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.

Slow Blog Day

But maybe this is a good time to catch you up on the doings at our place...

Remember this phone? Turns out it's been sitting in a box unused for, let's say the last three years. Fortunately, I finally got around to doing something about that: sent all four (yikes!) of our old cell phones to www.collectivegood.com, where they'll donate what's reusable and recycle the rest. They even pay for the shipping!

Also sold an old iPod by using the CHS classifieds. Nice.

Where is this post going? Not sure, but I saw this on a walk the other day:

Love it.



And finally, back to home-improvement, we took advantage of the holiday weekend to finally organize our books, which we hadn't really done since we left Kansas three years ago (!). Raised some interesting questions--for example, is President Obama's memoir best placed with the biographies? Or creative non-fiction? What about his second book? And do three Gabriel García Márquez books justify a Colombian section?

We ended up with quite a range of subject areas, but it's maybe no surprise that philosophy had the most titles (somewhere around 160), followed pretty closely by American literature. So, there you have it.

Cheers, reader!

Sisters & Symposia

As you may have heard on Emily's Twitter feed, Providence Archives now has a Flickr stream going; here's one of my favorites:

Sisters prepare to leave on a begging tour in the Kootenay, British Columbia, c. 1896
Originally uploaded by Providence Archives, Seattle


This one is also popular:

Sisters depart the Nome mission, 1918
Originally uploaded by Providence Archives, Seattle

Oh, and I know I've posted this already, but just to fill things out a bit, here's my desk from the other day:

Finished a draft of a paper on Plato's Symposium, but not before I had 5 different copies (Greek, English, both) going at once...
Was a fun project, and hopefully I'll be reading it at a conference or two in the coming months. Let me know if you'd like a copy, reader.