Monthly Archives: July 2010

The Kids Are All Right

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Well it is pretty much official, Dave is certain that he’ll get the job at the National Institute of Health (NIH).  On Friday, he flew from Rochester to Maryland, interviewed and made a presentation on his research work.  He still has to cajole two letters of recommendation out of his professors and complete the application process to make it official.

After he completes that process the real fun begins.  Dave has to figure out where he is going to live and how he is going to get around town and how he is going to get all of his stuff there.  The deal with his friend’s Jetta fell through, can you say a new car?  Dave can.   😮

Dave is uncertain now whether he will be able to join us at the Cabin this summer.  He has to finish up his work at Rochester and begin his year-long stint at NIH soon enough so that in the fall of 2011 he can enroll and start graduate school on time.  Where ever that might be.

I asked Dave what he was going to be doing at NIH and he started to explain, then stopped.  He promised to send an email explaining things.  He probably figures that this way he wouldn’t have deal with too many dumb questions.

Dan spends his days alternating between packing up his apartment, moving stuff into the basement and completing his registration and enrollment to CalArts.  He and Annie and Anne and Susan all depart for California a week from today.  And then I’ll be left home alone again.

Chris sent me the lovely following picture of the entrance to Joe Rombi’s, Chris and my folk’s favorite restaurant.  It is located in Pacific Grove.  I’ve been there and it is really quite nice.

Anne and I went out to the movies Friday night.  We went to go see the new movie, The Kids Are All Right.  The movie stars Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo.  The following synopsis is from IMDb:

Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) are in a long-term, committed, loving but by no means perfect relationship.  They have two teen-aged children, Joni and Laser.  Joni and Laser are also half-siblings, having the same unknown sperm donor father.  Joni now eighteen contacts their sperm donor father.  He is late thirty-something Paul (Ruffalo), a co-op farmer and restaurateur.  After Joni and Laser meet with Paul, Nic and Jules learn what their children have done.

Although the movie features the two principal actresses as a lesbian couple, the movie is less about gay life than it is about marriage.  The gay community is actually all up in arms about the movie’s  portrayal of middle age married (gay) sex.  “The Moms” worry about and nag their kids: about the friends that they choose, their unwritten thank you cards and most humorously about their son’s sexual orientation.  Nic the doctor is the bread-winner, while Jules has played the role of the stay at home mom.  It is almost the picture perfect representation of a story book 21st century family, mother, mother, son and daughter.  Then in marches the buffalo, Paul, and he cracks the fissures that are already there wide open. 

Marriage is about raising children.  Nic and Jules have done that.  Marriage is also a marathon.  You need to be able to go the distance.  I’m told that when you run a marathon you eventually hit what is called the wall.  Every runner that wants to finish their marathon must summon up the strength to break through their wall.

Marriages sometimes face major obstacles like the wall, but they are more commonly torn apart by the mile after mile, year after year regime of daily running.  It is harder to run in tandem than it is to run alone.  Your partner is either running too fast or too slow.  Either way you find yourself off of your best pace.

In the film Nic and Jules find their wall in Paul.  Crashing through their marathon wall gives them the what they need to re-seam their marriage’s cracks and gaps.  Given the lighthearted tone of the movie, I don’t think that it is giving away too much to relate the son’s sage advice to the Moms, “You two should get back together, you both are too old to get a divorce.”

This is the best movie that I have seen this year.  If it doesn’t win gobs of nominations, then I’m not watching the Oscars next year.  It is a shame to pit Bening against Moore in the same movie.  They’ll likely split the Oscar vote.  My vote goes for Moore.

Spies of the Balkans

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Alan Furst is an author of historical spy novels set just prior to and during the Second World War.  He has written eleven novels in this genre and I have read them all.  His latest work is Spies of the Balkans.  Anyone of these novels could substitute as the script for the movie Casablanca.  Although there are few Americans in these books, the rest of the polyglot cast is present and did I mention Nazis?  Yes, there are always lots of Nazis.

From his first novel in this genre, Night Soldiers, to his most recent, there are similarities between the different stories that border upon repetition.  Furst dances close to this line, but never crosses it.  Prototypical of this dance is his use of the Paris Brasserie, Heininger, as a scene in every one of his novels.  In each book this scene is populated by that novel’s main character, but in each book that character’s context is different.  For some it is a one time visit, for others it is a favorite meeting place.  In the latter case there are other occupants of the Brasserie that sometimes raise the protagonist’s suspicion.  I suspect that a careful cross referencing of Furst’s books will find a correlation between the suspicious glances of one book’s character with that of another’s.

What makes Furst’s novels compelling is the detail with which he paints his scenes.  He garners these details from period books by foreign correspondents.  According to Furst:

Their books were always called “Flames Over Europe.” They always told people exactly what was going to happen and they were never believed.

This is a genre that I am naturally susceptible to, Spies and Nazis and Bears, Oh my! 

The following synopsis is derived from Borders, where I buy all my books:

Set in Greece in 1940, Spies of the Balkans, focuses on Costa Zannis, a senior Salonika police official known for his honesty and discretion.  As the Nazis’ intentions for Europe’s Jews becomes clear, Zannis goes out of his way to aid refugees seeking to escape Germany.  When Mussolini invades Greece, Zannis joins the army, where he meets Captain Marko Pavlic, who as a policeman in Zagreb investigated crimes committed by Croatian fascists. With their similar politics, Zannis and Pavlic soon become friends and allies. Subtle details foreshadow the coming Nazi crimes.

Did I mention that I liked the book?

Yellowstone Birds

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Regular readers of this blog you knew that it had to be coming and today it has arrived, the birds of Yellowstone.  Take solace in the fact that after this trip I have hit you with them all in one fell swoop, so to speak, rather than drawing it out over a week or so.  Some of the birds are pictured quite close, but most of them are at a fair distance.  Anyway, enjoy!

I’m still giddy over my Fresh Press nomination on Tuesday morning, especially so since this is the second such nomination this year.  I the space of 24-hours I got 2800 hits and over sixty comments.  I especially pleased with the comments because unlike the first time these comments often say more than just nice pictures.  I especially liked the comment that described herding buffalo using a large tractor or maybe even a bulldozer.

I’ve done the math on what are the odds of anyone person’s blog being picked in a year as a Fresh Pressed and have calculated that the odds are one in a hundred (278K WordPress.com blogs / 12 Fresh Pressed blogs / 5 days per week / 50 weeks).  One in a hundred is not all that steep of odds, but if you calculate the combination of a given Fresh Pressed blog being selected again then the odds climb to one in ten-thousand.  Maybe there is more than luck involved in our selection.  Could it be quality?  As you can probably tell, I am well full of myself.  I promise to get over it soon, just maybe not soon enough.

Although Anne and I are back in Saint Louis for a while that doesn’t mean that the rest of the family is stationary.  On Friday, Dave flies from Rochester to Washington DC.  This is an interview trip.  He is interviewing for a year long internship at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD.  He plans on entering graduate school in the fall of 2011.  He is expected to make a presentation on Friday, so I guess that he will have to sing for his supper.

Dan, number one son, is also getting ready to hit the road.  He is busily packing up all his cares and woes for his planned launch westward at the end of next week.  I’ve been scouring all the copier stations for empty paper boxes.  Not this weekend, but nest weekend, Dan and Annie and Dan and Annie’s moms will saddle up the wagon train and start heading west.  Go west young man and woman!  But don’t forget to bring your mothers.  😉

Second Pressing

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I woke up and by the time that I was in the shower I had an idea for today’s post.  It usually doesn’t work that way.  My idea involved a discussion of a book that I have just read and a play that I have just seen and their relationship, but then fate intervened.  Joy of joy or maybe more accurately Joy of WordPress.com reached down from on high and promoted this little blog to WordPress’ Fresh Pressed page.  Joy is the self-proclaimed “Editorial Czar” of WordPress.com and the defacto Fresh Pressed picker. 

This is the second time that Joy has picked this blog this year.  The first time was in April with a post entitled The Bike Stalker.  That was a mysterious and magical event.  I didn’t know what was happening at first and then when I realized what it was, I got giddy over it.  I remember bicycling on a springtime Saturday morning in Madison County, IL and hearing my iPhone tone off the new comments as Anne and I ticked off the miles.

This time I was more aware.  In between Jane’s comment and the end of my commute ten more comments were waiting to be moderated.  I’ve seen this show before.  To that end I would like to take this opportunity to promote Anne’s and my MS-150 bicycling charity pages.  Any donations would be appreciated.  They are all for a good cause, fighting Multiple Sclerosis.  Regular readers and former donors don’t be shy.  You know who you are.  😉

The pictures and the movie with this post are all about the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River.  It is just a little bit bigger than its neighbor, the upper falls.  The five of us, Anne, Jay, Carl, Ashlan and myself all marched down six-hundred feet to take these pictures and more importantly we all marched up again.   The following ditty covers the subject well:

The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

Do NOT Approach Buffalo

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I returned to work on Monday.  One nice thing about going back to work after a really great vacation is that you get to tell all of your co-workers about it.  I enjoyed doing that and everyone seemed to enjoy hearing about it too.  One thing that I learned from my co-workers was that last Friday a woman was gored by a buffalo in Yellowstone.  She was recording a video when it happened.  It is shown below.  You can even hear her speculate during the video about what will soon be her fate.

When you purchase your ticket to enter Yellowstone, you are given a map of the park, a copy of the park’s paper and a car mirror hangtag.  The mirror tag warns visitors of two common dangers that are to be found in the park.  One side deals with the danger around the geothermal areas of the park.  This side has the equation, thermal areas = thin crust and is followed by the corollary, boiling water lies beneath.  More pertinent to this discussion is the other side of this hangtag.  This side warns, many visitors have been gored by buffalo, further, buffalo can run three times faster than you can! 

Before I left work for vacation one of my co-workers warned me to lookout for those people who walk around with a big I floating over their heads.  My expression must have transmitted my lack of comprehension, because he then explained that the floating I stood for idiot and that you did not want to be near them.  I took his advice with a grain of salt, not realizing at the time how accurate his warning was.

On Anne’s and mine first day in Yellowstone we met some of those people, the ones with the floating I hovering over his head.  We were in Old Faithful basin, which is mostly traversed via raised board walks.  Remember the mirror hangtag’s first warning?  On our out bound leg, I spotted a lone buffalo in the bushes along the edge of the geothermal area that we were exploring.  We took its photo and then continued on down the boardwalk.  When we turned around and were on our way back to the car we reached a point where said buffalo had wandered very close to the boardwalk.

We elected not to attempt to run the gauntlet so to speak, but instead we doubled back and took an alternative path.  Several gentlemen, each with a floating I above their heads did run the gauntlet.  The first one to do it passed the buffalo all the while speaking to it as he would his dog, “Good boy, Good boy.”  They were more fortunate than the woman in the YouTube video.  At the very least, they were luckier than her in that no one threw anything at the buffalo as they approached.

Leaving Yellowstone

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Sunday morning we said goodbye to Carl, Jay and Ashlan.  We left West Yellowstone, heading west.  We were heading to Salt Lake City to catch a plane.  Jay and company headed back into the park on their way to Colorado. 

We quickly turned south into Idaho.  The first part of our drive was through national forest land, two lane roads, with lots of small towns to slow down for.  I didn’t mind though, because after a week of national park driving even slowing down to 45 MPH still felt like going fast.  Then we hit the interstate.  You got to love a 75 MPH speed limit.  We made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

Our route back to Saint Louis connected through Las Vegas.  When we left West Yellowstone the temperature was 55 °F.  It was 85 °F in Salt Lake City and it was 108 °F in Las Vegas. 

I haven’t been to Las Vegas for so long, that I can’t remember.  I had a window seat and got a good view of the strip on our final approach.  The whole town looked hot, dry and dusty, a city built upon broken dreams and five dollar lobster.  The airport had slot machines in it, which I had expected.  What I had not expected were their number and the overall garishness of their appearance.  I was a bit put off by them and didn’t even wager the quarter that I had planed to.  It just seemed a waste of money.

We boarded our flight to Saint Louis and were seated when the captain announce over the PA that we were just waiting for one more passenger.  That passenger, Will, arrived and proposed to flight attendant Emily, who accepted.  They kissed and embraced at the front of the aircraft, in front of everybody and to a round of applause.  The captain came on again and welcomed everyone to Southwest Airlines, the love airlines.