Notes and Sketches
Work in progress, and other notes on interesting things I've seen. If you are here looking for my Mongolia notebooks, they have moved to their own page.
A mid-winter trip to Bangkok has left me with a group of several quick notebooks from the week of exploring I had a chance to do there. more...
Moving ~ 2014-05-13
After returning to the United States last July, I drove to Montana to help take care of this year's cherry pruning at the Emerson orchard. When I returned to Rochester with Judy, moving west was first on the agenda, and our first task was to get her remaining belongings from the attic into a rental truck so she could make it back for the start of her school year. I was left with the task of helping my sisters prepare my mother's house for sale, and getting my own house ready to sell to Evelyne, the tenant who took care of it during my year away. Both of these tasks involved carpentry, painting, and lugging boxes, furniture, and woodworking tools—a few that are made of cast iron, that were meant to be stationary. In my mother's house, an estate sale got rid of, in one day, what my sisters and I could not. At my house it was not so easy. more...
Between September, 2012 and July, 2013 I was in Mongolia. Originally part of this section, those notebooks have moved to their own section of the site. See Mongolia Notes. more...
Adirondacks (Still Waiting for Mongolia) ~ 2012-09-18
While we wait for visas, we have decided to take one last pilgrimage to the Adirondacks, land of more water and vegetation than we will see again see for another year. As on other important journeys, a trip to the Adirondacks is made by passing certain traditional landmarks, and on this trip we stopped to note of a few of the more important ones: The steer in front of Joel's Frontyard Steakhouse; the picture of the buffalo head on the Buffalo Head billboard which has looked exactly the same for decades; and the real gateway to the Adirondacks, The Wigwam, which can be recognized at a distance by the airplane fuselage embedded in its roof. more...
SFO to DTR ~ 2012-09-11
After a cloudy start in San Francisco, the skies opened up over eastern Nevada and remained mostly clear through Utah, Colorado, and much of Nebraska, hazing over as we crossed Iowa, and becoming so thick that I hardly recognized our largest river when it passed below me as we crossed into Wisconsin. Dusk came over Lake Michigan, and darkness by the time we landed in Detroit. more...
Waiting for Mongolia ~ 2012-09-08
For the past month Judy and I have been waiting to go to Mongolia, and as we do we are wrapping up a lot of unfinished business here at home and with friends and relatives that we won't see for another year. In addition to the normal trip to Montana, along with the cherry tree care and the Buffalo Barbecue, the swimming and visiting with the extended clan, there was moving out of an apartment and finishing classes for Judy. (I took a couple of days away from the orchard to fish.) In the past month there has also been a trip to New Jersey for my sister's wedding, and a trip to California to visit Judy's sister. more...
Transit of Venus ~ 2012-06-06
I had planned to be more prepared for this, but when the beautiful clear afternoon finally got here, I was still bogged down with phone calls and equipment that would not work, along with people who seem to be being paid to be useless at troubleshooting scanner problems. So I figured I had time for a run, then I would drive up to the lake to see what I could see with the pinhole setup I had put together. But on my run over Cobbs Hill, there were already many people set up for the event, and as I stopped to talk, they showed me the very first of the transit. more...
Western Autumn ~ 2011-10-25
Least Weasel, Lochsa Lodge, Cutthroat. Dynamite, deadfall, dry fly. Rock Creek, Rattlesnake, rainbow. A two day fall break that fell exactly on my two days of classes left me time to spend nine days in Montana. Judy and I spent a couple of days in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest, around the Lochsa River, sightseeing, hiking, and even soaking in a hot spring along Warm Creek. Back in Missoula, I spent a few days fishing nearby Rock Creek, both at the lower section near Clark Fork and the upper, just east of Philipsburg. The weather went from rain and fog to sunshine, with cool fall temperature topping out in the 50s. It took a couple days to figure out what trout do and eat when the water gets cold, but I figured it out. more...
I am not getting rich as a teacher, but every now and then there are rewards. Here is one of them. more...