And I Dance

Stand with your left hand resting lightly on a chair back or the kitchen counter, feet together.  Tighten your bottom and rotate your legs from the back of the thighs.  This will cause your feet to turn out.  Don’t let the toes turn out further than your knees.  Feel like you’re zipping up an invisible pants zipper deep in your stomach.  Stand tall, belly to backbone.  Don’t forget to breathe.  Drop your shoulders and open your chest.  Make your back broad.  You should be able to feel your back muscles engage.  Remember:  breathe.  Keep your butt down or your back’s going to hurt.  Feel like the top of your head is stretching up to the sky.  Don’t lift your chin.  Are you keeping your thighs turned out?  Breathe!  Okay, now slide your foot out.  Keep turning out.  Keep pulling up.  Point your toe as hard as you can; push your heel forward.  Stretch long.  Stretch tall.  Turn out.  Are you forgetting to breathe?  That’s ballet, and you haven’t even moved yet.  Believe me, it ain’t all daisy crowns and pink tutus.

When I was 13, my Mom took me to Princeton’s McCarthy Theater to see the ballet Midsummer Night’s Dream and, in a whisper, guided my eyes.  I’ve been a balletomane ever since.   When I did a college semester in London, I lined up overnight night at Covent Garden to score tickets to Nureyev and Fontaine in Sleeping Beauty.   Whenever I had a chance to get to New York I saw the New York City Ballet or the ABT.  In Moscow, it was the Bolshoi every six weeks like clockwork.

I began lessons when I retired.  Watching me in class isn’t pretty; I’m worse than you might imagine.  I’m not being modest here; I’m just, er, mature for a ballet student.  When you begin ballet as an adult, then have to skip two years, then begin over again only to have to go easy for a year because you’ve torn your meniscus, and then, through shear stubbornness, keep on, well, let’s just say you don’t expect to audition for the Washington Ballet.  I’ve got no flexibility -- never had much, to tell the truth -- and I’ve got next to no turnout.  My stomach muscles are not what they should be, and I have a bad habit of leaning.  What I do have is enthusiasm.

After the first ten minutes of class, I’m sweating to the beautiful music.  After an hour, I’m panting.  By Reverence at the end of the hour and a half, I feel great!  I’ve justified my existence for the entire day.   Not much in this world gives you so much bang for the buck.  

Most of the students in my classes are better than me and always will be.  Some are professional; some may as well be.  They pant and sweat right alongside me although, let’s admit it, the results are rather different.  Sometimes I’m frustrated but never disheartened.  I’m there for personal growth not competition.  If I just keep at it, I’ll get stronger (and, with luck, thinner).   I’ll never be as good as the 20-year-old in front of me, but I’ll be better. 

And in every class, there are those few, glorious moments when the world is reduced to music and movement,

                    and I dance.

I Hate That

You know what I hate?  I hate it when the tab on the cereal box won’t go in the dratted slot.  You’ve just opened a new box of cereal, and you’re going to keep the freshness in and the ants out.  You scrunch up the plastic wrapper, punch through the slot and, voila!  No not voila.  Un-voila.  The dratted thing won’t slide in.  You punch out the slot more thoroughly.  Nope.  You wiggle and waggle the tab around.  No, no, no!  Grrrr.  Eventually you push and shove enough to force the tab through the slot, and the entire box stands there listing to one side.  You give up and put it in the pantry and hope you can forget about its drunken, leering stance until you have to face it the following morning. 

I hate it when you’re changing the sheets on your bed, being a good housekeeper, and you run slam into the bed frame practically breaking your toe, and you’re hopping around, and blood’s dripping down, and you’re swearing and you can’t even kick anything.  What kind of reward is that for good behavior?

I hate it when you think you’ve paid a bill, but the next bill comes, and it’s almost twice as big as usual, and you figure out that you misread the previous bill and paid only part of it, and there’s no one else to blame it on, and what were you thinking, you idiot? 

I hate it when you buy something at the store -- especially something for a child -- and it’s in that heavy plastic packaging that can’t be opened, no way, no how.  You pull out a heavy pair of scissors or even some metal snips and jaggedly slice the stuff, risking slicing your hand opened on the stiff, sharp plastic in order to extract an object your Perfect Grandchild is dancing out of his or her pants to play with.  I hate that stuff.

I really hate it when you’re sound asleep, it’s 5 AM and you are awakened by shrill stabbings of sound.  The pastoral life is all well and good, but what’s a bird doing bursting his lungs with song at 5 AM?  By six, your eyes are a-goggle and more sleep is hopeless. By the time you drag yourself out of bed, the bird is silent.  Stupid bird. 

I hate it when someone tells you their store is two miles past a well-known landmark and, yes, come in any time during regular business hours to pick up that replacement part.  Then you drive out there, and it’s freaking seven miles past, plus five of those miles are under construction so the traffic’s been reduced to one lane, and, instead of half an hour, it takes you an hour to get there.  You get there at 3:05 only to find out that “regular business hours” to this person means 8 AM to 3 PM but not between noon and 1 PM which would be lunch, and no one will answer your tapping on the window or anything, and, well, Long Fence, yes I do mean you.  Then you have to turn around and drive a half hour home completely empty-handed and frustrated and exhausted.  Man, I really hate that, don’t you?

The Answer Is Not A

Sorry to be so long in posting.  I clicked my ruby slippers, flew  back home and have been making up for all the racing around I wasn’t able to do in the tri-cities. 


Now, to answer the first question posed in my previous post.  There is no A.  A is not the correct answer.  There was supposed to be an A Reactor, but for whatever reason, it was never built. The A Reactor area became a buffer zone between the outside world and Reactor B.  So we have no A, but there were a total of eight reactors built.  There were  B, C, D and F.  Then there  was N (for New) Reactor and H,K, and E.  I don’t know why the brilliant minds that created controlled nuclear fission couldn’t get the alphabet straight, but in any case, all the reactors have been razed except for B Reactor, considered the jewel in the crown of the Manhattan Project when it was designated a National Historical Landmark. 

 At the start of the tour, you walk directly into the core of the world’s first production nuclear reactor.    

Whoa, that’s way cool.  You stand there looking up and up and up at 75,000 fuel rods.  The uranium along with some PCBs, asbestos and mercury are still encased there, but the boron rods are in place preventing any reactions.  When they first started up the reactor, they weren’t even sure it would work.  In fact, during the first few start-ups, it zoomed into life and then zoomed itself off.  In one of the short films on the tour, a scientist (I think it was John Marshall) explains how he plotted the deceleration of the reactor.  Ha ha, he chuckles, from the straight decline of the graph, it was obvious the problem was xenon.  What a rascal!  They added 500 rods of uranium, and the thing buzzed to a start ran on just fine with never, ever a safety problem. In fact, I found the safety features impressive considering it was built in 1944.  Remember, too, the whole shebang was designed and built before computers, all done with slide rules.

B Reactor required 27,000 gallons of water PER MINUTE to keep it cool.  The water came from the Columbia River, just spitting distance away, a major water and transportation channel for the northwest, flow, flowing to the sea.  (You remember Gilbert and Sullivan explored along it; wait, no, I mean Lewis and Clark.)  Once the reaction was complete, the rods were removed from the reactor and taken by an interior train to T Plant (again with the alphabet!).  There the plutonium was separated out leaving the nasty, nasty waste products.  The plutonium was transported to Los Alamos, and the waste was stored in tanks.  The current project is upgrading the storage tanks and making them permanently safe so nothing explodes or seeps into the Columbia River.

Interesting stories from Hanford.

(1) The University of Chicago discontinued its football program in 1939.  Because it was U of C, what else would they do with their abandoned football stadium other than allow Enrico Fermi to build a prototype nuclear reactor in it?  Just in case the reaction ran out of control, he hung boron bar above it.  The plan was that, if there was a problem, someone would take an axe to the rope holding the bar, dropping it into the reactor and stopping the nuclear reaction.  Fermi -- wisely, one can’t help but think -- did not want to leave the task to a “long-hair” (scientist) who might have to chop and chop to hit and cut through the rope.  He hired a woodsman to stand there all day with an axe, just in case.

(2) The workers didn’t know what they were building, but they were devoted to helping the war effort.  They all agreed to contribute one day’s pay, about $6.00 per person to buy a B17 bomber plane which they donated to the government to fight in the war.  They called it Day’s Pay.  By the time they tracked down Day’s Pay after the war to bring it back to Hanford, it had been dismantled with so many other, then useless, aircraft.

(3) Fermi himself placed the first piece of uranium into Reactor B. He has an office there, and you can look directly into it. It’s not that impressive as offices go, but if you are a geek, you will empathize with how exciting this was.

  

Fermi’s assistant, Leona Woods, worked under him at Chicago (she was instrumental in the utilization of Geiger counters).  She wanted to come out to Hanford to measure neutrons from the reactions.  She was pregnant at the time and wore overalls to be discrete about her condition.  Management asked if there was anything they could do to make her more comfortable, and she asked them to create her own bathroom so she wouldn’t have to share with the men.  So they did.  Just for her.  No one insisted she should stay at home with her baby.  [Editorial note: Sometimes I think since then we’ve taken a step or two backwards in women’s rights.] She had two healthy children during her work with nuclear reactors. (I wondered, so I checked.)

(3) Fermi’s office opens onto the reactor’s control room. Nothing was automated; the wall banks of displays (not seen here) were read by one man and written down by another. You can sit in the chair at the center of the controls. It’s silly but fun. 

(4) Now you may wonder, as I did, about the location of Hanford in south-central Washington State which is an impractical distance from Los Alamos where the plutonium was being used to build nuclear bombs.  How did they get it from A to B?  (See?  I can keep my alphabet in order.)  They drove it there.  In cars and such.  The speed limit at the time was 35 mph, which meant the trip took a bit of time.  Ambulances, however, didn’t have to obey the speed limit, so sometimes they’d load the plutonium in ambulances and rush it south. 

Also, I promised you I’d discover why the 500 sq. miles of Hanford was called Hanford.  A man named Cornelius Hanford organized a town way out there in the high desert because he felt the area was perfect for orchards.  Each orchard plot was the size of Chicago.  Just so, you know, you could grow enough trees.  When the government took over the site (chosen from 70 possible sites they looked at for isolation, water for cooling and a power source, in this case the Columbia River and the Grand Coolie Dam), they named it after Hanford. 

The picture below doesn’t show anything important about B Reactor, but I thought it was a useful lever. I always wanted to be cooler, especially in the lunch room. This is what I needed.

Seriously, the tour is GREAT!  Also, unlike the full site tour, you can actually get on this tour.  The docents are charming, the Hanford Reach (that area of the site) is gorgeous, and you’ll walk right into a nuclear reactor.  If you ever find yourself in the tri-cities area, do it! 

The End, My Friend

Friends are interested in what’s in Hanford, Washington State and what it is Steve does here.  Hanford is the nuclear waste site for the approximately 100 metric tons of plutonium used in making weapons for the Cold War.  You remember the good ol’ fifties that Conservatives want to get back to.  We NEEDED that plutonium because the generals wanted to be prepared for 45 nuclear exchanges per hour.  Now, you might ask, what would be left after the first hour?  The answer is, I don’t know but not much. 

Steve works on hazard analysis at the Site.  That’s all I can tell you. I memorize one simplistic line about each project he’s worked on, and that’s it for this one.  Previous one-liners include:  measuring acid rain, working on methodology for cleaning up the Valdez oil spill, dismantling and storing material from Russian nuclear subs, securing nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.  I know, right?  The only other thing I can tell you is that all his work happens in god-forsaken places, and here we are.   

More interesting to me is, why is Hanford called Hanford?  I’m going on a tour of the original reactor next week, so I hope I can to report the answer back to you.  (That would not be Reactor B.  Why isn’t it called Reactor A?  I don’t know that either. Was there a Reactor A, and, if so, what happened to it?)  The name makes no sense.  We’re here in the tri-cities [Richland (including West Richland), Kennewick and, across the bridge, Pasco].  None of the cities is called Hanford.  I know Hanford is the Hanford Reservation, but you’d think it would be called the Yakama Reservation because it is on, well, the Yakama Indian Reservation.  Yeah, I could Google the name, but what fun is that?

Meanwhile, I get up at 5:45 three mornings a week to take Steve to work.  Occasionally he needs the car to go to a meeting or go out to the Site, but ,otherwise, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I drop off and pick up him and his colleague, Jim.  Jim’s wife drives Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we each take our man the every other Friday that they work.  It’s taken me several weeks of this commute to notice the name of the office building they work in:  Omega Park.

I don’t know if there’s an Alpha Park; I haven’t seen it. (Maybe it went the way of Reactor A; who knows?) It would be fun, though to drive from an Alpha Park to Omega Park: from A to Z, from beginning to end. Well, all we have is Omega, the end.  We hope it’s the end as in, the Hanford Site is all safely cleaned up, and there’s no danger and no more work here; we hope it’s not the end as in, BOOM.

It's Becoming

I grew up when girls had long hair and wore dresses.  Trousers of any sort were forbidden at school except for snow pants on a winter’s day, and then they had to be removed at the classroom door.  (Anyone remember cloak rooms?)  I, however, was a tomboy.  Somehow I buffaloed my Mom, usually so conscious of social norms, into letting me lop off my hair (think a cute bob a la Rachel Maddow).  Out of school, I ran around in my brother’s old Tee shirts and jeans.  (Well, my Mom was a product of the Great Depression; hand-me-downs were a fact of a third child’s life.)  Even as a little girl, I did not like the constraints of a stereotype. 

My own daughter was a petite, slim child (read “small and skinny”) on the outside but indomitable on the inside.  The days of gender dress were over, and I have vivid memories of her racing through her aunt’s kitchen and out the door with an enormous millipede between her fingers, screaming triumphantly, “Look what I’ve got!  Look what I’ve got!” 

Then there were the hours of delightful play as she entertained her brother thinking up ways to kill the doll Billy by having him jump off the dollhouse roof, fall out the dollhouse window or slip in the dollhouse bathtub.  Sweet girl.  Her ambition was to be the person who went down in the shark cage.  She was a wonderful child and easy to raise but pink tutus and tea parties, not so much, either of us.

My Perfect Granddaughter?  That’s different story.  She chooses the pink and the frilly every time.  We laugh and say she must have gotten her girlie streak from her dad.  She knows all the Disney princesses, and the thrill of her life was getting done up at the Bippety Boppety Boutique at Disney World.  She’s nobody’s pushover, believe me, but she is all girl.  

(Alan got done up, too)

When she was misbehaving at the dinner table (both my grandchildren are Perfect, so although I can’t remember what she was doing, I’m sure she was doing it to perfection), my daughter rebuked her mildly with, “Stop it, Suzannah; that’s not becoming.”

My head swiveled, and I mouthed, “Not becoming?”

My daughter shrugged, “It works.” 

And so it did. Suzie sat up straight, smiled and became a model girl.

Don’t you wish it were always that easy?  The mean kids bully a meek one in the parking lot, so you walk over and say, “That’s not becoming.” They immediately stop and extend hands of friendship.

Secret service agents in Colombia:  “That’s not becoming,” and they zip their flies and return to the hotel, alone, and sober.

The mental cloud following you around?  Shake your fist at the sky and say firmly, “That’s not becoming,” and the universe shapes up and sends you a sunny, sunny day.

Drive a Homonym

Kia makes a little car called -- I kid you not, the Sou.  When Budget told us that’s what we’d be renting, what I heard was Sol.  You know, like the sun.  Yeah, that made sense to me; I’d be driving around in a yellow car called the Sun.  Sizzlin’!  Or maybe it would be “Sole” like a way to get around but better than on foot.  It never occurred to me that they would name a car after the spirit within. 

But, no, when I saw it, it was the Soul.  Should you miss the name in chrome on the tail of the car, you certainly cannot miss it emblazoned all over the comfortably padded seat backs:  soulsoulsoulsoul.    Sort of makes you hesitant to lean back too hard for fear of squashing.  Don’t get me wrong, though; the Soul is a good little car.  It’s a box-like vehicle that handles surprisingly well for, what seems to me its non-aerodynamic shape.  The knee to pedal ratio is really good (always an issue for me with my lanky legs), and the storage in the back is adequate.  Gas mileage isn’t bad.  Ours, ironically, is the color of gray mud.  All I have to do in parking lots is look for the mud box, and that’s us. 

I like everything about the car except its lack of rear view visibility.  The view in the rear view mirror seems pretty good, but then a car whooshes by on your right, and you had no idea it was there.  Glancing to your right rear won’t help either.  There are big, freakin’ frame spans between the back side and rear windows that obscure all attempts to see what’s there.  My husband showed me how to angle the right mirror waaaay out so that I could see into the right lane behind me.  That does the trick.  The view to the right rear is a bit better because that is the side where the driver is sitting.  Still, it’s less than optimum to be always just praying that you’re not going to ram someone as you pull over into the lane next to you.

Did you ever rant that some people were soulless?  Did you ever really think it?  (Politicians excluded -- that’s not where I’m going with this, honest.)  In my over-analytical, over-imaginative mind, I clearly see the connection between the problems of the Soul and the soul.  Many people we consider soulless or conscienceless (politicians or no) are those that never look back.  If they do look back, something in their makeup obscures what they are able to see in the past.  This means, of course, that they are not able to link what’s been done in the past to what’s going on now to what will happen in the future.  No vision of consequences means no progress for the soul. 

Now, though, if you worry that you’re not kind enough or righteous enough or spiritual enough, if you worry you don’t have a soul, you can simply buy one.  Yes, you can.  Granted, it’s a Soul you climb into instead of a soul that’s inside you, but you can go to your Kia dealer and pick one up.  Problem solved.

I think I’d prefer driving a Sol, a sparkling star, than a Soul.  I imagine myself humming along the highway, bursting with light, illuminating the landscape, being an inspiration to everyone driving by.  Oooh, you can buy a sun from Honda.  It sports a removable roof from which, I image, your soul can fly.

The Yummy Yellow Jubilee

Later today, we’re heading back to Washington State.  We’ve had a wonderful time with the Perfect Grandchildren.  There was the dying of the Easter Eggs and two Easter Egg Hunts (one at their house, one at the neighbor’s).  There were the early morning snuggles and the tire swing and the games.  The activity that stands out, though, was Suzannah’s birthday dinner.  We were unable to get here in time for her actual birthday and birthday party, but her parents reserved an evening for a special birthday dinner. 

What’s your favorite meal?  Any meal you want and calories not be regarded.

Perhaps you’re a steak fan and would go for a medium rare fillet with Bearnaise sauce, fresh, crisp green beans with toasted almonds and a baked potato gobbed with butter and sour cream.

Maybe you’re more of a rack of lamb kind of person.  Maybe seeing those little paper hats popping up from plate gets your saliva dripping.  Next to them picture quinoa cooked in broth and a wooden bowl filled with Romaine lettuce and heritage tomatoes.  Shall we toss them with a nice raspberry balsamic vinaigrette?

Or do you eschew red meat in favor of a lobster tail with a pot of drawn butter, asparagus sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and a mound of fluffy jasmine rice?

How about fat scallops sauteed with mushrooms and onions and a nice sticky mound of vegetable risotto?

Wait.  Wait a minute.  You’re not an eight-year-old.  Think back to your childhood where anything complicated was unreliable and anything green entirely out of the question.  Suzannah’s Daddy promised to cook anything she wanted, and Suzie intended to take full advantage of the offer.  She danced around as she announced what I think of as The Yummy Yellow Jubilee, the entire menu being in the color of children everywhere’s favorite meals.

When the wonderful night came, we loaded our plates with macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes whipped with lots of butter and real cream, corn, and sliced my daughter’s homemade bread which waiting to be slathered with more butter.

 For dessert, we diverted from the yellow theme and scarfed down an ice cream cake made of white cake and Oreo cookie ice cream.

Given my druthers of meals, I’d go for the scallops or possibly the lamb, but given my choice of company, I’ll take the Yummy Yellow Jubilee menu with my Perfect Grandchildren.