Bucket Lists

I have seen a number of bucket lists on blogs and profiles.  When I started this blog I thought I would make a bucket list too but I haven’t.  I have a few problems with bucket lists.  I’m not sayin’ bucket lists are bad.  Just sayin’ they may not be for me.  

I know, I know.  I've been there twice already but I really want to go again.

Most of the bucket lists I’ve seen make me a little envious.  What makes me jealous is not what’s on the lists but what’s been checked off the lists.  There are a lot of young travel bloggers (and many more just plain travelers) who are going many great places and doing cool things.  I am shocked to see all the places they’ve been and things they’ve done.  Glad it’s not a competition ‘cause I can’t compete, at least not with them.  I’m sure if I published a list of places I’ve been and things I’ve done many people would be jealous.  I have been fortunate to do the things I’ve done.  Competing with other bucket lists is not what I have a problem with though.  

It’s when people talk of crossing off or checking off someplace  or something that bothers me.  I just can’t do that.  

I’ve heard friends come back from a trip and about all they say is “Well, I can cross Italy off my list.”  
“Don’t you want to go there again?”
“Nope, been there, done that.”

Sorry, I'm not crossing Paris off my list either.

Other’s, when planning where to go won’t even think of visiting someplace they’ve already been even if it includes different activities or even just passing through on the way to somewhere else.  

Now I can appreciate having limited time and money for travel and having to be choosy.  With so many places to go why go to someplace you’ve already been?  ‘Cause it’s an awesome place and I love it, that’s why.  

I know every time I visit a place for the second, third, forth... time there is someplace else I would like to go but never will.  But I’m not playing Travel Bingo or Monopoly.  I’m doing what I love to do, visiting incredible places, and enjoying my life (maybe that’s all I need to put on my bucket list).  

But, what really bothers me is all the things I never see on bucket lists.  Things like:

√  Read Dr. Sues to my kids every night.  
√  Take my parents to the Devils Racetrack in Death Valley.  
√  Stay up all night comforting my sick child.  
√  Train a dog (miss you Koa).  
√  Track desert tortoises with my brother.  
√  Take care of a friend’s yard who is sick with cancer.
√  Snuggle with both my kids in one reclining lawn chair watching the night sky       
    for falling stars until we all fall asleep.  
√  ...

This list could go on and on but what’s crazy is I couldn’t have made this list ahead of time.  These things just happen, they’re not planned.  Only after the fact do I usually realize how lucky I am to have done those things.  And things like these are much more important and rewarding than travel and doing the bucket list stuff.  

Western Australian Plants

I find the plants in Australia very interesting.  I'm not a botanist but I do pay attention to the natural world and it's easy to see that plants down under are much different than the plants I'm used to seeing.  

I am a bit disappointed in these photos.  Most were taken in the harsh light of mid day so I knew the photo's weren't going to be great but I also used new lens with a focal length and f-stop that gave a much shallower depth of field than expected.  No excuses, just lessons learned.  

                                               

Indifference and the meaning of life

“The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going.  Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert.”  

Edward Abby - Desert Solitaire

Driving through the deserts of Western Australia I was listening to Desert Solitaire when I heard the passage above.  I thought of course the desert is indifferent to us.  The oceans, mountains, forests, winter, summer, rivers, tropics, weather, earth, sun, physics, chemistry are all indifferent to us.  The universe is indifferent to us.  

Then I thought “I feel like I matter.  I feel important.  Don’t we all feel like we are important?  Maybe this feeling that we matter is just an illusion.”  

I began to think about why I feel like I matter.  Look, there are road signs that help direct me to where I want to go.  Someone put them there for me.  Someone had a car waiting for me halfway around the world just so I could drive myself around in Australia.  Someone made all these cool gadgets for me.  Someone cooked me dinner last night and someone wished me “G’day” this morning.  All that makes me feel important.  But it was easy to see through all that.  It wasn’t that I really meant anything to these people.  It was money that really mattered to them.  I was just a means to get money.  It’s just an illusion.  Don’t get me wrong.  Most the people I meet are nice and genuinely friendly and certainly want me to have a good day and many help me without getting anything in return but a smile and a thank you.  But none of them are going to loose any sleep if I don’t have a good day unless I inconvenience them in someway while I’m having a bad day.  I move on, I’m forgotten, they’re indifferent.  

"Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the ante-human, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse - it's implacable indifference."  Edward Abby - Desert Solitaire

I feel like I’m important at work.  I get paid and benefits for starters.  Most of my coworkers are friendly and they help me get my projects done but that’s their job and they will need my help to get their stuff done too.  If I announced I got another job and was leaving they wouldn’t try to get me to stay.  I would not hear from very many after I left, mainly a few who would just contact me to see if I could help them get a job at my new company.  I’d move on, I’d be forgotten, my acquaintances are indifferent.  It’s an illusion. 

I thought about so many things that make me feel important and that I matter but in reality I don’t, not as an individual.  Maybe as a statistic or a dollar but not for who I am.  I won’t go into them all here, the list is too long.  

In among these thoughts I started thinking about how I care about the desert.  The deserts are important to me.  The mountains, oceans, animals, forests, earth are all important to me.  There are so many things I am not indifferent too.  I couldn’t even begin to list all of the things that matter to me, that make a difference to me.  Most of these things don’t care about me.  Most can’t care about anything at all, for example breakfast, my car, my camera, science, clean air, etc.  Some don’t really care about me as an individual, for example the Dallas Cowboys, Neil Young, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ami Vitale and even those I have helped through the charities I support.  None of them are going to call me to see how I am doing or send me a Christmas card (well, I have gotten Christmas cards from the Dallas Cowboys).  I know these are caring people and they are not indifferent to their fans and supporters.  But they care about their fans collectively not individually.  So even most people that I care about are indifferent to me.  

I saw this blue-tongue lizard in the road and stopped to move it away from traffic.  I do that for all reptiles I see on the road.  I care about them.  
I'm not indifferent to the desert.  

What about all the beings and things that matter to me but are indifferent to me?  They’re still matter to me.  They add enjoyment, adventure, knowledge, thrills, challenges and excitement to my life.  They’re part of me, maybe that’s why they’re important to me even though they don’t care about me. 

That brought me around to those that do care about me, that I do matter to, who are not indifferent to me.  My kids, my parents and the rest of my close family care about me and that’s not an illusion.  I love them and care about them too.  They matter to me.  My close friends care about me.  My cats and the dogs I’ve had aren’t indifferent to me and they treat me special.  

So in all the universe there are only a few beings that aren’t indifferent to me, everything else is.  Same is true for them, only a few beings in all the world aren’t indifferent to them.  Our solar system and the rest of the universe are indifferent to our small insignificant planet.  Things that are not indifferent to me are quite unique and rare in the universe.   

I don’t believe the universe has a meaning of life and it’s our job to find it.  Life just is, it’s part of the possibilities of this universe given the physics that operate here.  When conditions are right, life happens and evolves.  If we want a meaning to our lives each of us will have to figure it out for ourselves.  

Seeing through the illusion of being important humbled me a bit.  I’m not as important as I feel.  It also helped clarify the meaning of my life.  There are very few beings that I matter to and they are what matter most to me.  I better keep them close, take care of them, make sure they know I love them and make sure they know I’m not indifferent to them.  The desert and the universe are indifferent to them, they need to know they matter to me.  

In an indifferent universe maybe the greatest gift I can give anything is to show that I am not indifferent.  

There is much more I wanted to say in this post but truncated many of my thoughts to keep from wandering off on too many tangents.  So some of the ideas seem incomplete and a little cold to me.  I would liked to have gone on in more depth and to explore more thoughts but it would probably be of little interest to anyone but me.  For example, my mother used to tell me "Don't cry over things that can't cry over you." Another way to say don't care too much about things that can't care about you?  Maybe a good rule of thumb but are there exceptions?  

The Boxer

Many songs take me back to a certain place and/or time when I hear them.  None more so than “The Boxer.”  When I was growing up my bedroom was in the basement of a small old house.  The walls were cement and the ceiling was just over 6 feet high.  I thought the room was big but that was just relative to the other rooms in the house.  There were three small windows that I covered up with aluminum foil so the room would be completely dark at night.  I had taken over the family’s stereo record player and set it up in my room.  It folded up so it could be carried like a suitcase.  The speakers could be detached so they could be moved far away from the turntable.  We only had a few records that I had any interest in, two Bill Cosby records, The Monkees and four Simon and Garfunkel records.  By the time I was about 12 I had lost interest in the Monkees and Bill Cosby records.  There’s only so many times you can listen to Chicken Heart and I’m sure I exceeded that.  That left only the Simon and Garfunkel records.  Every night I would stack two or three (sometimes all four) Simon and Garfunkel records on the turntable and listen to them as I lay in bed.  One by one they would drop and play.  I rarely fell asleep before the music stopped.  Often I would flip them over and listen to the other sides too.  This was a nightly routine for me.  When I was 14 I won a Kiss album from a radio station and I was given Aerosmith’s first album for my birthday.  That was the end of listening to Simon and Garfunkel for many years.  You might guess hearing “The Boxer” takes me back to my dark room where I must have listened to that song hundreds of times.  Nope, “Sounds of Silence” does that for me (Hello darkness my old friend...).  “The Boxer” takes me to the kitchen of a 4th floor apartment in the Sung Shan area of Taipei at 6:45 a.m. on a June Morning.    

The old man's oven and shoa bings (燒餅).  The best I've ever had.

Twice I spent the summer break in collage in Taiwan.  I was taking Chinese classes as my fun classes while earning a degree in Chemical Engineering.  My first summer in Taiwan I needed to extend my visa after two months so I found a couple of people I could teach English to so I could claim I was working and get my visa extended.  I was a terrible English teacher.  I tried to prepare and do a good job but I had no training and could do little more than talk to my students in English.  I taught a lady that lived about a mile from me twice a week at 6:00 a.m.  I didn’t like waking up that early but I did enjoy walking to her house early in the morning.  The sun comes up very early in Taiwan in the summer and back then the city seemed to sleep in.  It was always pretty quiet.   Very few cars were out and the busses weren’t running that early.  I always walked by an old man who was out preparing his oven which was an old metal 55 gallon drum that had a domed insert welded into it with a hole at the top and a little door on the side to put charcoal in bottom.  He baked green onion rolls (a type of shao bing 燒餅) in it by sticking the dough onto the inside of the drum through the opening in the top.  I always said good morning to him and let him know I would be back in an hour to buy a few.  

This lady had a number of books she was using to learn English and she would have questions about vocabulary and why we say things the way we do in English.  Seems I never had good answers as to why we say something a certain way and when I did think I knew some grammar rule she would find exceptions and I wouldn’t know what to say.  We would sit at her kitchen table for 45 minutes going over her books and questions.  At 6:45 her radio alarm clock would go off letting us know lesson time was over and she needed to get ready for work.  It always came as a big relief to me.  One morning at 6:45 the clock clicked and “The Boxer” began to play right from the start.  It was perfect, I hear the click then the first note of the guitar intro began.  I hadn’t heard the song for years and wanted to stay and listen to it but the lesson was over, she was in a rush and showed me to the door.  I walked home with the song in my head.  Of course I bought some green onion rolls on the way home.  I always did.  

The north part of Zhoughau Road between the train station and Xīméndīng.

Like most days during my summers in Taiwan I had no plans and it was still just 7:00 a.m.  I decided I would try to find a Simon and Garfunkel cassette tape with “The Boxer.”  I thought this would be easy.  I was always looking at cassette tapes for sale in Taiwan.  They were everywhere, even the morning markets had vendors selling cheap pirated cassette tapes.  I mainly looked for Taiwan singers and bands but I saw a lot music from the US for sale there too.  I first went to the local morning market and checked out cassette tape vendors but didn’t see any Simon and Garfunkel tapes.  I took a bus to the old Taipei train station.  

There were plenty of street vendors and shops that sold tapes in that area.  I worked my way from the train station down Zhounghau Road to Xīméndīng (西門町) with no luck.  I decided to try the big department stores around Xīméndīng.  They always had a good selection of American music though they were more expensive (they were not pirated or at least higher quality pirated).  I still couldn’t find any Simon and Garfunkel tapes there either.  The longer I searched without success the more obsessed I became with finding the tape.  I went to the Zhoungshan (中山) area.  

Looking down Zhoughua Road towards Xīméndīng.

There were fewer places to buy tapes but there was more American stuff in that area but I found nothing.  I went to Gonggwan (公館) a market near National Taiwan University and again found nothing.  I searched with no luck until about 4:00 in the afternoon.  I was running out of places to look but was determined not to give up.  I remembered a bookstore at Shīdà (師大 National Taiwan Normal University) that I had been to a few months earlier.  It didn’t have many tapes as I remembered but most of the tapes were from the US.  I took a bus to that area and walked a short distance to the bookstore.  There in the small rack of cassette tapes I found Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.  

Taipei has changed a lot since that day and the world has changed even more.  Is there a collage student that would spend a day looking for a song?  They would just find free wifi somewhere and download it.  I’m not saying one way is better than the other, just different. 

Every time I hear “The Boxer” I picture that morning at the kitchen table when the radio alarm went off.  I picture the fold-up suitcase type displays of pirated tapes in the Taipei markets, the ladies in the department stores searching though their racks trying to help me find what I was looking for and the feeling of success of finding Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits in the bookstore at Shīdà.  I’m glad I had to search for it. 

What songs take you back to a special place and time?

Found Money

An Australian one dollar coin found in Pemberton, Australia.

I pick up pennies when I see them on the ground.  I don’t do it for good luck and I don’t spend them either.  Not sure what people think of me when they see me picking up pennies out of the dirt but I guess I don’t care.  I take them home and put them in a jar.  Of course I pick up nickels, dimes, quarters and any other money I find.  It all goes in the jar.  Many years ago my dad started doing this.  Not sure why he started doing it but I’ve associated “Found Money” in jars with my dad for as long as I can remember.  

When I was young I spent the money I found.  The first money I remember finding was a $10 bill on my way to school when I was in first or second grade.  I took it to the school office and turned it in to lost & found (even though I found it far from school).  They said I could have it if no one claimed it in 30 days.  I couldn’t stop thinking about that, it seemed like so much money.  No one claimed it and I used the money to buy an HO race car at Sage’s in San Bernadino so I could race on a big track one of the neighbors had set up in their garage.  

When I started traveling on my own I remember saving the money I found to give to my dad as souvenirs of my travels.  Later I started saving it all in a jar like my dad.  My brother and sisters did too.  Many years ago I proposed we have a contest to see who could find the most money each year and the winner could pick a charity to donate everyone’s “Found Money” to.  For many years my dad and I would each find between $25 and $50 a year.  I never donated the actual found money.  We always donate more to the chosen charity than was found anyways.  I keep all my “Found Money” for each year in a jar.  I have a lot of “Found Money” jars and I have no idea what, if anything, I’ll ever do with them.  

We don’t find as much anymore.  Maybe it’s the economy and people are more likely to pick up the change they drop.  My dad doesn’t get out as much as he used to and his eyes aren’t as good as they once were.  I don’t stop at convenience stores and grocery stores as much as I used to so I have fewer opportunities too.  Still wherever I go I’m always on the lookout for “Found Money” and pick up all that I see.  Not because I need it nor because it’s for charity.  I do it because it reminds me of my dad.  

My 2012 "Found Money."  By far the lowest total since I've been saving it in jars.  

Shell Beach and Large Numbers

I am sometimes amused or at least entertained by large numbers.  This usually happens when I see a large number somewhere unexpectedly.  I recently saw a sign at Shell Beach that had a large number where I expected a larger number.  Shell Beach is part of Shark Bay in Western Australia.  I understand it is one of only two beaches in the world made entirely of shells.  I expected a lot of shells but I still thought there would be sand.  I was wrong.  Nothing but shells 5 meters deep (15 feet).  Shell Beach is a few hundred meters wide and many kilometers long.  An information sign on the beach said "Shells in their millions" make up the beach.  I felt that number was a bit small.  With the help of Google Maps and Wikipedia I estimated number of shells to be around a quadrillion.  That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1E+15), a billion million.  

I know the sign was just trying to convey the idea that there are a lot of shells on the beach.  It’s not easy to get our heads around big numbers, so I guess millions is as good as any number for that purpose.  

I like to look at large numbers in different ways to help grasp just how unimaginably large they are.  For example a few years ago I bought a few Zimbabwe One Hundred Trillion Dollar bills on eBay and gave them away for Chinese New Years in red envelopes (紅包, hong bao).  (They are the largest note ever printed.  Hyper inflation in Zimbabwe is another story.)  My nephew was particularly impressed.  He told me that was the coolest thing ever.  I told him if he was given $1,000 every second starting when he was born, in 16 minutes and 40 seconds he would have a million dollars.  However, he would have to live 3,171 years to get one hundred trillion dollars.  

One of my favorite examples of a large number in an unexpected place is a 40 digit tracking number for delivery confirmation from the US Post office.  I had to enter all 40 digits to get the confirmation.  I thought the US Postal service was being pretty optimistic to have 40 digit tracking numbers.  Why do they need so many digits?  Were they thinking they could possible deliver 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 letters? If each letter was 1 millimeter thick, a stack of this many letters would be over 1E+21 lightyears high!  That’s beyond the edge of the observable universe.  If each of these letters weighed just 10 grams, the mass of this many letters would be 50 billion times the mass of the sun.  

The sign said shells have been piling up on this beach for about 4000 years.  If that is correct and my estimate is not high by a factor of 10 or more (I tried to keep it conservative), then on average 684,000,000 shells wash up everyday.  One way or the other that’s a lot of little critters living and dying out in Shark Bay.  

Got Bogged Again

Driving north on Indian Ocean Drive in Western Australia I kept looking to the west to see the Ocean.  There were numerous dirt tracks heading out to the beach so I decided to take a break and walk along the beach for a little while.  I turned down one little track and drove a few hundred meters.  I didn’t notice that the track wasn’t the red dirt of the surrounding land but it was white sand.  Well I didn’t notice until I was very near the beach and felt the wheels sinking into the sand.  I realized I had made a mistake and immediately made another mistake.  I tried to turn around by first backing up and trying to make a three point turn.   Well halfway through the turn my front wheels began to sink into the sand.  I tried to rock the car backwards then forward and was encourage because the car did move a little but all I was really doing was getting deeper into the sand.  I was bogged.  I got out and tried to stuff a few rocks and sticks under the front tires.  Just sunk deeper into the sand.  After trying this a few times the front wheels were so deep in the sand that the bottom of the car was resting on the sand.  I found a piece of concrete, a large brick and some old strips of carpet and an industrial type mat/rug that were no doubt left by others who had been bogged.  I also found a few flattened beer cans and started to dig.  

It was bad enough digging in the sand with beer cans under the hot sun but there were also Australian bush flies.  They look like ordinary flies but the are hellbent to suck the sweat off your skin or better yet crawl in your ears or fly up your nose (don’t want to think about why they wanted to do that).  I felt they must have sensed I was helpless and could not even attempt to shoo them away with a wave of my hand.  Digging in the sand with a beer can in each hand all I could do was curse them and occasionally shake my head like an annoyed cow.  When they flew up my nose (which was often) I blew them out with a snort.  

I tried digging out around the tires and stuffing the rocks, brick, carpet, mats and concrete under tires a few times but all I got was dirtier, hotter, more tired and madder at the flies.  No movement of the car.  I finally got out the jack and dug out under the car so I could put the brick under the car and the jack on top of it.  Then jacked the car up as high as it would go.  I dug out around the tires and under the car and tried to dig a path in the sand in front of the car.  I put the concrete and rocks under the tires and laid the carpet and mats out in front of the car.  Then removed the jack.  This time I was able to pull the car forward and out of the hole.  But, I was headed towards the beach and immediately got bogged again.  

About this time a lady walked down the road to watch her kids sail by in a few sail boats out on the Indian Ocean, looked like some kind of race or practice.  I asked her if she would drive while I pushed.  That just sunk the tires in deep again and she had to go to keep up with her kids and walked back to her car near the highway (note to self: locals don’t drive down these tracks).  

I wasn't planning to go on any 4X4 only roads this trip,  just well maintained dirt tracks like this one.
So I rented a small economy car.  

I was bogged a second time and to get out I had to drive through the sand pit that I had just dug myself out of.  It was hot, I was tired and covered with sand.  It was in my hair, in my ears, in my shoes, and stuck everywhere to my sweaty skin.  The bush flies were all over me like flies on... well, you know.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get out of this one but I wasn’t ready to go for help.  

I went straight to the jack method.  Digging, snorting, cussing, jacking the car up, moving rocks, carpet, mats and concrete.  And I got the car moving in reverse.  Instead of backing out down the road which didn’t seem to promising, I steered the car off the road and into the grass and small shrubs and drove around the big sand pit.  When it looked safe I backed on to the sandy track and turn around and drove back to the highway.  

I stopped at the highway to brush some of the sand off me and pour myself some water from my 10 liter jug.  It had taken me an hour and a half to dig myself out.  As usual a few bush flies followed me back into the car.  Outside they are obsessed with flying up my nose, crawling into my ears or tormenting me by walking around on the inside of my sunglass lenses.  But as soon as they are trapped in the car they panic and try to get out.  There was one buzzing around the driver’s side window.  I smacked it with the back of my hand and squished it dead then pulled back onto the highway.  

Didn't take any pictures of the beach at this place or of my bogged car. Didn't even walk along the beach there.
These beach photos were taken earlier that morning at a the beach in Cervantes.