Vagina Dialogues, Revisited

I stopped at Trader Joe's to pick up some wine and noshes on Friday, before heading out of town with my girl peeps.  "Have fun, and behave yourself!" said the cheerful clerk.  (They're always cheerful at Trader Joe's.  It's part of the job description.)

"Make up your mind," I said hilariously.  "Have fun, or behave myself?"  Aaahhh-hahahahaha.  I do love my own sense of humor.

This group of peeps has vacayed together before; the stories are recounted in Vagina Dialogues I, II, III and IV.  This trip we were down three members (four if you include L-Tiny): Vespinator moved to Germany (how rude), Rock Star is promoting her new CD on a 10-day Midwest tour, and the Professor is re-prioritizing.  

We navigated Friday night traffic, met up with peeps along the way, and came up with the first catch-phrase of the weekend:  "This trip is a well-oiled machine," J. Cool kept saying, "Well-oiled machine.  Everything is under control and running smoothly."  This, after she spent an hour-and-a-half driving less than ten miles from her house to my house.

We finally arrived at the cabin in the woods around 10 p.m., and we were more than ready to tip a glass of wine or two.  Somehow we stayed up well past midnight--two of us until 3 a.m.--eating cheese and drinking wine with labels like Pirate Booty and Evil Twin.  Our conversational topics included boyfriends, movies, kids, jobs, house renovating, and the pronunciation of "gor-GON-zola" and "PAP-ricka."

We also discussed our plans to go kayaking the next morning, which ONE OF US had spent HOURS researching and planning.  After the long drive and several glasses of wine, the thought of spending a couple of damp hours testing our upper body strength against a swift current did not sound appealing to one or two group members.  Actually, all of them, except me.

The next morning we again debated the merits of going kayaking on the scenic Pigeon River.  The day was overcast and chilly, and the stakeholders were sort of inclined to noodle around antique shops and go to wine tastings rather than getting in touch with their inner outdoorswoman.

"It's so gloomy," one whined.

"My broken rib still hurts," complained the accident-prone one.

"I hate nature," said a third.

"Two-and-a-half hours?" they chorused.  "My muscles are sore just thinking about it."

We put Skip, the cheerful and obliging shop-keeper at Kayak-Kayak in Holland, MI, on speaker-phone.  "Tell you what," he said tinnily.  "Come on over to the shop, and I'll drive you down to the river.  If it's raining too much, I'll refund all your money."  This was a more-than-reasonable offer, and we headed up to Holland.  (Or is that down to Holland?  I'm bad at geography.)  It started drizzling, then really raining on the drive up, and Bob the Builder could not let it go.

"Here, E. Peevie," she said helpfully, "you can borrow my sunglasses."  Beat.  "They'll keep the rain out of your eyes."  Squeak, squeak, swish, swish went the wipers as we followed Skip and his trailer of brightly colored kayaks down the highway.

"I'm just going to close my eyes and imagine I'm sitting by a fireplace holding a glass of wine," Bob said.  I threw a Look at her, but even I was starting to wonder if maybe this was not a great idea after all. 

"How far away is this place?" we wondered, as the miles blurred by; and the rain kept coming.  We had thought it was a mile or two up the road, but--maybe because of the rain, and because of Bob the Builder's unrelenting teasing--it seemed like we were traveling to another state.

Finally, we pulled over and bounced down a rutted road.  Skip backed his trailer up against the shore and started unloading kayaks.  A tiny sliver of blue sky appeared, but the clouds kept drizzling, and we pulled our hoods and hats down over our faces.  Skip pointed us to the life jackets, but reassured the hydrophobes among us that the river would rarely be more than a few feet deep.  He pulled a blue tandem kayak off the trailer and dragged it to the water's edge.

"This one's ours, J.Cool," I said.  The others were all taking singles, but J.Cool has back issues, and I had volunteered to be her chief paddler. We climbed in, and Skip pushed us off the shore.  We paddled out into the middle of the gentle current and waited for the singles kayaks to join us.  Spike found a rhythm easily, and quickly turned out into the current; BrokeGirl wasn't very far behind.

But Queen and Bob the Builder, OMG.  They spent some time talking over paddling strategy with Skip, and then he pushed them away from the beach.  Bob headed straight into the weeds on the opposite bank; and Queen paddled in circles.  Bob freed herself from the river flora, turned herself around, and paddled back across to the other bank; and Queen paddled in circles.

J. Cool and I drifted and watched the unfolding drama of Urban Girls v. Pigeon River, periodically calling out to them supportively.  And by "calling out to them supportively," I mean "laughing hysterically."

"Shut the eff up!" Queen yelled, somehow switching from clockwise circles to counter-clockwise circles.

Eventually, the comedy portion of the kayaking expedition ended, and our group meandered down the Pigeon River.  The sky drizzled, stopped, and drizzled some more; the sun made occasional promises, but failed to deliver.  We disturbed a great blue heron, who lifted up from the shallows and spread his blue-gray wings against the gray-blue sky.  A hundred yards further down, we startled his mate, who also flapped languidly away.  A pair of wood ducks floated in the weeds, barely glancing over as we paddled by.

"This is my new favorite sport!" Bob the Builder allowed, and I maturely resisted saying, "I told you so!"  

Until now.

After an hour or so of paddling, drifting, and floating downstream, we headed back upstream to our beachhead, where Skip was waiting to pull us ashore.  I think he was a little surprised that we had stayed out as long as we did in the not-so-accommodating weather; or maybe he expected one or more of us to die a watery death and not return at all.  

"Way to go, ladies!" he called out cheerfully as we approached the beach where he waited in the shallows in his shorts and Keens.  "I'm so proud of you!  Next trip you get half off!"  He clearly enjoyed putting people on the river.

"I'll bet he's a retired bond trader who left the big city and opened up the little kayak shop that he had always dreamed of," profiled BrokeGirl.  Sure enough, when we asked him, he said he had retired from Goldman Sachs and moved from New York a few years earlier.

I love my peeps, and I could not be more grateful for their friendship and the opportunity to hang with them, away from the chaos and responsibility of real life.  But as it often happens, I was also grateful to come home to my little family, to eat grill-marked hotdogs with them, and to listen to my delicate flower of a little daughter belting out Bon Jovi's Shot Through the Heart in the shower.

NOTE:  I borrowed the heron photo from NJ Bird Photos which has hundreds of really fabulous photographs.

Random Notes From My Vacation

1. Across Minnesota, giant, white windmills, each with three long arms, dot the landscape. They caused me to wonder: How much energy do they harness? Are they efficient? Are they privately owned, or state-owned? Can the energy be stored? What is the energy used for? Why aren't there more windmills harnessing free energy across the miles of empty land?

As you might have predicted, I did a little research on the subject. This article is informative, though obviously biased in favor of the benefits of wind energy production. This older article from USA Today reports that a teeny .5% of all electricity generated in the U.S. in 2005 came from windmills, but that percentage is expected to keep rising. The U.S. Department of Energy reported in 2008 that "wind power could provide up to 20% of the nation's total electricity needs by 2030."

2. The sky looks different in Minnesota and South Dakota than it does in Chicago. Bigger; bluer; taller. The clouds look different, too. Sometimes they were white mountain ranges; sometimes they were ominous tidal waves; and once they looked exactly like Wisconsin State Fair cheese curds.
3. A business opportunity for you entrepreneurial Green Room readers: There are two restaurants near the northeast entrance to Badlands National Park. One is the Wagon Wheel Bar, which I described here; and the other is the restaurant at Cedar Pass Lodge, just past the entrance. The next nearest restaurants are in Wall, South Dakota, a slow 22 mile drive away. This place can definitely use another restaurant. If you can stand the loneliness, start writing up your business plan. I'm available (for a fee) to help you plan the menu--based on my hours and hours of experience in the area.

4. As the child of two extreeeeemely conservative, Christian parents, I grew up believing what they told me: whereas the Bible must be interpreted literally whenever possible, and whereas the Bible says the earth was created in six days, and whereas yada yada, therefore, the earth is not more than 10,000 years old in spite of what science, archeology, and geology have to say about it. I confess that I still hang on to the inclination toward literalness in Biblical interpretation, and it has taken me a long time to let go of my young earth predilection.

However. Being in the Badlands for four days did more to influence my belief about the age of the earth than did 12 years of public school, six years of college and graduate school, and 48 years of exposure to news stories, public exhibits, museums, and other sources of information on the topic. The layers of fossilized Badlands rock, with their varying colors and textures, shouted out to me, "Look at us! We're really, really old! Older than your dad thinks we are!"

I still believe that it's possible that God created the earth in six literal, 24-hour days; I just don't think it's likely that he did. God can do anything, even create brand-new things that look old. Adam is a good example--if you happen to believe in the creation story of Adam and Eve, which I do.

Yes, it's possible that God created the Badlands--and other old-looking geological formations -- with the appearance of age and changes over time. It's possible -- but why would He?

Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and many of you have the chance to go to the polls and vote in the primaries of the presidential election. I should have done this before now, but it's not too late for me to tell you why I'm voting for Barack Obama. Here it is:

1. I believe he is the most likely candidate to bring a swift end to the costly war in Iraq--or at least, to our participation in it. The civil war (are they even calling it that yet?) will probably go on for years, but our presence there is not making things better. It's only getting Americans killed and turning our foreign policy into target practice for the rest of the free world.

Mr. Peevie said to me yesterday that this single issue is becoming a litmus test for a presidential candidate. It seems likely that McCain will get the Republican nod, and he seems committed to the surge and a long-term commitment of troops to the region.

2. He has creative, aggressive, and bold ideas for dealing with this country's most urgent and far-reaching domestic concern: energy. We use oil, gas, and electricity often without even thinking about it--but we need to be paying attention, and not only when we're complaining about how expensive gas is. (Maybe it's good that gas is $45 per gallon because we will finally begin to be willing to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels!)

Look at John McCain's web site. He doesn't even mention energy, gas, alternative sources of energy, fuel--nothing. Also, nothing about poverty, helping low-income working families, or education, either.

3. Obama is better equipped than anyone else in this race to understand and respond to national and international issues in an open-minded, fair, and politically sensitive way. We as a nation will gradually shed the image of a bossy, narrow-minded, jingoistic bully, and we will regain the admiration and respect of other nations who look to the United States to set the standard for human rights and self-determination.

4. Obama is believable when he talks about changing the way politics works. I'm not saying that I naively believe that the system won't change him, or that he'll be able to do everything he says he wants to do. But Obama makes a strong case for making bi-partisanship, process, and fairness realities in our political environment. Reading his book The Audacity of Hope actually put a glimmer of hope for our political future in my cynical soul!

To my Republican friends (you know who you are!), I am respectfully urging you to become a crossover voter, like lifelong Republican Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower. She described Obama as "a man who can salve our national wounds and both inspire and pursue genuine bipartisan cooperation. Just as important, Obama can assure the world and Americans that this great nation's impulses are still free, open, fair and broad-minded."

To my Democratic or undecided friends, I am respectfully urging you to make a choice for change: change in the direction of the war in Iraq, change in our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels, change in politics-as-usual (including the influence of special interest groups), and change in the grumpy, mildly depressed political mood of our country. (You feel it, too, right?)

This hope for change, this anti-depressant in the form of a candidate, is Barack Obama. Vote tomorrow!

Water, Water, Everywhere

In honor of Blog Action Day, this blog today takes up the lament of the Ancient Mariner: "Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink!"

Water may appear to be abundant and renewable, but the truth is that fresh, potable water is not infinitely renewable. It takes centuries to replenish underground sources of fresh water, and energy to restore and recycle used water.

In the public television series Our Changing Planet, experts warn, "Overuse and degradation of the world's groundwater is among the serious environmental challenges facing human populations in the coming decades."

But what can one person or one family do to make a difference? First, be aware of how much water your household uses. Here’s an easy-to-use tool to calculate your family’s daily water use. When we're not careful, the Peevie family uses about 345+ gallons a day. Yikes!

And second, be careful and intentional about your water usage. Here are eight simple steps you can take to conserve water at home:

1. Take shorter showers. A typical 10-minute shower uses about 50 gallons of water. Take a five-minute shower instead. Bonus Conservation Points: Install a low-flow shower head to save even more water.

2. Don't let the water run while you're brushing your teeth or washing your face. This could save one gallon every time. For my household, that's about 3,000 gallons in a year.

3. Run the dishwasher and washing machine only with full loads.

4. Don't let the water run when you're washing dishes in the sink. Fill two sinks, one for washing and one for rinsing.

5. Water your lawn and flowers in the early morning to minimize evaporation.

6. Don't over-water your lawn. Frequent, shallow watering reduces the ability of grass to survive during dry periods. "The best rule," according to the Environmental Protection Agency, "is to water only when the lawn begins to wilt from dryness - when the color dulls and footprints stay compressed for more than a few seconds."

7. For those of you who love the little fishes: when you drain your fish tank, use the water to nourish your plants. It contains excellent fertilizer!

8. Don't let cold water go to waste while waiting for hot water. Use containers to catch it for another use, such as watering plants or flushing the toilet.

Start taking steps to conserve water today, and set an example for your family and your community. Even small steps end up conserving thousands of gallons of water over time.