Tricia and I recently popped in on my parents to see how they’re doing, lend a hand about the house and yard, amble through a few galleries, and sample the ample takeout opportunities of the southwest. Just a quick visit, bracketing a weekend a few days either side. But always with time for a few photographs — many of which were taken from the airplane window — great cloud formations just one of the many things to see from aloft (though whereas rakkity got landforms topography, I got pretty much the opposite). And as usual, I’ve willfully (and inaccurately) rendered a world completely unpopulated by humans …

Adam

Hilary Burgin, aka La Chica, turns twenty. (I know, I could be wrong and I really should check this out with her mom.)

Once Diane regains some or her drug-sapped energy and can stop by, she will be happy to not have to have to negotiate the makeshift stairs that disgraced the approach to our house from our new garage level all Winter and Spring.

As I write, Linda beautifies our new morning-coffee-and-paper view, engrossed in her next favorite passtime (after cooking) — planting Stella Dora Day Lillies, purple Salvia, and Variegated Coreopsis along
the patio wall (that’s Gracie inspecting her work).

No remodeling result is more impressive than when depicted in
before-and-after shots.

It’s as cool to experience its actualization as it was to design it!

Oh yes, the excellent, meticulous and incredibly fast-working Brazilian craftsman, Miguel, and one of his apprentices, Aljon. “This is my house now; when I’m done I’ll give it back to you”, he proclaimed, just before starting. He truly attended to every detail as if it was his own. Thanks also to Oscar, who went two extra miles and patched the garage siding!

Kudos to Matt Junod, owner of JHS Landscape Construction for a project that exceeded expectations. Matt says what he does, then does what he says — with quality, speed, and a smile. You couldn’t expect anything better than that.

Stay tuned for the patio-warming party!

“Honey, please come back to me. No one will call you Mrs. Diane Canning. I promise.”

Thought bubbles:

Me : I can see Polly’s lips moving but I can’t hear anything.

Diane: You’d think he’d be ready for this after thirteen years.

Patti : My sister could have married a lawyer.

The kiss, twenty-five years ago.

Diane, did you know that Otis wrote this song in 1967 while living on a houseboat in Sausalito? Do you suppose he and Sweet William were friends?

One foot dipped into the iPod pond…

I’m cheep. I winced when I gave daughter Katie a $74 shuffle iPod for her birthday. No way would I buy one for myself, however. (Even assuming the rakkity Family Financial Manager, herself, would allow me to). So on Father’s day, when I saw the Office Depot ad for a $9.99 deal on the TrekStor mp3 player, I remarked on it at the breakfast table, never realizing that my sweet one-and-only, mother-to-my-children, FFM, would sneak out immediately and buy it for me.

Now that I’ve played with the TrekStor, I know that it’s far from being an iPod, and it will certainly not work with iTunes, Nevertheless, I’ve loaded 250 MB of free MP3 music onto it already, and have listened to it’s crystal-clear playing of Bach’s Art of Fugue. (Next, I” add some Beatles music.) I’ll definitely use it when I’m at the gym (on the treadmill, but probably not on the racquetball court) and maybe on miscellaneous bike rides, or solo car rides. It plays music through the FM radio without any attachments– it’s better than the Shuffle in that respect. You can save photos on it, and it records voice. I think there’s even a way to extract tunes from iTunes to it.

Maybe I can even send sound files to the Blog from it. Great fun!

–rakkity

Michael, the second installment has been mediated by knowing that I was early, late and inadvertantly on time (last night) in birthday communications. Keep in mind that e-mail composition on a BB is real handiwork, no pun intended.

It may be that this is the substitute for letters, at least from England. So, my first realization, from visiting the Army Museum not far from Sloane Sq., where I stayed, is that the British have had much more experience in the mid-East and Iraq than the US has ever had. (This is different by the way from the Imperial War Museum which is much bigger.)

There are loads of old photos and memorabilia here, including scout cars and turbans, from their 1915-17 expedition in Mesopotamia and the British capture of Bagdad.  How were we so arrogant to think we could maneuver there with so little sense of history?  Ironically, the reason our flight is delayed is that Pres. Bush just flew in, they announced, pushing all flights back. I wonder if he could learn to pronouce “Mesopotamia.”

The play “Relocated” is a somber reflection on murderous acts of a German contractor, whose basement dungeon included his children and their children (whom he also fathered), all to “keep them safe”, he said. The distinction between reality and other conditions gets blurred, as does the acquience of his wife and girlfriend to his deeds. This theatre, the Royal, is known for its cutting edge work, and hosted Tom Stoppard’s “Rock and Roll”. “Relocate” is Stoppard with a much blacker heart. You would appreciate its grimness.

As I mentioned to Diane, this drama is “gobsmacking”, which means here, I’m told, “startling”, from the words “gob” or jaw, i.e., smacking one’s jaw unexpectedly.

Now that’s a word George can pronounce.

Until the next event. Found something also for you and Matt.  Best, Mark

Dear Lowlanders,

Last Sunday, my buddy Steve said we should go on a hike this Wednesday. So I contacted beartoother Chuck and asked for suggestions, saying only that, “Steve wants to go high.” Chuck suggested we go to the ghost-town of Hessie (at 9500′ in the Indian Peaks), and start from there. So Wednesday dawned and off the 3 of us went. We found that the melting snow had turned the road near Hessie and the local trails into streams. As we hiked/sloshed our way into the headwaters of Boulder Creek, snow started to fall. Steve hadn’t brought a warm jacket, so I gave him my extra jacket (ever since I got caught in a Sierra snowstorm when I was 19, I’ve always carried spare warmies when hiking in alpine country.For similar reasons, Chuck does too.) We continued on hiking on alternating snowpack, bare ground, and marigold-strewn marshes. I even used my snowshoes for a few minutes (Chuck & Steve preferred to post-hole.) After an hour or snowfall, the sun came out, and we had to doff some layers. It became a glorious spring day in the mountains.

We had to turn back a little early when Steve suddenly discovered that his new boots were disintegrating. (The company he bought them from will remain nameless, but it begins with R and ends with I. I’m sure they’ll replace the boots.)

While we returned towards the trailhead, the sun went back into the clouds, and it started to snow again. We met some surprised hikers coming up the trail. They were wearing shorts and light shirts, and said they’d be going up just a short ways. (I would sure hope so.) Steve stopped a little later and looked up through the falling snow at a greenish hill, and said, “Isn’t that beautiful!” So I made a short movie of it. In the background you can hear the roar of Boulder Creek).

Because the Colorado Front Range had a cold May and early June, the alpine wildflowers haven’t been as prolific as they were last year. But the Marsh Marigolds and Globe Mallows were abundant. They are among the first to appear when the snow melts. And there were zillions of little quarter-inch pink flowers that I identified later as Jacobs Ladder.

Steve’s boots managed to hold together until we returned. On the way back we stopped at the venerable Pioneer Inn and quaffed a Fat Tire Ale to celebrate our safe return to civilization.

-Ed

Michael,

I was trying to think of a suitable gift and decided it should be a travel BBerry e-mail in several parts. This is the first one, and it will be mid-night here shortly so I decided it is permissible to send it.

First, I got into the Stella  Artois grass court tennis tournament in the suburbs of London on Fri. against all odds, as it was sold out weeks in advance.  (It’s a prelim for next week’s Wimbleton.). The agent tickets were going for a minimum of two at 200-250 Br. Pds. a piece, or 800-1000$.

I went at mid-day, as was suggested, got a ticket for Court 1 (which is other than Center Court) from a fellow on the street, which in turn allowed me into the stadium to see doubles, and then wait for so-called “resale/turn-in” Center Court tickets to become available at the end of the day when people leave.

All told, I spent 7 hours watching tennis, the highlight of which was seeing Raphael Nadal win a tight third set tiebreaker against a very tall Ivo Karlovic (maybe 6’11”) – this after they split sets each on separate tiebreakers.

After that I got a little tired on my feet, as I had to stand a bit, so had to have some cold salmon and shrimp in what appeared to be an outdoor clubhouse for commoners and upper class alike.  Molly would have done better than me with the accents, although I was asked about my Dublin College cap several times. (I don’t know why I brought that with me other than it was less sweat-stained than others.)  Nor do I know what the inquiries belied.

By day’s end it was freezing, as the sun had gone down and the breeze picked up in the stands. I felt like I was in Maine.  Accordingly, that survivalist thing kicked in, and I stayed in the seats with increasingly fewer and fewer folks left, and proceeded to watch an exceptional match between Australian Nalbandian and young hardhitting Frenchman Gasquet.  I was close and could see the strain in both their faces – maybe 30 feet away, given the court positioning and stands.

Moral: what you have done for us has lasting effects. Without Maine cold, I would not have known that freezing unexpectedly is an occasional but necessary part of life in some places.

Lesson: dress more warmly the next time.

I went back to the courts again today, after seeing theatre, and put on several layers – all I had, which was not much (thought it was summer when I was packing).  Fortunately, I got in again, this time on a 5 Pd. turn-in ticket and saw the doubles final. It is amazing how even exceptionally skilled athletes can make mistakes in stressful situations, as did Max Mirny and Scotsman favorite Jamie Murray. They lost in a 10 point super- tiebreaker after splitting sets and were dispirited.

Moral: never count your chickens even if you are used to the weather.

Lesson: There is none.  The sun came out and it was relatively pleasant.

Tomorrow’s birthday note: theatre and a familiar jadpanther anecdote.

Best and feel well; you have contributed to all of our welfares in one way or another.  This is no small achievement.

Mark

Mike,

On our way across the pond last month, our Brit Air pilot just missed Greenland.  According to the map monitor on the back of the seat in front of me, we flew just south of the southern tip. (It was cloudy anyway.) But on the way back, we crossed the southern tip, and I got some photos. I’m in the negotiation stages with my hiking buddies to go here on our next backpack trip.

Our flight was probably about the latitude of Paamiut, on the west coast at latitude 62 deg, but I saw no towns. Apparently they were lost in the clouds along the coast.

Some of my pictures show a massive east-west fjord, possibly Lindenow Fjord on the east coast. But that’s just a wild guess.

A few of the shots are crystal clear, the luck of the draw with airplane windows. In one of them you can see the crevasses in a glacier system flowing out of the mountains.

The last few shots are of northern Canada –  the Barren Lands and James Bay, the southern extension of Hudson Bay.  The spring breakup was in progress. Whether it was early or not, as it has been in the last few years, I can’t tell.

–rakkity

Mike,

On our way across the pond last month, our Brit Air pilot just missed Greenland.  According to the map monitor on the back of the seat in front of me, we flew just south of the southern tip. (It was cloudy anyway.) But on the way back, we crossed the southern tip, and I got some photos. I’m in the negotiation stages with my hiking buddies to go here on our next backpack trip.

Our flight was probably about the latitude of Paamiut, on the west coast at latitude 62 deg, but I saw no towns. Apparently they were lost in the clouds along the coast.

Some of my pictures show a massive east-west fjord, possibly Lindenow Fjord on the east coast. But that’s just a wild guess.

A few of the shots are crystal clear, the luck of the draw with airplane windows. In one of them you can see the crevasses in a glacier system flowing out of the mountains.

The last few shots are of northern Canada –  the Barren Lands and James Bay, the southern extension of Hudson Bay.  The spring breakup was in progress. Whether it was early or not, as it has been in the last few years, I can’t tell.

–rakkity

Those babies are tucked up under the roof of the garage and it’s hard to get a good clear shot. Maybe once their heads are poking above the nest. However, while I was on the ladder their parents returned with food, and squawked at me. I was using my 90 mm prime, not my telephoto.