New blog: Check it out!

I have posted new photos on my other blog at www.aarp.org/community/renrae

That blog contains my birding journals. I am currently taking two weekly bird walks at either Havenswood State Forest, in Milwaukee, WI or at Kletsch Park along the Milwaukee River in Glendale. This is the first year that I have followed the spring migration weekly. It is interesting to note the chronology of bird arrivals.

My husband's photo of Iguasu Falls in Argentina (above) got bookmarked by the communityhost of AARP blog site.

Among my world wide travel photos at that site, the elephant photo got the most hits, nearly twice as many as any of the other photos in that album. I wonder why! I have a whole series of elephant photos leading up to this one. Perhaps I should locate the whole series on the aarp site. Check it out and let me know if you want to see more of these anatomically correct photos. Interestingly, our guide told us that these two elephants were both males, because they were in a herd of young males, traveling together. Females and their offspring are in other herds and a male and female only is together long enough to mate. This photo raises a question about that or else young male elephants are like dolphins and humans.

The farmer and the Jew story.

     I am a frustrated writer. That means for years I have scribbled all sorts of thoughts, dialogues, smidgins of plots, and fictional scenes. I have a large trunk full of these scribblings. I have even come up with a title for my dreamed of book -- "Jewish Stories by a Schikza." I am a schikza and I certainly have the stories from my 43 years of marriage to an Israeli sabra. I have been working on this book to some degree lately. The following story which, I think, shall appear in the book,  is true and speaks to the stereotypical thinking that would provide the background and guts of my "Schikza" book.
     Click on Read More below to read one of the stories from my future book.

The Farmer Story

     I grew up in a small town in northern Illinois. My father was a livestock trucker there. He bought hogs for Cudahy Packing Co in Cudahy, WI for many years. When Amos and I would go down to Pecatonica to visit my folks, sometimes my father would have to go and pick up some pigs at a farm or would have to visit a farmer regarding shipping the livestock. One time Dad said he had to go out to a farm and look at some hogs. I think the farmer wanted to know if Dad thought they were grown enough to ship to market. So Dad asked Amos to come along. When they got to the farm, Dad had to go with the farmer across the barnyard to look at the pigs. It had rained and the barnyard was in typical barnyard shape with mud and wet manure. Amos had his good shoes on, so the farmer suggested he just wait in the milkhouse; Dad and the farmer would be right back. The farmer was in the middle of milking, and two cows were stanchioned in the dairy with the milking machine on. Well, Dad and the farmer were gone a long time. Amos had milked in Israel and he began looking at the cows, and noted that they were done. He thought to himself that if the milking machines kept pumping much more, they might start to draw blood. These cows were ready to be moved out. So when there was still no sign of Dad and the farmer, Amos removed the milking machines and released the two cows in the dairy, brought two more waiting cows in, fastened them in the stanchion, cleaned off their udders, and fastened the milking machines on both cows.

A short while later here comes the farmer, ON THE RUN, into the barn. He had remembered that he had those two cows milking there. Then he stopped suddenly, looked at the two cows,  obviously realized they were not the two cows he had left milking. He looked around the barn to see if anyone else was there. Had his wife come out to change the cows? He saw no one else. He looked again at the cows, then at Amos, then at my Dad and back again. Then he looked back at my Dad again, and said, “I thought you said he was a Jew!”

    For most of you readers this is funny and self explanatory. But for those who might need a little explanation. This is a totally stereotypic statement by this farmer. He is expressing what the typical American, especially the rural American thinks is a Jew. He is probably a merchant or a lawyer, or a businessman, maybe thought to be a little bit shady, but certainly not a farmer. For Amos to know how to milk, goes against the very definition in this farmer’s mind. That’s why the farmer responded this way.

     But this also meant that my father had announced to this farmer at sometime, perhaps when they were walking through the barnyard that his son in law was a Jew. It was still a sign of my father’s rawness in dealing with his new son in law that he would make such a statement to the farmer.

     Yet the ridiculousness of either view needs to be considered. Biblical Jews were farmers. Israeli Jews are farmers, but also members of every profession known to man. Eastern European Jews including my father in law and my mother in law’s families were farmers also. Where did this idea that a Jew couldn’t be a farmer start? Where did the stereotype of a Jew as a shady merchant start? Why is that view part of our rural American hinterland? Well, I can’t answer that. But my marriage to Amos and my husband Amos himself has done at least a little to contravert that stereotype at least in my hometown. Meanwhile I tell this story to all my Jewish friends and they get it. They nod their head knowingly. Racial and ethnic prejudice seems to be part of the human condition. We must work very hard to break these stereotypes down if our ethical and intellectual evolution as a species is to continue.

Havenwood: Nature Notes: Patterns

Here's a site I found which shows a wonderful view of nature. There's a nice poem on it right now, and some great photos. Posted by an Indiana couple, I think written by the wife, after moving to a farm and therefore really appreciating nature.
Havenwood: Nature Notes: Patterns

Also, VERY IMPORTANT! I have established another blog. I seem to have been overcome by this blogosphere thing. What happened was -- I got on the AARP site and discovered that I can put a blog on that site for free. I have decided to make that site my Birdwatching journal and also a photo album of some of our travel shots and eventually some of my hubby's shots of birds of the world. Here is the new site:

http://www.aarp.org/community/renrae

Did you ever google yourself or your family members?

I am not talking about tickling your little grandson to make him giggle, or goosing your great aunt to make her scream or any other physical handling of another person. I am talking about entering a personal name into google and running a search on that name.
 I have done this occasionally over the years. When we first built our "castle" on Lake Michigan a local community newspaper did an article on the architect who designed our house and extended the subject to people who do teardowns on the lake and erect a large new home. We were among the first people to do that in our location, so we were in the forefront. My husband has always been rather private, but surprisingly he allowed the reporter to take a picture of us standing out behind our house. And they wrote about our intentions when we built our home. I think that article is still on the Internet. At one time, my husband had a traffic speeding ticket which appeared for a while on the Internet. I had a few sites relative to my medical practice. Otherwise our background is pretty quiet on the Internet. I know from viewing some other names on a Google that donating to a political campaign gets you listed with the political party and the amount you donated. Not everyone wants that.

     I had googled my grown kids in the past but not for a long time. So one night a week ago I googled my kids. Lo and behold there's all kinds of  hits. Our younger son of course has his facebook account. I had never asked his permission to enter that sacred site. What 35 year old single California dude wants his mother to go on his Facebook account? (Sort of by accident, his father recently opened a Facebook account and automatically permission request was sent to our son, because his email was in our address book. He said he agonized over it but finally approved his father. Mostly I think we will stay away from that site.)  On the google list, going through old volleyball reports, and even a scholar athlete listing on our son from high school years, here was a year old posting listing a patent that this engineer son had earned. When we spoke with him about it, he wasn't too impressed. He said there were two other names on the patent with his, etc, Yadda Yadda, yadda. But to his mother, this was a big deal. He had invented a special nozzle for inserting a chemcial into a jet engine that would serve to de-superheat the metal in the engine and therefore allow greater combustion, force, and speed to be produced. His parents were impressed.

     Then I googled my oldest son. Now he is an associate professor of surgery at University of Indiana, in Indianapolis, so I expected listings of him as a doctor, and his publications that have been put on the Web. But I didn't expect a video on YouTube. Indeed, someone had put one of his video's which he creates to teach his on the edge operative procedures. This one showed his hands prepping the abdomen for the surgery, and then the single three chamber port he had developed for doing lap band surgery with one incision. Then for the rest of the video, I saw the instruments working inside the abdomen to place that lap band. There was not a quiver; there were just very precise movements. For a mother, knowing your son is at the other end of those instruments is terrific. 

     A very rewarding google session!

Purchasing another home

     The last 10 days have been an emotional roller coaster.

    
 At our respective advanced ages of 73 and 66 respectively, my husband and I are looking for a second home in Indianapolis, IN.  Our son is a professor of surgery there at University of Indiana in Indianapolis. He has a family there. And there are our two grandsons. We go down there every several weeks to couple months and stay with them to participate in the development of those boys. We have always felt welcome in their home. My daughter in law has never done anything but to welcome us and maintains strongly that she wants us there. But we still feel sometimes that we are intruding. Sometimes we would like to stay longer, especially when the two grandsons get older and have school events for us to see. So that is one reason for us to consider purchasing a place there. A second reason: we know we at some point need to downsize. We have lived here now for 12 years and have managed to add more "stuff" to the stuff that we moved here from our ranch home. I don't want to stick our kids with the same mess that my folks had accumulated. Also we will not be able to maintain our large home and lot ourselves as the years advance. And if something does happen to one of us, the other will likely need a smaller place closer to family. So we think that if we purchase a condominium in Indy near some water, maybe it will be more attractive to us and might wean us away from that Lake Michigan view here. Over the last few years we have occasionally house hunted there but not seriously. But now with the economy cooperating in producing a buyer's market, we have looked more seriously.   

         Several months ago we found a condo on a small lake that we liked. It was move-in ready, we thought. But then at the second viewing when we were thinking of giving an offer, our real estate agent showed us a letter that stated that some major support work had been done on the cement slab it is built on and in the crawl space under part of the home. Now we had some investigative work to do. We found out that the home had a 5+ inch difference from one side of its floor to the other. That is pretty extreme. Yet we couldn't see any sign of cracking that would indicate this was recent. Some piers had recently been sunk along one side to try to stabilize it. Well, we didn't think we wanted to risk structural problems, but we went back and looked at the house again. This time we saw all the cracks in the marble tile floor and the missing grout. The kitchen and hall floor had moved a lot. So that house was out.

     Two weekends ago we were visiting our kids in Indy and went looking at homes again. The realtor found this single family home on Crystal Lake (Indy people call this a lake; here we would call it a pond). It actually is a bunch of ponds that fill old stone quarry holes. The house is a two story with the master bedroom downstairs and 2 bedrooms and a library/den upstairs. It is a single family but the landscape and snow removal is supplied by an association as with a condominium. We liked this house a lot and went back to look at it a second time. Though these homes are pretty close together along the lake shore, this one sits at an angle on a cul de sac and therefore will always have a little more space around it.

 The views from the windows are nice, but we noticed according to the platte map, the neighbor had placed about a dozen evergreen trees and a couple deciduous trees in the common area between us and the lake in order to shield his deck area from view. Those trees were not much of a problem now but would grow up to cut off about 30% of our lake view -- that portion that we should see out of our family room and dinnette -- right where we would sit to have our morning coffee with a water view. Well, offers and counteroffers flew back and forth between us and the owner who now lives in Great Britain. We finally had an agreement that if the homeowners' association agreed to have the trees removed, we would buy. Those trees were not supposed to be placed in the common area. Our potential home had a guaranteed lake view. But, in spite of multiple telephone communications, we received word on Monday that the homeowners' association would not do anything. They didn't want to take on the other owner and didn't feel that we had a problem with the trees because they were not tall enough to interfere with the view at this time. They advised us we could come back to them in the future if the trees became a problem. Great! We were upset; we had sort of formed a small attachment to this property, imagining where I would put what furniture, thinking about buying a pontoon boat for the lake, etc --something you are not supposed to do. But we turned down the offer and let it run out due to the concern about the trees and the fact that the association didn't want to do anything about what another owner had done in the common area.

     My husband spent a lot of time on this deal -- a whole 10 days. With his usual meticulous nature, he had a lender lined up, and an inspector. He did a lot of research on both properties. The realtor who had the listing is a very large company in Indianapolis, perhaps the largest. We had an agent from a much smaller firm. My husband also was dealing with a smaller bank as well. He made a statement that I had never heard him make before, though he said they used this statement all the time at his workplace years ago. Cover your ears! This is not a gentle pretty statement. He said "Elephants always like to fuck elephants." He meant that this very large real estate company would probably not do anything about the trees or the purchase. He was already figuring that the deal would go sour.

     Here's the view of the little lake. It's nice but you can see the right end of the trees at the left of the picture.

     We're still contemplating what to do. My husband wants to look for a small single family home on some water, something that does not have an association to deal with. But we both are still thinking of this home on Crystal Lake even with its trees. We now plan to drive down to Indy next week and see if there are any other homes to look at. And we will make some kind of decision then. I don't recall us agonizing over all the several properties we have purchased in the past. Not over our original ranch home (although my husband reminded me that he kept a budget for months to determine if we could afford that first place), not over the Lake Michigan property on which we built our current castle, not over the duplex in Madison, WI where our older son lived while going to school there,  not over the condo in CA where our younger son lived when he went to school,  and not over the various rental units that we have owned over the years. Why are we agonizing so much over this one? I don't think it is financial. Our first home was purchased when we were very financially at risk, my husband with a new job, and me still finishing medical school. So why are we so uncertain now? I have concluded that it might be a feature of being older. Maybe we are just more set in our ways, less flexible. My husband volunteered that he is worrying about the economy, about building that is still to take place around that home, and just a lot of what-ifs. I don't know. It is just different this time and we don't seem to be dealing with the possible changes very well.

     I am reminded of our attempt to purchase a large home in Milwaukee where the grounds were also maintained by an association. We also fell in love with that home. But the offer was not quite turned in expeditiously because our agent was on vacation. And a sister in law of the listing realtor wanted the house, put in a bid just over ours that arrived before ours and got the house. We were very disappointed that time also. But what happened? We began looking at Lake Michigan properties and did our teardown and built our current castle, which we just love. So maybe something else entirely is in store for us. Will keep you all posted about what happens!