travel

More Notes on a Victorious Vacation

I’m easily delighted. It’s one of the benefits of driving as much cynicism out of myself as I can. Cynicism is a kind of cowardice, in that it seems to consist of a morbid fear of being delighted. Screw that. Dare to be happy; it doesn’t hurt that much!

Case in point: The morning after we arrived in Honolulu, Carol and I took a walk around the immediate vicinity of the Hilton, looking for a breakfast that wouldn’t cost us $20 a head. McDonald’s might not have been my first choice, granting that I have a fondness for Egg McMuffins. But I like their iced coffee a lot, so when we stumbled on a McDonald’s, I ducked inside to get an iced coffee.

OMG: They had a spam and eggs breakfast plate!

We ate at McDonald’s. I was delighted. Their breakfast plates are a Hawaiian thing. Hawaiians of Polynesian ancestry seem to like spam, and whereas I have no least trace of South Seas blood, I too find Spam delightful. I didn’t have it every day (though I had it a lot) and now that we’re home from Hawaii, I probably won’t have it again until the next time we’re there. That way I won’t get tired of it, and it will retain its power to delight me.

Immediately adjacent to the Hilton Hawaiian Village is the Fort DeRussy Military Reservation, which these days is an R&R facility for current and retired military. This includes the Hale Koa Hotel, which is limited to military and retired military personnel, and several restaurants and bars, which are open to the public. I bought a tube of Pepsodent at the PX before I understood what the store was, and in doing so may have violated their policies; not sure. Their little outdoor fast-food restaurant (I forget its formal name) was spectacular, and the lunch I had there consisted of the largest and juiciest deep-fried chicken breast I’ve ever had. Like the Pepsodent, it was lots chapter than it would have been elsewhere.

I observed a phenomenon that I’ve observed before, and seems to be getting more common: talking on your cellphone in public as though no one else can year you. Granted, I was walking behind the young woman in question and there was no one immediately in front of her, but sheesh–we were on the grounds of the Hilton Hawaiian Village. I wasn’t really listening, but at her volume it was hard not to hear: “…yeah, and I scraped my f—ing pedicure off on the sand!” I only had to twist poor Bobbie Burns a little:

Oh wad some gift the Giftie gie us,

To hear oursels as ithers hear us!

Tripwander

Oct 14th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

By the time I finally crawled into bed last night, I’d been awake for almost 36 hours straight, which may be a new record for me. It’s an occupational hazard of certain kinds of vacations: The hardest part of going to Hawaii is coming home–and not simply because it’s nice in Hawaii. (Which it is; wow. See above.) Flights back to the mainland are invariably redeyes, and given that I sometimes can’t even sleep in my own bed, I’ve not been surprised to find that I can’t sleep in an airliner seat. So I take along books full of well-written ridiculania (this time it was Colin Wilson’s The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved) and try to make the most of all that quality tin-can time. Worked. And now, having slept for close to 11 hours, I can get back to the universe as reality.

We took two weeks off on Oahu to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary, and I made a conscious decision not to do any more computing during that time than I absolutely had to. I didn’t post here, didn’t do much surfing, ignored my aggregators, and pushed back answering most email until after our return. And y’know? As they say on Slashdot, Nothing of value was lost. We didn’t watch TV, either. We didn’t do any aerobic tourism. I brought a kite and chose not to fly it. We spent much time side by side, splashing in the gorgeous water, drinking pina coladas, laughing at ancient in-jokes, and reveling in one another’s company. That was, after all, the idea.

Our first few days were at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, in the venerable Rainbow Tower, which had gotten a little too venerable since 1969. All the time we were there the tower echoed with the sound of jackhammers. Our room was on the 16th floor, facing Diamond Head and the full length of Waikiki Beach. The view was amazing, and worth the trouble of having two of the four tower elevators out of service.

In the early evening darkness, we watched people launch these little LED-illuminated toys into the air off the beach. A rubber-band catapault takes them up forty or fifty feet at least, and then they spin down slowly in the fashion of a winged maple tree seed. I dug around a little and found that this is the item. I would have bought one, but the guy selling them out of his backpack wanted $10 each for what is evidently a $1.50 item. I’ll bet they’re at the dollar store, and will look. A Certain Somebody has her fifth birthday coming up, and a big field behind her house to launch it from. Way better than maple seeds!

The other thing that made me grin was watching the spectacular Friday night fireworks from our balcony. The east side of the Rainbow Tower was the best seat in the house. The beach was packed with people waiting for the fireworks, and dozens (maybe hundreds) among the crowds had smartphones, which shone blue-white in patterns like constellations. Silly? Maybe–but it was a startling and unexpected image. I’m sure that what they were doing was tweeting the experience to their friends, who didn’t have the good fortune of being in Hawaii like we did. It’s what the postcard has become, a century and a half after postcards were invented.

Sea Launch 500Wide.jpg

Thursday afternoon we were sitting in the Hilton’s beachside cafe having a drink, and Carol says, “There’s a drilling platform out there.” She pointed. I was lead-pipe sure there’s no offshore drilling a quarter mile from Honolulu, but dayum, there was a drilling platform off toward the airport. I looked again later in the afternoon and it was gone. The mystery was solved the next day, when we took a bus trip to Hilo Hattie’s for some souvenir hunting, and realized as we passed the docks that something rare was in town: The Sea Launch Odyssey. It was at the docks for refueling on a long, slow trip to somewhere for refitting. It has a 13,000 hp engine and evidently toodles around the oceans very well all by itself. I’ve stayed in towns smaller than that thing, and it suggested what may become a new short story, “Trash Angels,” about Penrose tiles and empty soda bottles.

Four days later, we retired to the other side of Oahu and took a vacation rental on the north beach near Kailua, with our terrace only 100 feet from the crashing 7′ waves. We read, lounged, got our sinuses cleaned out by the waves, and ate at some decent restaurants, especially Pinky’s Pupu Bar and Grill. I’m running long today, so I’ll get a fews more observations out in the near future.

Early Halloween

Oct 1st, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I’m starting to get notes from people asking if I’m all right, and I am, though for the last few days I’ve been fighting an anomalous migraine headache and haven’t felt much like writing. Lots to catch up on, now that I’m feeling better.

First off, I guess, would be the fate of our closest Borders. No sooner did it close its doors than a crane hoisted a banner for Spirit Halloween Stores across the name. I’m not a big Halloween fan (my sister got that gene) and so haven’t paid much attention to Halloween retailing, but Spirit is a national chain with an interesting business model: lie in wait for a big-box store to go belly-up, and then quickly reanimate the corpse for a couple of months prior to October 31. We have at least one other Spirit outlet here in the Springs, up on the north side inside the vacated remains of Ultimate Electronics. They may have year-round stores somewhere, probably in larger cities with more of a Halloween culture than we have here. The new store (in Southgate Plaza) hasn’t opened yet, even though there’s only 30 shopping days left until You Know What. Somehow they make it work.

And while we’re talking about reanimating corpses, I want to recommend a short story to zombie fans who may not have heard of it: “Impulse” by Eric Frank Russell. It first appeared in Astounding in September 1938, but it’s been reprinted many times since then. I found it in my decayed and dustbound copy of Groff Conklin’s 1962 paperback horror anthology Twisted. That’s a little remarkable, because “Impulse” is not a horror story as we usually define it. It’s pure SF, and remarkably prescient SF at that. Consider this excerpt:

It was a space vessel that carried us from our home world of Glantok. The vessel was exceedingly small by your standards–but we, too, are small. Very small. We are submicroscopic, and our number is myriad.

“No, not intelligent germs.” The ghastly speaker stole the thought from his listener’s mind. “We are less even than those.” He paused while he searched for words more explicit. “In the mass, we resemble a liquid. You might think of us as an intelligent virus.”

Basically, Russell’s talking about a colony of nanomachines living inside a dead human body that it stole from a morgue. The nanons got it running again, and even accessed memory proteins in its brain. So we’ve got a zombie here, a real zombie that doesn’t rely on supernatural machinery to make it go.

The story is better than typical pulp, although it respects all the usual pulp tropes including a mostly unecessary damsel in distress. I’m a fan of the story for an odd reason: It was the first story I ever read to a group. In the summer of 1964, my scoutmaster at Camp West in Michigan tapped me to read the story to Troop 926 while gathered around the evening campfire. It was fun, if a little tricky, because I had not read the story before sitting down to read it, and didn’t know myself how it would turn out. I remembered the title but not the author, and it took some googling to find it–else I would be flipping through the hundred-odd anthologies I have on the shelves downstairs.

By the way, Conklin is a superb anthologist, possibly the best out of the 1950-1975 era, and if you ever spot one of his books, it’s worth grabbing. (Kingsley Amis is another; his Spectrum books should be stalked and devoured.)

One more note about ghosts, albeit of the sign variety: While in Chicago last week I visited the strip mall retail complex at Harlem and Foster, which was an early shopping center (circa 1960) and when built contained the closest department store to where I grew up. (Turn Style, long-gone but the precursor to Target and K-Mart.) The strip mall contained the bank where I got my first account, and the Walgreens where I got my first job washing dishes at their grill. It also contained a slightly freaky windowless lower level divided into four small stores, one of which was the Arcade Bookshop. It was the first bookstore where I recall spending my own money, and I probably bought Conklin’s Twisted there. I also ordered several books on the fourth dimension from the very patient lady behind the counter. It opened when the mall as a whole opened. It became a Christian bookstore in the 1980s, and closed in the early 1990s. You can’t see it in the photo shown above, but the upper right sign space is the old Arcade Bookshop sign, reversed so the back side is out. However, if you’re there in front of it you can clearly read the store’s name through the plastic–backwards, sure, but that’s no real trick, and seeing the old store where I spent so much of my allowance in the 1960s was definitely a treat.

Back Off, Man. I’m a Steampunker.

Mar 27th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

At the first annual Anomaly Con in Denver, at the Tivoli Building on the Auraria Campus downtown. It’s a specialty SF convention, catering to the steampunk subgenre. I came up Friday night and met Jim Strickland Saturday morning as the con opened. Jim had set up a panel for us with the concom, and readings from the two halves of our double novel.

I freely admit I had no idea what to expect. I have never been to a comics or media con, and in fact haven’t been to a traditional SF con in four or five years. I used to go to three or four every year, back long ago when the world and I were young and I was writing a lot of SF because my life was simple and I had not yet broken into computer books.

This was, well, different. There have always been a few people at cons in hall costumes. At Anomaly Con, probably 85% of the congoers are in hall costume all the time, and some of them are doozies.

Most, as you might expect, were Victorian gentlemen and ladies, plus the occasional mad scientist. But beyond that were some western card sharps, a few outfits clearly adapted from Civil War re-enactments, a couple of pirates, at least one pith-helmeted explorer, plus a scattering of zombies and a handful of imponderables that might be from some subsubsubgenre I haven’t heard of yet.

The effort and ingenuity that went into some of these costumes was boggling, and the cleverness factor off the charts. My vote for Best of Show goes to Matt Schaps, a young man who created a steampunk Ghostbusters proton pack out of the guldurndest collection of retro junk, including a 3-gang variable capacitor, a Model T Ford ignition coil, a J-38 Morse Code key, five or six vacuum tubes, a couple of IF cans, and a biggish woofer behind a brass shell salvaged from a ceiling fan.

At our panel, Jim and I discussed the necessary conditions for the evolution of a Victorian-style industrial age, and whether it was a fluke or an inevitable stop along the path from mud huts to interstellar empire. We used my Drumlins universe as an example, and explained how factors like freedom of thought, economic freedom, relatively benign religion lacking monasticism (and the nasty dualism that monasticism inevitably carries with it) and cheap energy would almost invariably create something like the England and the US of the 1890s. The panel was well-received, and afterwards we spent a lot of time at the tables in the hall tossing ideas around with interested attendees.

I’m about to head over there again, and will post additional photos this evening or tomorrow. My own hall costume is limited to a western-style vest and the ill-fitting top hat I bought for the Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party in late 1999, but it will do for now. Next time I might well lean a little western, since the Drumlins stories I’ve done so far tend toward space westerns more than steampunk. (Drumlin Circus incorporates some of both.) It’s been a lot of fun so far, and the setting is perfect: In the room where we held our panel, a huge two-cylinder stationary steam engine with a 10-foot flywheel lay in state, with small boys dressed like Oliver Twist scrambling all over it and spinning the handwheels. Crazy world, yes, but a good one.

Tripwander: The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Dec 28th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Christmas in Chicago is always aerobic, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and gather impressions, now that we’re packed and ready to hop a plane. In seven short days I chauffered, shopped, entertained small girls, repaired a planter that needed deck screws and Plastic Wood, fixed computer problems, wrapped innumerable presents, unwrapped (different) innumerable presents, and ate far, far too much sugar.

First bit of advice? Don’t mess with small white dogs. The Pack has been with Jimi this trip, but Carol’s sister Kathy has a ten-pound Maltese, and Wrigley received two dog toys for Christmas. One was a stuffed squeaky dinosaur that was all but guaranteed by its maker to be unshreddable by dogs. The other was a Christmas Kong snowman toy made of the same stuff that luggage straps are made of, and certainly looked like nothing short of a machete would take it down.

Ha! I use the word “was” deliberately and with emphasis. It took Wrigley less than 24 hours to chew the squeaker out of the unshreddable dino, leaving a hole that suggested an alien bursting its way out from the vicinity of the poor thing’s kidneys. The Kong snowman lasted a little longer, but 36 hours post-Christmas, its squeaky plastic core lay exposed, and Carol had to remove its innards to keep Wrigley from swallowing them.

We did a lot of visiting and probably more eating than we should have. On the way to see our nephew Matt’s flashy new apartment, I drove past my high school (Lane Tech) for the first time in over twenty years. The building itself hasn’t changed since I graduated in 1970, but the neighborhood is now almost unrecognizable. The “tech supply” stores where we bought drafting paper and bow compasses are gone, perhaps because Lane is less technical than it used to be, or perhaps because French curves are now draggable splines in a CAD document. The legendary Riverview amusement park (behind Lane Tech and still in operation until my sophomore year) is now a drab retail center.

Sic transit, and all that.

Transit? Uggh. The weather was hideous (clearly due to anthropogenic global whining, or perhaps unsustainable xenon dioxide emissions) and I had a rental car peculiarly unsuited to snow and ice: a lumbering Nissan Altima with rear wheel drive, grabby brakes, and a keyless key fob with an un-guarded panic button that will go off if left in your pocket with anything stiffer than a glob of rice pudding.

My nieces gave me a Pillow Pet shaped like a penguin, which I suspect will be useful for leaning on while I mark up manuscripts, or simply as a laptop cushion for a lap that doesn’t have much inherent cushioning. I can see it parked on the back of my big reading chair, staring down at QBit, but therein lies some danger: QBit, like Mr. Byte before him, doesn’t like artifacts with eyes, and we’re going to have to be careful that he doesn’t drag the plush creature off to his lair to shred at leisure. (At least the penguin doesn’t have a squeaker.) Like I said, don’t mess with small white dogs.

It was abundantly good to see family again, and partake of vigilia on Christmas Eve with my sister, Bill, and her girls, complete with piles of pierogi and Manischewitz sweet wine, just like we did it in the Sixties. Christmas Day at Kathy’s brought us cookies, key lime pie, ham, Hawaiian salad, potato bake, bean salad (which I heard was very good) apple and pecan pie, and much more.

It’s a little late, but better late than never, and no less sincere for that: Merry Christmas to you and yours from Carol and me and the Pack. There’s much to be said and done in the coming year, if we can get past this bruiser of a winter and remember what really matters: freedom, family, and friendship. I’ll give it my best shot if you’ll give it yours!

Tripwander: Cruise Wrapup

Dec 7th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Carol Jeff Formal Night-500W.jpg

Prior to our cruise, I hadn’t had a drink in a couple of months, mostly because alcohol and Tylenol don’t mix, and I was scarfing those to keep myself sane until the shingles rash on my back went away. So this trip I rediscovered the delights of a good pina colada, which really depends on two things: 1) ice crushed fine enough in the blender, and 2) enough but not too much booze. Holland America does a lot of things well, and one of them is the festive and yet humble pina colada. First rate.

The food, as on most cruise lines, was excellent, and I noticed something else: The portions were smaller. I’m more than fine with that, since I’d rather have a smaller quantity of really good food and not bring it home on my waistline.

Way back in the summer, when we still thought we were going to Hawaii in October for our anniversary, I bought a clever thingie on eBay called a Dicapac WP-110. It sounds like an over-the-counter nausea remedy (nausea remedies were much on my mind last week) but it is in fact a heavy duty resealable plastic bag sized for various digital cameras. Sounds dicey, but for something so much cheaper than an underwater hard case ($25 vs. $175) it worked pretty well. There are many models, all the way up to the big ‘un for SLRs. Make sure you check which model fits which cameras.

Testing it was a challenge. We had hoped to bring home pictures of fish and coral and such, but as I’d mentioned earlier, both of our snorkel trips were canceled due to rough water and high winds. Our last day at sea, I put my beat-to-hell spare Kodak V530 in the bag and dunked it in the midships pool. Fish were scarce, but I did get a good shot of Carol’s ankles, and, more to the point, no water got into the bag with the camera.

Framing the shot was hard because of reflective effects; you have to be looking square at the LCD display or optical weirdness will occur. Pushing the camera buttons is a challenge, and early practice (both above water and in something easy like a pool) will be a great help. I guess the really big issue is to make sure the seal is sealed. It’s a ziplock plastic bag, after all, and if you “cross-thread” the meshing plastic tracks, you’ll flood the bag and probably lose the camera.

Perhaps because of its older demographic, Holland America is not as informal as other lines like Carnival. On 7-day cruises there are still two nights where dinner is formal, and to avoid packing a suit I rented a tux from the ship. The cost was not outrageous, and apart from a little tightness in the shirt collar (fixed with a cheap plastic collar extender, of which I always keep a few in my travel bag) the tux fit perfectly.

In summary, we had a great time not doing much (well, ok, I read three books) and escaping a winter that is descending far too quickly. We hadn’t gotten out on the open seas like this since 2004, and (seasickness notwithstanding) it was long past time.

Tripwander: Cruise Retrospective

Dec 6th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Carol With Ms Ryndam-500W.jpg

Broadband on the high seas isn’t very broad. It also costs a fortune, so I made a conscious decision not to blog in real time about our recent seven-day, much-delayed 34th wedding anniversary cruise. I bought some “Internet minutes” (at 70c each, egad) to flush my spam every couple of days so my primary mailbox wouldn’t fill up, and posted a previously written Contra entry partway so it wouldn’t look like I’d sailed off the edge of the Earth.

In truth, we stayed well away from the edge of the Earth (besides, they’d just painted the guardrails) and instead sailed from Tampa back to Tampa by way of Key West, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel. The point of the cruise wasn’t to go to any of those places in particular so much as to just get the hell out of here, since winter began early again and between my shingles and Carol’s pancreas it had been a lousy couple of months for us. Cruise vacations have been cheap lately because of the recession, and Carol got us smoking deal on a larger cabin with its own balcony overlooking the bounding main. The bed was comfortable, the bathroom could be turned around in, and there was a lot less claustrophobia to be had than on our earlier cruise adventures. On the whole, we heartily recommend Holland America cruises, especially if you’re over 50. The service is spectacular, the ships squeaky clean and not enormous (1200 people, not 5,000 like some of the newer boats other carriers are fielding) and the food abundantly good, if at times a little too abundant.

Seven Mile Beach-500W.jpg

The main was bounding quite a bit this cruise, to the extent that both of our snorkel trips (in Grand Cayman and Cozumel) were canceled and refunded by the tour providers. We hit Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman instead and slopped around amidst the eight-foot waves near the Royal Palms Beach Club. Disappointed as I was by losing our snorkel trip, I got tossed around enough on the beach by the breakers (including being dragged along the bottom and almost relieved of my trunks) to figure it would have been a short and unsettled outing anyway. (It definitely cleaned out my problematic sinuses, though.) Grand Cayman has no cruise dock so people “tender in” on lifeboats, and the water was so choppy people were falling down while trying to board and disembark. During the school year the median age for cruises like this is probably 70, so falling was a serious issue, and certainly made the disembark/re-embark lines longer.

Butterfly Key West-500W.jpg

Once you get a block away from shore, Key West is mostly bars, and from the sheer quantity of Mardi Gras beads hanging from the overhead power lines, I’d guess the street parties there are something to see. Key West has feral chickens the way some places have squirrels, and you can buy killer-rich key lime pie slices from street vendors. We visited the Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory, where I snapped a great many photos of foliage where butterflies had been sitting only moments before. I’ll gladly trade several megapixels for less latency, but pocket camera manufacturers don’t seem to be interested.

Key Lime Pie-250W.jpg We met a lot of interesting people from several different countries, including a retired Welsh sea captain and a couple who were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary. I sure hope I look as good–and more to the point, function as well–as those two when I’m 88! At the first meal in the formal dining room at the ship’s stern, I found myself seated next to another writer, Dottie Billington, Ph.D., who wrote her first book at age 50 and exhorted me not to give up before I become a best-selling SFF author.

Carol and I have been on several cruises before and eat carefully, wistfully avoiding the dessert bars and keeping carbs to a minimum generally. As best I can tell, I brought less than four pounds home that I didn’t leave with, and intend to lose them before Christmas gets into full roar.

More tomorrow.

Odd Lots

Nov 23rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Maxwell’s Demon as Web comic. (Thanks to GMcDavid for the pointer.)
Here’s a tutorial on adding a MicroSDHC card to the Nook ebook reader. Looks like a mechanically touchy business (be careful!) and nothing substantive is said about sideloading content on the inserted card. Sideloading of content is something I’m less and less willing to compromise on, as I do not want a censor between my slate and material that I want to read.
I’m due-ing diligence on the very impressive, Android-powered Nook Color, but the frontrunner in the Great Jeff Slate Project continues to be the Galaxy Tab, especially since Samsung is offering this keyboard dock. That said, Nook Color is the right idea for ebook freaks: Approach a general-purpose slate from the ebook side, starting with a killer ebook store and working toward everything else. (Supposedly, V2.2 and access to the Android app store is coming soon.) My view: Dedicated e-readers like Sony’s and even Kindle will eventually give way to more general-purpose slates of similar size, though slates may “lean” toward one enthusiasm (like ebooks) or another.
Back in 1983 and 1984, I did about 10,000 words on a since-abandoned novel that included a species of road surface that charged your car’s batteries as the car moves over the road. A pickup called the “board” (after surfboard) was suspended beneath a vehicle and hovered over the road surface via maglev to generate current like a linear alternator. I was pleased to see that Wired posted a news item on some guys in New Zealand who are developing almost precisely that. Not sure how well the math works out (especially with respect to infrastructure costs) but it’s a cool idea. I added another small touch: Ohmic losses in the “voltway” surface kept it snow-free in winter.
Pope John Paul II was an idealist. Pope Benedict XVI is a pragmatist. My SF prediction: As he grows older and sees the problems besetting the Church getting no better and possibly worse, he will begin considering other reforms that his uncompromising predecessor would have considered impossible. Hey, Bennie! How ’bout Vatican 3!
People who have lots of moles have longer telomeres. Or at least look younger than they are. Carol and I are both so blessed, mole-wise, but I think it worked better on her than on me.
If you spend a lot of time in the car but off the Interstates, take a spin through RoadsideAmerica, a bemused compendium of eccentric stuff you can see on road trips. I liked the entry on smiley-faced water towers, since we pass one in Adair, Iowa every time we blast back and forth to Chicago. And Adair is far from the only one.
From the above site: When we left Arizona seven years ago, some people nodded and said, Cool! Colorado isn’t as crazy as Arizona. Well…I’m not sure that’s true.

Tripwander: The Board Into Summer

Nov 11th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

We got back here to Colorado from Chicago just in time for the first snows. And while it snows like hell outside my window, I sit here in an interior fog, recuperating from a typical post-Chicago-trip headcold. I’m starting to climb out of it, but if you haven’t heard from me lately that’s mostly why.

The trip itself was short as such trips go, and was mostly concerned with getting Carol’s mom moved back home from the nursing facility where she’d been for some time. We also spent four days babysitting our nieces Katie and Julie while their parents took a much-needed break from parenting to attend the Ohio Valley Filk Fest in Columbus.

Tending small children is aerobic, to say the least. We ran around the back yard with them and the dogs, took them to several parks and playgrounds, and (finally) got a kite into the air in the big field behind their house. The kite was a nondescript 20″ ripstop Nylon diamond item from Wal-Mart, and it flew beautifully without any tail at all, thanks to a relatively light and steady wind. Katie (who is not quite four) flew it carefully and well, though whether she listened to my uncle-ish lectures on staying away from the power lines is unclear.

Carol and the girls blew soap bubbles and chased them, assisted by Dash. QBit watched dourly from the sidelines after he touched a biggish bubble with his nose and popped it all over his face. We retrieved any number of things (including Julie’s Hello Kitty boots) from The Window Well Where Balls Go To Die. Kick a ball around the yard long enough and it will end up there, though how the boots got in remains a mystery:

“Julie, did you drop your boots in the window well?”

“NO!”

Well. I guess that’s that.

Of all the Pack, Dash clearly had the most fun. We deliberately had the neighbor girl come by regularly to play with Dash and his littermates when we first had them (and their mother) so that they would know what kids are and enjoy their company. And wherever there were kids, that was where Dash wanted to be. We watched him watching through the slats in the back fence while a group of local gradeschoolers played touch football in the field. His tail was wagging so hard I thought his butt would fall off. A few minutes later, I heard Dash’s distinctive yaps from a distance, and realized that he was out in the field with the kids, having somehow finessed the fence. When I went out the gate to fetch him I saw how he did it: There was a loose slat that wasn’t fastened to the bottom horizontal board, and he had just shoved it aside and pushed through the gap.

Fixing the fence was easy enough. The nails were still in the board, and I whacked them back into place with a handy half of a brick. We then watched Dash go back and forth along the fence for the rest of the afternoon, stopping at each slat and nudging it sidewise with his nose, clearly searching for The Board Into Summer.

We watched a lot of what passes for kid TV these days, including Phineas and Ferb (brilliant) Dora the Explorer (craftsmanlike) Wonder Pets (eh) and Fish Hooks (ghastly.) The cartoons provided a clue to an otherwise puzzling occurrance: We ordered in supper one evening from Mr. Beef and Pizza, including a styro container of chicken noodle soup. Julie grabbed the soup container and handed it to Gretchen, exclaiming loudly: “Arbor Day! Arbor Day!”

Arbor Day? I was puzzled until Katie followed up with “Por favor!” Ahh. Abrade! Open it! This was one of a number of Spanish words used in Dora the Explorer, which may be the girls’ current favorite cartoon. (Gretchen made Dora and Boots costumes for the girls for Halloween, though Julie refused to wear her Boots tail.)

On the last day we babysat, I came down a little oddly on my left leg running around on Gretchen’s uneven hillside, and, once I stopped writhing in pain, had to go to urgent care for an X-ray. Nothing was broken, but my knee swelled up something wonderful, and I was on a crutch for two days and visibly limping for the rest of the trip. Anaprox helped.

So we’re back, and I can now confront the huge wobbling pile of things I need to catch up on, making sure that all of the detonators go off. If one misses, well, the rest of the block will be toast.

A Big Lake in Autumn

Oct 21st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I’ve been a little out of it the past few days, in the wake of an inadvertent encounter with Chinese Five Spice Seasoning, with which I’ve tangled before. Which of the five is the culprit remains a mystery, save that it’s unlikely to be either cinnamon (Chinese or otherwise) or cloves. No matter. I’m a caveman, not a gourmet, and spices regularly cause me various kinds of grief. (This time it was a bad migraine.) All better now. Hey, is that a giant beaver over there? Where’s my club? I’m hungry.

Anyway. We took a quick trip to Lake McConaughy last weekend, to find a lake just a few feet from full. All that beautiful lake bottom is now underwater, as it should be, but for almost ten years the lake was as much as fifty feet down due to drought in the watershed. I didn’t get photos of the crib when the water was at its lowest, but the two photos below (taken last weekend and about thirteen months earlier) will give you a sense for the magnitude of the change. In one year, the water rose over thirty feet, and once the winter rains begin methinks the spillways will see their first use in quite awhile.

We’ve had a slightly cool autumn, but Saturday took a foray back up into the mid-80s. Carol broke out her bikini and we got a little more than knee-deep in the 70-degree water before deciding that the season was indeed a little past its peak for swimming. So we ran the Pack along the beach, pausing now and then to fish burrs out of their paws and get photos of the fall foliage.

While driving a Nebraska county track to the south shore, Carol noticed something odd in the dry cornfields to either side: The corn had been harvested from the top halves of the stalks but not the bottom halves. This seemed consistent (we stopped to look) and had a machine-like precision about it, suggesting that corn is harvested at various times depending on how dry the cobs need to be. We passed an evidently abandoned microwave tower, which provided a natural cover photo for a short novel concept I’ve been saving for a NaNoWriMo November when I don’t have to travel. It certainly won’t be this year.

We’re shopping for a new vehicle to replace Carol’s increasingly cranky 1995 Plymouth Voyager. The Ford Flex fascinates me, as it seems designed to maximize interior space, which is always handy when you’re transporting dogs in bulk. It’s AWD (which we need given where we live) and it can park itself. Precisely how (and how well) it pulls that trick I’m not sure, but given that flying cars will not be an option in my lifetime, I think I’ll take that and be glad of it.