The Other Don Kelly

I am currently home sick, with enough downtime that I can actually muster the wherewithal to write something. We’ve been watching Iris a few days a week, which isn’t too strenuous but nothing else gets done when she’s here, so the rest of the week is compressed, etc, etc. Not much to write about lately anyway. No good news anyway — global warming is reaching the “find out” phase here, but that’s just too depressing to write about.

Meantime, I finally picked up the first book of the “Wheel of Time” series, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. John R and Matt I are both reading the series, and both recommended it, so I e-borrowed it from the library. It’s fantasy, which is not my thing, I’m having trouble deciding if different aspects of the story are required tropes in the genre, or just plain derivative, and it reads like it was written for children, but I read 600 of almost 800 pages since Friday, so it must have something going for it…

Remembering Sally A: Our friend Sally passed away early this year, and there was a memorial service for her Saturday at the Quaker Meeting house. She was an amazing woman, with a big personality and a sense of humor and a heart to match. There were many people there, friends and relatives, teaching colleagues and people she’d helped over the years, with many stories from her life and travels. It was nice to see how people cared, to bump into old friends and to hear the stories, but it was still a tough day.

Congratulations Holly & Chris! Our niece Holly got married on Sunday down in Glassboro. Rainy day, travel was tough (there & back) but the wedding was fun. Some pictures:

I guess I could have had a lot to say this past month, if I wanted to, but the inspiration didn’t come — I also didn’t want to blog about some things (birthdays, anniversaries) in the moment, as they might turn into a security risk. But now the tales can be told:

• I did another Road Scholar ride, the first of this year, and the second-to-last ever RS bike ride from Shawnee. This was actually one of the better ones.
• Happy Birthday to me! I hit the big Six-Oh this year.
• Happy Anniversary to us! Anne and I celebrated ten years of marriage this month.
• Welcome Home! We just got back from our final big trip out to Denver, where we helped Emmi & Kyle pack and move. Five prep days in Denver, then five days driving back here to their new home. We’re already on babysitter duty…

Now that we’re home, I’m easing my way back into the cello — Iris loves when Anne or I play music, by the way. The Native Paths project continues apace, and I just did a volunteer day (my first in weeks) at the D&L archives. And now I’m blogging again! It’s good to be back.

As a bonus , here’s what I wrote ten years ago, and what I wrote fifteen years ago.

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

I’m just hanging out while the furnace guy does some repair work (a little more than routine, but nothing major), waiting to see what the weather decides to be today — I woke up to some drizzly weather, but now the sun looks like it might come out. A soft day, as they might say in the Old Country…

I got in a decent towpath ride on Wednesday, once again killing multiple birds with one stone: I wanted to survey the route for the upcoming Road Scholar ride, maybe taking a few pictures along the way, and I also wanted to get in a D&L trail patrol ride.

Wednesday (like most days this week) was windy and a bit chilly, but the ride was pleasant and the trail surface was much more solid than I would have expected. I guess that with so little snow for the ground to absorb, it didn’t take much for the recent wind to dry things out. There weren’t all that many people on the trail, but I did see my old friend Kim H walking her dog, so we caught up for a bit before I continued on my way. My total distance was about 25 miles, and my total time, what with the wind and all the photography and socializing, was almost three hours.

I saw a few reportable issues on the ride, mostly garbage piles, so I documented them (with QField), and when I got home I tried uploading the incidents to my QGIS “trail reports” project before reporting them for real. (The trail patrol stuff is completely separate from and independent of the QGIS project, but hey I guess I just like doing things twice.) I thought that my recent network improvements would make the upload process smoother, and it probably would have but I use QField so seldom that I mostly just frustrated myself relearning what to do. Eventually I got it done, and also logged my trail patrol report.

Yesterday was another D&L day, volunteering at the Museum. I did some bike work and helped with moving some old exhibits into storage. Dinner was El Jefe take-out at Bonn Place, visiting with Anne’s friend Sarah. Today we’re going to see Chris Smither play at Godfrey Daniels, and then tonight is a St Patrick’s party in Jim Thorpe. Slainté!

I am currently reading three books:

Foster (by Claire Keegan), is about a young girl who is sent to live with another family. The book isn’t a long one (I’m about halfway through); it’s very well written, and a sweet story (so far), but there’s a growing feeling of foreboding, of another shoe about to fall… Anne recommended this to me after she read it. Interestingly, the story takes place in Wexford, Ireland, where some of my ancestors came from, and where we spent some time on our honeymoon.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) is another recommendation from Anne. I just got it from the library last night on my tablet, so I’m only a few pages in but I’m already liking it.

The last book is a loan from Jeff. Evening in the Palace of Reason (James R. Gaines) is about the fateful meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick The Great, the generational and cultural clashes represented by that meeting, and the resulting creation of A Musical Offering. It’s a great story, but the best part of this book is the background material: digressions, biographies, histories of musical theory, the Reformation…

I keep moving from one to the other, to the other. They’re all great.

Some other recent reads:

Still Life by Louise Penny, the first novel in her Inspector Gamache mystery series. Anne loves these books, and so do several of her friends and they’re always talking about them, so I thought I’d give the first one a try. The book was pretty good, and I can see why people like it, but I have to say I’m still not a fan of mysteries — especially here, where the author’s head fakes, misdirection, and general control of the information flow was a bit on the clumsy side. I’ll probably read the second one eventually (where the author may hit her stride a little better), but I’m making no promises about the entire series.