Author: AirBeagle

[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,…

[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.] One of my favorite spots in the southwest … our next destination, post-grad school? Flagstaff, AZ Population 52,894 (2000 census). Seat of Coconino County. Elevation about 7000 feet. Home…

[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 Two of our trip, as I remember it, was really pretty nice, with the possible exception of traffic and crowds in Las Vegas. The weather was beautiful and…

[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.] This is where you need XM satellite radio … Soundtrack, Day Two Lots of jazz and fading-in-and-out talk radio on poor-reception stations. Popped in John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things…

[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 still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F—- Egypt’…

[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 know that that’s one big-ass dam, lemme tell ya! Hoover Dam National Historic Landmark (NV/AZ) Built at a total cost of $165 million between 1931 and 1936, 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.] Wild, woolly Las Vegas. Whatta complete hoot. So very unreal and otherworldly … Las Vegas, NV Population 478,868 (2000 census). Seat of Clark County. The first settlement at what…

[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.] Hitting the road with some tunes and enjoying the countryside. I love it … Soundtrack, Day One John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. Obviously out-of-date yet somehow appropriate. Then a Columbia…

[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.] Yosemite is grand, but go when the crowds aren’t there: fall and spring. Spring is best, because the waterfalls are full and gorgeous … Yosemite National Park, CA Population:…

[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.] Tonopah (I still don’t how to pronounce it properly) is the very definition of ‘Middle of Nowhere’ … Tonopah, NV Population 2627 (2000 census). Seat of Nye County, 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.] I remember very little about even going through this town … Oakdale, CA Population 15,503 (2000 census); founded 1871 by the Stockton & Visalia Railroad Company; main attractions Hershey…

[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’s last day in California/first day on the road … Dottie’s True Blue Cafe My morning began at 7.45. I took care of whatever last minute things I could…

[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 still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F*** Egypt’…

[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.] Moving Day. Yegods. Whatta day that was. Exhausting. Near tears. Panic attacks. Loading that big truck. My last night in San Francisco. Facing the wrenching goodbye where Bayley and…

We left the Bay Area a year ago today. Just loaded ourselves and the beagle into the Jeep, drove, and by the end of the afternoon, we were over the Nevada border. Hard to believe it’s been that long. I still miss aspects of SF and the Bay Area, but it’s all essentially memory and…

I gave up my last vestige of California-ness this week: I broke down and overcame whatever denial I was living in for the past year and finally got a Michigan driver’s license. (I have had a valid California license this entire year, so don’t assume that I was driving illegally or anything like that. Anyway,…

[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.] No comment here. We DO miss them all … So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu! ‘Don’t say goodbye, say see ya soon!’ Goodbyes are hard … Kit, Erin, Me…

[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.] Well, I do miss BART when I have to deal with the drivers around here … but I don’t miss its expense, dirt, filth and crazy, weird people. And…

[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! The anxieties of the final hours before a major move! God! I’m glad we’re not going through this right now!!! 30 Hours and Counting This is just going…

[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.] Tunes on the road … Soundtrack, Departure Heard Art Pepper’s “Summertime,” one of the sublimest West Coast tunes you could ever listen to, on a jazz station when Steve…

We have a new photo gallery: « How to Make PeaMutt Butter Dog Treats »

August 12 and it’s 59 degrees outside. Astounding.

I was walking to the bus tonight, with my usual combination of focus on the path in front of me and absorption in my own thoughts, when to my right I suddenly heard a woman raising her voice and asking, “Do you speak English?” (It was more of an exclamation than it was a question.)…

According to the National Weather Service, July 27 was a record low maximum temperature for this region: The high temperature reached just 64 degrees…falling well below the record low maximum for the date of 70…set way back on July 27th 1874. Adding insult to injury…the high of 64 degrees occurred just after midnight! Temperatures hovered…

The weather this month has been amazingly, well, temperate. There was a bit of mugginess in the air this afternoon, but nothing that was even remotely oppressive. It was actually cooler outside this afternoon than it was indoors. And the cloud cover rolled in later in the day, with the nightfall taking on a signs-of-a-thunderstorm…

I haven’t made much comment about the marriage thing lately because, frankly, it’s too exhausting to keep up, and it’s dispiriting to see what lengths the right wing will go to in order to cloak their efforts to destroy gay peoples’ lives in the rhetoric of “preserving the family” (when the measures they are pushing…

[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 year later, these seem pretty inconsequential things to be missing … I had mostly forgotten all about them. San Francisco Scenes I Will Miss Things I will miss…

[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 year later, I STILL definitely do not miss these things … San Francisco Scenes I Won’t Miss Things I won’t miss about living in this San Francisco neighborhood:…

[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.] If I remember right, the beagle was very upset that we moved down the hall to my roommate David’s new apartment for the week before we departed for Michigan….

I’ve been so laid up with carpal tunnel (and thank you Hillary, Michael and Dorothea for your wonderful advice and care, I do appreciate it) that I really dropped the ball on an important milestone for aSquared AirBeagle: Happy Birthday to Us! We’re a year old! Because all of those entries are from my trashed…

[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.] Many mega-dittoes from me on this one … Things I’ll miss (not) Within the space of fifteen minutes just after 7:30 on Monday morning, within a block of the…

We went to see “A Home at the End of the World“ last night at the Michigan. The screening was introduced by Tom Hulce, best known for his performance 20 years ago in Milos Forman’s “Amadeus.” The movie wasn’t all that great; it was brief, the ending was very abrupt, and probably the only really…

I can’t believe how great it is that the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has finally gotten with the program and is starting to allow people with University of Michigan IDs to ride the bus without paying. (There were one or two free routes before this, but citywide is a godsend.) I’m saving easily $8-10 a…

I’m no paragon of the spoken word, as anyone who knows me can verify, but it always amuses me when I hear students — not just undergrads, grads and everyone in between — using filler words in their speech. “Like” I can understand; it’s an unconscious filler word, like “um,” “uh,” and all the rest….

This afternoon while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a couple of undergrad-looking guys, one toting what looked like a box containing a router and the other some other kind of electronic doohickey in a Toshiba box, and knew beyond a doubt that the influx has officially gotten into high gear. The students…

[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.] Well, it looks like this one saw me full of anxieties about leaving San Francisco for Ann Arbor: Overwhelmed Scenes from a farewell dinner for Frank with his colleagues:…

[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 have to admit to being a snob here; I always preferred SF to Oakland, which never really grew on me, its storied past notwithstanding … A note about…