My sister-in-law, Cindy Myers, who is staying with us for the Thanksgiving holidays, is an alpaca breeder and trainer. In case you don’t know, an alpaca is a domesticated species of South American camelid. It looks like a small llama, but unlike a llama, it is too small to be used as a pack animal. Instead, it is alpaca fiber that is prized by many people, especially knitters and weavers. The fiber is much softer than wool. I remember the extraordinarily soft feel of alpaca fiber when my daughter, Annie, was knitting with it a few months ago.

Cindy has started an alpaca business called Alpacas at Hum Sweet Hum. She has four animals right now, with two of them pregnant. She is also one of the few people who clicker trains them, which makes the skittish beasts more social and easier to handle. Annie just helped her launch her website, humsweethum.com. I’ve posted a photo with Cindy and my family in Hum Sweet Hum sweatshirts.

My sister-in-law, Cindy Myers, lives in Oxnard, California. She is not directly threatened by the massive fires that are sweeping coastal California from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, but she has to endure the smoke. She sent Lenie a photo of what it’s like outside her front door.

I lived in that area for about 10 years. My little home was about 11 houses from the ocean on Silver Strand Beach, nestled between the Port Hueneme (pronounced Y-NEE-MEE) Naval Air Station and Oxnard Shores. When the hot winds come strong off the desert, you get a Santa Ana condition, which is what they have now. It’s so devastatingly dry that you feel like your skin is cracking. The winds even pick up the pesticides from the agricultural fields so a lot of people, including me, would get these bad sinus headaches. With these terribly uncomfortable blustery winds driving these fires, there is no stopping them. You either let the fires burn to the ocean or pray the wind dies down.

Notice the relative calm at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego compared to the Superdome in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster? Did the federal disaster services agency learn that much since Katrina? Or is something else at play? Whatever, I am very impressed with the orderliness. I lived through many fires in my years in southern California, and people always behaved well.

I wonder how long it will be before someone blames these fires on Bush and global warming.

13th Year Anthology Intro

I’m writing the introduction to the 13th Year Anthology today. It’s our best anthology yet. It will go to the printer tomorrow, then to your mail box before Christmas. If you haven’t bought yours yet, better click HERE for our inexpensive preorder special.

I’m not a very religious person, but when O.J. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, I remember thinking, “I sure hope there’s a God because that bastard needs to fry for what he did.” Well, maybe God doesn’t need to intercede after all. O.J. is charged with some pretty serious crimes — two counts of kidnapping at gunpoint among them — and even though the case looks a bit flimsy at first glance, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s convicted “of something” anyway and goes to jail.

Ever since that incredible injustice 12 years ago when O.J. was acquitted by a moronic jury, most of the rest of American society has ostracized him. No endorsements, no appearances on sports shows, not even a mention of him by TV football analysts when they discussed great running backs of the past. That’s because we all knew he did it, and as a society we purposefully ostracized him.

These current charges may very well stem from a setup, as defense attorneys say, or it may really be just about “payback” for what O.J. got away with in 1995, but I’m still hopeful. Maybe this IS Divine Retribution interceding. Maybe God is playing a little joke on O.J., and holding him to account after all — in this life.

A bottle of good merlot while camping is a wonderful thing. Luckily my son-in-law Erik’s Dad, Rocky Tuttle, is a wine guy, namely, he studies the stuff. While my family was visiting Annie and Erik a couple of months ago in 29 Palms, California, Rocky was also visiting from Arizona and provided the wine for a barbecue we had at our cabin at the 29 Palms Inn. He bought some inexpensive (about $10 a bottle) Columbia-Crest wine from the local grocery store. It was extremely good. I am a merlot guy, so I know. The wine was 2004 Columbia-Crest Merlot, but it must also say “Grand Estates” on the label. I brought along two bottles for this camping trip.

Unfortunately I couldn’t open the bottles. The cork was just too tight. Luckily, I have a 15-year-old son, Jake, who is immensely powerful, so he opened them after a bit of effort.

This has been a very relaxing camping trip. Lenie has taken to reading the boys Harry Potter’s 7th book during the day because they are within a hundred pages of the end of this 759-page book, so I’ve had lots of time to just think. I think J. K. Rowling will be remembered just like Shakespeare, who was also very popular in his own time. We know from the history that people flocked to Shakespeare’s plays, especially his comedies, and now we read him hundreds of years later.

Hopefully, the language won’t change as much in the future as it did between Shakespeare’s time and now. Shakespeare was at the beginning of modern English, inventing many of the words and phrases we now take for granted, but we can still understand him with the help of a good English teacher or a guide. But our modern English is evolving quickly, at least as quickly since Shakespeare’s time. Isn’t that weird? The language we speak today is changing so much that we probably will have difficulty understanding Harry Potter a few centuries from now. If we let some teachers from the inner cities have their way, we won’t be able to understand some of our citizens a few decades from now.

Rocky Tuttle, by the way, is much more than a wine officionado. He is Gold Beach High School’s greatest football star, prominently displayed in its Hall of Fame. He got a full football scholarship to Idaho State, then got an offer to try out for the Green Bay Packers in his senior year. He said ”no” and decided to pursue a career in banking. I asked him if he regrets that decision, and he said he didn’t. “I realized I was simply finished with football,” he told me. He ran a 4.4 forty in college. That’s fast!

We’re eating good while camping. One of my favorite snacks is a toastite made from apples we picked from our own trees at home and blackberries we picked while here. Sandwiched between two pieces of whole wheat bread, it’s very healthy, besides being delicious. I also sprinkle on a bit of cinnamon sugar. We spray the insides of the toastiter with Pam, but any oil will do. Otherwise the bread sticks to the toastiter. They also cook quick in the fire pit, so you have to check them often or they’ll burn.

The boys make a sour candy from the unripe blackberry kernels. They just break them out and carry them around in their pockets. I tried some: very good but very sour.