Dodge ball
by Anton Zuiker on September 7, 2024
Erin, Oliver, and I were invited to a dinner party today with a promise of dodge ball and an Indian meal. We didn’t have plans so we said yes, and the night was an unexpected load of fun—adults and kids played five rounds of dodge ball in the back yard, then went inside for a delicious meal, lots of conversation, and word games.
We just got home. As we we pulled up to the house, Erin spotted a grey fox near our garage. A rabid red fox was caught in nearby Carrboro earlier this week, but the foxes we’ve seen on our property this week seem healthy and appropriately cautious of us. We’ll dodge them nonetheless.
See Lola Run
by Anton Zuiker on September 6, 2024
The NYTimes asked readers about the best movies of 1999. Erin and I were in Vanuatu so didn’t get to see any of them in the theater—except one. We took a break from our volunteer work on Paama to visit New Zealand, and during our first few days in Auckland, we went to see Run Lola Run.. I loved it.
Over the next couple of years, we watched many of the other hits from 1999, mostly on VHS in our apartments but maybe a few in Cleveland theatres.
Of course, the movie from that year that I’ve seen the most is The Matrix. Love that one, too.
Red fox
by Anton Zuiker on September 5, 2024
On my way out to Cat’s Cradle tonight, to catch the young band Happy Landing on the opening night of their tour, I saw a red fox dart across the gravel drive. It stopped in the woods just beyond the truck’s headlights, turned and watched me.
Recently, I prepared a two-page vivid vision (inspired by this) to guide my health, family and friends, finances, work, and writing over the next five years. In this plan, to answer “What is my state of mind” on my sixtieth birthday, I have this goal:
I find awe, beauty, and wonder from nature (hiking, camping, touring) and from people (music, arts, culture). I spend 5 full days outside and I attend 12 concerts, shows, plays, and other live entertainment each year.
I’ve already caught a couple of concerts in the last weeks (Cannons, The Heavy Heavy), with more tickets in hand for shows ahead. I join Uncle John later this month for the final year of the World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, then the one-day Carrboro Music Festival follows, and later my brother Nick will be here and we’ll be back at Cat’s Cradle for Melt and The Dear Hunter.. Culture is the easy goal.
The reach goal in my vivid vision is book related.
To focus on a topic of my one-day novel or memoir, I plan to mine my 25 years of blogging. For a long time and to have a hard copy archive of my writing, I’ve converted the blog posts from the Zuiker Chronicles and mistersugar.com into a single document, three columns of 9-point type to a page. It runs to more than 400 pages. Last month, I started to add posts that I have written on other, secondary blogs (Yumi Stap Storian, Wan Smol Blog, Coconut Wireless, and a blog I wrote with Dave Winer’s Fargo outliner). I have a bit of trepidation about feeding this archive into an AI engine, though I’m eager to learn what I can about all that I’ve chronicled and documented, so I’ll proceed cautiously and most likely use a local LLM. Someday.
At the moment, I’d just like a better way to search my archive. For example, with Malia now in Madrid for the semester, I’ve been thinking about the couple of years after I graduated college. I would purchase copies of El Pais and read that newspaper from Spain in my apartment in Honolulu, and later in Shaker Heights, as a way to practice my Spanish comprehension. But I’m not sure I mentioned that in two and a half decades of blogging. (The New Yorker happens to have a current article about El Pais in the U.S.)
I do know that I’ve blogged about a lot of wildlife—turtles and owls and ospreys and foxes and too many roaches and one dugong. All along, I have found awe, beauty, and wonder in nature. More to come.
Smokeless stoves
by Anton Zuiker on September 4, 2024
When I woke this morning and did a quick check of the headlines on the NYTimes and Washington Post, one story caught my attention: the Post has a long piece about an initiative to distribute cooking stoves across Mozambique and other countries as part of the carbon credits industry. The stoves, made of clay bricks and a few pieces of metal, turn out not to have held up. (Here’s a gift article link to the full story.)
As I read the article, I was looking for mention of BioLite, a company that makes better cookstoves and solar-powered lights for the American consumer. They also distribute some of these across India and Africa to promote better health through smokeless cooking. I wrote about the many BioLite products I use in Lights up.
BioLite was not mentioned in the WaPo article. Nor were other ways to make smokeless stoves, such as the concrete form used in Vanuatu.
I don’t seem to have ever written about the smokeless stove that we used on Paama. When we learned we would be assigned to Liro Village, where are training was held. As we returned to Port Vila for our swearing-in ceremony, Erin and I paid some men from Liro Village to construct the concrete, wood-burning stove in the standalone kitchen off of the house we would be using. A pipe sent most of the smoke up and out of the kitchen, and the fire heated pots over two round holes in the top of the counter. We also had a two-burner gas stove inside for heating the tea kettle, and we cooked quite a few meals on the concrete stove.
When my father visited us on Paama for the first time, he and I paid to have a smokeless stove built inside the kitchen of Leah and Noel, our host family. They used their stove regularly but they also continued to make open fires outside for roasting yams and manioc or heating lava stones to steam laplap.
Last weekend I made my annual batch of homemade hot sauce (photo above). As I’ve done the past few years, I cooked the vinegar and peppers on the BioLite HomeStove outside to keep from filling the house with chile fumes. This stove is the model that’s meant for low-income areas in other countries, but I was able to buy it during a short window when the company offered in the U.S. I enjoy using this stove, but it was a hot day even before I stood over the boiling hot sauce.
I plan to make a couple more batches of the hot sauce, but now I have a portable induction cooktop burner that I can plug into the outlet in the garage and cook inside its shade. So, smokeless.
Lunch reading
by Anton Zuiker on September 3, 2024
At a dinner party the other night, our friends got to talking about the books they are reading (and writing). I was reminded of how enjoyable it is to get lost in a novel and informed by well-written nonfiction books. One lasting memory: The summer I was a young magazine editor in Cleveland, I spent my lunch breaks sitting on a bench in University Circle reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. (My previous blog post about that book.)
Earlier this year, I read The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. He’ll be the guest of honor, joining by Zoom, for the DCRI Reads book club next week. As a warmup, my colleague Jenny and I hosted a watch party of the movie My Own Country, based on Verghese’s memoir of his time as a doctor in Tennessee during the early AIDS epidemic. I also read that book in Cleveland—I was working at Booksellers before I got the job at Northern Ohio LIVE—and it shifted my career focus to medical journalism. (See this post, and this short article from Duke Today in 2009.)
Now I’m reading Moonbound, the latest novel by Robin Sloan. I even took it to lunch today, reading it in the Durham Food Hall as I ate a pizza.
I track my books through Micro.blog, which has a good Bookshelves feature. Find my reading list on Wan Smol Blog.