Happy Christmas

The semester's done, travel impends, shopping's nearly finished, and of course it's 70 degrees and rainy in Tallahassee. I'm listening to Christmas music downloaded to iTunes and playing a cool Yule log animation downloaded from WGN 'cause it's too hot to light the fire.

May 2007 bring you new discoveries and pleasant surprises.

Anschluss: Colbert Nation

Milling around after watching Stephen Colbert's typically hysterical sendup of bourgeois rectitude at last Friday's Homecoming Powwow, the younger crowd I was hanging with expressed interest in seeing if we could get an autograph. Yours truly led them downstairs to the civic-center loading dock. A small clump of obvious autograph hounds were hanging out some distance away, but there was clearly a door into an area of backstage activity and it was clearly not being closely monitored, so we waltzed in to find a small knot of people also lying in wait for Senor Colbert.

We were lucky; only two more people crept in before the security guy started bouncing 'em at the door. Apparently the small group of about a dozen was OK, though, and after 10-15 minutes Hizzoner came out and graciously signed autographs and posed for pics.

Lindsay, Laura, and Will were ecstatic, as was our friend Jennifer.

All in all, a very truthy evening. Quite a hoot contrasting the rah-rah sentiments of the pep rally with Colbert's lampooning of our "racist war chant" and proposing a new "trail of cheers" tradition to go along with the tomahawk chop and "spear it night".

At Summer's End

The dog days are upon us.

No matter; in a few weeks we'll have either a cold front or a tropical system. There will be football and hallowe'en and oysters and camping to ponder. I'm ready, though I need to get some more swimming in before it's all done.

This summer has been busy as hell. The anniversary party was a complete success; took Mom & Dad totally by surprise and a good time was had by all. Same with the Fennell family reunion that came right on its heels. These two family events came after a summer of classes and workshops that paused only long enough for a week in Panama City; I came back to fall conference presentations for faculty and new TAs (n.b. - teaching FYE was excellent warmup and rejuvenator for these) and simultaneous orientation week for yours truly. One of the highlights of the latter was attending the university-wide convocation with Lindsay.

And so now I am really in grad school again. I'm getting to know the other doctorals, who seem to tolerate Joe Geezer pretty well. Nice folks. And I continue to enjoy the Comm faculty I'm meeting -- had some nice conversations at a reception last Friday night. I'm taking an introductory research methods course and an outside course called "Saving the Apalachicola" that should both be fascinating. The former is a refresher and I like to geek on epistemology anyway; the latter will entail some interesting field trips. It'll be a busy term, but full of learning & growing, too.

Long weekend unbridged to the mainland

Spent four nights on the Dog last weekend, with Nancy at the Co-op House with my sibs Paul and Susannah and their families. It was hot as blazes, but clear and dry for the most part, with amazingly translucent water for this time of year. Nancy saw dolphins leap, and I saw a few groups myself - including one individual with what looked like a damaged dorsal fin. Saw a few black skimmers, too; they always enthrall me with their exotic looks and specialized feeding niche, and they remind me of childhood boat trips off Mobile Bay.

Blue crabs were out in droves along the shore and could be easily dipnetted at night by the dozen. Awesome colors in their claws. At the island fish fry on Sunday night, someone brought a covered dish that consisted mainly of steamed bluecrab halves - mighty tasty though labor-intensive. We all got to know our island neighbors Brad and Ann a little, along with their gorgeous daughters, who were in turn captivated by Caiti, Ben, and Liam (sporting an outrageous mohawk lately). Turnout was good at both the Yacht Club barbecue and the fish fry; there is an enjoyable and a bit quirky sense of community out there, though one does always feel somewhat the hanger-on.

The island is recovering nicely from last year's storm surge, or so it appeared to me. Sea oats were in beautiful abundance and all the debris piles were gone. It was too hot to make hiking attractive, but I look forward to visiting the east end and the bayshore again come fall.

We also sat in on the Dog Island Conservation District board's quarterly meeting, always a small but interesting affair given the uniqueness of the island's circumstances. Issues included a replacement dock in Carrabelle, barging over limerock for island road repair, tiedowns for aircraft at DI Int'l (grass strip), and other details of island life.

The island was as crowded as it gets - seeing a dozen cars parked at any one place besides the harbor is a rarity, but the main road was lined with at least that many during the fish fry. And there was plentiful boat traffic in the harbor; we saw at least one large group coming in to the Pelican Inn, and watched a gaggle of people unload a pickup bed's worth of fireworks at the Yacht Club (for the fish fry finale).

Nancy and I rode over with Cap'n Dick on Friday AM's mail run. Ed brought Susannah and Benj over around 7pm then went back to Lanark for a second load, by which time the encroaching darkness and his unfamiliarity with the route caused him to get lost; meanwhile Paul & Jenny & kids were motoring down from Tally to make an after-dark run in a larger boat equipped with a Q-beam. After a bit of nail-biting and near-misses they ended up convoying over together around 11pm -- a trip both Paul and Ed said they never wanted to make again; despite the mild weather it was not a real familiar route and they ran aground twice in the dark. Fortunately they were moving very slowly.

The return was far less eventful and took place way too soon, as always.

Someone let him out of the can, I guess

Screenshot of NWS radar graphic shows Alberto -- not quite a hurricane -- dumping water on the Big Bend. And we need it! Tonight there's a cool wet breeze outside and it has been raining steadily for the past three hours. It will be very hard to get up in the morning; Alberto is scheduled to be coming ashore around Keaton Beach just about that time. Fortunately the areas hit hardest by the Dennis storm surge last year are west of the center, but that's still a lot of sucking day-fee-neet-ly going on in Apalachee Bay. NDBC reports gusts close to 40kt in Cedar Key already, with some of the offshore buoys picking up 18ft swells.

Hurricane Season 2006, Hello.

While I was standing there thinking about treehugging,

this huge live oak snuck up behind me and stretched out its boughs to give me a squeeze of its own, just seconds after it snatched my camera away and snapped this photo.

Ya gotta watch 'em.

Nice Quote, Gorby

Isn't it ironic that the former leader of the "Evil Empire" is doing more about the global environment than any of our recent Reagan-derived leadership? Consider this quote from a piece Gorbachev wrote for a special issue of Civilization, a magazine of the Library of Congress, back in 2000:

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilisation, people have moved to settle close to water. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write and sing and dance and dream about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

We need it for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for food, for industry, for energy, for transport, for rituals, for fun, for life. And it is not only we humans who need it; all life is dependent on water to survive.

Thanx to Jan Aceti for posting this on the Fostering Sustainable Behavior Listserv (fsb@cbsmlist.com).

Juggling, Beatles music, 'Net humor - the lot!

Chris Bliss kills 'em with one of my favorite Beatles medleys and some of the most balletic juggling I've ever seen. See some of his comedy routines, too.