Me Blog

You have done it again. I don't know how the party manages to do it, but you have done it to yourselves again. Instead of throwing Lieberman to the curb, which is more than he deserves, you let him keep his treasured chairmanship. Don't come crying when he stabs us in the back again. You gave him the knife, remember that.

As long as Lieberman is chairman of any committee, I will not give any money to the party not a measly buck. Not a dull, worn out penny will you see from me. I am not giving any money to the same old gang that can't shoot straight. Remember, you didn't win this election, Obama did. You got lucky that McCain ran one of the worst campaigns in modern history in one of the most hostile political environments in our history. Don't let that go to your head, With a few other idiotic moves like leaving Lieberman around to cause mischief, you will soon lose whatever positive will you may have with the American people. Its not that Americans suddenly love the Democrats, they just hate you less right now.

When Lieberman rears his ugly head again and embarrasses the DNC, the Senate or starts an investigation against Obama's administration, don't come around and ask me for any contributions. As long as Lieberman is a chairman of any committee, even the janitorial committee, I will not give you any of my money. No matter how hard you beg.

Capisce?

 

I too supported Hillary once, but she lost the nomination, it is time to move on. Barack Omaba is the democratic candidate now, deal with it. The choice now is between John McCain and Barack Obama. Hillary is out of the picture. If you really believed in what Hillary stands for can you seriously consider not voting or even worse voting for McCain? What kind of Democrat would rather see McCain become president? Is it worth it causing more irreparable damage to our country in order to punish the Democratic party?

I became a Hillary supporter after John Edwards dropped out of the race. I voted for Hillary in the Florida primary. I remember the Clinton years with great fondness. I watched in disgust as Hillary fell apart during the campaign. As the campaign moved forward and Obama kept gathering more votes Hillary became more and more desperate making questionable move after questionable move. She got to a point where she betrayed what she stood for. By the time Hillary withdrew from the race, was a pale reflection of the candidate she could have been.

Hillary probably didn’t get fair treatment from the media, but that is hardly Omaba’s fault. Blame the media, boycott the news outlets if you like but withholding your vote is a dumb way to protest. Besides, do you really think Obama is getting a free pass? McCain stumbles every day sounding more senile and confused. The man can’t even remember how many homes he owns. A rich man, with multiple homes who has been a senator for decades calls Obama an elitist and the media just passes that on without comment. Can you really sit at home on Election Day and let McCain become president out of spite?

Don’t get me wrong, the Democratic party infuriates me. It is impossible to be a Democrat and not tear out clumps of your hair on a regular basis. The party seems bent on screwing up an election that is ours to lose. The response to Michigan and Florida moving up their primaries was asinine. In a classic jackass move the party punished its voters for the actions of the state legislatures. Then instead of fixing this problem right away, the DNC let this problem fester and become a painfully divisive issue. After eight years of George W. Bush this election should have been in the bag. Unfortunately with a couple of months to go, the candidates are tied. It is possible that John McCain could be our next president. Those Hillary supporters who are planning to sit on their hands come November 4th could make McCain our next president.

I would have loved to have Hillary become president, unfortunately that isn’t an option anymore, not this go round. We have to vote for the candidates we have not the candidates we wish we had. The choice is simple, voting for Obama so we can put this country back on track again or letting McCain win and serve a third term for George W. Bush. We cannot afford four more years of the disastrous policies that have so badly hurt our country. All those Hillary supporters who still have doubts need to get over it, swallow hard and vote for Obama.

The term windfall is defined as: Sudden, unexpected profit caused by events not controlled by the beneficial person or company. In the case of the oil companies, these profits are neither unexpected nor out of the control of the oil companies.

Usually in a business when the cost of your raw materials go up you have to raise prices in order to keep from losing money. For example, when the price of feed corn goes up, farmers need to get more money for each pig or cow they raise in order to pay for their costs. If they cover their costs, their profits remain the same. In this scenario the farmers would have to raise prices above and beyond their costs in order to increase their profits.

In the case of gasoline prices somehow the oil companies have managed to make record profits while the price of oil went through the roof. How can that be? Well, let’s think about it. Oil companies must have raised the price of gasoline high enough so that they are making a lot more money per gallon of gas than they used to. Oil companies have made some changes to increase their profits, like closing down refineries (the same refineries that make the gasoline they sell). Fewer refineries mean less expenses but it also means less capacity to produce gasoline. Thus oil companies lowered their costs while limiting gasoline supplies which in turn increased the price of gas.

Windfall my ass! We was had.

 

In the past couple of years, as the price of a gallon of gas rose above $2, beyond $3 and past $4 the clamor for alternate sources of energy has become louder and louder. In our desperation some people have reached out for corn based ethanol as a solution to our energy problems. While at first this sounded like a good solution many serious problems have become evident. It turns out that corn based ethanol is not the bargain we were told it would be.

We should have smelled a rat from the start. The production of corm isn’t free. A lot of energy intensive resources are required to grow every acre of corn. Aside from man made fertilizers, farmers have to use a lot of expensive pesticides both of which damage the environment and leave lasting damage. The production of corn also requires the use of machinery that burns fossil fuels. The tractors and other farm machines run on diesel refined from oil. We have used a lot of fossil fuels and we haven’t produced an ounce of ethanol yet.

Ethanol is produced by fermenting the sugar found in corn. Corn starch can also be used to produce ethanol but it must first be turned into sugar. While yeast will happily sit and ferment sugars into alcohol without human supervision, processing the starch into sugar requires more energy and resources. To make things harder yeast cannot convert 100% of the sugar into alcohol. Ethanol id toxic to yeas and it can only tolerate about 15% before it is killed. The ethanol has to be removed before the yeast can make more. This extraction is achieved by distillation. The heat required for the distillation kills the yeast. Ethanol boils above 173°F and even the hardies of yeast passes away at temperatures above 158°F. To ferment the remaining sugar, the whole concoction has to coo down. While yeast can survive in much warmer temperatures its optimum range is between 50°F and 86°F. Above 98.6°F yeast stop producing alcohol altogether. Therefore the entire concoction has to be heated, cooled and let sit to ferment again and again in order to turn as much sugar into ethanol as possible. All that repeated heating (and cooling if refrigeration is used to speed up the process) requires even more energy. So far a hell of a lot of energy has bee used to turn corn seeds into ethanol and more will be used to transport it to customers. By the end of this process an ethanol burning engine would have to output a miraculous amount of energy in order to offset all the energy that was required to produce that ethanol. But alas, gallon per gallon ethanol produces less energy than gasoline. Instead of saving energy, we spend more energy by making ethanol. Perhaps if we produced ethanol in a greener process we may reduce its energy footprint but it would not take away the downsides of ethanol.

We could perhaps live with a less efficient fuel if it made us independent from oil. Unfortunately ethanol pollutes more than gasoline. Gasoline mixed with ethanol releases more toxic compounds and increases green house gas emissions. But ethanol will not make us independent from oil. In order to replace oil we would have to turn all crop land over to the production of ethanol and even then we would need 20% more to satisfy our needs. Never mind that we wouldn’t have any land left to grow our food. We may become energy independent only to become dependant on other nations for our food. If you think the recent salmonella outbreak was bad, wait until all of our food is imported from South of the border. Can you say “Montezuma’s revenge?”

Aside from the resource and energy costs involved in producing every gallon of ethanol there are other hidden costs and unintended consequences that make its use as an alternate energy source doubtful at best. The US government taxes imports of ethanol for fuel and gives a tax break for fuels that use ethanol. This policy increases the profits from making ethanol artificially, increasing demand for ethanol fuels in the process. This has the doubly perverse effect of increasing food costs while wasting our tax money. The increased cost of grains brought on by the heightened demand for corn has made raising farm animals far more expensive. Another perverse result of the increased demand for ethanol is that more land is being used in the US and abroad. Badly needed forested lands are being cleared in order to produce more ethanol thus increasing greenhouse gases by the reduction of CO2 sequestering trees. Instead of being a solution to our energy needs, ethanol has turned out to be a malicious hoax that has diverted precious resources from real solutions while making the problems it was supposed to solve even worse.

Many if not most of the people who oppose evolution have little or no real understanding of how it actually works. One of the greatest misconceptions is that evolution is random. Often they will argue that evolution is like expecting a fully operational 747 to assemble itself out of a pile of scrap. This argument is only impressive to those who misunderstand how evolution works. If they understood a bit about how evolution really works they would be embarrassed to utter such nonsense.

Evolution isn’t random; it is guided by natural selection, a process that doesn’t need any intervention. As its name implies natural selection is just that, natural. Animals survive or not depending on how well they are adapted to their environment. If you have two hares and one has a white winter coat and another one doesn’t, the one without will be much easier to catch by predators. It is unlikely that such a hare would leave many baby hares that share the dark winter coat. The result is that over many generations the frequency of hares with dark winter coats is reduced significantly. As you can see intuitively there is no need for human or divine intervention for this kind of selection to happen.

The random part comes in genetic mutations. Mutations are errors in our genetic code. When copies of our genes are made during cell division errors occur, these errors are mutations. If these mutations occur in the cells that generate the sexual gametes, (eggs and sperm), the mutation can be passed down to our children. As you can imagine, most mutations are harmful, even lethal. Changing things at random hardly ever results in an improvement, the key is that sometimes it does. The mutations that are lethal or maladaptive get selected out, again without the need for intervention from man or god. The mutations that are apparently harmless or helpful have a better chance to get passed on to future generations. If these mutations help the bearer survive or better adapt to it’s habitat, the chances are higher that the helpful mutation will spread through the population.

Another reason that people misunderstand evolution is that it takes place over very long periods of time, thousands and millions of years. You can’t sit there and watch evolution happen before your eyes. Evolution is a process of small changes over time in a population. Unless you are playing close attention to an animal or plant population for extended periods of time and looking at the variation of the distribution of genes, you are not going to notice evolution happening. In a sense humans have been tinkering with evolution for thousands of years. We have been breeding animals or plants since we first domesticated wolves and started planting crops. That we can breed animals is testament to the fact that natural selection works. If it wasn’t possible for a species to change over time, we would not have been able to breed so many varieties of dogs, cats or crops.

Another reason for misunderstanding about evolution is that some people think of the human body as the pinnacle of creation. They seem to think that it is perfect. To put it as simply as possible, it is far from perfect. There are many imperfections in to be found in the human body that would have been obvious to any intelligent designer. To begin with, our eyes are badly designed. You might have heard that our eyes are the only places in our bodies where blood vessels are directly and plainly visible, this is true but it means that the blood vessels as well as the nerves leading from the rod and cones sit on top of the cornea, in the direct path of the light. Not even the cheapest digital camera has a sensor in which the wiring blocks the light. To make matters worse the nerves and vessels have to exit the eye and in order to do so they have to go through the cornea, which leaves us with a blind spot in each eye. Any engineer that designed a digital sensor so poorly would be fired immediately. The funny part is that squid and octopus have better eyes than us “superior” humans. The blood vessels and nerves in the eyes of squids sit behind the retina and thus don’t block the light impinging on the retina. God must really like squid.

As many other people I suffer from back pain. In fact most people experience some sort of back problem in their life. The reason for so much back trouble is that our spine evolved on animals that had a horizontal posture. The mass of most animals hangs from a horizontal spine. Since our ancestors started walking erect our spines have been subjected to an amount of stress that they didn’t evolve to support. Instead of our weight being distributed over the length of our spine as it hangs between our shoulders and hips, the weigh of most of our body is borne by the vertebra of our lower back. This stress leads to all sorts of problems like herniated disks. As you can see this looks more like the result of random mutation and evolution than of though out design.

I could go on to talk about nipples on men, the appendix, aging, auto immune diseases, birth defects and other obsolete structures and maladies that cause humans trouble, pain and early death, but that would be piling on. Evolution is not a mere theory that is up for argument. Evolution is accepted scientific fact and it is no more in doubt than the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity. There is no controversy about evolution among real, serious scientists. A few people with an agenda manufacture false controversies hoping to change public policy for their own personal greedy motives. It reminds me of the cigarette companies who for so long claimed that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. They would trot out these “scientists” who quoted numerous “studies” proving that there was no link between cancer and smoking. These so-called scientists who claim that there are doubts about evolution or global warming, etc., are no more credible than the liars and thieves parading as real scientists who allowed the cigarette companies to continue to sell their cancer sticks. These “scientists” are no more than shills who will say anything to anyone as long as there is money in it for them.

The lesson of this post is simple, if your personal religious beliefs make it hard for you to accept reality, don’t blame reality. Maybe you should instead take a closer look at the superstitions and legends that you are holding on to. Maybe these irrational beliefs are the problem and not science.

The rise in oil prices has given rise to many valid complaints about gas prices. The exorbitant cost of gasoline is putting a squeeze on the budget of most Americans. People find that they are not just paying a lot more money to fill their tanks, the cost of food and anything that is made with oil derivatives or is shipped from distant places is rising as well. Given that situation and the upcoming presidential election, it was inevitable that some unethical politician would start pandering. What is sad is that McCain, who once was a principled maverick who stood for straight talking is now instead speaking with a forked tongue.

There is no doubt about it we have an energy problem, made worse by a government administration that did nothing but line the pockets of bil oil for 8 long years. We need to do something to fix this problem and we need to act quickly but drilling offshore is not the answer. We need to look for alternate energy sources and we need to conserve oil. We also need to invest in developing new technologies. In the near future the alternative energy industry is going to be developing quickly. The US can either work to be a leader of that industry or let it be developed elsewhere and lose the opportunity to get high paying tech jobs and give birth to a highly profitable industry sector.

There are many reasons why drilling offshore is a bad idea. Let me count the ways.

1. The US has less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves: Even if the US extracted all that oil, it would hardly affect the price of oil. The US uses over 20% of the world’s oil supply. A mere increase of 2% in supply will not lower prices significantly.
   
2. Extracting the oil will take a long time: Even if we started drilling now, it would take decades to get that oil into gas tanks. Analysts say it may take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to get the oil out. What will the price of a gallon of gas be in 2018?
   
3. The oil companies are not using the leases they have now: There are many oil leases going fallow. Why aren’t the oil companies drilling there? Why do the oil companies want more oil leases? This is just a land grab.
   
4. Extracting hard to reach oil is only profitable when prices are high: If the price of oil drops, the oil companies will not be able to make a profit extracting this oil. No high prices, no oil. That guarantees consumers won’t see lower oil prices.
   
5. The free market: If the oil companies do extract this oil why would they sell it at a lower price in the US market, if they could make a higher profit in Europe, India or China?

There are probably many other reasons. What should make us all suspicious is that no one outside of the fossil energy industry is saying that offshore drilling is a solution for high gasoline prices. Only the people who are likely to make big profits are advocating offshore drilling. The experts on the other hand tell us that the way out of this mess is to conserve.

The real and long lasting solution to this problem lies in conservation and in alternative fuels. In the past 30 years, the fuel efficiency of car engines has not increased significantly. This is not because automotive engineers are sitting back drinking beer in front of their TV’s. Modern car engines are very efficient; they produce more horsepower per gallon of gas than engines from the 1970s. The trick is that it is difficult to raise both gas mileage and horsepower. Car companies have opted for giving us cars that accelerate faster rather than cars that drive further.

The government has also failed to prod the car companies in the right direction. Car companies have resisted many of the things we now take for granted. They opposed safety belts and air bags; they oppose higher gas mileage standards. The government needs to stop listening to car companies and raise mileage standards for all vehicles. Car mileage standards rose after the oil crisis of the 1970’s but the government excluded small trucks from the regulation. This loophole was exploited by car manufacturers and resulted in the introduction of SUVs.

The gas mileage standard might have been too low but they at least applied to all cars. This loophole allowed vehicles with ridiculously low mileage to be sold to the public. This was not much of a problem while gas prices were low, but with gas prices spiking to never before seen heights, the millions of SUVs wasting untold gallons of gas are hurting the pocketbook of all Americans. We have been using gas as if there was an infinite supply. There are no hidden, mysterious solutions. We can all do something real to lower prices. We can conserve energy. Conservation and alternative sources of energy are the answer; anything else is election year pandering. Any politician who advocates offshore drilling as a solution to high oil prices is lying in order to get elected. Take that into consideration when you cast your ballot in November.

I have been feeling great lately, since I returned from CIT Week. I have more energy and I feel stronger. I just had a physical and my doctor told me my cholesterol numbers are great, not merely good mind you, but great. I am happy and grateful that I feel so good.

At CIT I met people who have various physical challenges. There were at least three people with Parkinson’s disease and one person who had partial paralysis of half his body. Yet all were working as hard as, or even harder than I was and usually with a smile on their face. It is difficult to feel sorry for yourself when you see something like that. It made me realize yet again how lucky I am that I have all my parts and that they are working well. Not that I don’t have some aches and pains, but I really have nothing to complain about. I am not trying to say I am in perfect shape; I have much to work on. I would like to lose some weight and I’d like to get stronger, but I can and will do it. I am not limited by a disease or accident and that is truly something to be grateful for.

For as long as I can remember I have been a glass half empty kind of guy. I can’t remember when this pattern started, but even in my daydreams I’ll often think about why what I am thinking of can’t happen or what will go wrong if it does. Up until recently I have accepted my negativity as realism but recently I have realized that most of my negativity is merely a bad mental habit.

This change in point of view started after my return from a tai chi workshop in Canada. My return flight was delayed because of high winds in Chicago. My flight was supposed to leave Toronto around 4:30 p.m. but I didn’t leave till two hours later. Part of the reason for the delay was that the plane had to return to the gate to refuel. We had been waiting to take off for about an hour when the pilot was informed of a route change to avoid the storm that was causing the delay. The new route required more fuel and the plane had just enough fuel for the shorter route. Returning to the gate, refueling and waiting to take off took another hour.

That two hour delay meant I missed my connecting flight in Chicago. The next flight wouldn’t leave until 10:00 p.m. CST and Arrive in Miami past 2:00 a.m. EST. Thankfully this flight was on time. Unfortunately for me I was sitting behind one of the rudest group of people I have ever encountered inside an airplane. It seemed that two families and their children where travelling together with their children and they were sitting right next to me. I have kids and I know how difficult it is to travel with children. Kids get bored, tired and cranky and the vagaries of modern air travel only make things worse. These people however seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious. When their children weren’t making noise, they would find some way to make their presence known, like talking loudly or joking. I thought I was ready for most eventualities, I had several pairs of earplugs with me and my iPod and a wrap around set of headphones. At one point, I was wearing both earplugs and my headphones playing loud music and yet I still was able to hear the screams of the kid sitting right in front of me. For the majority of the flight this child would react with loud, high pitched yelps of joy for every thing that he observed outside of his window. Every last cloud, star or distant light seemed to require some loud exclamation. Not once during the long three hour plus flight did the parents make even a tiny attempt to quite their children. By the time I got to Miami I was exhausted, frazzled and angry. I had not been able to relax or sleep for more than five minutes the entire flight. This was easily and by a long margin my worst flight experience ever. Needless to say I took my anger out on my wife when I finally got home.

After enduring such a nightmarish flight, I felt entitled to be angry and I looked for reasons to be pissed. It didn’t help that I was truly exhausted and traumatized. When I calmed down I realized what an ass I had been and apologized to my wife.

Later that same day, I dragged myself out of bed and once again apologized to my wife. She was understandably tired and her shoulder was hurting. I endeavored to make up for my dramatic arrival and spent the next two days paying more attention to her and massaging her back. This small effort on my part made my wife feel a lot better and went a long way towards making up for my behavior and had the side effect of making me feel closer to her.

 As a result of my stay in Canada, I was interested in reading the Tao Te Ching so I picked it up from Audible and bought a printed copy. In my absence Netflix had delivered a movie that had been recommended by a friend, The Secret. Over the next couple of days I watched the movie and I listened to a great recording of the Tao Te Ching By Stephen Mitchell. Strangely enough these two different works were resonating and reinforcing each other. Now, I am admittedly a skeptic, I don’t have much use for religion and metaphysics. I prefer facts and reality, so I approached much of what I heard in The Secret with a degree of doubt. But I could not disagree with one of the main point of the movie, that our thoughts affect our reality. There is no doubt that my return flight was a disaster but my attitude and thoughts made it much worse. Even before the flight I was anxious and kept fretting about missing my flight and arriving late. I was missing my family and wished to get back as soon as possible.  I was obsessed with getting back and I was concentrating on every thing that went wrong and thinking of other ways things could get worse.

I am not yet entirely sold on the idea that my mere thoughts can manifest wonders right out of the blue but I can’t deny my own experience. By thinking negatively, by looking at the empty glass I made things worse. I sat there stewing, getting angrier and angrier, looking for problems and ended up blowing up on my wife. If I had instead been more positive, I may not have arrived any earlier, but my state of mind would have been much different. I could have made the whole experience of flying back home a lot better instead of the long torture it became. By looking for problems, I found them and in spades. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

The result is that I am trying to change the way I look at things. It isn’t easy; I have many years of negative mental habits to overcome. I catch myself returning to old habits and thinking negatively but I am catching myself and that is a start. I don’t know that I’ll become a positivity guru overnight, but I know that looking for the bright side of life makes me feel better.

I have been in an introspective mood as of late and I have realized that I tend to look for the negative things in life. I have decided to be a little more optimistic so I am starting a series of posts about things I am happy about. These posts are not in any particular order.

The other day I was listening to the book "The Secret" in my car when they mentioned wishing for the car you want. I said to myself, "I am driving it". I drive a VW Beetle. It is a W3 or triple white model. I saw it at the dealer and I fell in love with it. Normally I prefer much more colorful colors for cars but the white and black was so striking and elegant that it won me over. Soon after that we were trading in our old VW and driving out in the new.

I am very happy with my VW, its not large or flashy but it is mine and it makes me happy.

I hope to make regular posts about TTBGF (things to be grateful for). I could sit here and pump out a hundred or so TTBGF in an afternoon but that would be a chore and I want to keep this light and fun. I also want to keep myself in a grateful mindset and stringing along a series of TTBGF over time better accomplishes that goal.

I spent last week in Canada at a tai chi workshop in Orangeville, Ontario. I have been practicing Tai Chi for nearly eight years and have been a beginner instructor for five of those years. I attended the workshop in order to move up to the next level of instruction and to bring my tai chi up to a higher level. I was somewhat anxious about attending the workshop, I worried (needlessly it turns out) that my tai chi wasn’t up to par and whether I was in good enough shape to do the work. It was a tough week, but I am glad I attended and I am all the better for it.

I have wanted to learn Tai Chi for quite some time but whether it was because of the cost or the inconvenience of the location I didn’t get around to taking a class until 2000. In the fall of that year tai chi came to me. My wife pointed out an article in our local newspaper that mentioned a new class that would be starting at the local recreation center. I took that class and many more since. I also started attending local intensives and small workshops. Soon I was attending workshops in Tallahassee home of the national headquarters for Taoist Tai Chi. Three years into my tai chi journey; my instructor asked me if I would like to become an instructor. I wasn’t sure that I would be a good teacher but I trusted his judgment and applied to become a beginner instructor. In 2003 I became a beginner instructor and have been teaching a tai chi class ever since. It isn’t easy, I worry often that I am not being clear enough, that I talk too much, that I am not funny enough to distract my students and keep them from becoming frustrated. But it also has been very rewarding; my students tell me that I am very patient, which would surprise no one more than my wife. She can surely think of many words that describe me, and patient is not among the top ten, or top twenty. Therefore becoming an instructor has helped me become more patient as well as improving my tai chi that I may become a better instructor.

The Taoist Tai Chi Society is a non profit organization and all it’s instructors are unpaid volunteers. Taoist Tai Chi was founded by a Chinese Taoist monk who immigrated into Canada in 1970. He was motivated to help other people improve their health by the practice of Taoist Tai Chi. As an instructor I would help continue Master Moy’s mission to make Taoist Tai Chi available to all. Master Moy Lin-Shin, passed away on June 6th 1998. He was very ill as a child and his parents took him to a Taoist monastery in hopes that they may help him, they did and Master Moy became a Taoist monk. He attributed his survival to the Taoist arts that he was taught and promised to bring the gift of tai chi to all who would be willing to learn it. He left behind a group of like minded people who have continued his mission and have made true many of his wishes.

The first CIT Week was held soon after Master Moy’s death and has been held every year since. Instructors from all over the world, from as far away as New Zealand and Malasya attend and work together. My instructor again asked me to attend the workshop to see if I would qualify as a continuing instructor. So I made arrangements to take off work and made travel arrangements. The first three days were very hard. I had volunteered to help with breakfast and I had to be in the kitchen by 6:30 a.m. awake and ready. I am not a morning person, my brain is hardy awake by 9:00 a.m. so this was a bit of a sacrifice, but every attendee is asked to volunteer with many of the tasks that make the workshop possible and getting it done and out of the way in the morning turned out to be a good decision.

The kitchen in Orangeville is quite large as you may imagine. Every day three meals were prepared for nearly 500 people. That kitchen was in use from early in the morning to late at night, either preparing a meal or getting ready to prepare the next meal. I ended up making scrambled eggs with two other people. It takes a lot of eggs to feed over 450 people so every day we cracked anywhere from 600 to 700 eggs. We had to use the woks to cook the eggs as the grill was busy cooking up bacon, sausages and either pancakes or French toast. Cooking in a wok is quite different, especially in a professional kitchen. After a couple of days the regular cooks would give us tips on cleaning the woks and on how best to cook the eggs. It was quite an experience, although I don’t think I’ll be craving eggs for a while.

The workshop usually started at 10:00 a.m. and went till lunch around 12:30. After lunch we met at 2:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. for an afternoon session. After dinner we would have a final session from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. by which time I was ready for bed. It wasn’t constant exercise; there was enough down time and explanations for you to catch your breath before another work out. There was no pressure to overexert yourself. We were constantly reminded to take breaks if we got tired and stopped regularly for snacks and liquid replenishment. Breaks notwithstanding, by Tuesday I was exhausted; all my muscles ached and complained loudly with every move. I skipped lunch and took a two hour nap. As tired as I was, there was little room for self pity, doing tai chi with me there were people who had greater challenges and they didn’t skip a beat. I met several people with Parkinson’s disease and one who was partially paralyzed among others. All talked about how tai chi had improved their health and some talked about how they had regained mobility. 
 

By Wednesday the clouds of exhaustion had parted and even though my muscles were still somewhat sore, I had much more energy. Later that day two instructors pulled me aside and informed me that I had been given an assignment as a CIT. After that news I hardly felt tired anymore I was walking on clouds. Of course the CIT assignment only means more work. I’ll have a new class and I’ll have to work harder on my personal tai chi so that I may have more to offer my students. I am also expected to return every year to CIT Week to continue my training and update my skills and to meet again all the great people for whom I helped prepare scrambled eggs. As much as I worried about this CIT Week, I am looking forward to next year’s workshop.