personal identity

Wine tastings and a few favorite things

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Arrived home from work and fed Rosie.  Looked at the dry native grass around my house and decided to water a bit of it even though I loathe wasting water.  Green is probably safer than winter brown.  The recent giant wildfire raised my concerns about the fire danger in this drought.  I cannot remember when it rained and the next ten days show no rain in sight.  As soon as I finish writing this or shortly thereafter, I get to run back to town and join probably 100 plus other people at friends’ house to taste the wine and food brought by Market Street.  These friends run a bed and breakfast with a spectacular garden complete with koi pond and just about every kind of flower you can grow in this area.  It’s cool, nearly froze last night, so I will wear the black turtle neck and slacks I wore to work.  It’s hard to believe that it was just above freezing last night and is supposed to hit 100 next Monday–the desert has now reached here apparently.

Thinking about this leads me to think about some of my favorites, especially when it comes to wine:  zinfandels, especially from Lodi, California.  The moderately priced one I buy most often is OVZ.  It frequently goes on sale here which is even better.  I also like  Seven Deadly Zins–unfortunately I have never seen it on sale.  Basically, I love red wines and almost never drink white.  A moderately priced nice blend is Apothic Red.  Market Street had a super sale so I bought several–ten percent off if you buy six at a time.  The best malbec I ever drank came directly in baggage from Argentina, a present to me from my Argentinian exchange student when he arrived.  You can’t get it here and when his mom tried to ship me some, she was not allowed.

The students at school  kept commenting on my black attire today.  They asked if I was going to a funeral or something.  I laughed.  I like black; I look good in black.  It also shows off my turquoise jewelry.  My most favorite color is orange. Turquoise looks good with it too.  Red and green are ok.  Finally after decades I have learned to like hot pink, but really I am not a pink person–see my poem about Hot Pink Toenails–on an old blog.  It remains one of my blog posts that people look at most–I have no clue why.  The one color I really do not like is blue, especially pale blue. Perhaps tomorrow I will post about favorite books.  I really would like readers to comment about their favorites.  It fascinates me what people perceive and feel about this and that.  Often I am the only person I know who reads what I read.

Off to taste some new wines and maybe find a new favorite.

What do people want?

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

As I looked at my blog statistics a few minutes ago, it dawned on me that apparently few others want what I want in life or care about what I care about.  Either that or most others like me do nor blog or read blogs.  One of my most popular posts over time had been a poem entitled “Hot Pink Toenails”.  My guess is that when individuals search and find this, they are not really looking for a poem about personal identity, the topic of this poem.  Maybe they have a foot fetish or are searching for some new type of nail color or pedicure.  My popular recipe posts I understand.  Who doesn’t want a great recipe for salmon or for tasty vegetarian dishes if you are vegetarian or entertaining vegetarian friends.  But hot pink toenails.  I would not even know what words to put in the search block to pull this up.

Sometimes to see if I can tag better to draw more traffic to my blog, I take a look at what visitors used for search terms.  Lately, “Costa Rica jungle flowers” and “what  did people wear to survive the dust bowl” showed up.  Both these make sense, the latter especially since a mini form of the dust bowl seems to have returned to this area of the country.  Yesterday and today, high winds and blowing dust like brown fog reigned.  It has become rather tiresome and scary, given that we have had no rain in so long I cannot remember when it rained at my house.  Miles of brown grass cover the landscape with the only relief being irrigated wheat fields and lawns.  I do not even want to think about what would happen if someone dropped a cigarette.  With a 45 mile per hour west wind like today, fire fighters would have an exceedingly difficult time.

For those who follow my blog and enjoy my posts about the environment, nature, etc., I won’t stop just because such topics often get fewer viewers.  These are things I passionately care about.  And for all of you who like facts, here are some to add to the fact list:

-80.000 acres of wetlands are lost annually in the US to intensifying coastal storms and sea level rise.

-The forest burn season in the western US has grown 50 per cent longer in the past 40 years.

-The once mighty Colorado River now dries up before it reaches the sea.

-Contrary to popular opinion, carbon emissions from power plants are not regulated.

-Money funneled into efforts to deny global warming and climate change, at least in the US, increasingly follow untraceable avenues.  They use pass through foundations, e.g. Donors Trust.

On a lighter note if you eat salmon and wonder what is safest to eat, here is the latest.  Canned salmon is safe because it is wild caught pink or sockeye salmon from Alaska with high Omega 3s and low mercury.  Most frozen and fresh salmon sold in the US is Atlantic farmed salmon with much higher mercury levels.  Grocery stores and packages indicate the type of salmon and whether wild caught so you can choose.