New food fad

This afternoon, my older sister, the one who lies in Indiana, called. “We’re going to the Indiana State Fair,” she said. This year, she said, the food to try is chocolate-covered bacon. “Everyone says that it’s one of those things that sounds gross at first, but when you try it, it’s really good.”

I’ll bet it is really good — you can’t go wrong combining sugar, fat, and salt. I did a little Web research on this new food phenomenon. According to Wikipedia’s entry, chocolate-covered bacon dates back to at least 2005. But last year chocolate-covered bacon was the big hit at the Minnesota State Fair under the name “Pig Lickers,” which means that this year it is appearing at all the best state fairs across the nation. Biggest thing since deep-fried Pepsi.

Given the realities of Bay Area culture, I’ll bet I won’t find any chocolate-covered bacon around here (although I might be able to find vegan bacon-substitute covered in low-fat fair-trade chocolate). Well, I may have to drive up to the California State Fair in Sacramento, just so’s I can buy me some Pig Lickers.

Weather

At a meeting the other day, some of the other people in the room were complaining about the weather here. “It’s so hot,” said one (it has been in the mid-80s, but windy and dry so it’s very comfortable). “Miserable weather,” said another.

At some point, one of them looked at me, and suddenly realized that I have just moved to the Bay Area from a place that is currently beastly hot, in the 90s and humid, a place which just had destructive rainstorms and flooding — that I have just moved here from a place that has blizzards and ice storms and hail and hurricanes and thunderstorms. “Well,” she said, “the weather here is not so bad compared to New England, is it.”

“No, the weather here is pretty good,” I said.

“The weather here is actually perfect for human beings,” someone said.

“But human beings just like to complain about the weather,” said someone else.

Thinking about church size

I’d kind of forgotten that there are lots of evening meetings when you’re a minister of a mid-sized church; small churches just don’t have that many meetings. Yesterday, I left home at 9 a.m. and got back at 11 p.m.; today I left home at 9 a.m. and here it is 9 p.m. and I am still at church.

This is one of the unspoken reasons why many ministers don’t want the membership of their small church to increase. They look at the ministers in mid-sized churches, they see that those mid-sized-church ministers typically attend three evening meetings a week, and they don’t like what they see.

This is one of the unspoken reasons why many church members don’t want their church to grow any larger; for there are many church members who prefer an informal organizational style, and don’t want the more formal organization required by a larger church, the type of organization that engenders a formal decision-making process requiring many evening meetings.

On the other hand, there are those of us who actually prefer more formal organizational structures. We also like evening meetings (in moderation: no more than three per week). And we like the increased diversity, the greater financial stability, and the additional programs that come with mid-sized and larger churches.

Both smaller churches and larger churches have their strengths and their weaknesses. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different.

Seasons

I remember from the last time we lived in the San Francisco Bay area that there are two seasons here: winter, when most of the rain falls, and summer when very little or no rain falls. I feel that the terms “winter” and “summer” are misleading, though: “winter” comes from Old English, and the season it describes has little or no resemblance to winters in old England. I tend to think of the two seasons here as the green season — because when the rain falls, the plants start to grow, and the hills turn green — and the brown season — because after the rains stop, eventually the plants dry out, and the hills turn golden brown.

We are in the middle of the brown season now: the hills are brown, the soil is dry, the air feels dry. I was walking through a residential neighborhood a couple of days ago, and some of the home owners let their front yards turn brown: either they let their lawns dry up and turn brown, or they had something other than grass growing, or they just had bare ground or pea stone for their yards. But the majority of home owners feel the need to have bright green lawns year round. As I walked through this residential neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking how odd it looked to have lush green lawns during the brown season. It would be as if New England home owners had snow-making machines, and tried to cover their front lawns with snow during the hottest days of August.

Arrival

After a certain amount of confusion, our Pod with all our belongings arrived this morning. We had a crew ready, and they unloaded everything quickly and cheerfully. In fact, the crew was so good, moving was actually fun — thanks a million, Dave, Emily, David, Mike, Mara, and Dick.

With all our belongings, our apartment feels a lot smaller than before. For a moment, we almost wished that we didn’t have all our belongings. We only wished that for a moment: it’s nice to have pots and pans, and clothes. But we continue to wish that we owned fewer possessions, and we are talking about what we can get rid of. I think I may be getting rid of some books — sixty boxes of books is too many books.

Evening walk

You can walk from our house to San Francisco Bay in less than half an hour, by following our street up three blocks to Monte Diablo Street, and then following Monte Diablo east to the bay. I walked to the bay this afternoon to look at whimbrels, willets, egrets, sandpipers, gulls, terns, grebes, and blackbirds. Then I walked back home.

The stretch of Monte Diablo closest to the bay goes through a suburban tract that was probably built on filled-in land. I walked past single story houses a few decades old with small lawns. A black girl came skipping up the sidewalk followed by a white woman; they turned in at a house where they were greeted by someone inside. “I’ll bet you wondered where she was,” said the white woman.

I stopped at M&H Market, just before the foot bridge over the freeway, to get something to drink. An older white man with a pencil-thin mustache waited on a hispanic man and a little girl. “Put it up on the counter,” said the man to the little girl, and she did. The man behind the counter was wearing a dime-store sombrero.

On the other side of the footbridge, Monte Diablo Street becomes shady and more attractive, with a mix of older houses and other buildings. I passed Pilgrim Baptist Church, currently advertising their vacation Bible school, and St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, and then the Hari Mandir Hindu Temple, and an anonymous gray building with a sign that said, “Church of Christ Meets Here.” I passed the M. L. King Community Center, and the King Swim Center.

When I got to our street, I turned right towards our house. An ice cream man pushed his cart down the sidewalk ahead of me, the bells on the cart jingling. A boy stopped him, and when I passed them they were deep in conversation; the man was saying, “Like how long ago? Lotsa years ago?” A group of people sat on a couple of cars parked on the street, listening to some quiet salsa while they talked idly. A white man wearing a broad-brimmed white hat and shorts went in the driveway of a big old house almost hidden by a fence and trees; I looked up the driveway and saw that it must be a party, for there were about thirty people, all of whom were white, milling around on the driveway and yard of the old house.

A small box truck was parked across the street from our house. The back was open, and a man was in the truck selling produce and bread. A short middle-aged hispanic woman stood looking up at and talking to the man in the truck. A young white man came around the corner and walked up to the truck to wait his turn. On the other side of the street, I turned in our front gate and walked upstairs to our apartment.

San Mateo City Hall throws us a curve ball

San Mateo City Hall just threw us a curve ball.

We shipped our belongings to California via a “PODS” temporary storage container. Last week, Carol went to San Mateo City Hall to get a permit to place the Pod on the street near our building (there’s no other place to put the Pod because the yard is completely fenced in).

The people at City Hall told Carol there was a brand new requirement that we get an insurance certificate absolving the city of all liability. We were not surprised by this, since New Bedford had recently instituted a similar requirement. But they also said they were going to charge us $800 for the permit.

I called Brian, the manager of the local PODS franchise, and told him the story. “Eight hundred dollars?! I can’t believe that,” he said. “I’ll drive down to San Mateo tomorrow and talk with them about this.”

Brian called me this morning. It turns out that it’s worse than we all thought. They city of San Mateo has banned all placement of temporary storage containers on the street, and they told Brian that if they find a temporary storage container on the street they will fine the company that owns it $1,000 a day. The fire chief has said that temporary storage containers interfere with firefighting, and cannot be allowed any longer, as of a week ago. Apparently, then, City Hall gave incorrect information to Carol — this is not about insurance, this is about firefighting.

Brian has gone out of his way to accommodate us. He is going to dispatch a truck with our belongings first thing Monday morning. The truck driver will wait while we unload the contents of the Pod into the garage and driveway. Now we are gathering a crew together to help us unload as quickly as possible. (If you’re in the area and want to help, send me email — I’ll buy you lunch!)

I’d feel better about this if the city’s new requirement made sense to me. But our building is on a street corner with about 150 feet of street access, and one 16-foot storage container is not going to create a significant problem for firefighters. This is the sort of thing that makes people cynical about City Hall.

Sigh. Just what we need. More stress in our lives.

Well. That was a suprise.

Monday night I had an attack of acute gastritis. Since I haven’t established my health insurance out here yet, I went to the ER at the local hospital, San Mateo Medical Center. The hardbitten triage nurse pretty much ignored me (you could almost hear her thinking, “Yeah, yeah, so what if you’re vomiting and in pain, there’s no gunshot wounds”) — until she tok my vital signs, and found my heart rate was 43 beats per minute. Although she kept chatting with her friend, her attitude changed: “Let’s get this guy in there right away, his hear rate’s down to 43, put him in T1.” That’s “T1” for Trauma Unit One.

So they put me on a heart monitor and immediately discovered that I have heart arrythmia, which I have had for as long as I can remember. I fuzzily tried to explain that it wasn’t serious, but I knew they were going to keep me in overnight. Sure enough, that’s what they did — attached a heart monitor to me and admitted me to the hospital about five o’clock.

A hospital is a terrible place to be ill. Mostly I just needed to sleep, but in the hospital they wake you up every couple of hours to draw blood, or take your vital signs, or maybe your IV runs dry and the insistent beeping on the IV machine wakes you up. Then, too, you’re somewhat at the mercy of your roommate. My roommate wasn’t as bad as some — he had the TV on until about 2 in the morning, he snored incredibly loudly, but he didn’t groan that much. In short, I could only sleep in short snatches.

As for the hospital food, the less said about it the better. When you’ve been puking your guts out, there are some alleged foodstuffs that you don’t even want to look at. In general, though, I can’t complain. Mostly I got excellent care. The doctors, nurses, and the various other people were kind and caring, and they were attentive and listened well.

They finally discharged me at 2:30 p.m., sending me home with meds for my stomach. Maybe I have an ulcer, they said. Carol heard one of the doctors say “mild hypertension.” I know what the real problem is: I have been overworking for the past four years, and it finally caught up with me. My name is Dan, and I’m a workaholic, and it’s time for me to get over being a workaholic.