Work is what you do

Definitions of work and school are being re-invented on the fly.

Around here these days, kids are working hard at making a living, and grown-ups are working hard at educating and being educated.

None of the people in my house actually WORK for someone else in exchange for wages now, but we're all incredibly busy anyway; and all bringing home the bacon, one way or another. My husband is a teacher, so he teaches kids. All ages, all subjects. School is continuing in our area - although nobody's getting paid for it by the state, because school funding has been diverted temporarily (let's hope!) to other needs. Is this true everywhere, I wonder? What are other communities doing with thousands of bored teenagers roaming the streets?

When the school year began, Bruce, eight of his teacher-friends, the high-school principal and the middle school librarian just voluntarily reconstructed the educational system in Bremerton on a sort of ad-hoc basis.

The students who are interested in continuing school - and there are lots more than I expected - voluntarily use their rationed Internet time to stay in contact with their little web of teachers.

The schools have gotten a lot more neighborhood oriented, for lack of transportation, and reflect the new values we've developed since petroleum started to fail. For example, on our street, we have a horticulture "pod", which is led by a former real-estate agent and master gardener.

She knows dirt; )

In the "pod" there are six middle-school and high-school kids who live on the next street or up by the park; there's my downstairs neighbor and her two adult daughters and five young grandkids; there's the old lady across the alley with all the nice canning equipment; and there's me and Gavvy.

The "pods" generally have a practical purpose besides education. We're pretty serious food producers in our neighborhood. We learn about soil, and what makes healthy soil; we save and share seeds; we compost; we design garden spaces; we plant and irrigate; we weed and control pests; we watch the plants grown through their life cycle, and learn of their biology; and we harvest, preserve, and cook. Pretty good chunk of education mixed up in there.

All of us are learning according to our interests, sharing what we know, and all of us are working. I have even dragged out my college biology texts for the occasion; )


(There are more academic "pods", too - or more research-oriented, I should say. Calculus is not dead.)



Another thing I've noticed is that the rhymes and songs we're coming up with to amuse/teach the little kids are different. They've been drained of their oil; )


Here's a little something from the Madrona Street Hortipod...Gavvy's new favorite.


Howdy U. Pickamellen

Looket alla yellamellens
stack'd in a heap
wonder which allamellen
i'm gonna keep

heffamellen thunkamellen
tink tink tink
settem back down
for'n yetamellen sleep

pushamellen givamellen
not too soft
green at the stripey, cushy on top
holdem to your ear and
thump thump thump
rollem on home and WHACKEM ALL UP!

Storytellin in the hood

Now that electronic entertainment's hard to come by...
now that people actually talk to each other again, because it's free...
now that dinner has become an art form because food is precious and processed junk food is yesterday's bad news...
now that we gotta teach our kids on our own, and Dr. Seuss is falling apart...

...guess what's enjoying a grand REVIVAL around my neck of the woods?

The story...and the storyteller.

My brother says, no matter what year you live in, no matter where you go, the one who tells the STORY around the campfire gets the biggest chunk of yak.

Here's how he earned his yak the other night:



The Cat and the Rat (imagine that!)



Hey Cat, said the rat -

Why you lookin at me
like that?


I'm hardly a healthy SNACK.

I'm greasy, I'm fried
I'm genetically modified -

I'll give you a heart ATTACK.

(ack, ack!)


But the fish there in the dish
could be lunch if you wish


She's practically cholesterol-FREE;


like a flounder, cod or sole
but swimming 'round in that bowl

You can catch her so eeee-Zi-LEE.

(Not me!)


Don't worry, said the cat,
about ME getting fat...
I'll just skip the supersize FRIES

Now, better take your head start
and scoot away if you're smart



and give me some ex-Er-SIZE.

(Run and hide!)


Oh.


Well...


How 'bout the bird? I'll bet you've heard
they're abso-LUTE-ly superb

stuffed with parsley, a little thyme, and some SAGE

not only that, said the rat
as he grabbed for his hat...


she's busted the door to her CAGE.

(Next page...)




Gavvy made him tell it five times, which is the only reason I remember all the words; )

The Watts bombing, the Navy, and the Rev. Leslie R. White

The Petrophile Overlords are coming undone over the Watts bombing.

I was pretty surprised to hear on the news last week that the Navy had "accidentally" dropped a load of bombs on the Watts district of Los Angeles. Turns out the only person who thought it was accidental was the Channel 7 anchorwoman who reported it. Morale has never been lower around here. The brigs are full of sailors who don't want to have anything to do with the Navy anymore.

Ear to the ground

If you want to know what the military is up to, for heaven's sake, don't read the official report. Official channels are mostly used for blowing smoke up the public skirt. Instead, go to the Navy housing playground next to their hospital and push your cute son on the baby bucket swings. And listen. Sure, there's plenty of wild speculation from people who have no idea what they're talking about, but you can pick out the real stuff from the garbage if you know what to listen for.
The officer's quarters jogging path, by the way, is another good place to have your ears open. Oh, yes, and the bx - the base's grocery store - where a nosy civilian named electric-car-girl is now delivering local organic produce every Tuesday, with her Navy escort, Williams...that's another good place to be a fly on the wall.


Here are some interesting tidbits related to the Watts bombing, if anyone's interested...

1) The plane and the pilot involved flew out of Whidbey Island Naval Air Station here on my peninsula, on the northern end of the New Naval Territories, as my husband sarcastically refers to it since WWO. It didn't come from the aircraft carrier off shore, as was originally reported. (That carrier, the Stennis, is temporarily back in port here from its West Coast patrol - and the gossip is very definite on that point.)

2) That pilot is dead. He committed "suicide" last week.

It seems that the Navy pilots all know each other. Why? Not that many of them. Virtually all of them train at Miramar, and the West Coasties mostly fly out of Whidbey, and so over the years they've all run into each other at the officer's mess here or there at one time or another. Brothers. And guess what? Nobody had ever heard of this guy. Correction: Not nobody, exactly. See item 4), below.

3) The plane has vanished off the surface of the earth.

Two different sources think they saw that plane go down in the deep water off the coast, the Mariana Trench, so that was a real good place to put it if you never want to see it again. My question is, did it fly there on its own?


Now, this is where the story gets really interesting...

If this truly was no "accident", why would the US military bomb the Watts district of Los Angeles, you might ask? And after a little thought, you might even get around to wondering how they even got a highly motivated, carefully trained pilot - an officer - to drop a load of bombs on his own country. After all, we're not talking about flying halfway around the world to bomb things that belong to people you've never met and who are prone to driving suicide bombs into your checkpoint shack. We're talking about dropping bombs on Aunt Sophie and Grandma Hattie, and maybe the next Shaquille O'Neal.

4) The pilot might have washed out of flight school as a mental case.

Word is, the guy might have been recruited for his psychotic neo-nazi skills rather than for his piloting. Somebody thinks they might remember him from Miramar, but he didn't last two weeks. They said his radio handle was Skinhead, if that gives you any insight into his character.

5) The Bush administration didn't do it.

Playground gossip is that this strike was rogue DHS/FEMA, not White House.

Word is also that it might have actually been a very messy assassination of a particularly dangerous terrorist: the Rev. Leslie R. White of the Grant AME church, also known as the Church of Watts. Around here, Rev. White is being compared to the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his picture is popping up everywhere.

If anybody knows why specifically Rev. White would be targeted by Homeland Insecurity as a terrorist, I'd sure like to hear about it.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me

The military, I'm getting around to noticing, has got pretty much no use for women.

That includes military women, civilian women, their own wives and mothers, women senators running for president...

No. What our Petrophile Overlords want from us girls is free labor, sexual servitude, someone to take advantage of and feel superior to and just generally abuse as needed. And if it's not too much to ask, could we SMILE big and gurgle admiringly in between?

Needless to say, this is starting to get on my nerves.

The trouble is, even nice guys get sucked into the military vortex around here. Guys I could trust last year are suddenly getting a contact testosterone buzz.

Makes me wonder how trustworthy they ever really were.


Am I alone in thinking that feminism seems to have been tied to the oil supply?

Is evolution moving backward?

We women can lock hands and refuse to be re-enslaved. All for one and one for all! Are you with me?

Battery-powered trucks, trains, and airplanes?

I've got internet service again for now, so I'll write in.

Our Petrophile Overlords (the Navy) have generously offered to share their off-grid power and communications capability, but they're strictly rationed. I've got an hour, since I've got a business. Most people get ten minutes a day. God help you if you've got dial-up.

I've never been so glad I let my friend Rob talk me into solar panels a while back. We can't afford them, of course, but he's with a company that installs THEIR panels on YOUR roof at their own expense, and then sells you the electricity for CHEAP - cheaper than grid. This doesn't help with the internet connection, since those guys are still on grid; but thanks to Rob, nothing's gonna get between me and my go-juice unless the sun goes out.

And hey, even if I can't pay my electric bill (to Rob's company), are they really gonna come take the panels back?


People are dropping money into my paypal account just to have a conversation, if you can believe that. Oh, they're just supporting the cause, they reassure me - but then they want me to help them lay hands on increasingly scarce electric cars, conversions, or parts so they can convert their gas-gobbling Lexus.

Now, the truth is, I DO know where to find electric cars, and I do have contacts at most of the major manufacturers. It's just that we're having the same supply problems everybody else is, because it takes DIESEL to ship electric motors, controllers and batteries from one end of the country to the other, same as any other freight.

Steve and Mark over at MCEV in Seattle say they can't keep Zenns and ITs in stock; every time they get a new shipment, and that's really often these days, they get several competing buyers for each car. Steve told me the last Zenn he sold went for 80 thousand bucks.

I'm driving their demo. I sort of hope they've forgotten about it; )

The ITs are built by Dynasty Motors up in BC, which isn't too far away. Tangos are coming from Commuter Cars over in Spokane, and they're selling them as fast as they can build them, funny-looking or not. Zenns are coming from Ontario, but they've got more capital to lay out for the exorbitant shipping costs. Trouble with Zenn is that they're heavily dependent on shipping right now, because their base car comes from France. Ditto with Miles, getting their base car from China. I can see those two types of cars becoming scarce, and good luck getting replacement parts.

The smart money's in conversions these days, I think.

Myself, I'm pulling for Rod Wilde's company, EV Parts, based in Sequim - just up the peninsula from me. He's got a conversion shop, and sells components and kits to remake gas cars into electric ones. This is why I favor Rod, and companies like his: We've all got these (increasingly useless) gas-guzzlers laying around anyway. Why not rip the guts out and replace them with an electric drive system? These guys have been doing this as a hobby for years, and can build an electric vehicle out of bailing wire, spit, and a few paperclips. The convenience of having an S-10 conversion, for example, is that you can get Chevy brakes, Chevy floormats, Chevy headlights, etc. at the local auto parts store (or the junkyard). Not true of your Zap, which gets all its special replacement bits from China.

Speaking of Rod...

...he's got some wild (Wilde?) ideas these days. He's been applying his considerable intellect to the problem of using batteries to haul freight. In fact, he says trains would be ideal. He's got that look in his eye again.

The reason Rod can still get EV parts when nobody else can is that he's been using his electric Postal-truck hotrod, the Gone Postal, to go GET parts from his suppliers. He thinks he can set up an alternative shipping service, if we can keep them in batteries.

And about batteries...

...the guys down at Altair Nanotechnologies in Reno say their new Nanosafe lithium batteries will work just fine in an airplane! See, the problem with electric-powered airplanes has mostly been the COLD. When it gets cold, batteries as we know them get more and more sluggish...and pretty soon, down goes your plane. Well, get this: the new Nanosafe lithium battery, same as the one they supply to Phoenix Motorcars, just LAUGHS at cold: all the way down to -6 F (Ed: My bad. Altair website says all the way down to -30 C. That's brisk, baby.) Maybe the bush pilots in Alaska won't want them, but they're good for just about everybody else, including commercial airlines.

Oh, and of course, electric-powered planes won't be emitting ANYTHING into the upper atmosphere.

Food for thought; )

Having a ball

I refuse to accept a life without joy, without culture. What good is it to be human if you can't dance?


Yes, yes, the Navy's got my knickers in a knot.

They've been making a few changes around the school district; most of them for the worse, in my opinion. I suppose I could have predicted that their definition of "necessary" would be different from mine.

For example: Gavvy's school has been closed. Bruce (my husband) says all "non-essential" classes around the district have been cancelled until further notice. Surprisingly, they weren't referring to math; ) They mean art, dance, drama, choir, band, special ed(!)...even languages like French and Spanish are considered "non-essential". In other words, they seem determined to suck all the remaining happiness out of the kids' lives. The parents around here just duck their heads and go right along, same as they always do. The other teachers have been around long enough to know when to keep their mouths shut... but not Bruce, of course.

He argued with the new Navy-issued Super about it until the guy threatened to put him in jail. Apparently somebody from the admin office intervened - funny, she's usually fighting with Bruce, not for him - and the other teachers got him out of there before he could do any more harm to his job prospects.

Really, he doesn't have anything to worry about. Nobody else wants to babysit.


On other subjects, the ferries have stopped. Even the Bainbridge ferry to Seattle, which is where half of Seattle's (rich) lawyers and (rich) accountants live. It's some kind of terrorism threat, according to the news. I'm more likely to believe that, with the ferry system operating so close to the bone for so many years, the state just doesn't have the money to put diesel in them now. And no doubt the Navy sees them as "non-essential", or else they can't justify appropriating that much fuel just to keep the peninsula workers happy.

Still, that's a few thousand more Bremerton, Bainbridge, and Vashon workers and professionals who can't get to work.


I'm on the planning committee for the local farmers market, and we've all agreed that it should probably remain where it's always been; in the Silverdale hotel parking lot. Nice central location. Problem is, the farmers can't afford to drive the food to the market from the farms around Silverdale, Poulsbo, Kingston, and we've even got a honey supplier from up in Port Gamble... and still break even.

Now the Navy, while they don't see the need for organic produce (it doesn't come in a can tattooed with letters and numbers, does it?), can definitely get behind the idea of local food; it means self-sufficiency. Very military.
Their budget for fuel is pretty loose, so once we found the right person to propose to, the rest was a piece of cake. We got a (refrigerated!) diesel truck, a fuel card, and a pair of twenty-somethings in uniform named Williams and Fish.

I've got a two-seat Zenn, which isn't much good for carpooling, but I can fit a fair amount of stuff in the back...so I'm taking vegetable orders and bringing boxes back to Bremerton. Note to self: If down to less than half-charge, you can't get up Andersen Hill with a hundred pounds of produce in the back; )


Anyway, back to the theme of joy.

Item 1: We're not letting the school go to the dogs. There are no non-essential subjects, and no non-essential students. I'm calling Gavvy's teacher to see if there's anything I can do.

Item 2: We're planning a neighborhood ball. Yes, you heard me right. There's going to be dressing up, dancing, and laughing until dawn in the gymnasium of the elementary school down the street. Now, to figure out the best way to broach this with our keepers.

Item 3: We're learning how to garden. Seems there's more to it than putting seeds in the dirt and throwing some water on top, and some of the old people in our neighborhood are really good at it. Now, to get up the nerve to go talk to them.

Item 4: We're not going to live in fear, or pessimism. Reality is what it is; and you might say it's not that bad for us, so we can afford to fart clouds of sunshine. You might be thinking your neck of the woods is so steeped in violence and need that you can't help but despair. But I argue that - no matter what - we've got the choice to live with hope, love, and optimism, even if it seems insane. Better to be insane and human, than "realistic"...and much less.


The Seattle Electric Vehicle Association meeting was cancelled, because of security, or lack of it. I suggested we move it to Bremerton. I might be irritated at Big Brother, but they do keep the crime under control. Nothing's decided yet.

Hummer-flogging Petrophiles

I've been calling them the Hummer-floggers, or Petrophiles, or other disparaging terms for so long that I forgot they sometimes actually make themselves useful: I'm talking about the huge Navy community here in Bremerton, thanks to the naval shipyard on one end and the submarine base on the other.
Started calling 'em that because we've got a huge autoplex here - for a relatively small town - and all those boys from the ships and the Naval hospital seem to have driven off the lot with a Hummer or some other unsightly land-tank. I keep telling 'em that driving a giant gas-gobbler doesn't REALLY compensate for anything, but I've never felt like I got through; )

Anyway, I KNEW there was a good reason I wanted to situate myself in the warm, hairy lap of the Navy: They live here. The officers - the doctors and nurses at the Naval hospital, the scientists and metallurgists at the shipyard, and all the other military middle-class that makes the floating blue world go 'round - they all own homes here, send their kids to school here, and will retire here. It just follows that they're going to make it their business to take good care of it.

Now the Navy has quietly taken over Bremerton and Silverdale. I hear they've "secured" the whole Olympic Peninsula, Whidbey to Pt. Townsend to Pt. Angeles, too. I don't know whether this is a good thing or not. Our family isn't remotely Navy - in fact, we're overeducated bleeding-heart liberals - and all the mindless goose-stepping usually gets on our nerves.
It's hard to turn down good help, though.

They're making sure the civilian hospital stays supplied with equipment and staff, putting uniformed patrol on the streets, in the schools, in the grocery stores, and at the gas stations.
They've taken over the (diesel) city buses, which are now free and run a lot. Uniformed Navy personnel are driving the extra city bus routes.

My husband's job (he's a substitute teacher here in the Bremerton School District) isn't in any danger; in fact, he's got more work than ever. Lots of the regular teachers around here actually live in the outlying areas where the improved city bus service can't reach them. Consequently, the administration has gotten pretty desperate to staff the school. I hear they're tapping the Navy for that, too. Why not.

The compounding pharmacy in Maryland that's been shipping Gavvy's special vitamins to him since he was born actually called me yesterday to say their supplies might be unstable, and would we like to order an extra bottle, just to be sure? We don't really have the money, but I ordered two extra (they're about 75 dollars for a month's supply, but shipping has gone from 6.95 a package to 21.50). I'm feeling optimistic about business and pessimistic about continued availability of the vitamins, so I went ahead.

For most of us, vitamin supplements are sort of a luxury. For my beautiful son, an urgent necessity. Because of a chromosomal abnormality, his body will eat itself alive without the antioxidants.

I can't think about that too much.

Anyway, the news is basically good from Bremerton, thanks to the Navy. Everything still works. Sounds like naptime is over, so I'll say goodbye until next week.

There's a meeting of the Seattle chapter of the electric vehicle association on Tuesday night, and my presence has been sweetly requested. It'll be interesting to see what my buddies are doing with their alternative transportation. Only good deeds, I hope; )