Wednesday, September 26, 2012

End of the Lipo

So I wonder if you remember the time I passed out on the toilet and I woke up upside down in the corner with a big old goose egg on my forehead and a new humble attitude.
It was the second night after my first Interferon injection. More than 6 months ago. Oh what a miserable sad little time that was.
This coming Friday I will be taking my 28th, what should be my last injection, and it don't be like that now. I'm fine. Happy. Skinny.
Did you notice that word? Skinny?
I don't know that I have ever used it referring to myself before.

When I was first in the hospital in Thailand to have my sex change surgery I asked the doctor if he could also do a little liposuction around my ample waist and associated areas of shame. He looked at me for a minute and said,"No, Heidi, it wouldn't really change anything. You have a certain body shape and lipo wont change that. I could do it, but you should save the money for something more important."
I weighed, at the time, right at 200 lbs even.
Over the four years since then I have fought tooth and nail to get that number down and keep it down and it has been an ugly cat fight the whole time. I got to where I considered anything even near 190 a moral victory, and anything under a triumph.
When I started this treatment, weighing 186, last spring,  the worst part, worse even than falling off the toilet, was being forced to eat 60 grams of fat every day, day in and day out, to dissolve the Incevek, at $600 a day, and get it into the blood to hunt viri. Greek yoghurt, full glasses of half-and-half, butter on everything, and, to this day , fuck peanut butter. 186 to start with,  12 weeks later I weighed 202 and beyond hating myself, I was simply, helplessly astonished at the firm roundness and the sheer size of my thighs and the massive swell of belly that obscured any view of foot or shoe. At first as you rapidly gain like that, the cellulite fills in and your skin gets this inflated sheen that is almost attractive. But not.
Then phase 2 started.
12 weeks later, I weigh 167.6 this morning.
How does that happen?
Once I stopped the fat madness at week 12 the whole dynamic changed. I quit eating at all. 
The interferon takes away any real appetite, and it makes my gums sore so it is painful to chew. Like when I was in DePaul doing my drug/alcohol treatment, I had all my remaining teeth pulled and got a set of false teeth and it was so hard to eat I became the first woman in DePaul history to actually weigh less after 6 months than before.
I am disgusted with food. It all tastes weird, and I am not used to eating very much. Half a little red potato and half a yam and I am good to go.
But I feel the same about food as I felt about dope at the end. It is nothing but trouble, it makes me ashamed of myself, and I cannot pretend one second longer that I like it.
Anorexia...
Hell yeah!

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Out Of Sight, Out of my MInd

Oh it was such hard work. We were like little beavers with a fresh adderall prescription. And we almost didn't get there, but in the end through simple unimaginative persistant stubbornness we did.
Bob brought just enough old lumber from his backyard, and very nice tools, just the right ones, to make a couple of long low saw horse type risers to rest the dory upon for its winters nap.
My old pal Brennan Enos from back in the day taught me a little trick to making sawhorses and a very informal design that I have used countless times over the years. I like to think that SW Oregon is the richer for all the sets of these sawhorses I have made in 25 years building stuff. And, best of all, though I had not done the trick in 12 years or more it all came right back and even the 16d hot dipped galvanized nails slammed right home with that cute and comfy wood handled hammer because I knew to pre-drill in that old brittle hard fir 2x4 and Bob knew to bring his nice new portable drill motor and the mass selection of bits. And my right hand, apparently, has not lost its cunning.
What does not show is that I was totally exhausted by the process of making these little horses. I had to keep going because there was a long way to go. Meanwhile Bob unloaded the dory and got it ready to move to phase II
I made a tripod out of 3 oars, and hung a 4-part block and tackle setup, which was just barely enough to get the dory far enough off the ground to get my little bicycle dolly underneath, but in the end we did get it under and strapped the thing down and hand-carried the dory by easy stages up to the parking lot, when Bob had a brilliant idea...
We are very proud of ourselves, this is Jean the operator of the marina, the big cheese, the head honcho, the Boss of the Dock, and a nicer person never walked a dock. And helpful too.
So Bob goes, "Hey Heidi Sue check if the bow will fit under the trunk lid and we can roll it with the Golf"
And guess what it did fit and slowly Bob rolled us over to the hose to wash out all the sand out of the Dory and all its cracks and crevices and there was quite a bit of it, too, and I was glad to see it washing over the gunnels. We just slid the whole bow right in there and tied up a little rope to keep it more or less in its place and then finally the three of us, very slowly, rolled over to the newly graveled and graded storage yard right next door.
That little red float house down there on the river is where Jean the Honcho lives. She put us up here in the back of the yard where she can keep an eye on my stuff. Without being asked...Nice Lady!
Turns out the height of the risers is perfect so that I will be able to work on the caulking and paint next spring. I brought most of the gear home with me, but I intend to have Home Depot deliver me a little lockable locker type shed/job-box type thing at some point so I don't have to drag stuff back and forth. I was at the end of all available energy by then so the placement of my massive 8x20 canvas tarp will wait for another day. We did good work, we got shit done, and we looked really good doing it, too.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Pipe Dream

There was a thing in the paper, the Coos Bay paper the other day about how the Jordan Cove LNG project is evolving, and that led to an interesting sidebar discussion the fruits of which I am figuring out how to share and with whom.
Background being that a couple years ago the fossil fuel industry went on one of its periodic rampages with the incredibly rising price of a barrel of light sweet crude (the greatest product name ever, n'est-ce pas?) and somebody, several sombodies, rich bastards no doubt, took a look at the geography of the west coast and came up with a brilliant pipe dream.
They proposed, and put up some dough to get going, building a natural gas pipeline from Coos Bay through to Nevada and building an import terminal at Coos Bay out on the North Spit of the bay, an area zoned for industrial development for many years, occasionally built on and never very successfully. The site has direct frontage on the ship channel only five or six miles from the ocean, railroad access through to the I-5 corridor and the UP freight system, and a port authority hungry to make up for the dead lumber business in the industrial base of the Coos Bay area, sorely beset and in need of transfusion. To the city fathers this looked very attractive.
The permit process began over vocal and vehement opposition from the NIMBY crowd led by one Wim Wenders, a local gasbag restauranteur and Holly Hall, a former somebody and wife of a prominent longshoreman. The woogie-woogie crowd chimed right in, but the permit application sailed on through and was granted at many federal and state levels. But about that time the deal changed with discovery of massive deposits of drillable natural gas on this continent so the goal of the project changed to export. We would now suck the gas from North America, concentrate it at Coos Bay, pipe it aboard some very large tankers, and all-fall-down-rich.
Ships can cross the Coos Bay Bar easier and safer than anyplace between San Francisco and the Straits of Juan de Fuca, whoever defuca he was
Unbeknownst and unrecognized, the bottom felll out of the world cargo shipping business. Keep this in mind, it comes into play shortly.
The pipeline was a separate deal, but its permits too keep being granted and it begins to look like this thing might actually come to pass, ugly and dangerous as it is. If you've ever been to High Island, Louisiana you will know just how ugly  the petro industry can be, but it makes money, big money, fuck-you money.
As I have noted before in these columns, the Panama Canal is changing, and world shipping will change with it. Shipowners are losing money on every mile they steam, but they keep going to keep market share and it will turn around eventually. But one thing that everybody in that world is looking at are the little economies like managing hull speeds for "gas mileage" rather than fast passages. Steam a little slower, arrive a little later, save 30% on fuel. There's enough idle tonnage that nobody notices the later arrivals, and nobody cares. It's a recession, after all.
So why would a container ship travel all the way up the Columbia river, 20 hours of steaming each way, if they didn't have to? Very few container ships even bother. Portland did about 75,000 containers last year, at 4k per ship thats only 20 or so ships all year.
I just saw this drawing in the Coos Bay paper last week. Come to find out, it takes a hella amount of electricity to compress gas snough to liquify, think of a giant air conditioner compressor, and how loud and obnoxious that is and how it racks up your light bill. But hey, no problem, we got assloads of fuel, natural gas up the yingyang at this point, so the energy poobahs are proposing a power generating facility to go along with the terminal. Sell the excess to Bonneville. Everybody makes out.
But look at the left side of the drawing.You will see a proposed container facility less then six miles from the ocean so if the corps of engineers has to dredge well, hey its a drop in the bucket, so why not go to 50 feet, only 3 feet more than it now is, and voila, POST PANAMAX-ready. Hot stuff.
You can see the edge of the container site from here, way over there past the North jetty. that little low row of pine trees is approximately the spot.

The usual fools are yelling about the change in plans regarding the power generator, but it is a clean generating process so fuck them. The truly fascinating thing is nobody's bitching about the container facility. All the poor longshoremen, men that made fabulous wages loading all our trees onto ships until the trees ran out, sending raw logs to Japan, can now run some cranes and sling some slings and generally fuck the dog on a new dock with a new scene.
Or do we pussy out? The question is do we really want Coos Bay to be like Brookings, all California retirees, or like Newport, all tourists from the valley? I think Coos Bay needs to have a soul and some ugly industry and say no thanks to the yuppies.
The really cool thing about this container facility is that it is not the product of some agency executive with a  hard-on, or a city father looking to get re-elected. Rather it is the result, from what I have heard from knowledgeable sources, of a proposal by the biggest player in the whole container cargo universe, the Maersk organization. If you want to see what they are working with look at the picture in the post before this one, the next down the page. That ship can't land in North America, it is too deep [EDIT: this information is 12 years old, harbors have been modified, there are much larger classes of container ships now]. But with very little work it would slip right into Coos Bay, unload 2 or 3 thousand TEU containers, not even the whole cargo but, say, a stack or two of priority goods and slip back out again with about a 12 hour turnaround pilot-to-pilot. And in a world where pennies add up, that aint hay.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

I Stand Corrected, sort of...

It's a classic case of spout off now, study the issue later...
I finally dug a little bit into the West Hayden Island project proposal only to find it aint what I thought it were.
Sam Adams apparently wants to make this his legacy gesture to the city, annexing the west end of the island so that the port can build a new docking/freight/container/bulk facility on the land it already owns.
The whole shebang is about 800 acres, land that has been left alone to become a rather impressive cottonwood forest with attendant wildlife all complete.
There's a little tiny deer out on that gravel bar minding her own business.
It is a nice place, quiet, rich in that distinctive leather-like smell that makes a cottonwood forest so hypnotic embellished with birdsong amidst the calm of the forest, far from care or travail. Nice soft sand beaches line the Columbia side, the Oregon Slough side not so much, there's lots of evidence of old industrial activity like log storage and places where the hoi polloi rid themselves of big useless things made of metal, in one spot there's a collection of old air compressors rotting to rust on the beach, a toilet, plenty of old logging cables and a dead microwave or two.
But the Columbia side is nice and the sand is clean and it feels like a wild place next to the hustle and bustle of a very active part of the river. More than one major barge line uses the shallows to store their barges in a kind of a valet parking situation, in between times when the grain barges are called to load up and go someplace. And the barging of grain on this river is a very big business indeed.
SO there are two concepts on the table, and surprise #1 is that they only involve 300 of the acres available, leaving the entire end of the island just as it is. On the Oregon Slough side of the island there are  fairly extensive mitigation projects to clean out the rip-rap and the old dead pilings and restore some freshwater marsh areas sadly diked off and filled  years ago, along with some removal of dredge spoils making some new shallow water habitat like the old habitat long buried under the crap of industrialization. Net gain.
There are the usual amenities for a port facility, a giant loop of train track with some extra sidings and, lo and behold, a proposal in one concept for a separate bridge to send the trucks across the slough with their containers or bulk over to North Portland Harbor Terminal 6 to join the already built facility there. Good idea.
Two wharves are in the drawing I saw, one for break-bulk cargo, for grain or scrap or sawdust or whatever, and a larger wharf for containers, dunno how big but not very, more or less the size of the Terminal 6 docks, 1400 feet or so, which can handle 6 or 8 more cranes.
This whole thing isn't very big.At all. The port acts pretty disappointed about not getting to use the full 800 acres, but fuck them, of course they want more. The point, my point, is that this size of facility just might wind up usefully utilized in the forseeable future.
Portland will never be a player in the container world, it is too far up the river, and the river is too hard to dredge. The Corps of Engineers spent millions and many years getting permission to deepen from 40 to 43 feet and just barely pulled it off. That's it. They will never get permission to go so much as a foot deeper.
This Post-Panamax behemoth will never see Portland anyway, in fact there are no harbors in North America big enough to accommodate its very deep draft. There is a scheme afoot to get it into Coos Bay, but that is another story [EDIT: this information is 12 years old, Regina Maersk now calls at NY and Long Beach, CA.]
The new Post Panamax ships will service the deepwater ports of the world, but there is plenty of tonnage of fairly new and well-built ships to service the secondary ports of the world, and Portland is comfortably within that realm, for many, many years to come.
The thing is right now there's a glut of shipping capacity, and the cranes at Terminal 6 are sadly underutilized. But that will not always be the case.
So if the port can figure out how to get the freight on and off the island without destroying the quality of life for the residents that have come to love their quiet backwater of a neighborhood, this new port facility might be a good thing to have built.
We shall see how it turns out, some public agencies don't respond well to public feeling,  but for now, I stand corrected.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Committee

Back in the day, a couple three years after the Exxon Valdez accident up in Prince William Sound, I happened to be working for the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve down in Charleston on the south coast. It was, still is as far as I know, kind of a bastard amalgam of the Oregon Division of State Lands and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is way too many acronyms for rational thought, but what I was doing was the more or less maintenance function on a 5,000 acre woodland/wetland reserve that also had a number of public and office buildings, science facilities that weren’t much in those days, lots of vehicles and some boats and kayaks. Plenty of stuff to keep a guy busy. You would think.
Now right after the tanker accident folks on the west coast, particularly in state government, got pretty excited about the locks on the barn door and whether or not the horses were gone. The Oregon Legislature put up some money and commissioned a study of the transportation of petroleum products through the waters of the state. Which resulted in  a committee being formed, and hearings being held by said committee, and they gave us a  secretary and some funds for paper and pencils and doughnuts, so to speak.
On the committee were  a handsome young Coast Guard LT-J, G Paul Nelson, who became later a player for ODEQ,  Rudy Gorst, known in Coos Bay as “The Clam Diver”, a truly weird member of the concerned public who had without a doubt the most annoying verbal tics and neologisms, who also I found out, was a transsexual wannabe, long before I crossed the line, some anonymous shipping broker/freighter operator who never showed up, a no-nonsense towboater executive named Dick Lauer from Sause Bros Ocean Towing,  and tall skinny Minnie Mouse-voiced Mike Graybill, the director of the Reserve where I worked, who couldn't be arsed to go to the meetings because they could not possibly enhance his career so grudgingly  allowed me to go in his place. He did finally show up at the last meeting when we gave final approval to the report, horses long over the horizon. But for a year and a half I sat on that gang and hashed out the implications.
Which as it turned out, meant every other month driving up Highway 101 to Loincoln City, Oregon, to some kind of a beach-front convention hotel, and endless hours in committee drinking coffee and eating little box lunches while discussing the ins and outs of the oil transportation business.
Now I’m a lifelong underachiever, but I love the water, and those of the waterfront, and I spend a lot of time in places that would not benefit from contact with petroleum products. I found a way, fairly quickly, to contribute by becoming a voice of reason that could articulate what these guys were trying to say to each other, and I had the middle ground everywhere I looked, and they were, I like to think, grateful for my way with words if not my actual presence. I learned a hell of a lot. We published a report with recommendations that were eventually turned into Oregon State government policy in the form of Best Practices and specific laws.

That's the tanker at anchor out in the stream, with a Tidewater fuel Barge tied up alongside if you blow this way up you see the blue fuel hose looped under that white boom-crane. The spill response vessel is right there next to the action. Two big Shaver Co tugboats, nice new beefy looking vessels were just out of sight on both ends of this operation. Of course that's my dory on the beach and I was like a kid at the circus watching this all unfold
SO when I got out to the island last week and I had things all set up and sat down on the sand to see what was going on out on the river, I just about jumped out of my chair because all at once I knew exactly what I was seeing, from all those stupid meetings all those years ago. That committee started some shit for sure, and I thought back on what we did.
We thought it was a good idea that when you are transporting oil by tanker, and that tanker is moving through restricted waters, there should be a tugboat standing by just in case something happens with the steering or the power plant. The Shaver tug just out of the picture to the right was there all afternoon, waiting to unmoor the tanker.
If  oil does somehow go in the water, bad things start happening  pretty fast, so we said that when you are actually transferring oil from one vessel to another or to the shore or from the shore it would be nice if there was to be a vessel with some containment booms handy just in case. That’s that smaller but very fancy and shiny silver boat just in front of the tanker. That thing is a fairly expensive piece of kit, a custom welded aluminum high powered jet-drive response vessel owned by the Clean River Consortium, basically a trade association of all the river users that has equipment pre-positioned all around the harbor.
It was there all afternoon, right up in there, and as usual nothing happened and the crew fished and sunbathed and barbecued and generally fucked the dog all afternoon but by god they were there and if something HAD happened they could have had booms in the water in a matter of seconds and skimmers and pumps and extra radios and whatnot Johnny on the spot. Now when a tanker docks or undocks there has to be a second tug, which there was, and the minute the fuel barge was done and towed away by a THIRD tug the two Shaver Ladies hooked up, unmoored the cables from the mooring buoy, helped weigh the anchors and get the tanker turned around and on her way back down the Columbia to the sea. I was astonished and pleased to see the fruits of all that head-aching boredom so many years later. And I was thrilled that I had had a hand in making these beautiful waters safer for everybody, OK, maybe a little bit, not a lot, but some.