“Come on, Doc, it’s not science! When it happens, it just hits you. It’s like lightning.” – Marty McFly, Back to the Future Part III
A couple nights before my buddy’s wedding, I was at his house with a bunch of other guys for a time of toasting, roasting, and advice-giving. One thing I shared was how immediately evident it was to me that the couple was The Real Deal, and how a similar certainty hit me like a bolt of lightning when I first met my future wife.
Later on, the wedding reception was held at Ace Eat Serve, a ping pong hall in a converted auto garage serving pan-Asian cuisine. (Loved the amazing food and the novelty of playing ping pong at a wedding.) The ping pong tables outside were made of concrete and had metal nets with Ace’s lightning logo cut through them, which in the sunlight looked like this:
It’s almost as if I was at the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.
Got to visit Denver for the second time this year for a friend’s wedding. While there another Denver friend brought me on a walking tour of the Crush Walls urban art festival in the RiNo neighborhood, where we saw some really cool graffiti:
Spent a few days in the Northwoods of Wisconsin on a fishing trip with my dad and friends. Beautiful weather, fresh air, fishing, a rental cabin, film noir in the evenings. Not bad livin’.
I took a few photos and videos along the way. The tree stumps outside our rental cabin had some nice colors:
This was the view for most of the trip:
We mostly saw walleye and croppies, with a few bass and northerns as well.
We went to Chippewa Inn for dinner one night. Somehow it was my first time at one of Wisconsin’s famous supper clubs. I had Bavarian goulash with spaetzle and a Moon Man because when in Wisconsin… :
I guess I love trees:
Here’s a GIF of the water off the dock, which that morning was Malickian:
And another GIF from the rental boat, which stayed smooth and steady even at high speeds:
I had the honor of being in a college friend’s wedding in Denver last week. My wife and I made a vacation of it and hit up several spots in Colorado.
For extended trips we usually put together an itinerary with important travel info; Jenny thought of the title and I contributed the images:
We flew in, got our rental car, then headed to the mountains, accompanied by Mr. “Rocky Mountain High” himself. Our first stop was the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park:
We didn’t stick around, however, as we soon embarked on a hike toward the Ouzel Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park. We didn’t make it to the falls, but still soaked in the views and the clean air:
We then headed to Boulder and stayed the night at the Hotel Boulderado, which maintains its original Edwardian-era style and even a working Otis elevator. Supposedly the hotel is haunted. All I know is their creepy chair game was solid:
We stopped at the post office in Boulder, which has some sweet PO boxes:
The Boulder Public Library was another highlight. My wife took pictures of everything, but I only managed the windows:
On Tuesday we drove to Manitou Springs and stayed in a gorgeous Airbnb cabin in the mountains near a friend of mine. The next day was the Fourth of July, so to celebrate we headed to Paint Mines Interpretive Park, outside of Colorado Springs. It was a scorching hot and sunny day, but above all I’ll remember the absolute quiet as we walked through the maze of hoodoos and colorful clay formations. You can find plenty of amazing photos of them online, but here are two I took from it:
It was then back to Denver for the wedding weekend. We enjoyed the nightlife around RiNo, including Odell Brewing Company:
and knockout at Gerard’s Pool Hall:
Finally the wedding arrived. I wasn’t focused on getting good pictures, as I knew the professionals would take care of that. But here’s one in the venue (which hosted the ceremony and reception) of the bridesmaids awaiting the couple after their First Look:
I’ve been to Colorado a few times before, but this trip was especially fun given the variety of activities, the good weather, and quality time with great friends.
I’d heard a lot of great things about Asheville, North Carolina, so my wife and I finally made a trip there happen to meet up with some Durham friends for a long weekend in the mountains. Surprise: It was wondrous!
Our Airbnb was a cabin on a mountain farm in nearby Black Mountain, complete with sheep named Frodo, Samwise, Arwen, and Twiggy (the last one was named by previous owners). This was the view the first morning:
We missed Peak Fall foliage, but there was still plenty of color to mix with the barren branches:
And cozy morning frosts—very Hygge™ indeed:
One morning we hiked up Lookout Mountain in Montreat based on the recommendation of our Airbnb host. We were not disappointed by the Misty Mountain-esque view:
Asheville proper offered lots of walkable streets, good southern food—had chicken & waffles for the first time—and, among other Liberal College Town accoutrements, several “poems while you wait” street typists:
We flew into Atlanta and drove up to Asheville through South Carolina, but on the way back we drove through the Great Smoky Mountains. We did this not only to enjoy the gorgeous terrain but to stop and see the remnants of Camp Toccoa, the World War II paratroopers training camp made famous by Band of Brothers:
The camp site was closed, but we could see the famous “3 miles up, 3 miles down” Currahee Mountain from town.
I took pictures on a few other occasions, but so often my phone pictures failed to capture what I saw with my own eyes. That’s OK: being there in the moment was reward enough, as was hanging with friends, finally seeing Asheville, and getting to enjoy a crisp autumn weekend in Appalachia.
One of the many things I love about fall and winter is sunrise happens later in the morning, thus allowing me to go for a run in the darkness of the morning without having to get up at WHAT o’clock. On a recent run I broke my rule about not taking pictures of the sunrise or sunset. I was running to the lake as usual and saw this guy standing atop the large boulders buttressing the shore:
Several people along my route were gazing at and taking pictures of the sunrise. It occurred to me then that if there’s ever an apocalyptic event and I’m somehow stranded with strangers, I’d like to be stranded with the kind of people who wake up early to photograph the sunrise.
Here is the same sunrise one minute later, made more dramatic by my iPhone camera viewing it through a playground and trees:
Plus a bonus pic atop a viewing station at Blue Mounds State Park in Wisconsin:
Spotted this sign on a run through a lakeshore park. “Dogs” and “litter” came after, but feel free to fill in the blank with better words. Or just leave it as is and use it as a maxim for life.
Just for fun I’ve started turning videos I take into GIFs using Giphy’s super easy GIF maker.
This one was on a flight descending into Raleigh, North Carolina. The rain was streaking on the window like that for only about 10 seconds, so I’m glad I had my phone ready:
The breeze and sunlight was dancing nicely with the makeshift curtain in our bedroom window:
On a recent morning run to the lakeshore the water was really choppy, more so than I think I’ve ever seen it. The waves were crashing against the boulders that buttress the shore and splashing onto the sidewalk. Since I couldn’t predict when and where and how high the waves would crash, I planted myself at a pleasingly symmetrical position and hit record. This is about 10 seconds out of a 40-second clip. As usual the camera fails to capture the stunning color and spectacle of what my eyes saw:
And one photo, from a family reunion/memorial in West Virginia:
We just got back from a long weekend in Durham, North Carolina, for a friend’s wedding. I had a great time bummin’ around the area while my wife was busy on bridesmaid duty. Had some barbecue, heard some blues, and took a few pictures…
at Ponysaurus Brewing:
at Carolina Soul Records, where I found some Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, and a Stax Records compilation:
at Stagville, one of the largest plantations in the antebellum South—this one was in the “Great Barn”:
I call this one “Freedom”:
And there was the unintentional irony of a Master lock on one of the preserved slave cabins:
The wedding reception was in a beautiful building near the Eno River State Park:
And our last stop before our flight home was Duke University’s “chapel”, which, come on, is actually a cathedral of epic proportions:
This happens to me all the time: I hear about a book (or movie or album, but usually book) and find it at my library, then I read it and see mention of another book or figure, sending me off into that direction, where I find another book to read. And so on. I’ll call it the Wikipedia Effect, which is a little less hippie-dippie than calling it the Everything Is Connected Effect, though it’s of the same spirit.
This time, I listened to the 99% Invisible episode on the U.S. Post Office, based on Winifred Gallagher’s new book How the Post Office Created America: A History, which I went to look at in the stacks. I didn’t end up checking it out, but as my eyes wandered a little farther down the shelf I did see an intriguing title: A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon.
Calling the story “heroic” is a bit much, but it’s a quick and well-done story of the small group of monied men in mid-eighteenth-century New York who staked their fortunes on basically willing the oceanic cable into being, even after some pretty serious setbacks. It’s a good companion with Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, a broader history of the invention of telegraphy.
I spotted it on a shelf at the library when I was looking for something completely different—is there a word for serendipity striking in the library? Librindipity?—but my interest in it made me realize I’m intrigued by the stories of how innovative technologies came into being.
In addition to these two books about the telegraph, I’ve already read a few books I think fit into this theme of the development of a revolutionary technology or notable technical achievement:
Screw and screwdriver (One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski)
Chairs (Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair by Witold Rybczynski)
Photography (River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit)
Some of these were heralded in their time, known right away to be revolutionary, but some were not. I’m interested in both: how things came into being whether we noticed them or not.
A quick brainstorm yielded a few more ideas for future reading along these lines. (I’ll need a hashtag for when I catch up with these. Let’s go with #TechnicallyFirst). There’s no guarantee I’ll read these; they’re just ideas gathered in one place for future reference:
Transcontinental Railroad (Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen Ambrose)
Interstate Highways (The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift)
Electricity (Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes)
Pencils (The Pencil: A History Of Design And Circumstance by Henry Petroski)
Will have to keep adding to the list. But I thank A Thread Across the Ocean for sending me down this path, wherever it leads.
This is part 3 of pictures from my summer trip to Scandinavia (previously: Finland and Sweden). I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but these are my favorites from Norway.
This is part 2 of pictures from my summer trip to Scandinavia (pics from Finland here). I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but these are my favorites from Stockholm and greater Sweden:
Just got back from a two-week trip to Scandinavia, through Finland, Sweden, and Norway. I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but first up here are my favorites from Finland:
Flying above Idaho, returning from Portland. I usually don’t take pictures from airplanes, but I’m a sucker for mountains, especially ones as pretty as these. They sparkled:
Chicago at sunset, as lonesome and resolute as the celestial orb overlooking it:
William Fitzsimmons concert. I liked the natural quadrants that formed outward from the violinist, and the colors exaggerating those divisions:
Flower Power, a photo series from photographer Sophie Gamand, aims to portray pit bulls in a different light and captures the sweet, loving dog beneath the oft-misunderstood exterior:
Victims of prejudices, uneducated laws and urban tales that associate them with ultra violence, they are probably the most misunderstood dogs. Pit bulls, like any terrier dogs, are strong and powerful animals. There is no denying that. But power does not necessarily mean violence. Most pit bulls are peaceful and sweet love bugs. Their power is in their snuggles and unconditional love.
