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.
Draft night
by Anton Zuiker on September 2, 2024
My brother, Joel, loves the Minnesota Vikings and fantasy football—he’s been inviting me for years to join him at a game in the Twin Cities and to pick a team for a league. I’m a soccer player, of course, so have never engaged in this football fantasy.
Until now.
Joel was not able to join us at the big family reunion in Colorado in July, but he invited his brothers and cousins to participate in an ESPN league, and a bunch of us agreed. Tonight was our draft, and it was quite fun, in part because we gathered in Zoom to talk and joke and help each other learn the rules and strategies for selecting a team. I called my team Sugar Rush, and I have no idea how I’ll do week to week.
Oh, and right after Thanksgiving, I’ll be meeting Joel in Minneapolis to attend the Vikings game against the Arizona Cardinals. (In 2016, I ran past the Vikings stadium on a cold start to the Twin Cities Marathon.)
The fish in Vanuatu
by Anton Zuiker on September 1, 2024
At work, a colleague asked a faculty member in the Nicholas School of the Environment for tips about the ArcGIS StoryMaps tool for creating visual reports about places around the world. When the faculty member shared examples of what her students had produced using StoryMaps, my colleague quickly forwarded the list to me with a simple message: Vanuatu!
I scanned the list and found the link to The ‘happiest’ fishers and threats to their fisheries, a stunning report from Christopher Watt. He’s a Duke graduate student who spent nearly a year in Vanuatu on a Fulbright U.S. Student Research Grant.
Looking at Watt’s photos and reading about the changes in how ni-Vanuatu fish in the seas around the island, I thought about Noel Timante. He was my host and friend (he considered me his brother) on Paama, and he had a yellow wooden boat that he used to fish beyond the reef — when he wasn’t up in the hills tending his many gardens with Leah. Because of Noel, Erin and I enjoyed many dinners of fresh tuna and red snapper.
Noel died in 2002, a couple of years after we finished our Peace Corps service (recorded in this blog entry). I miss him. I miss sitting with him on the black-sand beach at Liro Village as the sun sets over the calm Pacific Ocean, all those unseen fish on the move up and down the archipelago.
Twisting in my memories, and soccer
by Anton Zuiker on July 28, 2024
Weeknotes for July 22-28, 2024
Big-league soccer returned to Chapel Hill on Tuesday with a friendly match between Manchester City and Celtic FC. The rain storms stayed away and the night was beautiful. Our family and cousins (including one who flew in from Idaho after many delays caused by the global IT issue) filled 9 seats not far from the pitch, and we enjoyed the game. Celtic was victorious 4-3.
It did rain later that night, so the next morning I went slowly up the gravel drive. Sure enough, there was a box turtle to document. This one had massive scars from some traumatic injury in the past.
Erin took a quick trip to Boston for a conference and was back late Friday night, so we planned a date for Saturday, a wine tasting at nearby Rocks & Acid Wine Shop. The wines were Italian, cold and light and refreshing, with some tasty food by the chef of Chapel Hill restaurant Osteria Georgi (one of our new favorites). After that, we walked two doors up to Market & Moss for dinner, then across the street to see the entertaining Twisters (a good short Atlantic article about the director here). We walked halfway home, came upon friends, chatted until Anna drove up to take us there rest of the way.
There’s a scene in Twisters, toward the end, where the main character Kate is standing on a bluff, a river below and a storm in the distance. That was so close to a memory I have: I’m in Mississippi Palisades State Park, looking across the river to Iowa as the sky darkens. My prom date and our friends got into our car for the drive home but were stopped by the storm — a tornado, we were to learn. In 2005 I blogged about that tornado memory. In May of this year, I found a site with historical tornado data and I was able to confirm my memory: an EF01 twister on May 8, 1988 just east of Oregon, Illinois. (I recently recounted that memory in a therapy session as I explored fear and my various responses.)
My 2005 blog post also mentions “steady gales that tried to blow me off the top of the Oahu pali.” I lived in Honolulu after college, and in December 1992 a high school friend came to visit. We joined the hiking club for the strenuous Puu Heleakala hike on the Waianae coast. The winds at the top made me nervous, but it was the blister from my new hiking boots that would get infected and send me to the hospital for a shot of penicillin.
This week I firmed up my plans for a September visit to Chicago and DeKalb. I’ll join my cousins for “An evening with Goose” (a jam band, read this Atlantic profile) at the Salt Shed, meet a college buddy for dinner, then head west to visit relatives in DeKalb, where I spent my high school years. Looking at a map to confirm a memory of where I played pick-up soccer on summer evenings, I noticed there’s a “seed to spirit” bourbon distillery south of town called Whiskey Acres, and as I learned more about the farming family behind the distillery, I realized that I know that “fifth-generation farmer and self-proclaimed ‘recovering attorney’ turned distiller” — Jamie Walter is the friend who hiked with me to the top of Puu Heleakala.
In work Slack this week I posted this:
Librarians are the best! I wanted to confirm a childhood memory so contacted the librarian at the university in my home town. Asked and answered. I regularly contact the Duke librarians for help. Remember them, and thank them!
I’ll add here my thanks to the librarians at UH Manoa for digitizing the Honolulu Weekly, that wonderful newsweekly that helped me make the most of my time in Honolulu. (I was able to confirm the hike details in the Dec. 16, 1992 issue).
Oliver joined me for pick-up soccer Wednesday night (soggy and sloppy) and this morning (hot but we played long). I had a perfect view up the field to watch him take the ball, dribble and juke his way toward goal, then curve a shot into goal, a bit like Oscar Bobb for Manchester City in Kenan Stadium on Tuesday (Bobb signed Oliver’s City jersey at a pre-match event).
Reunion Highs
by Anton Zuiker on July 7, 2024
The Zuiker Family Reunion 2024 is just done and I’m back home in Chapel Hill (elevation: 500 ft above sea level) yet still soaring from the week we spent with my extended family in Breckenridge, Colorado.
While most big families gather for an afternoon picnic, my father and seven of his eight siblings, 15 of my cousins with their spouses/partners and children, my brother Nick and Carolyn and their sons, Erin and our children, and a few other long-time family friends—70 of us in total—committed to a full week in the mountains.
We do these reunions, sometimes called jamborees, every seven to ten years. This is a family that loves to be together, have fun together, sing together, hike together, play together. Our most recent reunion in 2017 in Tennessee, as I reported in this post, included “sing-a-longs and game nights, tubing down the Pigeon River, hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountain’s National Park, a cousin’s wedding, alpine slides, a primer on solar eclipses, my dad’s (labor-intensive) meatball dinner, lots of photos and conversation.”
My cousins Jenny, John, and Justin all live and work in Denver. They took the initiative to plan this year’s reunion and when they selected nearby Breckenridge, the family was all in. We arrived from Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Texas, and Tokyo. (One cousin called in from Guam, where she is on deployment with the U.S. Navy, and Aunt Judy joined by Zoom a few times.)
Like our previous weeks in Tennessee and West Virginia and Indiana and Wisconsin, this week was packed with activities: an opening-day picnic at Carter Park’s pavilion, a few hikes and a couple of long bike rides, multiple pool parties, another meatball dinner prepared by my father while the rest of us were kayaking on Dillon Reservoir, a family photo—Malia designed a t-shirt with a phrase my Aunt Sue provided: “Life’s climb is better with family at your side”—walking into town to eat or shop, and late-night discussions or game nights.
But there are three highlights for me: the gala dinner and family trivia contest (with a slide show and singing and dancing), the family marching together in the Breckenridge July Fourth Parade (clad in our reunion T-shirts and beaming smiles and handing out candy), and the epic trek that eight of us did up to the top of Quandary Peak.
Quandary Peak is a 14er — the summit is 14,265 feet above sea level. Erin and Oliver and I were part of the group that started out early on a sunny, cloudless day for the long hike to the top. This was our final full day in Colorado, which gave us time to acclimate; still, Erin was feeling the effects of the altitude so she listened to her body and stopped at 13,000 feet. True to her nature, she sat on the mountainside for an hour and reveled in the silence and solitude.
Meanwhile, the rest of us kept going. By the time I reached the top, Oliver had already been up there for 20 minutes with my cousin. I joined them, snapped a bunch of photos, and marveled at the panorama of snow-topped mountains all around. I felt great. I felt awed. I felt strong and satisfied and humbled. When the rest of our group arrived, we took another family photo. (Zach surprised us with the Zuiker Family Reunion sign from our gala dinner!) Back in Breckenridge the next morning, I bought “I climbed Quandary Peak” T-shirts for everyone.
Quandary Peak, Colorado, July 5, 2024
At every family reunion that I can remember, going back to the Zuiker Jamboree at Ravens Roost in 1984, we have sung along with John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. In Breckenridge one day, three teenage siblings were singing that song on the main street while a block away another singer was doing his version on a restaurant balcony. After our gala dinner, Uncle John on a rented guitar led us in a singalong, another moment to add to an overflowing album of family memories.