Operation Inner Tube

 

So, it was 26 degrees with a wind chill of 20 and freezing rain falling - what better time to go inner-tubing on the remains of the ten inches of snow that had fallen this week!

We suited up and tromped around the neighborhood, crunching through the ice-crust on the snow, looking for the perfect steep-enough-but-not-too-steep incline for slide-down. After a few fall starts, we found the perfect site, the hillside from Fourth Avenue down to the dog park trail. Coco tossed her tube down, got on at the lip of the slope, and... nothin'.

The tube just cracked the crust and sank into the soft snow beneath, holding our intrepid daredevil immobile. Conditions were not ideal, at all.

 

Undaunted (and to my surprise), Coco began dragging herself down the hill, using the inner-tube as a snopwplow to clear away the thin ice crust and the top layer of snow.

With that apparent success, I enjoined her to have the first run, but she insisted that honor go to me, since I was still at the top of the hill.

The success of the plow plan was not merely apparent, but actual! Bolstered with enthusiasm, Coco trekked back to to the starting line, and...

And with that winter activity ticked off the list, we came back inside for another cuppa.

Three more for the road

So, this likely could have gone on He is a Thark, especially considering this prior post, but given the uncertain nature of the Walakanet Blogging Empire, I thought I'd throw it up here.

In any case, it's just a short video of cool three-wheeled vehicle I saw here yesterday; I am not sure, but I am wondering if it might be an old Morgan.

Of course, it's being driven an old hippie, because Fairhaven.

Musical instruments I do not play

 So, here's the thing:

Some years back - more than I care to calculate at this point - I bought the ukulele pictured above in a mad flight of island fancy during a trip to Maui. As time passed, I practiced irregularly, took a few lessons from time to time, and even recorded a video or two of my playing during one more active period, but really, the uke spent a lot of time idle. I am not sure if I don't have a musical soul at all, or if I just never had a long enough stretch of consistent practice to reach critical mass, or what, but I can't say with any honesty, even after all this time, that I play the ukulele.

Of course, since owning a ukulele worked out so well, I went ahead and got a mandolin, which you can also see above.

This decision was made in the service of charitable giving at an online gala supporting the Whatcom County Humane Society, and was encouraged by the enthusiasm of friends (if not spouse), spurred on by a little auction rivalry with one "Amanda", and perhaps abetted by some consumption of peanut butter whiskey. But paying entirely too much for an instrument that I cannot play was all for a good cause, so there we are. I hope the kitties and puppies are happy.

Oh, did I mention it's an electric mandolin? It came with this sweet amp and bunch of other stuff.

So, what have I learned about mandolins since making this commitment? Well, first, that they are tuned completely differently from a ukulele; that they have metal strings instead of nylon; that they are strummed or plucked with picks; and that the likelihood of my actually learning to play one is certainly no worse than my learning to play ukulele, but hardly any better.

In any case, I can't play either one right now, over even tune them, since my thumb is broken. At least that's a legit excuse, eh?

alignment

So, I have a copy of the  Tao Te Ching on my nightstand - the new annotated translation by Derek Lin - and I have been reading a single-page chapter each night before I go to sleep. Well, maybe three nights a week is a good average on how often I actually do it, considering how often sleep starts upstairs on the couch, snuggling with Coco and the kitty. I think Lin's translation is more accurate and instructive than it is poetic, and perhaps that was his intent. It's a nice little ritual of contemplation, at any rate.

Last night I read chapter 14. The first stanza goes like this:

Look at it, it cannot be seen
It is called colorless
Listen to it, it cannot be heard
It is called noiseless
Reach for it, it cannot be held
It is called formless
These three cannot be completely unraveled
So they are combined into one

As I read that, an almost fifty-year old memory immediately came to mind. A few minutes Googling confirmed my uncannily accurate memory of this:



Now, I have no way of knowing whether Herman Miller, who wrote the pilot for Kung Fu, ever read the Tao, although Wikipedia says that many Tao-based aphorism were used in the series. There is a connection between the Shaolin tradition and Taoism, and although Zen Buddhism plays a primary role in the order, it's quite possible that Lao Tzu might be quoted by way of illustrating a point. In any case, it was a remarkable late-night convergence that brought me back to sense of wonder than only a youth can have and lines that I quoted oh so many times without knowing their true source.

Two-lane blacktop

So, the other week Coco and I drove across the state to Spokane to visit some great and good friends. Instead of taking the interstate, we went by way of the North Cascades Scenic Highway, generally state route 20, which runs through a beautiful mountain pass, goes through some lovely recreation spots, passes by Grand Coulee Dam, and really doesn't take much longer.

It's a pretty grand dam, all right.

As we were driving along on the east side of the mountains, I noticed that there was an extremely straight and long stretch of road coming up - somewhere around Davenport - and I have to tell you that in the generally hilly coastal landscape of the Pacific Northwest (my part, anyway), it was a bit of trip driving for so long without turning the steering wheel an inch. It was such a deal that I just had to share it with you.

Enjoy.

Snow kidding around

So, while much of the southern Salish Sea region was hit with Snowpocalypse or Snowmaggedon or at least Snowdowns at the end of last week, up here at the north end in the City of Subdued Excitement we were missed by most of the storm and only got a dusting. Here's a view from our place on Saturday morning:

A bit underwhelming, especially when compared to the winter wonderland photos being sent by pals in Seattle, like this photo from a park in our old neighborhood:

Thanks, Margaret!

Coco was bereft. She looks forward to snow every year, and seldom gets enough to satisfy her winter jones. To be so close to the blizzard and still see so bare a landscape was frustrating. What to do?

Simple. Thanks to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, it was a quick 44 mile southbound drive to the Washington State Department of Transportation Safety Rest Area at Milepost 207 of I-5, inside the snow zone. And it was well worth the trip:

A bit of winter frolicking, some hot chocolate for the drive home, and a happy sweetie: I'd call that a successful afternoon.

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!

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.

Staycation daze 2: The Long and Winding Road

So, Coco had a burst of spontaneity this afternoon and suggested that we make sandwiches, drive to Artist Point on Mount Baker, and eat dinner while taking in the vista. Mt. Baker is right in our backyard, so to speak, so I readily agreed. After her acupuncture appointment, we threw together some hoagies, jumped in the Scion, and headed out.

At first, it was exactly as we imagined: the glory of the natural world, bursting with beauty.

Pacific Northwest forests really are beautiful.

We neglected to consider two factors: (a) it is still very early in the season, mountain-wise, and (b) Artist Point is at about 5100 feet. Our sunny vacation day afternoon drive soon turned into... something else.

Yes, the road to Artist Point was clear, but there were still yards of snow on either side - toward the top, it was more like traversing a tunnel than enjoying a ride in country. What's more, we actually climbed up into the cloud layer, so visibility was about ten feet. The vista, when we finally reached the top, was, shall we say, limited.

On the other hand, parking was easy to find.

It was also about 40 degrees, and although the composting toilets were open, those and the trash cans were the extent of the accessible features.

Yes, there is a door to a restroom in there.

We changed our plans, turned around, and drove back down the mountain. Once we got below the cloud layer, it started to rain on us, a perfect cap to the expedition. We sped down the mountain to a brewery/pizzeria right on the edges of the civilized world: it gets great reviews and we have been meaning to try it, so this seemed like the time. I wish I could tell you that the pizza and the beer were great and made the whole misadventure worth it, but both were just okay.

What did make the whole trip worth it was getting to spend a few uninterrupted hours with my sweetie, listening to music, chatting, and laughing at our own damn crazy selves. That's what I call good times.

First failure of the new year

So, this actually happened last night, but I am counting it for 2018 anyway.

This artifact from 1928 appeared in my Twitter feed (and in a most annoying feature of Twitter disappeared so I could not find it again). I thought it would be fun to actually assemble it, so I printed it off on card stock, cut all the pieces out carefully, inserted thumbtacks in all the appropriate places, and secured them with bluetack. Here's the result:

As you can see, no amount of tugging on the scythe handle can get Father Time to open the box so Baby New Year pops out. Looking at it, it seems that the geometry is all wrong - that there's no way to make the angles work out - but I can't shake the feeling that I did something incorrectly. It's hard to imagine what, since there are only four joints and they are all clearly labeled, but the end result is that the little device doesn't perform as advertised.

And you know what? That doesn't matter.

Because it was fun to cut out the pieces. It had been a long time since I had cut anything out, and I could almost feel my tongue wanting to slip out the corner of my mouth the way it would do when I was a little kid concentrating on a task. It was fun to build the model, digging out thumbtacks to use instead of the specified pins, and finding blue tack - still good from my ESL teaching days in the 1990s! - to hold the joints secure. It was even fun to try to puzzle out why it didn't work, and to make the video documenting the failure.

And that's the feeling I am going to try to keep during 2018: it doesn't really matter if my drawings live up to my expectations, or what kinds of sounds I can coax from my ukulele, or if any thing I create succeeds or fails according to some external standard. All that matters is engagement with the creative process, a little satisfaction of completion, and having some fun. If I do that enough, eventually there'll be hits among the misses.

But seriously, I don't think this little New Year's geegaw will ever work.

Have a Compassionate Fourth

So, I wanted to say something this Independence Day. The current political scene is fraught with the problematical nature of patriotic displays, which seem to have been co-opted by those willing to see our putative democracy slide from oligarchy into downright autocracy while they wave their flags and wear their red baseball caps. But I wanted to try.

I have always wanted feel more patriotic than I do; I suffer from the conflict between appreciating all that the USA promised to be and the understanding of all that it actually has been. Years ago, Robert Mayer's retired hero in Superfolks captured the quandary thus:

I have thought about how to resist that cynicism and support the justice and virtue that we are supposed to stand for.  How do we celebrate Independence Day when our history includes Manifest Destiny, slavery, and exploitation? Where do we start? Perhaps with the constitution.

Justice, tranquility, general welfare, blessings of liberty - those internal values are right there alongside common defense, the only outward-facing purpose articulated. Values which, I might add, seem threatened in some new way just about every day lately. I can get behind these values, the ones we, the people, are supposed to stand for.

We, the People - another piece of the patriotism puzzle that I can't let go of, even though university professors tell us we're no longer a democracy. This piece fits nicely beside the E Pluribus Unum that heads the page - the unifying motto of the U.S. until it was shoved aside by the theocratic In God We Trust in the red-baiting, atheist-hating fifties.

Maybe we can get past our bigotry and xenophobia, embrace the diversity in our country, mend the wounds of colonialism and slavery and sexism and nativism, and build the country that we say we want to be. United together, We, the People, can do this; I can celebrate that.

There's still a hitch in the giddyup before I go shooting off fireworks (although I really can't stand fireworks, since they make life miserable for pets and wildlife, not to mention many veterans.) Even if We, the People, can wrest our democracy back from the oligarchs and the autocrats, we're still stuck in a capitalist, consumerist, corporationist system that does no good to our souls, our world, or our society. Once upon a time, I thought there might be something like compassionate capitalism; I have come to the conclusion that that is a logical impossibility, since capitalism is by its nature exploitative and unfair. And compassion seems to be notably absent from the current political discourse. People seem willing to destroy the planet for profits and to allow people to die rather than feel empathy for them; capitalism is not reflective or empathetic or compassionate. And I believe compassion is what we need.

This divide between compassion and patriotism is explored in this article from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, which is well worth the reading. But really, the circumstances only leave me with one place to go:

What could be more patriotic than the longstanding American tradition of the red, white, and blue, and, uh, red?

 No, seriously:

I'll be patriotic and keep working toward Democratic Socialism in the USA. That I can celebrate.

So here's some fireworks:

Happy Fourth of July everyone.

Book 'em

So, I mentioned last time that the coolest bits of Bellingham are in the area that comprised the original four towns and I alluded to a maximally cool bookstore as an example. I have actually mentioned this bookstore in a prior post: Henderson Books.

The store is rather unassuming from the outside, sort of a typical used book store, so on what grounds do I assert its awesomeness, you may well ask. Here is my evidence, in four points.

Point the first:  Just look at it on the inside, willya!?

Is this place crazy or what? Henderson might have as many volumes here as are in Powell's City of Books in Portland - but crammed into one building instead of taking up an entire city block. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, and bridges have been built across the aisles to hold even more books. It's a bit of madhouse, but you can really find just about anything there.

Which brings us to...

Point the second: The Gandalara Saga

Back in the early eighties,  I read this relatively obscure paperback science fiction adventure series, set in the wonderful desert world of Gandalara and chock-full of swordfights, derring-do, and sabre-tooth tigers. I devoured each volume as it would come out, and then re-read the saga as a whole; in many ways, it is a nearly perfect example if its idiom. 

In one of my many transitions over the years, I found myself separated from my seven-book complete set.  I slowly built it back up, but volume six, Return to Eddarta, eluded me for years. Until I came to Henderson, which not only had my missing volume, but also two complete sets. 

Two.

Still not enough? Okay, let's move on to:

Point the third: Science Fiction by Gaslight

Sometime around 1971, I read - and re-read, and re-re-read - this book, which was in the collection of the Bay Ridge branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. It is a fascinating collection of short stories written around the turn of the last century, many of which have stayed with me in no little detail until this day. Some of the stories are prescient in their depiction of the then-future, now-present; some are curiosities whose presumptions have been overturned by later science. I left New York in 1978 and had not been able to get my hands on a copy since then, as much as I have desired to re-re-re-read the stories. I would occasionally find a copy at some rare book dealer online, at the asking price of $50 or more, and sometimes wished I had just kiped the book before heading west.

On the visit to Henderson during which I picked up Return to Eddarta, I asked where a copy of this book might be if indeed the store had one (there's no automated inventory system of any kind - this place is totally old school). A clerk to me over to a  far corner of the shop where the SF anthologies were stacked and pointed to one of the bridges across the aisles. "It might be up there," she said. "What was it called again?"

I pointed, mouth agape. "It's that one."

Point the fourth: The cherry on top.

As if that wasn't enough, after climbing up a ladder (not a step-ladder -  at Henderson you have to use real honest-to-pete ladders to get it its top shelves) to retrieve the book,  I found out the price:

Six-ninety-five! Hella sold!

QED: Henderson is one of the coolest bookstores on the planet, in the coolest section of a pretty cool town.

Where the (restrained) action is

So, Coco and I have been 16 months in Bellingham, the City of Subdued Excitement (which has manifested as a category on this blog,  replacing Jet City as the label for local news.) And while Seattle has a typical boring municipal flag, Bham has a cool flag:

From the sort-of official description:

The two stars on the flag represent the the two coastal Salish tribes - Lummi and Nooksack - while the three wavy lines stand for "noisy waters," the translation of "Whatcom" from Chief Whatcom of the Nooksack. When the flag is flown vertically, these wavy lines also become a depiction of Whatcom Falls. The four green stripes represent the four original towns of Bellingham: Whatcom, Sehome, Bellingham, and Fairhaven. The blue half circle symbolizes Bellingham Bay, which unites the four towns.

It's those four towns that interest me the most. Here's what they looked like in 1889:

We live in the south, right about the F in Fairhaven; my college is due north across the bay, where the word Eldridge is. You can see that my daily commute, whatever mode of transport, is basically a tour of the original towns.

Here's how the towns grew and consolidated between 1889 and 1922:

And here's a comparison between the original city and modern Bellingham:

Now, here's what I have discovered: with only a few exceptions, the coolest stuff in Bellingham is found within the boundaries of the four original towns, or at least within the original city limits.

In that space, mostly between the bay and I-5, we find the funkiest restaurants, the grooviest bookstores (more on which soon), the art house movie theater, the independent businesses, and, of course, the establishments (such as the Bellingham Herald newspaper) that have been around since the early days of settlement.

Further out than that, you have the Red Robin, the Barnes & Noble, the cineplex, the mall, the big box stores, and the suburbs.

I know where my subdued excitement lives, and I hope to share my experience with you over the coming year.

#HawaiianEye: Return

So, we were wheels down at Bellingham International a little more than ten hours ago, walking out in winds that were forty degrees colder than the island breezes we had left. I guess it's always good to be home, but the cat might have been the only compelling reason to return right now.

This, of course, is why we come. Coco's smile is never more genuine than when she is on the beach, near the ocean. Her relationship to the sun has shifted since her melanoma (hence the supersuit) but her relationship to the island has not. The bio on her website still reads in part "My soul-home is in Maui, Hawaii. My birth home is in Seattle, WA. My current home is in Bellingham, WA." I can see this truth whether she is quietly studying the landscape or searching the tide pools for turtles or letting the power of the waves embrace her.

Which is not to say that our trips to Hawaii are not problematic to us. We are both well aware of the colonial adventurism and history of deceit that made Hawaii part of the U.S., and of the high environmental impact of maintaining the tourism-based economy on the island - and of just getting to and from it. In our previous forays into moving to Hawaii, we often wondered how deeply we would wind up involved with the sovereignty movement and how ironic that might be. For now, we try to move gently and mindfully through a land that is still pretty close to paradise in many ways.

In any case, we return refreshed and ready for what will likely be a tough year ahead.

Bonus bits and bobs:

I paid a visit on our last day to Maui Comics and Collectibles, the only comic book store on Maui. Look for a report on that experience in an upcoming He is a Thark.

Our last beer in the island was in the airport lounge, which has these crazy cool fans:

Coco thinks I have recorded this before, but I couldn't find it on Pog and Vodka..

On the plane ride home, the latch fell out of the seat back in front of me and I could no longer return my tray to its full upright and locked position. The flight attendant came up with this interim repair job, and I needed to change seats for the landing for safety reasons (the word "impale" was used more than once).

That's is for this edition of #HawaiianEye. Mahalo.

My happy vacation face.

#HawaiianEye: Mele Kalikimaka

 Holiday music at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel

So, I usually celebrate December 25 as Isaac Newton's Birthday, a practice that grew out of my reluctance to embrace either the religious holiday of Christmas or the commercial holiday of Christmas, but wanting something to celebrate along with everyone else.  Apples and rainbow ornaments replaced the crèches and the reindeer, and a tradition was born (Newton Day apple pancake breakfasts became A Thing in our crowd).

But Maui is about as far from Isaac Newton as I can imagine, so here's a try at a different sensibility: for some time I have been thinking about what I call TV-movie Xmas: a non-denominational, spiritually vague celebration of peace, good will, and generosity; a time when we take a moment to reflect that kindness is actually important and that manifesting it is valuable. I can get behind that.

So, in that spirit, Mele Kalikimaka from Napili Bay!

Lady GIFs - let 'em load

So, I caught some nice funny video of our college president at graduation and I have been meaning to convert it into a GIF so that we could stick it on a web page somewhere for a bit of whimsy. I checked around online and found a couple of sites, one of which was a little better than the others. Since I was in the groove, after I converted the commencement video, I made a few more GIFs from easily accessible clips on my laptop.

Coco in the Rain

 

...flooded Office Dept parking lot

Will it Go Round in Circles

 ...Cowan park?

JK Could Have Danced All Night

 ...Oscars Night!

Sissy Celebrates 
 

...empty middle seat on a flight to Chicago.

Be-Bop-a-Coco, that's my baby...

 ...Ballet Vietnamese restaurant

 
When you read the headline, did it sound like gif or jif?