lummi island wine tasting march 5 ’22
Wine Tasting is Back!
Based on today’s updated Covid data for Whatcom County, over the past two months the surge of the Omicron variant of Covid 19 has rolled over the country, taken a huge toll, and is declining rapidly. As the chart shows, new cases across all age groups have converged to very low levels for all age groups and County subregions. The remaining exceptions are the unvaccinated, who still remain at risk of serious illness for themselves and their contacts. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of observing.
Based on these rapid declines in cases and the rapidly declining restrictions in our region, we will be open for wine tasting and sales starting THIS Saturday, March 5, from 4-6 pm. Anyone with boosted vaccine status is welcome.
It has been a Long Haul, and we look forward to seeing you!
Friday Bread This Week
Weekly bread pickup will continue to be at Island Bakery for the rest of this month, with some expectation that it will return to the covered area in front of the wine shop at some point after that. If you are on the bread email list, you will have received order and pickup info from Janice. Pickup is in her driveway out on West Shore Rd from 4-5:30, with a fire pit to keep the Usual Suspects (and their dogs) comfy for a bit.
Current expectations are that bread pickup will likely return to the wine shop in some fashion sometime in April.
To get on the bread list, click on the “contact us” link above and fill out the form. Bread menu is sent to the list on Sundays. If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.
Mailing List Issues: The Continuing Saga
Again last week the new blog subscriber mail-out system sort of worked, but again with a full day’s delay. The app has no email address, no help desk, and no contact phone, so still in the dark about how to manage when it sends.
For the time being, last week it worked pretty well to email the link to our subscribers when we post. Then some time later the auto-mail feature might be in the mood to send the “official” version, depending on, you know, what’s going on on their planet/
This Week’s $5 Tasting
Thurston Wolfe Old Vine Chenin Blanc ’20 Washington $18
From vines planted in 1981 in Horse Heaven Hills; delivers aromas of ripe kiwi with rich sensations of honey and pear…nice!
Can Blau Can Blau ’18 Spain $16
Long an Artisan favorite; consistently showing aromas and flavors of ripe dark fruits and berries, a seamless texture, and long, silky finish that improves with aeration.
Townshend Cellars T3 Red Washington $18
Bordeaux style blend of cab, merlot and cab franc; fruit forward with hints of black currant and vanilla, with layers of complexity and depth through extensive oak aging in French and American barrels.
The Economics of the Heart: Time Bandits
Time Bandits was a very funny movie from the early 80’s, the typical sort of nonsense that Monty Python created. This clip is one of the most memorable takes from the film. By this point in the film everyone knew very well that the boy’s parents were complete idiots, so Of Course when the mysterious smoking object appeared in their midst, every audience knew immediately when the kid said, “Mom! Dad! Don’t touch it, it’s EVIL!…” that they Would touch it and it would NOT be Pretty.
It is with that same inevitability that we all now see, moment to moment, day by day, the countless ways we have been enslaved by the Corporate State’s Dystopian disdain for and devaluing of Our Precious Time. This ongoing appropriation by business of what used to be individual rights is the direct and intended result of fifty-some years of Business School Dogma that the fastest way to riches is to Appropriate everything historically in the public sector and sell it back at a profit to the people who used to own it collectively. These include clean air and water, home antenna (pre-cable) TV, quiet surroundings, and most of all for today’s rant…OUR TIME!
#1. Don’t know about you, but these days about 80% of our daily phone calls are from numbers that are currently inactive and therefore untraceable, from robot programs that link any real human voice to a sales pitch for the latest scam product or service; and from questionable requests for donations for a charity you have never heard of.
#2. Back in the 1950’s my mother was a switchboard operator at an answering service. When a client office was closed, calls were forwarded to her switchboard, and she would take a message to be delivered when the office opened next. Nowadays, what we get when we call most businesses, even when they are open, is a lengthy menu of options, each of which leads to more options, and none of which gets you any information you actually need until you start screaming “Representative! Representative! Representative!…PLEASE I MUST talk to a Real Human Being…Aaaarrrrggghhh!”
Or, as more eloquently phrased by old-time sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, “I have no mouth, and I Must Scream!” In the past week I have spent many hours a day trying to solve a problem with the wine shop’s credit card processing system, being passed, with lengthy delays, among representatives across the world who could handle one piece of the puzzle and hand me off to another long wait, etc., and never getting the basic problem solved.
#3. Several months ago I went through the same thing with Century Link regarding our phone service, which kept getting more and more expensive. One would think that, of course, the fracking Telephone Company would have figured out a long time ago the best way to do customer service over the phone, and they did…real people sitting at switchboards. But the most Profitable way is minimize wage expenses by replacing people with electronic mechanisms that discourage most, connect some few with useful assistance, while reducing the most vulnerable few to whimpering puddles of despair.
4. Btw, a few months ago we cancelled Century Link, and moved our phone online to a local server we’ve been with for 30 years. The good news is we can always get a real person on the phone who will hang out with us till the problem is solved. The bad news is that online phone service creates conflicts with our now-online credit card machine, and that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Hopefully this little rant has been a distraction from the Real problems facing our world at the moment. We close by placing our palms together to bow and add our hearts to a global prayer for the well-being of the people of Ukraine.
lummi island wine tasting feb 25 ’22
Wine Shop Schedule Update
Based on today’s updated Covid data for Whatcom County, we will remain closed this weekend. However, daily new cases in our area continued to fall last week, with a 43% reduction in hospitalizations, and test positivity rate down to 20% from over 80% two weeks ago. Based on these numbers and forecasts, we are now open for shopping and sales appointments.
If these trends continue we expect to open for tasting in the next couple of weeks.
We are in the process of restocking our shelves, updating our “order wine” link above, and looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks!
Friday Bread This Week
Weekly bread order pickup will continue to be at Island Bakery this week.
If you are on the bread email list, you will have received order and pickup info from Janice. Pickup is in her driveway out on West Shore Rd from 4-5:30, with a fire pit to keep the Usual Suspects (and their dogs) comfy for a bit.
Current expectations are that bread pickup will likely return to the wine shop in some fashion in the next few weeks.
To get on the bread list, click on the “contact us” link above and fill out the form.
Mailing List Issues
Last week the new mailout system sort of worked, again with a full day’s delay. So still a few glitches.
So tonight we will mail the link via gmail, and when the auto feature decides it’s in the mood, you should receive the email version.
Economics of the Heart: War and Entitlement
Parable of the Monk and the Scorpion, Mattimore Cronin https://medium.com/@mattimore/parable-of-the-monk-and-the-scorpion-1dcbc77891c3
The Big News across the entire world tonight is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is hard to imagine that anyone on the planet– even Putin– finds either joy or solace in it. So what kind of economic calculation leads someone to believe such an action will yield benefits that will make it worthwhile? Well, it all depends on the congruency between our principles and what is expedient.
One major drawback of our primate ancestry is the strange combination of having the characteristics of both highly social herd animals on the one hand (paw?) and asocial predators on the other(s) as circumstances evoke in our nervous systems.
Every war begins with some group of males deciding that some other group of males either has or wants to take their group’s Stuff, be it land, or water, food, women, or gods, and decides they must attack them and take Their Stuff first. History is replete with examples: The Sunnis and the Shia, the Catholics and the Protestants, the Christians and the Jews, the Whites and the Blacks, the Hutus and the Tutsis, Us and Them, per omnia secula seculorum.
Most wars are in some way about one group’s sense of entitlement to something some other group controls. In this case it is a bit more perverse, denying a country’s right to an independent existence, and being willing to destroy it completely as punishment. Here’s hoping the Russians have a 25th amendment and a growing willingness to use it. And wishing miracles for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters.
lummi island wine tasting feb 18 ’22
Wine Shop Schedule Update
Based on today’s updated Covid data for Whatcom County, we will remain closed this weekend. However, daily new cases have been falling rapidly, and as we go to press tonight there were no new cases reported today, a landmark to celebrate as the Omicron tidal wave gets past us. With luck we can all start exhaling again soon!
Gov. Inslee, like many other state governors, has announced an end to mask mandates in most places around the Spring Equinox on March 21. This is part of a trend described this week by Jennifer Rubin that those of us who have chosen to get fully vaccinated can stop worrying about trying to protect those who have not and will not. There is a growing consensus that in another month the risks will be as low as they are going to get, and the options for treating those who do get it continue to improve.
In preparation for reopening in early March, we are restocking our shelves, updating our online order/pickup links, and looking forward to seeing you all in a couple of weeks!
Friday Bread This Week
Weekly bread order pickup will continue to be at Island Bakery this week.
If you are on the bread email list, you will have received order and pickup info from Janice. Pickup is in her driveway out on West Shore Rd from 4-5:30, with a fire pit to keep the Usual Suspects (and their dogs) comfy for a bit.
Current expectations are that bread pickup will likely return to the wine shop in some fashion when we reopen.
Mailing List Issues
Last week the new mailout system sort of worked, but with an unexpected delay. So still a few glitches.
This week we will be another test. Thanks for bearing with us; hopefully we will have it sorted out before we reopen in a couple of weeks!
Fingers crossed…again!
Economics of the Heart: Freedom from Religion
St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Bangor, ME ca 1950
I started school a long, long time ago, in the fall of 1950, in a Catholic school in Bangor, Maine. I was four years old (birthday in the fall), and they didn’t call it kindergarten, they called it subprimary. The school was a three-story, very solid stone building with dark, windowless corridors and occasional overhead lights, cave-like. But the classrooms were walled with windows and quite bright and pleasant.
My teacher was Sister Cecilia. She was young, bright, and charming, and the following year she was my teacher again in first grade, a good thing. In second grade things got complicated, and I went to a couple of schools in Hartford in the fall of ’52 before coming back to finish second grade at my old school in Bangor. My teacher then was a small, crotchety old nun who looked (to a little kid) for all the world like a witch. Kinda scary.
Several times a day we knelt in the aisles to say prayers, and on Fridays the whole school would spend much of the afternoon in the next-door old Church (beautiful but vaguely threatening) for novenas or rosaries. There was also Catechism, a little book with things to memorize and idealized cartoon pictures of little boys and girls so you could see how their pure white hearts got little black spots on them if they said a bad word, or did a bad thing, or ate meat on Friday. And if you did something really bad ( a Mortal Sin) and died before you went to confession and got communion, you would Go To Hell Forever and Ever. I can’t imagine I was the only one who had serious nightmares about all of that. Scary stuff. So I was about six years old when I started suspecting that Religion is the Original Authoritarianism.
From third grade on I went to public school. It is hard to describe what a Relief it was to go to a well-lit, big-windowed “modern” school, with cheerful teachers in ordinary clothes, no threats of eternal damnation, no Dread of saying or doing something wrong and maybe having to go upstairs to Sister Mary Principal and get The Strap, sort of a black leather slide rule case she might hit you with and make you throw up when you came back to class and a janitor would come and pour stuff like eraser pieces on it so it wouldn’t smell so bad. It is still amazingly vivid, though I haven’t thought about it for 70 years. So yes, public school was a huge relief.
So it is with some serious concern that we read this recent article in Salon about the Supreme Court’s ongoing war against every American’s right to the freedom to Practice or NOT practice any religion as they choose, as recent Supreme Court decisions have begun to question. It is also very much worth noting that Two Thirds of the current justices are Catholic: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and…one outlier, even-keeled Justice Sotomayor. Sadly, Justice Gorsuch is a “former” Catholic, with all the baggage that goes with it, and Kagan and Breyer are not. And though our Prez is a Catholic, let us all pray that he takes care not to appoint another one. More than Congress, more than the Cabinet, more than any other governing group, the Supreme Court should provide proportional representation of religious, racial, and ethnic ideology, and this court is Way, Out-of-control Catholic and White. Refer to paragraphs one and two above about why that is a Really Bad Idea.
The original Constitution was quite vague about many things, including religious freedom, saying only, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And this has left the fundamental question open for 250 years about whether citizens of this country have to right not only to practice whatever religion they choose, but also the secular freedom to make their own moral and ethical decisions. The obvious contradiction here is the Right’s insistence that on the one hand no one should be required to get a vaccine during a devastating Pandemic, but any woman can be forced to give birth from an unplanned pregnancy.
The controversy before us is whether every American is free to choose to follow or not follow the beliefs and practices of any particular religion. This is the realm of secularism, which we are apparently not clearly guaranteed by our Constitution. This ambiguity and the increasing Starboard (right) List of our current Supreme Court to impose the Catholic doctrine is made clear by this article, which provides a pretty good summary of the Right’s Assertion that our Country is and always has been “Christian.” And like all tyrannical regimes in history, it starts with the Book of the Law, declares their personal anointment as Interpreters of the Law, and asserts their Obligation to punish anyone who does not follow Their Law.
lummi island wine tasting feb 11 ’22
Wine Shop Schedule Update
Based on current Covid data for Whatcom County, no wine tasting again this weekend.
Whatcom County continues to be a Covid hot spot. On the bright side, new cases across the County have fallen off by almost 70% during the past week, and case numbers are lowest for residents over 65, and next lowest for those between 45 and 64…you know…our base! Interestingly, vaccination rates are highest in the 25-49 age group (92%), next in the 65+ group (85%), closely followed by the 50-64 group (78%).
The bad news is that because the Omicron variant is by far most contagious variant so far, it has spread virtually unimpeded across the country, the fastest by far, finding ready hosts in the unvaccinated. Compared to the first wave two years ago, the Omicron wave has raced across the world in the space of only a few months. New cases are falling rapidly, and deaths are expected to follow them with about a two-week lag. If those trends continue, risks are expected to fall rapidly over the next several weeks as herd immunity grows from new vaccinations and from acquired immunity from having had the disease.
We are beginning the process of restocking our shelves, and will be updating our online order/pickup selections over the next week, and hope to be open for sales soon.
Friday Bread This Week
For the time being Bread Pickup will continue to be at Island Bakery. If you are on the bread email list, you will have received order and pickup info from Janice. Pickup is in her driveway out on West Shore Rd, with a fire pit to keep the Usual Suspects comfy.
Current expectations are that bread pickup will likely return to the wine shop when we reopen.
Mailing List Issues
Well, this week we will try posting this brief missive via a new app suggested by a “trusted source” who is responsible for getting this blog started in the first place back in ’09. At the moment we have no idea how or whether it works. If it does, great! If it doesn’t we will follow up with an email tomorrow (Friday).
Fingers crossed!
2072 Granger Way