Friday, March 30, 2001
A quick reading of a "Showcase" column by Michael Levy in the March 26th issue of The New Yorker prompted me to visit the "American Memory" collections at the Library of Congress for photos by Walker Evans. Stunning black & white images by Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks (Kansas' own), Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon are available here.
God, I love this place. Rewards like this ameliorate the frustrations of maintaining this gizmo. (I reformatted again this morning.)
6:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Bicycling wanderlust
occupied my imagination yesterday in free moments, as did a renewed resolve to improve my conditioning so that I can accomplish some of the things my imagination tells me I need to do.
I'm certain that a long excursion is out of the question this year, but yesterday I began to nurture this small obsession by looking for biking events (tours for recreational riders, not races) listed on the web for future planning or daydreaming. I've focused on sites for events in neighboring states, those within a morning's drive of home.
Every year when the annual BAK (Biking across Kansas) takes off in the second week of June, I'm revving up a new set of summer classes, a task I enjoy and would be reluctant to give up. I think that the school would permit me to, but it's just not in me to miss that week. Those first days are too important to the students' later performance. And to my need to control their progress, I suppose.
These other tours in the region take place at other times, so maybe next spring or summer I can slide one into the schedule as an adventure for the boys and me.
Since I brought up the matter of conditioning, I'll also list the Rockport Fitness Walking Test, which provides a calculator to measure (estimate, really) oxygen uptake. The site also provides other measures of aerobic fitness.
7:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Critters are on the move � wild turkeys, skunks, turkey vultures, and last night three deer in a meadow at the bottom of Williston Point Road. Winter was hard on the deer, by the look of this thin threesome.
The wanderlust has hit me after this confining winter. I spent some time yesterday considering a bike trip for the boys and me. Maybe we could bike across Kansas. Josh and James did that a few years ago and loved it. They would have done it again but other teen activities and interests interfered (Boys' State, for instance). We could take a ride on the Katy, the former rail trail that crosses Missouri from Clinton in the west to St. Charles in the east.
After spending some time in the garage last night checking the condition of our two-wheeled inventory, I fear that these trips might be better accomplished in the spring or summer of 2002. Taylor is still on a 20-inch bike, and I haven't replaced my beautiful Cannondale that was stolen a few years back, so his equipment might be inadequate for the trip, and my old Schwinn LeTour, though fine for the short jaunts around town, wouldn't survive either of these longer trips. Owen's bike was new last summer and would be fine for either trip. Josh's could be brought up to standard with some minor maintenance if he were to choose to join us.
I think of this not only because I'm a critter that would like to be on the move, but also because a friend has just returned from a hiking adventure in the Grand Canyon. That adventure was a far more rigorous outing than I have in mind to attempt, but the example set by the planning and preparation (both of equipment and personal fitness) is one that might in execution provide many hours of diversion and help stave off or mitigate my winter blahs next year, or am I grasping at straws as wildly as this sentence is searching for clarity?
Nevermind. I think the plan will be to take some shorter local tours this season, and then in the fall to consider new bike purchases when the prices are falling.
So be it.
7:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
Nancy and Keith, friends of ours for the past twenty years, are divorcing. Because the wives in this foursome worked together briefly and because they were the ones who nurtured the friendships, Nancy gets us in the settlement, it appears. Last night, she and I spent several minutes visiting by phone about houses she might purchase in our neighborhood as she scales down her lifestyle. She is preparing to leave the huge Leave-It-to-Beaver style home near the country club that the two of them (no kids) have inhabited during the past decade of their (nearly) thirty-year marriage, and she seeks an abode more physically and fiscally manageable. I'd love to have their house, but owning that home would require a clear deed to our house plus $100,000, I suspect.
After visiting with Nancy, I headed to my lair to view a program by a journalist that I am coming to regard as a national treasure (which probably means I've grown more conservative, alas). I appreciated the two-hour PBS presentation of Bill Moyers' report on the chemical industry, Trade Secrets. The web site includes a link to a transcript of the program, and the transcript includes a record of three URLs that were mentioned during the thirty-minute panel discussion at the end of the program:
- abouttradesecrets.org, the ad hoc site provided by the chemical industry to rebut the program
- Environmental Working Group, the site of an environmental organization that has investigated abuse by the chemical industry, and the site where some damning industry documents are or will be archived
- childenvironment.org, the site offered by the pediatrician on the panel, Dr. Phillip Landrigan, a site which isn't working as of this posting (although a Yahoo! search on "Phillip Landrigan" yields dozens of hits related to the effects of chemical pesticides on the health of children)
Way does lead on to way, doesn't it, but I still believe that too much information beats too little info every time.
9:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
Yesterday, wild turkeys � the first for me this season � grazed in a galumphing, undulant flock of fifteen in a field west of the one-room schoolhouse at the foot of Stagg Hill.
10:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
Monday, March 26, 2001
I do love the serendipity
of the Web. This morning, while searching for background on A.E. Housman, I came across this link to the home page ("Home, page, and don't spare the horses!") of Chris Borthwick. The pages are graphically simple but content rich, as those of a polymath often are. There's an article about Housman's invective, as well as some of the writer's (a psychologist, I think) articles on intelligence and on facilitated communication. Worth a longer look when I have more time.
11:50 AM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, March 25, 2001
Ah, spring! As they begin their spring journeys underground, the roots of the elms and hackberry trees in our yard seek the joints (God, I hope it's just the joints) of our old, clay sewer line. Last night the sewer backed up, spreading some bathwater across a small portion of the basement floor. I postponed the rooting out of the pipe until this morning. The job is now done, I am showered, the odor is out of my sinuses, and I have earned my sloth for the rest of the day.
This morning, while engaged in my mindless rooting (this is, after all, a job that rewards caution modestly and imagination not at all), I thought how nice it is to have Josh back in the house for a while (a pleasure that is increased by the knowledge that he'll return to the dorm tonight). I mean that it's nice to hear his music playing so loudly again, but it will be nice to enjoy some silence too.
What I probably also mean is that we've almost arrived at the point in our father-son relationship where I will be able to tell him that I enjoy his music (this morning, Dashboard Confessional) without ruining it for him. Not today, but soon, I think.
11:40 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, March 24, 2001
I'm happy to see the return of Catherine Hines' journal, formerly Hinesight, now Passive Voice.
7:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
Too cheap to spring for another motel room, Josh and James drove straight through from Fredericksburg, VA, to our home (1230 miles, he says) in 18 hours, arriving here at 3 AM today.
8:40 AM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, March 23, 2001
While I remained at home, committed to my two afternoon classes that overlap the break, the mom and the two resident spring-breaking tykes took off yesterday morning for an adventure three hours west on I-70 at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History on the campus of Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. A replica of Sue, a collection of bones billed as the "largest, most complete, best preserved T. rex," is on display there, on loan from the Field Museum in Chicago. According to the boys, the gift shop was pricey, as museum gift shops tend to be.
After their visit to the Sternberg Museum, our little troop went on to the nearby Fort Hays State Historic Site, a former cavalry outpost, where the mom toured the site while the boys combed the pricey gift shop searching for geegaws that fit their budgets.
On the way home, they stopped in historic Abilene, where they might have visited the Eisenhower Center, the Greyhound Hall of Fame (dogs, not buses), the Museum of Independent Telephony, or any number of other educational and edifying sites, so of course they visited the Russell Stover Factory Outlet nestled close by Abilene. Here they spent their geegaw allowances on chocolate-covered munchables.
So far they are sharing tales but not chocolate.
8:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, March 22, 2001
Josh notified us yesterday
by e-mail that he and James had arrived in D.C. He wrote from American University, another of his prospective destinations for next year. The trip and the campus visits have reinforced his desire to attend school outside Kansas next year.
7:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
Bits and pieces (though that shouldn't need explaining here):
Josh has checked in
by phone and e-mail during his journey east. He and James are in Harrisonburg, Virginia, for a day or two, visiting the campus of James Madison University before resuming their trip to D.C. They appear to be having a wonderful adventure, so wonderful that James felt it was time to have an earlobe pierced to commemorate the trip. Silly me, I'd have bought a postcard.
Taylor's parent-teacher conference last Thursday brought out more adoration from his teachers. When he was ill earlier in the semester, he was concerned about missing school because the little suckup (and I do say that affectionately) didn't want to miss the newspaper advertising unit the class was engaged in. He won the competition for the fourth graders throughout the city and the shop ran his ad in the local paper.
Owen has disappeared from these pages but not from our lives. It's just that he's in that Jekyll-and-Hyde stage of adolescence: Particle or wave, moth or butterfly, asshole or angel � what shall I be today? He's been difficult to capture lately, but he (like the other boys) is on his spring break from classes.
Ruth the Biologist and I completed our joint pledge visits on Sunday, so now Dick the Bug Guy and I can get started.
Yesterday I returned the overdue Bryson (In a Sunburned Country) to the library without having finished it, and I picked up the Doctorow (City of God). While there, I browsed the library's shelf of surplus books and bought a hardback first edition of P.D. James' The Children of Men (1992) that I found there. I read it a few years after it was published, but for a buck I had to indulge my bibliomania.
7:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, March 17, 2001
A gap of three days here?
Well, that wasn't supposed to happen, but it's just a sign of a life, I suppose. There have been old books to read (coincidentally, some of the same titles listed for March by Xeney), new books to abandon (the writing in Bryson's Australian adventure, In a Sunburned Country, hasn't grabbed me), and student papers to grade before they grow older and are buried under the strata of newer papers.
Today brings much ado: a farewell to Joshua as he departs on his spring-break jaunt to D.C. with his sidekick, James the Giant Peachy Guy; St. Paddy's Day fun in Aggieville (the local student district); a two-mile fun run for the Taylor (his initiative); and some pledge visits for the fellowship. Oh, and I'll move some compost and plant some onions. It's a big weekend, but I want to write, so maybe later.
And I must replace that dreary picture on the index page.
7:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, March 13, 2001
Coffee-mug insight: Inside every older person is a
younger person wondering what the hell just happened.
6:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, March 11, 2001
She deserves the best, but when she called yesterday to ask if she could place a pair of small campaign signs in our yard to promote her husband's candidacy in the local school board race, I had to ask her if his views (his views, not hers) might be like those of a current school board member who is a mere condom vote away from being a full-fledged social conservative, or might his views be more like those of another, more liberal member whose outlook is more like my own.
"More like the first, I think," she said quietly.
Of course, those signs now stand prominently in our yard, you see, because she was Joshua's second-grade teacher, and then Owen's, and finally Taylor's.
And she deserves the best because she gave her best.
But godless me, I'm praying for vandals.
7:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, March 9, 2001
During a break between classes yesterday,
Michael caught my elbow to recommend his current read, E.L. Doctorow's City of God, a book named for St. Augustine's blueprint for a Christian Rome. I stopped at the Manhattan Public on the way home from work to check out the book. Someone else had already snapped up the Doctorow, but my name is now first on the waiting list. While registering for the book, I also changed the method by which I will be notified of any library news (overdue books, for instance) from postal mail to e-mail.
Damn. NPR just reported that Bobby Fisher turns 58 today. How's that happen?
8:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, March 8, 2001
It's late in the season for spotting a bald eagle here, but as I drove to work on Tuesday I saw my only one of the season. This winter, the boys and I found none below the dam where the eagles usually perch high in the cottonwoods to fish the Blue River. Tuesday morning, however, I saw a lone eagle head north from a roost along the Kansas River near the First Territorial Capitol building.
9:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, March 6, 2001
A quick visit this morning to the New York Times Navigator revealed that The New Yorker finally has a worthwhile presence on the web.
10:20 AM CST (GMT -6)
Monday, March 5, 2001
I should have written it down as soon as I heard it on NPR yesterday, because I'm afraid I've modified Garrison Keillor's homely definition of culture. I'll offer it here as a paraphrase: Culture is what you know about the world by the time you're twelve years old.
Scary, huh?
8:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, March 4, 2001
Yesterday was a day of meetings
, starting with morning coffee among the Unitarians and ending with a dinner with the comfortably shod socialists of MAPJ (uttered MAP-jay, the vaingloriously named Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice).
Our Unitarian fundraising group met at the fellowship in the morning to line up our quarry. I'll do double duty in this campaign. I've been paired with both Dick the Entomologist and with Ruth the Biologist in this effort, presumably because they can read a map and because I'm not shy about asking somebody for a buck. The same constitution that lets me eat the last glazed donut or the last strip of bacon also permits me to ask someone who can well afford it for a donation for the fellowship, where others might behave with more reticence.
Brice let this meeting run a little long as we had fun carving up the fellowship, identifying the folks our pairings would visit over the next month as we solicit pledges for the building expansion. It felt like NFL draft day: "The team of Bob and the Bug Guy take Mary Widowbucks in round four."
I spent the evening at the annual dinner meeting of the good folks of MAPJ, sharing a table with Sam the Psychiatrist, Larry the Physicist (with Stini, an exchange student from Munich), and Chris the Guy Who's Been Everywhere and Done Everything. I sometimes attend smaller committee meetings as part of my participation in this organization, but I don't often attend the plenary sessions, such as this one (although I did last year). The speaker last night was Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange. His presentation on globalization was impassioned, energetic, engaging, and garnished with tasty progressive chestnuts, both fresh and aged. He's active in Green politics in California, where his wife Medea Benjamin ran as a Green for US Senate against Dianne Feinstein.
The links provide information on some of his publications (Globalize This!: The Battle Against the World Trade Organization, for instance). I'll probably pick up a title or two for those times when I need to clear my palate of Dubya Bush's rhetoric.
9:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, March 3, 2001
The Unitarians gathered last night for lasagne and light entertainment as we kicked off the building-fund pledge drive that will continue until April 1. The evening was relaxed, entertaining, and educational. We solicited no pledges last night, and offered no tote bags or coffee mugs. The evening was meant as a notice to the general membership that we are headed their way.
The predators among us will meet again this morning to stake out our prey. The behind-the-scenes drive has produced many generous donations and has put the goal within reach, but the numerous smaller pledges that we hope to secure in the public portion of the drive will be indispensable.
Once again, Brice ran a tight meeting and handled our distractible group with grace. We sat together during dinner. Also at the table was one of our members who is of a type that although attractive in childhood, often becomes tiresome with age � the gifted child who remains precocious into his seventh decade or beyond. That's beside the point, of course, and I don't know why I mention it except that this guy "gets up my nose" (as a friend says) all the time and he did again this night. He complained about the library's hours, which have been more generous than ever under Brice's tenure. In addressing the complaint, Brice noted that so far this fiscal year, the university library was 1.5 million over its budget (about .9 million per year) for heating and light.
That the library budgets nearly $2500 per day to maintain the temperature and to light the place had never occurred to me. That it had to spend more than twice that amount daily shocked me. I mention this here apropos of nothing. It's just jetsam.
7:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, March 2, 2001
Life has been comfortably dull lately, as anyone who peeks here from time to time might recognize, but a few things remain from February that I'd like to note for myself before I forget them. February is never a good month for me (and this has been worse than many), but nature seems to erase my memory of this month altogether, and in a month, I'll look back and have no bookmarks at all about the month unless I record them here.
So, odds and ends today.
Taylor completed his four-game basketball season. Although he played well in every game, the team finished the season with one win, two losses, and a tie (to Hyphenated Ben's team, mercifully).
Owen's braces came off this week. He'll wear a retainer until his face and mouth grow and mature more. Then, when the orothodontist (for whom State Farm, paying in our behalf, must have bought a new pool by now) thinks it advisable, we'll replace the dentures that he's outgrown, dentures that Owen needs because he lost some permanent teeth when he tried to stop a car with his smile on the eve of Clinton's reelection in '96.
Two of my classes ended yesterday, and two more started last week. For the next three weeks, my teaching load will be more relaxed than it has been. I'll work only a few hours in the afternoon, leaving my mornings and evenings free. I'm looking forward to having some time to read, write and prepare for the next full cycle of classes without having the boys around. I'll reserve evenings to help them with homework. I still do pretty good fourth and eighth grade work.
On the way to work this morning, I spotted a lone snow goose sailing a few feet above a snowy field. No other geese appeared nearby on the ground or in the air, but an uneven wedge of them flew high about a mile away as the goose flies.
11:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
I ended that previous posting hastily, having been interrupted (while I worked in a computer lab at school) by students who were making up tests that they had missed earlier in the semester. If I had had the time to write more thoughtfully, I might have written that on the last day of February, the sun was below the horizon well before 6:30 in the evening, but the sky was still bright.
9:45 PM CST (GMT -6)
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