Day three. What can you say about these god-trees, the redwoods?
Highlight of day two of our California vacation was the sea lions hanging out, watching the humans at Pier 39.

California vacation day one: Travel hell.
Holy crap what a day – and it’s still not over. The Indianapolis to Dallas flight was delayed by two hours. Once we finally landed in Dallas, we ran to the connecting flight gate but missed it by less than five minutes. Then we spent two solid hours in the American Airlines customer service line. But the good news is that there is a flight going to San Francisco at 10:45pm.
In response to Jean, sharing my favorite picture of the Oregon coastline from our (best) vacation (ever) last year
Gray, beautiful Oregon coast evening. I’m on a short visit until Wednesday, but still popping into my microblog to post photos.
Waiting for An Evening with Neil Gaiman

Pretty excited to get confirmation of our tour of Tor House, the home of poet Robinson Jeffers, during our upcoming trip to California.


After reading this post by Patrick Rhone (others have also talked about this but I can’t find it right now), I decided that I needed to print whatever I really wanted to keep. So I collected my journals, a few social media posts, and some other miscellaneous writing into roughly equal documents. Then I printed them and created four saddle-stitched books. I’ve left them in a pretty rough-and-ready state because I like the DIY look.
Wrapping up Spring Break
After a couple of intentionally uneventful days midweek, we hit some of our favorites local spots on Friday. On Saturday, we went to the Van Gogh digital projection exhibit at Newfield’s. It’s impressive technology and definitely a unique museum experience. Worth doing once, anyway. We also walked around much of the rest of the museum. As with the digital projection, you can tell they’re trying to do something different by mixing together eras and geographical regions and leaving places for people to write down their reactions.
Spring Break, thus far
This week has been Spring Break, which is why I haven’t posted much. We front-loaded the week with travel because the weather was predicted to be (and has turned out to be) pretty dismal. On Sunday we visited Madison, Indiana and, briefly, Clifty Falls State Park. Madison is a great little town with plenty of historic homes (like the Lanier Mansion), cool shops, and a riverfront park. Here I am along with two other guys with strollers waiting outside the shops.
When Rachel gave me a record player for Christmas, she included with it an album of Big Band recordings because she knew that what I primarily wanted out of a record player was the romance of playing this music on it.
There’s a reason for that. When we were first married, our Sunday night after-church ritual was to eat fast food with friends. (The iron-clad digestive system of youth…) But we had to keep an eye on the time because we needed to leave in time to catch “Big Band Jump,” a syndicated radio show on our local AM station which we would listen to on the drive home and while we got ready for bed. Then once we were in bed we would listen to an old-time radio show performing all sorts of mystery and thriller stories. (I can’t remember its name - maybe it was rebroadcasts of CBS Radio Mystery Theater?)
While that story makes it sound like we were married in 1948 instead of 1998, it’s one of my fondest memories of those early days of our marriage. Big Band music already has a certain romance to it, but add to that two newlyweds in a small apartment listening to music and stories from their grandparent’s time and you have a sonic impression that lasts.