Hear the leaves falling
by Anton Zuiker on March 23, 2019
Even with a dozen big trees now gone from our property, there still will be a lot of leaves to fall from the many dozens of oak, elm, maple, and other trees that remain. The last few times I’ve visited the hardware and garden stores, I’ve looked over the selection of gas-powered backpack blowers, expecting I’d purchase one so that I can keep the yard clear this autumn. But in the April issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows argues against leaf blowers.
Their high volume, which I had long considered their most salient feature, is only their second-most-unusual aspect. The real marvel is the living-fossil nature of their technology. And because the technology is so crude and old, the level of pollution is off the charts.
Fallows was part of a small group of people and elected representatives to successfully advocate against leaf blowers in Washington, D.C. Kudos to them for making their communities less polluted with gas fumes and low-decibel noise.
I knew that two-stroke engines weren’t great for our environment, but I thought, wrongly, that they were getting cleaner. Fallows set me straight, and that’s enough for me to not get one of those backpack blowers. The other facts he shares—about an increase in hearing loss in the U.S. and how a blower’s motor will surely damage my ears—settles the case. I’ll be looking at the battery-powered blowers from now on, and grabbing for the metal rake that’s worked quite well for the last few years.
The convenience of books
by Anton Zuiker on March 22, 2019
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, and she’s one of the best journalists I’ve read over the last few years. Her feature about the potential of a devastating earthquake in the coastal Northwest, and her reporting about the stink bug invasion, are perfectly excellent. The March 25 issue includes a shorter memoir about her father’s love of books, and how he stacked them up, around, and down the sides of a bedroom dresser.
There’s a paragraph in the middle of Schulz’s piece about the novel Middlemarch, which her father regarded as the greatest in the English, and others found near it. “I don’t know if he had completed either of the other two books, or even begun them. But it doesn’t matter, I suppose. No matter when my father died, he would have been—as, one way or another, we all are when we die—in the middle of something.” Sublime.
Schulz’s description of her father’s books took me back to the literary cocoon of my friend Richard Gildenmeister, whose apartment in Cleveland was crammed full of books (and more). That short profile I wrote about him in 1996 is still one of my favorites. I’m glad, too, that I recorded Richard telling me some of the stories about the famous writers he met in his long career as a bookseller. Schulz tells of the stories her father told her when she was young. “I regret to this day that none of us ever thought to write them down.”
Erin has kept a running list of the wondrous and humorous sayings of our children. She wasn’t with us tonight when, after a long day of travel, Oliver said of this place we’ve come to visit, “There are so many convenient things here that I haven’t noticed before.” I heard him later in bed, reading from a book.
Shot put around the world
by Anton Zuiker on March 21, 2019
Erin alerted me to a heartwarming story about two Ni-Vanuatu women—one a Special Olympics athlete, the other her coach—featured on the Humans of New York site. (Erin tells me Ruby Sinreich alerted her.) Monick, the athlete, won the silver medal for shot put at the Special Olympics World Games in Abu Dhabi.
Anna, our daughter, took up the shot put last year, and is throwing again for her senior year. Her first track meet was last week, with others to come.
I came across Ruby’s name earlier today as I searched for an old BlogTogether post. Ruby was one of the first bloggers in Chapel Hill, a regular member of our Chapel Hill bloggers meetup, and a speaker at the first Triangle Bloggers Conference in 2005. I was looking for an event we held a couple of years later, a happy hour in RTP to meet Eric Mlyn and hear about the new DukeEngage program he was leading. I wasn’t very good at keeping the BlogTogether site alive, so here’s the post archived in the Wayback Machine. I saw Mlyn’s name in the Duke River of News this week and learned he is stepping down as executive director of DukeEngage.
Lights, moon, rest
by Anton Zuiker on March 20, 2019
While I waited for the zoning inspector to arrive to her desk at Chapel Hill town hall this morning (I needed to check on a permit for some work up at the house), I watched a maintenance man step to the elevator. He looked up, noticed the florescent light was out, and took out his notebook. I assume he jotted a reminder to file a work order or to tell a co-worker to replace the tube.
Later, walking through the hallway at work, I walked carefully past a maintenance man up a ladder twisting a new bulb into a recessed canister.
Back home, I saw the tool shed was unlocked, so I stepped inside, wound up a long extension cord I’d tossed inside over the weekend. I reached up and turned on the BioLite SolarHome unit I’d charged with the good sunshine Saturday.
I have a light turned on here on my desk as I write this blog post. The rest of the house is dark, the family all in bed.
Electric lights are wonderful.
So is tonight’s super worm moon. Like many nights, I will step out the front door to look at the starlight and moon’s glow, listen for owls and coyotes, and breathe in a moment of peace, then go off to sleep and dream.
When you need a mousetrap
by Anton Zuiker on March 19, 2019
A colleague today gave me an update on myRESEARCHhome and the navigators service, two ways Duke University (with funding from the National Institutes of Health) helps scientists and physicians in their research activities. The navigators are people just waiting to help an investigator find the right resource or understand the correct process.
That update reminded me of my Grandpa Sisco, our family navigator who shuttled us around town and to and from the airports and always had the right resource for us—except that one time when I was in high school and I asked him for a mousetrap.
“I don’t have any mousetraps,” he reported. Later that night, he stopped by our house and handed me a brown paper bag with two new mousetraps. For the next 20 years, he always had a spare mousetrap in his desk drawer.
I was reminded of Grandpa Sisco a second time today during a presentation by a former chief communications officer for Mayo Clinic. Grandpa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in small-town DeKalb, and his physician referred him to Mayo. The treatment worked, and Grandpa lived an active life into his 90s.