Oasis Class on the Kumeyaay

Little is known about the Kumeyaay before the arrival of the Spanish in San Diego. They had one of the densest populations of indigenous peoples in the new world, with an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 living in what is now San Diego county. This large population was supported primarily by fishing, the kelp beds off of Point Loma providing a large quantity of a rich variety of fish that they caught primarily with hooks and lines. They didn't have boats as such, sometimes using bundled reed floats or flattened tree-trunk floats, but these were adequate in San Diego's many sheltered bays, inlets and river mouths.

Their fishing was supplemented by hunting small animals and birds, gathering shellfish and other sea creatures from the shore, and cultivating and harvesting grasses, a number of species of which have become extinct since their way of life was changed.

Women would wear a small apron at their waists and sometimes a second apron covering the breasts. Men and children were said to go naked except, sometimes, for a hat or, sometimes, a very loosely woven cloak thrown over one shoulder.

Men were the hunters and the tool-makers. They worked about eight hours per day, having plenty of time to rest. Women did the gathering, cooking, basket-making and many other things, working all day long. Both men and women could become religious leaders, as this was an inherited function that wasn't gender specific.

Individuality was not permitted. Any deviation from group ways was punished by rebuke. A serious rebellion would result in being cast out of the group, which was equivalent to a sentence of death -- an individual, alone, probably could not survive once he left the tribal land where everything he knew about was.

The Kumeyaay cremated their dead, during a mourning period of four to eight days, time enough to allow the spirit to leave the world of the living and enter the spirit world. The mourners would paint their skins black as a sign of sorrow. Personal possessions of the deceased would be burned along with his body. A wooden doll representing the dead person would be kept for a year before it and any other material possessions associated with the deceased would be burned on the anniversary of his death. From that point on, he would never be mentioned again, having completed the transition to the spirit life.

The various bands of Kumeyaay each had their own territories, marked by long tradition -- but not marked down physically anywhere. Likewise, each had their own paths to and from the shore, their own ceremonial places, their own garden spots and hunting preserves. They all knew what belonged to which band ... until the Spanish arrived.

The Spanish viewed the land as unoccupied and free for the taking. They decided to build their mission on one of the prime Kumeyaay sites (they called the Kumeyaay "Diegueños" and considered them to be ignorant, brute savages). After a few years of being unable to grow crops at that location, they decided to move the mission to its present location above Mission Valley, both times conscripting the Kumeyaay for labor.

The Spanish soldiers, finding the fields of grass cultivated by the Kumeyaay from what is now Oceanside down to today's National City, used it to pasture their horses, wiping out the Kumeyaay winter crop and causing the extinction of several strains of seed grasses.

Spanish women never travelled to the New World. To convert native women to the Catholic faith, they were offered a work day only six hours in length, about a third what they had been working for the tribe. The new faith became very popular, and newly converted brides with new Spanish surnames popped up everywhere.

The number of Kumeyaay seemed to diminish rapidly, but this was matched by a rapid increase in the number of "Spanish" in the area.

The first picture drawn of a Kumeyaay shows her wearing a cloth dress that covered her completely. The first photographs show grossly bloated people, the result of a too-sudden shift from a generations-long high protien diet to a high carbohydrate diet. For about a century, at least since the establishment of the reservation system for native nations, the Kumeyaay lived in abject poverty, depending on welfare, few even having electricity.

Then they got casinos.

The casinos have made the Kumeyaay rich. They have handled it well and I, for one, feel they deserve their good fortune.

Salad

I love salad.

Because I'm allergic to lettuce, I'm not supposed to eat salads.

There are, however, days when I'll say to hell with the consequences. Today was such a day. I needed a salad.

I can get away with small amounts of lettuce once in a while. I can eat even larger quantities of spinach with no dire consequences. Even small amounts of members of the cabbage family will cause me instant misery.

This is the season when the baby salad fixings are at their best. I got a package of baby herb salad mix containing several lettuces (red and green remaine, red and green oak leaf, lollo rosa, and tango), baby spinach, red and green chard, mizuna, arugula, frisee, radicchio, parsley, cilantro, and dill. I also got a package of fresh basil to mix in with the other greens. I threw in some Persian cucumbers and some very sweet little tomatoes, the size of cherries, that came clinging to a vine. I thawed a couple of cups of cocktail shrimp, tossing them in with the leaves and fruits, and added my remaining supply of goat cheese, about a third of a stick. With a splash of sweet Vidalia onion dressing, I was ready to go.

A good salad has multiple contrasts: bitter and sweet, soft and chewy and crunchy, with a medley of tastes. This was a good salad. It went well with a slightly sweet, fruity, white wine.

When Cathy got home, I simply pointed her to the fresh ingredients and let her make her own salad. When Delia arrived, I made her a salad similar to the one I had enjoyed but with feta cheese instead of goat cheese.

The little package of fresh salad mix lasted just long enough for our three salads. That's the way it should be.

Salad should be fresh.

Ghost Story

Beware! This appears to be a true story of the consequences of bureaucracy's disregard for human life.

Easter Eggs

The Teutonic fertility goddess Eastre, for whom the Christian springtime reserection holiday is named, had the special power of being able to transform birds into rabbits. That's why those Easter bunnies were associated with eggs.

Actually, it was a hare, the springtime Moon-hare sacred to Eostre / Ostara / Astarte / Aphrodite, the goddess said to have given birth to the Golden Egg of the sun.

Day of the Tortoise

We have a snail problem. I frequently encounter snails on our driveway late at night or early in the morning. I usually step on them to crush them.

This morning I encountered what, at first glance, appeared to be a very large snail. But snails usually have a big stripe that follows the spiral on their shells. This fellow had a different design. I took a closer look at him as he chugged along. It wasn't a snail at all. It was a tiny tortoise.

There are no tortoise native to San Diego county. This one was either purchased as a pet or hatched from the eggs somebody's pet laid in their yard. It could have come from quite far away, carried, I'm told, by a raven or other large bird.

I called the zoo for information about what to do with this creature. They referred me to the San Diego Turtle and Tortoise Society, who gave me the numbers of three members. I called the one in my area code and left a message.

I got a reply in about twenty minutes. The member living closest to me is about two miles away, so I contacted her, first leaving a message on her machine and later, when she returned home from work, making arrangements for Cathy to deliver the animal to her house.

It is illegal to return a tortoise to the wild in California.

You are supposed to get a license to own a tortoise. I imagine this law gets broken frequently, mostly out of ignorance. But tortoises are land animals, unlike turtles, and require special care. They like to burrow but must be protected from flooding. They must even be protected from the damp of night. During the day they need both sun and shade. Small tortoises, like this one, are vulnerable to a number of predators, including small dogs like Rocky.

Taking care of the animal, no matter how pretty he was (and he was pretty, his tan shell having a single thin brown line forming a loop on each segment), would have been too much effort. Just finding his owner might be too much effort. The society is set up to handle such things. It is better to let the creature go as soon as possible, as we did.

More Strange Dreams

I spoke too soon. I had another set of dreams in the series. They were rather disjoint and jumbled, so I'll just summarize.

The folded glossy paper the officer had placed in his mouth before suiciding was a set of instructions for a fantasy mystery game called "Phantom Hand". The instructions and a CD, placed in a pasteboard folder, had been sent or given to many young police who were into the computer gaming scene. This particular game had reached cult status, with two opposing groups forming, the Right Handers or, more simply, Handers, and their opposite number, the Back Handers.

I was an outsider who had been unaware of the phenomenon. That is why I was not considered a suspect, the murder and suicide being taken as moves in a cult war. My superiors wanted to see if an attempt would be made to recruit me into one group or the other and by whom, so I was asked to just become familiar with the game and wait for something to happen.

Now it's shaping up into a nice story!

Something is developing in my subconscious. From experience, I know I just have to let it simmer. Meanwhile, I'm having some interesting dreams again.

No More Strange Dreams

No more dreams at all.

Hardly enough sleep.

Strange Dreams

Last night I had two dreams that were rather strange. They were connected, as if the second dream was a continuation of the first.

I was young and single. I was also a uniformed cop, no longer quite a rookie. I was at a party with a bunch of other cops, perhaps forty or fifty of them, in a motel outside of the city. None of us were in uniform at the moment, of course. Several splinter groups had moved to different rooms because of the crowded conditions, but I shared a table with five others in what seemed more like a dining area than a bar despite being dimly lit.

People got upset, things got very active for a while but then settled down, and an investigation started immediately. I was apparently not considered a suspect.

Then I woke. In a few minutes I went back to sleep and resumed the dream.

This time I was outside the motel, in the parking area. It had lots of oak trees and gravel roads leading to independent cabins.

A few moments later I found him, sitting in a large, dark-colored car parked by itself under a group of trees. He had stuffed several napkins in his mouth and had placed a piece of glossy paper, printed in black on white and folded like a small brochure, in front of his mouth. He then stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I woke up.

I haven't written any mystery stories, but this could be the basis of one. I have several characters to develop, two living and two dead, and I can add lots more. I have an interesting situation. The locale isn't bad. This has to go into my future stories file.

Typically, when I start to dream an important story dream, the dreams will keep coming back for several days. This time I had two quite vivid dreams in one night. If I get more dreams about the same situation, it may be more than just a story.

New Mozilla

I had been running Mozilla 1.5. I just upgraded to Mozilla 1.6. Mozilla 1.7 is in Alpha testing, a stage at which I am not the least bit tempted to touch it.

There wasn't much wrong with M1.5. I would sometimes get a blank screen when the browser was showing me a link on a new page, but I could work around that. There weren't that many new features, either. But it took less than ten minutes to make the upgrade and it was free, so why not?

Mozilla is constantly being improved. The improvements may be so small as to be invisible, but they are there. I try to keep up with the current production release ... but I avoid beta and alpha releases of anything. I once had a bad experience with some beta software I was testing for a different company (it completely wiped out my operating system three times, causing complete data loss each time).

I haven't had a chance to test anything (except the blank screen problem, which got fixed) on the new release. I'll be using it daily, though, so it should be well tested by the time either the next version comes out or Thunderbird comes of age.

Thunderbird

The browser I use is Mozilla. I also use the integrated mail program.

The Mozilla people are working to divorce the browser from the mail program. The new mail program, written from scratch, is named Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is much like the integrated mail program. It looks the same and has many of the same features. But it is incomplete. It isn't up to version 1.0 yet, so it doesn't come with an installer or setup program and it doesn't automatically inherit settings from your existing mail program. You can set it up as your default mail program, though.

The intelligent Spam filtering is in place and seems to work well. That is, you teach it what kind of messages are Spam by marking Spam messages as such, and the program figures out some kind of rules from your choices of messages. I have it place messages it classifies as Spam in a folder called Junk, which I review regularly. If the program mistakenly labels something as Spam that I don't want it to, I want it to learn the difference. It will learn, too. Just telling it that it was wrong about the message being Spam gets it to change its rules. Pretty soon it stops making mistakes.

HTML mail is dangerous. There are a number of exploits that can be done using HTML in email. But Thunderbird has an option to render only simple HTML. That means it will ignore all but a few very simple and safe HTML features. Sanitized HTML is available at last.

It was an obvious step, just like the option to not permit JavaScript in email messages. There are places for JavaScript and advanced features of HTML, but not in email.

I had no problems with the mail functions of the program. Everything worked flawlessly.

I'm not going to start using Thunderbird just yet, though. I'm going to wait for version 1.0, the first production version, when the program can transfer all of my settings and import my accumulated mail files and address books.

I shouldn't have long to wait. They are almost there now.