Russell Lawall portait painted by Masako. Painted while Masako was an art student in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, my grandfather Russell Lawall visited Japan with his wife Edith Lawall. Russel and Edith were my mother’s parents.

Russell and Edith had a strong fondness for Japan. They did not speak Japanese, so they arranged in the early 1970s for a local Japanese tour guide and interpreter to show them Japan. That guide, Masako Miyata, truly befriended my grandparents, and they invited her to move to the United States to live with them and go to college, as Masako was in her early 20s at the time.

Masako studied painting and ceramics at The Art Institute of Chicago. She lived with my grandparents for years — I’m guessing five years. Masako went on to marry an American and became of Professor of Art and Art History at James Madison University. She is now Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History. Her husband, Steve Zapton, also holds the same title at the same institution. Masako’s full name is Masako Miyata Zapton.

Masako created dozens of ceramics pieces while she was a student. When my grandfather Russell passed away in 1994, five years after my grandmother Edith passed away, my mother called Masako to see if she wanted the dozens of items back. My grandfather Russell had saved them all, and they were all on display in the family room.

Masako said she did not want her old student work, but that she also did not want any of it to go to strangers, apparently because the works were signed by her and she was not proud of her early examples.

She said family could keep as many pieces as they wished, but that she wanted the rest to be conclusively destroyed, not sold at an estate sale, donated or otherwise disposed of.

It fell on me to destroy Masako’s student artwork. I wore a full face protective shield to protect me from flying chips of fired clay while I used a hammer to smash dozens of vases, bowls and sculptures, while my brother captured video on my Sony Hi-8 camcorder, which I still have but no longer use.

I kept the best examples of Masako’s work, and I have them at my house and at my parent’s house.

My most precious Masako piece of artwork is a portrait she painted in oils of my grandfather Russell.

This portrait of my grandfather is shown above. Click on the picture twice to see a much larger version of it that is so detailed you can see the brush strokes.

While it may look like an abstract painting, it shows a striking resemblance to my grandfather if you stand far enough away from it.

This painting is framed and in perfect condition. I did not need to retouch the above photograph, which I shot within the last month for this blog.

It is characteristic for me to name people I reference in this blog by their first and last name, and then to make future references in the same post by last name only. I have chosen to reference Masako by her first name throughout because even as an art student, she signed her work with just her first name, and she is known professionally as an artist even now by just her first name, to my knowledge.

Thank you Masako for the artwork. And thank you for helping my grandparents for so many years. You were very kind to them, and I appreciate your kindness.

Elsie Battaglia in about 1932

As I have reported, my dear grandmother Elsie Battaglia turned 100 years old December 12, 2011. Her friends, Ron and Eleanor Highet, owners of the Original Pancake House, threw her a wonderful birthday party, attended by 75 of Battaglia’s friends and family.

Barbara Sherman, a reporter from the Tigard, Oregon USA newspaper the Regal Courier, was among the guests, and she wrote a amazingly wonderful article about the party and my grandmother’s fascinating life. I only learned about the newspaper article today, however, it was published December 29, 2011.

I learned from this article that my grandmother was proposed to on her first date after 15 minutes of conversation with the young man.

I have known for ages that Grandma was proposed to on the first date, but only today did I learn the proposal happened so quickly.

15 minutes! Think about that for 15 minutes.

Elsie Battaglia, April 12, 2011. Photograph by Kevin Warnock.

[Important note: Since this blog will be around longer than the article will likely be available on the Regal Courier website, I made a screen capture of the story, presented here as a PDF format file:

Regal Courier newspaper story about Elsie Battaglia, December 29, 2011

Please read the article on the newspaper's website, and ignore the PDF screen captures until the newspaper's link no longer functions, or the newspaper no longer exists.

This blog will live on for centuries, thus this precaution against an important link getting broken.

It is critical you read the story at the newspaper's website, as that's how the newspaper makes money. If you read my PDF before the newspaper deactivates the link, you are stealing from the newspaper's bank account, which is not kind given how kind they were to feature my grandmother's birthday party.]

I decided October 21, 2010 we are not compatible, and probably never were compatible. This is a tragedy, as I loved her with all my heart and then some. The pastry chef mother of her best friend picked up on this even though she rarely saw me and hardly knew me.

Tomorrow is a new day and now that I’m single again, as of December 12, 2011, I am actively looking for my next love.

I have turned a corner and life is looking bright and promising once more. These blog posts are no longer masking much.

I am no longer heartbroken and ruined, rather, I am charged up, enthusiastic and optimistic.

Elsie Battaglia's 100th birthday party at The Original Pancake House, 8601 SW 24th Avenue, Portland, Oregon, USA, December 12, 2011

This morning my young at heart grandmother Elsie Battaglia celebrated her 100th birthday party. She was born on this day in 1911! Seventy five of her friends and family joined her at The Original Pancake House. Battaglia has been friends with the proprietors of this business since 1950.

In the photo above, I’m sitting to the left of my grandmother.

Elsie Battagla 100th birthday party invitation

Yesterday, November 21, 2011, I received a paper invitation from my beloved 99 year old grandmother Elsie Battaglia to her 100th birthday party, which is scheduled for December 12, 2011, next month. I scanned the invitation for you to see. I direct your attention to left side of the graphic, which is the front of the invitation. The right side of the graphic is the interior of the folded invitation.

The text on the left illustrates the strides the world has made in the last 100 years.

I love my grandmother Elsie so much. I’ll be at her birthday party, and I’ll share the highlights with my readers here on my blog.

If you’re having trouble reading the text, click on the invitation graphic to enlarge it dramatically.

Elsie is on Facebook. She had WebTV in 1997.  Her now disabled and unused email address was elsie97@webtv.com. She had her Volkswagon Bug in the mid 1950s. Her first son (my father) picked it up for her in Paris, France and had it shipped back to Portland, Oregon, where no doubt it was one of the first in the United States.

Apple iPad Facetime, from Apple.com website, June 14, 2011

Since Apple iPad tablet computers have forward and rear facing video cameras, and are set up for slick and easy video conferencing, I have a proposal:

Make iPads available for check out in hospitals and nursing homes, so that patients can receive ‘hospital visits’ from their friends and family more frequently.

I bet that if a scientific study were conducted that patients would get well sooner and be happier if they could video chat with their friends and family for free, even if they didn’t own or know how to operated a computer. I suspect the video chatting on the iPad is so easy to use that nurses and doctors could be trained to be trainers in mere minutes.

I suspect there are already robust WiFi networks in care facilities, so the networking is already in place.

While we’re at it, install permanent video cameras at all funeral homes so people can attend even if too far away to travel.

For that matter, install video cameras at churches and other places where weddings take place, so more people can attend weddings.

For an extra dose of ‘being there’ somebody could create a holder for an iPad that would look sort of like a person from the sholders up. Where the face would be, place the iPad. This iPad holder could be clipped to the back of a chair or bench.

This way a church, wedding venue or funeral home might have 10 ‘remote seats’ available, where one iPad equals one seat. When someone is occupying a seat at home, their face is shown full screen on the remote iPad. In this way, the physically present attendees can see the faces of the remote guests, and the relatives will be comforted that more friends and family could attend.

Since all these iPads cost money, I suppose it would be OK for wedding and funeral venues to charge extra for these virtual seats. But I would say just give them away at first, to get people hooked on the concept. It’s such a far out idea I am doubtful people would pay until they had seen it done at another event.

I read once that when the grocery shopping cart was invented and placed in stores that nobody touched them. The proprietor had to hire pretend shoppers to push them around as if they were really shopping. That educated actual shoppers, who began to use the carts themselves for real. I think something similar might be required to get this idea off the ground. It might even be necessary to hire fake guests who do not know the wedding party or the deceased, to virtually attend the wedding or funeral, cry and be present.

I’ve read that in Japan there are businesses that rent actors to attend weddings in person to give the impression the bride and groom have more friends than they really do. So there is a precedent for fakery like this.

I think the idea of virtually attending important life events is a good one. Especially going forward with jet fuel being so expensive and security standards getting stricter. It just isn’t a great idea to fly all over the planet for all these events, and such travel I predict will one day become politically incorrect.

There are so many ways to make my idea more like being there. The iPads could be mounted on motorized tripod mounts the remote user could adjust, so people could look to their sides and say hello to real people. The iPad has a camera on the back already, so people could see who was sitting behind them. Maybe two iPads could be mounted back to back so that people sitting in the back could see who was sitting up front in the virtual seats.

Lots of people miss lots of important events. My idea is much more social than simply installing some anonymous cameras that might be security cameras as far as the attendees are aware. With my idea, people present physically can interact with people present virtually.

I dub my idea FaceSeat.

Of course, this concept is applicable to zillions of events beyond weddings and funerals, but at first I would focus on these big markets — a lot of people marry and die in the world.

With the provocative name FaceSeat I could get sued by Apple and FaceBook at once. Think of the stunning PR that would result – instant mind share. If Oprah [Winfrey] still had a popular daytime television show, I’d be on it within days of the lawsuits being filed.

PS — This is just a wacky idea I’m writing on my blog! I am not jumping into to the videoconferencing industry. If someone has already thought of and published my idea, I’d like to know about it so I can update this post.

College debt over time, from Wall Street Journal May 22, 2011

I read Money Lessons for Every High-School Graduate by Zac Bissonnette in today’s Wall Street Journal newspaper. Bissonnette’s piece is one of the most direct and sensible articles about money I’ve yet read.

While the lessons of this article are aimed at recent high school graduates, I think the lessons have yet to be learned by many people.

Lesson number four particularly resonates with me:

“Materialism is misery: Lives of thrift and conscientiousness lead to less stress, greater enjoyment of the things we do have and a lighter carbon footprint. But most of our societal associations with wealth are deeply connected with materialism: luxury goods, power and status.

“The more materialistic values are at the center of our lives, the more our quality of life is diminished,” says Knox College psychologist Tim Kasser, author of “The High Price of Materialism.”

Recognize the real benefits of wealth — freedom and flexibility — and don’t let the pursuit of its illusory trappings interfere with your ability to reap those rewards.”

Thanks to my generous relatives, rental and investment income, I have the freedom and flexibility the passage refers to.

That makes me richer than almost everyone I know, in my mind.

Even better, I am happy. I like my house, car and possessions, and I rarely dream of upgrading them.

Might I appreciate a gilded existence? Perhaps, but perhaps not, because with material riches come pressures that I have seen make many people unhappy.

I’ll take my happy, freedom filled middle class life over an unhappy, constrained upper class life… with joy.

I am confident I’ll make a lot more money, but happiness is more important than money.

Elsie Battagla, April 12, 2011, King City, Oregon, USA. Photo by Kevin L. Warnock.

My grandmother Elsie Battaglia joined FaceBook today. She is 99 years old. I helped her with the signup process, but she pushed the buttons to create the account by herself. We uploaded about half of the pictures in her physical photo albums — some 1,300 pictures.

FaceBook is currently the most popular so-called ‘social network’ in the United States, and perhaps the world.

I decided to photograph grandma today for her FaceBook profile picture. She applied her own lipstick and I set up my studio light I had brought with me. I used my Canon 5D Mark II camera with the 135mm soft focus portrait lens set halfway between 0 and 1. I directed her poses like I was photographing a young fashion model, and the above picture is the result. I am very happy with the way it turned out, and I think she looks fantastic, especially since she isn’t wearing makeup other than lipstick, and the picture is not retouched.

My lovely breakfast cooked by Claudia

Around the breakfast table this morning in Tigard, Oregon, at the home of my 99 year old grandmother Elsie Battaglia, I had a good conversation with Claudia.

Claudia is a school teacher, and only recently put her profession on hold to take care of my grandmother full time.

Claudia and I had an animated conversation about teaching children to cook. I wondered aloud if perhaps the best way to teach children to cook would be to have the students cook lunch daily for the student body. Instead of employing kitchen staff, schools could employ cooking teachers that would teach and supervise students who would do the actual cooking and serving.

The teaching opportunities would be varied and numerous:

• Nutrition
• Meal planning
• Accounting
• Budgeting
• Cleaning
• Customer service
• Math
• Growing
• Purchasing
• Cooking

School kitchens already have certified cooking and food preparation appliances, and by turning the kitchen into a classroom for use throughout the school day, the classroom area of the school is automatically increased at zero or small cost.

Claudia thought my idea is worthwhile. She has dozens of ideas she wants to pursue to increase the quality of education. She hopes to open her own small school, where she can implement many of her ideas. I encouraged her to start a blog to write about her ideas to make friends with likeminded readers. She said she’s been wanted to set up a blog for a while now, and asked me to help her set up her blog during my current visit. Of course I agreed, and that’s on our agenda.

Certainly there is a risk if students are charged with cooking for their classmates. Someone might poison the food, for example. But, to my knowledge, prisoners cook for fellow inmates, and I haven’t heard of poisonings happening in that context.

I would think that daily cooking for classmates would help students feel connected to their classmates to such a degree that poisonings would be quite rare. Something is clearly wrong in US schools — so wrong that students are regularly shooting their classmates and instructors with guns. I wonder if cooking for classmates might reduce school shootings by helping students feel more connected to and empathetic towards their fellow students.

The advantages to having every student know how to cook for themselves and for a crowd I believe would strongly outweigh any possible dangers from accidental or intentional kitchen related incidents.

The way the system works in the US now is millions of students can’t cook a healthy, delicious and balanced meal when they graduate. As a result, they rely on corporations to cook for them. The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan details the many horrors that result when corporations cook food to feed a populace.

When corporations cook for people, health suffers and people get sick and die. The number of people that get sick from eating corporate food is likely orders of magnitude higher than the numbers of students that perhaps might get sick by eating student prepared food.

Society should be able to accept a potential small incremental risk to the immediate safety of school lunches in exchange for a dramatic improvement in food safety long term by the population turning away from corporate food in favor of home cooked healthy and delectable meals.

The gold standard even today for desirable food is a ‘home cooked meal.’ Why aren’t we teaching the entire population how to prepare a great home cooked meal? It is unfortunate that cooking isn’t a required class each year of school. With my plan, described here, to turn school kitchens into classrooms, and to turn students into trained cooks and kitchen managers, adding 12 years of cooking classes to every K-12 educational system in the country doesn’t have to cost extra, and the dividends society will reap are potentially shockingly dramatic.

I predict that a rigorous analysis of my plan will show that the lifecycle cost benefit to my plan will total trillions of dollars per generation, as the health care costs to treat the illnesses associated with poor diet will likely be shown to dwarf any direct costs associated with turning school kitchens into cooking and management classrooms.

Many others are advocating for healthy school lunches. Here are some links:

• High School Students Bring Healthy School Lunch to DC – and Cook with White House Chef Sam Kass
• Two schools grow, cook food in lunch partnership
• Healthy School Lunches
• Students Will Cook Their Lunch and Eat It, Too

I predict a firestorm of protest from various powerful unions if they were to seriously consider adopting what I write above. The existing school lunch cooks would probably not have teaching credentials, so the teachers’ unions would probably not want them to become teachers. I also suspect the existing lunch staff would not want to teach hundreds or thousands of students how to do their jobs.

I don’t know what type of person would be best suited to the position of cooking teacher, but I am nearly certain there would be many applicants for a job like I’ve outlined above. I think a special type of person is needed — someone who is passionate about food and nutrition and teaching, yet can handle the daily grind of operating what amounts to a busy commercial kitchen with student workers.

I am passionate about teaching people to cook. I created and published my first cooking show in January. I sadly haven’t published follow on episodes yet, but I remain committed to publishing 11 more shows this year.

power lift reclining chair

My grandmother Elsie Battaglia is 99 years old.

Starting on April 1, 2011, she hasn’t been feeling well, and she sounds extremely tired on the phone. She’s had an array of tests completed by her doctors, and they can find nothing wrong. In fact, her doctor said she is ‘remarkably healthy’ and that there’s no reason for her to be at the hospital.

Even so, she sounds so lethargic on the phone that I am concerned. She is sleeping 12 hours a day, which is quite unusual for her.

I decided to skip the TiG aluminum welding class I had signed up for last evening at TechShop in Menlo Park, California.

Instead, I began driving my car north from San Francisco, California to Tigard, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

Note that I never sold my BMW even though I wrote a post in March 2010 advertising it. I didn’t get an offer over the lowest blue book value, so I had a change of heart, as I really love my car. I had wanted to sell it in order to buy a Volkswagon Golf TDI, which gets far better mileage. But Golf TDIs are in short supply and are very expensive on the used market. The new ones can’t run on biodiesel, so they were out of the question.

The drive to my grandmother’s house is 630 mile drive, which is far too much for me to drive in one day, particularly since I drive precisely at the speed limit to save fuel. I drove about 300 miles last evening and stayed at the Sis-Q-Inn Motel at 1825 Shastina Drive in Weed, California.

The drive today was tiring, as I hit Friday afternoon rush hour traffic as I approached Tigard.

I arrived at Elsie’s house around 5pm.

She was reclining in her brand new power activated recliner, similar to this one, that can nearly ‘stand up’ to help her get out of her chair easily. I had never seen such a chair in operation in person, and I was impressed. I saw ads on TV for such chairs when I was a kid — I didn’t understand then how critical a chair could be to someone.

Elsie’s dear friend Char, who has known my grandmother for some 40 years, came over this evening and made dinner for Elsie, Claudia and me. Claudia is Elsie’s friend who lives with her and helps her out. Claudia is an absolute delight, and I am so thankful she is here. She tells Elsie she loves her several times a day.

I am very close to my grandmother. I introduced my last girlfriend to Elsie before I introduced her to my parents.

Elsie got married when she was 16, and had my father when she was 18. Her husband died of a heart defect when she was 23. This was in about 1935, when the country was still in the Great Depression. Her husband’s father owned an apartment building in Portland, and Elsie went to work for him collecting the rent from mostly broke tenants. She describes the work as a tough assignment, but she was persistent and mostly succeeded. The apartment building is still there, and my father and brother went to visit it within the last two years.

I don’t know how long I am going to stay here in Tigard, which is why I drove. I have my laptop with me, and my grandmother has a fast WiFi connection, so I can work effectively from here.