Month: August 2004

Today was perfect weather (in my opinion), for summer, anyway … the sun was out, but there were periodic clouds moving across the sky, and the weather never got much hotter than 70 degrees. There was a breeze in the air and the light was taking on that lazy, hazy quality it gets at the...

From today’s Ann Arbor News: The Farmers’ Almanac is predicting a wild winter with heavy precipitation and dramatic temperature swings in the Northeast. The northern Plains and Great Lakes will be snowy, the almanac says, while it will be milder in the southern half of the country. The Northeast will have unusually wet weather –...

Well, no more Retro Posts, folks … we made it successfully past the one-year mark and what a year it’s been. I’ve forgotten lots of things that happened, but I do remember one thing: The trees were still green this time last year! Yesterday: « Our Life in Michigan – Another Sunday in Frisinger Park...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] The first squirrel encounter … and it’s been a year of lots and lots of squirrel encounters! [Yes, it has — I thought I’d had my exposure to the...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Settling in … Ann Arbor: Days Seven and Eight After orientation yesterday, I walked home from central campus, all the way down State past the underpass of East Stadium....

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Rethinking things … Developments Our blog (specifically, my entry about the library-lessness of orientation yesterday) has been linked by librarian.net (which I found out after getting a couple of...

Say hello to The AntiFascist, your antidote to that famous right-wing website run by that famous Florida queen-in-denial. (It’s brand-new, so bear with us …)

Oh, yeah: I’ll be on the other side of the LGBT table this year (this coming Thursday), helping greet incoming first-year students as a board member of LILA.

It’s more than somewhat embarrassing to re-read last year’s entries from about this time about the School of Information, actually. I still feel, a year later, as though the school is emphatic (occasionally over-emphatic) in its attention to Information with a Capital I. This means lots of computer-related coursework, lots of technology, lots of econ,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Does he feel the same way? Orientation: Day Two The second day was quite an experience. The highlight of the day was being put into a group with four...

This was the first day all month that actually felt like August. Most of the rest of the month has alternated between day that were what could best be described as tepid and days that were actually cold and/or thunderstorm-filled. I’ve had no problem with the mild August, though it seems to have disconcerted Steve...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Immersion … Orientation: Day One Well, Orientation Day One is over and I can report that ….. it’s gonna be a busy two years. They had us all in...

Bear with me as I indulge in some sentimentality … What’s interesting to me about glancing back at the retro posts from last year at this time is how new this all was to me: not just Ann Arbor, although that was certainly a big part of it, but the whole adventure, from going back...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] The calm before the grad school storm … Ann Arbor: day five Today was a bumpy one. We went out to get some supplies and victuals. I bought a...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] More of our first days in AA … Ann Arbor: day four We went out to dinner with Scott tonight at Gourmet Garden, a Chinese restaurant on the west...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Some memories are better left blotted from the mind … All moved in (mirabile dictu) What a weekend. We basically just unloaded an entire trailer full of our stuff...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I do remember the exhaustion here … Day Eleven Sorry there haven’t been any posts this weekend, but we’ve moved 7,500 pounds of household goods, from the trailer into...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ouch. Moving in is almost as bad as moving out … Ann Arbor: Day Two We signed the lease documents and started moving things into the townhouse. This is...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Has it really been a year already?! Ann Arbor: Day One Steve was out and about today making sure the trailer was in place to unload at the new...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ahhhhh … home at last. A year ago today, we arrived in Ann Arbor. Whatta year, whatta year … Day Eight Day Eight — Lexington, KY, to Ann Arbor,...

One thing that I’ve really learned in my time in southeast Michigan is an increased appreciation for the blues. You have blues played on the radio and blues festivals in the Bay Area, to be sure, although for historical reasons I don’t understand, the Bay Area, as anyone who listens to KFOG (the only radio...

The students are definitely back. About the only thing that hasn’t happened yet is the start of classes, so the mad throngs of students filing across central campus haven’t materialized yet, but otherwise the “quiet” of summer is pretty much over with. The traffic on State is back to snail’s pace levels. A couple of...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] My second visit to Lexington, which I think is rather a pretty place … Lexington, KY Population 260,512 (2000 census). Seat of Fayette County. Second-largest city in Kentucky. Home...

The first time I met Bayley was the first time I set foot in Steve’s apartment in the Sunset in February 2000. Steve opened the front door and a beagle was on the other side of it. When Bayley saw the stranger (me), he looked at me, let out a loud, reproachful, prolonged howl of...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Memphis. Ugh. Tennessee drivers. Ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t have embarked on this journey down memory lane … Day Seven Day Seven — Memphis, TN, to Lexington, KY Surprise! We...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Thank god for this music … it distracted us from the homicidal/suicidal Tennessee drivers on I-40 … Soundtrack, Day Seven Between Memphis and Nashville, Emmylou Harris’s The Ballad of...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I kinda enjoyed Nashville, but we need to go back and spend more time there … Nashville, TN Population 569,891 (2000 census; figure covers Nashville proper and Davidson County)....

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ugh. Maybe on another visit it will seem okay; last year, it was the pits to me … Memphis, TN Population 650,100 (2000 census). The first European to set...

Bayley Murphy Beagle was born in a double-wide trailer house in Kemp, Texas, near Dallas, on 20-Aug-94, to Laddie Lattie and No-No Emmitt. He came to live with David and I on 17-Oct-94. He is better travelled and has lived in more places than most people I know. He has lived in Dallas and Plano,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Day Six started out wonderfully and with lots of fun in Don’s airplane flying above Sundance Airport northwest of Oklahoma City. We then drove around Norman and around Thunderbird...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ah, Day Five … Santa Fe and Oklahoma City … my old stomping grounds. Some great things happened, some nasty things happened, but at least we survived the Texas...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I remember nothing of this … geez, hit 40 and your memory goes, doesn’t it? Soundtrack, Day Six Don played an album this morning that startled me: From Elvis...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Frank speaks more eloquently than I can. I have too much history and other stuff mixed up in my 20 years in Okiehoma to be objective … Oklahoma City,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] A short one … Oklahoma City was burning hell that day … ironically, this summer has been much cooler. The high there on 9-Aug-04 was just 76 degrees. Well...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Sixteen Horsepower kicks ass … and that album will forever remind me of that cross-country excursion. Soundtrack, Day Five Sixteen Horsepower’s Hoarse, one of my favorite albums. A very...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ah, yes. Day Four. Fabulous getting to spend time in my favorite US city and fantasizing about returning (next year?!) to live there. But then we had a couple...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. God, how I love Sante Fe! Santa Fe, NM Population 62,203 (2000 census). Full proper name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco...

The damage that the Boy Emperor is doing to the nation is largely incalculable, and much of it secret, as the mainstream media is slowly and finally beginning to point out. Says « the Washington Post »: ’ Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing...

You’d think AirBeagle was moribund since there hasn’t been a post here in over two weeks … but you’d be wrong. I’m simply suffering through a period of forced inactivity thanks to the onset of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which began in May, reached its peak as I tried to start grad school the first of...

Unpleasant critters who leave unpleasant calling cards on your arms and ankles, and I’d never encountered them (to my memory) before moving here. Steve had to explain to me what they are. Guess I’m going to have to stop letting the beagle wander off into the bushes behind the house.

I thought the lavender wildflowers that have popped up in almost every unoccpied spot of grass in Frisinger Park were a nice addition of color (they’re deceptively gorgeous) until I read a little column in the Ann Arbor News yesterday that fingered them as spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa), a pernicious invasive weed. Originally a native...

There don’t seem to be very many pigeons in Ann Arbor (or what pigeons there are have been cruelly maimed in glue traps, as a story in today’s Ann Arbor News reports; why didn’t the pig who dreamed up the glue traps just get out his rifle and shoot the things instead of torturing them?)....

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Boppin’ through New Mexico with some tunes … Soundtrack, day three Ella Fitzgerald: The Best of the Song Books and Windham Hill Sampler ‘84. And Sixteen Horsepower’s Olden. Also...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I think that Day Three was my favorite part of our trip. The weather was gorgeous with curtains of rain over I-40; the temperatures were great for August and...

« A Beagle Guards the Yard »

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Fabulous New Mexico … Laguna, NM A hamlet about 45 miles due west of Albuquerque on Interstate 40, Laguna was the next place we stopped before hitting the bigger...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Gallup is quite the town … Gallup, NM Population 20,209 (2000 census). Founded 1881 as a stop on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad by David L. Gallup. Home to...

Finally broke down and watched “Party Girl,” that strange little 1995 cult flick with Parker Posey as a Manhattan clubhopper who is inexplicably and fanatically converted to the religion of Melville Dewey overnight (and whose love interest is a Lebanese falafel vendor who secretly yearns to be a teacher). A very odd artifact in spots,...