• A Change Of Plans

    My duets got canceled yesterday, and Anne’s meeting got postponed, so we decided to drive up to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary for a hike. We got up there about 11:00, bought memberships so we can go hiking there more often — three visits and the membership pays for itself — and then we did a nice two-hour walk from overlook to overlook. Most of the hiking was pretty easy, but there was one path (the Escarpment Trail) which involved a bit of scrambling so we did get in our adventure exercise. Some photos:

    It was a beautiful, brisk winter day. There were a few others out too, including a volunteer hawk counter at one overlook. He clued us in on what we could see there, but even though we did see one eagle and a northern harrier — they were specks to me, even with binoculars — he told us the raptor migration is pretty much over for the season. (He also explained to us why there was a fake owl in a nearby tree: smaller hawks would attack it in the daytime while they had it at a relative disadvantage, thus coming closer to the overlook for easier observation.) We said our goodbyes, and hiked off to check out some of the other trails and overlooks he told us about.

    After our hike we got lunch at a little general store outside New Tripoli, a place one of the rangers had told us about. A very pleasant day!

    (Today we’re both fighting colds…)


  • Monday

    Happy Birthday to my brother Chris!

    Today is another Iris day. She’s taking a nap right now, so we’re chilling and getting a few things done, like blogging…

    Saturday was our CAT Holiday party. Great crowd, tons of food, and our beer choice (Sam Smith’s Winter Ale) was a hit. Yesterday was Christmas Cookie Bake Day for Emmi and Anne, so Kyle and Emmi were over with Iris for much of the afternoon, then we went over to John & Donna’s later in the evening, to watch Christmas shows with them and Diet. It was a busy, social weekend!

    Up next: I have my cello lesson in a few hours, and tomorrow Donna H and I are playing duets.


  • Saturday

    It’s not quite the countdown to Christmas here yet, but today is the CAT board’s annual holiday party at our house. We’re getting the place ready this morning.

    Yesterday was an Iris day, and we also had a few visitors: next-door neighbor Jim came over with a gift loaf of of bread, and Lisa from Cutters picked up my touring bike — she was borrowing it as a sizing demo for another customer.

    Anne was out on some errands, so Iris and I were on our own when our visitors arrived. We’d just spent some time in the neighborhood, and also in the backyard where we’d walked all over some fallen persimmons — it was all in our shoes like dog poop. We came inside and I took our shoes off, and that’s when I noticed that Iris’s hat was missing. Uh-oh, it could be anywhere in the neighborhood, but hopefully it was just out back — we went outside and it was right in the wet grass, and now my socks were wet from the rescue so I took them off too.

    I got Iris’s shoes cleaned and back on her feet, but still hadn’t dealt with my footwear when our visitors arrived. So there I was, barefoot outside in December, holding Iris and a loaf of bread and chatting like it was the most normal thing ever. At this point, I guess it kind of is…

    (Lisa texted later– they got the sale!)

    Not much else going on.


  • Slow Ride, No Snow

    I got in a towpath ride yesterday: 23.8 miles in 2:21. Not my fastest but hey it’s winter-ish… I wanted to ride in the falling snow, but by the time I got my butt out the door the snow had stopped. Still, it was a really nice ride, and very pretty if you know how to appreciate these kinds of gray days. I was a bit surprised how much it took out of me, even considering where we are in the season — my legs were burning when I was done, on a ride I thought I could do in my sleep. Oh well, you start from where you are, and my legs tell me I got some exercise points yesterday.


  • Some Quick Book Reviews

    December 7th, a day that lives in infamy. It’s also the second day in a row for snow in the morning. Nothing is sticking, it’s still too warm, but it sure does look nice. Anyway…

    I spent a good portion of November fighting with recurring colds, sinus infections and the like. Just before the wedding trip I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics; the doctor said that there was probably some underlying virus causing the recurrent secondary infections, so she advised rest and fluids. I was pretty aggressive about the “rest” before our trip, and that (plus the antibiotics) pulled me through the weekend, but I still had a lot of rest/recovery to get done…

    I filled my downtime, at home and in Boston, with a few e-books:

    Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway: This is the same author who wrote Titanium Noir, and our library has most, maybe all, of his books so I thought I’d check him out a bit more. (Fun fact: “Nick Harkaway” is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell; his father David Cornwell was also a novelist — and his pseudonym was “John le Carré.”)

    Angelmaker is not science fiction; it’s more like a gangster story, with fantasy elements but set in our world, modern London in particular — the story world was well built, and a very pleasant place to visit. The story itself (no spoilers) moves pretty quickly to a very satisfying ending.

    I liked this enough that I took out another of his novels from the library.

    Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway: Tigerman is complicated, and a bit darker/sadder than either of the other Nick Harkaway books I read, but like them it was also a fast moving semi-thriller, a sort of murder mystery that spins wildly out of control. It’s set in the present time on a fictional island, without too much science fiction — though there is an industrial pollution apocalypse looming over the island — but it uses comic book themes as framing, something I don’t know much about so I may have missed a few nuances along the way.

    Like I said, this novel was darker, but it was also more complicated and emotionally deeper than either of the other two, with a somber but still satisfying ending — it was the best of the three.

    Echopraxia, by Peter Watts: This is sometimes called a “sidequel” to Blindsight, not quite sequel or prequel but set at about the same time as the events in the first book. So it’s a hard sci-fi story with a lot of biology overtones, set in a post-human, near future dystopia. The cast features an escaped vampire, a hive mind, the father of the previous book’s protagonist, and a somewhat hapless “baseline” human biologist along for the ride to near-solar orbit, where they are again up against that enigmatic alien civilization.

    This is very much a “careful what you wish for” tale about the Singularity, and was a harder, meatier, slower read than the Nick Harkaway books, which sometimes means “better,” but while it was a great read I think the Harkaway books were better.

    Journey To The Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, by Stephen Budiansky: My usual MO with library e-books is to really get into it with one or a streak of fiction choices, search for more and find myself overwhelmed by unfamiliar authors and titles, and go select instead some non-fiction that looks interesting. Then I either get bored or annoyed, and I drop the book. I took out this book half expecting the same thing to happen, but I forgot that biographies, though non-fiction, are stories and can hold my attention as well as any novel…

    Kurt Gödel was a member of the Vienna Circle, or some Vienna Circle, and was the brilliant mathematician who proved that mathematics could not be reduced to rote logic — there would always be true mathematical statements that could not be proved. (This raised a bit of a stir, needless to say, just as the attempt to finally get mathematics on a rigorous, purely logical basis seemed to be reaching its culmination.) That much I knew about him, but this fleshed him out quite a bit more: his colleagues, friends and rivals in Vienna and the academic world, his marriage, his escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, his years at the Institute for Advanced Study and his friendship with Albert Einstein, his struggles with mental illness, and his eventual death from self-starvation.

    The book was based on a lot of recent research (by the author) in Gödel’s papers and archives, and did a great job describing the man, his work and his world. I was pretty happy with this one.

    I’m currently feeling better and I’m more active, and I am now on the hunt for my next book. I just downloaded John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I’ll let you know.

    PS: WXPN is doing the “885 Best Songs by Women (As Chosen By You)” this week. Right now they are somewhere in the low 600’s and the ladies are killing it. Groove is in the heart, baby!


  • Memoria Mortuorum

    Mike, Before a Ride in Jim Thorpe, 1993

    I just realized this, so I thought I’d note the day: today is the twentieth anniversary of my friend Mike Kucher’s death. This is what I wrote about about it not long after, and this is a little photo collage I put together for his fiancee. It seems like a thousand years ago.

    Rest in peace, brother.


  • Obsidian Dreams

    So I haven’t been writing much, here, but I have been experimenting with some software I ran across called Obsidian. Billed as a “flexible writing app” and lauded as “a second brain,” it’s basically a markdown enabled text editor with built-in file linking structure — almost like a simplified reinvention of the Web on your local machine. It’s used as a note-taking or idea-generating app, and it’s generated a lot of hype in some circles…

    I’m currently giving it a go, using it to document all the moving parts in my Native Paths project, and also to organize my thoughts for a postmortem of my experiences with the Road Scholar program.

    I find the app pretty easy to use (for my simple purposes), and I have to say it’s really nice and well-made, it’s an actual pleasure to use but I’m struggling to see where all the hype comes from. Time will tell, and maybe I’ll see more as I use it more and explore all the other features.


  • Scenes From A Wedding


    Extra! Extra!

    Our nephew’s wedding was the big November event in our extended family. Greg and Emily had their wedding just outside Boston, the central location for the extended families and also near where they live. Anne and I drove up with her sister Lorraine on Friday, and met parents-of-the-groom Joe & Laura and a few others for a tour of the Samuel Adams Brewery. After that, and after checking into the hotel and meeting up with more people, a big group of us went out to dinner before walking over to the pre-game party at a nearby pub.

    Much shenanigans ensued, and a good time was had by all…

    The wedding was Saturday, at a venue just outside Boston proper. I did not get many pictures of the ceremony itself, but I did get a few sweet shots of the family at the reception.

    I put the camera away after the the eating and dancing started in earnest, but rest assured another good time was had.

    Congratulations, Emily and Greg!

    The next morning we — us, Ben & Jenni, Lorraine, and Joe & Laura and Alex — took a walk over to the Italian section in Boston’s North End for cannolis and pizza, and then it was time for all our long trips home.


  • And The Days Go By

    Wow, it’s been a month; all of November I was running silent. Plenty has happened, which I’ll I’ll write about in other posts, but here as an icebreaker is an Iris photo update:

    This was at our rescheduled Halloween Parade, one week after the original parade was rained out. No photos, but she enjoyed watching Trick or Treat from our porch, and she liked the parade too, especially the school bands, and especially especially the percussion sections…

    I watched her one morning about a week ago, and this is how we spent the time, at least until it was time to go to the playground. Snacktime, and some time with her “drumset” — the mixing bowls, which she likes to bang around and also stack and unstack.

    We watched her yesterday, and we had fun playing with her and her makeshift “toys.” Friends visited later in the day and the weather turned unexpectedly nice, so we all took a walk over to the playground. She and her personality are both getting so big!


  • Looking Back At Looking Back

    I’m currently battling a cold/sinus thing, no COVID according to the test (and from what I see I’d guess it’s a bacterial infection anyway), but I still feel pretty shitty: stuffy nose, sore throat, headache and stomach ache, and just feeling really tired. I’ve been hanging indoors for the past two days, sleeping and working on my Native Paths project, which is now almost halfway through the foot segments. (The canal museum is doing their next project on native paths in the Corridor, so it’ll be interesting to see their take.)

    Meantime, here is what I wrote, ten years ago, about my first bike race. Enjoy!