memories

adventures / memories / photo / Washington / Wednesday — Comments Off on Catching up, last Saturday
23
Jun 21

Catching up, last Saturday

Here’s the deal, I’m writing this in arrears. We deliberately ratcheted down our screen time for a few days, but we saw a lot of lovely things and I wanted to share them here. The easiest way to do that, I figured, is in sequence. So, yes, this is published for Wednesday, June 23, the day we returned. But this particular post covers Saturday, June 19th.

Do you remember where you were on Saturday? I do. Here’s the proof.

As we previously discussed, we’re on a trip that’s a surprise to me. We flew yesterday, landing in Seattle and spending the night there. But it wasn’t our final destination. And we were on the plane to Seattle, our second plane of the trip, before I learned that much about where we were going.

We got a rental car this morning and visited the famous Pike Place Market.

That’s where The Yankee and I met her second cousin. She lives nearby, and took us out for lunch. It was a family introduction and a family reunion.

She is the author of eight books, meaning she’s got plenty of stories to share. She told us all about her childhood in Alaska, re-meeting my mother-in-law as adults, her travels abroad, her family, history and architecture. It was a pleasant lunch conversation with a lovely woman.

And we did some people watching on the balcony of the Copacabana, a Bolivian restaurant in the market. It’s been a family-owned joint for longer than I’ve been alive. And, on this day, the line to get in was short. In general, there were people milling about, but Seattle is apparently a city still emerging. The market, we were told, did not yet look like the crowded place it would be on a brilliant June Saturday.

At Copacabana, try their fritanga. It had fresh-tasting hominy — from a can, I’m sure, but still good. And the pork was simmered in an Andean cumin sauce. It was nice and mild, and I wish there was more of it. Quite tasty.

I haven’t had hominy in ages. Saw it on the menu and blocked out everything else. Hominy, I believe comes from Mesoamerica. I don’t know when it made it’s way down to Bolivia, but it’s nice that it did. It worked well here. Also, hominy is more nutritious than other corn products. (So grab some today!)

After we said our goodbyes we hoped in the rental car and drove a quick three hours outside of Seattle on a sunny summer day to Long Beach, Washington. You can find it down near the Oregon border.

Our rental condo was just 300 yards through some tall grass and low pines from the beach.

May I present to you, the beach:

I don’t guess I’ve seen the ocean since July of 2019. The seashore isn’t a spiritual destination for me like it is for some people, but even so, two years seems much too long.

Here are some panoramas of the beach. Click to embiggen.

I stood there on the beach making these changes to the photo, admiring a view I’d never see, when the actual beach was before me. And isn’t that a silly thing to do? Once more, click to embiggen.

In the next post, we’ll see a bit of Pacific coast history, and more Pacific Northwest beauty.

adventures / Friday / memories / video / Washington — Comments Off on Travel day
18
Jun 21

Travel day

Saw the first headline about the upcoming fireworks shortage. (We’ve got two weeks to set off a series of stories and scavenger hunts.) But if you can’t find some, come on over. Most assuredly our neighbor bought them all.

We sat in the backyard last year and watched, which was much better than having to find the perfect spot and a parking spot, besides.

He had four false finales last year.

(Update: A week later, at the grocery store, I noted they’re selling sparklers on the end caps nearest cashiers. I think we’ll be fine.)

Anyway, we’re on the road. The Yankee has booked us a trip to I-know-not-where. It’s a long weekend, anniversary getaway. She booked it and said something about it being a surprise and we decided to play that out, just to see how it went. She told me what days to take off from work, what to pack and all of that.

I knew we were going to the airport, and the weather, milder than we’ve been experiencing, was the only clue I had. So I figured Pacific Northwest or Maine.

Turns out that Maine was a possibility, but we went another direction. We made it to the pay-to-park lot, to the airport, through security and down to the terminal and I still knew nothing. Out of habit I looked up at the sign at the gate and saw our connection was in Detroit.

I know it’s not Canada, because she didn’t tell me to get my passport. She could have just grabbed my passport. But also, there are still those border-crossing issues related to the coronavirus.

This is, by the way, our first flight since who knows when. Masks are still required in airports and airplanes, but don’t count the number of noses you see, it’s demoralizing. We were doing an over/under and realized, within 10 minutes or so, that we set the number far, far, faaaaar too low. At one point in Detroit I started wondering aloud, for the benefit of the ill-fitting mask wearers around me, how it was that people managed to put their pants on.

It’s really not that much different, I said, a bit of fabric worn over parts of the body that society has deemed, ya know, necessary.

No one answered me. No one ever answers those.

Aside from a few car-borne family visits this is also one of the very first times we’ve been anywhere that wasn’t at least somewhat necessary. And we have lived and worked in something of a bubble. Be it by institutional mandate or county orders or people’s concern, people we’ve encountered have generally taken great care to take great care. Today’s trips through the airports, then, have been an eye-opening “how the other half live” experience.

Anyway, in Detroit I carefully avoided the sign at the gate. No idea where we were headed next. We got on the plane and the flight attendant did the old welcome aboard speech — still the same spiel, even after that long layoff — and before my lovely bride could distract me (She went with a very loud “SHHHSHHHSHHSHHH!!!!”) I heard the guy say we were heading to Seattle.

Which, really, at some point you have to find out. And while I didn’t want to set my expectations for one place or another, the heat index in Indiana was 105 degrees today. We’ve gone the right direction, is what I’m saying.

Even still, that’s not the actual destination. We were to take a shuttle to an airport hotel tonight. It never showed up, so we hailed an Uber. Tomorrow we’ll rent a car and drive a few hours away. The mystery persists.

Instagram / memories / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on When things float to the surface
16
Jun 21

When things float to the surface

I don’t even recall what I was looking for, but it wasn’t in the same subdirectory. Anyway, I ran across this shot from the Crest Building. It was 2002 or 2003. And I really don’t recall what this was about.

I’m sure it was a very important news story. Let’s go with it being a Roy Moore story. Could be a Don Siegelman story. Or a Richard Scrushy story.

I was doing a lot of work covering people destined for infamy, or worse, just then. It could have been an election piece.

One of those guys, the chief justice of the state supreme court, was removed from the bench. Two of them, a governor and a captain of industry, wound up in jail. The state’s narrowest gubernatorial election was held. The difference was something like 3,000 votes, as I recall. And there was a sublimely ridiculous mayoral race. It came down to a runoff. One candidate refused to do media interviews and she, ultimately got trounced.

I was at her watch party that night and reminded her that, if only she’d talked to us …

She ran again a few years later and did do interviews and finished a distant, distant third.

I’m looking at that 2003 mayoral field. Almost everyone in it was a mayor or a city council member (the glacial impasse between mayor and council was a big issue that election cycle) or has been convicted of something, or a combination of the three.

Good journalism. Good times.

Speaking of which …

memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Re-working an older project
2
Jun 21

Re-working an older project

You might recall I made this, last October.

The idea was I wanted something to hold the little card that opens unlocks doors in our building on campus. Pulling out my wallet every time was getting old. First off, this is wood, so it was easier to clean — when we were still concerned about such things — rather than my quality leather. Second, pulling the wallet out all the time was just getting taxing. Once someone snuck a peak at my driver’s license, just a casual can’t-help-but-see-it sorta thing and I decided there are limits to small talk.

So I needed something else. Well, I have a small stack of business card holders, but I wanted something I could just slip in the front pocket of jeans, so it needed to be a bit smaller. I wound up working up that thing you see above, and I wedged in four or five business cards, just to keep everything snug in there. And it served me well.

The only real problem was that I used the softest wood this side of pine, so I decided not to long after I took that photo, that I should probably seal it. What I applied yellowed almost right away. It wasn’t my favorite look. The problem with that is there are two possible treatments I used on it, and I don’t remember which one caused the yellowing. So now what?

Well, it sits in my pocket 98 percent of the time and no one has been around anyway since almost everyone else is working from home, so it wasn’t a big deal. But this week I decided to sand off that poly and put something else on it. So I sanded it raw with an 80-grit and then worked back up to 600. And then I put on some wood conditioner and, later, a dark stain and poly blend.

Only it didn’t take very well. So I went back for a second coat and applied it different, and it worked much better, aside from the inevitable human error. Because making mistakes is the only way I’ll really re-learn things like stain application that I’m sure I was taught in the seventh grade.

So I sanded it down again. Only this time I didn’t do it completely. I’m trying the shabby look. Why, I should put this on Pinterest.

I would, except I can’t seem to get my camera and lights to cooperate nicely today. But it doesn’t it look like something you’d inexplicably see on a shelf at Hobby Lobby?

Oh, look, this one is a bit better.

And in a week or two I’ll get tired of this shabby look and then do the stain and poly blend properly. Or at least better, and then retroactively justify the errors in the application process. (Take that extra little drip on the artisanal curve, I like that sloppy error!) At which point I will then probably jam the card holder in a pocket before it’s completely dry and ruin a pair of jeans.

Anyway, that’s what I did this evening, aside from pet needy cats.

How was your Wednesday?

Covid-19 / IU / memories / podcast / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Here’s a backward way toward hope
11
Mar 21

Here’s a backward way toward hope

A year ago, today, was the day our university began it’s multi-campus shut down. That’s nine campuses, more than 100,000 students and at least two or three professionals, besides, spread out across an entire big state. It was a Wednesday, the Wednesday before spring break and they said everyone was going home and spring break would be two weeks and the situation would be re-assessed along the way.

And, look, a lot of us aren’t ready for retrospectives. I know I’m not interested in it just now, but I just want to say this one piece. A year ago, tomorrow, was my last day on campus for a while. I went in that evening to watch the sports guys wrap it up. Their sports director did a little monologue and he held his last meeting and there were tears. Students were graduating and realizing that it was very likely going to be not at all how they imagined. Well, what has been since, right?

Last March, right away, the entire IU system went to work on handling the most immediate tasks and planning a safer future. I had the opportunity to be a very, very small part of some of listening in to a slice of a portion of some of those plans as they pertained to my corner of things. It was fascinating. It was informative. It was frustrating. And, taken as a whole, there’s no mistaking it: Indiana University put every single one of their experts and their hardest working people on the job of doing this right.

Still, not everyone is back on campus, but we’re headed the right direction. I’ve been back full time since February and three and four days a week in the fall. The campus generally has a slow summer feel to it, and that’s been by design. Meanwhile, statewide, cases and hospitalizations are down. Vaccine uptake is increasing. IU is scheduling an in-person graduation for students in May and a fall term that’s more familiar than unusual.

Did her experts and staff work tirelessly to make the best of this? You’ve no idea. Did some of the top minds in their infectious disease and public safety fields go above and beyond for a full year? They won’t sing songs about those people, but they should. Did the university step up in ways big and small? The university distributed 290,000 masks at no cost. They built two labs to process their own Covid tests, up to 50,000 a week. We did everything but socially distance the storied buildings.

There were hiccups, I’m sure. Universities don’t pivot on a dime, and maybe no one realized until this past year how much that happens in giant operations is attributed to inertial motion. But what IU did is singularly impressive. This isn’t a retrospective, but it’s worth acknowledging that one thing. The university took care of her own.

And, somehow, they let me do programs like this …

I’m pushing 70 of those now. And it’s getting a tiny bit cheerier. Oh! Sweet hope!

And this speech from the president came out today, too. So petty of the White House trying to steal my thunder. But that’s OK. We’ll let them in this instance.

I also saw the saddest, sweetest note today. One of our former students, who is now on air in west Texas, got her first vaccine shot today, a year, almost to the day that her father passed away from Covid. What must that have been like for her? (She already had super powers, though.)

But this is what I’m really excited about.

We are one year into this and we are finally talking about the underprivileged and the rural communities. This state is sending out mobile vaccine units. Companies that are in the smallest towns you’ve never heard of are talking about getting in this fight. It took a year, but on the other hand, it only took a year. (It took less time. It took those places watching the big cities burn and then seeing the embers coming into their neighborhoods, and they started thinking about where their sleeves were in relation to their wrists and elbows.) In under a year, and we’re getting to the far flung places.

When I was in the third grade I developed chicken pox at my grandparents’ house in north Alabama. My grandmother, having raised tiny human beings before, suspected that’s what it was, anyway. And she took me to the pharmacy, the only medical concern in easy reach. The pharmacist there, non-plussed as he was by being asked to diagnose people who walked into his store, confirmed it and gave us the lotion, told us to stay away from anyone else and sent us on our way. That was three-plus decades ago. Last year an aunt and uncle got a Covid diagnosis at that same pharmacy. The closest hospital, where my aunt spent several days, is a 45-minute drive away on a good day. And that’s easy, compared to some of these places. Their little part of the world is hardly detached from the rest of us, but it can sure feel like it if you needed to see someone for health care, to say nothing of a specialist.

That we are already talking about these rural places at all, that medical experts and businesses are trying to figure this out, is a good thing. That different sectors of the economy are searching for a way to add more distribution points so that the people thought about the least can be addressed just like anyone else is a good development. Hope is where you place it. And don’t you agree we could use as much of that as we could get?

There’s a reason Shandy Dearth talked in our podcast about getting a vaccine so grandparents can safely hug their grandchildren again. Hope is where you place it.

In the studio for sports shows tonight. Tried a little something different for the gif. Who knows how this will end up.

The shows will end up just fine. They’re under good direction and I enjoy getting to watch them all work. And you can enjoy these particular episodes online tomorrow. I’ll share them here, I’m sure.

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