Penultimate day: looking backwards

Coco loves to play with photo editors - I really liked this one.

So, it was a good year, overall.

Work consumed a lot of the year. I was named Interim Vice President of Instruction at my college on January 1, and was selected as permanent Vice President of Academic Affairs & Student Learning in June (same job, just a different title). I have to say (and have said) that for the first six months of 2018 I worked more and harder, and was further behind than I can remember being at any job in the past twenty years. Thankfully, summer gave me the opportunity to regroup, and fall has been less crazed - I have new deans and will be starting 2019 with a full complement of administrators, so things should be a bit more manageable. It's a great gig - I have said that I want it to be my last, best job, and I think we're still on that trajectory.

A day in the life

The next big item was the house. This was the year of Home Ownership Ascendant: new dining room set, new Smart TV, new kitchen appliances, new hardwood (bamboo) floors on the upper floor. Lots of fuss & feathers, and lots of do-re-mi out the door, but it seems to have been worth it.

Floors

 

I also did a lot of health care - started off the year with a colonoscopy and have been going to the doctor (as well as the dentist) routinely now. I am up to six pills in the morning: one for high blood pressure, one for thyroid, one for allergies, two vitamins the doctor told me to take, and a probiotic that Coco says I should take. As the saying goes, if I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.

And politics... well, the less said the better. High hopes for January and some checks on the madness.

But still, we had good times.

I played a lot of D&D; not enough, but a lot. I had to quit one game, a couple of others were strictly short-term, one long-term campaign ended, and I'm in one monthly now. The logistics can be challenging when half my gaming peeps are down in Seattle. I even took a manic weekend trip to Boston to play in annual weekend retreat game as guest of my friend Lyle - I was honored to have been invited and had a great time, but one weekend a year ain't gonna do the trick.

My current character, Just Joa

We had visitors - the selfsame Lyle (once alone and once with family); Diane (for Pride); Karmin; Jackie & Jeff (technically, we met in the middle); Erin & Tim; Margaret; and Jason & Emma & Sky.

I took a drawing class and made some pictures.

We got up to White Rock and Vancouver several times and of course we topped the year off with Palm Springs.

Click to embiggen and panoramacize the view of Joshua Tree National Park

And of course, I got to spend the whole year with this wonderful family:

Coco the Adorable:

Here she is in disguise as a Fly Girl:

And the bully-boy, Selkie:

And one last shot of me, participating in Turban Awareness Day at the College. The fellow who wrapped me said I have the perfect head for turban-wearing, and someone who should know said I looked like many of the older men in Northern India. What can I say? It's headwear.

I hope that looking back 2018 been as kind to you as it has to me.  Onward!

Season's Greetings

So, with that most generic of holiday salutations, here is my annual wish of goodwill toward all. I expressed it last year in a somewhat more lengthy post:

But frankly, right now couldn't we use even the hokiest reminders that kindness and caring are important and that we should all demonstrate a little compassion and generosity in our personal, professional, and public lives? 

So whatever you celebrate at this time of year, from whatever source your goodwill springs, I wish you peace and joy, and I ask you to spread love and hope wherever you can.

And of course, since Coco and I are in Palm Springs for winter break this year, no holiday greeting would be complete without the Three Kings Three Drag Queens.

Up and down The Ten

So, the vacation continues!

In a perhaps surprising choice, Coco and I went on an honest-to-goodness hike on Friday. Not just our usual two-to-three mile walk around a neighborhood, but a drive out to Tahquitz Canyon and a two-mile loop through the desert terrain, up to the fall and back. Dang, you'd think we were from Bellingham or something.

 Coco took the opportunity to play with her real camera.

The falls were almost totally dry this year, but still quite lovely.

This item from the visitor's guide caught my attention:

 I mean, I may be a city boy, but even I know desert canyons don't have water fountains...

That evening we switched gears and went out to the Fantasy Springs Casino & Special Event Center to see the Brian Setzer Orchestra. It was great fun; I have no pics, just two observations: 

• smoky casinos are pretty yucky
• rockabilly can be pretty damn great

On Saturday we got a little crazy, jumped in the car and sped/crawled down the San Bernadino Freeway to make a visit to L.A. The first stop was more of a pilgrimage: the L.A. City Hall building stood in for the Daily Planet in the old Adventures of Superman TV series, and I wanted to get a look at it in person.

Even though the area around it has gotten a it congested, it did not disappoint.

The next stop was the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum - I guess I have more of an affinity for the older, classic attractions than for new-fangled stuff. I really wanted to see the spot that appeared on the the movie The Two Jakes (which I cannot find a still of online!) but if my memory of that scene serves, it appears that spot actually never existed outside the film - at least I couldn't find anything remotely resembling it, except a utilities deck on the museum. It was a great visit nonetheless.

A favorite Pleistocene mammal, many of which met their end in La Brea

And since we were already in L.A., we decided to jaunt out to make sure the ocean was still there and dropped down to Ocean Park in Santa Monica. The tide was too far out for easy toe-wiggling, but we took a long walk down to Venice Beach and back. It was a great walk marred only by the poor air quality - an unhealthy 161!

We broke up the ride home with a stop in Claremont to have dinner with Coco's California cousins, and capped the activities for the sixth consecutive day with a dip in the hot tub that is mere steps from our room.

It's good to be back in the desert.

Desert time

So, in the past, I have blogged daily from vacations, or even started a whole separate blog just dedicated to a particular vacation. For this winter holiday getaway to Sunny California, not so much, eh?

I recently came across this article, and while it's not top shelf, it did resonate with me:

Click the image to read the article - and be sure to click through to his GeoCities site!

Since I have abandoned Facebook and I guess still have the urge to post about my life online, another outlet would be welcome. I have been on the Twitters a bunch, and have ruminated on that recently, but when it comes down to it, I agree with the main thrust of this fellow's argument: that the heyday of social media was that time when there was a vibrant ecosystem of personal blogs, each unique, each demonstrating style and personality and positioning in ways far beyond simply choosing your own header on your Facebook page or your own handle on Twitter.

Okay.

So here's some vacation tidbits on day five of our eleven-day excursion to Pam Springs, Hollywood's Waiting Room for Heaven.*

This is less an adventure and more of a relaxication, and we found a tiny nine-unit "resort" that fits the bill perfectly.

We did make a trip out to Coachella Valley Nature Reserve to experience the Thousand Palms Oasis - right on the San Andreas fault line in the middle of the desert. Pretty amazing to walk through what was essentially a palm forest with pools of water.

Despite intervening years of increasingly intrusive human habitation, the sense of what the oasis must have felt like way back when was still palpable.

But it hasn't all been spiritual-connection-to-nature stuff, of course. We have gone to a big band show, checked out the art museum, have tickets for a Brian Setzer concert tonight and a drag show brunch on Sunday, and went to the Wild Lights at the zoo and the downtown street fair last night.

Wild Lights is the name for the zoo's holiday lights extravaganza, which would have been way cooler if we hadn't been thinking all the time about how annoyed the animals must be with all the distracting lights and music while they were trying to sleep, and if the crowds had been a tiny bit more respectful of them. (Zoos are problematical.) Anyway, the lights were fun.

The downtown street fair was an elaborate affair, with several blocks closed off for food vendors, entertainment, activity stations, craft booths, public agencies, and suchlike. There was even some merchandise that we actually wanted to buy, and Coco did get a t-shirt.

We stated off the visit with art, though - our first stop was a create-your-own-acrylic-painting booth run by a sweet young woman who wrangled the (mostly) kids through the process with aplomb.

Coco in her element:

She always brings it:

As for me, well, I didn't go too far out of my comfort zone with this study of Arthur Curry:

More to come, I promise. We're restoring the ecosystem.

*Because old and ailing stars came here to die.

It's the thought that counts...

 

So, I was just reading Mark Evanier's excellent blog News from ME and since it was his blogaversary he allowed as he had blogged upwards of 26,000 posts since 12/18/2000, for an average of four times a day.

I started blogging on 3/1/2005, and I have posted a little over 1800 times, for an average just a shade better than once every three days.

I clearly need to up my game.