I might have some special powers . . .

But then again maybe I don’t. This blog supports ambivalence.

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The Beehive

Picking up the Boston narrative where I left off, BAP and I spent our first night in Boston at the Beehive, a jazz club  in the Boston Center for the Arts. The guide-book in our hotel room said it was the new hip and elegant place to be.  We weren’t dressed for either, but we went anyway and [...]

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Thanksgiving-birthday-Chanukah extravaganza

Sis, Bro, and Bugaboo came to my place for a Thanksgiving-Birthday-Chanukah celebration on Friday. At 4.5 years old, Bugaboo recognized a number of the letters on his new Alphabeasties cards and, when I remarked on his large vocabulary, explained that this was ” because I have the biggest brain!”  (Apparently, he deduced this from a pre-school lesson [...]

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Bring Your Child to Nature Day

We interrupt these Oregon posts to bring you a few entries about places closer to home.  Last weekend, 13 of us took a youngster-friendly, not-quite-Labor-Day-weekend camping trip to Warren Dunes State Park, just north of the Indiana border on Lake Michigan.  Mett, Biah, and Miss T enjoyed walking the trails, picking up leaves, immersing themselves [...]

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Dayenu

I went to 2nd seder in Libertyville last night.  This may not technically qualify as a trip out of town, but it would have felt that way if we hadn’t beat the rush hour traffic. My nearly 4-year-old nephew, Bugaboo, attended as well, discovering this home of old friends for the very first time.  Initially, he felt shy in the [...]

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Lessons learned from a first trip to Alaska

(And I would sail 500 miles, and I would sail 500 more . . .) We left Denali by train, taking a scenic railroad car with a glass top to Fairbanks, our last Alaskan stop.  It was just a place to sleep for us:  We were on an early morning flight back to Seattle and [...]

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Is your guitar an endangered Alaskan species?

I was half listening to Re:Sound on WBEZ today, when my ear was caught by the mention of Sitka spruce trees and guitars in the same sentence. Sitka spruce is the state tree of Alaska–the largest variety of spruce and the most ubiquitous tree in southeast Alaska.  Logging Sitka spruce is lucrative. A great many guitar makers use Sitka spruce [...]

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Manoelito

I can’t move this travelogue from sea to land before I’ve mentioned Manoelito.  There was a lot of live music on the ship, and most of it wasn’t very good, but, by the middle of the cruise, Mom and I had become Manoelito Martins groupies, checking the daily schedule to see when and where he would be performing.  This frequently led [...]

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“They look like golf balls”: Rafting in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve

  When we arrived at the bank of the Tsirku River, I was loaned standard-issue rubber boots and a wool hat (since my Tilley hat blew off on the catamaran ride over), and our busload of travelers was divided into four or five rafts.  Mom and I chose to join Sylvia, a thin but strong young woman who [...]

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