Routine Day

I love having a varied life where I do many different things, because the fact is, I crave routine.  That's right, it's the various and sundry things in life that make my regular routine special.  Tomorrow I will have a plain old regular day.  I don't have to come down off the hill, so I have plenty of time to cook, to harvest, to clean and to organize around here.  I can put the laundry away that's been sitting in the basket for two days.  I can de-clutter the kitchen counters.  I can sweep the patio. 

It's the kind of day I love most, but the kind of day that quickly becomes boring or tedious if I get too many of them in a row.  

That's why errand days in town, relatives and friends visiting, a little winery work on the weekends and days at the beach are so important.  Because once they're done, the blessed routine resumes, and I see it with new eyes, and appreciate it, each and every time.

Add and Subtract

The homesteader's dilemma

One of the basic tenants of homesteading is to turn one's home from a zone of consumption into a zone of production.  But it also means that if you use x amount of energy, you try to either reduce or at least maintain that amount as you go along in life.  Meaning you don't add appliances without thinking about their impact on your household bills and the environment.

Sometimes this is a challenge.  Right now, for instance, I have realized I am accumulating a pretty nice collection of wines, some of which are new and could do with a nice laying down for several years.

A laying down, you ask?  Yes.  If you know wines, you already know that this means.  Get a bottle of, say, 2010 Cabernet, and while its drinkable now, it will be even better in a few more years.  Laying it down means just that:  Setting it aside and, just as important, storing it properly, so you can hang onto it until it comes to the peak of its deliciousness, when it's truly ready to be opened and enjoyed.

Laying down on the job

The other day at the winery, for example, the staff sampled a 2009 Cabernet, which everyone thought was delicious, until the manager opened a bottle of the 2005 Cabernet, which had been stored in the temperature controlled wine library to age for four years longer than the 2009.  The change was remarkable; the "laying down" truly took a good wine and made it great.

Wine is an investment.  I have a coworker who collects new wines, allows them to age, then checks on a wine brokers website to see when it's selling for the most money. That's when the wine is at its peak, so that's when he opens his bottle.  He said usually a good wine will double in price by the time it reaches its peak, and some become more expensive even after that.  

So as I'm working for wine now and amassing a pretty nice collection of wines, I need something to store them properly in, i.e., a decent wine refrigerator (rather than the 8 bottle one we currently have), so I can do the same thing as my coworker and open no wine before its time.

Investment receptacle

But we're homesteaders, and so begins the homesteading thing of adding and subtracting  as far as our power usage goes.  When we get rid of the inefficient 8-bottle cooler we have now, that will save some wattage.  Moving the chest freezer indoors has saved us a lot of wattage also.  So now I can justify buying the wine fridge as we've created energy savings elsewhere.

These are not hard and fast rules; we're not energy-use zealots, but we do believe in not wasting finite resources, like those that bring us our power.  So we check and we balance, and we find a way to preserve our new and delicious investments.

Hot

We've been in the midst of suffering through a massive heatwave, which I have heard is affecting the entire southwest United States, so most of our energy has been directed towards keeping ourselves and our livestock cool.

And our appliances.

One of the things I managed to cajole Big Ag and Groceries to do this weekend (early one morning, before it got hot) was move our chest freezer from our sweltering garage into the cool, air conditioned spare room.  It does not look great; there is no way to make a white Kenmore chest freezer stuck in a spare bedroom look chic, but I can at least say that since moving it, it runs far less often and probably with a lot more ease than it did in our 110 degree garage.  Plus, since no one us currently using that bedroom, there's really no reason not to do this.  We actually had a power outage for several hours on Friday night and that got me thinking about the year's worth of frozen veggies, plus the half-hog we bought from my sister-in-law.  To have all that go bad would be not only a huge loss for us financially, but also a waste in terms of time, effort, and in the case of the hog, a life.  

The freezer can go back into the garage in a couple of months, once we are clear of the possibilities of triple-digits, but I think I'm going to leave it there for now.  

In other news, we've been putting gallon Mason jars filled with ice water into the hens coop to give them something cool to lean up against, and they are using them.  Yesterday we fled to the beach, where it was only in the high 50's and I had to pull on a sweatshirt for our walk alongside the water.  It felt good.

Triple digits are in the forecast until at least Thursday here, so we'll be doing all our chores before 9 am and hunkering down in the house for the rest of the day.

One of the best things about working at the winery is that on hot days, they open the barrel room up and serve in there, where it's always a brisk 65 degrees.  Doesn't get better than that in heat like this.  I worked Saturday, and will again next weekend, so it makes for a good choice on weekends:  The beach or the barrel room ... your choice of where to stay cool.