So this is where I was last night. In a church. At the Court of Honor for a new-minted Eagle Scout, Jordy, son of one of my best friends. Now, I know there are people hereabouts who did the whole Boy Scout thing. But this is all new and foreign to me. When I was the age a boy might become an Eagle, I considered the entire business of uniformed do-gooding and mandated wholesomeness fascistic. I considered the few boys who took that path to be complete dorks. Of the twelve traits listed on the left side of that program,…
Category: Rural and small-town living
Life far from freeways, Starbucks, malls, and other benefits/distractions
Cough …. cough … sputter. I knew it was a mistake the other day when I boasted about Old Blue’s sterling reliability. Sputter … gasp. Suddenly I feel the horsepower of a wooden go-kart under my right foot. Cough. But all is well. Though I’m miles from home, I’m in an area I know. And right there’s the parking lot of a defunct neighborhood c-store. I coast in as the engine finally dies. After a moment of “Ohshit, what now?” I call R., an old faithful shade-tree mechanic who lives only a few miles from where Old Blue now refuses…
Yesterday evening as darkness fell, I went to close the blinds and discovered the planet Venus beaming in my face. Then there was tiny red Mars above and to the left. This time of year it’s rare to see anything in the sky except clouds and occasionally the obscured light of the moon. So behind am I on my astronomy that I had to doublecheck that it was Venus, not Jupiter, that bright and that high above the horizon. The website I consulted even said Mercury should have been somewhere in view, but there were hills in the way. I…
Happy Friday, everyone. Here, for your perusal are a few nice finds and random thoughts. —– I found the above image via Gab.ai, which is now having an influx of libertarians, anarchists, and pro-gunners following the infamous Twitter purge. —– And here’s a polar bear patting a sled dog. This isn’t the first polar-bear-and-dog buddy image on the ‘Net. But it may be the most lovable. —– Seems everybody’s got a hopeful agenda for Donald Trump, who remains (despite media certainty that he’s Adolf Hitler reborn) quite the blank slate. Some of those hopeful agendas are worth getting behind. But…
The evening before election day, Ava and I walked down to the estuary, sat on a pier, and watched the fishing boats come in. The sky was cloud-studded but dry, the weather shirt-sleeve warm. The light resembled a luminist painting. The morning of election day, we walked down and watched the boats go out again under the same low, dry, radiant sky, while sharing a buttery croissant from the local tea shop. I thought, not for the first or last time, “It doesn’t matter whose butt gets planted in the Oval Office. This doesn’t change. This is my place and…
… it’s a good wake-up call for anybody who might face a widespread natural disaster (which is, of course, everybody). Last summer, a vast exercise called Cascadia Rising was quietly carried out through the Northwest. For government types and emergency-service providers only, it made barely a bump in the consciousness of ordinary people — which may prove to be the ultimate flaw in its design, but that’s a question for another day. Cascadia Rising was designed to test emergency response in event of a “full rip” earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone. Full-rip means a monster, a megaquake, 9.0 or…
This did not happen in my neighborhood. Nor this. Both did happen in yesterday’s predicted monster storm. But such damage was sporadic, not widespread. I’m still hoping to hear good news from blog readers to the north of Seattle, especially from the couple I know of who enjoy waterfront living. Which may not have been all that enjoyable yesterday. But for a lot of us the storm was … meh. And that’s a good thing. Where I am, it arrived about four hours later than forecast. Unusual, because whatever else does or doesn’t happen, you can often set your watch…
Wild, wild morning. Awoke in the dark to flashes of lightning. A tornado warning had just been issued and, that quickly, canceled. Soon, the phone buzzed with texts from Furrydoc making sure I was okay and all prepped up for what’s to come. (She always worries about me. She actually lives in a more exposed and vulnerable spot than I do, but she has Boy Scouts in the family and a ready bug-out plan.) Both of us have our storm preps pretty much covered. She mentioned filling the empty space in her freezer and fridge with jugs of water; a…