Getting there…
Redundancy
Amazon says: “Discover the world’s all-time bestseller in an entirely new light”. The “Books you may like” section has “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, by Carl Sagen, as its first suggestion.
Provence, France, 2012-07-10
A Cruise up the Inside Passage, 2011-07-06
July 2011 we took a family cruise through the Alaska Inside Passage.
The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Tracy Arm Fjord.
It was early morning. It was very still.
At the end of the fjord is the Sawyer Glacier. The fjord was undoubtedly cut by that glacier and it’s vanished cousins. The fjord is 600 feet deep below the glacier; you could think of this like floating 600 feet in the air through Yosemite Valley. This cliff would be much higher…
Here’s the Sawyer Glacier:
Though I didn’t get a picture, my most vivid memories are of flocks of large birds in the distance, flying over the water. Geese, pelicans, maybe, flying in silence. This is wilderness — no roads filled with family vans looking for a campsite here.
The side canyons are beautiful and forbidding. The area is part of the “Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness”, and according to the USDA, “…there are no established hiking trails or public recreation facilities…” However, I’m sure that with sufficient determination and resources it would be possible to trek in some of these canyons.
Yosemite Mist, 2011-04-21
Yosemite Falls, 2011-04-21
Pictures of Oregon Coast, 2010-08-20
Pictures of the Oregon Coast from a driving trip 10 years ago…
Thinking about retirement while vacationing at Lake Como
Coping with Retirement
I went on Facebook today; saw many posts from Facebook friends related to my work life, and fell into a revery. There’s no way I would ever want to go back — the bite of being a person of leisure, world traveler, and detached observer of humanity goes a bit too deep, and the freedom is glorious. But the pull of the world of work is still there, and it hurts a bit. Sitting at my balcony looking over Lake Como, hearing the Italian chatter outside, the call of ducks, the lapping waves, and thinking about — thinking about everything. There isn’t anything I would rather be doing at the moment, but a bit of sadness about things undone hangs over it.
(2014-05-26)
The Coffee Station
I make coffee here every morning. If you look closely, right behind the hopper for the coffee grinder there is a small memo book, the “Coffee Station Log”. The March 4 entry reads, in part: “…coffee is supposed to last until we leave for the NY-Barcelona cruise on April 16.”
I read that this morning, on March 20, not quite three weeks after I wrote it. Things are happening so fast! The cruise is no more, almost certainly, and the US has 50,000 cases of COVID-19, on track for 100,000 in three days, and by the time April 16 arrives we will undoubtedly be over a million.
Unlike too many of my fellow citizens, I understand exponential growth. I still find the reality of it hard to grasp, but I am holed up in my bunker, making coffee every morning, for as long as I can.
Walking in Beliz
