Mark’s Bloomin’ Journal

Another string of Boeing 757’s in Delta livery, whisk me via Salt Lake City to Orlando, FL and back to Portland in approximately 50 hours. As much as I would grumble about airlines this was nothing more than a flawless repeat of all the hundreds of trips Delta has flown for me over the past decade. The only worthwhile observation being that the ticket price has soared whether in mileage or cash as at the same time comfort and amenities have continued their crash and burn spiral.

As many times as I have been to Florida it has almost always been along one coastline or another so the featureless green and watery flatness that is the center of the state has never really been a part of my thinking….at least not since I was briefly in Tallahassee for Jeb’s inauguration which seems eons ago and long before there was serious talk of competing with the Chinese (working on a Cuban license) in drilling for oil off the coastline. If two and three buck gas did not do that then four buck gas most certainly has the dialogue started. I guess that indicates that even the Subaru crowd are feeling the pinch.(Not really surprising as a quick fact finding foray indicates even they only get about 20mpg…hardly the measure of green frugality!)

From the 17th floor of the Rosen Center all I can see is an endless green that eventually melds with sky blue, dotted with puffy whites. The green flatness sprouts clay colored hotel towers, ribbons of highway and the painted coasters and towers of a myriad amusement parks…something like giraffe necks sticking up above a savanna’s Acacia trees. From an aircraft only, can one see that the green ground represents maybe only 70 percent of the landscape, the rest being ponds, lakes and ditches stretching towards Coco Beach and the Space Center at Canaveral. From the sealed bedroom window I imagine that I too can see the curvature of the earth.

Super Floral is where the USA’s largest floral buyers, the Costcos, WalMarts, the FTD’s and a million and one grocery chains go to place the big orders that keep the big growers happy for the coming year. Along with the ( I know it is hard to believe) real flowers there is booth after booth of all the crap that we doubtless have Chinese workers slaving (as seen in last months depressing feature “China”) over for a few bucks a month while inhaling lord only knows what life shortening fumes. The balloons, the plush, the faux wreaths, the faux baubles, the faux flowers even. Miles of ribbon and tons of pottery, tin buckets and wooden roses. Everything but everything that seems to be associated with flowers to the extent that the flowers themselves might become secondary. After all flowers are perishable, a pain in the ass!

More than ever I appreciate Flowerbud’s green box and our adherence to it carrying nothing but fresh flowers, sometimes a vase and very rarely an absurdly small box of a chocolatiers expensive tastes. There is no room for “plush” in the green box and the only thing that might be remotely inflated in there is my opinion on the certainty of our value proposition. As I march up one aisle and down another in the amazing structure that is the Orange County Convention Center I count my blessings as I honestly don’t know what I would do with all this stuff. Make a ton of money with it I suppose, if the lunch time talk by the voluble Jim McCann of 1-800 is anything to go by at all. At a billion bucks a year he can’t be all wrong. I’ll be damned If it doesn’t go against my better judgment though, to say nothing of my taste.

This floral convention is not like the ones I have the fortune to attend in Latin America or in the Netherlands. Those, while surely regulated as to those that can attend are always far more vibrant, packed and exciting…even in the days before the general public is allowed to swarm in and ooh and aah over what we flower peeps have come up with. Because this is for the really big fish it seems very quiet, eerily so. I guess there are not that many really big fish out there! As some of the merchants tell me they only need one big purchaser a year to make it all work, beyond that they are blessed.

Being something of a Curious George and finding myself trawling past bored people with eyes beginning to glaze it becomes readily apparent that one need only glance sideways at a girl from Colombia, a guy from Taiwan, a couple from Fallbrook and they will pounce in anticipation of a conversation, any conversation. With fishing poles ready and hooks suitable baited the angling is fun. It amuses me that people who know that you are not a likely candidate for their product will chat in fascination of what you do while others that really should be paying attention to your words, because you are in fact sure their product has validity for you, don’t understand it and allow their eyes to wander rudely to more “likely” targets even as you speak. When that switch happens it does not matter what you have to sell, you are not ever going to sell it to flowerbud. Some of these sales hacks have been around the industry way too long and are blind to the newcomers, new ideas and sorely needed new directions.

Not only is is flat and green it is hot. Not is it merely hot, it is sticky hot. Toss in thunder and lightening and rains enough to float a beached whale and the walk from the motor coach to Margaritaville within the grounds of Universal Studios theme park is a warm, wet affair. The namesake drink on rocks, with salt sees everybody happy enough to chat, to eat, to play at the crab racing and listen to a parrot head singing the seductions of carefree island life. Just one more for the road, after all the alarm does not go off until 4.20AM and Delta seats 18F & 18F hold little allure at this moment. They do however, in a mere six flying hours glide me across the south, the mid west, the west and on into the pacific north west, ever so gently down the Columbia River from the Dalles dam to Sauvie Island on a left down wind, a base leg over The Pumpkin Patch and a final approach aimed right at Mt Hood. Nothing flat here, nothing hot here and already I can feel myself slowing down.

There have been an awful lot of rental cars for me to drive in recent weeks and in just about as many countries. As the price of fuel soars they become an ever more costly component of the trip, therefore choosing the right one becomes critical to the bottom line. There is clearly a standout motive force and it is outrageous that we are seemingly deprived of the technology that makes it so.

While some of us (like those of us in Portland OR. whose behavior seems insufferably green and enjoy jamming it down reluctant throats) pat our collective selves on the backs and feel super cool for buying Toyota’s Prius or some other hybrid, in reality they provide dismal mileage by comparison to what is available to the world at large outside the US. The fact that we are (kept) in the dark about this and are laboring under the thought that we are heading in the right and righteous direction is absurd. To wit … I picked up a VW Passat wagon the other day in the UK and it effortlessly returned 55mpg while running at freeway speeds seldom seen here unless accompanied by flashing lights and dark glasses. It as easily burbled around country lanes a Hummer could not hope to fit down. If I had driven it with a little less abandon I might have got a solid 60/65 mpg out of it. While these figures may seem startling and other wordly to you they are becoming mid pack in the world out there as the French, Japanese and others launch ever more modern diesels that sip at the parsimonious rate of 75/80 mpg…while going like stink, all the while without the stink of course !

Don’t try kid yourself that these are toy sized cars for two and a purse, with gutless performance and a plume of smoke out the back. The Passat diesel in question runs and pulls stronger than any car I own or have owned with motors so much larger and grossly more thirsty. It will keep up with or soundly beat 95% of anything on our roads. Don’t kid yourself that these are polluting conveyances as they are not…they run far cleaner than our gasoline powered cars and from within the car itself there is nothing to tell you the motivation is coming from a diesel…other than the stunning mid range torque and acceleration! Not to mention the (comfortable) bulge in your wallet that you still get to sit on.

So why are we messing about with batteries which are clearly a poor answer and pose serious environmental problems in manufacture and disposal? The same goes for ethanol, the emphasis on which will surely lead to environmental degradation by removing far too much bio mass from the landscape, absorbing way too much water and man made nutrients as at the same time providing lousy motive power and upsetting the worlds food supply and pricing structure. Sitting out there still is a fuel source, that while declining could be made to stretch so much further, giving breathing room (literally) for us to develop even better, ever cleaner and longer lasting solutions to an energy source needed for transportation in particular. Why or how can we be proud of a fleet average that struggles from both engineering and political perspectives with 20 odd mpg when the vehicles already exist to triple that number at the very least? Just how blind can we remain as at the same time we pay lip service to our fuel consumption, complain about fuel prices and see sections of the economy suffer badly because of such. Oh and of course, don’t forget there is all that concern about the environment. If our current driving/travelling habits remained the same but consumed just one third as much as present…would that not be a good thing?

I know with certainty that if we put the average Jack or Jill in a showroom to make a choice between a hybrid and a diesel of the VW’s ilk the hybrid would never be asked to the dance. I read that Mercedes and now BMW will add more diesel options for ‘09. That is all well and good, but what about the rest of us mere mortals. Bring them on and let us all enjoy that sure to be $4.00 a gallon gas that  can be pressured to eke out 60mpg. We should be enjoying it right now so as to give us a huge competitive edge that has already been lost by those on the other side of the Atlantic where a gallon of the stuff already costs $10.00 courtesy of the tax and spend crowd.

As for my other recent drives, particularly in California the offerings were brand new, supposedly state of the art, pretty close to the most economical on offer and driving speeds were to say the least mundane and the mileages recorded by all models hovered around the 20mpg mark. None offered any more room for man or beast than the VW and none were as quick or good handling. The comment of “that’s just wrong” from a young teen when  viewing our own recorded 17mpg on the ride home from the airport pretty well sums up where we are. The puzzle is why?

No matter a certain malaise in the economy and the endless bucket brigade that bails out one atrociously run financial institution/mortgage company after another, the price of oil soars, the price of gold soars and Easter flower shipments soar right along with them…so all are not losers at the hands of the sub prime miscreants in Calabasas and their ilk. Having lurched through January, pulled back in February this is a more positive time to be in flowers. The last week or two have been active in a quite positive fashion. (more…)

What time of the year is it? Well, it’s time to write a Valentine’s Day article, you know the kind, where I enlighten you on Valentine’s roses and other suitable Valentine’s Day flowers…even as I watch the New York Giants battle the New England Patriots, Super Tuesday is mere hours away and the climatic conditions around Flowerbud’s growing regions and major delivery areas are a little less than conducive for a peaceful afternoon of chips, dip and overwrought commercials. Oregon is already 6″ above normal for rain fall (18″ in last 60 days) and if we get any more mountain snow it may well become our major export. Most of coastal California is inundated with rains and unusually cool weather and snow in drifts is about to re visit the Sierras.

This means that carefully scheduled V Day flower crops are dragging their feet. Likewise in Ecuador and Colombia there is a surplus of rain and cool weather in the growing regions. It is beginning to appear that excess will be no great problem this year. Taking that in stride I look further east and see that Chicago is storm bound and New York City is its usual frigid self…and Memphis? (more…)

As an intersection it may not even exist but as a rather abrupt turning point it certainly does and comes upon one unexpectedly and most inconveniently. Avianca releases me from the fetid confines of the aluminum tube that has made transit from Cartagena to Miami possible. The flight’s terminus seems hostile in comparison to its departure point. The slow, silent, bag lugging shuffle along endless corridors and past various surly check points that take up space and time with nothing more productive in mind than a glare or a sneer at the entrants.

Toes touching the yellow line, passport, permanent resident card, customs declaration neatly and accurately filled out I glance about at fellow travellers with suitably discreet curiosity and not a care in the world much beyond an idle contemplation of why my line always appears to be the slowest of them all and a silent prayer that those now at the booth have been as accurate with their forms as I and we can all move along and get on with the next chapter of a busy day. I am beckoned to approach! Idle contemplation morphs to an immediate and tightly focused understanding, that of having an enemy. (more…)