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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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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