Radio WANN

If I can just finally finish this darn quilt, I can get back to regularly writing in this Blog.  I’m getting there, too.  All I have left is sewing on the binding, and voila!  I could listen to the radio while I sew, but as you know from my previous post, what I do is watch junk TV.  It’s been a LOT of TV.  I don’t listen to the radio much in the house.  I listen mostly in the car and sometimes in bed at night when I have trouble sleeping. 

I live in the DC suburbs, which means that most radio listening lasts from 20 to 30 minutes, the average time it takes to get from point A to point B.  I listen to a bunch of NPR, and when that gets too intellectual or esoteric, I skip to WTOP which revolves through news, sports, traffic and weather and then repeats.  I like the classical music station, too, especially when the news is disheartening or political rancor reaches an apex.  Been a lot of classical lately unless is slow and droopy.  I want to get to my destination, not pull over to the side of the road for a nap.

What I WANT is a radio station that will have this programming:  Car Talk; Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (and not just one day a week which is never when I’m driving around); lively classical music, maybe a combination of Sousa marches (is that considered classical?), ballet scores and Viennese waltzes; and also a show devoted to Broadway show tunes.   I can't believe there isn't one already.  That program can play all the music from a single musical or mix up the shows; I don’t care.  What I want is something spirited and upbeat that will keep me slapping my thighs and singing along.  Then every, say, 15 minutes, there will be a break with a short report of news and weather.  Every hour, one of those breaks would be required to report some good news, perhaps a good deed done or someone who saved somebody from a disaster, something that would, you know, help you maintain faith in the human race.

Currently when I turn on the classical station at night, THAT’s when they choose to play vivacious music with maybe a little Dvorak thrown in.  No, no!  At 11:30 PM, I want to SLEEP!  At night they should be broadcasting hour upon hour of lullabies.  The other day I almost bought a baby’s CD of lullabies, but I don’t have a CD player built into my alarm clock/radio, and, heaven knows, I can’t fit anything else on my night table.  I could download the sleepy stuff onto my i-pod, but then I’d have to listen with earplugs, and I must have small ear openings because earplugs hurt by ears.  Plus I defy you to sleep on your side with an earplug stuck in your ear no matter what size your ear is canal is.  Many moons ago, you used to be able to get a mono earplug which could go in the “up” ear, but we are too technologically stuck-up for that now.  Now you can listen to your i-pod in bed only if you sleep on your back.  Not that I’m bitter.

SO there you have it:  funny talking and upbeat music by day, soft, downy tunes by night.  That’s radio WANN, my dream radio.  What’s yours?

Defining Patience

I quilt.  Yes, as my mother used to say, I cut up pieces of material and sew them back together again.  They say that a quilter has the patience of a saint.  I'm not a saint.  I race through the piecing -- the cutting and sewing of pieces of fabric into the pattern of the quilt top.  At first I cut and pieced by hand piecing which took forever and was not very accurate, but when I learned how to use a rotary cutter, it was a new world.  Now I wheel off slices of fabric at warp speed and sew them together by machine.   I can get a quilt top put together in a couple of days.

Once it’s pieced, the top becomes the top slice of bread in a sandwich.  Batting is the filling, and the bottom slice is a wide, long piece of fabric backing.  The sandwich is quilted together by stitches in a pattern.  Some people do that part by sewing machine, and I have, on occasion, done that.  I don’t have a very good machine, though, and I don’t like to sit hunched over it.   

Instead I quilt by hand.  Yes, I sew every last stitch by hand, and, believe me, there are a lot of them.  I quilt when I’m doing something else like watching TV or, well, TV is about it.  The show takes up most of my attention, and the sewing goes on slightly below the conscious level.  You get into it like you do with any repetitive activity, and I’d name one if I could think of it.  If you think about how much time it will take to make even a baby quilt or how many single stitches you have to take to complete a quilt, you’ll never begin one.  If you just work on it without focusing, well, it’s like that proverbial march of a thousand miles:  it happens one step -- one stitch -- at a time.  Quilting does not take the patience of a saint, my friend says, it takes the patience of an idiot. 

First, you slide the needle in and out, easily, smoothly.  You use a very small, slim needle, and the challenge, to the better quilting, is to see how many stitches you can collect on the needle before you pull it through the fabric.  The quilt I’m currently working on is a collection of appliqued kitties separated (or joined, depending on your viewpoint) by sashing with little black birds on it, shades of Heckle and Jeckle.  The whole thing makes me laugh.

I usually quilt in straight lines or a wandering sort of bee’s path.  For the first time, however, I have a quilt that lends itself to using a stencil I bought long ago and have stored for years in the bottom of the closet.  The stencil is the kind of old fashioned pattern I’ve long wanted to use.  A wreath of leaves encircles the backing beneath each kitty, and vines travel up and down the sashing. 

I have to admit I like the pleasant mental fog of watching Judging Amy reruns while my needle goes in and out, up and down.   I try to solve Inspector Morse's  latest murder while the leaves take form, the circles complete themselves.  It’s not a quick process.  You have to be stubborn. 

But the patience of a saint?  The patience of an idiot?  Oh, dear, are those the only choices? 

Hair and Other Things

When my kids returned from camp or college, they’d look around the house and comment, “You moved the furniture again.”  It’s true.  You couldn’t live in our house if you were blind:  you’d be knocking your shins all over the place.
 
I live with one furniture arrangement furniture for a time, but then I think, “hmmm what if the couch were over here?" and I’m off, dragging and pushing.  I used to move the pictures, too, to suit the new composition, but now I just leave everything on the walls alone.  Otherwise one tends to focus more on the pincushion effect in the wallboard rather than the art.  But the furniture?  That’s fair game.  Why not?  If I don’t like the configuration, I can move it again.

Clothes, too.  If I buy something and notice that when I go to wear it, I don’t quite like how it fits (oh, yeah, like you’ve never made an unfortunate purchase), I’ll think, what if I take in a dart, or a tuck or contour the seams?  Why not?   If my amateur tailoring doesn’t work, I can unpick what I’ve sewn.  If that fails, well, I wasn’t wearing it as it was anyway, now was I? 

I confess to a rather cavalier approach toward hair, as well.  I like having long hair, and so I grew it for years.  I enjoyed brushing it, and I got pretty good at an Edwardian roll, a French twist and even a little Topsy that I wore over one shoulder.  I enjoyed playing with it, but I never thought that it suited me when I wore it pulled back, which, since I hated it swooshing in my face, was all the time. 

Three weeks ago I opined to my stylist, the ever-fabulous Chris, that I wanted it short, but I’d spent a fortune in barrettes.  He said no problem and lopped off six inches which still left enough to fasten back.  I liked it, but it lay scratchy on my neck in the summer heat.

Back I went, this time with a picture of my daughter’s haircut, stacked in the back angled to a smoothness in the front.   So cute!  Her hair is a finer than mine, but Chris said it would work.  He layered the back up another couple of inches, and I had a veritable riot of curls swooping long and smooth in the front.  He knows I won’t blow it dry.  I won’t flat iron it.  I won’t, in fact, do more than wash and scrunch it, and this cut was perfect.   Or almost perfect.    

After looking at it in the mirror for two days, I wondered what if I had curls toward the front, too?  I mean, I have all this wave in back whereas the front was just hanging there.  Let’s face it, I’d already more than spent my hair stylist allowance, but I bet I could do it. 

I got home from dance -- glorious dance where I’d held my bangs back with a little flowered clip -- and I took out my hair scissors.  (Oh, yes, I’ve done this before.)  I studied the angle of the cut in the back.  I mean, it’s really difficult to cut your own hair in the back, because, you know, you can’t see back there even with a second mirror. But the front?  Why not give it a try?  

I worked from the ears forward in three sections and snipped just enough to get the layering that encourages the waves.  And if it didn’t work?  It’s just hair; it grows.  It’s just a blouse; you can unpick what you’ve sewn.  It’s just furniture; you can rearrange it. 

What if?  Why not ?  Those are the questions I ask, occasionally followed by, “What the hell?” or “What the hell!”  Oh, and my hair looks adorable.

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.