A new Rusty
by Anton Zuiker on December 3, 2024
In September 2002, as I was beginning graduate school, I officially retired my trusty burnt-orange backpack that I had purchased 20 years before and then taken with me through high school and college and around the world as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I’ve had a lot of backpacks since then. Messenger bags, too. And GORUCK packs. And packable sacks for traveling or popping into the market.
In 2017, I needed a new daily backpack. When I learned that the Synapse 19 (from Tom Bihn in Seattle) came in burnt orange, nostalgia struck and I ordered one. The next day, a message came from the company to regretfully inform me that when they went to box my order, they’d just run out of the orange. I shrugged and replied that I’d take the Synapse in black.
This backpack has served me well for eight years — it’s just back from my trip to Minneapolis, where Joel and I attended the Vikings football game and the Golden Gophers men’s hockey game — and it is time to replace it.
I’d seen that Tom Bihn was expecting a new bundle of this backpack in the burnt orange, and that’s what I ordered last week and finally received today.
No telling where this backpack and I will go together.
Go blue
by Anton Zuiker on October 27, 2024
“I’m walking into town to vote,” I told Erin this afternoon.
She was reading a novel on the blue sofa. She’d voted yesterday before a visit to the nearby Carrboro Farmers Market.
With U2 in my ears, I set out for the same little house behind Carrboro Town Hall, where the Orange County Board of Elections is holding early voting.
When I stepped inside, no line, and I took my ballot to the flimsy plastic booth and I started filling in the bubbles beside Kamala D. Harris and Tim Walz (President and Vice President), Valerie P. Foushee (U.S. House of Representatives N.C. District 4), Josh Stein (Governor), and others. I entered my ballot into the collection machine, put an I Voted sticker on my shirt, and kept walking.
I’m proud to have voted. I’m grateful for the freedom and privilege and right to join in choosing our local, state, and federal leaders.
The creative class
by Anton Zuiker on October 15, 2024
One after the other in my inbox today, messages from three companies inviting me to purchase their new items:
- Dan Cederholm announced Hubano, “an all-caps display serif inspired by some lettering found on a Cuban cigar box.” I’m a member of Dan’s Secret Type Club, which means I get an early look at his new fonts. I’m using Free Lunch Tomorrow to design a new brand for my The Long Table project—I love the ligatures that come with this font.
- Field Notes, maker of an iconic note book, announced their 64th Quarterly Limited Edition. This edition is The Birds and Trees of North America and it features the artwork of Rex Brasher (1869–1960). I’m no longer a subscriber—I’m working through a backlog of past editions, as well as a stack of notebooks we ordered for ScienceOnline2010—but my family still jokes about how I regularly received notebooks, pencils, and hanks.
- Studio Neat announced their Patch Club, their “fun excuse to try our hand at some embroidered patches.” I’m not into patches too much, but I do have quite a few products from Studio Neat, including their great pens, mechanical pencils, Totebooks, and Panobooks. Any day now I’ll be receiving the Keen, a retractable utility knife.
I’m grateful to these teams for their quality creations. I’m sure they’re thankful for my dollars. Hope they keep up the great work.
Read the heat
by Anton Zuiker on October 13, 2024
The weekend’s autumn weather was perfect, with sunny days and cool nights. Erin is still getting through Covid, so we had no social activities. After Oliver’s soccer game in Durham Friday afternoon—he was at right center back and he defended well in the j.v. team’s lopsided win—I snuck out for music at Cat’s Cradle Back Room.
Saturday was glorious and I had time on my hands. I took a cup of coffee and a book to the back deck and sat in one of the modern Adirondack chairs that my brother Matt had given us for a housewarming gift last year. The book was a new teen and young-adult novel by Michael Ruhlman: If You Can’t Take the Heat. It’s a story about an injured high school athlete in the suburbs of Cleveland in 1980. Young Theo Claverback meets a girl, he gets a job in the kitchen of a good restaurant, and he learns a few life lessons and cooking habits.
I loved this book!
I spent most of the day reading it, only taking breaks to refill my coffee and to put the legs on a bench I’ve been making from a slab of the white oak that came from the trees we milled in 2019. I had a ticket to another show at Cat’s Cradle but I read right up to show time, finishing the last page and then taking a quick shower and pulling on my boots.
During the lull between opening act (Dori Freeman) and headliner (The Wildmans), I thought about what I liked so much about Ruhlman’s story: its narrator’s voice made the story flow well, the kitchen scenes were more expansive and realistic than the enjoyable but frenetic scenes from The Bear, and all of those Cleveland references reminded me of my decade or so in Cleveland.
For example, the Shaker Lakes are a key location in the story and I first kissed Erin on a bench at the Shaker Lakes. Also, the restaurant where Theo gets to work is in a house on Larchmere Boulevard, and Erin and I lived for a year after Peace Corps seven buildings over from Larchmere. And in the Acknowledgements, Michael notes that three of the characters who work in the restaurant have the names of real people who worked with Michael in Sans Souci, a great restaurant that was in downtown Cleveland for the longest time. Erin and I were invited to attend a special dinner to celebrate the Sans Souci fifth anniversary in 1997—I was editor of Northern Ohio LIVE then, and Erin and I were getting ready to depart for Vanuatu—and I remember that Michael was working in the kitchen that night and we chatted on our way out.
Now that I’m done with If You Can’t Take the Heat, I’m hoping Erin and Oliver will read it soon. Oliver surprised me this week, opting to keep his gaming computer off so he could read to the end of Between the World and Me, a book he voluntarily chose for his English assignment. Oliver and his friends have started to cook together, so I suspect he’ll thoroughly enjoy the Ruhlman story, too.
In all my forms, everywhere
by Anton Zuiker on October 13, 2024
Dave celebrated 30 years as a blogger, and he’s having a blast developing a new textcasting tool that connects WordPress and Mastodon and someday, perchance, the rest of the web of social media and Fediverse tools. Meanwhile, Manton has added Threads crossposting to Micro.blog.
I feel myself hesitating at this rapid interconnectedness. I’ll be slow to adopt this. I’ll not rush to be posting across Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads and other services. I’m still scarred from my online wipeout 10 years ago.
But as I’ve been watching Dave’s excitement and following the community discussion across Micro.blog, I’ve been thinking about Robin Sloan’s latest novel, Moonbound. In that, Sloan has imagined a delightful character named Clovis, a wandering robot that is wirelessly connected to other traveling robots in the world. Indeed, the robots share the same consciousness.
When the sun was high in the sky, Ariel found himself gaining on a robot grinding slowly along the Rath-road. Unlike Clovis, this robot was squat, barrel-shaped, and rolling on treads.
As he passed, the robot buzzed: “Hello, Ariel de la Sauvage.”
He looked at the rotund robot. “We have not met,” said Ariel. “How do you know my name …?”
“I have met you,” the robot said. “I am Clovis. In all my forms, everywhere, I am Clovis.”
“Where is the form I met?”
“I am walking to the coast. I am nearly there.”
Clovis was my favorite character in the novel. (Read it and enjoy.)
A lot of my early blogging, in the years 2000 to 2004, documented my own excitement at all the writing and publishing and discussion tools that were becoming available. I bounced from one to another but, in the summer of 2004, I settled on Textpattern. I’ve been using this for my main blog (Zuiker Chronicles, then mistersugar.com, then back to Zuiker.com) for 20 years now and I’m grateful to Team Textpattern for their steady development and ongoing stewardship of the CMS.
What’s cool about the textcasting and crossposting that Dave and Manton and others are building is that I can stay with Textpattern for my main blog and push my writing, if and when I’m ready, to a wider net. I do remember now that I am already crossposting to Mastodon (.@mistersugar@opalstack.social).
I will need to decide if, “in all my forms,” I will be mistersugar or antonzuiker—I am my name and I still love my nickname, but I stopped using mistersugar (explained here) during my social media sabbatical, and I’ve wanted to go back.