In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the City of Long Beach, California, set up five drive-through testing sites across the city.
In May, Mayor Robert Garcia gushed about the importance of the sites: “Having a robust testing capacity is crucial to keeping people safe and gradually reopening the Long Beach economy,” he said.
But when my son and I attempted to actually get a test at one of the Long Beach sites, we found the process so frustrating that we nearly gave up.
My son needed a Covid-19 test before starting his summer job as a camp counselor. The city encouraged people wanting a test to make an appointment, but on my first try there were zero time slots available. That was partly because the scheduling only seemed to allow appointments about a week ahead of time.
I had better luck on my second try, a few days later. I was able to schedule an appointment on June 27 at 3:30 p.m. at Jordan High School. I received a confirmation email with a reservation number.
The day before the appointment, we received a voicemail saying our tests had been moved to Veterans Stadium, at the same time. This was good, because the site was closer to us.
When we arrived at Veterans Stadium the next day, about 3:15, the parking lot was dotted with orange cones marking driving lanes and a few pop-up tents. But something was amiss: There were no people there and the gate was locked.
We did see six other occupied cars lined up at the gate and took our place in line. We were confused, but hopeful that somebody would show up soon to do tests.
After about 10 minutes, a man drove up and told all of us that our tests had been moved to a different site, the Long Beach Community College campus on Pacific Coast Highway. We headed off and arrived at the other site in about 10 minutes.
But the scene there was disturbingly reminiscent of the one at Veterans Stadium: Lines of traffic cones and a few tents, but no people. We saw a security guard and asked where the testers were.
"They closed up at 2 o'clock," he said.
Frustrated, we wondered if this test -- even though free -- was worth the trouble.
Still, we returned the Long Beach City College site the next morning, encountering a long line of cars snaking through the lot. I'd estimate there were about 80 cars there.
When we pulled in at about 9:45 a.m., a woman worker asked if we had an appointment and I told her, "Yes — yesterday. But there was no one here." This puzzled her, but after we explained, she directed us into a line.
We sat still for about a half hour, then our line started to move and at about 10:25, we got to the check-in station. I showed the woman there our appointment confirmation number and she was confused, and sought help. Soon a man arrived and tried to tell us we had to go to Jordan High. I explained what had happened, and he said they would have to enter my son's info "manually."
To be clear, all the workers there were super nice and did their best to help us. Still, I was surprised they had no way to access my son's information, which I'd entered online.
So we had to pull out of line, and a different man wrote down my son's information. This delayed us about 10 minutes.
Then we pulled ahead to the testing station. A woman came to our window and gave my son a testing kit. This revealed another confusing part of the process. Our email confirmation had included a link to a video showing how to do the test. It instructed you to rub the test swab inside both cheeks, inside the bottom and top of your lips, underneath and the top of your tongue, and finally, the roof of your mouth.
But the woman at the site instructed my son differently: He was to put the swab up his nose as deep as he could without pain, and rub it around for 10 seconds in each nostril. So that's what he did.
He described it as very uncomfortable — his eyes watered — but not painful. Then he placed the swab in a test vial as instructed, place the cap on, and returned it to the woman. We were done about 10:40, slightly less than an hour after arriving.
Now we wait for the results, which are supposed to arrive in about 72 hours.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Book review: "In the Wake of Madness" by Joan Druett
It says a lot about the job options available to young American men in the first half of the 19th century that so many of them opted to work on a whaling ship. Sure, you would get to travel the world and visit idyllic South Seas islands, but, as Joan Druett illustrates in "In the Wake of Madness" it would have been a grim career path, and possibly a hellish one.
In this 2003 book, Druett tells the story of the whaleship Sharon, and its seemingly cursed voyage of 1841 to 1845. Two men were brutally murdered on the trip, while other men died in accidents. The captain harshly put down an attempted mutiny, and most of the crew eventually deserted the ship at various ports of call.
Sound like a downer? Far from it: It is a fascinating story of life on a whaleship and the varied men — some brave, some cowardly, some cruel — that inhabited it.
While "In the Wake of Madness" revolves around the two murders, that's not the key to its compelling story. After all, if you're interested in homicide, there are countless true crime books to choose from. What sets Druett's book apart is that she places you on the whaleboat, amid the salty air, the dank smells of the cramped cabins, the sweat and blood of the men who lived and worked together without break.
Druett does this even while acknowledging that her primary sources are flawed and fragmented. She relied on the diaries of sailors as key sources of information, but at times they were are cryptic or mute. To fill in the spaces, she pulls from documents from other whaleships, news reports of the time, and accounts from authors like Herman Melville.
Druett makes it clear that while the trip of Sharon was particularly snakebitten, the work on any whaleship was often miserable and conflict-ridden. I suppose that's not too surprising when you have men living in close contact for years, never getting a full night's sleep (they swapped shifts every four hours around the clock), and pushed to the brink in extreme conditions.
No one asked me, but I've got to wonder how much trouble could have been avoided if the owners of the Sharon and the other whaleships would have put more time into selecting and training their men before the voyage even began. As Druett describes it, it was common at the time to take virtually any man with a pulse on board, regardless of whether he had any experience at sea or any skills at all.
So suddenly you're deep into a three- or four-year voyage and you realize that your crew is unqualified and possibly unwilling. It's also possible, as with the Sharon, that the captain himself was not up to the task.
One of the biggest problems on the Sharon was that the harpooners repeatedly missed the whale or threw so weakly the implement easily fell out of the target. Here's an idea: Hire better harpooners, or train them before you leave home. It might cost you a bit more upfront but it would have greatly increased the success of the journey and your ship would return more quickly with a full load of whale oil.
If you like this book, I would recommend, "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick, another story of a whaleboat trip that went very wrong.
In this 2003 book, Druett tells the story of the whaleship Sharon, and its seemingly cursed voyage of 1841 to 1845. Two men were brutally murdered on the trip, while other men died in accidents. The captain harshly put down an attempted mutiny, and most of the crew eventually deserted the ship at various ports of call.
Sound like a downer? Far from it: It is a fascinating story of life on a whaleship and the varied men — some brave, some cowardly, some cruel — that inhabited it.
While "In the Wake of Madness" revolves around the two murders, that's not the key to its compelling story. After all, if you're interested in homicide, there are countless true crime books to choose from. What sets Druett's book apart is that she places you on the whaleboat, amid the salty air, the dank smells of the cramped cabins, the sweat and blood of the men who lived and worked together without break.
Druett does this even while acknowledging that her primary sources are flawed and fragmented. She relied on the diaries of sailors as key sources of information, but at times they were are cryptic or mute. To fill in the spaces, she pulls from documents from other whaleships, news reports of the time, and accounts from authors like Herman Melville.
Druett makes it clear that while the trip of Sharon was particularly snakebitten, the work on any whaleship was often miserable and conflict-ridden. I suppose that's not too surprising when you have men living in close contact for years, never getting a full night's sleep (they swapped shifts every four hours around the clock), and pushed to the brink in extreme conditions.
No one asked me, but I've got to wonder how much trouble could have been avoided if the owners of the Sharon and the other whaleships would have put more time into selecting and training their men before the voyage even began. As Druett describes it, it was common at the time to take virtually any man with a pulse on board, regardless of whether he had any experience at sea or any skills at all.
So suddenly you're deep into a three- or four-year voyage and you realize that your crew is unqualified and possibly unwilling. It's also possible, as with the Sharon, that the captain himself was not up to the task.
One of the biggest problems on the Sharon was that the harpooners repeatedly missed the whale or threw so weakly the implement easily fell out of the target. Here's an idea: Hire better harpooners, or train them before you leave home. It might cost you a bit more upfront but it would have greatly increased the success of the journey and your ship would return more quickly with a full load of whale oil.
If you like this book, I would recommend, "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick, another story of a whaleboat trip that went very wrong.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Book review: "After Further Review" by Mike Pereira
There are a lot of things wrong with the book "After Further Review" — it's poorly organized and the writing is amateurish, just to name a couple. Still, I really liked it.
"After Further Review" is the autobiography (mostly) of former National Football League reffing czar Mike Pereira, a man many know from his appearances as the rules expert on Fox NFL broadcasts. I'm almost the perfect target market for this book because I have a lot of interest in both football and refereeing.
Pereira brings us inside the tent of a couple notably closed worlds — the NFL and the reffing community. He tells stories of good refs and bad ones, of difficult times in his personal life, and of off-the-field battles he had with various NFL executives and coaches. Wonderfully, he's not afraid to name names.
The book succeeds largely because Pereira comes off as a likeable guy with a lot of good stories to tell. Many of these are the kind of tales a guy would tell in the bar — rough and unpolished, but told with conviction.
He recalls a crucial call — plus a missed non-call — he made in a 1998 playoff game. He describes fighting to get replay review made a permanent part of the NFL. And he tells of fighting cancer not just once, but twice.
Still, if you don't love the subject so much, the flaws of the book may drive you crazy. First, the book is maddeningly disorganized. The first quarter of the book starts straightforwardly enough as Pereira tells the story of his boyhood and early adult life, his mind focused on his ultimate goal: Joining the NFL.
But at this point — just when you're eager to hear about his first years in the league — Pereira abandons the chronological format and starts jumping all over place. Jarringly, he throws in a chapter on how much referees are paid. I actually enjoyed it, but it is completely out of place. The same can be said about another chapter in which he analyzes key referee decisions from the NFL's past (of which he had no part).
I guess Pereira and his co-writer Rick Jaffe must have had some method to this madness, but the constant back and forth in time is confusing. A chronological approach would have been better. For example, instead of separating Pereira's battles for rule changes and his experience fighting cancer into separate chapters, putting them in context with each other would have given us a more well-rounded picture.
It's a little hard to believe that Pereira had a co-writer on this because the book it is written like Pereira dictated it all over several nights while holding a vodka tonic. Phrases like "So you can guess what happened next," "You should have heard the response," and "I fell for it, hook, line and sinker" give you some idea of the casualness of the writing.
For all the interesting stories Pereira has to tell, he sometimes skips away just when things are getting intriguing. Early in the book, for example, he says that when he first reffed football (a kids game) he realized, "I had found my passion." What was it about the experience that excited him? He doesn't explain.
Later, when he was supervising officials in the Western Athletic Conference he describes catching a bunch of referees cheating on their annual rules test. This would seem to be a big deal, but he laughs it off with a chuckle and moves on.
Those are forgivable flaws, though. If you like football — and especially if you like football and refereeing — you will find "After Further Review" an enjoyable read.
"After Further Review" is the autobiography (mostly) of former National Football League reffing czar Mike Pereira, a man many know from his appearances as the rules expert on Fox NFL broadcasts. I'm almost the perfect target market for this book because I have a lot of interest in both football and refereeing.
Pereira brings us inside the tent of a couple notably closed worlds — the NFL and the reffing community. He tells stories of good refs and bad ones, of difficult times in his personal life, and of off-the-field battles he had with various NFL executives and coaches. Wonderfully, he's not afraid to name names.
The book succeeds largely because Pereira comes off as a likeable guy with a lot of good stories to tell. Many of these are the kind of tales a guy would tell in the bar — rough and unpolished, but told with conviction.
He recalls a crucial call — plus a missed non-call — he made in a 1998 playoff game. He describes fighting to get replay review made a permanent part of the NFL. And he tells of fighting cancer not just once, but twice.
Still, if you don't love the subject so much, the flaws of the book may drive you crazy. First, the book is maddeningly disorganized. The first quarter of the book starts straightforwardly enough as Pereira tells the story of his boyhood and early adult life, his mind focused on his ultimate goal: Joining the NFL.
But at this point — just when you're eager to hear about his first years in the league — Pereira abandons the chronological format and starts jumping all over place. Jarringly, he throws in a chapter on how much referees are paid. I actually enjoyed it, but it is completely out of place. The same can be said about another chapter in which he analyzes key referee decisions from the NFL's past (of which he had no part).
I guess Pereira and his co-writer Rick Jaffe must have had some method to this madness, but the constant back and forth in time is confusing. A chronological approach would have been better. For example, instead of separating Pereira's battles for rule changes and his experience fighting cancer into separate chapters, putting them in context with each other would have given us a more well-rounded picture.
It's a little hard to believe that Pereira had a co-writer on this because the book it is written like Pereira dictated it all over several nights while holding a vodka tonic. Phrases like "So you can guess what happened next," "You should have heard the response," and "I fell for it, hook, line and sinker" give you some idea of the casualness of the writing.
For all the interesting stories Pereira has to tell, he sometimes skips away just when things are getting intriguing. Early in the book, for example, he says that when he first reffed football (a kids game) he realized, "I had found my passion." What was it about the experience that excited him? He doesn't explain.
Later, when he was supervising officials in the Western Athletic Conference he describes catching a bunch of referees cheating on their annual rules test. This would seem to be a big deal, but he laughs it off with a chuckle and moves on.
Those are forgivable flaws, though. If you like football — and especially if you like football and refereeing — you will find "After Further Review" an enjoyable read.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Book review: "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain
It's always exciting to come upon the work of a promising young author. Case in point: The novel "Tom Sawyer," by a Missouri-based writer named Mark Twain, which I just finished reading. While Twain wrote one previous novel with a co-author, "Tom Sawyer" is his first as sole author.
"Tom Sawyer" is a nostalgia-tinted tale of a mischievous boy — about 12 or 13, though Twain never specifies — living in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Tom, the main character, is a too-smart-for-his-own-good kid who can trick his friends into doing his chores, sweet talk the girls, and lead his buddies on days-long adventures as imaginary pirates and robbers.
The book braids several storylines together — Tom witnesses a murder, he pursues the winsome Becky Thatcher, he and Huckleberry Finn go looking for buried treasure — and eventually it all comes together for an engaging finish.
Twain makes it clear in the preface that "Tom Sawyer" is based in fact:
"Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine."
While the stories are fun, the writing is imperfect. For starters, Twain primarily tells the story from the "limited" third-person perspective — that is, from the point of view of Tom Sawyer. But, jarringly, he sometimes switches to the omniscient third person. In fact, one crucial section is told entirely from the point of view of Huck Finn.
My second criticism, I admit, is not very fair to Twain. But to read this book, published in 1872, in the twenty-first century is to encounter some antiquated vocabulary and colloquialisms that no longer are familiar. I'm not sure what Huck Finn meant when he said Robin Hood "must a ben a brick," for example, and there are several uses of the old word "stile," a term I was not familiar with.
It's too bad, because Twain also showsa great talent for colloquial dialogue, especially in the frequent rat-a-tat exchanges among adolescents. Here's one good section that starts with a question from Huck Finn.
"What does pirates have to do?"
It is, despite it's occasional flaws, an enjoyable read. I can't wait to see what Mr. Twain will produce next.
"Tom Sawyer" is a nostalgia-tinted tale of a mischievous boy — about 12 or 13, though Twain never specifies — living in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Tom, the main character, is a too-smart-for-his-own-good kid who can trick his friends into doing his chores, sweet talk the girls, and lead his buddies on days-long adventures as imaginary pirates and robbers.
The book braids several storylines together — Tom witnesses a murder, he pursues the winsome Becky Thatcher, he and Huckleberry Finn go looking for buried treasure — and eventually it all comes together for an engaging finish.
Twain makes it clear in the preface that "Tom Sawyer" is based in fact:
"Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine."
While the stories are fun, the writing is imperfect. For starters, Twain primarily tells the story from the "limited" third-person perspective — that is, from the point of view of Tom Sawyer. But, jarringly, he sometimes switches to the omniscient third person. In fact, one crucial section is told entirely from the point of view of Huck Finn.
My second criticism, I admit, is not very fair to Twain. But to read this book, published in 1872, in the twenty-first century is to encounter some antiquated vocabulary and colloquialisms that no longer are familiar. I'm not sure what Huck Finn meant when he said Robin Hood "must a ben a brick," for example, and there are several uses of the old word "stile," a term I was not familiar with.
It's too bad, because Twain also showsa great talent for colloquial dialogue, especially in the frequent rat-a-tat exchanges among adolescents. Here's one good section that starts with a question from Huck Finn.
"What does pirates have to do?"
Tom said:
"Oh, they have just a bully time -- take ships and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships -- make 'em walk a plank."
"And they carry the women to the island," said Joe; "they don't kill the women."
"No," assented Tom, "they don't kill the women -- they're too noble. And the women's always beautiful, too."
"And don't they wear the bulliest clothes! Oh no! All gold and silver and di'monds," said Joe, with enthusiasm.
"Who?" said Huck.
"Why, the pirates."
Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly.
"I reckon I ain't dressed fitten for a pirate," said he, with a regretful pathos in his voice; "but I ain't got none but these."
It is, despite it's occasional flaws, an enjoyable read. I can't wait to see what Mr. Twain will produce next.
Friday, May 15, 2020
Book review: "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau
I tried to finish "Walden," I really did. I made it all the way to page 368, prodding myself to keep going, reading a little, skimming a little. But even after many days of this I had another 140 pages to go and I realized I couldn't take more of this masochism.
Yes, I know that "Walden," first published in 1854, is considered a classic by many.
Some people revere the book, which is partly based on the two years Henry David Thoreau lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond outside Boston. Thoreau's philosophy of rejecting frivolous trappings of modern life and returning to a spartan life close to nature strikes home with many people.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify," Thoreau famously says. At another point, he commands, "Live free and uncommitted." And he notes: "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."
But for every nugget of wisdom Thoreau offers up, there are a dozen other sentences that go off the rails. They start intriguingly and you wonder where he's going, then the sentence twists and bends and soon becomes so tangled as to be indecipherable.
One of his sentences -- I'm not making this up -- clocks in at 248 words. At another point he throws in a 173-word sentence about pine groves. immediately followed by a 194-word sentence. Were there no editors in the 19th century? I love a good puzzle, but no amount of reverse engineering can make sense of some of the writing.
Thoreau can write lyrically, even beautifully, but he doesn't know when to stop. At one point, for example, he describes the glassy surface of Walden Pond like this, "When you invert your head, it looks like the finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another." Nice, right? Yes, except Thoreau keeps restating the same point -- the pond is smooth as glass -- for six more pages.
Thoreau lectures readers on the failings of their lives ("Men live lives of quiet desperation"), while exhibiting exceptional arrogance. "I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and have yet to hear the first syllable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
"Walden" has no real story, no compelling direction, and the chapters are arranged in no particular order.
Then there are the contradictions. At one point Thoreau says, "I dearly love to talk," but later he says "I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." Just eight pages later he says, "I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way." Yet, throughout the book he ridicules most people as shallow and shortsighted.
I understand that Thoreau's philosophy strikes a nerve. I think we all recognize ourselves, even today, when he says, "Our life is frittered away by detail." We think of our phones and other gadgets when he says, "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things."
And I'm sure many readers like that Thoreau encourages a lifestyle of working as little as possible.
But just when you start to think, "Hey, this guy Thoreau knows what he's talking about" he'll throw in a passage that makes you question his grasp of reality. Like this one:
"A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."
Let's break that down. First, a man who brags that he barely works doesn't have time to shake out a mat? And second, a mat to wipe his feet is the beginning of evil? What would happen if -- gasp! -- someone offered him a towel?
Many people are fascinated by the idea of breaking free from the bonds of civilized society and living independently with few responsibilities or commitments. While few of us are willing to drop our jobs and leave behind our modern comforts, the idea that it might be possible to do so is an entrancing thought.
For those people, Thoreau is a shining light of possibility. But a small collection of Thoreau quotes will do you quite nicely; you don't need to read the whole book.
Yes, I know that "Walden," first published in 1854, is considered a classic by many.
Some people revere the book, which is partly based on the two years Henry David Thoreau lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond outside Boston. Thoreau's philosophy of rejecting frivolous trappings of modern life and returning to a spartan life close to nature strikes home with many people.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify," Thoreau famously says. At another point, he commands, "Live free and uncommitted." And he notes: "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."
But for every nugget of wisdom Thoreau offers up, there are a dozen other sentences that go off the rails. They start intriguingly and you wonder where he's going, then the sentence twists and bends and soon becomes so tangled as to be indecipherable.
One of his sentences -- I'm not making this up -- clocks in at 248 words. At another point he throws in a 173-word sentence about pine groves. immediately followed by a 194-word sentence. Were there no editors in the 19th century? I love a good puzzle, but no amount of reverse engineering can make sense of some of the writing.
Thoreau can write lyrically, even beautifully, but he doesn't know when to stop. At one point, for example, he describes the glassy surface of Walden Pond like this, "When you invert your head, it looks like the finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another." Nice, right? Yes, except Thoreau keeps restating the same point -- the pond is smooth as glass -- for six more pages.
Thoreau lectures readers on the failings of their lives ("Men live lives of quiet desperation"), while exhibiting exceptional arrogance. "I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and have yet to hear the first syllable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
"Walden" has no real story, no compelling direction, and the chapters are arranged in no particular order.
Then there are the contradictions. At one point Thoreau says, "I dearly love to talk," but later he says "I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." Just eight pages later he says, "I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way." Yet, throughout the book he ridicules most people as shallow and shortsighted.
I understand that Thoreau's philosophy strikes a nerve. I think we all recognize ourselves, even today, when he says, "Our life is frittered away by detail." We think of our phones and other gadgets when he says, "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things."
And I'm sure many readers like that Thoreau encourages a lifestyle of working as little as possible.
But just when you start to think, "Hey, this guy Thoreau knows what he's talking about" he'll throw in a passage that makes you question his grasp of reality. Like this one:
"A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."
Let's break that down. First, a man who brags that he barely works doesn't have time to shake out a mat? And second, a mat to wipe his feet is the beginning of evil? What would happen if -- gasp! -- someone offered him a towel?
Many people are fascinated by the idea of breaking free from the bonds of civilized society and living independently with few responsibilities or commitments. While few of us are willing to drop our jobs and leave behind our modern comforts, the idea that it might be possible to do so is an entrancing thought.
For those people, Thoreau is a shining light of possibility. But a small collection of Thoreau quotes will do you quite nicely; you don't need to read the whole book.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Book review: "The Flame Trees of Thika" by Elspeth Huxley
My family and I have many fond memories of our 2013 trip to Kenya. The people were friendly, the wild animals amazing, the country full of surprises.
Many of these memories came rushing back to me as I read "The Flame Trees of Thika," Elspeth Huxley's 1957 memoir of her life as a young girl growing up in what was then British East Africa, and is Kenya today.
Huxley's parents brought her from Britain to East Africa in 1913 as they sought, like many young Britons of the time, to seek their fortune farming in "unspoiled" lands. They were told the land was fertile and growing coffee would be easy.
In fact, no part of the experience was easy -- a fact that helps make "The Flame Trees of Thika" so fascinating.
Much of the book deals with the relations between the white settlers and African tribes people who were often hired as laborers. There are some cringy parts in the way the white adults look down on the Africans. But Huxley isn't here to defend colonialism, just to describe the world as it was to a 6- to 9-year-old discovering life in a harsh land.
There are tales of dangerous leopards, snakes and one notable wounded buffalo. There is a murder investigation. There is the angst of a fellow settler caught in a love triangle. There is a boisterous New Year's Eve party that gets a little out of hand.
In all, it is an affectionate and gentle memoir, and an enjoyable read. Huxley does well drawing out the individual personalities of both black and white characters.
For me, the descriptions of the rolling grasslands, gnarled trees, rutted roads and the diverse wildlife of Kenya brought back mental images of our 2013 visit. I was surprised how even minor details evoked memories.
For instance, at one point the author mentions how thrilled one of the black laborers was when Huxley's father gave him a watch as a gift. That reminded me -- I had forgotten -- that during our visit two or three Kenyans had separately offered to trade goods for my watch. Later, Huxley mentioned sleeping under a mosquito net, and I was brought back to the two nights in a safari camp we'd spent sleeping under them (and how awkward it was to get in and out to go to the bathroom).
Speaking of mosquitoes, I was taken back to a night in Kenya where a mosquito buzzed in my ear as I tried to sleep after I read this line from Huxley: "No sound concentrates so much spitefulness and malice into a very small volume as the pinging of mosquitoes, as if needles tipped with poison were vibrating in a persistent tattoo."
Note the use of a simile in that line. In "The Flame Trees of Thika," Huxley is the master of all things simile, metaphor and analogy. Aspiring writers should pay attention.
Here are some that grabbed me:
mosquito net, , mosquito buzzingN
Many of these memories came rushing back to me as I read "The Flame Trees of Thika," Elspeth Huxley's 1957 memoir of her life as a young girl growing up in what was then British East Africa, and is Kenya today.
Huxley's parents brought her from Britain to East Africa in 1913 as they sought, like many young Britons of the time, to seek their fortune farming in "unspoiled" lands. They were told the land was fertile and growing coffee would be easy.
In fact, no part of the experience was easy -- a fact that helps make "The Flame Trees of Thika" so fascinating.
Much of the book deals with the relations between the white settlers and African tribes people who were often hired as laborers. There are some cringy parts in the way the white adults look down on the Africans. But Huxley isn't here to defend colonialism, just to describe the world as it was to a 6- to 9-year-old discovering life in a harsh land.
There are tales of dangerous leopards, snakes and one notable wounded buffalo. There is a murder investigation. There is the angst of a fellow settler caught in a love triangle. There is a boisterous New Year's Eve party that gets a little out of hand.
In all, it is an affectionate and gentle memoir, and an enjoyable read. Huxley does well drawing out the individual personalities of both black and white characters.
For me, the descriptions of the rolling grasslands, gnarled trees, rutted roads and the diverse wildlife of Kenya brought back mental images of our 2013 visit. I was surprised how even minor details evoked memories.
For instance, at one point the author mentions how thrilled one of the black laborers was when Huxley's father gave him a watch as a gift. That reminded me -- I had forgotten -- that during our visit two or three Kenyans had separately offered to trade goods for my watch. Later, Huxley mentioned sleeping under a mosquito net, and I was brought back to the two nights in a safari camp we'd spent sleeping under them (and how awkward it was to get in and out to go to the bathroom).
Speaking of mosquitoes, I was taken back to a night in Kenya where a mosquito buzzed in my ear as I tried to sleep after I read this line from Huxley: "No sound concentrates so much spitefulness and malice into a very small volume as the pinging of mosquitoes, as if needles tipped with poison were vibrating in a persistent tattoo."
Note the use of a simile in that line. In "The Flame Trees of Thika," Huxley is the master of all things simile, metaphor and analogy. Aspiring writers should pay attention.
Here are some that grabbed me:
- Kupanya emerged from a hut as reluctantly as a very tight cork drawn from the neck of a bottle.
- Their voices slid like a stream over smooth rocks, and gurgled into little pools.
- It was the time of day when heat presses down upon the earth and squeezes out the energy, when men idle in the shade like trout lying nose-to-current on the bed of a stream, when even doves can barely muster the desire to coo.
- A cold wind shook the trees like a vicious cavalcade of ghostly horsemen riding the air.
- When he spoke they greeted him politely but with a wary, almost shifty look, behaving a little like wildebeeste that smell a lion about; they do not panic and gallop off, but tend rather to huddle together, stop grazing and stand ready for action, although uncertain what to do.
- I picked up the bracelet feeling dazed, as perhaps a beetle feels when, all but scorched against burning lamp-glass, he tumbles out of range and lies there, half stunned to recover.
mosquito net, , mosquito buzzingN
Friday, January 3, 2020
Can renting a car save you money?
Dedicated readers of this blog will recall that about eight months ago, I calculated the cost-per-mile of driving my car. In the end, I concluded that it cost me 40.2 cents per mile to drive my car at that time (the cost will always vary because of the changing price of gas).
Today I'm wondering if -- given the costs of driving your car -- it can be cheaper to drive a rental car in certain situations.
First, let's break down the cost of driving per mile, as I calculated them: 16 cents for gas, 8.6 for maintenance, 15.6 cents for depreciation. When you rent a car, you still have to pay for gas, but not for maintenance and depreciation. So, with a rental, I'm saving 24.2 cents per mile (8.6 + 15.6) in the latter two categories.
But that doesn't count the cost of the rental itself, and that's a key element in this equation. If I rent a car for one day and drive 100 miles, I've saved $24.20 in maintenance and depreciation costs. But almost all rental cars cost more than $24 for a day, so renting isn't saving you money.
On the other hand, let's say if I drive 200 miles with a one-day rental that costs a plausible $40. Then I've saved $8.40 ($48.40 - $40) by not driving my own car.
Let's take a "real world" example. Say I want to drive from Long Beach, California, to Santa Cruz, California, spend one day there and then drive back. A total of three days. It's 369 miles each way, according to Google, for a round trip of 738 miles.
Multiply .242 by 738 finds that I would save $179 in depreciation and maintenance costs for that trip. But how much would a rental car cost?
A little online searching finds a bunch of low-priced rental car offers from sketchy companies I've never heard of. But renting from a reputable outfit like Enterprise for three days would be a total of $125 (and some persistent price hunting might find a lower price).
So yes! You can save money by renting a car. But do your calculations carefully. You're going to save most for a long-distance trip over a short period of time. Be sure the rental car comes with unlimited miles.
Also, keep in mind the "hassle factor": How will you pick up and drop off the rental car? If it's a long way to get there and back, that's defeating the purpose. Can you park your car at, or near, the rental place? Will you have to pay for the parking? Or maybe you need a ride there and back? Each situation is different.
Today I'm wondering if -- given the costs of driving your car -- it can be cheaper to drive a rental car in certain situations.
First, let's break down the cost of driving per mile, as I calculated them: 16 cents for gas, 8.6 for maintenance, 15.6 cents for depreciation. When you rent a car, you still have to pay for gas, but not for maintenance and depreciation. So, with a rental, I'm saving 24.2 cents per mile (8.6 + 15.6) in the latter two categories.
But that doesn't count the cost of the rental itself, and that's a key element in this equation. If I rent a car for one day and drive 100 miles, I've saved $24.20 in maintenance and depreciation costs. But almost all rental cars cost more than $24 for a day, so renting isn't saving you money.
On the other hand, let's say if I drive 200 miles with a one-day rental that costs a plausible $40. Then I've saved $8.40 ($48.40 - $40) by not driving my own car.
Let's take a "real world" example. Say I want to drive from Long Beach, California, to Santa Cruz, California, spend one day there and then drive back. A total of three days. It's 369 miles each way, according to Google, for a round trip of 738 miles.
Multiply .242 by 738 finds that I would save $179 in depreciation and maintenance costs for that trip. But how much would a rental car cost?
A little online searching finds a bunch of low-priced rental car offers from sketchy companies I've never heard of. But renting from a reputable outfit like Enterprise for three days would be a total of $125 (and some persistent price hunting might find a lower price).
So yes! You can save money by renting a car. But do your calculations carefully. You're going to save most for a long-distance trip over a short period of time. Be sure the rental car comes with unlimited miles.
Also, keep in mind the "hassle factor": How will you pick up and drop off the rental car? If it's a long way to get there and back, that's defeating the purpose. Can you park your car at, or near, the rental place? Will you have to pay for the parking? Or maybe you need a ride there and back? Each situation is different.
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