Coastal Notes

little bits of this and that

  • Losing Touch

    Today I almost got scammed on eBay. Fortunately I caught the scam in process and got my money back. The really bad news is that there’s no repercussion for the would-be scammer because there is no way to file a complaint with eBay because I “successfully” dealt with the issue directly with the Seller.

    By making the first line of defense the interaction between the buyer and seller, eBay intentionally deflects any responsibility for actions like the one that happened to me. Let me tell you about it.

    Last night I made “an offer” that was $12 below the $32 asking price for an item which is discontinued and will soon be obsolete. My offer was accepted and I was asked by eBay to pay the bill. I did so using my PayPal account, one of the options they offered me. In the morning I awoke to find that my payment had “not processed successfully” and I was asked to submit another form of payment. Without paying enough attention, I did just that, using the convenient Apple Pay option which was now available but hadn’t been the prior evening. It was only after I submitted the payment that I realized the amount had been revised from $20 to $32.

    Now, I’m assuming that the “not processed” and “submit new payment” parts of this are all under the Seller’s control. I reached out to complain (only to the Seller, that was the only option I had at this stage for service) and had my transaction immediately canceled.

    Because I now do not have an actual transaction, I am unable to complain further about the attempted scam.

    Clearly I’m assuming that the Seller was responsible for this, first accepting an offer below asking (an “Make Offer” button was available, which shows some intent to accept lower offers!), and then by rejecting the first payment attempt and submitting a revised, higher payment request. I’m also assuming that this type of bait and switch actually works some of the time which is why the Seller feels so emboldened to do it.

    What we lose, of course, is any sense of consumer protection from anyone, starting first and foremost with eBay. But doesn’t this continue nearly everywhere? Customer Service is funneled at best through AI and remote service desks — my own experience with these varies greatly very much dependent upon the amount and quality of resources companies put towards these activities.

    It has become increasingly difficult to get solid customer service as we abandon brick and mortar. I recently spent a couple of hours on two separate customer service chats with a major home improvement store, only to achieve only about 85% of what I truly was due legally based on stated pricing policy. The AI in that instance was of zero assistance and the path from AI to human was ponderous.

    I tried to send a compliment to Amazon the other day (yes, I know, shocking and most unnecessary); I wanted them to hear that I supported a decision they made (and then they unmade – the policy age in which we exist, sadly). Do you know it is virtually impossible to email the company? I could have chatted with customer service, but that felt to ethereal — I wanted a digital footprint!

    Much of this is just designed to wear us down, right? To cause us to “give up,” throw our digital hands in the air and just accept a) the loss of funds, b) the soft scam, c) the minor intrusion, d) the ever so slight force of will pushed upon us as the end user and consumer rather than as the vendor or supplier or seller.

    How is it that we protest, to whom do we turn for support and, ultimately, for protection to the reduction in importance of our own voice? My local supermarket has closed, my favorite restaurant, the local Starbucks is gone. This all feels like one day we’ll awake to find we are wholly subject to the whims of others and have lost all ability to vociferously object.

    Hoping someone will comment. Hello. Is anyone really out there?

    Lonely and frustrated in a digital world.

  • CATCHING UP

    [Ed Note: I have been informed my previous posts may be housing GSP errors (grammar, spelling, punctuation). *sigh* no doubt. I will endeavor to review and correct, but the point of my exercise is more creative than editorial, and so no promises are made. Thank you as always for your correspondence.]

    [Photo by me: Shinkai in the Kiso District of Japan.]

    My retirement is now more than a year old, and that alone leaves so much to talk about. I have pretty much stayed away from my old career and most of my business contacts. I’ve changed my LinkedIn profile to “gone fishing,” I’ve had a couple of lunches here and there with old staffers mostly centered around their onward job searches. And that’s been super healthy from my perspective.

    Yesterday I had lunch with a business friend whom I’ve known and done regular business with for more than a decade. She’s super busy with career and family, but we always took the time to lunch a few times a year just to catch up on each other rather than on our overlapping work experience.

    It had been nearly 15 months since I’d last seen her, but ours is one of those wonderful friendships where catching up comes quick and easy; we each have a hierarchy of questions to ask, news to share and stories to tell.

    Sadly, her news was in great part of loss that she was managing through. The death of a parent, an uncle and a close friend, all within a very brief period of time. Sharing these stories reminds us of our own losses or our sense of impending loss as our circle around us ages and declines in health.

    We had our “regular table” in the front window where the urban street scene passed us by and where we had a sense of great privacy from the world as we each opened up in turn about husbands, friends, health, grieving, separating, coping and all that life has to offer. In what seemed like an instant, an hour and a half had passed by and she needed to return to work while I had the great luxury of wandering off into the warm afternoon sunlight, determined to find the quietest path homeward across a bustling Monday afternoon in the city.

    It’s likely I won’t see her again until the fall or winter. Our lives around us will have changed, evolved, morphed. Lives will no doubt have been lost, the world will continue to spin and for sure chaos will remain the order of the day. But I will look forward to sitting close to her over food, sharing our confidences straight from the heart, understanding the impact and weight of each story. Ours is a very special friendship, unlike many of my others, not requiring daily chats or even monthly zooms, but only this simple act of lunch once every several months. We are two adults who feel connected by shared experiences but our true connection runs so much deeper — in the support I know we feel for each other’s life experience beyond us two but share intimately in our own safe space — my friend and my counselor

  • RIGHT TO LIFE

    This is such a complicated topic, but, also, not really.

    I think we all believe we have a Right to Life – the right to exist as human beings and to try to comprehend the purpose of our lives.

    We have survived on this planet by being creative, clever, curious and obstinate. We found food and shelter, we created weapons to help us hunt and, later, to defend us against ourselves.

    We have been successful in overcoming the obstacles of this planet, and in that success we have likely created our own undoing. We are overpopulating, we are not utilizing resources sustainably, and our very tribalism that no doubt helped us through many of the most challenging times keeps us from working together as a species to prevent our ultimate demise through planetary destruction.

    We are running out of water. We are damaging the very atmosphere that allows us to breathe. We are over consuming fish and meat and yet failing to produce vegetables and grains in ways which solve hunger for all people. We are overpopulating the planet and tipping the balance of nature against us, yet doing almost nothing to attempt to maintain that balance and ensure our long term survival. These are opinions, these are well-established facts.

    The very tribalism that brought us safely through the mountains and the forests and the droughts and the wars, through the heavy rains and the winters and the hot deserts, that very tribalism could also kill us off.

    We seem unable to move beyond the tribalism, seeing our fellow human beings as others rather than as ourselves. By maintaining this historical perspective we spend our time and energy on defense rather than on community building. We spend disproportionate amount of monies under the banner of “maintaining peace” rather than on seeking harmony.

    America and its allies – if we still have them – had a chance to lead the world into a new age of unity and purpose. America had – and likely still has – the opportunity to put down arms and promote global peace with an eye toward humanities long term survival on this planet.

    We the People can still become All People, not just Some People. We the People can harness collaboration and understanding as tools for a better tomorrow, a healthier planet, a world without borders, a world at peace. We can start by laying down our arms, for they are certainly the death of our own species even today as I write this. We can change our attitude, we can change our tone, we can embrace one another and we can try together to understand what it will take for us all to survive long term. It’s time for new global tribalism.

  • Winsome

    The only thing I ever cooked before the age of 41 was sloppy joes. Maybe party mix. And, of course, lobster stew (but that’s a longer story).

    In my 40s, I briefly owned a kitchen supply store (also a story – a very long story). During that time I had a friend who was a chef and cookbook author. Carl taught me one super important thing — cooking is an art, not a science. Carl taught me to enjoy the process, to experiment and to “try, try again.”

    Some of us are raised to be perfectionists — it is a curse. Many advanced tech cultures teach a “fail fast” method of development and this is an important skill and attitude for a cook. If I stopped trying to cook something every time I failed, I would likely never cook anything twice.

    Like so many others, I really began to hone some of my cooking skills during the COVID19 pandemic. How many of us now have sourdough starters, a perfected chocolate cake (that would be me!) and a tried and true pizza (crust and sauce – 2 points!). I’ve added Japanese Milk Bread to my recipe bench, but, more important, I have truly learned a) not to be afraid to try something new and b) what I dare and what I do not dare to try. You know, some days you just know you don’t want to try and climb that hill…

    Yesterday I made an “au gratin” combo of onions, mushrooms and, of course, potatoes. This is a rarity in my life because I live in a very “anti-taters” household. The au gratin was a day long activity that I doubt I shall try agin anytime soon despite the fact that it came out quite well. First there was the slicing (much aided by the recent addition of an OXO mandoline slicer to our kitchen. And the onions and the mushrooms. There was the grating of the block of gruyere (yes, yes, I froze it first — barely helped). Then, because I’m an overachiever in the kitchen and beyond, I did the “boil the taters in cream” thing, plus sautéed the mushrooms and onions. Then came the construction and the hour+ of baking. Delicious and well-received at the birthday dinner last night.

    I was unsure of the actual amount of sliced taters I needed, so I did a practice fill of the baking dish, moved to a larger size, accounted for shrinkage when cooked, and I still ended up with too many sliced potatoes. So somehow – and I really don’t recall how it happened – I stumbled into an air fried potato chip recipe. I suspect one of my household members said “that’s the only good thing to do with potatoes” and I was caught up in the excitement of the moment.

    For those of you who haven’t tried, let me say now that air frying sliced potatoes is not an easy task. There’s the slicing, the soaking, THEN there’s the drying off (here I was remembering that McDonald’s famous fries resulted from them being left in sacks in the dry night air of Southern California). Finally there’s “just enough but not too much” oil and some salt (and pepper maybe – be adventurous).

    Last year we got a new oven (finally saying goodbye to our plug-in element 1982) and said oven comes with an air fryer option. Now, I’m somewhat doubtful that this “big oven air fry” is as impactful an air fry as the little counter top gismo – I have one in the countryside, not here in the city. I think it kicks ass. The oven, maybe just a little tap to the butt, but def not an ass kicker air fry…

    Anywho, I studied 4 different recipes – I think this is a smart idea to anyone trying something new for the first time. And now that I’ve had the experience of trying two batches, I will definitely go do some more homework before I venture into the potato chip-making biz again.

    You see my evidence above. And this was the pretty 2nd batch. The first batch was nearly 100% dark brown. You know when you look at a recipe the first time and then you look at your first effort and you sort of wonder “who actually can cook it to look like that?” That’s precisely how I felt (still feel until I get better results – someone isn’t sharing their details!).

    Very very very fortunately for me, my city household members actually like the burnt end of things, which also goes for these chips. I appreciate people with a “wide palate.”

    So you win some, you lose some. Yesterday I had a great loaf of Hokkaido Milk Bread and my first ever gruyere au gratin with mushrooms & onions. I had a pretty good marinated pork loin. The brussel sprouts were a bit underdone in my opinion, but everyone ate theres and said nice things, so I will try not to lose sleep. This morning’s effort in potato chips: D- in my book. An F really.

    I’ll let you know if I rise to the occasion ever again. I may just shop at Trader Joes….

  • Wildflowers

    In process

  • friends & relations

    Warning: I am not at all sure where this is going.

    Recently I’ve been contemplating friendships (or relationships, what have you). Why we are friends with some and not others, why we start up friendships and why we end them, why we keep hanging on and when we gently (or maybe not gently at all) let go.

    Looking back on life, I think I’ve usually held my friendships to a very high standard. Those who know me from way way back know that I had (still have?) some “hard to put your finger on” gauge by which I judge the quality and value of my friendships. There are certainly those who have run into that fence and then found themselves on the other side of it. I have no doubt that I, too, have crossed lines with friends and am therefore no longer on their holiday card list (I’m being snarky, but always truthful).

    My boundary is clear to me and surely abrupt to others. One of the things I value most highly in my friendships is honesty; specifically, the ability to speak honestly about one another. It is not news to me that others frequently find me irksome, annoying, “a dick,” what have you. I am not new to this rodeo. My outspokenness is often the source of my trouble in friendships — what I see as honest, others see as criticism. Now that’s an interesting topic — “criticism” puts a negative spin on honesty, whereas for me it’s really more about just being truthful with one another, something I believe friendship should be based in.

    I have won some and lost some, and I have put the work in to maintain some and have chosen to step away from some that I think are not longer worth the maintenance (are friends like cars, you need to know when it’s time to trade them in?). I’ve been accused of being cold – so perhaps this is where that comes to bear.

    I think when we are younger it is easier for us to make friends because we are still in the exploratory stages and refining what we think of things. As we age, time speeds up because we’ve experienced more and have learned (one hopes) how to maximize the enjoyment of the time we have left by narrowing down our experiences to those we like and those we still wish to explore. Friends who can survive that whole ride are surely there because they have survived the collective experience curve, the process of picking up, considering, keeping or discarding, as if Life was a game of poker (or mahjong, perhaps)..

    In case you are wondering, I am struggling with some of the effort I’m putting into friendships and relationships and wondering if this is how my cherished remaining hours should be spent when my list of ‘how to spend that time’ grows ever longer…. At the same time, I am also wondering why my friends like me – what is it that I bring to the friendship that makes time with me valuable to them.

    My guess is that this is more than just one post (and perhaps a call to find a new therapist!). Or perhaps it merely means I need a nap.

    Life choices can be so complicated. I get why people want to be hermits. TG my dog doesn’t care much about any of this!

  • Here Today

    Lately I have had the feeling that I am nearing the end of the road. It isn’t a feeling of fear or depression or anxiety, it is just a sensation that I’ve been trying to better understand.

    I retired recently, so it could be that cutting loose the anchor of a daily schedule has set me emotionally adrift a bit – I certainly wouldn’t be the first to feel a bit rudderless in retirement. Reorienting oneself to all this freedom (yet it feels so much busier to me!) might well cause the inner workings to fall into a fatalistic contemplation of the meaning of life. Yup, that could definitely be one cause.

    I’ve also been experiencing a great sense of loss lately, some my own and some the loss – present or future – of others dear to me. Last year at this time a dear friend died quickly of cancer — literally within 60 days or less. I think I’m still processing that rapid departure.

    I heard from a family member of an old friend with whom I’d lost contact that he’d died in December. His sense of humor was infectious and I used to love having him share his view of the world with me.

    Another very dear friend of very long standing announced the other day that they had come unpleasantly close to death a few weeks back. I am still processing the fact that the call might have been their spouse informing me of their demise. This may sound selfish, but I would have felt deprived of the chance to say goodbye, to have one last chance to really connect.

    And maybe that’s the feeling I am dealing with — grief at not having had the chance to tell someone I love them, that I will miss them, that it’s been meaningful for me to have known them and that — good times or bad times – they’ve been an important person on this journey, that they’ve made a difference by being there and I appreciate that.

    So this is not new, I suppose. We never really know when that last moment is that we’ll see a friend, a lover, a family member. And we never know who we’ll get to say goodbye and thank you to or who we’ll never get to say that to. I jokingly say to my spouse, “I’ll miss you when you’re gone.” But it’s not really a joke, is it? I mean, maybe the joke is that I’ll die first and maybe we won’t be together when that happens – again, you never know. I really just want him to know that I’ve really appreciated our time together on this path.

    Gosh I hope this isn’t morose – I certainly don’t intend it to be. And please don’t call me all worried like – just call me and say you were thinking of us and wanting to touch base, catch up, hear each other’s voice, remember why we’re friends….

    I just wanted to share this feeling I’ve had and try and scratch underneath the surface a bit to see what’s driving it all..

    And just maybe all I really want is to tell people that I love and appreciate them so that they know.

    [btw, artwork by me; gouache april 2025; egret in ueno park, tokyo]

  • My 6th Sense

    [Ed Note: When I set out on this journey it was to task myself with regular creative writing. Little did I know (ah, those words would sink a flotilla) how much research would be involved to support what I imagined to be relatively minor efforts. A very loud, collective “Ha!” is heard from the Experienced Ones in the audience. All of this to say, I learned so much more than I ever need to know about human senses and their number. So, “yes, yes,” there are great debates over the sense labeled “#6, but I am taking liberties…”]

    One of my favorite bits in literature is from “Lord of the Rings,” wherein Samwise is overcome with wonder at the prospect of meeting (and then actually being with) the Elves. I felt that same feeling the first time I saw giraffes move across the countryside in South Africa — that gentle, almost hypnotic, graceful flow for such a huge being. Not that I wouldn’t also like to meet Elves, I’m just a bit more centered in my reality than that…. (I hear you. Be quiet.)

    I also love Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance;” it’s been an anthem for me throughout my adult life.

    I hope you never lose your sense of wonder
    You get your fill to eat, but always keep that hunger
    May you never take one single breath for granted

    And so I relish, cherish and embrace those moments of wonder when they spontaneously come upon me in life.

    We live on the side of a steep canyon wall in the coastal mountains of West County, Sonoma. In the heavily-forested hillside above our house, a heard of deer make their nighttime home (some years this is a doe and her fawns, sometimes it is multiple young bucks and does and fawns – I do love familial diversity). We hear them at various times of day as they come and go across our driveway to the creek at the bottom of the hill. Sometimes we see them just at the bend in the road standing backlit against the golden afternoon sunlight pouring through the forest canopy. And often when we are on the road walking with our small dog he will stop and listen with great intent. Then we will hear them moving slowly through the underbrush and from time to time we will even glimpse them. The three of us will stop, stand in silence, and listen in wonder as these gentle beasts move quietly about us.

    I have no doubt that this is how Samwise felt the first time he encountered Elves in the forests of Middle Earth. I hope we never ever lose this sense of wonder.

  • Do you hear what i hear?

    I am beyond fortunate to spend much of my time these days deep in the redwood forests near the coast. This is quite often a nearly silent corner of the world where we are awakened at first light by the sounds of birds and spend our early mornings sitting quietly, contemplating the stillness.

    I believe that many of our neighbors here live here for the peace, the sense of being present in the immenseness of the natural world around us. The seasons are marked by sounds: The sound of heavy rains on the roof and on the deck outside our windows, the sound that same rain makes as it seeps through the earth and joins creeks that run just below us, the sound of trees bending in the breeze, the sound of deer quietly passing on the hill above us where they often sleep at night, and the sound of squirrels chasing each other back and forth from branch to branch (and the ensuing sound of falling nuts and cones, which I often think are intentionally aimed at our small dog!).

    The noises added to this world by humans stand out as cacophony; we add unnatural noise to our world that masks the true sounds of the planet and its life. The morning stillness here in the forest is broken by the sound of an overhead jet passing far above us and along the coast or the sound of a “too large for this road” truck and trailer as it groans and bangs and races up the hill to some deeper human engagement to bend and twist the natural landscape. Among “us neighbors” who have been here more than a few years, we often talk about how newcomers do or do not adapt. Many newcomers – and particularly “weekenders” (who oddly come for the “peace & quiet” of the countryside) – play amplified outdoor music, talk louder than necessary to be heard on a small deck in a quiet glen, and otherwise fail to connect with the larger sounds of nature around them. Newcomers who stay more than a few years generally become more attuned to the quietude of this beaut corner of the planet, and tread more gently on the soundscape of nature.

    Much of what we create is done to dominate nature: Housing, roads, large scale farms, and, of course, cities. Our cities and even our towns are testaments to our dominance over the natural world, and most typically are done at the expense of that world. We tread harshly upon our landscape. Yet even in the smallest corners we build temples to that which we have removed: Small pocket parks, front lawns, window boxes, tree-lined streets. We innately understand that we are displacing this world by sheer brute force. I trust I will not live long enough to see the world bow down its head in defeat, but I do wish we could all learn to listen more carefully and honor more deeply and live more symbiotically so that our world would flourish rather than fold beneath our presence here.

    [Embee Note! Boy oh Boy I learned a lot about wordpress on my iPad this morning…. Yikes.]

  • To Every Season

    Having literally abandoned google for chatGPT, I have recently been unsatisfied with the AI responses — authoritative in voice but frequently incorrect in content. This has nothing to do with today’s Note except that I went to google to learn more about Sweet Pea (the plant) and was quite surprised to learn that the annual version is one of the most popular flowering vines in our nation. Huh.

    Where I live, sweat pea PERENNIAL is an invasive plant, one that takes hold both through seeds and underground root proliferation. Insidious.

    For many, many years we have paid day laborers to take a scorched earth policy in spring to our wooded, hillside property in Northern California. Hours of backbreaking effort beneath the late Spring sun gave us 1 ¼ acres nearly devoid of this hideous insult to the ancient redwood forests (well, maybe they’re only about 150 years old or less, their ancestors having been stripped from the land by earlier Colonizers who used their wood for housing in far away places).

    Yet this Spring their are more than ever; huge embankments line our country drive, pop up among the ivy (also not native, I suspect, but certainly in keeping with someone’s idea of a fine Country Home), creep in among the St. John’s Wort (hey, invasive or not, it was here first!), and generally propagate at free will in every sunlit corner of this land. How dare they!

    So having expended our energies in a campaign of terror against the Perennial Sweat Pea Community, I have taken this year to contemplating their place in Nature’s Plan for the planet. Is this actually their season and I am merely attempting (and failing miserably!) to interrupt it for my own personal whatever, or is there truly something evil and insidious about this plant? The local deer – who also according to “The Plan” have increased their brood after a very wet Spring – are certainly enjoying it’s tender tips for nourishment and are using it for bedding in the nighttime. Even we have clipped some of the stunning flowers to brighten the inside of our (invasive?) home.

    Our neighbor claims it dries and becomes tinder for wildfire. How rude! Doesn’t it realize that this is the Age of Man and wildfire is not our friend? “Hush,” say the not so Ancient Redwoods, “you are here only for a moment, invasive and perennial, but not Eternal. That is for the rest of us.”