Category: Like Life

No more elephant hunting

last parking spaceLast week I donated Alberta, my venerable Ford Explorer, to one of my local public radio stations. She and I had a good run: we traveled (usually on birding/hiking trips) to Louisiana, Key West, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, twice to the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape May, several trips to Delmarva. She carried set pieces to a theater competition in Geneva, N.Y.; we took Mom birding in southeastern Indiana; during nesting season, my waders were always in the cargo area.

that scrapeThe biggest body damage she sustained was a scrape in the driver’s side rear fender: I ran into a support column in an otherwise empty parking structure in Vienna. Another time, a driver banged into her in Falls Church, but he nosed down and hit her square in the hub cap: you can’t see the damage at all.

208KIt was the multiple trips to the shop that did her in: she was on her third transmission; we repaired the brakes last October only to have them fail again in May. But we still got past 200K miles before Della came on the scene, and we finished up with 208469.4. I will miss her.

Postcards from Ohio: 1

Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week. First stop was Bexley in the Columbus suburbs to visit friends. On our way out of town we stopped at the Cherbourg Bakery, which makes an excellent line of tasty treats, all of them gluten-free and Leta-friendly.

254Next to our parking space on Main Street, we found a mileage marker from the original National Road. We had covered the 254 miles from Cumberland much more quickly than those who traveled before us. Distances from Wheeling, to the east, and nearby Columbus, just 3-1/2 miles to the west, are somewhat legible in this image. (Point and shoots don’t do well with inscribed stone.)

Sweet music

February 01, 2012

* * *

Dear David L Gorsline :

This letter is to acknowledge that Chase has received the funds to pay off your mortgage loan referenced above. Chase will forward an original executed release of lien for recording to the recorder’s office in the county where the property is located.

* * *

If Chase collected escrow funds for paying your mortgage taxes or insurance, you are now responsible for payment of these items.

On the radio: 7

Stacey tapped me for a bit of a challenge: voiceovers for five audio clips (at NPR we call them “actualities”) from Zhou Youguang, to be part of Louisa Lim’s profile of him for today’s All Things Considered. Zhou headed up the committee that devised the pinyin system, thereby reforming the Roman transcription of Chinese characters. Stacey asked for an older man’s voice, seeing as how Zhou is 50 years older than me (his spelling system was published when I was two years old). Older, but spry and mirthful. I hope I gave her what she was looking for; in any event, the completed piece sounds like magic.

I think this is the only time that I will voiceover someone who has his own Wikipedia article. I am deeply honored to have worked on the story.

Holiday weekend

zoom zoomzoom zoom zoomLast weekend was a time of watching things go very fast—the Baltimore Grand Prix, from our grandstand on Pratt Street. The people we saw on the office building roofs had the best vantage point. Leta was bemused by the sponsorship of Braille Battery.

Pekoe at easeAnd for watching things that go much slower, but not necessarily quieter. Pekoe’s purr has been known to approach the triple-digit decibel range.

Virginia earthquake 23 August 2011

needed a new clock anywaya little cleanup to doAt home, the quake left a little evidence of its passing. In the basement, some coffee cans of picture framing hardware spilled from the top of a high shelf, and a clock likewise fell.

Upstairs in the back bedroom a lamp tipped over and a lava lamp hit the deck. I am very grateful it fell on carpet and did not smash. Everything else looks just like I left it this morning. The various cracks in the walls, the result of the house’s settling ever since I started loading my belongings into it twenty years ago, are no worse than before.

On the radio: 6

Stacey asked me to do a voiceover for the first part of Jason Beaubien’s three-part report on the harrowing journey that Central American migrants make across Mexico, so they can then cross (illegally) into the United States to find family and work. I voiced the worker Hector Valdez, who is remarkably low-key about the prospect of being kidnapped by gangsters; he’s introduced at 2:00. And who’s that we hear near the end of segment? Stacey herself!

The entire series is worth a listen (part two, part three), as well as Beaubien’s reporter’s notebook post:

I’d dozed off on what the local media have dubbed “the Highway of Death.” I jerk awake and immediately feel for my backpack on the floor of the bus. My bag is still there.

The bus has come to a sudden stop and several young men are coming up the front stairs. A few weeks earlier, hijackers, allegedly from the Zetas cartel, had been boarding buses on this road, pulling off migrants, bashing their heads in with blunt instruments and dumping them in mass graves.

The young men are yelling and for a second I’m trying to make out what language it is. This often happens to me when I’m traveling. I wake up on an airplane, I look up from a cup of coffee in a restaurant and I have no idea where I am.

It’s Spanish. They’re speaking Spanish and they’re selling snacks. Everything is OK. I fumble in my pocket for some coins to buy one of the sandwiches wrapped in foil that they promise are very hot and very tasty.

For scale

for scaleSo before I whacked this Paulownia tomentosa to the ground I thought I would get some photographic evidence. Leta helped out, but balked at doing a fan dance with the dinner plate-sized leaves. More fool I for not identifying the tree (known as Princess-Tree or Blue Catalpa) last year and letting it overwinter. There are several other weeds along this side of the house that I need to deal with, as I clean up after the overgrown juniper that was damaged by recent winters, but one thing at a time, please. Besides, I rather like Pokeweed.

How did it get here? Well, Sibley describes the fruit as “pods persistent, brownish, splitting open to release hundreds of seeds.”

Thanks, Mr. Schaper

The monthly newspaper of a certain advocacy organization for which I only recently became eligible for membership is generally forgettable (at best), especially when it comes to “Do you remember this?” roundups. But the staff box callouts for a web site feature brought back to mind a game that I’d forgotten that I remembered: Cootie. I had a set when I was a wee one, and the reason that I don’t remember the rules is that they’re so simple they hardly exist: roll a die until you collect all the plastic body parts for your cootie bug. Sort of like playing Hangman with less skill required. I recall putting the critter together, Mr. Potato Head without any possibility of phenotypic variation, but I don’t think my parents or anybody else ever played with me. There were limits, even in 1961, to an adult’s capacity for boredom just to entertain a child.