Boxing Day

We have a fine tradition of Boxing Day, at least.  Our next door neighbors, Canadians of great generosity, have always invited us for Boxing Day dinner.  My conceit is that we get to be the peasants who are invited in the night after the feast to share the leftovers.  It’s like some variant of having Elijah coming in for the Passover Dinner.  But, of course, they don’t think we’re peasants, they don’t treat us as peasants, and it is usually the actual turkey dinner that we are invited for, even if it is often held on Boxing Day.

The other Boxing Day tradition up here, I think, is one that I’ve never participated in: the going to the stores for the Boxing Day discounts.  In fact, this may well be the primary Boxing Day tradition: you go to the stores, buy up tons of goods on deep discount, and take your boxes/packages home with you.  By contrast, we never get the leftovers of the holiday feast put into little boxes for us to take home.

Never going to a Boxing Day sale is one of the things that is easy to accomplish when you live in an out-of-the-way part of the country.  There aren’t that many things that I need or want a lot extra of, at least the things that are on sale.  If they knocked 50% off  the price of eggs or imported cheese or smoked sausage, I’d be more interested, I suppose.  But for now, Boxing Day is, like Christmas Day, a day that doesn’t require you to do much of anything prior to dinner time, when you put on clean clothes and present yourself to the neighbors’ table. 

This year, though, the dinner had a touch of sadness, as the neighbors have put their house up for sale and we are about to do the same, and there probably won't be another Boxing Day dinner at the neighbors for us. But what is not in the future doesn't overcome what was in the past.  Thanks, Don and Jean, for always being there for us.

Christmas, the Eve, the Day

For some of us in our eighth decade, everything seems to be less about the present than about the past, but I think that for virtually all adults who do not have young children in their immediate environment, Christmas Eve is pretty much all nostalgia, all the time.  And the older one gets, the farther back that nostalgia goes.  If I just knew something about my mother’s or my grandmother’s childhood Christmases, I’d probably be nostalgic for them.
Comparing Christmas Eve in the 1930’s and ‘40’s with Christmas in the first decade of the 21st Century presents such an enormous gap that I can scarcely make my way across it.  I was in Idaho, then.  It was always cold at Christmas, bitterly cold, and snow was abundantly available usually.   By Christmas, the town government people would have flooded a vacant lot with water and there we could take our new skates to try out on Christmas Day itself.  I don’t know that anybody floods anything anywhere for skating rinks anymore.  We’ve found other ways, for pretty much everything, I guess.

Before, during, and immediately after the war, Christmas was a tree with decorations, and singing on Christmas Eve plus the opening of one carefully chosen gift from those under the tree, and then on the following morning, the rest of the presents.  It seemed like a lot of presents, but there were seven of us by 1945, and since everyone bought at least one gift for everyone else, plus the grandparents’ gifts, the abundance was largely sheer volume. The childrens’ presents always included new pajamas/nightgowns, slippers, a game, a book, maybe new mittens, and one big phenomenon: a train set, ice skates, a bicycle, although those big gifts were more a post-war phenomenon. 

In early December each year, my parents would give us each a little money, $3 or $4, as I recall, and with this we were expected to produce about ten presents: one for each of the other 8 family members, and a couple for friends.  We made some things.  I remember embroidering baby bibs for my youngest sister one winter, knitting scarves or mittens when we were ten or so.  We spent many hours in the five and dime stores (Woolworth, Kress, Newberry’s) imagining buying a little bottle of perfume for our mother (Evening in Paris, in a blue bottle), some candy for our father, little salt and pepper shaker sets for my grandmother who was a collector of such things, barrettes or hair ribbons for another sister, a deck of cards for my older brother, a simple toy for the baby (I recall painting empty wooden thread spools with red fingernail polish and then stringing them together one year), and I don’t know what for the friends.  Coloring books? Stickers?  Jacks or marbles?  Possibly.

During the war, there just wasn’t that much stuff around for presents.  I remember one year, my grandparents gave me a can of mushrooms, while my older brother received a package of cinnamon rolls.  I remember my next younger sister receiving several pieces of Fleer’s DoubleBubble gum, gum whose taste I can recall vibrantly still.  Our stockings had fifteen or twenty cents at the bottom, a tangerine, a few pecans and walnuts in their shells, a package or two of life-savers, a small package of maple sugar candy, some crayons or colored pencils, maybe a little notebook.  And we were plenty excited about such wonderful things because, in general, we didn’t have very many things.

Today’s children and grandchildren have so much of everything that they already have everything long before Christmas is even an emerging holiday.  And they’re surely not spending their days trying to imagine what they might give to someone else.  To my surprise, it turns out that I share that experience with this current generation of children: now, I too have or have had just about everything I could ever want; such an abundance of things, experiences, and relationships that I cannot imagine ever needing more, although I definitely continue to need those I still have.  And all I have to give is the work of my hand.

Merry Christmas to all those I know and love, to all those who read this, many of whom I do not know, to all those of good will: May the abundance of life ever reside in your heart.

Wrapping It Up

The seasonal specific holidays are getting by us: Hannukkah over, the winter solstice gone, Eid all packed up.  We've got Christmas and Kwanzaa still in the near future, but I've wrapped it all up.

Last January, I started a project in which I made one furoshiki/wrapping cloth each week.  Today, I  finished the last of the 52.  The furoshiki originated in Japan, but it is also found, although in a slightly different form, in Korea, where it’s called a pojagi (or sometimes bojagi).  In both places, it is cloth that is used to wrap a gift or some other object that could be more easily carried if wrapped (e.g., bento—lunch--boxes in Japan).  In Japan, it is a specially designed cloth made just for this purpose; in Korea, it is more likely to be pieced from other cloth, more like an American quilt is pieced.  The sizes vary, depending upon what is being wrapped.

I came to wrapping cloths in the gift wrapping form.  I imagined a beautiful cloth loosely wrapping an exquisite but small gift: maybe a perfect apple, or a luscious chocolate bar, or a small hand-made Shaker basket.  My idea was to make one a week during 2009, using different techniques, and then to send them out as Christmas 'gifts' in December, leaving the recipients with the option of keeping them as gifts for themselves, or as wrapping for a gift that they were giving to someone else. 

I had very few rules for myself in the process of making them.  They were to be 16 inches square; they were to be made of ordinary fabrics that I had around; they were to be lined; they were not to be quilted; and no more than 8 cloths could feature a single technique.  As it turned out, there are a few that are unlined because I had some beautiful linen pieces that were previously hemmed and I didn’t see a way to line them.  Otherwise, the rules held.  I found different themes interested me over time.  There are a half-dozen that are related to ways of mending and closing fabric: these include classic mends/darning as well as buttonholes and buttons.  There are a number of takeoffs from traditional Japanese art forms: Haiku (in my version, the fabric forms/components are arranged in a 5-7-5 design); flower arranging; and sand raking (in which stitching lines take over for raking lines).  There are a number of cloths that feature indigo dyes, shibori dying, and various Asian silks (Thai, Chinese, and Japanese).

All 52 of the furoshikis can be seen here.  At the upper right corner of the flickr page, there’s a ‘slideshow’ choice, which is a nice way to see them individually, but for information about the individual cloth, you have to click on the individual picture.

And now they are all gone.  The first, which did indeed enclose a small hand-made Shaker box, went to a granddaughter for her 13th birthday.  I kept one for myself, a genuine Japanese furoshiki (whose photo is not included in the set) given to me by a quilting friend who knew I was doing this project.  But the rest have all flown away throughout the U.S.

And now, there's only a week to figure out what kind of project 2010 needs to have.

Quagmire

 The very word is so nostalgic, so late-60’s, so Vietnam War-ish.  But nowadays, quagmire means so much more:  Afghanistan, health care reform, trash collection.  Yes, I’m afraid it’s once more time to get a trash collection update.   It’s been maybe six months now since those of us in Point Roberts lost all curbside trash collection, in addition to curbside recycling pick-up.  Each month, it seems as if the WUTC has yet another problem to contend with in respect to getting this knotty problem solved.  Mostly, WUTC thinks that it needs another thirty days to do whatever needs to be done.

And what needs to be done?  At the moment, we seem to have applications from two candidates: Freedom 2000, the Dave Gellatly/Ron Caulder outfit; and Point Recyling and Refuse, the Arthur Wilkowski outfit which, up until six months-ish ago actually had a certificate to provide those services and was in fact providing at least the trash collection part.  In fact, Wilkowski recently offered up several ways in which he might provide some services, but WUTC turned him down on the ‘temporary’ plan, and now we seem to be fixed on the full plan, which is not exactly as full as he used to provide.  And that is perhaps because the business model for the ‘full’ plan—curbside pickup of trash and recycling--is no better now than it was when he cut the curbside recycling because the business model had too few customers to make it a viable model.  You still with me?

The WUTC may now be as confused as many of us are.  I say this because their current plan (since Dec. 4) is to wait about 25 days and then have a public hearing on the issue.  The official reason for this is that, because the Commission has decided to combine its consideration of these two applicants—even though they are not applying to provide exactly the same service--it would be ‘appropriate to hold a public hearing. . . to provide an opportunity for members of the public to comment orally on the record concerning the pending applications.’  It’s particularly worth noting, I think, that on a matter that is of great concern to and (far too) lively comment among the residents of Point Roberts and of interest to virtually no one else in the State of Washington, the WUTC has decided to hold the hearing in Olympia, Washington, maybe 150 miles away from us.  To their credit, they scheduled it for 1:30 in the afternoon.  On the other side of the balance sheet, there’s not only the location but also the date: December 29.  So, if you aren’t too busy with post-Christmas shopping, or sunk in the post-Christmas blues, and have cleared out the Christmas guests, or returned from your Christmas travel, well...here’s an event that might attract your interest, fill up your otherwise blank calendar in that strange week between holidays, assuming the weather isn’t so unseemly as to make driving dicey.

If you don’t care that much or aren’t able to make the trip, however, WUTC will accept your written views up until January 4.  After that, I guess, they’ll be taking about 30 days either to make a decision, or to figure out how to get some information that they don’t already have.

The residents and sometime-users of trash and recycling collection have been busy making their views known to WUTC over the past months, of course.  The WUTC puts all comments on line, so you can check out your neighbors’ views here.  This is a list of all the documents they’ve received, and if, say, you want to see what Knick or Gordon thinks, click on the date of the document (the far left column).  Then you usually have to choose to see the document in either a ‘pdf’ or a ‘word’ format.  It’s not the friendliest website I’ve ever seen, but if you keep at it for awhile, you’ll probably get the knack.  If you lose the site, it might help to know that the docket # is 091687.

The complainant ladies trio are represented among these commenters, although if you read the APB you probably already know what they think.  Reading Mr. Wilkowski’s response to their comments may be of interest, though.  I, at least, had not seen his response to their views anywhere, and it is certainly the case that there are two sides (at least) to this dispute.   His response is here. 

About thirty people have taken the time to communicate their views and, having read them all, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag.  Some support Freedom 2000, some support Point Recycling, some support them both but just want a solution, some primarily support mandatory participation in a trash collection system in order to make sure that it’s economically viable.  I found it problematic to offer my views to WUTC insofar as I have no special or specific information (as opposed to rumors) that the WUTC lacks about either applicant or about the nature of trash and recycling collection.  On the other hand, perhaps they need to know where Point Roberts is located.  I do know that.

'Tis the Season

Today’s results from Copenhagen are not, I suppose, surprising.  It looks as if North Americans will be reluctant to do much about changing their/our energy use patterns until a lot of people who didn’t expect ever to have beach property are looking right out at the ocean.  That might even include me, I guess; unless all of Point Roberts is underwater.  But even if I have beach, I suppose I'll be living on an island.  What chance, then, of a ferry from Bellingham?  Or what used to be Bellingham?

This morning, the news of the world included advice about how we can, each and every one of us, lower our energy footprints in this time of crisis.  One piece of advice, specific to the season, had to do with having a little less of a Christmas light extravaganza.  Words falling, I think, on deaf ears, if the overly decorated houses I’ve recently run into are any indication.  The pictures above and to the left are of three houses on one street, a neighborly competition perhaps, on Vancouver’s eastside.  (Incidentally, the deer in the middle of the first picture--on the ground--move their heads up and down.)

Well, a colorful Christmas, certainly.  And then there's the alien invasion over the Kremlin to entertain us, too.

Library Charity

"Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free."  This is not the slogan of the Point Roberts Library's magazine exchange.  One might think that putting signs on the cart indicating that it is a 'magazine exchange' and 'free magazines' would make it clear that this is not a place to leave your airline brochures for travel to Turkey.  Doubtless some people are going to Turkey this year, but it seems very unlikely to me that they would ever think to go to the Library's magazine exchange cart to find information about such a trip.  You go to the magazine exchange cart to find a copy of Wired, or The National Geographic, O, Smithsonian, Harper's, etc.

I went by the library today to do my weekly (when I'm here) tidying-up.  And what did I find today?  Well, maybe it's the Christmas season and people have lost their wits; or maybe it was the very cold weather last week that caused no blood to flow to their brains.  What I found were a lot of old newspapers and a spontaneous outpouring of catalogs, particularly from LL Bean and Land's End.  Maybe a dozen of one of them.  Some person (the LL Bean contributor, I think) had carefully cut out the back-page mailing label in exactly the same way on all those catalogs, making it clear that these weren't accidentally dropped off at the library.  The other set of catalogs apparently came in packages because they had no printed labels requiring removal.  Just a little reminder, folks: we all get those catalogs.  We don't need to pass them around.  What the contributors of catalogs might need to do is contact the web site that permits you to request that companies stop sending you catalogs. 

There are some people, I guess, who think that leaving something in a recycle zone automatically gives value to objects that have no value.  Do these people also give their worn out underwear to clothing drives?  Keep your catalogs to yourself, I ask.  Politely, if possible; like the Grinch, if not.  No more difficult for you to cart them to the dump than it is for me.

Sterling's Struggles

It’s been about two months since Sterling Financial Corp., the parent/holding company of Sterling Savings Bank (which has a branch here in Pt. Roberts) received its ‘Cease and Desist’ order from the FDIC.  Sterling’s most important job during this period was to increase its capital by about $300 million.  In order to do this, the corporation could sell stock, sell bonds, or get a line of credit from some other financial outfit.  I guess they could sell assets, as well, including real estate they had foreclosed.  And there might be other things I don’t know about; I’m not an expert in this field—I just follow the news.

Selling stock isn’t very useful because Sterling stock sank on the FDIC order’s news.  The stock price has  bounced around over the last 8 weeks, but mostly it’s bounced down, and is now in the high 60 cent area.  Sterling did set up a web page where they were arranging to sell their foreclosed properties, but that’s not likely to be something that happens fast given the housing market.  Does private equity wish to rescue Sterling?  Would you think it was a good investment to buy Sterling bonds at this point?  No, nor would I. 

Poor Sterling!  It’s even been removed from the NASDAQ Mid-Cap listing because its stock fell below $1.00.  This delisting is a slow process, however, and what this amounts to is NASDAQ saying that they will really, really do it if Sterling's stock stays below a dollar/share over the next six months.  In addition, Sterling still owes interest on the TARP funds that it got from the U.S. Treasury, including the last payment that it missed.

Last week, there were stories in the financial press that Sterling was likely to miss its due date for that capital increase ordered by the FDIC.  That date would be this Tuesday.  Of course, the FDIC doesn’t have to do anything right away, and usually doesn’t.  There are many, many over 500 banks on the ‘Troubled Bank List,’ many more than are about to fail.  Banks that fail are usually on the Troubled Bank List, but it is possible to stay on that list for a long time, and it is even possible to get off that list by rectifying one’s financial problems.

From my vantage, Sterling looks like a pleasure boat surrounded by sharks, though.  This week, two law firms announced that they were looking for people to be members of a class action lawsuit against Sterling for federal securities law violations, relating to allegations that Sterling failed to accurately present its financial status last year.  These two (one, two) law firms are looking for people who bought Sterling stock from July '08 to January '09. 

A third law firm is looking for Sterling employees, whose retirement account funds were used to purchase Sterling stock during that period, as part of an investigation into whether Sterling failed to act prudentially under ERISA, the federal law that deals with retirement fund programs, and thus should be subject to another class action suit.

The company has traded out several of its highest officers.  But the sharks keep swimming closer. 

A few more banks fail almost every Friday.  And for almost all those banks, some other bank takes over the operation immediately.  On Friday, you have an account at Greenstreet Bank; on Saturday, that account is now held by Redstreet Bank, right in the same building it was on Friday.  The customers are safe; even the tellers and other day-to-day employees are usually safe.  It’s the shareholders, bondholders, and the executives who take the hit.  And in this case, it could also be the taxpayers, since there is a TARP investment at stake.  We live in interesting times, where it is possible to learn about things you never thought to learn about previously, including about your own little bank..