This time last week we were in Mexico. It rained and stormed a lot, so we didn’t get to do all of the diving we’d planned. This time last year we were in the process of moving. It was hot and dry and smoky and stressful. This week we’re dealing with tree damage at home from Sunday’s storms.
I’ll let you decide which is better, but it certainly wasn’t this time last year.
So let’s talk about last week, instead.
One afternoon we just played in the waves. The water was almost rough, but we had a nice time getting beat up. There’s nothing to this video, but a little girl’s smile in an adult’s happiness.
I recorded quite a few of those. Most aren’t very well composed — waves — but, looking at them now, they were consistent. Every time the wave slipped away from her, she stood up and immediately turned for the next one. She’s not even aware of it. It’s an ingrained move, one stemming from years playing in the waves. That’s what I love.
She’s always looking ahead.
These were the best clips from our two-tanks of diving in Cozumel. As you can see, the visibility was pretty low, but we did see a few nice things.
I’ll cut these into individual pieces for anyone who plays favorites. Some people just like to watch the sea anemone wave endlessly. Also, if you didn’t watch it all the way through — shame on you — there’s a giant turtle at the end.
Count the big things. All those times she falls asleep in my arms. The knowing looks. Anticipating what story she’ll tell next. That smile. Those eyes. The flutter that comes with knowing our time apart has ended, even the brief ones. These are the things worth preserving.
You may count the setting of the sun as monumental astral mechanics, but I number the many days of sitting together and talking about absolutely nothing and the peaceful nights when we read next to one another, but calendars don’t matter to time, they really don’t. The number of times a day that the moments feel important are unquantifiable.
The less important, the jobs and moves and all of the other little gains in life are so much white noise — the distant hum.
These are the things things that matter.
The way she curls her whole body up when I make her laugh, and all of those times when she reaches out to hold my hand. The tally of histories and memories, great hugs and hot dates, the silliness and seriousness, the number of laughs and smiles and adventures, they all stretch beyond vision. There’s a lot of good fortune and a great many blessings in all of that, too.
If we must, the calendar says we’ve been married 5,479 days. Meaning today’s important number is 15. Fifteen years ago today my uncle stood in front of our family and friends and, as he said, tied us in a knot we wouldn’t soon be able to unravel. I’m grateful for all the important parts that make up everything between then and now, and the simple and grand thoughts of what still may come.
Completely whiffed on the Wednesday feature yesterday. Whoops. This just a day after I skipped a planned Tuesday feature. It seems that, in my haste to be hasty, I’ve been too hasty. That’s the problem with speeding up, or taking one’s time, or both. Anyway, apologies for missing out on the markers. I’ll return to them next Wednesday. We’ll talk music below. But first … today was a peaceful, relaxing, “What was I supposed to be doing again? Oh, that’s right, nothing.” sort of day.
And then, breaking news via email. Isn’t that something? Wasn’t that something?
Usually, I know about the story before the emails come out. Social media, despite it’s many frustrations, is a swift informer. But I hadn’t been on any of the apps in a bit, and then the New York Times wrote.
My lovely bride was swimming laps at the time. When she was finished I told her the news, and we set about wondering what the comedians and the satirists would say.
I also looked back at what I was doing on this day a year ago. We were in Alabama, and it seems I was looking at the ol’ family tree.
Five years ago, I said one of those bike things that sounds like something profound in a waxy wrapper of nothing. Still seems true, though.
There’s no way in the world that was a decade ago.
Fifteen years ago, we were in Savannah, and Tybee Island.
Twenty years ago, I stopped by the local civic center, on a whim, which was hosting a model train convention.
Now, I’m no train enthusiast, but there are granddads and dads and children all being kids together, so why not?
I walk in and meet some nice people; one man telling me of some very historic parts of his collection — he’d accidentally been given the paperwork that documents J.P. Morgan’s purchase of an entire railroad; three men talking at length about how best to paint a cliff face and so on. But the best part was stumbling onto a booth with college merchandise.
I found this tapestry that I love. I got it for a song.
Now I just need to figure out how to display it, without it being used for cover.
Funny the things you do, and don’t remember.
We return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I pad the page out with music. I’m doing this because I am currently re-listening to all of my old CDs, in the order of their acquisition, in the car. It’s a wonderful trip down memory lane and I’m dragging you along, because the music is good.
Today we’ll do a double entry, since it is back-to-back of the same act. I picked these up in 2004, but the albums are older than that. If we’re going back to my first listen in 2004, we have to hop in the time machine and go back another decade to when Barenaked Ladies released “Maybe You Should Drive.” It was their second studio album, and went double platinum at home in Canada, where it peaked at number three. It was the band’s first visit to the US charts, sneaking in at 175 on the Billboard 200.
The first of two singles, “Jane” was an instant catalog classic for Steven Page.
There’s a lot of great work from Page on this record. Here’s one more fan-favorite, the second single, which just feels like a deep cut at this point.
I picked up this CD after a handful of the later BNL records, and several shows. So many of the songs I knew. (Three of these tracks are on Rock Spectacle, which was my first BNL purchase.) And so I don’t know when I first heard this song from Ed Robertson, but it’s one of those beautiful works that I’d like to be able to hear again for the first time.
The day I bought “Maybe You Should Drive” I also picked up “Born On A Pirate Ship,” and I wish I remember, now, where I got them. But because I got them together, these CDs have always belonged together. The former came out in 1994, the latter was the followup, released in 1996. It was another hit in Canada, peaking at number 12, and captured more American ears. “The Old Apartment” was a breakthrough single and video, and Pirate Ship went to 111 in the American Billboard chart. It was certified gold four years later. Andy Creegan had left the band, Kevin Hearn came in soon after, but this is a four-piece record.
It is peak 1990s Canada pop.
I still think this is a song about a dog, Catholicism and a bunch of other random things. It’s inscrutable.
People that just knew BNL from airplay — well the Americans anyway — will recall this as their first song.
It used to be that “When I Fall” seemed like it had to be a full, live show performance. But then Robertson played it in one of the Bathroom Sessions, and you heard it in a different way entirely.
Page will occasionally remind you he’s working on a different level. This is one of those times. Seeing it live is the preferable way* to take in this song, so go back with me to a time when it’s amazing we had washed-out-color video and you can’t explain the tracking squiggles to the children of the future. But don’t fixate on that, follow the performance.
That song … Steven Page … it just feels like it should be a misdemeanor to not know anything more than their later pop hits.
*I think karaoke would be another ideal way to hear “Break Your Heart,” but that’s just me.
One of two Jim Creeggan songs on Pirate Ship, this one sneaks up on you every time, which isn’t creepy at all. And for four minutes it just gets better and better and better, and bigger and bigger, even when it lulls, which is a lot of fun.
And here’s Creegan’s other track, which refuses to fit in any pop music mold.
BNL is touring the US this summer, though we won’t be able to see them. We did catch them last year though, which was the third time we’d seen them in two or three years. Everyone wishes Steven Page was still in the band, most everyone has wished that for 15 years, but aside from the 2018 Juno Awards celebration of the Canadian Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, that may never happen. (Though they haven’t definitively ruled it out, and that’s what hope is aboot.) The band stills put on energetic rock ‘n’ roll shows. They’re very much worth seeing.
It was a damp and chilly and otherwise gray and rainy day here today. It also sprinkled. And moisture just simply hung in the air, like we were looking out over a moor. And it was also grey and dreary and it drizzled and it was cold. Furthermore, it was dank and slippery and nothing in the distance, such as it was, looked appealing. The clouds, not content to just pass lazily by, ground to a halt, and then lowered themselves upon all of us. It was the sort of day you might best address with hot tea and a horror story. Ridiculous for the second week of May, but ideal for sitting around and taking it easy. And, anyway, the pest control people were due between noon and 4 p.m.
He arrived at 4:35.
So it was good, then, that it was a day for blankets, because if we’d sat around and did nothing on a beautiful day waiting on that guy to show up and wave his high pressure sprayer around … that would have been a real … buzzkill.
Anyway, he got some spiders and ants and wasps. We will see if I should remain skeptical.
But while we visited away the afternoon, my mother had some serious cuddles with the cats. I realized that I inherited the “an animal is sleeping on me, and thus I can’t move a muscle in fear of disturbing the creature” thing from her.
Poe took a lot of naps.
We watched King Richard. It was OK. Two or three great scenes where you wonder if they were real, dramatized or Disneyfied. Probably a movie about Venus and Serena Williams, specifically, would be more engaging, but Will Smith can’t play those parts yet. AI can’t do everything, you.
We also watched the first episode, of three, of the new documentary on the Boston Marathon bombing.
I was driving to campus one fine, sunny Monday when those bombs exploded at the finish line in Boston. And I remember listening to the Boston et al scanners online in my campus office later in the week, and wishing people would stop trying to “report” from what they heard on scanners.
Scanners are endlessly fascinating. I grew up listening to them. For my entire childhood my grandparents had one sitting in the living room and it was either on, or I’d turn it on. But that’s where the sausage is being made in the first responder’s world, and that doesn’t at all make it valuable information for a regular audience, particularly in the most stressful circumstances, like, say, a vicious gunfight after a week-long manhunt.
That, too, was fascinating to hear, in an intense and morbid way, but that doesn’t always merit continually commentary from everyone else.
Anyway, the documentary is in three parts, and they’ve got a substantial handful of the key law enforcement types as prominent interview subjects. They are all speaking pretty candidly, which is delightful. The documentary will have to at least touch on the online sleuthing for suspects, but they surely won’t spend a lot of time there. I bet they won’t talk about the scanners at all. I bet David Ortiz makes it into the documentary.
They did not talk about the best part of the whole horrible experience, the one detail I’ll always shoehorn into a conversation about that particular story, and the part I hope to never forget.
NBC Sports reported people crossed the finish line and kept on running, running to Massachusetts General Hospital, where they donated blood for victims.
That’s just the most beautiful damn thing.
Then, so many others were moved to donate blood that Mass General and the Red Cross temporarily stopped accepting blood donations.
Regular people, working in the interest of helping other regular people. That’s why the bad guys can’t win. We won’t let them.
Out in the backyard, the black cherry (Prunus serotina) is flowering nicely. And, if you would, I’d just like you to stop for one brief moment here and contemplate the focal plane of this photograph.
This is how it worked. Our sellers left us a list of all of the wonderful growing trees here. It’s terrific, really. And on that list, it simply said “Cherry trees.” They were very helpful in many ways, the sellers, but I think a little map would have been fun. It would have eliminated some mystery.
But the discovery is the fun, you say! And you are right! And we are still discovering things!
Late last summer I figured out which of the two trees were the cherry trees. That sounds ridiculous, it’s not like we have 400 acres here or anything, but these particular trees don’t look like how I remember, or envision, cherry trees. These are big. Then one day late last season I had this great idea: look for trees with fruits growing on them.
Viola.
So there are the two cherry trees out back. Tall as can be. I thought they were chokecherry trees, but then I began reading about that species and these two guys are much bigger than those. So I’ve now decided they must be black cherry trees. To be fair to me, according to what I’ve just read, the two species are related.
See? Still discovering things. (And I love that part.)
I’ll try to eat more of them this year.
Speaking of eating, for dinner tonight we went to a local Indian restaurant. This is a new-to-us place, but well regarded, and widely so. It sits in an old bank light to look like a new age church and people come from far and wide to try the food. Indeed, when someone who’s been around here a long time asks where we moved, and we tell them, they ask us if we’ve been there yet.
And now, having gone, I’m quite disappointed it took us almost a year to go.
This was so good.
I had the lamb biryani.
The menu describes it as “Fragrant basmati rice are layered with a spicy and delicious Lamb curry made of succulent chunks of lamb leg to make this classic flavorful rice entree.” That’s enough for two meals, easily. And so that’s dinner tomorrow, and I’m sure it will be even better in that way that the best spiced dishes often are.
My lovely bride and my mother each tried different chicken dishes, pronounced them both incredible, and we were all quite pleased. Especially since the guy said “We only do reservations on the weekend, but come right this way.”
Every plate that passed by looked intriguing. Most of the things on the menu was calling out to me. We’ll be back there, and probably quite soon.
Have a great weekend! We’re going to do something this weekend we’ve never done before!
I saw an unusual thing while I was running around yesterday — I do that on rare occasions, and yesterday I took the garbage to the inconvenience center and then took a long way back home — something that reminded me of an almost 20-year-old joke.
There was a little place a little ways off of a quiet interstate exit. That exit, itself, was headed to nowhere in particular. You don’t get off at that exit unless you wanted to drive through the woods for another half hour or so to get to the small place you were going. You had to drive a mile or two from the freeway just to get to this old rusty, dusty gas station. It looked like an elongated trailer. It was one of those places that tried to be all things to whomever was doing without in the area. The two nearest communities have less than 800 people between them, and that dirty old gas station probably saw them all with great frequency.
What those people saw, when they drove up, was a gas station advertising tanning beds and live bait.
Some guys I worked with, that had that interstate exit on their commute, discovered it. They named it the Bait ‘n’ Tan.
That came to mind yesterday because as I was headed back home, and back to the grading, the endless grading, I chose a route that took me by a new restaurant. Once upon a time, it was a store that sold the local ice cream.
The ice creamer’s creamery plant — presumably The Plant, but I’m still trying to figure out the details — and it’s main store are near our house. The creamery is closed, though the brand still exists, somewhat. There are lately some goings on at the plant, which is showing its years and neglect. Apparently that building has new owners, but no one is clear yet on precisely what the plan is. That’s not terribly important.
Instead, we’re focusing on this other little storefront, about eight miles away as the crow flies. It has been closed since we’ve been here, but most recently it seems to have been operated as a convenience store and small pizza shop. Last fall there was a marquee sign out front. If I remember correctly, the sign promised a Mexican restaurant coming soon. Each time I rode by it on my bicycle — it is on a regular bike route, but not necessarily a direction I need to drive that often — I would take a glimpse to see if it was open. Finally, the last time I pedaled by, I noticed a blinking sign in the window.
I was having a good ride the day I noticed that, and I didn’t see anything else, so I figured I’d stop by another time. Well, friends, because there was grading to work through, and the weather yesterday was so lovely, that was the time.
The old ice cream sign is still out front, but there’s a smaller sign on the building giving the name of the new restaurant. My internet searching suggests the new place is a Caribbean restaurant. Now, it’s a bit out of the way, and almost everything around here is locally owned, and that’s delightful, and I feel the need to support those local efforts. Also, I love Caribbean food.
And, then, I saw it. In the far corner of the small parking lot.
Restaurant. Live Bait.
I sent that as a text to one of those guys. He replied instantly, “Oh my goodness. You might look down the road for another option. Like a sandwich from a gas station.”
I emailed it to the other guy. He wrote back, “It’s funny the things people want to pair live bait with. I think I’d rather get my bait where I tan than where I eat. But that’s me.”
Turns out the convenience store had stayed in one family for 30 years or so, but it went on the market last summer, just as we were unpacking. And now, it’s a specialty restaurant, and bait supplier.
I can’t wait to try it. The food, I mean. And just the food.
Today, after a substantial chunk of grading, the endless grading, I took a walk through the backyard. Look what’s blooming today!
And just around the corner, the grape vines are starting off strong.
This year, maybe we’ll get to the grapes before the birds and bugs.
Inside, more grading, and then more grading. And when I stepped back out this evening to water the vegetable seedlings, I took a moment to admire this part of the path, and the new solar lights my lovey bride installed last week.
We might cover the joint in solar lights before we’re done.
That might also happen before the grading is completed, as well.
After today, I have just one set of assignments and two sets of final exams to mark.
Here’s a nice distraction for whatever your Thursday has offered. These are a few more specimens of the beautiful bloody belly jellies. And, if you missed them the last time they were here, they are all about light, the absence of it, in fact. The combs are providing us with a bit of light diffraction, but there are no spotlights where these creatures live. Red looks black even just below the surface of the water, and in the deep sea, where the bloody-belly comb jelly lives below 1,000 feet in the North Pacific, it is dark.
These beautiful jellies, then, hide in plain sight. The combs are providing us with a bit of light diffraction. Predators and prey never see those incredible colors.
Technically, they are ctenophores, meaning that they are not true jellies, but the name is sticking, even though it is a new one. This species were first collected off San Diego in 1979 and described in just 2001.
These beautiful ctenophores will show up here one more time, next week. Tomorrow, we’ll return to the 1920s. And I’ll also be grading.
