Happy Holidays!

We're off to Illinois tomorrow morning--hope the weather holds out!


Meanwhile the Senate is set for a landmark vote on what might be the most important piece of progressive legislation in like 40 years... A perfect present for me: to land in Chicago and hear that the health care reform bill passes!

Holiday Wildlife

Saw the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker last week.

With sets designed by Maurice Sendak. Wild!

Cute little stage in the lobby, perfect for photos:


I guess Trophy Cupcakes is relatively tame, but still cute, no?


And at home, the cute hippo from Merrica gets pride of place under the tree:




Sorry for the long break, reader. Hope to see you again soon!

Camping and Gaming

A quick hit from the scanner:

Emily, Frank, Fran, Dave, Magen, and Annie on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters

And a bit of post-Thanksgiving game playing at Jon and Sara's:

Thanks for the photo and the fun!

One more kid-camping shot:

Fran, Magen, Dave, Emily heading into the Bob Marshall Wilderness

Hope you have a great week, reader!

Rain Forests

We had a great time in the rain forest last weekend! So amazing. Otherworldly, even.

Here's Emily in the Hall of Mosses, in the Hoh Rain Forest

Also saw some big trees, like this Cedar:



Most of our fun was in Olympic National Park, which also includes a strip on the ocean:

Ruby Beach

The surf sounded so cool because of all the rocks--take a listen (you can hear the water pulling back from the rocks at about 3/4 of the way in):

(Sorry for the clunky player; guess my coding's getting rusty...)



Emily is getting pretty good with her camera phone:




The best part was definitely the rain forest, though. Every inch of it seemed to be green and growing. Trees covered in moss and fern, growing out of other dead trees. Even this:



Couldn't have done it without our awesome REI parkas and water-proof hiking boots. It rained literally the entire weekend (they average 12 feet per year! feet!), but we were comfy and dry the whole way through.

And we saw two herds of elk...


Speaking of wild animals on the Olympic Peninsula: we were so close, we pretty much had to at least spend a little time in Forks:


So many pictures! If you want more, check out the whole set on Flickr. In the meantime, here we are outside the Lake Quinault Lodge:


And one more big tree:

World's largest Sitka Spruce.

Enjoying the Fall

So it's mid-November, and we're heading out of town for the weekend.

Spending a couple of days at Lake Quinault Lodge, out on the Olympic Peninsula.

Here's a shot from their website:


Our main agenda item while out there: the Hoh Rain Forest.

Crazy moss pic from the Wikipedia entry:


In case it really does rain 2 inches a day while we're there & I'm scared to use the camera, here's a link to a Google image search of more pics of the rain forest.

Old Photos, New Recipes

Still scanning...

One of my favorite photos of Merrica and myself. At Lincoln Park, on a boat (!), in 1999.

In school yesterday, a student brought in some cookies she'd told us about earlier in the week.

Bacon and chocolate chip. Tasty? Weird?
For some comments from other friends of mine, you can check out the Facebook post.

One more from the scanner:

Larry and David Hughes, at St Olaf for Emily's graduation, 1999.

From the Scanner

As you may have heard, we picked up a scanner recently...

Some highlights from out test runs:

Emily, Magen, and Fran, skiing in Michigan, sometime around 1989



Yancy & Rodrigo on spring break in California, 1996.

More to come! Happy Monday!

Storing and Stewing

I dropped by the Seattle Area Archivists table at the Washington Archives Fair last week, in the Seattle Public Library:

Emily, current Chair of the group, manning their display.

Also worth displaying:

some delicious lamb necks.

We bought them on the recommendation of the nice gentelman at the Olsen Farms stall at the farmers market, and we used them in stew. Probably the best stew I've ever had, or at least up there. Necks: who knew?


Finally, in bonus We're Better Than Maine news, it looks like Referendum 71 is doing well. After two days of vote counting it's ahead 52% to 48%.
Who's voting for it?

Apparently those of us who live near water.

Well, whatever. As long as it passes!
And the scary lady who opposes most all forms of public transit will not become King County Executive! Phew!
So whatever you might want to say about races outside of Washington, at least the results here look good...

All right, reader, back to grading!
Cheers!

Wine OR Philosophy

As you probably know, I presented that paper on Plato's Symposium at the Northwest Philosophy Conference last weekend. It was pretty cool, and I met some nice people and heard some good presentations. And Pacific University has a beautiful campus and some great seminar rooms.

Unfortunately, the conference itself is a bit of a mess. If you clicked that link up there, you saw the schedule: one day only, 13 sessions at a time! That's both way too much and way too little. Only one person came to my session, and there were a number of sessions without any audience at all! I was supposed to present comments on a paper about Aristotle, but no one came. Lame.


Fortunately, Pacific University is in Forest Grove, and Forest Grove is right on the edge of Oregon's wonderful Willamette Valley, where they make lots of wonderful wine! The picture up top was taken at Montinore, and I'd definitely recommend their Pinot Noir and their Gewürztraminer.

Ismail and Kari met up with us, and we managed to visit two vineyards and one tasting room. Yummy!

This is Kari at the Patton Valley Winery. We got a great tour, and learned all about their very small, sustainable Pinor Noir operation. Who knew that letting weeds grow was a great way to manage insects? Not me, but I like it! And the wine was good too!

Not only that, but they use screw caps instead of corks. Call me weird, but as much fun as corks can be, I'm a huge fan of screw caps...

Anyway, nice people, tasty wine, pretty countryside--a great way to spend an afternoon!

Grapes--about to be pressed.



Like I said, yummy!

Was and Will Be

Well, a few days ago I mentioned a great sunset on Twitter. A bit late, but here's the best photo we could come up with:

Kind of hard to see, but if you look toward the bottom, you'll see we weren't alone with our cameras. Saw cars literally stopping in the middle of streets to take pictures. Sunsets don't usually look like that here...


Also pretty--the Grizzly Bear show at the Moore:


Hard to convey, of course, but here's a clip of one of the weirder songs (from a different live show), which I really like:

Even weirder, perhaps: it's a cover of a song originally recorded by the 60's girl-group the Crystals.
I don't know about you, reader, but I think his voice is just magical. And beautiful.


Lastly, we only have three more months of waiting and then my article of Plato's Republic will be out!

Online table of contents--complete with an abstract of my paper!--available here.

SW

Okay, so I'm busy. I know you are too, so it's really no excuse...

Anyway, here's a photo Emily posted to facebook, for those of you not on there:

Caption: "My favorite street: SW Yancy"
Such a sweetie.


Have a great week, reader! See you soon!

What a Weekend!

Had a great Saturday: got up early, had a fun day, got some good news. In the evening we saw Romeo & Juliet at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, which was just amazing. ...Oh, and we went shopping & got some back-to-school (?) clothes. So that's always fun. Pictures (maybe) soon.

We'd heard and read good things about the ballet, but I never expected it to be this awesome.

A video that won't come close to doing it justice?
Sure:



Nice Sunday too:

Enjoyed the beautiful fall weather while walking through the park near the Dahlia Garden...


Oh, the good news? So one of the great things about my schedule is that we have time to visit lots of friends and family during the summer. And one of the questions that lots of those friends and family like to ask is: What do you do during the summer, anyway?

This past summer, or for at least two-thirds of it, I read nearly everything I could find having to do with the Symposium, by Plato. I must have read at least five or six full-length books, along with well over 30 articles and essays. My goal: to try to understand things a little better, and try to see if there were areas where I might make some contribution of my own. Nothing helps you understand a book or an argument like writing and working your way through it.

And now the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (the big time!) has accepted my paper on the Symposium for the upcoming April 2010 meeting!

My paper has to do with the tension between what Socrates says about the ideal lover and what a jealous, drunken young man named Alcibiades has to say about being in love with Socrates.

If you'd like to take a look, the APA will post it online in January. Can't wait? Okay, I've posted a draft--feel free to give it a read! Let me know if you'd like to talk about it!

Pretty Pictures

Guess the start of the school year's got me a bit distracted from the blog. But here are two quick things to savor...

Some very encouraging numbers from Charles M. Blow's recent column about Obama's slow and steady pace on health care:


And Chris pointed us to this great video of Al Franken on Letterman many years ago:

All quite entertaining, but as I mentioned on Twitter, the real fun starts at about 6:30.

Cheers!

Dogs and Crows

Mentioned this on Twiiter, but it really deserves a blog post, no?

Mike bought Coney Island! Awesome!

So happy to see him succeed! And to know that those hot dogs & gyros will be there next time we're in town!


In other news, I heard about this video recently:

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Pretty fun use of the crows-on-wires imagery! Compare: the CHS logo.

Out in the Cascades

Spent my last weekend of summer hiking and camping with Jon & Sara--former neighbors & current friends--in and around North Cascades National Park, a couple of hours north and east of Seattle.

Sara, enjoying the view from above Ross Lake

Sara and Emily, eying the trail over Ross Lake Dam:


We hiked down to the dam:


And then over to Ross Lake Resort, a wonderfully strange, even surreal grouping of cabins and boat houses, all floating on logs in the lake.

Only accessible, of course, by boat or by hiking trail.


Jon and Sara, waiting for the water taxi back to the other side of the lake.

On the water taxi:

Really just a motorboat, but "water taxi" is fun to say.






We couldn't stay, since we had reserved a campsite at nearby Rasar State Park.

Sadly, we took no photos (partly because it was dark by the time we were settled in & fed), but the Washington State Parks system has an awesome website, that has things like maps of the parks:


And even photos of individual campsites, like ours, good old #47:

Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, good company. A great way to end the summer.

Speaking of, I have a syllabus to finish...
Cheers, reader.