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books / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Two cats and a book
27
Jun 22

Two cats and a book

It has been three weeks since we featured the most popular part of the blog — hey, we’ve been busy. But now we can catch up with the kitties. They’re both doing well, thank you.

Phoebe has been having a lot of cabinet meetings of late.

I’m sure there are many important policy decisions are made in those meetings. Where to map, what to scratch, how to stretch.

Probably the cabinets are a part of her routine to try to create distance between her and Poseidon, seen here showing of his regular charming nuisance.

No breakfast is safe from this guy. Mine certainly wasn’t yesterday.

Can’t say he didn’t warn us. Here he is, warning us.

“YOUR BREAKFAST IS NOT SAFE!” — Poseidon, probably.

I don’t know when I wrote the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written, but it occurred to me early this morning that this is a thing we should chart. I wrote this.

The book is News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

It is a good book. It is, unequivocally, an important book. It was when it was released in 2011, and remains so today. But these little problems are compounding. Maybe it is a function of the editing process when they created the Kindle version.

Look, I’m not an expert in this area. Far from it. The first error, I knew a tiny bit about the man involved. The second was revealed as a chronological inconsistency one page, and a few paragraphs, apart. The third is an obvious error. The fourth I found because now I’m googling every name and publication in this book. I’m enjoying the book and learning a great deal. It’s just slowing me down, from the continued learning, is all.

Of course, I’m also picking up tidbits here and there about the people and their work that weren’t included in the book. When the world wide web is your footnote database …

I don’t know if this is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written (Not by a longshot. — ed.) but it is somewhere on that list.

Come to think of it, let’s never chart the nerdiest things we’ve written. Never, ever.

adventures / Friday / photo / running — Comments Off on Moving into the weekend
24
Jun 22

Moving into the weekend

Two pictures of moving about. This one from a run!

And this one from a walk!

So it is a light end to a few busy weeks here. Next week might be light, too, who really knows? It’s the pace of summertime, and I hope yours is off to a lovely start.

Come back Monday, we’ll get a long overdue update on the kitties!

books / Indiana / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Pick up some books
22
Jun 22

Pick up some books

And how was your summer solstice? The day was 14 hours, 55 minutes and 28 seconds here. And there’s always that guy who just can’t wait to point out that the days are doing nothing but getting shorter until December.

Around here? We hate that guy.

But we love the long days. If you stepped outside last night at 10:19 and looked west, moments before nautical twilight, it looked like this.

No camera tricks, no Photoshop treatments. That’s just the view after 10 p.m. in June.

If I ever say anything here is better than that, I am, in fact, making a secret, coded cry for help.

Since we talked about books last, I have recently finished you might be interested in. First was The Last of the Doughboys by Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin.

In the earliest days of the 21st century Rubin started interviewing the surviving military veterans from World War I, all of them centenarians. He wraps his interviews around rich context about the Tin Pan Alley music of the era, and his own tours of France and a general historical overview.

Those stories are as uniques as the men and women’s experiences. Some of them colorful and sharp as they were in 1918. Some of the details had become foggy over the course of their long lives, as you might expect.

Some parts of the book are about some of the other parts of their lives. None of the people Rubin interviewed were a part of this experience, but that was up to chance and good fortune as much as anything.

I knew this particular story, but it is always surprising to think about it in the full context.

The crux of the book are those interviews, though, and memorializing those last veterans’ experiences. Rubin, in fact, had the chance to meet the last American survivor of the Great War. All of that is in the book. It’s a worthwhile read.

Now this one, Longitude by Dava Sobel. This book was a surprise hit, even for the author. She saw it go through 29 hardcover printings, translated into more than 20 languages and become a national and international bestseller. The 10th anniversary edition includes a pretty special foreword by Neil Armstrong.

Granted, the idea of a book about longitude seems like an important one. But it also seems like a daunting tome. How do you write an interesting book about invisible lines on a map? Sobel is about to show you. First, just enough of the technical to explain what she’s talking about, and why this is all so important.

And so now you know why this had been a problem for generations, and why the search for a solution was so important. As the book gets into that it quickly becomes obvious, even to land-lubbers, how most of the success of those pre-longitudinal sailors was about luck with skill. How anyone got to where they wanted to go before their supplies ran out is a mystery.

Then, we meet the people.

For whatever reason, when I opened the book I expected this to be a dense read, but, to Sobel’s great credit, it’s just about the most approachable text you can imagine. Give this a read, you’ll be pleased and surprised.

adventures / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Extra travel photos
21
Jun 22

Extra travel photos

You thought we were done with that amazing vacation, didn’t you? The first rule around here is my site, my rules. And the second rule is use all the photos you can.

The third rule is rub it in if you can (because you’re back at the house and in the office anyway).

So a few more pictures to get through today, all of these from the return portion of the vacation. And then, after that, it’ll get normal here again far too quickly. (Because the fourth rule is indulge in normalcy, and pad your content with routine matters.)

There are, it turns out, a lot of rules.

We saw this at the bakery just outside of our hotel, where we had a nice little quiche breakfast before heading to the trolley to get to the train station to ride to the airport to take a tram to get on a plane to fly to the U.S.

You need a quiche to fortify you for such logistics. Anyway, we saw this, and I have no comment.

I just read that the EU (Switzerland isn’t a part of the EU, but does participate in the Union’s single market) produces about a million metric tonnes of strawberries a year. About half of them are from Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy.

I imagine they all look as gorgeous as these.

At the airport, we saw perhaps the most useful, tasty chocolate that’s ever tempted you.

Useful, that is, until you eat some key part of the map.

Nearby, this stack of fudge. I wonder how long that’s been there, if it’s still edible or if it was made in some special way just for longevity in a display box.

This guy was flying the planes.

You better not be my pilot, Herr Lego.

He was not. Just your regular human people sitting in chairs up front while the plane flew itself. Zurich to New York and, after a reasonable layover, on to Indy. We saw our first sunset in the U.S. in two weeks. Call it Pennsylvania.

Looks like Pennsylvania, right? And that looks like the end of that trip to Paris, Normandy and all over Switzerland. Now, back in Indiana, we wonder where we’ll go next.

(This week’s early idea is the Caribbean.)

adventures / family / memories / photo — Comments Off on Happy anniversary to us
20
Jun 22

Happy anniversary to us

Take your time.

We were standing in the heat, in Savannah, where we’d taken our first trip, across the street from our tree and the place where we’d gotten engaged. Everyone was sitting outdoors on the hottest weekend of the summer — you shouldn’t reserve a space in August, I figured, because people would melt — so they melted for us in June, instead.

The story’s setting is really about the place and being our place, but the story is always told and remembered for the heat.

My uncle is standing beside me. He and I are waiting until The Yankee comes down the aisle on her father’s arm. She’s smiling to light up the world. I can see that smile even now.

We’re in front of everyone and, ever since, I’ve thought, it would have been nice to say something profound and special to her parents. How do you say in a whisper, in a moment, that you’re going to spend all of your time watching out for their daughter and trying to make her laugh? Not that she needs that, because she’s amazing. They know that, of course, because they raised her and watched her, and they were beaming with pride. That they were beaming with pride seems exactly why you should have that thing to say. I still kick myself for not being smart enough to figure that out, and not being cool enough to deliver in that moment.

My uncle delivers. He’s got this lovely little service, and it is just about perfect. I’ve heard him preach a little, but he’s a church singer. I can pick out his voice in a church full of singing people if I’m standing in the back of the room. He’s a good and kind and patient man, and, there, on such an important day, he was putting words to thoughts about what I’m supposed to do with all of my days to come. Almost all of our two small families are there to hear it, and the fullness of that remains as important as anything.

She says a part and tears up a little and I whisper something about taking her time. Like she needs this advice. This is one of the strongest, smartest people I know and this platitude is silly even as I say it, but there’s no rush here. Not really. It’s hot, sure, but there’s no rush. There is rushing aplenty in our lives, a lot of rushing that day even, but this is a moment to be empowered and encouraged and emboldened. Do it your way. The fans aren’t moving any air, anyway.

You may kiss your bride, and I did something funny and people giggled and then the ceremony was complete. We had a lovely dinner sitting at a long, long table. We took more photos, including this one, and the festivities continued long into the night.

And they continue still! The festivities continue on with adventures, at home and abroad, and with the people who care for us. They carry on in all the big moments. And they absolutely continue on in the even more important, little, pleasant and predictable parts of life, which was the sort of day we planned today.

Thirteen years of laughter. Take your time.

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