Reading about sweatshops and modern life made me more grateful

I was reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle last week and could almost feel the desperation of his characters as they fought for work and to have enough money to live. And when I read accounts of people's lives in our current recession, I can also feel their desperation, as below:

"So many homes in Las Vegas have been foreclosed upon that banks rarely bother to hang a "For Sale" sign on the front lawn anymore. Instead, visitors identify bank-owned properties by the brown grass and the 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper taped to the front door or the garage.

On a cul-de-sac in the once-pleasant neighborhood of Silverado Ranch, Larry Wood is the last remaining resident. Two of the four homes are in foreclosure and a third is a "party rental" only occupied by rowdy tourists on weekends. One of his neighbors made a few bucks before abandoning the home, he says. "They sold all the palm trees and just walked away from it," says Wood, sporting a "Freedom Isn't Free" T-shirt. "It's a great neighborhood. I guess that people weren't financially set up to get through the crash."

Nevada has a greater concentration of economic misery than any other state. The state's unemployment rate, which in June edged up to 14.2 percent, has risen faster during the past year than it has anywhere else, and nearly six percent of all homes across the state's desert landscape received a foreclosure filing in the first six months of the year."

Reading is such a wonderful thing -- you can peer into other people's lives, both real and fictional, and feel so much better about your own lot.

Two million minutes

This video shows how Indian and American kids spent 2 million minutes (the time it takes to go through high school, I think). I've been worried for years over the state of American education (but then again, I went to a public school in Mississippi), and this video seems to say my worries are valid.

What do you think?

Do you think this is true?

Wonder what my husband would think.

No friends? It's worse for your health than being fat

Did you see this? I knew Facebook was good for my well-being. Also, I am making more of an effort to keep up with my friends. I was talking to one the other day, and we agreed that we have to keep our little group together, even if we are starting to drive each other crazy (we seem more entrenched in our personal views and eccentricities as time goes on) because it's good for our health!

WASHINGTON — Having good social relationships — friends, marriage or children — may be every bit as important to a healthy lifespan as quitting smoking, losing weight or taking certain medications, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University in Utah found.

They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy.

"A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day," psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org.

Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic, was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity.

Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found.

Volunteers wanted for 2012 Olympics

Just a quick post before I go and sign up as a volunteer for the 2012 Olympics in London. I'm worried I won't get any tickets to events as they will be oversubscribed so am going to sign up as a volunteer so at least I can see things that way.

Annoying Call Center
A woman from a call center in India calls us almost every evening. Last night we were watching an Indian comedy on the TV (it has English subtitles) so my husband must have stunned this woman in Bangalore when he said, "Sorry, I don't have time to talk; I'm watching Sasural Ghenda Phool."



My son is threatening to sing the theme song to the woman the next time she calls. It's very annoying -- "Hoy, hoy, hoy....sasural ghenda phool" and on and on.

Shingles
Still taking five antiviral tablets a day and my shingles rash is itchy and starting to be painful. I can't take sick time though because I'm not really ill, and I'd just hang around the house itching.

The antivirals seem to have affected my mind though -- I can't remember anything. At my age, that is VERY welcome.

Why More Education Lowers Dementia Risk

At last I can think of a good reason (below) that I stayed in college for so long...it certainly didn't help me get a job!

ScienceDaily (July 25, 2010) — A team of researchers from the UK and Finland has discovered why people who stay in education longer have a lower risk of developing dementia -- a question that has puzzled scientists for the past decade.

Examining the brains of 872 people who had been part of three large ageing studies, and who before their deaths had completed questionnaires about their education, the researchers found that more education makes people better able to cope with changes in the brain associated with dementia.

Over the past decade, studies on dementia have consistently showed that the more time you spend in education, the lower your risk of dementia. For each additional year of education there is an 11% decrease in risk of developing dementia, this study reports.

However, these studies have been unable to determine whether or not education -- which is linked to higher socioeconomic status and healthier lifestyles -- protects the brain against dementia.

This is not the case, the new study lead by Professor Carol Brayne of the University of Cambridge has found. Instead, the study shows people with different levels of education have similar brain pathology but that those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of dementia.

According to co-author Dr Hannah Keage of the University of Cambridge: "Previous research has shown that there is not a one-to-one relationship between being diagnosed with dementia during life and changes seen in the brain at death. One person may show lots of pathology in their brain while another shows very little, yet both may have had dementia. Our study shows education in early life appears to enable some people to cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia symptoms."

Compared with previous research, this study was able to answer the question because of its large size and statistical power.

The researchers used data from the EClipSE collaboration, which combines the three European population-based longitudinal studies of ageing (the Medical Research Council Cognitive Function and Ageing Study, the Cambridge City Over-75s Cohort Study and Vantaa 85+, a Finnish study).

The studies have assessed participants for up to 20 years and are three of only six such studies in the world.

The results have important implications for public health at a time when populations in many countries are ageing.

"Education is known to be good for population health and equity. This study provides strong support for investment in early life factors which should have an impact on society and the whole lifespan. This is hugely relevant to policy decisions about the importance of resource allocation between health and education," says Professor Brayne.

The results are published in the journal Brain. The study was funded by the BUPA Foundation, the European Union and the Medical Research Council.

Further details of EClipSE are available at www.eclipsestudy.eu.

Forgot my laptop

Have you ever done anything this brainless? I drove 35 minutes to the office then realized I didn't have my laptop so I had to drive back home (another 35 min) then back again to the office (yet another 35 min). I am worn out now and the day seems half gone too.

I raced along the roads on my extra trips like a lunatic thinking I'd driven this road already once that morning so yes, I owned the road.

Scratching my head over history

I went to dinner with some girlfriends this week, and we started talking about how we all assume that our kids have our histories built into their brains, but they don't.

Think about it. Your history is ingrained in your memory but have you told your kids about it or written it down? No, you just assume they're going to know that the sepia-colored photo of the man sitting in a Maxwell is your great-grandfather who worked in the oil business in the 1920s. And what about stories from his life? Do you remember those to tell to your kids?

I just assume that somehow my history got passed down in the DNA I gave the kids. I keep thinking they know traditional Southern ways but they don't.

And then when I think about what I need to tell them, I find myself scratching my head. Now WHAT did my grandmother tell me about her father? Let's see, he worked in Romania during the first world war in the oil biz. I know that because I have a photo of them from that time, and I have a menu from one of the ship's dinners.

But what else? I can't remember. It's all vague now. So there it is -- we live our lives and by three generations we are forgotten as if we never lived at all.

Even if I knew the birth and death dates of my Irish relatives because my father used to try and find them in the Dublin main library, what good is that to me? It doesn't tell me anything about them that makes them come alive.

Perhaps it's better this way. Just live your life and enjoy it, and don't worry about your legacy because no one will remember you anyway.

Spending the weekend in 1915

This weekend I am suffering with shingles -- all the itching and pain and discomfort. I am whining to my husband and getting him to do the chores instead of me. My daughter and friend Martin told me that I could suffer from 'post-herpetic neuralgia' so I am milking that for all its worth. I am taking five antiviral pills a day and hoping that stops the progress of the shingles but new ones break out everyday.

So yesterday evening I relaxed by watching Carrie, the film version of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. Laurence Olivier was the lead and was so wonderful in the part of the tragic hero who fell in love with Carrie (Jennifer Jones) and threw away his life for her. It's set in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and Carrie at one point is working in a sweatshop sewing. It reminded me of the book I downloaded for free to my Kindle, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. (You can download books written before 1923 for free as they are part of the Gutenberg Project -- at last I can read the books I used to hear about as a child. There's no way I could run out to a book shop in Reading and buy that book.)

The Jungle is brilliant -- all about sweatshops (especially the meat-packing industry in Chicago) and how workers suffered before there were any laws to protect them.

More info below. Go read this book!



American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. Upton Sinclair

Jackson, Mississippi -- old and new

My aunt in New Orleans sent me a photo of my hometown of Jackson Mississippi in the 1950s. My English husband Mel was completely enamored with this photo and set about trying to identify the year it was taken based on the make of cars and the movie showing at the Paramount theatre (see it on the right hand side):


What year do you think this photo was taken?

When we went back to Mississippi last month, Mel disappeared for a few hours.

"Where did you go?" I asked when I saw him again.

"I had to get a picture of Capitol Street as it is now," he said, "to compare the photos."

Here's what he took - the same street 50 years later:

Shingles and dermatones

I woke up with a rash running down my arm this week. It's itchy and bothers me. My daughter, the future doctor, diagnosed it as shingles and explained to my how the same virus that causes a childhood case of chicken pox can cause shingles in adult life.

She explained that nerve cells located near the spine can be mapped to the nerves in your body that they are attached to -- it was amazing information to me. She said these lines running on your body are called dermatones.

She sent me a dermatone map (below) and said, "where you have your rash is roughly colocalised with the T1 dermatome."


A dermatome is an area of skin that is mainly supplied by a single spinal nerve. There are eight cervical nerves, twelve thoracic nerves, five lumbar nerves and five sacral nerves. Each of these nerves relays sensation (including pain) from a particular region of skin to the brain.

I know this is probably boring to you but I was amazed that a virus could hide in a nerve cell in my body for so long and break out again when I was an old bag and you could tell exactly where it had been because of where the rash broke out. They know so much these days, don't they?

Eating Taco Bell the British Way

One of my British friends at work just ate some Taco Bell food for the first time in her life. (Taco Bell has just opened up in the UK.)

"It was really tasty," she said. "I drank an American root beer with it too so I was feeling just like a Yank."

Except she doesn't eat much like an American. Being British, she ate her Taco Bell with a knife and fork. That made me laugh. You can always tell a British person eating -- even if you put a sandwich in front of them, they will use a knife and fork to cut it up.

Canestrelli recipe

No, I had no idea what these were either until my Italian friend baked them and brought them to work yesterday. Delish...recipe below.


Historical facts (aka: you can bake them and then act as an expert of italian
traditional products): Canestrelli is the name of many cookies of (mainly the
north-west) of Italy.

Yet, when people say “canestrelli”, normally they refer to those produced in
Liguria, around a small town called Torriglia. They are shaped like a small daisy
(at least 3-4 cm wide).

Ingredients:
240 gr unsalted butter, softened
100 gr icing sugar
200 gr flour
200 gr potato starch (if you can find it, otherwise use cornflour)
4 egg yolks (5, if you use medium eggs)
1 pinch of salt
2-3 drops vanilla essence
icing sugar for sprinkling

Boil the egg yolks for 5-6 minutes and sift them using a sieve (don’t mash them,
but try to make it as “fine grated” as possible).

Mix the butter with the icing sugar. Add the egg yolks, the vanilla essence and
the pinch of salt.

Sift the flour and potato starch together and add them gradually to the mix.
Form a ball, wrap it in cling film and leave it rest in the fridge for at least 30
minutes.
Preheat the oven at 180°C (165°C if you got a fan oven).
Roll out the dough (at least 1 cm high) and cut the cookies.
Bake for 20 mins (or until when they start turning golden brown).

Now the tricky part: take the tray out of the oven and don’t touch them for a
while. Let them rest at least 10 minutes before putting them on a cooling rack.
That’s because the boiled eggs and potato starch that give that lightness feeling
when you eat the canestrelli, makes it very fragile and you would destroy them
all if you touch them when they’re still hot.

Once they’ve cooled down, sprinkle them with icing sugar.

Can you go home again?

I've been living in England for almost 20 years. Now that the kids are getting older, my husband and I can contemplate returning to the US if we want. We wanted to stay here for their education -- the schools are good, college is much cheaper than in the US, etc.

But when I start thinking about actually moving back to the US, I get nervous. I didn't have a fun childhood -- my father was a bully and my mother was ill with Multiple Sclerosis -- so I think when I got married and moved to England, I was running away from all my problems. My parents are dead now so there's no emotional trauma waiting for me in America.

When we were in Calfornia recently, the sights and smells of America would bring back old suppressed memories that I think I've never dealt with and it was unpleasant. It's like I forged a suit of armor to protect myself in the UK and chinks of light were getting in when I was in the US.

So I was wondering if I could even handle full time life back in the US or would I lose my marbles? I closed off all the negative feelings years ago, and I can't have them come flooding back now.

Unsettling dreams

Jet lag makes my dreams worse. You know how it is, you wake up in the middle of the night unable to sleep but then you want to snooze during the day when you are supposed to be awake and lively.

I keep dreaming that I am living with my mother in different places -- one time we were in Texas, another in Florida -- we are in a little house and she has Multiple Sclerosis, like she did for most of my life, but she's younger and the disease isn't so bad. She's optimistic that she can hold off the progression of the disease, just like everyone is who gets MS; they think they can keep out of a wheelchair by staying positive, eating well and exercising, but they can't.

So there's my mother as she was when I was a teenager but I am my real age in the dream so I know how bad her disease is going to get. She's the only one who doesn't. It's so weird that I have to relive the progression of her MS in these dreams -- the years and years of her decline. I wake up depressed.

Jet lag

Don't you hate jet lag? The world feels like it is crashing in on you, and you can get depressed and listless -- or is that just me generally?

I was doing OK yesterday but then it felt like the floor at the office was giving way. By the time I got home, the world was spinning around and I had to go to sleep immediately. I have just roused my son out of a four-hour nap -- he'll never be able to sleep tonight.

Last night we all watched 1988's Working Girl at 3 in the morning because we couldn't sleep.

Every time I come back from the USA, I say the jet lag I experience is the worst I've ever had it but this time I think it's true.

Worse than Jet Lag

The only thing worse than jet lag is those hideous unemptied suitcases littering the house. Where is the maid to get those taken care of?

I can't stand trying to find a place for all the crap in the suitcases so they just sit and stare at me for a few days until I finally do something.


I'm fed up with crap too
That reminds me -- I'm sick of too much stuff too. I want to take everything in the house -- husband included sometimes -- and throw it out.

I just started a project to throw out a broken-down computer desk -- I'm sure we won't need to replace this either as everyone has laptops these days. I found a bunch of papers in the drawers from the 1990s - it's all going to the dump tomorrow.

Last Day in Santa Cruz

This is our last day in Santa Cruz and even though the weather was cold while we were here, we had a great time. I'll miss taking a bicycle out and cycling next to the ocean. I've done that every day and it gives me great pleasure.

Mel had a birthday while we were here. Here is him looking surprised as I bring in some cake:


Yesterday we went to the Boardwalk again to do some rides and activities we didn't get to the other day.

I rode the monorail to get a good look at the boardwalk from on high:


Some people love the Santa Cruz boardwalk so much that they get married there:


We were playing miniature golf on a pirate ship and came across the most unfortunate fellow who was drowning in quicksand. But I had to finish the shot so I couldn't do anything to help him:


I had a great vacation but it was sort of sad too as the kids are all grown up and I don't have anyone to do little kid things with anymore. My son who is 16 doesn't want to go on vacations with the family anymore so I guess this is our last big adventure.

My daughter won't have much time off anymore as she enters her third year of medical school next year so I guess I need to get real about the changing nature of my family. But it makes me feel old and all used up. I need to get my groove back somehow.

Santa Cruz Boardwalk

It's still chilly in Santa Cruz so instead of loafing on the beach, we went to the Boardwalk instead. It was a lot of fun -- filled with rides, games, stands with salt-water taffy (my favorite -- I used to always send a box to my mother but since she's gone, I'll eat her share myself :).

I used to be able to do scary rides but these days I get scared by anything. I did a water plume ride without fainting and then got on the ferris wheel. When it began to go up in the air, I clutched at Mel and told him I was frightened. He laughed cruelly and said that I was never a nervous nelly before.

Here's a pic I took while I was up in the air. Wouldn't you be nervous?


The kids weren't scared though. They were in the pod ahead of us:


The weather isn't going to get any better so we'll probably go back to the Boardwalk on Monday. There was a fright house that I wanted to try -- those are the dark places you enter that have real people in them who try to scare you and strobe lighting. I know I'll be scared but at least I'll be on the ground, right?

I put a dollar in a machine to get my fortune told by this freaky looking guy.

He was so annoying, telling me he really didn't know what was going to happen to me.

Keep Santa Cruz Weird

I saw a cute bumper sticker on a car this weekend:

Keep Santa Cruz Weird

Santa Cruz seems to pride itself on being hippie and New Age. On the radio on Sunday morning, instead of religious services, there was a New Age woman doing a sort of sermon talking about people's 'vibrations' and karma. It seemed to fit the place perfectly.

It's good to travel and see people behaving differently from the norm. I just read this Mark Twain quote in the San Francisco paper:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

A crack in the edge of the world

I always like to read about places I visit so I bought a book about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. It's called A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester.

In it, he explains about the earthquake and subsequent fires. He devotes several chapters to Tectonic Plate science -- I had no idea that tectonic plate information has only been nailed down recently. I struggled to understand what he wrote as I am a scientific doofus but it was frightening to think of the plates rubbing against each other and breaking free to cause an earthquake.

Here's a photo taken after the SF earthquake but before the fire engulfed the city. It's poignant to see the people standing and watching as the fires come closer to destroy their own homes and lives.


The photographer, Arnold Genthe wrote about this picture:

This picture shows the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed onto the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed: 'Oh, is that a still from a Cecil DeMille picture?' To which the answer has been, "No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself."

Visiting the Redwoods

We went to a park yesterday to visit Redwoods. They are the largest and oldest trees I've ever seen.


Look at the cross-section of one of them. It started life at the same time as Jesus:


There's one ring per year -- I think Mel's birth year is in this pic somewhere -- he just had a birthday this week and is getting pretty old, just like me.

No solicitors

My kids wondered why Americans don't want lawyers coming to the front door of our Californian vacation rental. I explained to them that this means 'don't come to the front door selling things' in America. But maybe I should buy one for my door in England just in case a lawyer tries to knock.

Relaxing in Santa Cruz

We're just settling in to our vacation rental in Santa Cruz. The weather has been too cold but we are trying to do our best to have fun anyway.

Here are Katie and me having a snooze in the hammock in the backyard:


We took a boat trip around the bay and saw sea otters playing.

The Santa Cruz boardwalk is one of only a few left in the US. We went there and had a lot of fun on the rides, except I got really scared and screamed and embarrrassed my family (even more than usual).

Sad Alcatraz

We went to see Alcatraz, the island off San Fran that was a federal penitentiary for 30 years. It was sad to see the little cells where people lived for 23 hours a day (they got out for 20 minutes for meals).

Worse still was the hole, the pitch black cell where prisoners were thrown into solitary confinement. They let us try the cell out -- it was terrifying. One prisoner wrote that the only way he could stand it was to close his eyes and pretend he was travelling somewhere exotic. Each day, he said, would be another trip.

Through a little window you can see the city of San Francisco in all its glory. New Year's Eve was the worst experience for the prisoners, they said. Because on NY's Eve you could hear the laughter and happiness of people who were free and having fun and it showed you so clearly all that you had lost.

Watching A-Rod's butt

We went to a baseball game near San Francisco last week. The Oakland A's were playing the New York Yankees. My husband Mel is a die-hard Red Sox fan so he can't stand the Yankees. When Katie and I heard that Alex Rodriguez would be playing -- the sometime boyfriend of most Hollywood cuties -- we had to be for the Yankees. (Mel was disgusted by our shallowness.)

Here is A-Rod about to bat. I noticed the men in the stadium were discussing baseball statistics but the women were checking out A-Rod's butt muscles:

The game was pretty good -- Rodriguez hit two home runs -- and one while all the bases were loaded so the Yankees got five runs right there.

While I was sitting watching the game, Santa Claus came into the stadium to have a look. I wonder which team he wanted to win?

Angry Greeks

Have you been keeping up with the angry Europeans who get to retire at 50 or 55 on full pensions? Retirement ages need to be raised but they get furious when their government tries to do it.

There was a funny quote in the New York Times from a Greek plumber who just retired at 60. Greece has just raised the retirement age to 65 (gasp), and he says:

Nobody expected this -- this is worse than the occupation under the Germans.

A bit of a Drama King, don't you think?

Clever vacation planning

There's a heatwave in most of the United States this week, and it's hot in England where we live, but we have managed to visit Santa Cruz, California, in the middle of a cold snap. There's no sun, and it's too cold to even sit outside. We were so disappointed.

Please make me feel better and tell me about a vacation of yours that went wrong.

In the meantime, I am DETERMINED that we are going to have a good vacation anyway -- I'm just not sure how to achieve it.

I booked a little cruise around the bay for this afternoon so maybe that will cheer us up. It's one of those one-hour things to see fish and sealife. Maybe that will lift our spirits.

All-American activities

We went into San Francisco to see the 4th of July fireworks. We got a spot near a bridge and waited with hundreds of other people. Then fog rolled in. Suddenly we heard a firework going off but we couldn't see it. Panicked that we were going to miss the fireworks after standing for nearly an hour, we and everyone else in the crowd began to run towards a better place so we could see something.

As we were running through various piers with hundreds of others to find a good viewing spot, we began to laugh. It was like we were in one of those apocalyptic thriller movies -- we were racing through picturesque piers, you could hear sirens blaring and people shouting -- it turned out to be a lot of fun. There was no big crush or anything -- we were all just running at the same time as if the world was ending.

In the end, we didn't see a single firework! All that effort for nothing. Oh well.

The next day, we went to a bowling alley for some all-American fun. In England, bowling costs a fortune and is very crowded but in this place in south San Francisco, a game was about 5 dollars.

Here's Katie about to make a strike:


Afterwords, Katie and I posed with some (I guess) famous SF bowlers:


Later, we went to see Toy Story 3 in 3D. Am I the only person who gets a headache from those 3D glasses?

Stop calling me LADY

Whew, we've been so busy sightseeing in San Francisco. Even Katie, my daughter, got all tuckered out and she's a young thang:

Today we rented bikes to cycle around San Fran and go on the Golden Gate bridge. Here's a pic we took while cycling:

The Golden Gate bridge is magnificent. I was so happy to see it at last.

We are enjoying California but am missing British politeness. I have picked up the British habit of saying 'sorry' for any infraction so was nonplussed by how forthright San Franciscans can be. I was cycling slowly, as is my wont, and a woman started yelling at me, "LADY!" and she basically told me to move over as she was cycling past.

Then I was cycling past the entrance of a supermarket, and the driver of a car shouted, "Watch where you are going, LADY!"

And then we were in a store going up the escalator when we realized the floor we wanted was below so we got off -- we were only about two steps into the ride -- I said 'Sorry' and a man told me off -- beginning his sentence with "LADY...."

If I am LADYed one more time today, I will scream.

I think I'm grumpy because we've had such a hectic schedule. The cycling today was 2.5 hours long, and I couldn't keep up with the family going up hills. I couldn't believe that I couldn't zip along those hills and lanes with the rest of 'em but I was slow and needed breaks. I didn't even finish the length of the Golden Gate bridge but just cycling over part of it was thrill enough for me.

Visiting a whinery

My family thought a visit to California's 'whine' country would be right up my alley as I am the biggest whiner on the planet. But when I got there, I saw it was all about wine, not whine. Oh well.

I whined a lot because I had on shorts and it was so chilly in San Francisco that I wished I'd worn warmer clothes. But then we drove to the Sonoma Valley, and it was so hot that I started whining about that.

Here is the vineyard we toured:


Did you know white wine is made without the grape skins but red wine is made with the skins and so takes longer to process? Lemme see, what else did I learn on the tour?

Barrels are flavored so you can taste things like oak when you drink the wine. Here's a pic of one of the caves where they keep the barrels:

I'm not much of a wine drinker -- I can't tell if I'm drinking horse pee or an expensive vintage plus I get a headache afterwards. Here's my daughter and husband testing wines:

Maybe I can't drink wine very well, but I can knock back a margarita with the best of them. We stopped off at a Mexican restaurant on the way home from the winery and I had a Cadillac margarita that had so much alcohol in it that the fumes alone almost made me drunk. It was just what I needed...good thing Mel was driving back to SF and not me.

Japanese garden in the Golden Gate park

San Francisco has a fabulous park called the Golden Gate. Our favorite part of it was the Japanese garden. It was so peaceful and calm.

We had a nice Japanese tea in the garden called hojicha -- that was the tea -- and mochi -- a sweet rice cake.

We felt as serene as Buddha afterwards:


But then I caught my daughter with a strange man:

I think all the sunshine is affecting her. I'll have to get her back to good old repressed England very soon.

Happy Independence Day & Chinese Exclusion Act

I'm so happy my kids get to spend the 4th of July in America for once. I always feel bad that they don't have more American experiences when they are half American themselves.

We are going to the waterfront in San Francisco tonight to see the fireworks.

In the meantime, let me tell you about our visit to Chinatown earlier this week. It is a beautiful and colorful place.

We went to a Chinese American museum and learned all about the Chinese in San Francisco. Did you know that there was an Exclusion Law that meant no Chinese could come to the US and work and become citizens? It was passed in the 1880s and wasn't rescinded until the 1940s.

Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and the Act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. After the Act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new home.

Here's a political cartoon from about 1915 when the US was protesting Russia not allowing Jewish immigration:

I had to confess to the director of the Chinese museum that I had never heard of the exclusion act before and basically had no knowledge of Chinese American history. Pretty embarrassing that I'm not better informed....

Cool San Francisco

I thought San Francisco would be hot in the summer but then some Facebook friends warned me it could be cold. I'm so glad they told me because it has been a bit chilly. But today we went to the Golden Gate park, and the weather was perfect. It's so sunny yet there's a fresh breeze so you never get sweaty. What a terrific climate (I speak as a girl who grew up in Mississippi with 100 percent humidity -- you can break into a sweat just walking out the front door.)

We started out at the Shakespeare garden, and Katie and Mel decided to do some scenes from Romeo & Juliet. I was shocked that Mel could recite scenes from the play by heart but he said he'd had to study it so hard for an exam when he was in school that he never forgot it.

(A homeless man asleep on a bench nearby was disturbed by Mel's re-enactment of a riot scene.)

Next we walked through the musical section of the park. Here's a statue of Verdi:


Oh but before we got there, Katie decided to roll down a hill. I tried to do it too but I'm too old and fragile.


We're going to a baseball game next week - the New York Yankees are playing. My husband Mel hates the Yankees because we used to live in Boston so he's a Red Sox fan. He enjoyed reading this bumper sticker on a car in the park:

The best part of the park was the Japanese garden. I'll tell you about it soon. We must have walked a million miles today. When we got back to the hotel, Katie and I went to the jacuzzi outside to get our muscles relaxed and now I feel like going to sleep.

Flowers in our hair

On our way to San Francisco so I picked some flowers from my garden to put in our hair.

People in the airport looked at us funny but we didn't take the flowers out -- how could we?

Now that we are in San Francisco (awful plane trip on Virgin Airlines -- so cramped in the seats), my daughter and I are still picking little flowers when we run across them to put in our hair.

Kids on the waterfront -- isn't it pretty?

We explored the city a bit today -- rode on a cable car, bought tickets to see Alcatraz next week (it's hard to get in there -- it's mostly sold out) and ate dim sum for lunch (major pig out there).

We were walking to Chinatown and passed by the Wells Fargo museum. It was free so we went in. We had so much fun in there. They had a stagecoach to ride in, antique phones to play with (we had to crank it first and hold the receiver in the other hand), and other silly things to do that were incredible fun.

Here is Katie calling her brother up on the phone:


We had to pose with Black Bart. He was such a bad man! He kept robbing the Wells Fargo stagecoaches - the woman there said he robbed them at least 28 times. (Katie put her red baseball cap on him to smarten him up.)

Entry-level Kindle

What a boring post title but such an exciting gadget. In the US, Amazon dropped their prices on their entry-level e-reader to $189. I have wanted an electronic book reader for a long time but they were so expensive.

My friend Brenda gave me a gift certificate to Amazon.com for my birthday but I wasn't sure what to do with it as it's no good for Amazon.co.uk in England. Then I thought -- I'll get a Kindle at long last. I applied the gift certificate to the purchase, had them send it to our hotel in San Francisco for no shipping fee and voila, it's here.

It's so cool. We've started downloading classic books for free. I need to read some Mark Twain on it this very evening. (After we watch Jeopardy, a habit from America that we have missed so much while living in the UK.)