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.
Safety in the air
by Anton Zuiker on March 18, 2019
In January, when Anna and Malia accompanied me on the trip to Chicago, we flew Southwest Airlines. The flight from Raleigh-Durham to Midway was on a very new, nice, and comfortable airplane. I remember telling the girls how nice it was to have so much leg room. The plane was a Boeing 737 MAX 8.
That plane, and all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes around the world, are grounded as officials study the cause of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on March 10. The Seattle Times has published its investigative reporting about the way the 737 MAX 8 was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. Aviation crash investigations take time, and the truth may emerge differently than we think we understand the causes and effects today.
I’ve loved Boeing jets since I was a boy, watching 707s take off from the Phoenix runway and touring the Boeing visitor center on a family trip from our home in Idaho to Seattle in the late 1970s. (I was a Seattle Supersonics and Dennis Johnson fan at the time; a few years ago, I met the parent of Anna’s classmate, who turned out to be UNC standout Tom LaGarde, also a member of the 1979 NBA champion Sonics.) Even my post about our trip to Australia gushes about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
I’ll be in the air again soon, hoping for a safe flight and wishing for that spacious seat on the MAX 8. Let’s hope the aviation regulators, experts, and engineers find their answers and solutions so the airplanes in the skies are safe for all.
The writing-cabin rabbit hole
by Anton Zuiker on March 17, 2019
Every two months, a new issue of dwell arrives in the mailbox, and I eagerly sit down with the magazine to read about cool architects, artistic individuals, and the modern homes they build around the world. I’ll invariably see a cool cabin or Scandinavian sauna or sleek wood-burning stove, and I’ll be off on a couple of hours of searching and surfing to find out more. I am keen to build a writer’s retreat out on the back part of our wooded lot, and I dream.
A new issue arrived yesterday. I read it on our back deck in the warm sunshine, and was soon learning about the MINIMOD Spot, a perfect contender for the retreat except it’s only available in Brazil and Uruguay, and then I found myself looking at the Muji Hut, but that’s only available in Japan. The Danish wood stoves I could probably get, but they’re expensive. Good architecture and design and craftsmanship should be well compensated.
I know a few architects, and have met others, so I suspect that in the end I’ll turn to one of them to solve this itch. Maybe our Peace Corps friend, Kevin Anderson. Or Nick’s sister-in-law, Carina Coel and her Austin-based all-women firm Restructure Studio, which just announced their Arbor Plans project to offer “green-by-design, ready-to-build architectural home plans and Accessory Dwelling Units.” Or Dot’s son, Nathan Hutchins, though he’s designed posh hotel interiors and his firm, Muza Lab is way out of my league.
As I said, the writer’s retreat out back is a dream, and a rabbit hole I’ll keep diving into.
Into the wildflowers
by Anton Zuiker on March 16, 2019
Anna, Erin, Malia and wildflowers (August 2007)
That Dan Barber TED talk reminded me I hadn’t been to the Carrboro Farmers Market in many months, so this morning Oliver and I took a short drive over there. We got our treats, cherry babka for me and cinnamon roll for him, and I bought a small pot of bloodroot and a some other items.
Back home, I spent the day outside, redistributing the firewood and limbs, hauling rocks across the yard, raking leaves and dirt as we toil to make the ground around the house ready for grass. We had help today from a guy who does a lot of projects for us. Today he brought a tiller to work the ground, and I asked him to prepare space near the garden boxes where I could plant the wildflower mix that’s been in the shed since last year.
The photo above is my all-time favorite, taken on an August afternoon in West Jefferson, North Carolina during a vacation in the mountains. We stayed at the home of one of Erin’s law-school classmates. The South Fork of the New River ran through the back yard, and the family had a large swath of wildflowers that was simply heavenly. I’ve wanted to recreate that slice of heaven ever since.
The bloodroot I planted near the giant white oak tree.
Bloodroot
Free to read
by Anton Zuiker on March 15, 2019
Match Day over and the work week done, I came home, retired to the sofa, flipped on the television, and found a TED talk to watch: Dan Barber on How I fell in love with a fish.
Erin joined me in the living room to listen to Barber talk about truly sustainable fish farming in Spain.
I mentioned to Erin that Barber’s book was one of the best I’d read in the last 10 years. I found it in the library and handed it to her.
“I haven’t seen you reading this,” she said.
“It’s been awhile,” I said. “I read it that year I was quiet.”
The quiet year was my blogging and social media sabbatical, when I read a lot, got outside often to breathe, walk and run. Eventually, I wrote a 3,000-word essay that I thought would be a good way to explain what my reflection had helped me realize, but then I boiled that down to less than 300 and made that my Zuiker Chronicles redux post.
Holding Barber’s book again tonight, I tried to remember what I’d written about Third Plate. Here are two sections of that longer essay, with the themes and references that have made it into many of my blog posts since.
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From the bookshelf, I took down the paperback copy of Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon. This was a book I started in college, but never finished. A classic of narrative nonfiction, it’s a journal of Least Heat-Moon’s getting out—his university sabbatical and journey across America, and a chronicle of conversations he had with people in small-town cafes and roadside campgrounds. I recognized many of the places on his journey, geographical but also emotional. I devoured Delicious, a novel by food writer Ruth Reichl, with a protagonist who is mentored by an old-school Italian deli owner who takes his sweet time to talk and listen to his customers. I take time to read, take my time reading, Capote, McCann, Mitchell, Patchett, Steinbeck, Cervantes, Finnegan, Boo, and others.
Blue Highways made me want to get out and travel. The Rural Life, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, made me want to sit down and watch. Klinkenborg reflects on small details and routine activities on his weekend farm in upstate New York, in short essays that are insightful and meaningful, just the kind of writing I’d always wanted to do myself. Klinkenborg is a professor of creative writing, and his newest book is ‘Several short sentences about writing.’ To write as clearly as possible, he advises, be observant, reflect on what interests you, and, above all, notice what you are noticing. Or, “See what you’re looking at,” chef Dan Barber quotes wheat farmer Klaas Martens quoting soils professor William Albrecht, in Barber’s excellent The Third Plate meditation on the future of food. Sitting one afternoon on my favorite stone bench in the Duke Gardens, I watched a great blue heron hunting slowly in the stream. The bamboo rubbed and rustled gently in the breeze, and slow deep breaths filled my lungs with warm Spring air. After a while, I noticed that I felt no need to rush that image out to the world. What I was looking at was mine, for just that moment.
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The TED talk over, and the Duke-UNC game still to start, we watched the stunning documentary Free Solo about Alex Honnold’s climb up El Capitan without any ropes. An amazing feat.