dennis – Page 2 – Dennis C Merritt

Abortion, Ireland, Citizens’ Assembly

I never liked Roe v. Wade.

It never seemed right to me that nine, politically appointed, individuals should decide the law of the land on a topic like abortion. That should have been Congress’ job, to meet and deliberate, weigh all sides of the issue, and come up with good law that reflects the will of the people, the people they represent.

But no, that’s not what politicians do. Instead they try to make an issue like abortion divisive. They want us to be in Pro-Life or Pro-Choice camps, and get mad at each other.

Those very labels completely cloud the issue. We have a word, “fetus,” which we use because there is nothing else like it. The Pro-Life people want us to think a fetus is just the same as a new born infant, who we all agree has a right to live. The Pro-Choice people want us to think the fetus is just like a blemish every woman has a right to remove from her body with elective surgery.

But the truth is, it’s not an either or situation. I don’t think even the most adamant Pro-Choice person thinks an eight month pregnancy should be aborted. Nor are there many Pro-Lifers, except the hard core, who think a morning after pill is a bad idea.

Instead, it’s a question of where you draw the line. Even the Texas law says abortion is OK in the first six weeks, and Roe v. Wade said states could ban abortion in the third trimester. Most of the people in the country kind of agree abortion should be legal in some situations and not in others.

As I said, Congress doesn’t deliberate on issues like this. But there is a better way, and it was done in Ireland, and it worked.

Like here, abortion was a volatile issue in Ireland, with demonstrators and politicians doing the sorts of things they do here. As an alternative to that, a Citizens’ Assembly (CA) was convened to study the abortion issue and make recommendations on what abortion law should be in Ireland. The CA was made up of around a hundred people drawn from all walks of life who got together to listen and discuss the different sides of the issue, and make a recommendation on what the law of the land should be.

All well and good in theory you might say, but can it work for real? Yes it did. People with wildly differing initial opinions, came together on a middle ground recommendation. How did it become law you might ask? Well the Irish legislature decided to put the CA’s recommendations up to a national referendum, and the people voted, and it easily passed, and those recommendations, from a demographically diverse group of citizens, without a financial or political stake, became law. Law that, according to various surveys, closely matches public opinion.

In a way, this was quite freeing for the politicians, no longer having to worry about taking a stand one way or the other, of offending some voters at the expense of others, no longer having to frame such a complex issue with sound bites for their base.

I highly recommend Googling “When Citizens Assemble” on YouTube to learn about that particular CA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjpuDk9_BWI The video was shot before the final ending resolution became law. And to further research democracywithoutelections.org, sortitionfoundation.org, and helena.org to learn more about how CAs are being used today for other issues around the globe. This is actually happening, it can be done. It’s not pie in the sky.

Instead of people gathering and protesting with Pro-Life and Pro-Choice signs, I’d love to see them gather to demand a Citizens’ Assembly be convened to write the law of the land, and not nine, politically appointed, individuals.

Forest and Trees

Pat Hynes, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, wrote an op-ed piece in the Greenfield Recorder about work to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and looked to the way a forest of trees cooperates as a model for human behavior.

In that same issue of the Recorder was an article about a couple with a prominent BLM sign that keeps getting defaced. Previous issues had articles about John Turner’s massacre of a Native American village as people wonder if Turner’s Falls is really such a good name for that local town.

This is the op-ed piece I wrote referring to all that.

I share Pat Hynes’s horror at the current state of global nuclear arsenals. I also share her wonder at the ways the trees in the forest communicate. I mean even the tomato plants in my garden are talking to each other for their mutual benefit by sending chemical messages through the soil.

But I think the forests also illustrate the real problem with nuclear proliferation. Those amazing technologies employed by the trees to help each other is also used to wage war amongst the different species. The evergreens and the deciduous trees are fighting for control of the forest, just as my tomatoes are battling the weeds for my garden. The forest pines have no problem using their needles to create a soil inhospitable to oaks.

The lush variety and wonder of our local woods has come about due to a balance of power, as each species uses its own weapons and networks to compete with the others.

In much the same ways different cultures have both lived and fought through human history. In much the same way the nuclear powers co-exist today. But, as Pat Hynes points out, it really has gone too far, it really is very scary.

Let’s go back to the Japanese and Americans in WW II. Comparing us to trees, the question then is, were we just common members of the same species who should work for a common good? Or members of different species who see each other as threats?

Clearly at that time we saw each other as threats and used our technologies accordingly. Them at Pearl Harbor, us at Hiroshima.

Clearly if we want to save the planet as being fit for human habitation we need to do the equivalent of having oaks and pines agree to work together. This will not be easy.

The problem with Japan and America at the end of WW II is we didn’t understand each other. A Japanese friend of mine once recommended a book to better understand Japanese culture and thinking. It was called the “Chrysanthemum and the Sword” by Ruth Benedict. The book itself is interesting and informative, but what I found even more interesting is how it came to be written.

It was written by an anthropologist who was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1946. We really were looking for answers, for clues to understand the “them.” Did it work?

Well I believe it did, for it shaped the thinking of American – Japanese relations after the war. Unlike my father who witnessed the death and destruction in the Pacific caused by the clash of our nations, I only knew a World where the Japanese were our friends. It’s actually hard for me to imagine the Japan that my father knew.

I believe it is this sort of cross-cultural understanding that will be vital in curing our global ills.

I just finished reading “Mayflower” by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is all about understanding the cultural clashes between the Puritans and the Native Americans. And just as Pat Hynes points out about WW II days, there were those then that understood and tried to reach less deadly solutions to the conflicts. But the majority simply didn’t understand, or even care to understand. The atrocities of King Phillip’s War, on both sides, were the result of that. What John Turner did to the Native Americans at what is now Turner’s Falls was exactly the same as what we did at Hiroshima. And for the exact same reasons.

Sigh, it goes on and on. Robert McNamara, a main architect of the Viet Nam War, later went to North Vietnam to try to better understand his counterpart there. Guess what? There was a big misunderstanding. We didn’t understand that it really was just a civil war in a small country. They didn’t understand why giant America cared so much about their small civil war. They didn’t grasp the weight of the Cold War on our psyche.

We were worried about nuclear Armageddon and saw Viet Nam as part of that. I grew up practicing hiding under my Long Island desk in case a nuke was dropped on NYC, which seemed a real possibility at the time.

Can we learn to understand each other on a global scale? Bringing it closer to home, can the left-leaning people of Massachusetts learn to understand why the right-leaning people hate us so? Can the owners of the BLM sign in Orange understand the person who keeps defacing it?

La Noche de las Tortugas

The Night of the Turtles

I got to spend another week in Cancun getting more work done at (product placements coming) Cancun Dental Specialists. I stayed at the Flamingo Resort hotel which is right across the street. The dental work was good, as was the resort, but that’s not what this is about.

Walking along the beach one day I saw some strange tracks.

With a groove down the middle between two scalloped rows…

I wondered what could have made them. They all connected the sea and deep, freshly dug, depressions, three or four feet in diameter.

And then I thought — Sea Turtles!

A woman with excellent English and a French? accent came out from a condo on the beach where I was standing. She saw me taking pictures and came out and explained.

It was turtles. They come out at night and lay their eggs which then take weeks before they hatch. But there’s a problem. Frigate birds, which I loved watching fly, were hanging out just waiting for baby turtles to eat.

Hmmm, is that why I saw so many when I first arrived?

They have a six to seven foot wing span..

So, she and her husband would wait for the turtles to hatch and gather them up and hold them until dark, when it was safe to let them in the ocean.

There were also conservationists who would ride up and down the beach on ATVs and collect the eggs and put them in nurseries. There was one at the Flamingo hotel.

Each with a sign documenting the date the egg was collected, so they would know when they would hatch.

She said they saw turtles at any time of night, after sunset, before sunrise and in the middle of the night.

So I decided to go and look. The first night I went out after dark. I saw nothing. The next night it rained. The following night I woke up at 2 AM and thought, I’m going to look for turtles.

I walked one way down the beach, seeing some fresh tracks but no turtles. I turned around and headed back, with a half moon hanging over the ocean. As I was walking, I saw a small light down by the water. A flashlight of a person? Too dim. Some phosphorescence? Too regular. Maybe moonlight reflecting off the back of a turtle???

Maybe you can’t see the small circle of light below the moon light, but I could.

I approached and in the dark, saw a big old turtle crawl from the water’s edge over the sea weed. I watched as it lumbered along. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest.

I wanted to watch the whole drama unfold, but really? This turtle was moving sooo slow. OK, OK, I have nothing else to do. I didn’t want to use a light because in the 1960s movie Mondo Cane they said artificial light confused the turtles.

But I couldn’t help myself and took one flash photo. I was behind and the turtle was making its way up that steep mini-cliff that ran along the beach. It didn’t seem to mind.

The iPhone takes surprisingly good night time photos. Well, still dark, but here you see the turtle digging its nest, throwing up sand.

And crawling away, the white on the left of the nest is the underbelly of the turtle.

Compare to the photo above, you can see the turtle has moved further away.

And then it returned to the ocean. I tried to capture the turtle wading into the sea in the moonlight, but you can’t see the turtle in any of them. Here though is some glint of moonlight off the turtles back as it approached the sea. The same lighting that first drew my attention.

The next day I wanted to go back and see the nest of the turtle I had watched. On the way I saw this evidence of another turtle’s work, covering resort beach chairs in sand as a result. Yes, there were nests all in and about the resort’s chairs.

Beach chairs covered by another sea turtle’s nest building.

Here then are the photos of the track and nest from the night before.

The nest, right in front of the condo where the lady told me about the turtles.

You can see the entrance and exit made to the left, as in the night time photos above.

The track to and from the sea, with others that must have appeared later that night.

The sand cliff ascent point, with thrown sand from the nest in the foreground.

The track looking up from the beach towards the condos.

St. Crispin and the Iroquois Confederacy

I’m working on a follow-on book to Jazz Chords for Baritone Ukulele which will be called, surprisingly, something like Jazz Chords for Guitar. (This story is only going to be about that for a little while, major digression coming.)

The chapter I’m working on is about chord progressions, of which a fundamental one involves the I, IV and V chords. (Doesn’t matter if you know what that means or not.).

So I came up with a simple progression using those chords that sounds like a lot of songs. This is it:

I IV I V I IV V I

Seeing as how I was going to use this progression to illustrate different ways of playing it, I decided it needed a name. I came up with the clever name 1415-1451.

But that’s kind of boring. What if I considered those numbers as dates? And used some historical context for the name? Enter Wikipedia.

1415

The Battle of Agincourt, that’s the battle where Henry V lead the heavily out-numbered English to beat the French and made St. Crispin’s day a memorable one for the British.

It was the center piece of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and Henry’s speech before the battle was considered some of Shakespeare’s best writing. Here’s Kenneth Branagh’s version:

1451

A Mohawk prophet, whose name means Two Rivers Flowing Together had a vision of peace between the warring tribes in the area. He’s also called The Great Peacemaker. Some didn’t agree with his vision, but he formed an alliance with Hiawatha, a great orator, and a woman, The Mother of Nations, who offered her home up as a meeting place for the leaders of the five warring tribes.

(How do they know it was 1451? Legend has it there was a solar eclipse at the time. Hmmm, that means it could have been in the 1100s as well, but never mind that.)

They created the Iroquois Confederacy with a tribal council made of the leaders of all the tribes. This might have been one of the first, if not the first confederacy. That is, a government where there are a number of independent political entities that join together just for those things that benefit all, such as for the common defense.

Defense was, of course, the big one, and by joining together for that they could better deal with the other tribes in surrounding areas. Other non-defense issues, such as marriages, property disputes, etc. were all handled on a tribe by tribe basis.

This was state of the Indian Nation when the French and English, still fighting after all those centuries, arrived in North America. And why it was so important to get the Iroquois on your side. The French got the Iroquois on their side, whereas the English had other tribes on theirs.

300 Years Later

It is said that our Founding Fathers were well aware of the Iroquois Confederacy and used it as a model for our own Constitution. The rules of that confederacy are all written down and were widely known at the time. Just like the Iroquois tribes, each state wanted to run its own business, but they wanted to join together mostly for the common defense. (Against who? well Canada was one of their big fears, territorially very similar to the Iroquois situation.)

Background of French and English

The French and English fighting all had to do with 1066, when the French conquered England and English royalty was French, and so let them claim rights to land in what we now call France. As did the French, who happened to live in the land we now call France.

Key to the legal battles was one of the nobles on one side or the other didn’t have a male heir, and the claims of the other side that the female heir counted were disputed, and, well a lot of people died. And how did the English win at Agincourt? It appears it was a superior weapon.

The English long bow delivered an arrow with such force that it could penetrate the cheaper armor worn by the French infantry. (The nobles were better protected.) One move in the eternal arms race.

But the French wound up, in the end, coming out on top of the war, in large part due to the efforts of Joan D’Arc. She’s in this story too!

Well clearly I needed to write some lyrics to go in this song, 1415-1451. Here they are.

Two Rivers Flowing Together

I – In fourteen fifteen
IV – On St. Crispin’s Day
I – At the Battle of Agin-
V – Court,

I – The English destroyed all
IV – French hope of victory
V – And ended the Hundred Year
I – War.

—

I – In fourteen hundred and
IV – Fifty one in a
I – Land across the
V – sea,

I – Warring Iroquois tribes
IV – Made a lasting peace
V – In a new born confedera-
I – cy.

—

I – Three Hundred years later
IV – The French and the English brought
I – Their strife to the American
V – Shore.

I – The Iroquois Nation
IV – Allied with the French in
V – The French and Indian
I – War.

—

I – Defeated again the
IV – French then supported the
I – Colonist’s revolu-
V – tion.

I – Who on winning then used
IV – That Iroquois model
V – In framing their new
I – Constitution.

Abbot Cutler and Diana Merritt helped get to the final verses, and Nancy Shinn then wrote a melody line. I then performed three parts in a video. Now, I don’t really have any ego in my musical or reading ability, but I did have fun putting this together while in Cancun getting my teeth fixed.

Jerry, who’s blind

Jerry was probably more of a college acquaintance than friend of mine, being closer to our mutual friend John. Like John, Jerry was a math major, and like John and myself, Jerry was a Go player.

Jerry was blind, and I mean completely and totally blind. He had had some degenerative disease around age five which required the removal of both his eyes. He just had eye sockets. He didn’t wear dark glasses or anything, he just figured he looks how he looks and if seeing people had a problem with it, that was their problem.

His parents enrolled him in the Perkins School for the Blind. Apparently the first thing they do with the kids is put them at the edge of a large playing field and ask them to run. Very few blind kids will run. Jerry was one who did. It turns out this changed the way the school approached his education.

I was walking down one of the streets just outside of the college campus and Jerry came up behind me, moving fast, late for class. He never used a cane, but had a kind of defensive gate and moved quickly and precisely. As he passed me I watched him avoid the other people on the sidewalk, and then, without slowing down, veer right through the center of the archway and onto the main campus.

Wow.

John said he was walking with Jerry once and Jerry asked him, “what’s that big square object over there?” It was a truck parked where there usually wasn’t one. Did I mention Jerry didn’t have any eyes?

Go is a game played on a 19×19 grid with black and white stones. Jerry wanted to play and someone made him a metal Go set with holes for the grid and pegs for the stones. The tops of the pegs had two different textures so Jerry could tell them apart. He would run his hand over the board, “seeing” the position, and then place a peg for his move.

I played with him a few times, and I was talking about it with his friend John. I mentioned that Jerry took a long time making his moves. John replied, “That’s not because he’s blind. He knows the board as well as you do. It’s because he’s Jerry.”

Citizens’ Assemblies

A recent letter to the editor outlined what the author thought would be a reasonable approach to immigration reform. It got me to thinking about what a friend of mine had explained to me about Citizens’ Assemblies, a form of sortition.

What’s sortition? It turns out the Athenian Greek democracy did not elect representatives. Instead they were chosen at random from the population. That’s sortition.

For some, the very fact that we elect our representatives is at the core of the problems with our government today. They argue that if congress were made up of randomly selected, demographically representative individuals then a lot more would get done, and get done better.

Why? Because the representatives would focus on the issues, not the visibility of the issue and how it affects their fundraising and chances for re-election.

That’s clearly not going to happen to our Congress any time soon, but there is a variation on the idea that is happening in places and could happen on a national level. It’s called Citizens’ Assemblies.

A Citizens’ Assembly is a group of randomly selected, demographically representative individuals brought together to address one particular issue, hopefully to make law, but at least to make recommendations. These could be relatively large groups. They would take input from various stake holders and experts. After making their decision, they would disband.

An example of a Citizens’ Assembly is a jury. Random people together to solve one particular issue. It works reasonably well, even for contentious issues. Imagine if Derek Chauvin’s fate was to be decided by Congress, rather than a jury. The vote would be split down Republican/Democrat lines with no-one particularly caring about the particular facts of the case, like the medical testimony on what actually caused George Floyd’s death. All that would matter to the politicians is how their base, their colleagues, and their party perceives their vote.

They can be used at any level of government. Imagine a town wanting to come up with a sign ordinance governing what sorts of signs stores can put up, balancing the town’s esthetics and the need for local merchants to advertise. A great problem to form a Citizens’ Assembly to solve.

On a national level, take immigration. Imagine that a number of individuals, such as the letter writer mentioned above, were gathered together and asked to come up with an immigration policy that made sense. Not anyone looking to get re-elected, but people from all walks of life getting together to discuss, analyze, think about a plan that might work for the country.

They would listen to current experts, to immigrants, to employers of immigrants, to the Dreamers, to those who’s jobs are threatened, to those unhappy with changing neighborhood demographics, medical experts on disease, law enforcement, etc. etc.

It wouldn’t take that long for such a group to settle on a reasonable path for our country. It could then become law, and, since it was decided by a Citizens’ Assembly, the politicians could wash their hands of it.

Maybe every 5 or 10 years the issue would be revisited in a similar way?

My friend points out that politicians don’t actually want to solve these sorts of contentious issues. Both sides need the issues to fire up their bases. Immigration has been used as political fodder since, well, since forever. Build the Wall! Children in Cages! Vote for us! That’s how each side gets the voters out.

Abortion. A Citizen’s Assembly could study and come up with a path that best reflected the conflicting opinions of the country. And when they did, well there goes another get out the vote slogan, no more Pro-Life!, Pro-Choice! being used to get votes.

Health Care.

Gun Control.

Environment.

And so on for the issues of the day, leaving the politicians to do the more mundane work of running our government. And getting elected based on how well they do their job, and making more visible how they do it and what’s really going on when they’re not actually doing anything about the issues they campaigned on.

Cancun Teeth

My dentist looked in horror at my latest x-rays. Decay all over my mouth, most worrisome being large areas below the gums.

This was all relatively new. I’d already lost two molars because of it, but now it looked like there was additional extensive damage.

I was getting implants for the two missing teeth, but since they were $5,000 each I just got the more inner one (30, I now know tooth numbers) and decided to live without the last one (31).

The new x-rays lead to a visit with one, I’m told, of the best overall dentists in the Amherst area. He took more x-rays, admired the gold work I’d had done already, and told me to come back and he would have a plan.

The plan was for a complete rebuild of my mouth. Based on what I’d seen as well, this seemed like what was necessary. I could have done dentures, but if they could save my teeth… I had some savings, but not a lot, and the house needs painting.

I went in to learn the plan. The dentist showed me and I immediately saw the bottom line. $40,000! I knew it would be expensive, but that was more than I expected. Then I noticed the top of the page. That was for the uppers.

Next page, lowers. $30,000.

$70,000?!?! And that didn’t include the last molars (31, 18, 2 and 15) But I’d love to save my teeth…

My Spanish daughter-in-law said dental work was much cheaper in Madrid, so I started to look into it. Then a FB acquaintance said he’d gotten a lot of work done in Cancun, and it was excellent.

So I contacted the place he’d recommended. They looked at the plan.

$13,000. And if I wanted the back molars rebuilt as well, another $2,000.

So I bought a ticket to Cancun. Upgraded my flight to comfortable seats, bags included, got a nice Air B&B and here I am.

I had a consultation yesterday, and began to understand the economy a bit better. The dental office was nowhere near as opulent as the one in Amherst, but the dental equipment… Easiest x-rays I’ve ever had taken, plus photos that I’ve never had taken, and software on screens that gave the dentists views and options I’d never seen before.

Two dentists, a surgical guy and a crown guy went over the pictures, long conversations where the only word I understood was “corona.” They came to similar conclusions as the Amherst dentist, but explained it all using the computer display.

There were some differences, they said I’d have to lose a couple of more teeth than I thought, and showed me exactly why, and what their plan was to deal with those gaps. Another implant, a temporary bridge covering the extractions giving them time to settle, and another visit in six months to finish that work. (The Amherst dentist was proposing supporting a bridge on a tooth that was probably beyond saving.) All still for around $16,000.

Tomorrow it starts. Four long days, 6-8 hours of dental work, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Then again on Monday if necessary to readjust, fix, etc.. A couple of days of vacation and time for me to see if anything in my new bite needs changing. (The scheduling and billing software was as amazing as the dental diagnostic software. The manager clicked on icons of teeth taking the dentist’s plan very quickly into a schedule of the work to be done and the billing.) And then back home.

I feel like a customer here, dealing with an organization that is proud of the service and value it provides. Cancun Dental Specialists. (I did feel more like a mark in Amherst, or maybe to be fair, someone who they determined might not be willing to pay the cost of American dental work and therefor not worth spending too much time with.)

How did this happen you might ask. Well I’ve had the same dental routine for thirty years, since I got the gold work, and had some cavities and work done, but this last year’s damage was extraordinary.

I think it had a lot to do with Rolaids. I would brush my teeth at night, go to bed, not be able to sleep because of indigestion, and then chew a Rolaids or two. Sugar tablets in my teeth over night.

It might also be due to dry-mouth, which can destroy teeth in around three months I’ve read. (I’ve done a lot of Googling.). The Rolaids and indigestion are related to dry mouth as well.

And old age, my gums are receding and a lot of the expensive damage is at or below the gum line.

Funny thing, upon learning all this I stopped taking the Rolaids. And my indigestion greatly improved. Just a little an hour or so after I eat, but none other than that and none at night. I don’t eat much late, but I didn’t before either.

It’s as if the Rolaids were destroying stomach acid causing more to be created which, somehow could it be, was related to dry mouth.

I’ve now got more saliva than I recall having in recent years.

The Cancun dentists are also going to do a “deep clean” because they sensed the food that had gotten between the gums and the teeth. A deep clean is one of the recommended procedures for dealing with gum disease.

I’m for sure going to have a new personal dental routine, as even after all this work, decay can still erode the underlying teeth if it continues to penetrate beneath the gums.

Those are the before pictures. You can see the decay at the gum line of my upper front tooth. That’s just appeared in the last month or so. There were two similar spots on the lower front teeth as well, which were filled by my local dentist, before he sent me to the uber-dentist in Amherst.

The gold work was done thirty years ago by a dentist who it turns out was famous and known by both the Amherst and Cancun dentists.

Condiments

Opinions on the optimal mixing of condiments.

Ham Sandwich

When making a ham and Swiss and tomato sandwich with mayonnaise and mustard, it’s nice to arrange the ingredients in such a way as to maximize tasting pleasure when they mingle in the mouth.

Clearly the ham should be in one layer, the tomato in another, and the cheese in between separating the two. The mayonnaise and mustard should be separated as well, with the mayonnaise on the slice of bread touching the tomato.

The mustard, however, should not be spread on the other slice of bread. Instead it should be spread directly on the ham, preferably in between two ham slices so that it does not touch the bread.

Why? If the mustard is spread on the bread, its taste gets absorbed in the bread and when the sandwich is bitten into, the mouth experiences mustardy flavored bread in the vicinity of the other ingredients.

But if the mustard is shielded from the bread, then the mouth gets to experience the bite of the mustard directly with the ham in some very exciting mouthfuls.

The same is true of a hotdog. Spread the mustard directly on the hotdog and it’s exciting to eat. Put the mustard on the bun first and it becomes a boring mush.

Oatmeal

You’ve got a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal. It’s ready for the butter, brown sugar, raisins and milk. How best to add them to maximize the enjoyment of each bite?

If you mix the brown sugar and butter thoroughly in the oatmeal, and then add the milk, all the excitement of those ingredients is lost, as they just offer a blended sort of taste, and you might find yourself wanting to add more and more sugar.

There are other options. One is to very slightly mix the ingredients. Then each bite will be different. Some will have just oatmeal, and others a blast of sugar. Sort of like when eating a layer cake, some bites are pure cake and others have a ton of icing. Fun!

The other option is to pour the milk on top of the sugar and butter before it’s mixed in and let it sit. Now when you mix it the oatmeal tastes like it’s in flavored milk, also a fun sensation.

I’m not sure which I prefer.

As to the raisins, well they keep pretty much to themselves but I like to have enough so that I can get one in every bite.

The last ingredient is salt. You need some salt in the oatmeal, but unlike the sugar, you don’t want to get a bite with a spike of salt in it. So the salt should go in before it’s cooked so it gets totally blended in and is barely noticeable.

Salt and Eggs

Unlike in the oatmeal, it’s fun to get a nice taste of salt on scrambled eggs. For this reason it’s better to hold back on the salt while cooking, leaving some room for the tastebuds to encounter fresh salt sprinkled on the eggs while eating.

Somebody was famous for saying he would make hiring decisions based on whether someone tasted their food before salting it. I’d say I wouldn’t want to work for someone who didn’t understand different people’s preferences, and that some like to encounter a fresh salt taste in their bites rather than a boring blended saltiness throughout the food.

Landscapes

Next I tried landscapes. We have a great view out our dining room window, across the Deerfield River with a hill across the way. So here it is.

I really struggled with how to make the trees on the hillside, there’s a lot of them, and they all sort of blur at one point but are distinct at another.

Anyway, no matter, I’m really proud of the duck in the river with his orange bill.

Next was the view across a relative’s back yard.

A grey day in the Adirondacks, and again, wrestling with what to do with blurred forest in the background. Really liked how the blue barrels came out and the bushes on the left.

Then I was taken with a photo in our newspaper. I don’t think I enjoy working from a photo as much as from real life, but still it was fun. And the same problem with the background trees.

This was a great exercise in layers though. Had at least ten, starting with a sketch and then the stuff both near and far.

Most recently I was taken with an old photo that was posted in a group that talks about our small town, Shelburne Falls, MA. It used to have an iron bridge for cars and a trolly bridge close to each other, crossing the Deerfield River. (Same one with the duck above.)

The trolly ended and the bridge was going to be destroyed but some people decided to turn it into a garden and now it’s The Bridge of Flowers and draws people from all over. That’s why it was so much fun to see this photo of when it was a trolly bridge.

It was black and white, so first I did a black and white.

And then I colorized it.

Procreate First Steps

I just bought a new iPad and Apple Pencil to mess around with. Then got Procreate which seems to be the best software for drawing. Here’s my beginnings.

First, I tried to draw what was in front of me:

As I mentioned in another post, it’s all about the journey. I had fun doing this.

From there I went to the wood stove, and made three attempts, fascinated with the fact that there is a special brush for painting flames. (We have two steam dragons on the stove.)

With my mother’s words in my head, an oil painter in her day, that drawing glass is hard, I went for the Manhattan (my mother’s drink of choice) in front of me.

Thus my first few days.