Garden

Official gardening season has begun, as it always does in Denver, on Mother’s Day. The primary reason is that usually, but not always, we are past the very cold days of winter. The second is that the Denver Botanic Gardens Spring Plant Sale is Mother’s Day weekend. I, and many other people, go every year and buy lots of plants. Then we are forced to become gardeners for the next week as we struggle to put them in the ground before they can die in their little pots on our back porches. 

Every year I swear I will show self-control and only buy what is on my list. Every year I enter the Gardens and all my good intentions evaporate. I suppose this wouldn’t happen so quickly if I actually took the time to write down my list. Or if I actually sat for five minutes and really thought about what I needed and did not need. But the Garden Sale begs for you to enter and explore and discover and how do you do that if you limit yourself to what can be listed on a piece of paper?

The Botanic Garden has introduced me to some of my favorite plants. The first year I went with my cousin, Christine, we came across a plant, Nicotiana sylvestris (flowering tobacco), which we had to buy because her maiden name and my mother’s maiden name is Sylvestre.  Also, we both had space to fill and it grows big, but mostly the name was irresistible. And so I planted it in my back yard and it grew and grew and grew. The plants grow between four and five feet high and several feet wide. The leaves are big and they have white tubular flowers. Best of all, it seems to not care very much about soil quality. Another favorite is the gazania, which is from S. Africa and is low growing with daisy-like flowers. I love the name and it is drought tolerant. 

Of course, there have been problem plants. I could not resist the adorable little plant with the pretty serrated leaves. The tag said it would grow up and have yellow flowers and it wasn’t finicky about where it was planted. I convinced Christine to buy some, too. I put it in my yard and it immediately attempted a hostile takeover of the flower bed. Not to name names here, but it was tansy. I’m pretty sure the reason Christine and her family went to live on a boat for a year was to escape it. Consider yourself warned.

For the first time this year I did not go to the garden sale. It felt very odd, like I had missed an important holiday, but I  have managed to survive. It helps that Christine did not go either. Christine has the excuse that she had classes to attend. I was busy at the barn and it just seemed a bit much this year to fit it in. On top of that, Laurence and I swear that we will be having the backyard redone, but, of course, we can’t really agree on what, exactly, needs doing. So, I think I am sticking with some vegetables and annuals this year. 

Despite not attending the sale, I still feel that the season is upon me and I have begun cleaning out my beds. A job that would be much easier if I had just done some of it last fall. So far, everything seems to be taking longer than it should and at this rate I’ll be lucky to be planting in August. Thank goodness for the perennials, they cover a multitude of ills and bad planning. 

Since the sun is still shining I think I will head outside and pull more dead leaves and debris out of the garden. Mostly though, I think I will just enjoy the fine weather.

(If you would like to read about Christine and her family's adventures the year they lived on a catamaran you can order the book her husband wrote, "Skirting the Shore," by Adrian Martin, on Amazon.)

Books and Movies

Since the last week was so horrific I have decided to completely ignore it and instead share some things that have made me happy in the last few weeks.

First, of course, would be my awesome new Tesla. I still love that car. I love driving it, I love the color, I love the endearing way the door handles ease out as you approach the car. I particularly love the feature that updates the car over the internet. You go to bed one night and the next morning there is a message on the computer screen that you can now set the car to start charging at a particular time. Good for those who have lower electricity rates at two in the morning. (Denver does not.) And, not mentioned in the message, but found out over the next few days, when you save your seat position it now includes the side mirrors!  Yay! No more Laurence messing up my mirrors! Our marriage is saved!

Michael Pollan has a new book out, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.”  Just saw him on the Colbert Report and the main message of his book seems to be not to worry about what you eat as long as you cook it yourself. (The example he gives is french fries. Not good for you, but easy to order in a restaurant. Now if you cook at home, how often do you make fries?) This easy rule comes as a great relief because his previous book espoused the message, “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much,” which seemed a bit difficult to follow.

I am a big fan of Mr. Pollan’s ever since I read his book, “Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World.” He discusses apples, tulips, potatoes and marijuana. My favorite thing I learned from this book was that if you plant apple seeds, none of the trees will be the same. You cannot plant seeds from a Macintosh and get a tree that produces Macintoshes. You will get all kinds of different apples, most of which will not taste very good. All of our apples come from grafts. It is a wondrous thing to contemplate. 

Another of my favorite authors has a book out.  Mary Roach has just published, “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.” I have just started it, but already I am hooked. So far she has covered saliva (amazingly we have two types and she covers both!), the stomach fistula of one Alexis St. Martin, and the crunchiness of food (including fruits and snacks.) Along the way she points out that people who have a disorder or injury that will not allow their voice box to move so that they can swallow would rather have it removed and be mute than not be able to eat properly. She also gives advice on that age old question: If you had to be swallowed whole by an animal, which animal would you choose? I do not think I am giving too much away when I tell you that she recommends picking the penguin. Truly, I cannot wait to head into the intestinal tract. 

      Anyone familiar with Ms. Roach will no doubt have read her book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” This book is a must read if you have any ambitions at all regarding your life after death. Always wanted to go to med school? Volunteer as an anatomical teaching aid. Car safety your thing? You can go to work as a crash test dummy. Law enforcement? The FBI is always looking for a few good men to study decomposition. The mind boggles at the career opportunities.

      And last, I have a movie recommendation. We rented “28 Days Later,” I loved it. Of course, I do enjoy a good zombie movie so if you do not like zombies, I think you should probably rent “Groundhog Day” instead. As to “28 Days Later” it starts out with animal liberationists in England liberating the wrong animals, in this case rage and virus filled chimps. One bite and twenty seconds later (no kidding, it is very specific) people become homicidal zombies who run way faster than the traditional shuffle we have come to expect. This makes them scarier, but luckily, they still succumb to repeated blows to the head. This is particularly good news for the Brits because they lack any good access to guns. The movie follows the trials and tribulations of four of the survivors, one of whom awakens from a coma in a deserted hospital with no knowledge of the epidemic. It was directed by Danny Boyle of “Slumdog MIllionaire” fame and I’ll admit we watched it because we are probably going to go see his new movie “Trance” at some point and just felt like watching a Danny Boyle movie. So, if you like post-apocalyptic zombie movies watch it. If you don’t, watch “Groundhog Day.”

Tesla: Early Days

Leaving the Service Center

 I have just finished wiping down my new Tesla. Earlier I hosed it down to get the dirt off it because I had to drive it in the snow on Monday (which was supposed to be sixty degrees and sunny) and the mud on Tuesday (because the damn snow melted.) Then Laurence took it out  and said it looked worse with all the water spots on it, so I grabbed my new car washing spray that I had previously purchased and went to work. It looks much better now but not as great as if I had hand washed it.

This is not good. I am not one to regularly clean my car (although I keep vowing to, I don't really mean it.) My van would go months before I'd drag it to the car wash and run it through the express wash. I think of cleaning my car as a chore unless it is a hundred degrees outside and a water fight is involved. Somehow, though, with this car I feel compelled to do it. I am not sure I enjoy doing it, but it feels wrong to let it sit in the garage all dirty.

Part of the reason I want it clean is because people notice this car. This is not a complaint, everyone loves to hear how cool and lovely their baby is and I am no different. The point is when someone notices your baby and she has jelly on her face and a dirty diaper you feel like a bad parent (even though she was spotless and smelled great not five minutes before, I swear!) So I cleaned my car.

Now it's not like I did not know people would notice the car. I did. I read the Tesla forum and the owners comment on this all the time, I just thought that they were, perhaps, just a bit, exaggerating. For the record, they were not. It is ridiculous the amount of attention the Tesla gets.

A sampling:

Half a block from the service center, where I had just picked up my brand new car, I stopped at a red light. A man in the passenger seat of an SUV rolled down his window and motioned me to do the same. He wanted to know what kind of a car it is and told me, "It is a beast!" (Which it is.)

At the grocery store a man came up to me in the check out line and asked if I liked my new car and how did it drive? (This was a bit embarrassing because I had parked it on the far side of the lot and, because I wasn't used to it yet, had kind of slammed on the brakes and parked it at a weird angle.)

Driving with my windows down a guy stuck his head out the window and yelled, "Nice car!"

Another time at the grocery store Laurence and I were in the car, about to pull out, when a pickup truck drove by and the driver took a picture of the car.

Driving down the road a young man with a beard and tattoos driving an old beat up car pulled up even with me, got my attention, and gave me a big grin and a thumbs up.

Waiting to pick up Stephen from school four young teenagers told me how cool my car is. Of course, I let them sit in the car and showed them some of its tricks.

At the car shop to buy some mats for the car the clerk asked me what kind of car I have and when I told him I had a Tesla, two of the three on duty clerks immediately left the store to check out the car.

An older man and woman in a car next to me turned their heads as they drove by to look at the car. I was afraid he was going to drive off the road.

I have owned this car for only twelve days.

Luckily, I have enjoyed showing people my car and answering questions. I just hope I become immune to the attention and don't feel bad about not washing the car. Now excuse me, I have to go put on nice clothes and fix my hair so I can drive my Tesla to the grocery store.

A Very Good Day

While at the barn today Laurence called to tell me Tesla had contacted him about the delivery of my new car! (I really am not an exclamation point kind of person, but it really really needed one.) I handled it pretty well, I screamed at my friends, Tracy and Devon, "MY CAR IS HERE!"  (Several weeks ago when I went onto my Tesla account and saw the scheduled delivery window I could barely breathe. So, you know, improvement.)  Luckily, the horse Devon had turned loose in the arena did not seem bothered by the outburst.

My lovely (that adjective is directed at you, Laurence) green Model S has left Fremont, California, the only home it has ever known, on a truck heading for Colorado. It will arrive this week and I get to pick it up on Friday afternoon. I'm not sure I will be sleeping between now and then. I have calculated the hours until the appointment (65 hrs and 45 min) but that cannot possibly be right. It feels much longer than that. 

The only drawback is that our outlet for the car has not been installed in the garage yet. I can plug it into the regular outlet with an adapter so it isn't a huge problem. Unfortunately, I will have to back my brand new scratch free perfect Tesla into the garage. (The outlet is on the back wall and you plug the cord into the back of the car.) Maybe Laurence will back it in for me. Of course, then I run the risk of never getting to drive my car again. I've been on the Tesla Forum. You would not believe how many people have begged their spouses to try the car just once and then regretted it because now they have to share. I'm sure Laurence will give it back, I think. Perhaps I'll just practice backing the van in. I have nothing else to do till Friday.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, I had a horse to saddle and a riding lesson with Devon. Poor Raymond, the horse, I'm sure he thinks he is going to be forgotten once I get my new car, which will not happen. (Although, I do have to admit, I did toy with the idea of changing his show name to Tesla, but since he does not accelerate nearly as well I dropped it. Tracy did point out that he probably jumps higher than the car can, so that's a point for Ray.) I got Ray and myself all ready and then went into the arena (which is indoors) and started warming up. 

My lucky day continued. Instead of working on transitions or jumping or whatever else we always do,  Devon saddled up Dot the school horse and we went outside to ride in the snow. We had had a big storm on Sunday so there was lots of snow on the ground plus it was snowing again. We went into the little field next to the outdoor arena.  I have never ridden in the snow before and in my mind's eye I kept seeing the Budweiser commercial with the Clydesdales galloping through the snowy field. We were much less spectacular. Ray was his usual self and simply lifted his feet high to step calmly over the snow. No high spirits or beautiful slow motion running for us. We did trot a bit and I was just getting up my nerve to canter when Devon mentioned she'd seen a horse hop through the snow like a big dog once so I figured trotting might be good enough. As it was after about half an hour I could feel Ray's gait change from nice high steps to more of a trudging sensation. Devon and I called it quits and took the horses back in. Ray, after being unsaddled and brushed, was delighted to find more hay had been added to his stall in his absence and I left him contentedly chewing away.  

Then I had lunch, ran some errands, returned home and now I am just waiting...

64 hours and 45 minutes to go.

Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in Serbia, moved to America, invented and promoted alternating current, became a nemesis of Thomas Edison.

Elon Musk was born in S. Africa, moved to America, co-founded PayPal (made a fortune), co-founded SpaceX (sounds like what it is, develops space vehicles, currently making runs to and from the Space Station), co-founded Tesla Motors (named after Nikola, see above.)

Tesla Motors, based in Palo Alto, California, designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars. So far they have produced a roadster and a sedan (Model S) and will be starting deliveries in 2014 of an SUV (Model X.) They are not a subsidiary of another car company, they are a brand new company. Tesla is not the model name, it is like Ford or Honda. (I may be over-explaining here, but people aren't really sure what I mean when I say Tesla. After all, when was the last time there was a new car company that wasn't from Asia? Never mind, just googled American automobile manufacturers, at least eleven have been started since 2000. Apparently I am just not in the know.

The point of all this, though, is that Tesla cars exist and I will be getting one!! And it will be dark green, for those of you who care about such things.

Laurence put down a deposit before Christmas (as a gift) so that I could test drive one, which I did in early January. Now, unlike other car manufacturers, Tesla does not have a lot of dealerships. They have one  in Palo Alto. In Colorado their equivalent is a storefront inside (yes, inside, near Stride Rite and the food court) the Park Meadows Mall. They have a white Tesla Model S sitting there plugged in. To test drive you go out into the parking lot and in the covered area there is a charging station and a silver Model S plugged in and ready to go. Of course it was the performance version (I will be getting the regular model) and can go from 0-60 mph in 4.4 seconds. (The regular model does it in 5.6 seconds. I do wonder if I might need that extra 1.2 seconds one day, but Laurence is fairly emphatic that I won't. Sigh.) It is an amazing car. Quick and nimble. I fell in love with it, despite Laurence heckling me from the back seat, and I quote, "Oh my God! You're driving one of the fastest sedans in America at 30 mph!" In my defense, we were on regular roads and I was driving someone else's car. Highway driving was crowded and moving at 50 mph so what did he expect me to do? Of course the person from Tesla was also urging me to go faster, so maybe Laurence had a point.

Anyway, even at 30 mph it's a fun car. And, with the back seats folded down it has enough room for my horse show trunk. And with a 300 mile range I can make it up to Estes Park (for the big show) and back. And when you approach the car with fob in hand the door handles, which have been retracted for aerodynamic reasons, slide out. And when you open the hood it is just like a Volkswagon Bug, no engine! Just trunk space. See? Even when not moving the car is fun.

So after driving the car and loving it and tallying up the pros and cons and adding in a healthy dose of why not? I opted to get one. Of course, nothing in this world is straight forward. I had to configure my car. This entailed a trip back to the mall to talk to the ever helpful Tesla personnel and figure out if I needed the bigger battery (yes, major range anxiety here) or the Active Air Suspension (again yes, you push a button and the car raises up two inches!) or the Sound Studio Package (no, not sure I could hear the difference in quality and also do the Car Talk guys really need to be on 12 separate speakers?)

But then we had to figure out the color. Here is a major problem with Tesla not having a dealership, there are no cars on the lot to check out the colors. All they have are these color panels. We knew what the white and the silver (actually a lovely soft grey) looked like, but what about the blue or the red or the green? A paint chip does not tell you much about what your wall will look like once painted and that's how we felt about the color panels. The Tesla person who was helping us handed us several panels and pointed us towards the door so out we went to the parking lot to see how the colors looked in the sun. Then Laurence had the brilliant idea of matching the colors to actual cars in the parking lot. We found a Mazda that was close to the dark grey, and a Honda that was similar enough to the red, and several makes that had a very close match to the blue. We couldn't find the green and we'd probably still be looking if security had not driven up and wanted to know what we were doing. We explained but he still looked at us funny.

Back inside we returned the panels and sat in front of the computer to configure the car. We settled on (and by settled on I mean I chose) green (Laurence preferred the silver) and picked out all our options. Then we pushed the button and waited for the estimated date of delivery. Everything we'd read and everyone we'd talked to had a waiting time of at least six months, but it came back Feb/Mar. Yippee!!!

So then I went home and waited and waited and waited for Tesla to call. This weekend I logged onto the web site and they had posted my delivery window dates. Between March 2nd and March 16th the car will arrive!

So now I'm at waiting and waiting and waiting. Laurence and I already cleaned the garage in preparation for the electrician (to install the outlet needed) and in anticipation of the new car. I have gone on the Tesla web site and read all the forums. I have looked up who Elon Musk is. I have annoyed my brother by pointing out that I will have a Tesla soon and he will not. I really must find something constructive to do.

I think my car will never get here.

Van Gogh

Earlier this month we went to see the exhibit "Becoming Van Gogh" at the Denver Art Museum. Let me just say that I have never been to such a crowded exhibit in my life. It was packed. So packed that the museum is taking the unprecedented step on its last weekend of remaining open from eight in the morning on Saturday until midnight on Sunday. Of course, it is completely sold out.

The exhibit focused on Van Gogh's becoming, well, Van Gogh. Works covered the entire span of his career from his early sketches (which should give any aspiring artist hope because they were certainly not his best work) to some of his masterpieces. I loved it because while great art is nice to look at, seeing that great artist's work progress from the my-little-nephew-can-do-that stage to the ok-I-give-up-that-is-so-far-beyond-anyone-I-know stage is a revelation. The exhibit is a wonderful example of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour thesis, that anyone practicing something mindfully for 10,000 hours can become a master. (Which of course leads a person to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are only so many 10,000 hour chunks left in their life and oh-my-God! what am I going to spend it on? And why didn't I know this when I was twenty?)

So, to distract myself from thoughts of how I may have squandered my hours I will now describe for you some of my favorite parts of the exhibit.

Van Gogh used a perspective frame. This was a frame that showed the lines of perspective (think of the Last Supper with those diagonal lines drawn on it.) You place the frame in front of you and look at the landscape you are drawing through it. Then you use the lines as guides. He also had a grid frame. Same thing, hold it up between you and your subject and then transfer what is in each little square to the corresponding square on your paper. I'm not sure how this simplifies your life, but Van Gogh was a big fan.

Van Gogh copied copiously from other artists. Of course, how else do you learn a new technique if you do not copy and practice? But it is still a bit jarring to see it. The fun part is that sometimes, especially as the exhibit progresses, his work is so much better than the work he is copying.

Van Gogh did not love color in the beginning. He had to work and learn about color. His earlier works have very little color in them but as the exhibit unfolds it becomes more and more important. One of his techniques to strengthen his color sense was to use yarn. He would take two colors of yarn and roll them into a ball so he could then see how the two colors affected each other, thus simultaneously improving his ability to paint the colors side by side without mixing them and endearing himself to all the knitters.

Van Gogh was friends with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. And they took an art class together in Paris. The class consisted of learning to draw the human figure from plaster casts. Since he and Toulouse-Lautrec were assigned seats behind the plaster casts because, apparently, they did not draw very well, we are treated to sketches of the backsides of nude women. For what it's worth, in a side by side comparison of sketches Toulouse-Lautrec's seem a bit better than Van Gogh's. The exhibit does not mention which students in their class sat in front of the models.

Van Gogh's ears were not referred to once. An odd omission since that is the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of Van Gogh. Not to worry, though, I looked it up. As we all know Van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to a prostitute. (OK, I didn't know that. I knew he cut off his ear and sent it to someone, but I did not know she was a prostitute. Nor did I know that because she was, understandably, horrified she alerted the police and they found the artist before he bled to death.)  He supposedly did this after an argument with his friend Gauguin. Well, good news! According to two German scholars none of this makes any sense at all and they have put forward an alternative theory. Instead of Van Gogh chopping off his own ear with a razor and sending it to the unfortunate woman, Gauguin, who liked to fence, cut off said ear during their quarrel and then Van Gogh sent it to the poor woman. No explanation of why he would send his ear to anyone, which, really, is the least understandable part of the whole story. Neither Van Gogh nor Gauguin could admit to what really happened because cutting off someone else's ear with a sword was illegal and Gauguin would have been jailed. That was the last time Van Gogh ever saw Gauguin.

Which brings us to the end of the exhibit and Van Gogh's death. He was thirty-seven years old which surprised me considering how much he accomplished. Now, again, we all know he shot himself and, again, we are all wrong. Since the gun was never found and the angle of the wound was odd and Van Gogh gave conflicting statements, people who study these things have come to a new conclusion. Van Gogh was shot by a friend's teenage son during a quarrel. Yes, yes, I know, shocking. You would think he would have learned from his encounter with Gauguin not to argue with people holding weapons, or at least to choose a better class of friends. And yet, he did not and we are left with some great works of art and the itch to know what he would have painted next and whom he would have quarreled with if he had lived.