Eggs
by Anton Zuiker on March 16, 2025
Abi Carter at Cat's Cradle (March 13, 2025)
On Thursday night, Erin and Oliver joined me at Cat’s Cradle Back Room for Abi Carter, winner of Season 22 of American Idol (we three watched this season from start to finish and enjoyed Carter’s beautiful voice). After the show, Erin bought t-shirts and Oliver got Abi’s autograph, telling her he’d just come from playing alto saxophone in the pit orchestra for the Carrboro High School Jag Theatre performance of Something Rotten!
“That’s sick,” she replied.
“Guess who just got on TikTok with a celebrity?” Oliver posted to our family chat on the way home.
I had no idea what Something Rotten! was about. I went to the show last night and laughed throughout at all the wordplay on Shakespeare—Omelette: The Musical (“It’s Eggs!”)—and references to American stagecraft. What a fun show, and the Carrboro kids rocked it. Oliver had solos from underneath, and we were so proud of him.
Eggs—egg prices!—have been in the news as a reference to the state of the economy (and ability of certain politicians to tell the truth). They are a punch line on t.v. and in my Bluesky stream, and the high schoolers last night worked it into the performance. Touché.
At home, our three hens are now laying their eggs in the same small coop but in a different part of our four acres. I’ve spent the last month creating a large fenced run for the chickens, gathering dead juniper trees from around our land to use as posts and hauling hundreds of rocks and small boulders to line the yard as protection from burrowing creatures. My friend Sid came by one Saturday to help with the wire fencing, and I’m spreading wood chips to connect the chick yard to the walking path I’m creating through the woods.
My project was inspired by the DIY instructions in Hentopia: Create a Hassle-Free Habitat for Happy Chickens; 21 Innovative Projects by Frank Hyman. Frank and his wife, Chris, wanted backyard hens and helped lead a successful effort to legalize them in nearby Durham in 2009. I’ve had Hentopia since our previous chicken coop up at the old brick house, and I paged through the book over the winter as I started planning the project. We’ve let the hens range the land but the hawks and owls and foxes and coyote other critters means we’re often running outside to protect them. My goal was to make a space where the hens could move about but be protected and safe. Soon as we add a top screen to the new run, we’ll have achieved the goal.
I also ordered three more Barred Rock pullets from Sunrise Oak Farm (between Durham and Hillsborough); these new chickens are in the garage for the moment but soon will join the hens. I paid $40 per bird back in January, but now the price is up to $54. Eggs!
Promoted
by Anton Zuiker on March 2, 2025
At the Duke Clinical Research Institute, I’ve been promoted to associate director of research communications and engagement.
This step up was one part of the vivid vision I created for myself last summer; I hoped to get this role before 2027, when I will reach my twentieth anniversary at Duke University. I wanted to apply what I’ve learned over the last few years, about being a better leader and coach, to this position in a department in which I have thrived since I joined in 2020. I’m grateful for the promotion.
A Chronicles rebrand
by Anton Zuiker on February 28, 2025
I’m excited to introduce a new brand for the Zuiker Chronicles:
The background
For many decades, my grandfather, Francis C. Zuiker, mailed his typewritten travel essays, which he called The Zuiker Chronicles, to his sons and daughters (and eventually his grandchildren). My father, aunts, and uncles followed with their own Zuiker Chronicles letters.
When I was in college and learning desktop publishing and newspaper layout with Aldus PageMaker on early Apple Macintosh computers, I designed an Anton Edition of the chronicles. Later, Erin and I sent our news from Vanuatu—Frank loved that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer just like my father and an adventure writer like himself.
We returned to the United States as the dotcom bubble was about to burst, but I dove into the web and created a website at zuikerchronicles.com (and zuiker.com) as a tribute to Frank the Beachcomber and to serve as a website community for the extended Zuiker family. Lots of other sites and social media tools made it hard to keep the family active on this website, but since those first days in July 2000, I have written a personal blog first at zuiker.com, then at mistersugar.com, and then again back here.
The first design for the Zuiker Chronicles website used an illustration of aspen trees that referenced the family campground in Wisconsin, which we called Raven’s Roost. From 2005 to 2015, I used a design featuring a raven and a font reminiscent of a vintage typewriter. The mistersugar brand, introduced in 2004, was based on a carved wooden pig that we brought back from Vanuatu.
Time for a new brand
I’ve wanted a new logo for the Zuiker Chronicles for years. As part of my vivid vision, I finally made it happen. At last summer’s Zuiker Family Reunion, two of my cousins got a Zuiker tattoo on their backs—they wanted to honor our grandfather, we found his signature at the bottom of one of his chronicles, and the tattoo artist in Breckenridge arfully recreated it on their skin. Jenny and Kathy almost got me to get the same the next day. I still might.
Home in North Carolina, a state from which many of Frank’s chronicles were written, I went looking for a local designer. But the community on Micro.blog connected me to Ning Kantida, a Thailand-based artist who likes to create letter designs. Ning was eager to help me create a new brand.
Turning to the turtle
For this update, I told Ning, I wanted to replace the raven with an Eastern box turtle to honor the land I live on in and to reflect my passion for recording the turtles I see on my walks in the woods—and to give a nod to my slow writing style. (See my turtle photos here. Uncle Larry sent me photos of tortoises he’d come upon while hiking in the West.)
I’ve written about sea turtles, too, and I have a carved wooden turtle bowl from Vanuatu. Once I shared a photo of that with Ning, we pivoted to using that to inform the logo.
So, we had grandpa’s signature and the sea turtle form. My last request was to have a element about writing: the previous brand referenced the typewriter, but I am constantly writing notes with a pen or pencil.
A professional
Throughout January, Ning methodically and artistically created the layers of the brand, with each emailed update wowing me with thought and detail. In my design brief, I had listed expected deliverables and I got what I hoped for, including the wordmark and logomark, color scheme and typography guide, and favicons.
Importantly, I also got a great partner for this project. I am delighted by the result. Thank you, Ning!
Next steps
I’ve already begun to code an updated Zuiker Chronicles. I hope to launch the new design in a few weeks. I’ll write up an explanation for that, too.
And, stickers.
Coda
Ning has a detailed explanation of her approach to this commission.
Family reality
by Anton Zuiker on February 28, 2025
On my way to and from soccer Wednesday evening, I listened to Alternate Realities, a three-episode report from NPR podcaster Zach Mack about a bet with his father as to which of 10 conspiracy theories would come true in 2024. I found this to be an enlightening story. It’s a sad story, too. And it hit so close to home. Here’s the two-minute series intro:
Fussy and fit
by Anton Zuiker on February 22, 2025
Oliver is on a winter soccer team called the Spartans. They had their first match today as part of a tournament in Burlington. Oliver played on the defensive line and he was very strong, but the team lost and in the final minutes he seems to have broken a toe.
Back at home, while I used the last of the daylight to prepare the spot where I’ll be building a new chicken run, Erin made shrimp scampi as consolation meal for Oliver. After dinner, I grabbed a jar of my cherry pie filling and whipped up a cherry crisp. I followed the apple crisp recipe in Betty Crocker’s 40th Anniversary Edition cookbook—I think Erin’s mom gave this to me and Erin when we were married in 1996—and was intrigued by this note at the top of the instructions:
Apple Crisp is an American classic that uses our abundance of native apples in a luxurious-tasting, no-fuss dessert. During World War II when food rationing was in effect, this patriotic crisp was featured as “easy on shortening and sugar.”
When the cherry crisp came out of the oven, we took bowls of the deliciousness upstairs to finish watching The Six Triple Eight about the 855 members of the all-Black battalion of the US Women’s Army Corps that managed a backlog of 17 million items at the end of the war. I salute their skill and accomplishment, their pride and perseverance.
I’m under no illusions tonight: it’s been a pleasant Saturday for soccer and a peaceful evening for history and sweets, but there is a battle raging for fairness and equity.
Another marker
by Anton Zuiker on February 17, 2025
On Saturday, Erin and I attended the unveiling of a second marker to recognize the horrible history of lynching in Orange County, North Carolina (and across the United States of America). This marker, next to the historic old courthouse in Hillsborough, pays tribute to Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Morrow. They were killed in 1869.
This marker, and the one in Carrboro that honors Manly McCauley, are the work of the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition in coordination with the Equal Justice Initiative. Erin serves on the OCCRC and we visited EJI and the Legacy Sites last year.
The ugly face of racism is before us again, and still. You may take away the language of fairness and love, but we will not give up this fight.
Tattered and blue
by Anton Zuiker on February 15, 2025
In his blog post yesterday, Studio Notes #19, Dan Cederholm links to a video interview of the actor Walton Goggins talking about a few meaningful objects, including a particular favorite book.
I nearly jumped out of my seat when he held up a blue, tattered, paperback edition of Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha. It’s also one of my favorite books from a time when I actually read whole books. I have that exact same paperback. And it deserves a re-read.
I also have a copy of Siddhartha, and still the folded pink detention slip that a high school teacher gave me at the time I was first reading the book. I blogged about it in 2006.
My other favorite paperback, this one with a cover in lighter Carolina blue, seems to have gone missing; I must have lent One Hundred Years of Solitude to a friend or relative in the last few years. I purchased a used copy recently and planned to read it again (fourth time?) but I think instead I’ll read the shorter Hesse novel about contemplation and listening, which feels like it will pair perfectly with Pico Iyer’s Aflame (as I suggested in this recent post, I did get back to the bookstore to get this).
While I was reading Cederholm’s post, watching Goggins’s interview, and holding my 1980s copy of Siddhartha, I also was waiting for a dear friend to arrive in Chapel Hill. Khaled Khan, my high school friend and Colorado hiking partner, had let me know he’d be at UNC-CH with his family for a tour of one of the graduate schools. They came by the house for afternoon tea, and I smiled.