Mike Higgins for the People!

I wish I had a vote in Farmington, New Mexico. Just this once.

Thanks Mike, once more. I needed a gentle jostle. Life's been a bit akimbo and harsh lately. Some of take a while to learn, I suppose.
Of course, it's summer here. Which means 65-75 farenheit with wind (nearly always) sun (a fair chance) and rain (wait, here it comes). And culture's a-flowing by fest and so forth.
Most significantly, I meet the first family visitor to the underside of this sweet planet. My brother Sean and his girl Eva will make the journey this week. Spending about 5 days in Wellington before zooming off to the south island glaciers next week. There'll be cycling and sauvignon blanc, fotos and feasting.

So, I've heard a little about this public office thing. Can you fill me in when you have the chance, Mike?

I haven't heard from you.....

Of course, that's because I haven't checked your blog. I only was reminded today because I have started a new blog for the purpose of contacting those who wish to communicate with me in my capacity as a Trustee for the San Juan College Board. I decided to be a candidate when our local district member resigned his expiring term early so that a replacement could be installed during the last board meeting of the year. He has now been an incumbent for about ½ hour, but the hope was since without any publicity there wouldn't likely be anyone else running, and with no one else running, the incumbent would be a "shoe-in". I decided that I needed to be a spoiler. Here I am, and with a small and short campaign (the election is on March 3rd) I have a very good chance to win. I'm not sure how many other volunteer jobs I'll need to quit in order to serve well, but I am looking forward to winning. My blog is Mike Higgins for the People.
I've heard a little from Tom, and, of course, I talked shortly with you in August when I was in Denver when you called. You sounded good then , and it sounded like you were working toward some goals, and on your way well.
I'll try to check in to the blog more often..
mike

Avenues of interest

Retrospective: 43 Appointees; Bush the worst Prez ever?

A Look back: Onion Headlines (brilliant!)

Wingsuit base jumping!

Happy New Year! Behold the Beast: Draw back the curtain on the worst of 2008
An excerpt from # 43: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.
Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.

Cognitive Biases (Is the only reason this hasn't been edited off wikipedia because no one can be bothered to care?)
Times are tough. Ford Tough!Pictures!
Riding around in circles at 200mph was always the answer....

Honey Laundering: not as sweet as it sounds (from the excellent series by the Seattle PI--soon to be RIP?)

Fun Blog: Stuff Journalists Like

Continuing our exploration of a (still somehow) fascinating world: worm gruntin!

Banks Peninsula

This was October on the Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. A long weekend of hikes, wine, and a great boat ride given by the proprietor of the French Bay Backpacker (a wonderful place). And I piloted a Smartcar!
In November I visited Nelson, a favorite city I'd not seen in 4 years. Even warmer, there were more wonderful meals, riding walking and a Beer Fete! No pics however.

Upon return from the states, good things began to happen. Namely winters grip was broken, most of all. The first signs were gained on the Ministry's field trip and induction in the 'city' of Gisborne. Around 25 of us toured the forests, farms and such getting dirty and hearing all about our stakeholders in that part of the nation. Here we are meeting some, including a truffle hound! Those are special oaks in whose root systems the shrooms thrive. He did too, after failing as a Biosecurity dog, he does fantastically here.

While I'm basking in the mems and fotos of the summer\winter (JULY!), I want to post two of my favorite young sons. From Colorado, Landon and Cormac.

9000+ miles: It's just stuff

In July on a very hot afternoon, my good friend Beaner and I loaded all our things in Colorado.

Then in October, in a gale morning storm it disgorged its precious cargo (made moreso, and less) in Wellington.

A box of stuff.

Does Natural-Gas Drilling Endanger Water Supplies?

What motivates the breeders? I've long wondered...

Relatedly ('Stop Making Sense!')

Climate Change Excerpt: In his fascinating book Carbon Detox, George Marshall argues that people are not persuaded by information. Our views are formed by the views of the people with whom we mix. Of the narratives that might penetrate these circles, we are more likely to listen to those that offer us some reward. A story that tells us that the world is cooking and that we'll have to make sacrifices for the sake of future generations is less likely to be accepted than the more rewarding idea that climate change is a conspiracy hatched by scheming governments and venal scientists, and that strong, independent-minded people should unite to defend their freedoms.

He proposes that instead of arguing for sacrifice, environmentalists should show where the rewards might lie: that understanding what the science is saying and planning accordingly is the smart thing to do, which will protect your interests more effectively than flinging abuse at scientists. We should emphasise the old-fashioned virtues of uniting in the face of a crisis, of resourcefulness and community action. Projects like the transition towns network and proposals for a green new deal tell a story which people are more willing to hear.

Talking Thresholds

The 20 Healthiest Foods for Under $1

End in '010?!?!

Car Review?

(a big blog) Sigh

Looking back at the beach before the wave overtakes you

What to do?

and why (favorite blog of late)

More neat bugs: (beginning to think laying low was it all along)

Mini mag

Today I had splendid chocolate cake by the sea at the foot of the cliffs that face the South island. Many miles away, the peaks were laden with abundant snow. The sun shone bright, attempts toward spring are being made. Soon the seals will return, hauling their frames out of the waves where orcas fear to tread. Good times....

Ford: Like the worst uncle in the world. Always late, on the dole, living on the past, and gives his best somewhere else. Ford Tough!

Is nothing pure? No safety in this illusion either....

Great Journeys all together on a map

Conspiracy spoiler: chemtrails. One of the better write-ups on the subject

Gasp! Got air?

What a story: PapaJack Weil, Denver icon

This one goes back 120 generations

Mega edition

Six ways from sunday

As if two decades of watching 'COPS' weren't enough:

What is GEOS?
I dunno, but maybe my Arvada friends Bean and Tom, will.

Don't Look up: Canada

Dandelion rubber?

Snips from this nyt article on hurricanes in Florida:

A dangerous level of complacency

For many, though, the message has yet to register.

“My concern is that they will get the religion at the very last moment,” he said. “Then they want everybody to help them at the very last moment, a stroke of good luck: “there is hurricane amnesia.”

“It’s human nature,” an overconfidence in the strength of their homes.

Bring it down now: Jumping on Eggs

Nano: Why ask why; it may one day save us from ourselves, and other nonsense

Faith in humanity; bring on the pooting preacher!

From Peak Metals: What the world needs, Mr Hiemstra said, is “breakthrough thinking on every level about everything"

I see the latest in EcoJohns is propane incineration? (Maybe if it heats the outhouse!)
I dunno, why can't we continue to flush 16 gallons of drinking water each time?!?

Time Reckonings

and perhaps other complex astronomical.....stuff

This is amusing (what can afford not to be these days?), yet I dunno ?!?!? Of all the novel, buck-making schemes.....

Another on 'Green Crude'

USNews on Leaving America

Perhaps just in time, as Der Homeland is evermore being secured:
"an increasing number of international travelers have reported that their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices have been taken

The policies cover "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form," including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover "all papers and other written documentation," including books, pamphlets and "written materials commonly referred to as 'pocket trash' or 'pocket litter.' "

Reading, reading, reading

Food: what the heck is in it?
And do we care any more?

En Masse Return

Well, I've meant to tell the horror story of my return flights to the new country for two weeks now. Perhaps the trauma has subsided enough finally that I should do so before I forget any more details.
Things that were good:
Having a couple of days following the load and send-off of the shipping container to 'chill' (being 96 fahrenheit, that's all one could do anyway) with my great friends, the Sheridans.
Relatedly, having all day really before my flight left to figure out the dismantling of the vintage Nishiki roadbike into a box for transfer. With my friends (they're always up for a challenge--they've two boys!).
Flight seating: I must have had some karmic backlog here because despite the circumstances my legs and I fared well.
As I get older I find that saying goodbye never gets easier; though I can count on subtle differences to 'keep it real'. Doing so this time around was harder knowing how much is not known about the trajectory of all of our lives. But there'd have been no goodbye without time spent!
Things that have given me more gray hair:
The baggage folks at Denver United did their best with my freakish load. They were capable, smart, patient and empathetic. They walked the line between cutting me slack and 'toeing the line' of their newly amended baggage rules.
I'd known it would be harder then ever (in our short memory) to buck the system or make good with the goods I was bringing. The bags and cartons were carefully selected for their qualities:
--multiple small bags for transfer\fold-up\strap to one another utility--these became a single carry-on with room to spare.
--A cheap ($5) cardboard carton (well the brand rocked--CAnnondale) reinforced to contain the aforementioned road bike in the cargo hold. Tommie and I worked for over an hour to take off various protruberant sharp bits and fit them in the carton. We did real good!
--A hardcase ordered special by Beth to protect and to carry her smaller(!) keyboard to New Zealand. Stuffed--to the chagrin of Customs I'm sure--with chocolate and other contraband.
--Two quite large, quite heavy checked bags (one a padded backpack, one a huge duffel) on which I'd spent at least two hours shifting the loads that morning in the Sheridans basement. Containing many winter clothes and other useful items. The scale at the counter started out saying 57 and 47 pounds, but in five minutes I was within legality and without penalty. It was stressful but amusing.
We negotiated the business end of things and (tho I knew it was coming) I payed several hundred dollars for the overweight and oversize keyboard in a case to make the flight. I was, of course (whose?) packing for two.

So I was through! It was almost as relieving as signing off on the container! With two hours to kill, I had a couple of microbrews and used the free wi-fi before I went through security (minor search) and caught the flight to LA. Step one down.
We were delayed on the tarmac for nearly an hour and the pilot gave contradicting explanations until we took off. The flight was quick (two hours and some?), and I was glad to have an hour and a half layover there instead of the EIGHT AND A HALF I'd had coming through before. Fatigue was apparently already creeping in, as I was confused by the time zone changeover, factoring in the delay, etc. Never the less, content that I did not have to collect my bags for transfer from domestic to International, I settled into the wi-fi area of THE International terminal where I'd spent the above mentioned day. After double checking the fact that I did not have to collect those checked bags with a concierge.
An hour or so later I sauntered (as much as one might through the JFK-ian tunnel that led to gate D-23, quite a walk actually) to find that it did not exist. Or rather it did, as I'd been assured along the (temporary construction) way, in fact it was the last gate. Except that at the end of the line, there was an escalator down to another level. No signs save the dividing up of 23 to B and C (A was nowhere to be seen). There was no staff at either gate, so I verified that the teens at gate B were catching a flight to Australia. Up and down the escalator to no avail again, and back out through the two security checkpoints in that tunnel asking all the way. Panic now rose, as the flight would leave in 15 minutes and I had no reason to believe that it existed in my vicinity. Authorities did not exist, only TSA 'specialists', all of whom assured me that it was over there somewhere. At this point a half dozen persons had looked at my ticket and could not diagnose where from the flight left. I was sweating.
No longer interested in being so helpless, I went ignored these assurances and pushed back out to the main (Penn Station-esque) hall. Swarming now with travellers to destinations all over Austral-Asia, I had to push my way through brazenly dull stares to get to the door or the terminal. Here, a venerable LA concierge looked at my ticket and said, "Air New Zealand, they leave from terminal 4, way over there"! He pointed around the u-shape to the end. I ran.
I pushed past the passengers dis-gorging from their petro-mobiles and sprinted around the U. I paused, and said 'there's no way', and then I ran on. It was close to a mile when I saw the ANZ signs. I ran into the nearly deserted door and around and through all of the dividers to...another security checkpoint. Sweat now poured off of me, having run through the LA evening dressed for a Southern hemisphere winter. I begged the staff to cut me some slack as we went through the x-rays. Off came the shoes. Beep. Violation. They marked me for search.
As I'd run into this terminal, my name was announced with the warning 'final boarding call'. Now I was soaked through my clothes, belongings spread out on a table, trying to find my passport and tie my shoes while a 20 year old young man went through the duty of asking me why I'd stuffed power bars in my coffee cannister. I beseeched him to free me as they made another announcement. That's me I said, brandishing my passport and noticing the time. He glanced around at his peers, and let me go.
Streaming items stuffed back in my bag, clothes flying I ran headlong for the gate. This terminal was wide and finished, which meant I could juke and cut around people as I went. I now had a feeling simultaneous of despair and great humor, like a cosmic joke was being played on me. On the long mile run outside between terminals, I'd played likelihoods in my mind and determined that I really did not want to spend 24 hours at LAX, miserable and unpaid by work. That is why, when I came around the corner and saw the correct effing gate--I knew they would let me on. Even if they had to ferry me across the tarmac on a baggage truck to a speeding jumbo jet. I was getting on the plane. The staff didn't bat an eye. They radio-ed through to the locked and loaded plane that I'd turned up and I was sped onboard. Fellow passenger did bat an eye at the sweaty, disheveled guy with the half-cocked grin who got on the plane. Especially the two lovebirds I was seated next to--in the emergency aisle.
Fourteen hours later we arrived in Auckland at dawn. We were late, there was weather (winter had truly begun while I was in the States, as it has continued in that globally warming way), and I thought I was meant to collect my checked baggage for Customs. I waited for an hour at the carousel, another half hour at the claim area, and then I ran (yes to another terminal). Through the rain. It was cold--in the forties. Apparently I do clearer thinking at that speed.
Not only did they not have my bags (though only after time spent waiting did I find that they were to have gone on though to Wellington without collecting), but that they were not in the country. No one could tell me where they were.
So I ran to catch my connection to Wellington, because I had to win some battles, right?!?

I missed the plane. Directed to a ticketing desk, I was first made to understand that I would have to pay for another. I begged to differ, and they relented. An hour later I was on the last leg into Wellington.
In Wellington, the howling winds brought it below freezing. The seas had no regard for any of this, and as much as I was able, neither did I.

A new set of challenges had to be dealt with.

Postscript: The bags arrived two and a half days later.

More to read

Bigfoot is everywhere

Higher Learning: Berea College

the Green Boondoggle: 1.0. Hindsight

the Spoils of Patriots

(t)he Americans who built the nation's nuclear weapons are still fighting a cold war.

Tens of thousands of sick nuclear arms workers — have never seen a dime. (snip)
the government has derailed aid to workers by keeping reports secret from them, constantly changing rules and delaying cases until sick workers died.

Many ill workers have become mired in a process so adversarial that top program officials at one point considered putting some of them under government surveillance — spying on them

from the rOCKY mOUNTAIN nEWS

Someone else's idea

For that's what most of us are looking for, shopping you might say.

To that Sex in the City, Pyramid scheming, DOW obsessed, interior decorating, Oprah worshipping, man or woman I suggest that maybe, just maybe:

"YOU ARE NOT HERE TO BECOME HAPPY; YOU ARE HERE TO BECOME CONSCIOUS..."

Eckhart Tolle

Fall to Spring to Summer to Winter

There is so much to write about, yet I seem to have few words to say. I'll start with what's most remiss: my gratitude and thanks to those in the States. To those I did not see for their understanding, and especially to those with whom I was able to spend some time. It was rich.
Words cannot properly express (in a so-called normal visit) the joy and the pain, the pleasure and the gap in having that time together, Even harder in these days has it been to see you and carry onward.
The title is a reference to the temporal traipse that took me from the solstice in the Southern hemisphere to the other side of the world in it's (other) solstice. It could have been interstellar travel for all I knew as the reel of daily life had little reference save gravity's pull.
And I hate to use the descriptor, but it was surreal seeing everyone still carrying on in their lives. I don't know what I expected to see--and I was touched frequently at the poignancy I felt in each everyone's presence.
It is always such a tug at the heart to come (some say) home. I'd wondered if I was more vulnerable to that in the circumstances--and concluded i'd just see. Yet the same things that have always driven me mad with their power; the complacency, resignation, the apathy; racism, rationalization and distraction all in the midst of great intellegence; the trashing of a great land; the congestion, pollution and entitlement. It's still a drag, and there's evermore no excuse.
Never more in my life's experience has the bounty, the spoils of the world market been so apparent. Had I any sense, I may have loaded a container for a lifetime, maxing out my credit card, so cheap were the prices I was seeing in the midwest and Colorado. Candy, water barrels, books and clothes, building materials, make-up, you name it. For it is all.more.expensive.elsewhere.
But I was not thinking any more of a lifetime. The dream of building a home had been borne away, as if by some fierce channel winds. It was all I could do to just be. with whom. I was.
A lot of recovery was done while I was in the States. No one told me what to do (Bless You!)--we simply talked, did stuff, got some things that needed, done. Sorting through some physical boxes of, well things; just talking and being together was the best medicine I couldn't ask for.
One that there is no prescription for (me, yet) in New Zealand.

You have my eternal gratitude (in only an unweighted temporal, time order!):
Mom, Christopher, guy at the phone shop who set me up for pennies, the memory of my grandparents, Tom Mc, law enforcement between Ohio and Colorado for not suspecting me in my rented Soprano-mobile, North Coast Brewery (not a sponsor, unfortunately it's the other way around) the Sheridan family, Diana H., M&m Mars Co. and Darryl. Each of you really, really helped and enriched me.

Love, love love~~!

Jesse

Excellent reads

New Yorker: Turf Wars

Kiwi Solutions

The latest thing you've never heard of that could save our skin

More Fruits from our garden of eden

More stuff I liked

It's a gas, gas gas.

Road rage, desk rage?

More on bees: maybe it's simpler than previously thought.

Losing my religion: the Gospel of Consumption

World Heritage Sites: collect them from the comfort of home!

Hope for a life less Plastic:
the Blog

Cynical yet? super size indeed. No mention of the fact that it costs to re-design packaging the latest con

Solar: new directions?