Family Pacific Northwest

The new new Normal

Posted on July 29, 2021

And now it’s summer. Like, a real summer, this time, because school was briefly in session but now it’s properly out, and the Covid vaccination cards are filled, with two doses, four times over, and then put away in a drawer.  Out of sight, and almost out of mind.

The days are empty and full alike. Summer’s first week saw us hightail to northeastern Oregon for a bout of llama-trekking; four days out in the Wallowa wilderness with, yes, llamas, and yeah, that’s a thing, llama-trekking, and a good thing at that.

Then time on island, and time in Seattle; the almost interminable July sunshine lighting up the solar panels of one abode and baking the home office of the other.

Update:  Aargh. I’m picking up pen on a paused post, now, it’s a month and some later — and suddenly ‘Delta’ is big in the news, and here on the brink of August, we just canceled our summer-finale flight to Heathrow. (Well, technically, Virgin Atlantic cancelled on us, first.)

So five short paragraphs, and we’ve backslid into a purgatorial new new new normal.  Not so bleak as the ‘new normal’ of 2020, but not quite the wonderful-wide-open world that the start of summer promised.

The days are shorter already.

But.  We’re all fine and good and healthy, which is worth remembering. And the assured promise of those long midsummer days always gets broken, year after year. Every July feels endless, until it doesn’t.

looking at Pender I. (or is it Saturna? always hard to tell….)

Family Salish Sea

Fourth Quarter, 2020

Posted on September 24, 2020

Haven’t been motivated to write much, this year (obviously), but lately I’ve a nagging notion to put pen to paper.  Put word to thought, pixel to screen, as 2020’s finale looms in the glide path.  Hoping that on the other side of the calendrical horizon lies some kind of, you know, denouement.

We’re doing okay, I should note. The little island in the Salish Sea became home, once again, since school ended in June.  Save for a week back in the city, when we fetched ‘the tiny’, a Vardo-styled caravan we snagged off Craigslist and subsequently pulled ashore.  The girls love the thing, and have traded weeks of residence throughout the summer.

gypsy caravan unloading off of barge to beach

Otherwise, of our months here, I’m not sure what to write.  I mean, it’s island time: where we always seem closer as a family, happier on the whole, and let the days blur.  Moment to moment, it’s the crunch of gravel underfoot, the buzz of dragonflies, the smell of woodsmoke and wet trees.  That steady influx of signals, speaking to a slow turn of seasons, and not much else.

And yet.  This period out here admittedly different than the usual ‘getaway’ weekends: Thanks to a recently-installed antennae that’s 125 feet up a fir tree, we have internet here, now.  (Just not a whole lot of it — a wan dozen-megabits or so.)  Enough that I‘ve managed to work remote for months, and the girls have done a couple weeks of school, already.

Sadly, though, we’re pushing our luck with the logistics — I’ve scrambled to run our generator when the kids belatedly inform me that their laptop batteries are low, and we keep having to disable webcams when Zoom calls start to freeze.  Never mind how hard it is (for any of us) to focus properly as three video-conference calls take place in a 280 square-foot cabin.

So. Cozy as the wood fires may be, we’re headed back city-side, soon.  Work and school will likely feel a little more serious again, more central to each day.  My brain says that’s a good thing; my heart cautions otherwise.

We’ll see.

Family

Nordic North

Posted on August 29, 2019

More retrospective, after seven weeks on the road.

We hit our groove, this time, somewhere between Sweden and Denmark.  Both places being new for all of us, and yet so eminently accessible.

Bike rides and birthday graffiti.  Harbor swims in Copenhagen and never-ending Swedish sunsets. Eating sushi on rooftops, then munching toffee almonds in the streets.

So much to love, up north.

Technology

Little Printer Lives!

Posted on June 8, 2019

Back in late 2014, I bought a Little Printer on the cheap.  I’d always wanted one – it was cheerful and tactile and whimsical in a moment when most tech… wasn’t. Skeuomorphism was on the skids, back then; ‘flat’ and faceless experiences like iOS7 and Metro ascendant.

I got a steal on Little Printer because the product was already end-of-life’d.  Berg, the tiny UK firm producing it, had folded a couple months prior, and while a skeleton crew kept Berg’s servers running, my Little (and very-Bergcloud-dependent) Printer was never meant to last.

the longest Little Printer roll ever!

But, boy, did Tam love the thing while it worked.

The flashing light that indicated there was news to print was a big excitement.  She liked the feed from the ‘Little Men’ books.  She particularly adored one feed that dished up Daily Cats.  

For a while, she was obsessed with creating the longest-possible uncut Little Printer feed.  Just because. 

And then, alas, they shut it all down.

I followed along for a bit as one of the founders worked to spin up an open-source version of the Bergcloud servers, but it was fairly gnarly at the start, and frankly, beyond my technical ken.  From an end-user perspective, the old cheer and charm seemed permanently out of reach.

Fast-forward, then, four years, when I stumble across this headline:  Little Printer returns as an open-source messaging device

The article tells the story, but in short, a small UK consultancy re-built the client side of the equation, going so far as to release an iOS app, and most importantly, a fairly straightforward guide on how to get up and running.  A nice little side project for the company portfolio and PR efforts.

It was enough to get me interested.  And to attempt late-night open-heart surgery on the circuit board inside Little Printer’s bridge, using a USB-to-TTL cable, old-school SSH, and some very careful copy-and-pasting of commands in terminal windows.

It worked.

And here we are in 2019, with our Little Friend back in the kitchen.

 

 

Family SoCal

The end of 2018

Posted on January 3, 2019

 

I’ll give 2018 this much: it ended well.

Not that it was particularly bad or difficult year, for our family — we have far too much to be thankful for.  Gratitude is due, and given.

 

And yet.

If years were U2 albums, well, 2018 wasn’t exactly “The Joshua Tree”, was it?

“No Line On The Horizon” —  yeah, that’s another U2 album, one so forgettable I had to look it up just now — seems a more appropriate match for 2018.  Amorphous. Directionless. Interstitial.

Generally unloved.

 

And yet…

2018 ended with color and joy.  Sunset on a beach called Silver Strand, in the unexpected company of old friends and their offspring.

It was a low-key New Year’s Eve in the very best of ways; effortless, comfortable, and fun.  Kids exhausted themselves early, playing tag on the beach in the dark, and we had everybody tucked in at a Residence Inn well before midnight.  I stayed awake —  waiting, in a pitch-dark hotel room, for 12:00 fireworks to appear on my Apple Watch — and went to sleep completely happy.

 

And so:

I woke with high hopes for 2019.  An unanticipated spirit for embracing the year ahead, that, three days later, I still haven’t managed to shake.

Maybe it’s because we have European summer adventures on the books, already; maybe it’s a gut awareness that change and reinvention are coming.  All I know is that 2019 deserves a rallying cry, and I’m rolling with one that could be a caution, or a warning… but let’s carry the musical metaphor, and call it a goal:

“Achtung, Baby!”

Cambridge Days Excursions Elsewhere

Back and There Again

Posted on June 22, 2017

Can’t really call a place “an old haunt” until you’re back and weirdly lingering around, and yeah, that’s us now on Day 3 of travels.

We’re in Cambridge, and whoah, what a difference a decade makes: our first steps out of the train station felt unexpectedly foreign, jolted by the phalanx of new real-estate developments that loom over the tracks. It took a couple good blocks of pulling suitcases for Cambridge to start feeling like Cambridge, again, familiar row houses and all.

We’ve spent all of five hours back in the old neighborhood, and I’m already set to make snap judgements: the Cambridge Blue lost its indie charm (and former owner, I presume), Mill Road’s gained none (not sure I’d ever want it to), and most importantly, the mystery of Roll On Blank Tapes persists.

Roll On Blank Tapes, Gwydir street

Seriously. While the faded mural for Hot Numbers Records on Kingston St. has gone so far as to be restored, like a valued fresco from days of yore, just a couple blocks away, there sits an empty shopfront that’s got TDK MiniDisc and Top Tape adverts plastered to the windows, still. Each one every bit as sun-faded and dust-covered as they were in 2004, when we first arrived.

I’m told there’s a connection to H. Gee, another temporally-resistant shopfront which mysteriously endures on Mill Road. I bought ~50p of fuse wire there, once, years ago, and even then, had the strong sense mine would be the only transaction of the day.  I say “endures”, but it might be “endured” — right now, the window stock looks worryingly sparse.

Can’t help but think there’s a strange synchronicity, beyond just the shape of the name, between H. Gee and E. Buk, that odd Manhattan shop window that appeared in Pattern Recognition (and my own accidental wanderings in SoHo, once).  E. Buk’s window so artfully curated, H. Gee so bizarrely random; one like ikebana, the other like jetsam, both so arresting.

H. Gee shopfront, Mill Rd, Cambridge

Anyhow. Turns out while Hot Numbers may not be slinging vinyl anymore, there is a sweet coffee shop here that’s resurrected the name, dutifully spinning records and giving me just enough pricey coffee and free wifi needed to hit [POST].

Excursions Elsewhere

Unarchive, Edit, Recompile, Run

Posted on June 11, 2017

Like an old and broken pickup truck, this blog mostly just sits on blocks.  Bits and bytes weather the elements, one season to the next, while the odds its engine will turn over decay each day.

But the batteries — if you’ll indulge my metaphor — apparently still hold a charge, and from time to time I do manage to take this thing out for a spin.  It rarely lasts.

Nevertheless, I’m tinkering under the hood, again. The CMS engine is sputtering in fits and starts as I flush the bit-rot and rebuild the broken pieces: crufty MovableType backups, a half-busted Tumblr migration, ancient Blogger exports,  inconsistently-applied Markdown syntax.  It’s a strange return to a bunch of unfashionably-longform posts written in a voice that’s familiar, but definitely not mine, not me, not anymore.

Still, it’s a labor of love. And behind lock and key of a [ LOG IN ] link, I’ve finally managed to un-archive and republish a hundred-odd private posts I wrote for friends and family when our first child was born abroad. The archived timestamps remain accurate to the minute, but damn if it doesn’t all just feel so long ago when I read those posts now.

Anyhow.  A decade of parenting provides enough wry perspective to know how niche the readership for such material is — but it was a much-needed connection to family, then, and there’s two precious kids reading those posts for the first time, now, and I reckon that’s all the audience that really matters.

But enough of the past, neh?

I’ve got the engine running. And the weather suddenly feels right for writing. We have Big Travel back on our itinerary, after so many years, and I can’t wait — our little family’s about to hit the road for a good stretch.

Let’s see if this old blog can do the same.

"Big Job" fire truck in the woods