My Aunt Marks 40 Years with King County

I've always been proud of my Aunt Judy, who lives in Seattle. She just passed a big milestone with the county government where she works. She has always been the cool aunt, the one you could tell everything. (Much to her chagrin, I pretty much did exactly that.)

Musing on McCarthy

Read The Road over my holiday work break. Cormac McCarthy's prose verged on poetry, as usual, but I cannot quite imagine trying to translate his vision into film, so I have my doubts about going to see the John Hillcoat movie. From what I understand from reviews the filmmakers actually soft-pedalled the bleakness of the book....Blood Meridian still appears to me to be McCarthy's greatest accomplishment, but it would take an unconventional filmmaker to carry off an adaptation in this era when movies are market-tested to death. The potential to produce an epic visual palette is there -- I'll carry his jagged, lightning-struck cordilleras in my mind's eye for the rest of my life. McCarthy's vision of human nature is unrelentingly grim; I have to honor him for being more honest that many mythologizers of the old West have been -- there is nothing sentimental in Blood Meridian. As good as they were with No Country for Old Men, I still can't imagine even the Coen brothers pulling it off.

Mom, Dad, and Aunt Judy Visiting New Mexico, Sept. 2009

L to R: Mom, Aunt Judy, Dad, and Kathy, when we were at El Pinto, north Albuquerque, September 2009.

Vandenberg Air Force Base, California: Sept. 2009

At Vandenberg AFB in California, we visited this crater, which is all that's left of a Titan missile silo that exploded in the early 1960s. It's amazing that these ICBMs weren't involved in more accidents, and a lucky thing too. We were there to collect data on old Air Force facilities, part of the DoD's Legacy program to save data on its historic sites. Vandenberg has the distinction of being an Air Force base that is focused on missiles and rockets rather than on conventional fixed wing aircraft. So the base consists mainly of old rocket gantries posted like sentinels along the foggy central California coastline.

Brother Ted and his daughter Una, September 2009

At Turtle Lake, Itasca County, Northern Minnesota. Evening. Baby & Bro.

Late in coming...a brief blog entry on Chicago...

Chicago, June 2009. I have been so busy the past half-year I haven't spent any time posting from my various trips. In June I went to the Army Corps of Engineers offices in Champaign-Urbana to do some research on energy use in historic Department of Defense buildings, part of a "greening of the DoD" program that's underway. I flew into Chicago and happened to have a friend's tickets to see the Twins and Cubs. I got to walk all over downtown and took the El up to Wrigley Field on the North Side, and saw the Twins win both days. St. Paul's own Joe Mauer, to chants of "MVP! MVP!", hit a home run in his first at-bat on Day 1. Also during this game, the aptly named Milton Bradley, rightfielder for the Cubs, forgot how many outs there were and, after catching a routine flyball, threw the ball into the bleachers with two outs, allowing a run to score. While I was there I also checked out the weird and wonderful central library building downtown, which looks like a 19th or early 20th c. beaux arts/mannerist pastische but which actually dates from 1991. Outdoor baseball, architectural marvels, a great public transportation system: I could live in Chicago. I just have to persuade the boss to move our office there.