Giving Thanks

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. One of the best I can remember. The food was great, and the company was delightful. It was what every holiday should be: relaxing.

Even though I started cooking Wednesday night and started cooking again about 8 a.m. on Thursday, I've come to enjoy the Zen of preparing a complicated meal. I guess I've done T-Day dinner enough before to have the comfort that I know what I'm doing. I had as much fun making it as I did eating it.

I got to, as Shannon would say, "put on the dog." Good china, gold (plated) flatware and some antique crystal I found at a thrift store a couple of years ago but almost never get to use.

We started with a honey-citrus fruit salad with holiday spices and moved on to turkey (most of it's still in the fridge), dressing, portabellas stuffed with vegetarian dressing, giblet gravy, vegetarian gravy, a cranberry relish with apples and celery, carrots with tarragon and mashed potatoes. Cherry pie for desert. (I didn't make the pie, but it was good.)

We sent an entire grocery bag of food home with John, our guest. He has Parkinson's and is mostly home-bound. Can't drive. Even walking is a problem. He was in the hospital the last 2 Thanksgivings, so we were happy to see him at least able to get out this one.

When he sat down and actually looked at the table, he started crying. I had finished it off while he and Shannon weren't looking, and I do lay an impressive table. (W and Cheney should talk to me about shock and awe.)

All in all, a very good day. I've matured enough to not get frantic over cooking, and Shannon's matured enough to stay the hell out of my kitchen when I'm doing it. I enjoyed everything from the planning to the shopping to the cooking to the eating in a way I haven't in a long, long time.

And John was so sweet. He brought a purple orchid that I'm determined not to kill. It's absolutely beautiful, but delicate and fragile. It reminds me of egg-shell china: I'm afraid to touch it because I might break it.

I did some research, and it's in a family that likes indirect light and water only when it's dry. I put it on the porch where is will get the light it needs. I think it's grown overnight.

I told John afterwards that he had to take the food with him if he wanted a ride home.

And if I had any spare money, I'd be out shopping today. But I don't. Instead, I think we're going to pawn off some more of our left-overs on another friend of Shannon's who is in the middle of moving and couldn't make it over yesterday. We can't help him move, but we can bring him food.

I took Shannon to the VA hospital on Tuesday for pre-op procedures. We go back next Friday so they can re-set his left big toe. It's out-patient surgery, but they have to put him under to do it. So we have to get up early, get him there early, spend the better part of a day there and then make the hour to hour and a half drive back home.

Good thing T-Day was fabulous, 'cause this coming week's gonna suck.

Still, Shannon has coverage that will pay for everything, thanks to the VA. Medicaid thinks that his SSI is too much money, but the VA doesn’t. Whether they will bill Medicare for it or not, I don’t know and ain’t gonna ask.

I’m thankful that we both have health care coverage. Mine costs about $7500 a year (1/4 of which I pay), and Shannon's is arguably better. But it’s better than a lot of plans out there right now, and it’s certainly better than none at all.

And I don't have to go back to work until Monday, so I have a couple of days to rest up before I have to brave I-35 again. (Being paid to stay home and employer-based health insurance, by the way, are among God's greatest innovations.)

Our rent’s going up in January, and we still have un-addressed repair issues. On the other side of the coin, I can walk to work, there’s a great small natural food grocery across the street and everything we need is within a few blocks, so we spend almost nothing on gas. And even though there’s been a spike in auto burglaries in the last few weeks, the streets are safe enough to walk at night. I never think twice about it.

We have a roof over our head (even though it’s also the floor of the cow-people upstairs) and we can afford to live in a nice, upscale but human-scale, livable neighborhood.

And my job is fairly secure, something of a luxury these days in and of itself. I have more vacation and sick time than I can take. I get 10 or 12 paid holidays a year on top of that.

Times are tough, and money’s tight. We have cut back spending for a lot of things. No extras right now.
Thanksgiving dinner is not an extra for us right now. And neither is offering hospitality to others who have even less than we do. When we have to cut Thanksgiving out of the budget, I’ll know we’re in trouble.

But we aren't and we don’t.

For that, I’m ever so humbly thankful.

A Thousand Pictures

When I was young, older people still spoke of Roosevelt in an almost reverential way, when they talked about the Depression at all. Most didn’t want to. It was water under the bridge, roads they didn’t want to go back down and every other trite way of saying that they were focused on the future, not the past.

Every now and then, though, nostalgia got the better of them. And when they talked about Roosevelt, they used words that they normally reserved for their favorite preachers. Savior is the one that came up most. “Roosevelt saved the country” was what I heard from many of them.

They never mentioned the New Deal or the WPA or any other of the programs he put together on the fly. And he did put them together on the fly.

What they talked about was how inspiring he was. He talked to them and told them how bad it was, but reassured them that things would get better. I doubt that he ever told them exactly how bad it was, but hearing his voice on the radio gave people hope.

He realized quite keenly that financial crises are most often crises of confidence. They have as much to do with psychology as with economics. They are driven by fear as much as anything else.

And they feed on themselves: crisis breeds fear which exacerbates crisis as people act in fear which creates more fear that creates more crisis that goes on and on in a downward spiral until everybody’s broke.

I’m glad that Mr. Obama has been reading Roosevelt lately. He’s inheriting an analogous mess.

So when the Bush administration remained silent for too, too long, Obama spoke up to offer words of hope that had been noticeably absent. Words that calmed the markets at least a bit because it looked like someone was in charge.

The markets are going to be up and down and all over the place for the foreseeable future regardless of who is or seems to be in charge. There’s too much damage to be cleaned up quickly.

And bailouts are a stop-gap measure, at best: they do little but stanch a hemorrhage. They provide little to no long-term relief.

What we need now are words. Encouraging ones that tell us “things will be better.” Ones that reassure us that there is a plan for recovery. That the American dream is not dead.

Many people discount the power of words, but I’m not among them. Roosevelt used them to blunt the Depression. They didn’t fix it, but they gave people hope and thereby shored up the shaky foundations of both our financial and political systems.

Words have power. They hold hope, joy, happiness and goodwill. They inspire. They reassure and comfort. When they are released like the endangered species that they are into native environments, the results can be staggering.

The recovery from this economic crisis will be as much a matter of psychology as of economics. Until fear is fully replaced by hope, the crisis will deepen.

The right words breed hope. And if hope doesn't show its face across the broader markets soon, we're all in for a wilder ride than any of us want. Until credit markets thaw, nothing will change. When those who control financial institutions can visualize hope, then stability and prosperity will return.

Someone has to draw a picture that makes sense to Wall Street and to legislators and their constituents.

And if the sitting President will not, the President-elect must. Even if it's just words.

A picture is not always worth a thousand words; sometimes, the right words, though, are worth a thousand pictures.

Chain of Fools

Sometimes I hate it when I’m right. Or at least mostly right. Citigroup got partially nationalized over night.

American taxpayers now own more pieces of more banks than ever in history, and that trend disturbs me. Greatly. The federal government should not be in the business of owning major shares in banks. Or any other business, for that matter.

We now collectively own pieces part of multiple banks and the largest insurance company in the world. And we likely will end up with a good share of failing auto companies, too.

When this whole mess started, I had more faith that bailouts might work. But so far, companies have taken the money and changed little to nothing about the operating policies that had them looking a pauper’s funeral a month or so ago. And the pauper’s grave isn’t out of the question for most of them, still.

Like mine, the government’s pocketbook is only so deep. When it gets tapped out, there won’t be any more bailouts for anybody.

The Chinese will quit buying US debt at some point when they perceive that we have no possible way as a country to service that debt. And since they’re our primary source of funding debt, the results could be catastrophic.

And the primary reason for bailouts has been un-freezing credit markets. But they’re still as icy as ever. When banks won’t lend to banks, I don’t think it’s worth my time pursue credit on any level.

My mood is shifting from holding-on-to-hope optimism to how-in-the-hell-do-we-get-through-one-more-crisis pessimism.

Like many people, I have bailout fatigue.

How long can it go on, and how may times can it happen? When will enough be finally enough? When will it all end?

I have to only remember the greed, irresponsibility and lack of oversight and regulation that put us where we are today to need a Prilosec for intense heartburn.

Shannon and I lead a fairly complete and rich life while paying our bills on time (or at least close to on-time. With any number of bills, close is good enough). We don’t accumulate debt that we cannot service.

We do those things because they are the smart, practical things to do. In the long run, it’s easier and cheaper to live within one’s means than to not.

If only the people begging for bailouts now only knew that.

No Maybe, Baby

The economy's going to hell in a row boat. Next week, Citigroup will likely fail or be taken over by the Fed. It might sell pieces part or the whole bird to someone else, but no one else has pockets that deep.

Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are the only possible contenders for a sell-off. But each has already taken its fair share of buying companies on life support. None of them have the will or resources to take on more bad debt.

Some times, enough is enough is always enough.

Thanksgiving's bearing down, and the world is going crazy around me. There is no good financial news to report. Every indicator points to a recession that might out-do the one triggered by the Arab oil embargo of the early 70's.

I know how bad it was back then. I was just a kid, but kids aren't stupid. They know when it's not the right time to ask for new clothes, even though they're growing out of the ones they have. They know that a haircut is a luxury. That if their feet keep growing, they'll have to ask for new shoes, knowing full well that something else will have to not be bought to get those shoes.

Money was tight back then. Daddy was only working 20 or 30 hours a week. “Partials”, they called it. If the hourly people worked fewer hours, no one would have to be let go. That meant he made less money and that we had to make do with less.

Even as the price of everything from gas to groceries soared.

It wasn’t pretty.

And neither is this go-round.

My fear is that things will get worse than they were back then. All the factors are in place to trigger a total economic collapse. Despite a $350 billion cash infusion, credit remains frozen.

Banks don’t trust each other, so they won’t lend to each other. The Fed has said it’s done until after the inauguration.

There is no cash to be had, and the next one at the guillotine is CitiGroup, executed as a pauper. At $3.77 a share, they can’t last long.

I’ll admit that I’m scared and conserving cash where I can. But my cash doesn’t go as far as it used to. Gas prices have dropped ($1.87 around the corner), but the price of nothing else has. And since my company has taken an incredible hit to net assets just 4 months into the fiscal year, I doubt a raise or modest bonus will happen.

We’ll muddle through. I have no doubt of that. We won’t eat out as often (which isn’t that much any way), we won’t buy clothes, we won’t renew magazine subscriptions. Not doing things like we normally do will contribute to the overall decline, but if I can’t pay for it, I ain’t buying it. And I don’t have enough money to throw down any black hole of “maybe”.

Maybe if I spent more, the economy would recover sooner. Maybe it I went out to eat more, waiters might not lose their jobs. Maybe if I bought new clothes, one more clerk wouldn’t be let go.

We’re entering a period of survival of the fittest. And I intend to survive.

No maybe about it.

The Black Kennedys

Who'd of thunk it? Elegant, cosmopolitan and literate. The both of them. And they're going to be the leaders of our next first family.

Quite a change of pace. One that's long over-due.

Who else could carry off those boots as a First Lady to be?

Even the Clintons never looked this good.

Glamor is back.

And it's about time.

The Bitter Pill

While I have little sympathy for auto execs that fly in to DC on private jets to beg for money, this story is about much, much more than them. The number of jobs that would be lost if GM failed is staggering in and of itself. Such a failure wouldn't create ripples throughout the broader economy: it would be a tsunami.

While I agree that US automakers have been unresponsive to customer demand and that the execs at all the big US companies enjoy bonuses that cannot be justified by their companies' performance, allowing those companies to fail would be a disaster.

That sentence leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I don't like it more than most people, but I also think that we have to be pragmatic at this juncture.

The idea of the Fed owning large shares of US corporations frightens me as much as the government loaning money it doesn't have to shore up companies that might or might not make it out alive once the fat lady sings.

There is no good answer to this crisis. There are only ones that are better or worse.

Even the better ones aren't pretty.

If GM goes under, so will Goodyear. They haven't been having a good time of it lately, and losing one of their largest customers could easily send them over the cliff, too. As it will any number of other suppliers.

I have a vested stake in all this, I'll admit. And perhaps it colors my opinions.

The pension my father earned that now is a primary source of income for my mother would go away if Goodyear fails. And Goodyear doesn't have enough breathing room for GM to fail.

Daddy worked a good part of his life for them with the promise of a pension. With bankruptcy or outright failure, that will have been a lifetime's work for nothing but a broken promise.

There are millions of other people who will have to deal with same harsh realities given the same scenario.

It's a bitter pill, as I said, that goes against everything I would normally prefer. But these are not normal times. With the economy teetering on the edge of what could become the 2nd Great Depression, rules and ideology go out the door.

What matters is what happens and how quickly it gets done. And It's got to be done now, not later. We can't wait until January 20 of next year. The clock is ticking, and the bomb's about to go off.

There's no time to lose.

Jazz Fruit Salad

Just about every year, I make a fruit salad for our Thanksgiving pot-luck lunch at the office. And every year, someone asks me for the recipe. While that’s flattering, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage because I use recipes to get ideas and not to actually cook from. Like musicians who play by ear, I cook by sense. Sight, smell, taste and touch, to be exact.

Having a general idea of where I want to get to, I start improvising, measuring nothing, changing ingredients on a whim or based on what looks good when I’m at the grocery. I measure nothing, but tweak until the taste, texture, aroma and presentation are the destination I had in mind.

With my fruit salad, the most important part is the citrus dressing. You can choose whatever fruit you like or looks good at the grocery to put in. Just about anything will work.

I usually use cantaloupe as a base fruit, then add grapes (they seem to be best when they are sliced in half long-ways), Granny Smith apples cut into wedges and then into big, hearty chunks, pineapple, kiwi, mango and mandarin oranges. Sun-dried fruit, like cherries, work well if you have enough time to let them soak overnight, and I’ve used pecans halves tossed in melted butter and then roasted under low heat in the oven. Leave some of the halves intact to use as garnish, but give the rest a coarse chop. Optionally, you can toss the pecans in butter and then sugar before roasting. (Turbinado sugar is the best because it retains a bit of molasses flavor. Raw sugar’s ok, and refined sugar works so-so.)

For the dressing, combine the juice of 2 medium oranges, 1 lemon and 2 limes with enough honey (a cup or two) to coat your fruit well. (The citrus will keep anything like apples from turning brown, but you should probably put them in last and when the honey-citrus mixture is ready.) If the lemon and lime make it too tart, you can add more honey until you have the flavor you want.

Also, if you use any canned fruit, you can add the liquid from it at your own discretion. Caveat: don’t add so much of the liquid that the dressing gets too thin. It should coat the fruit well with a small amount of liquid standing. When you refrigerate it, the other fruit will release juices, and you don’t want so much liquid that it becomes a cold fruit soup.

Toss the fruit in the dressing and add cinnamon, nutmeg and clove powder to taste. Heavier on the cinnamon and lighter on the nutmeg and clove—the last two are fairly potent in small amounts. One additional option is dried ginger, but the other spices tend to overwhelm its subtle zing.

Tip: I like to buy the spices in small quantities from the bulk section at Sun Harvest. They can lose their flavors quickly, especially the cinnamon, and the bulk products always seem fresher. Also, you can buy in the quantity that you need. (It’s much better than buying full bottles that will go stale before you use them up, so it’s also cheaper.)

Finally, I like to refrigerate it over-night in a closed container to let the juices meld and the spices seep into the fruit.

Like most dishes, the single most important thing is the ingredients you start with. The cantaloupe should be firm but not hard and fragrant when you smell where the vine was attached. The juice oranges should be softer and deeply colored. The apples should be very firm and the grapes sweet, not tart. (Purple ones seem to be better than the green ones.)

There’s really no end to what one can do with this basic framework. For a summer salad, leave out the spices other than ginger, and pile that it in. And instead of pecans, use toasted shaved coconut. Choose the fruits that are in season or you just happen to have a hankering for.

Improvise. Create. Enjoy.

I Can Be Your Hero. . .

Post election, after that sweet moment the polls closed on the west coast and CNN called the election for Obama at 10 p.m. central time on the dot, before they even released the results of California, Oregon and Washington, I’ve been wandering around trying to make sure it’s really true. Everyone says it is, but part of me still doesn’t believe it.

It’s sinking in slowly: we have the black Kennedy’s moving into the house we all own in a couple of months.

Not the Kennedy’s, exactly. Our future first lady has no problem giving her husband, the future leader of the free world, a little bit of grief on national TV. Watching the interview on 60 Minutes tonight, I got the distinct impression that it hasn’t been just his grandmother, Toot, who kept him grounded. Michelle Obama keeps her husband in line all the time.

Not that I think he minds.

I know a little about someone making me want to be a better person. And not just for myself. To include other people in ways that we can. Giving money to local charities rather than buying Christmas presents that people don’t really need or even want.

Michelle Obama is the power behind the throne. Not that she dictates policy or even gets involved enough to express an opinion. Not that she doesn’t have one. I’m sure she does.

Her power comes from a deeper place.

She makes our future president want to be better than he might have been, otherwise. Not because she brow-beats him, but because he wants to be her hero. And his kids’ hero. He wants a better world for his family than he had himself.

He created his life out of nothing with a strong woman standing by, letting him do what he needed to do to live his dream.

Daddy worked long hours, taking as much overtime as he could stand, to make sure we had a better life. I don’t know if that was his dream or not, but I think he was proud in the end. He raised a family, and then another. He was a parent from the time my older sister was born in 1963 until he died last year. 45 years of being a parent to children.

That in itself is remarkable.

Heroic, some would say.

The Obama family is not too different from a lot of others around the world.

Including mine.

Triage

Since all is said and done (the fat lady sang real loud), I'm engaging in gratuitous political endorsement and celebration. Not that I'm shy about voicing my opinion.

But the election's over and the path forward is a little clearer. But only by a bit. We know who will move into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave on January 20. What happens afterwords is anybody's guess.

I do not envy the President-elect, although I respect him thoroughly. He's inheriting a mess that's not going to get better any time soon. From what I've been reading from people who know more about economics than me, we're in a triage stage right now: save the ones you can, leave the iffy for later and let the hopeless cases die. Give them morphine and let them go.

I know that sounds ruthless, but that's how it has been playing out.

Still, I have more hope than I did last week. And not because I believe that a President can change a whole lot by executive order. That and the veto are about the only powers one has, other than appointing Secretaries.

I'm more hopeful because of the message of the President-elect. Throughout the campaign, he's come back time and time again to the message of hope and possibility, invoking the idea that we can achieve all things. That we can become and be what we want. That all things are possible.

That's the most important quality of any President: the ability to inspire hope in times of great peril. The times we're living in.

Hope inspires faith, and faith calms all things.

These days, hope is a priceless commodity. An intangible asset that can be valued only by how people respond.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't think so.

In this election hope trumped all else.

Too Much Time on my Hands . . .

I’ve been off work since Thursday at 5:00 p.m., and I’m amazed by all the things I can get taken care of if I don’t have to go to work. I got ink for the printer, unloaded the dishwasher, did laundry, took Shannon out for lunch, went to the grocery, cooked a fabulous chicken, unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher and picked up the dry cleaning. I also paid rent and the water bill, along with a couple of other bills, filled up the car and got it washed.

(Baby was horrible-dirty. Between the landscaping and construction on this property and the mall being demolished across the street, the dust gets a little heavy some times.)

This morning, though, my eyes are swollen, and they burn. The bathroom wall collapsed in on itself a week ago, and it’s been sealed off since. The water damage that had accrued and been neglected over the years reached the point where the tiles no longer stuck to the walls around the tub. They starting falling off in sheets and left water-logged wallboard covered in mold exposed.

In theory, we have 2 bathrooms, but since the toilet and tub for the master bath are in the contaminated area, we really have 1 bathroom and an extra sink. I sealed the mold room off with clear plastic packing tape and a towel as best I could. The worst part is that the sealed-off room has the tub with handicapped grab bars for Shannon. They were supposed to already have them in the other tub by now, so I’m guessing that, since they don’t, the great mold makeover may take a while longer than I had anticipated.

And the Democrats won’t stop calling. On Saturday, I called the county Party office and the state Party office to tell them that enough is enough. I voted over a week ago, so they’re wasting my time as well as theirs. Still, over Friday and Saturday, we had about a dozen calls from one or both of them. I don’t think it was the national Party, because Obama has no chance of winning Texas. He’ll take Travis County handily, but we’ll be one of only a few counties where that happens.

Other races on the state and local level, though, remain important. The carpet-bagger who took over my newly-gerrymandered US Congressional district a few years ago faces serious competition. The man who used to represent me and got gerrymandered out of my district has little to no competition. In Travis County, TX, home of old-fashioned Texas liberalism, old hippies and intellectuals, the US Congressional map is so contorted that it looks like nothing so much as water draining down a toilet. Or a satellite picture of a hurricane about to make landfall. Or a black hole.

Take your pick of analogies. One is about as apt as the other. And appetizing.

We met Shannon’s mother and sister-in-law down south for lunch earlier today. Just one more thing I was able to fit into my fun-filled 4 days off. His mother’s about 80, but spry as ever. She’s as excited about the upcoming election as me, so I’m sure the other diners enjoyed our sometimes-animated conversation. She doesn’t hear so well anymore, so I had to talk louder than I would have otherwise done. They got an ear full, I’m sure.

And his sister-in-law is still going through chemo for uterine cancer after undergoing a radical hysterectomy last month. She’s putting on a brave face, but I could tell it’s wearing her down. “2 more rounds,” she said. “Then we’ll see.”

I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I took another nice, long nap this afternoon. The clock continues to confuse my body. It’s already getting dark, and if I had worked today, I’d just be getting home. It will take weeks to adjust. But I’m sure I’ll be up half the night tomorrow watching election returns, so I’m not sure the time change is going to matter too much over the next few days.

And I’m taking inauguration day off if Obama wins. It will be an historic day that I want to see for myself in its entirety. I didn’t think I would live to see a black president. I thought a woman was more likely to come first. (She almost did, but that’s another story.) And a voice of hope and unity when it seems like to sky is falling makes my heart sing instead of sink.

Enough is Enough is Always Enough

I have received so many campaign calls, many of them from machines that don't understand "Leave me the hell alone", that I finally snapped yesterday. I called both the county and state Democratic Parties to see if they were responsible and to tell them to quit. They're also going to get this letter by mail (although what they get will include name, address and phone number, details that I'm not publishing online for many reasons).

I encourage anyone who is being harassed by any political party or candidate by phone to do the same. I may accomplish little, but it sure feels good to tell them to leave me the hell alone in my home.

The calls have stopped, for now. We'll see.

Click image to enlarge.