So, since this is an extra-long holiday weekend, here's an giant size blog post to go along with it. Actually, it's just a bunch of stuff that is cluttering up my to blog file, none of which is significant enough to support its own post but each of which I want to get out there. This is just a gussied-up pic dump, but extravaganza sounds a lot classier, no?
Without further ado:
I have more than one friend who is (or has been) in the rusty-metal-as-art school . For them, here's this detail of a large hangar-type door in the old Sand Point naval base site.
Is is settling if your highest athletic achievement is third in your age class in a 5K? Cuz this might be the last, best medal I get.
After I posted some pics of the new office, I was chided for not yet having my books in some sort of order. Well, they have been organized, but I can't say I am very happy with the result.
This totally looks like some sort of tree you'd encounter in a D&D campaign, no?
Why do I love the look of this cat illustration so darn much?
A little facile, but good advice nonetheless.
Phatic communication and social pleasantries explained.
I can't decide whether this is irony or poignancy.
This is exactly how I remember European beaches - totally ordered, and you can tell when you move from one resort's territory to another's by the change in umbrella color. The effect even has power on the ground.
And last but not least: steampunk, heck - there was a time when real life looked like this.
There's a lot wrong with the mythology of Thanksgiving, which arose from a particularly distorted view of our history, and we should recognize that.
There is a benefit, separate from any specific stories, to taking a moment to be grateful for all that we have.
Valuing the people that we know, the comforts that we enjoy, and even the things that we have will hopefully encourage us to realize what is truly valuable.
Taking time from our labors to come together and celebrate and share is good, and let us also be mindful of those who have been less fortunate than we have.
So, on this day I am humbly thankful for the material privilege I enjoy, the friends that I have found, and the love that I have shared.
And just so this doesn't become a too much of a sunrise sermonette, I am also grateful to live in a world where Wonder Woman rides a giant kangaroo.
So, the moving-in process is still going on, but I can say that we have the closets arranged and most of our clothes are where they will stay for the duration. Both Coco and I purged a lot of stuff in the transition, and we're storing things a little differently than we used by re-purposing some of the of our furniture, and I'd guess that we are folding more clothes and hanging fewer. As a result, we have wound up with a few clothes hangers left over.
There were three white mini-hangers, for delicate stuff...
and four white heavy-duty hangers, for pants or jackets...
...and six fancy white plastic skirt hangers with clips...
...and 17 standard white pastic hangers...
...adn another 26 black ones...
...and a whole pile of them in various colors.
There were five suit hangers, both wooden and plastic...
..and six of those fancy wooden pants hangers...
...and three of those crappy clear plastic kind...
...and this doohickey for neckties.
So the question is: WTF? Did we actually have a bunch of extra hangers that we didn't notice? Did the hangers reproduce in response to the stress of moving? Or did we really shift over 100 garments, either getting rid of them or storing them differently? And if that last circumstance is the case, how did we wind up with so many extra clothes? And why were we hanging them all up in the first place?
Of course, this whole affair also raises the question of what to do with these. I wouldn't imagine that we'll need more than ten percent of this surplus, and that leaves a lot of hangers to dispose over. I'm not sure even Value Village could absorb this donation - we might have to drive around tossing bundles into Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul as well. I am half-tempted to throw them in a barrel with all our outdated pharmaceuticals, set it on fire, and electrocute it, hoping to create a new polymer-based life form, but even if that worked, it would probably get loose and eat Fairhaven, and we all know where that would lead.
In the meantime, if y'all need any hangers, let me know, and I can hook you up. First one's free.
So, Coco and I spent some time this morning walking a few miles on the campus of Western Washington University, whose Fairhaven College is Coco's undergrad alma mater. It was a warm sunny morning and most of the campus seemed to be sleeping still (or watching the Seahawks game), so we had quite a pleasant and uninterrupted meander along winding paths, through underbridges, and up and down staircases both narrow and wide. The campus has an awful lot of big metal sculptures, which made the walk even more picturesque.
We ventured into one building so Coco could show me the auditorium class where she took her infamous Performance Art class, but mostly we explored the grounds, Coco surprised by a number of that-didn't-used-to-be-theres and mellowed by many oh-I-remember-thats. I saw where her drum circle gathered, found her dorm window with its middling-good view, saw the buildings where she had classes large and small, and the entrance to the dining hall where student got their soft-serve ice milk. But maybe best if all was when she shared her secret study space along an out-of-the-way walkway on the edge of campus, not too far from the Viking Union. As she sat down lost in reverie for a moment, I saw that sweet shy student still inside her, despite all she had done and become since then, the Quiet Girl who prefers her own company.
I think it's been nice to come back to Bellingham for Coco; it's a return, not a retreat. This town has lot going for it, some of which Coco is showing me and some of which we are discovering together. After the campus nostalgia today, we went and joined the local food co-op. We're settling in here, for sure, for what we hope will be a good, long stay.
Coco, with the sculpture The Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars for Bounty
So, it was my birthday, and it was great one. Coco made a big fuss, and she gave me some cool books, and we had a fun morning pulling the house together together, and we took our first trip as 'hamsters up to Vancouver (where I had one of the best meals of my life). And in the course of all this celebratory goodness, in a quiet moment over beer, Coco asked "So, what do you want from this next birthday year?"
Now, birthdays make great milestones for self-assessment and reflection, marking another trip around the sun and all that. And heaven knows this latest Big Transition - from tenured faculty to administrator, from community college to technical college, from Seattle to Bellingham - deserves some consideration and my future career plans - eight and a half years left and counting - merit some deliberation. But although I tried to come up with something profound, or at least thoughtful, I couldn't develop a strong theme or clear focus for what I want the next year to look like.
Coco and I did make some sort-of resolutions at the new year, which I usually don't do. We used a more of this/less of that format, and my list looked like this:
I'm still working on this list - doing well on some items and not so well on others - and I'm not sure I can add another scheme to the list.
In response to Coco's question, I also thought about whether I had gained any wisdom during the last solar circumvolution that could guide me in the next, and I came up with nothing. Maybe at this stage of the game, growth is incremental or accretive rather than revolutionary or exponential; I could think of no watershed insight to use as a pathfinder. Every day I try to be a little smarter and a little kinder than the day before, and maybe that's just how it goes now.
I did have a minor revelation today, for what it was worth. While cleaning out one of the remaining bins to be unpacked from the move, I came across a cellophane post office envelope. It contained a receipt for a $6.29 cash transaction that either Coco or I made in December 2010, along with the $3.71 change from the ten-dollar bill the purchase was paid for with.
I considered this situation, and it seems to be a good choice to live the kind of life where cash money doesn't get lost in the back of a junk drawer for five years. This little vignette says a lot about being too busy, about organization, about having too much stuff, about privilege.
And maybe that's what the theme of next year, and every year, is and should be: mindfulness of all the small ways that one can live better and be better. There doesn't have to be an epiphany or a breakthrough or a bolt from the blue or a major undertaking. Maybe it is really about just paying attention and trying our best, little by little, one day at at a time.
In any case, that's what I got, and that's what I'm going with.
So, I could give you and update on the move, or the snafu of a move-out, or the joys of being a 'hamster, or Coco's upcoming quarter as a literal Freeway Flyer, but instead, i want to share with you two sports highlights.
On our way out of Seattle after well and truly clearing out of the townhouse, Coco and I stopped by the Cascadia campus so she could make some copies for her impending First Day of Class. SAs we made our way back to the top of the parking structure, we could see the athletic field below and this scene was going on:
Is this a goof, or some weird training regimen, or what?
Then, as we were taking a walk around Fairhaven today, we encountered this game a little off-shore at Marine Park:
Now what the heck is this? It sure looks strenuous, whatever it is.
These two games sure serve to show how mainstream plain old soccer is, I guess.
So, as I am entering the decanal world once again, that means leaving the classroom and entering the office. Here's mine. That big batwing thing is a standing-desk retrofit apparatus with screens. Pretty slick, innit?
There will be differences working for a technical college instead of a community college, not the least of which seems to be the amount of motorcycle parking available. After a week, I am totally happy with the campus, the staff, my faculty, and the programs.
Once source of all that goodwill has to be the living arrangements as well as the job itself. This is the view from our deck, looking at the Alaska Ferry Terminal/Amtrak Train Station just down the street, on Bellingham Bay.
And that's the view from the cafe in Village Books, a short walk away - the Bay is always somewhere in the background, it seems. Bellingham is just a pleasant and laid-back place - quite a change from Seattle, especially the city Seattle is becoming.
But Seattle is where I am tonight. Coco and I spent the day finishing the packing and tomorrow morning the movers come. I had my last meal at our neighborhood pho place as a local, and tonight will be the last night we spend under this roof, where we've been for almost ten years.
I moved around a lot when I was a kid, so moving in and of itself doesn't signify for me; I know Coco is a little more affected, but in the end she's as excited to make a new home as she is sad to leave this one. We won't miss the daily garbage truck visits, the freeway noise from I-5 a few blocks away, the commute traffic, the neighborhood traffic, or the alley denizens, but this townhouse has been a good home to us. We've seen a lot of good times, hosted a lot of good friends, and served a lot of Thanksgiving waffles in these rooms, and our move to Bellingham has some bitter in with the sweet. Thank goodness that noisy freeway connects these two towns.
One thing that it totally sweet: I can unpin my Alley Marshall badge and throw it into the dust: from here on in, let someone else worry about the garbage cans overflowing, lids being blown away in a storm, or recycling being strewn about by a critter or other scavenger. I quit.
Hats off to Coco, who is keeping the home fires burning, battening down the hatches, toting that barge and lifting that bale, and generally doing the off with the old while I get the on with the newstarted.
After yeomen's work on the part of a party of loyalists, I am safely entrenched in Bellingham, living out of a suitcase for a week in an art- and plant-filled but otherwise mostly empty condo until the household move happens.
There was a little hitch in the giddyup with getting gas service to the new condo, but it's all shaking out okay and should be smooth sailing from on in.
At my first day of work, I found out that this Philosophy, Criminal Justice, and Rhetoric graduate will have deaconal responsibilites for Engineering, Instrumentation, Process Technology, Geomatics, and Welding. Here we go!
Going through a small boatload of HR Paper work earns some swag as a reward
Spiritwear, of course.
No wi-fi at home yet - luckily it's a short walk to the center of the neighborhood.
Well, the Summer Self-Improvement Scheme™ of 2015 is coming to a (slightly) premature close.
It was pegged to the 10 Weeks to a 10 K race training that was providing structure to my long, luxurious days of not-teaching. As I reported earlier, a piriformis strain put a hitch in that giddyup and both the execution and results of the regiment have been reduced considerably, to wit:
You can see (a) a bunch of missed runs and (b) a regression in both speed and distance. Who'd have thought I'd get a typical runner's injury? Maybe I should stick to a trike.
But piriformis syndrome is just a hiccup compared to the major life change that is disrupting the Scheme:
Yep, I'm heading back to Deantown! I have accepted a position as Dean at Bellingham Technical College, just up the road a piece from Seattle. This is wonderful opportunity to join a great school and do some good work, and Bellingham has always been a favorite place to visit for Coco and me (and Coco attended Fairhaven College there), so we're terribly excited by it all.
We're also going to be terribly busy, since my start date is less than two weeks away! As our cat's mechanical hamster used to say, here we go!
Just to tie up loose ends:
I'm back on Facebook. As problematic as the platform is, it is really the best way to keep in touch with local peeps during this transition.
I finished reading The Rhesus Chart and started and finished New Frontiers. I am in the middle of Traitor's Storm by M.J. Trow; I'll probably finish that but I'm not sure how much other pleasure reading I'll be able to fit in before winter.
Since the last SSIS report, I've done a lot of cat-sitting, spent a day working on campus, went to a magic/mentalism show, playtested games and bought one, had a guy-lunch and sweetie-sunset, but the featured highlight is this Taco Time Fiesta with my sissy:
So, I mentioned that last night, Coco and I were going out to listen to some live music - specifically, to Mama Doll, a group from Spokane that I have been trying to get to see live for about two years. I expected to be writing today about how cool that was, as indeed it was, but there was something even cooler.
Working backwards:
Yay! Mama Doll was the headliner, so they went on last, and they were great. They aren't the same group I fell in love with, though. Originally, it was just the honey-voiced Sarah Berentsen on ukulele dueting with Austen Case and her single drum; the pair produced haunting, smoky tunes with minimal accouterments. Now, Austen is gone and Sarah has been joined by Jen Landis on bass, Claire Fieberg on guitar and vocals, Kris Hafso on drums (with a full kit), and occasionally (like last night) Bart Budwig on trumpet. Sarah's ukulele and guitar are amplified now, too, and there's even a keyboard.
not last night
Well, it's not Dylan going electric, but it was still a bit of a change.
Nonetheless, the band is still great. Sarah opens her mouth and magic comes out - this is the kind of music that can summon spirits and open doorways to souls. Her new teammates provide excellent support, both musically and vocally. I was not disappointed after my long wait.
Okay: The middle act was Windoe. I wish I could say that I had enjoyed them more, but they were the weakest link of the night - the band played series of sort-of psychedelic rock tunes with little tonal or thematic variety. But they were in a challenging position, sandwiched between the other performers that night.
Best for last: The opening act was Shenandoah Davis, and here was the surprise of the night. The entire house was blown away by this performer's passion, both in her vocals and in her piano playing. Her bandcamp tags are avant-garde classical parlour music pop singer-songwriter Seattle and that's probably pretty accurate, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.
Shenandoah Davis plays the piano like she was driving a diesel tractor-trailer rig up a mountain switchback in a storm, and she delivers a metric ton of torches with every load. Davis physically engages the piano not just with her fingers but with seemingly every muscle in her body, her shock of black curls tossing and her shoulders rolling as she pushes and shoves the music out of the instrument and into the world. Her piano pounds and booms with impossibly complex melodies while her beautiful, high-pitched voice cuts through the soaring music and her deceptively simple lyrics cut though your unsuspecting heart.
It's been a long time since I was moved so strongly by a performance. I don't go out to live music often (why it's clearly a blogworthy event) but I am going to go see Shenandoah Davis whenever I can. And you should too.
This clip doesn't do her justice - she needs at least a baby grand, not a little keyboard, to really open it up and roar - but it will give you a taste.
I write this on an afternoon that is the haziest I can remember in Seattle. Looking out the window, I see a sky as bad as it was in Spokane last weekend... which means that the Lilac City and the rest of Eastern Washington must be much worse. The fires are particularly bad this year and the dust from the unusual dryness is adding to the issues of air quality. Good wishes to all who might face this as a real health challenge instead of an annoyance, and good wishes to all the firefighters.
Running
No chart this week. After running the Ben Burr Trail last Sunday morning, I could barely walk. The ache persisted and my running partner, noting my limp on Tuesday, spoke from experience tat I should give it a good long rest. My massage-therapist spouse Coco feels it might be a piriformis strain, apparently a common running injury. Ne recorded runs this cycle, just some daily hobbles at the lake or on the track. I wish I could say it felt like it was getting better, but I might be lying if I did. We'll have to see Tuesday.
This injury, plus a scheduling conflict, may make the planned September 19 10K unfeasible. But this is Seattle, so there are plenty of other 10K options the next week, including a fund-raiser for which I ran a 5K two years ago. We'll arrange something.
Facebook
I guess I can say I miss it a bit right now. A pal just got married, and there's lots of pictures and whatnot online that Coco has been enjoying. I am realizing that it is not so much the idea of FB that was getting off-putting, but rather the execution. The notion of a place to keep in contact with far-flung friends, family, and acquaintances is a groovy one; it's just that the algorithms, the inherent commercialism, and co-opting of the forum by other messaging gets in the way of that. I'm still trying to make my peace with the whole structure of online communication in a capitalist society. I'm not sure there's any entirely reasonable alternative out there.
Reading
Finished Old Venus.
Started and finished Fuzzy Nation.
In the middle of The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross.
Making
No workbench time this week. Yeah, yeah.
Miscellany
One partial day and one full day on work stuff.
One game night, a few lunches and dinners out.
A wedding!
On the docket: a live music show. As this is published, we'll be listening to Mama Doll at the Columbia City Theater! Here's a sample:
Moving to the 40 minute/4 mile plateau has been tough. I'm hanging in there at about a 10:30 pace average, but the going is rugged and I had my slowest mile in several weeks today. I'll blame the 500 foot elevation change in today's four-mile route and stick with it for another week, at least.
Facebook
Things happened and no one knows...
Reading
Still a little left to Old Venus (it's pretty thick).
Making
Some frustrating workbench time. Even with new materials, this doesn't seem to be coming together. Curses.
Four weeks in and holding steady at just a little over a 10:00 pace. This is a milestone: next week I will be running longer than a 5K for each training session. And so, a decision.
Almost forty years ago, before running was as ubiquitous as it is now, a friend who had already been a runner for some time told me that for overall health and wellness, the sweet spot for running was three miles, three times a week. Any more than that and you gain no general health benefits, you just become a better runner - and at the same time, your risk of injury climbs sharply.
When I first set this goal for the summer, it was in the spirit of do it while you can - I'm not getting any younger and doing a longer-distance race might uncork some youthful vigor. But I'm not a capital-R Runner in any sense, physically or psychologically (as I have often said, there's never been a time that I was running that I wouldn't rather have been not running), so I have to think about how much I will get out of this for how much I put in. I'm not sure what sense of accomplishment completing a 10K would give me, or where it would eventually lead. I could stick with the 5K distance and, as my old high school girlfriend does now, run one just about every week (plus two training runs each week). That might be enough on all counts.
In any event, I'll stay the course for now and see what the next bump up brings. I made a running playlist of appropriately paced music and have figured out my four-mile route. We'll see what happens.
Facebook
Have really been grooving on Twitter this week. Wish more friends were on it...
Reading
Finished Raising Steam.
Currently reading Old Venus, a short story collection.
Making
Got some promising materials but didn't put in any workbench time.
Week Three is finished. I ran the lake with Meagan on Thursday, and that may be a regular thing. Had my fastest miles on Saturday, coming in at just over two miles on the twenty-minute timed run for a 9:42 pace. Don't know why I was speedier that day - the rest of the times are remorselessly consistent. I have added a rolling three-run average to the plot lines that I think shows a more meaningful picture of overall progress.
Facebook
Actually missing the community a little bit this week... maybe I am forgetting the less-desirable aspects of the experience. But as much as I appreciate the connections that it helps maintain, I have been thinking a lot about how we have turned the Commons over to Corporatia and wondering if there is any way around that.
Reading
Gave up on The Story of Stuff.
Started and finished Death of a Liar.
Currently reading Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
Making
Mostly materials research. I think I may need A Book.
Miscellany
Worked on campus again, but only once, and this should be the last time for the summer.
The Dead End project is being re-tooled.
Had two gaming and three purely social engagements, including happy-hour happy time in Ballard and the Big Birthday Bash for Sissy!
So, let's deal with some housekeeping first: I have given upon The Story of Stuff by by Annie Leonard.
I like Leonard, I support the goals of her organization, and I think she has an important message. I just don't think she wrote a very good book. Or more precisely: I think she wrote the absolute best introduction to one of the dullest books I have ever read. Her intro is personal, witty, and engaging; the book reads like an extended Mental Floss listicle of things that can kill us. It was very disappointing, given my high hopes. To honor Leonard's good work, here's the twenty-minute movie that started it all. It's worth a watch:
To break the reading logjam that had me stuck in Leonard's prose, I went to the library yesterday and borrowed about seven books. I've finished the first already (and two GNs that will be reviewed on Thark), so here we go.
About thirty years ago I read a couple of books starring Hamish Macbeth, a constable in remote and rural Northwest Scotland. In his initial outing, Hamish was lazy and canny, and solved a cozy mystery set in a fishing school almost in spite of himself. In the second book I read (which Wikipedia tells me was the third in the series), Hamish was a little more action-oriented and solved a creepy murder that involved the corpse being picked over by lobsters in a commercial lobster farm. I never ran across any other books in the series, so when I saw this one, I was surprised to find that they have been coming out like clockwork every year - Death of a Liar is the 31st adventure.
Since I enjoyed those first two so many years ago, I picked this one up and looked forward to reading it, all the more so considering considering my especial interest in serial narrative.
Hoo, boy.
How can I put this? This books reads like it was cobbled together by an inexperienced relative from a dead author's notes. There's no pacing, the plot is incomprehensible to the point where the mystery doesn't even seem to matter anymore, and vignettes and subplots arise and pass like mayflies with no discernible impact on the story. What's worse, the prose sounds more like the summary of someone describing a story they had read than it does actual written narrative - the word perfunctory looms large as I assess it. The adage "show, don't tell" apparently does not apply here - supporting characters, their qualities and attributes, their relationship to and history with Hamish, and even some of their conversations, are all presented with the light touch of the nutritional advice label on food packaging. I certainly got caught up on the 28 books I missed!
And yet, I finished it. Hamish, roaming around the beautiful landscape with his dog and cat along on investigations, using all sorts of Scots dialect and interacting with all sorts of people, was still enough of a draw that I always wanted to find out what would happen next - not to the mystery, but to him.
But I don't think I'll be seeking out any more volumes.
So, between writing and publishing yesterday's post, I got going on the making. Turns out my pal Bucci was right: forget the art stores and even the hardware stores: for old-school soldering goodness, Radio Shack came through with the whole kit and kaboodle:
Well, the whole kit, anwyay - I'm not really sure what a kaboodle is. In any case, I sub-let some space in Coco's art studio and got all set up with my tools and consumables, including this sweet temperature-controlled soldering iron:
So, we're ready to Make! But make what? Well, I'm not really sure yet... most of the videos on YouTube talk either about soldering electronics or soldering jewelry, neither of which appeal to me much. I have half a mind to start crafting some D&D minis, but I will probably start out with some generic doodads and geegaws as I experiment with materials and techniques. In that vein, here's the first artifact:
It's a... well, it's four picture-hangers soldered together on three seams, but beyond that, I'm not sure. Coco said it looked like a guy standing akimbo.And it will stand up by itself, so maybe she is on to something.
After the roaring success of Sloppy-Seam Sam, the Soldering Stooge, I tried heftier materials: a few washers I had hanging around. This looked messy again, but cool:
Of course, it couldn't hold up to any stress and one of the washers broke off pretty quick, but it was pretty while it lasted.
I think I'll head down to Archie McPhee and get some more, lighter components to work with, at least as I learn. But we've certainly got traction!
Update: Between writing that and publishing, I did get down to Archie's, and tried two more experiments.
Just a pretty good bond between two wires.
I made a quadruped, but couldn't get the head on. I think I might be using too much flux? Too little? I don't know... back to YouTube.
A little facile, but good advice nonetheless.
