Grass Valley Vignette #1

I've been meaning to write about Grass Valley for some time, and I keep getting stuck. Mostly it's because I'm having trouble summarizing the place, even though as small as it is it should be very easy to summarize.

OK, I'll summarize. Grass Valley has 13,000 people in the city limits. It's a very small town. Nevada City is right next door (I can walk to it from my house) and it has another, oh, 8,000 people. You can Google them to see the location - they're in a forest about halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Now that the summary is over, I'll drop in some stories about the place here and there. And the first one is:

Vignette #1. The Story of Weston A. Price

Strolling through the Farmer's Market in Nevada City, I saw a slow food booth. The slow food movement, I think, basically promotes the opposite of fast food - I wasn't sure if it meant using crock pots, but it did have something to do with home cooking. I was familiarized to the movement from a huge slow food exhibition in San Francisco's Civic Center Park. In this exhibition, you basically waited 45 minutes in one of many massive lines to buy an apple for $4. Still, the Nevada City branch was hosting a free potluck with a presentation - something about "Fast meals with slow food". Perhaps we could meet other foodies. We cooked a couple quick vegetarian dishes, handed Max off to our babysitter and went to a meeting room in an office park.

There were about 10 people there, mostly elderly. I put my food down next to...some butter, bread, milk, jam, yogurt, oranges...very strange potluck. After some conversation, one of the statelier ladies slowly shoved some handwritten pages together and started talking.

Essentially, she said that you could make soup faster, for example, by making your stock once per week (after killing the chicken for the stock). Her mouth watered as she talked about living off cheese for a month - milk your goat a couple times a week, let it curdle, and store it in your barn. We started realizing slow food meant local and from scratch. From, I believe, ideally, your backyard. Oh. That's why that butter in the potluck was so freaking good. (Our chickpeas were canned in New York. Oops.) Next, she talked about how to make a good stock, the value of the gelatin in the stock, about the wondrous fats in butter and cream. I really wanted her to cook a meal for us. She mentioned Weston Price in passing. I should have paid more attention to the name.

Delia then asked how to make a vegetarian stock. After a bit of uncomfortable silence, the speaker said to avoid it if possible, but to use celery, carrots and onions. She talked more about Weston Price and soon the conversation in the room centered on similarities between slow food and Weston Price.

Figuring it's my turn to generate uncomfortable silence, I asked who Weston Price is. I was told he started a very well known food philosophy. After rudely blurting out that I hadn't heard of him, I was told in no uncertain terms that Weston Price is very famous. I was then given the Weston Price story.

Here's my recollection, in case you are one of the very few people not knowledgeable of Weston Price. As the lady explained, Weston Price was a dentist in the thirties who visited indigenous tribes to examine commonalities in their diets that led to excellent teeth, and hence, excellent health. The healthy diets, he found, consisted of plenty of meat and saturated fats. Unsaturated fat, it turns out, is horrible for you, but a large conspiracy of cooking oil manufacturers have covered this up.

I'm now looking uncomfortably at the two vegetarian dishes I brought - yams in sesame and peanut oil, and garlic chickpeas soaked in olive oil, and, umm...oops again. Still, I'm not sure I'm killing the participants. It's not clear to me that your teeth indicate your health. Doctors don't stare at my teeth during checkups and dentists don't give me nutrition advice. Perhaps that's a conspiracy also. Second, I read in a book "What to Eat" that you can boil a proper diet down to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." From this book, I read people have known for a very long time that animal fats are bad for you but, under pressure from the cattle and pork lobbies, government warnings state that saturated fats (a fat in animals) should be restricted instead. In other words, if there is a conspiracy, it's exactly the opposite of Weston Price's. Also, don't all these indigenous tribes have 35-year lifespans?

By the end of the potluck it's pretty clear that the majority of people there follow Weston Price, so I decided to ask one of them if the Weston Price diet increases lifespan. She said, instantly, that Weston Price followers live 7 years longer. Someone else said their mom moved to India, switched to a vegetarian diet, and died prematurely.

My head still hurts from the cognitive dissonance. Delia wants to go to the next Weston Price potluck. I don't because I'll have a hard time shutting up. But we did leave with a jar of perhaps the best apricot jam we've ever had.

In any case, how is this a Grass Valley vignette? According to the speaker, about 70 people were in the Weston Price club of Grass Valley. Given the size of Grass Valley, that's a really big number. But it doesn't surprise me that much - if it's an alternative movement, it's probably in Grass Valley.

Max's first disease

Max in middle of his disease.

I guess our luck had to run out sometime, and on what we suspect was Wednesday, December 10, Max caught a disease from his playgroup. Max seemed fine as the weekend approached, as documented by the photo below.

Max and strainer.

However, Max's visit with the eternally older, bigger and stronger Louisa on Sunday did not go well. Oh sure, in a sense it never goes well for Max - Max ignores Louisa and she tackles him, Max reads a book and Louisa takes it from him, but this time he was very clingy and whiny. Was he teething? Did he need sleep? We had no idea.

A rare smile from Max. Luckily, Louisa didn't catch the disease, despite sharing his food.

Soon, he started sounding like he was snoring, except he was awake and had all kinds of cute little coughs. At night it wasn't so funny. He coughed himself awake about every hour and we had to soothe him to sleep every time. A visit to the doctor the next day revealed he had croup. For the unitiated, croup is caused by breathing difficulties, and is normally fine and can be treated at home, unless in some cases the trachea closes and it's fatal. Good to know. Anyway, he was sent home with some steroids that are used to open up his trachea. Delia and I spent the rest of the day holding him while he coughed on us. Good thing baby viruses are no match for my manly immune system.

So anyway, Max responded pretty well - the next day he was tired but certainly sounded much better, and by Wednesday he was starting to crawl around a bit. Another baby in the baby group, Sean, also had croup, and his mom was pretty sick, which certainly helped us isolate the cause.

Sean: Disease carrier?

So Delia offered to take care of Sean a bit while his mom caught some sleep. And, not to say I'm implying anything here, but Max's recovery soon took a big U-turn. A couple days later, he left the doctor with another prescription for steroids, as well as some antibiotics (for apparently a secondary ear infection). Mom got a little sick, which didn't help. As for me, my manly immune system gave out completely and I got pretty much the full list of symptoms in Nyquil commercials. Mom, baby and me sick at the same time. Words of sympathy we got were something like "Get used to it."

On Saturday, however, Delia's parents heroically drove over to help. With Delia's dad cooking and mom taking care of Max, Delia and I could wander around like a zombie, lie in bed with my eyes closed, or read a great library book with the heady title, "The Future of Freedom" while Max was in good hands, coming out only to eat their soup. What was most amazing to me, though, was how Max responded. My job, as I saw it, was to soothe him and keep him from being too miserable. However, Delia's mom didn't bother with the misery part and played with him like he was healthy. For the first time in a while, his smile came back.

Delia's mom and Max.

Anyway, while we suspect there were several diseases in this house, Max is getting better. Here's Max's preferred use of the swing.

Last night. It was amazing to watch Max start from the floor and systematically work himself into the most dangerous position he could find.

We're not fully recovered yet, but things are improving, not counting mom. Anyway, here are a couple things I learned:

1) They (by that I mean the alien creatures who create articles on the Internet) recommend a cool mist humidifier for a croupy baby. Maybe in theory, but in practice it freezes the room. Perhaps for this reason, Max refused to be put into the crib and would only fall asleep being held (opening his eyes every few minutes or so just to make sure you didn't cheat and put him down.)

2) Nothing sucks more than trying to sing to your baby when you have laryngitis.

3) I couldn't sleep last night because of various pains, but that let me look around YouTube and find this video of an insane man surfing an unbelievably big wave. Even if you don't surf, look at the link.

Wal-Mart, 5am

About a month ago, Max had diarrhea, which led to night poopings. The night poopings are gone, but for some reason Max's night awakenings remained.

And so it was this morning at 4:15am Friday in San Jose, where we're staying for Thanksgiving with Delia's parents. Max whimpers, Delia wakes up and feeds him, puts him back down, the whimpering stops, I try (usually unsuccessfully) to go back to sleep, and....Hey, this is the day after Thanksgiving!

Delia spent a lot of yesterday looking online for sales, and Wal-Mart had a big one that started 5am. In fact, Wal-Mart had an e-machines laptop for $200. That's $100 cheaper than what I could find online. The online Wal-Mart ad showed a map where you could get the laptop along with the other 9 featured items. The laptop was in the back of lawn and garden. Huh?? Maybe they wanted me to buy gardenias afterwards. Whatever...Delia told me last night there was a Wal-Mart on Monterey Road about 10 minutes from here. She told me there'd be a big line, but I figured it would clear out after 15 minutes or so. Besides, what else exactly am I supposed to do at 4:45 am in South San Jose? This is exciting. Into the Civic I go.

This has nothing to do with Wal-Mart. Max's hair just hasn't grown out so, out of concern, I've started the Max Hair Watch. I am monitoring his hair progress by pushing it together, mohawk-style, and taking a photo.

I didn't know where Wal-Mart was, but I'm stopped at a light in a dark road somewhere in the mist. Coming the other way was a huge line of car lights. Lots of them were making left turns, lots were making U-turns, and...okay, Wal-Mart must be somewhere around here. So I make a turn and I'm in a big line of cars going somewhere. I'm in no mood to fight for a parking spot - I really don't care enough. So I park in an empty lot outside a pho noodle house.

Apparently I'm a trendsetter. Within literally a minute of parking, there were 50 cars surrounding mine. In a way, that's good news - it means I didn't park a couple miles from Wal-Mart.

And, after a 5-minute hurried walk jockeying for position with the other walkers, I see the store. It's about 5:00 am, the time the store opened.

OK, Delia was right. There was a line. It started inside the store, and went through a bunch of the kind of snaking S-turn things you see in the airport. Those were there just for show, though, because the line then shot out to one end of the store, to the back of the parking lot, around half of the lot, back to the store, to lawn and garden, around the edge of the lot and finally to the Lucky's in the next parking lot. I measured the distance for about 10 people, multiplied that distance by 10 to get a measurement for 100 people, and then...I wouldn't be surprised if the line had 2,000 people in it. More calculations: There were 10 featured items. So there had to be around 200 of each item if I was to get one. Ten items, 200 of each item, $100 savings on them...Wal-Mart would be losing $200,000 in about 30 minutes on each store. Yikes. Could Wal-Mart recoup that with another few hours of selling low-margin stuff? Well, that wasn't out of the question. The line was orderly and was actually moving pretty quickly and I made it from the Lucky's to the outside of lawn and garden. A rumor shot through the line that they were going to open the store at lawn and garden. Then, a security guard walked to lawn and garden. As he walked around the corner, a bunch of people broke away from the line to tail him like mosquitos. Nope, the rumor was false. But I could see inside lawn and garden and saw....another huge line. That's why they spread the sales items around. I'm probably not gonna get this computer.

I couldn't leave, though...I had enough curiosity to wonder what was in this store. So after a more or less uneventful 30 minutes (punctuated only by a Mercedes driving through the line from what was probably a very good spot...interesting. This person buys a Mercedes but is willing to go to Wal-Mart probably at 1:00 am to save a couple hundred dollars...) I'm in.

As the reader can probably imagine, the inside of the store was a mess. Predictably, I went to lawn and garden and the laptop was gone...but there were other ones on sale somewhere else. I went somewhere else and found tons of lines in all kinds of directions. I had no idea what people were in the lines for. I started asking. One person said it was for a camera. Someone else wanted a TV. Apparently the people in the lines didn't know what they were getting either. The store had an air of desperation and disillusionment. Would this be how Wal-Mart would look like after World War III? Wal-Mart employees were scarce, and the crowds were getting to me. I found refuge in the clothes hanger aisle...actually, I could use some clothes hangers. You know, I really want hangers.

I took my prize - a set of 10 hangers. I went to pay for it, but, of course, the lines at the front were miserable also. I left, wanted a souvenir and asked if I could have one of a stack of crowd control manuals at the front of the store. (Nope.) And so ended at 5:51 am, empty-handed, my Black Friday shopping day.

Photo dump

There's quite a few new photos on the website. Look to the left of the blog and you'll see new photo entries.

-The management

Lamb

I never thought I'd be eating the best lamb I'd ever had while hunched over in a smoked out house reading the ESPN website. But I've realized things like that can happen when you get the right cookbook.

For the record, this lamb is not old. It's grilled lamb with green pea sauce and mint vinaigrette, from a Bobby Flay cookbook. It looked good in real life. I should look on some photography website, but I bet a straight-down shot in harsh light is not the way to go.

Bobby Flay's book is "Grill It!" But it's dark by the time I start cooking, so I tried to "Broil it?" Afterwards, the smoke was so thick we had trouble seeing to the other side of the room, and we learned: Fume hoods are good. So Delia would go nowhere near the kitchen until we opened all the windows and waited for the smoke to clear and for our house to reach 43 degrees inside.

But it was worth it.

Delia emerged from hiding to photograph Max looking at the fan.

Halloween

Max preparing for Halloween.

Delia took Max to Grass Valley's downtown Halloween kids party. Other than that, I will not comment on the picture. I wasn't there, okay?

Max and his new friend Sean.

We unfortunately didn't take photos of the actual trick-or-treating, but here's what happened. We live in the Morgan Ranch subdivision, which is one of the only walkable areas in Grass Valley & Nevada City. We've heard rumors that parents brought their kids here but we never saw them. We usually spent Halloween in the house eating the candy we bought. But Max got invited to go trick-or-treating in Morgan Ranch by some friends, and we were asked, "So you're leaving the porch light on?"

Umm...what?

We turned the porch light on and within about 10 minutes all our candy was gone and we had to slam the door and turn the lights off before a couple 6-year-olds made it in. OK, that last part was an exaggeration, but we couldn't believe the madhouse we found when we actually left the house. I was wondering if Max would get freaked out by all the fairies and vampires, but he went into a very studious mood. In any case, our candy was gone, but I had a way to get it back. I had Max.

"Trick or Treat!"

"Well, hello.....awwwwww.....oh, he's so cute!! What's his name?"

"Max."

"Well, hello, there, little fella!"

"Umm....yeah.....Trick or treat!"

(Smile fading) "Who's this for, anyway?"

"It's for Max."

(Smile gone.)

We then went to a post-trick-or-treat party, where Max immediately made himself at home.

Max post-trick or treating. He is eating the candy, so there! (Note: Candy quickly removed from his mouth. )

Max at party, shortly before he crawled into the bucket of ice water.

It gets easier and other thoughts

A tow-headed Max with his older sister and grandmother, listening to Jazz music.
(Actually, I have no idea who those people are, and I don't think Max is blonde, but Max wandered up to them, so, whatever...)

Yes, it's been a long time. So long, I may have to change how I approach this blog. The previous theme was "misery makes high comedy" but I've noticed we've gradually had less and less of that material to work with. (By the way, I'm extremely superstitious about this - everything I write generally gets proven wrong in a week, so this post is inviting a horrible development. But I suppose that will at least give me more to write about.)

IT GETS EASIER

When people told us "it gets easier" a few months ago, Delia and I laughed. We laughed the rueful, centuries-old-tired, utter-loss-of-hope laugh. But, daggum if they weren't right. A lot of it was us gradually adapting to Max. Crying used to really scare us, but now it's much better. For example, we pretty much can figure out what is making Max cry now. It's almost always (1) Sleepy and angry about it (Tough!), (2) Hungry (feed him), (3) Fell and hurt himself (Soothe him), (4) Horrible stomach pains (don't give him chicken pieces), (5) Teething (give him Tylenol and generally suffer through this for a few days) and (4) Bored/generally wants attention (Do something to entertain him).

But there were milestones also that made life easier. They are:

1) Sleeping through the night (clear reasons),
2) Learning to cook,
3) Hiring Maya as our babysitter (she is fantastic at making our life easier),
4) Max being able to crawl (now we don't have to move him every 10 minutes because he's bored - he can explore himself!)

Before, we had to invest a huge amount of energy entertaining Max. Now he is perhaps too good at entertaining himself. (By the way, Max: When you read this blog, those are your mommy's feet. You may not guess you even have a mommy from these photos, but in fact she's the one who's taking care of you 90% of the time. Daddy just never takes photos to show this.)

5) A helmet for Max (now we only use it in the evening when he's really tired and spacey)
6) The baby backpack (the stroller was never too useful for us, but Max really likes being taken around in the backpack. Great for hiking, shopping, cooking, etc.)

Dad and Max at the beginning of the Bridgeport hiking trail. We ran into the South Yuba River cleanup day party. It's worth clicking on this picture because, yes, those bikers are generating the power in the guitar amps.
Max looking at the sky. I know this is happening when my backpack suddenly lurches backward. I have to continually ask Delia if Max is strapped in so he doesn't fall backward out of the backpack, which would be really bad.

Max after walk to Briar Patch.

7) Making a designated baby room. It's pretty big and free of electrical cords, bookcases he can pull down on his head, speakers where he can rip the cover off and investigate the tweeter, etc.

Max's play room. Picture taken as I write this blog.

Max can be left alone in there for up to 1/2 hour if no one is around, and much longer if he knows you're there, or even better, if you're in there with him. It has a futon Max can crawl up and down off of, and this gives us an opportunity to read while Max quietly plays, as shown in the video.

Reading in Max's play room.

So, in general, Max is now mobile enough to make his own fun, yet still nicely portable.


Max investigating his new car seat. Max tries very hard to climb up the sofa, and I wish I had a video of Max's ambitious, yet very risky, attempts to use the car seat as a ledge to get to the sofa cushions.

UNCOVERING MAX'S TALENTS?

Max will drop anything to mess with the guitar. By "Mess" I mean touching the strings, trying to eat the tuning knobs, climbing on the surface, etc.

Max at Walter and Kace's house in Sacramento, playing a haunting and yet ultimately uplifting experimental Jazz solo.

You may, of course, wonder, "Is Max a prodigy?" More likely, after reading this sentence, you want to puke. I admit it - I want Max to be great at something. I want him to be rich so I don't live my golden years as a Wal-Mart greeter. But, according to an article I just read, there's no evidence that people have inherent talents, besides obvious ones like being tall for basketball. Basically the people who are the best in their field have the most amount of a specific type of practice known as deliberate practice. According to what is apparently a lot of evidence in a lot of fields, behind what looks like a prodigy, you find an unusual amount of this deliberate practice in their life. So if there is a truly useful talent, it's the ability to sustain a lot of very grueling practice over a long time. And some articles say even that can be developed.

I have to disagree. As evidence I present Max's obvious talent in dentistry.

Max giving a periodic dental checkup.

Demonstrating proper brushing technique.

CONCLUSION

So, there's been stuff going on, but for a while it hasn't been the high drama we used to have. We only have incidents like yesterday: Max pooped in a bookstore, so Mom took him outside to change him. Only when Mom took the diaper off, and went for another diaper, Max took off, covered only by the poop on his butt, to a tree where he started eating the bark.