I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. The concept, at least as presented in our culture, tends to be too abstract – take a look at Wikipedia’s list of popular resolutions. They also list the results of a small (3,000 people) study: 88% of the people who study participants who set New Year’s resolutions failed to accomplish their resolutions.
Instead, I set goals, both for the year and on a weekly basis. These are both achievable and measurable; I can definitively say when I’ve completed each one. Of the eleven goals I set for myself last year (I didn’t post all of them here), I completed nine. Of the two I didn’t complete, one carried over for this year and the other has been removed from the list. Starting this year, I’ve added categories to the goals – those include personal, professional, fitness, house, and garden, among others – which I include on both the weekly and annual goals. I have a Google Doc listing the annual goals with a spot for a completion date, and a separate one for the weekly goals.
Here are some of my 2019 goals:
Test for my hapkido black belt – this is my carryover from last year.
Develop a garden plan for the year – the plan is different each year, as I look at what seeds I have (leftovers or harvested from last year’s vegetables) and determine how the crops should rotate.
Add a new garden bed – this is already a work in progress; I have mulch and leaves down in the appropriate area and will add dirt as we get closer to spring. I suspect there will be strawberries planted there.
Complete my next project management course – also already in progress.
Organizing around the house – I actually have three different goals around organizing at home.
Do you approach the new year with goals or resolutions?
Near the beginning of the year, I set several goals that were spread out across the year. This has been a rollercoaster of a year, with some goals postponed, some discarded, and some new ones added. The ones I had shared earlier in the year were:
Test for my Tang Soo Do black belt – tested in April, received my belt in June, and my embroidered belt (with my name and Dan number) in December.
Renew my Project Management Professional (PMP) certfication – I completed this in January and am working on my credits for the next cycle.
Add a new garden bed – I added a Garden Tower this year, and am prepping an existing area for next year’s new garden. Like renewing my PMP certification, this is a perpetual goal.
Garage door projects – this was actually two projects in one: replacing the door from the kitchen to the garage , which I had professionals do, and adding a garage door seal.
Duolingo had added Korean as a language option. Since we learn snippets of Korean at karate, I thought I’d try picking up a bit more. Oops. This fell off the list fairly quickly in January; learning a new alphabet takes a bit more time than just learning a new language, and I found I didn’t have that time to spare.
In addition to these goals, I set some new goals during the year. I had three major house projects that need to be addressed by professionals: old windows, a driveway that has settled with some significant cracks, and a shed that’s falling apart. My budget only goes so far, so I opted to replace the windows, which turned out to be a great decision as my boiler is having problems at the start of winter. I wrote a song, which was nowhere on my list of things to do. And, of course, I had the unexpected goal of finding a new job. Overall, I’m happy with the goals I set and the number of them I was able to complete.
I flew back to California for work last week. I arrived Sunday morning and managed to just make it to Oceanside for a boat tour – theoretically, whale watching, but it’s not quite whale season yet. We did see three kinds of dolphins as well as some sea lions. That was the extent of my traditional tourism; the rest of my days were filled with work. Meal times, however, were a great time to explore some of the local options.
It began immediately following the boat ride, with a coupon to Harbor Fish & Chips. I opted for the “small” – a single piece of fish – which was impressively sized; anything larger would have been too much for me. When I arrived at my hotel, I realized it was well-placed for walking to dinner. In addition to four restaurants down the block, there was an outlet mall across the street, with most of their restaurants at the end near the hotel. That said, Pokemon Go rewards you for walking, so I almost always to the long route to and from dinner.
Clockwise from the upper left: seared ahi salad; Wild Alaskan sand dabs with sauteed kale and goat cheese, grilled zucchini, and sourdough bread; “small” fish and chips
I had four opportunities to walk to dinner, and a goal of trying somewhere new each night. Being so close to the ocean, I made a point of selecting fish more than I usually would. I started with a fish taco and chicken tortilla soup at Rubio’s, a local fast food chain. My second dinner was a seared ahi salad at BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, another local chain whose name was new to me. By the third night, I wanted a milkshake, so I walked to Ruby’s Diner, a few doors down from the Rubio’s, and had a delicious burger/fries/onion rings combo with my drink. On my last free night, having walked past its “Now Open” sign for several days, I tried the Parmesan Crusted Wild Alaskan Sand Dabs at the recently remodeled King’s Fish House.
My last night had a work dinner scheduled, and the food was as delightful as the other nights, this time at the Flying Pig Pub & Kitchen. I ordered one of the daily specials – a pasta with sausage that was made in house – after trying a couple appetizers with my co-workers. I highly recommend their Brussels sprouts. Well, and the rest of their food… the whole week’s cuisine was amazing.
At one point a few years ago, after re-watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I mentioned to Cassandra that Dad had live in England at that time and occasionally shared stories of his experiences. This resulted in me e-mailing him to ask about the war-time bombing; his response follows.
Here are some comments on German bombing during World War II.
Where I lived in the north of England, we had no serious bombing. There were plenty of bigger targets, much closer to Germany or the French airports from which they sent their planes. One night a plane dropped a lot of fire bombs, but they all fell in the playing field of a girls’ high school about four blocks from our home. We suspect that a plane returning from a raid on Newcastle, a much bigger town to our north, wanted to get rid of its load.
London was the biggest target, and from the beginning of September 1940, an average of 200 planes a night bombed London every night for two months. Bombing continued after that but not so regularly and on a smaller scale.
Many children were evacuated to small towns and villages in the west of England, which were safe because there was no point in bombing them. A lot of these children did not see their parents for three or four years!
Since most of the bombing was at night, many people slept in bomb shelters, and also in the stations of the London Underground railway after it closed down for the night.
I moved to London five years after the war, and I lived and worked in the East End, which was the area most heavily damaged. I worked near the docks, which were an obvious target. In that area whole blocks of houses had been wiped off the map, and when they rebuilt after the war, they sometimes relocated the streets and gave them new names. Other streets of brick houses would have many gaps, with perhaps half the houses gone.
The German plan was simply to try to make London uninhabitable, but they did not succeed. It was a matter of luck what was hit and what wasn’t. The House of Commons was badly damaged, but Westminster Abbey, just across the street, was untouched. Fire bombs fell on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the firewatchers were able to put them out before they did much damage.
Air attacks on London declined when the Germans invaded Russia and were also heavily involved in fighting in North Africa. But in June, 1944, just after the allied invasion in the north of France, a new kind of attack came. The Germans launched flying bombs (the V1), which were pilotless and had jet engines set to fly just the distance to reach the london area and then turn off and fall to the ground. Over the next few months they sent several thousand of them, and there was no telling where they would land. My older brother was a member of an anti-aircraft battery stationed on the south-east coast, whose job was to try to shoot them down before they crossed the coast.
Three months later they began sending asupersonic rockets (the V2), which flew in a very high arch and arrived without warning. Again, since the aiming could only be approximate, the target was London. Their range was about 200 miles. They sent about 1,300 in the seven months from then until March 1945, when we were able to eliminate the last launching sites.
About a year before Dad’s retirement, I was working in the library computer lab, and my boss wanted as many staff members as possible to have web pages on the library’s website. The best way to encourage this was to start at the top, with the Director of Libraries. Of course, most of the staff weren’t familiar with HTML (this pre-dated CSS and WYSIWYG editors), so she tasked me with pestering Dad for content and creating his web page.
I probably have a copy of it on a floppy disk somewhere, accessible with a USB floppy drive, but it was easier to find using The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web.
It’s very classically Dad… he mentions some hobbies, but not all (he played squash in Portland, and racquetball most of the time we lived in Miami), and neglects to mention that his sabbatical year included two small children, who were likely a bit disruptive to his research. And it was written 20 years ago, before he retired to Guatemala and began taking cruises to various parts of the world, along with playing Scrabble and bridge regularly.
From left to right: my grandfather, Charles (1914); my father, Frank (2000-something); my grandmother, Frances (1917). My father’s shirt reads “This was a white shirt til I sat in the smoking section.” (I bought him that t-shirt.)
So here’s what Dad had to say about himself:
It’s a long way from London to Miami, especially if you go by way of Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Oregon, and take more than twenty years doing it.
I was born and grew up in Darlington, in the north of England, a town whose main claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of railroads. It lies on the the main line between London and Edinburgh, so collecting the names and numbers of the magnificent steam locomotives as they roared by was almost a required occupation for the youth of the town.
Some years later, armed with a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Durham, I enrolled in the School of Librarianship and Archives at the University of London. Because of its location, the School not only had on its faculty some of the finest teachers of library science, but it also enjoyed a constant stream of distinguished foreign visitors. One of these was the Dean of the School of Library Science at the University of Illinois. His glowing portrait of the state of librarianship in the United States clearly impressed me. After working in small college libraries in London for several years, I accepted an invitation to become a reference librarian at the Public Library of Akron, Ohio. Three years later I moved to the University of Illinois.
The University of Illinois Library was a wonderful place in which to expand one’s horizons. It was (and still is) the third largest academic library in the United States. Even in the early sixties, when I was there, it possessed more than four million volumes. Vast numbers of scholars with international reputations were to be found there, attracted by the quality of the University and of its Library. I worked closely with many of them, for it was my responsibility to try to obtain by interlibrary loan those works so esoteric as not to be held by that huge library.
During this period, the Dean of the Library School persuaded me to undertake a project left unfinished by one of his retiring faculty members, the preparation of a book surveying British government publications. It sounded like a straightforward proposition so, ignoring the danger signs (the work was far from complete, and the retiring faculty member had already spent fifteen years on it), I agreed. The problem with a project of this kind is that one tends to suffer from what I would call the “Babes in the Wood” syndrome – there are always more flowers to pick, so you keep going deeper and deeper into the forest. Before long, a bibliography originally conceived of as an appendix to the work blossomed into a separate book, that was ready for publication before its parent. It was to be fifteen years, including one year of sabbatical leave, before the H.W. Wilson Company was able to publish the Guide to British Government Publications.
Meanwhile, I spent five years at Penn State as the Library’s Assistant Director for Public Services. It was an exciting time of seemingly unlimited budgets and rapid expansion. Then, in 1969, I began a ten-year stay as Director of the Library at Portland State University in Oregon, a young urban institution. There, one learned lessons of a different kind: how to maintain the development of a library in an environment of frequent budget cuts and hiring freezes. And so, in 1979, to Miami, to a University about to embark on a dynamic thrust to higher quality, and to a library facing the need to cope with the age of computerized services. Both the University and the international community of Miami provide an invigorating environment.
Librarians, of course, don’t spend all of their time among their books. I like to spend much of my leisure time outdoors and in remote places. While in Illinois, I was advisor to a group of Explorer Scouts who – with improbable logic, considering their location among the corn fields – became interested in mountaineering. Thus, began a series of summer camping trips to the Rockies and beyond. The group’s first forays were mainly arduous hikes, but they gradually became more technical, planning climbs in the Tetons and, in the Cascades, assaults on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shuksan.
My years at Penn State afforded proximity to rock climbing in the Shawangunks of New York State, while in Portland one was on the very doorstep of the Cascades. There, with Mt. Hood and other peaks on the skyline, one did not have to make long-range plans for climbing expeditions. A quick check on Friday’s weekend weather report was sufficient to make people reach for their ice axes and crampons. In addition to Mt. Hood, which was a mere ninety-minute drive, Mt. St. Helens was a perennial favorite until it suddenly became an active volcano in 1980.
More sedate hobbies include collecting books, especially the works of a group of minor turn of the century English authors. And I collect and study the postal history of mail carried across the Atlantic by 19th century steamships. With all of these activities, spare time is a commodity that I don’t have to worry about.
As I mentioned in my post about A Fading Sun, I was fortunate enough to receive its sequel, A Rising Moon, to review right around when I was wondering when it would be published. According to Goodreads, A Rising Moon has been out for a couple weeks now, so it’s seems like an appropriate time to share the review I wrote for Booklist.
Remember, in some parts of the world, it’s traditional to give books at the holidays. But don’t be that guy who gives the first book in a series when it has a cliffhanger ending. Or that guy who recommends a book where the sequel isn’t even published yet, and then the trilogy expands to … how many books is A Song of Fire and Ice aiming for now? Oh, seven. (Yes, it was the same guy. Yes, we’re still friends.)
NOTE: There are spoilers here for the first book. Read beyond this line at your own risk.
At the conclusion of A Fading Sun, the Cateni were a conquered but rebelling people, with their mystical leader Voada Moonshadow killed in a battle against the Mundoans, and the Moonshadow spirit searching for Voada’s daughter, Orla. A Rising Moon is the eagerly anticipated sequel, picking up as Orla flees from the aftermath of that battle to the far reaches of Albann Bràghad. In Onglse, she meets Ceanndraoi Greum Red-Hand, the head wizard who both trained Voada and clashed with her. As expected, the Moonshadow spirit joins with Orla, who then follows the Ceanndraoi back to Albann Deas to fight the Mundoans. She quickly proves that she views the war and the Mundoans differently from her mother and the Moonshadow spirits, refusing the wholesale slaughter that they are encouraging. Her stubbornness and idealism put her at risk, with Moonshadow threatening to consume her spirit, just as she has absorbed all of the wizards who have wielded her power in the past. Will she fall to Altan Savas, the Mundoan war leader, as her mother did, or to her own anamacha?
My father passed away this week, at a mere 91 years old.
Dad and his little sister
Now I realize that to a lot of people, 91 is downright ancient. But Dad didn’t really start showing his age until the last few years, after being hit by a couple strokes. He climbed his last mountain, Pacaya, at 80, with my cousin’s family. He stopped playing racquetball at 72, not because he couldn’t play anymore, but because there weren’t racquetball courts nearby. And at 91, he was still happily traveling at every opportunity – he visited his little sister in England, went to his mother-in-law’s birthday party in Oregon, and was on a cruise in September when he fell ill. As I said, a mere 91.
I can’t tell most of Dad’s story; I’ve only been around for about half of it. But it started in Darlington, England before World War II, included military service just after the war, and was followed by a move to the United States after he completed his Library Science degree. He spend a couple of years in Ohio, followed by some time at the University of Illinois, Penn State University, and Portland State University (yes, he went from one PSU to another), before finishing his career at the University of Miami in Florida. A work trip brought him to Guatemala when I was in elementary school; the next summer, we came to Guatemala to learn Spanish.
Our family has never quite left since then, as we moved here for junior high with visits between here and Miami. By the time Dad retired, they had a house here, which they used as a base to help raise some of the grandchildren while traveling around the world. We are left with a great number of books, including an extensive Jerome K. Jerome collection, whose bibliography Dad worked on for years. Dad was rather excited the day I cracked open one of his English copies of Three Men in a Boat and found a printing mistake he didn’t have cataloged.
He also collected stamps, primarily ones featuring Catholic saints, and was a 50-year member of the American Philatelic Society. In his younger years, he also enjoyed rock climbing; he took us once when I was young. (I enjoyed that adventure far more than my sister did.) When I visited Devil’s Tower a few years ago and saw people climbing the sides of it, I asked him if he had done that. He had visited, but never climbed it.
As a child, I was spoiled not only by living in a house with thousands of books – and free access to all of them – but with access to an incredible research library as well. My sister and I were frequent visitors at the university’s library throughout our childhood, so I was quite familiar with it by the time I started college. I’m sure Dad hadn’t read all of those books, but if you ever played a trivia game with him, you might have thought he had. Even a year ago, I was still losing to him at trivia.
He was fiercely independent, rarely requesting assistance and frequently refusing it outright when offered for something he thought he could still do. He appreciated a fine drink – wine, whiskey, or good beer – but would politely accepted cheaper alternatives, like whatever beer Mom drinks. He took advantage of Miami’s climate to light up the Big Green Egg year round, and grilled a fabulous steak.
Dorkstock has always been a labor of love, a mini-convention run by John Kovalic’s fans within a larger convention. This was our third year being hosted by Gamehole Con, and I think the first time that Dorkstock has been a four-day convention. We had an incredible game schedule this year, filled with assorted Munchkin and Chez games, among other favorites from Steve Jackson Games, and both Steve Jackson and Phil Reed were in attendance. We pulled out some classic Out of the Box games and other, more esoteric games like Cthulhu in the House and Knuckle Sammich.
But one of our gamemasters goes above and beyond, creating 3-D and life-size versions of some of her favorite games. This leads to interesting e-mail conversations like “is an 18-inch hex large enough for a person to stand in”? (Yes, yes it is.) Among other masterpieces were the 3-D Dork Frag (originally published in an issue of Dork Tower), the 3-D Dork Tower board game (a parody of the classic Dark Tower game), the life-sized Escape from Dork Tower (not pictured), and the life-sized (with 18-inch hexes) Warhamster Rally. Those are certainly a labor of love. I’ll content myself with making the occasional Igor bars and running a few games.
Oh, and planning for next year… Gamehole Con announced their dates for 2019: October 31st through November 3rd. Can you say “Dorkstock Costume Party”?
As much as I enjoy a fine whiskey, it’s not my go to drink. Good whiskey should be sipped, in small quantities, and sometimes with dessert. Bad whiskey should be ignored. Life’s just too short for lousy drinks.
Despite the title, I’m not particular about whether my martinis are shaken or stirred. I own a martini shaker, but for expediency (which happens when you make your drink after you’re done cooking and have to worry about defending your food from the kitten), I rarely use it, so stirred is my default. I always make martinis on the rocks. In fact, I rarely use ice cubes for anything else; I don’t like diluting juices.
And I always make martinis with gin. I don’t particularly like vodka (though Whiskey Acres does have delightful sipping vodka), and have never seen the appeal of vodka martinis. What has changed in recent years is the variety of gins I’m trying in my martinis. It started a few years ago when my ex-husband discovered a North Shore Distillery gin. That has an amazingly distinctive flavor, and is probably sippable on its own if you’re so inclined.
Now I make an effort to try different gins, rather than making the same martini every time. Two Brothers, a local brewing company, recently expanded their selection to include spirits, so I’ve tried theirs. I have some regrets about not picking up a Journeyman Distillery gin while I was in Michigan, but I should be able to pick it up at Binny’s. Some days, I pick my gin based on the bottle design; on others, I take the time to put on my glasses and read the descriptions. The current bottle is from Vikre Distillery in Minnesota; the Boreal Cedar Gin is described as “… infused with the smoky aroma of cedar wood, citrusy wild sumac, and a trace of black currant.” It was actually a tough choice between their cedar, juniper, and spruce gins, and I may have to try the others at some point.
I’ve always loved Halloween. As a kid, it was a great excuse to hit up your neighbors and the next few blocks of people you didn’t actually know for what you hoped was good candy. Or at least candy you could eat with braces.
As an adult, it took on new meaning. Pagans believe that the veil is thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead this time of year, so Halloween, or Samhain, is a time when we can look to our dead relatives and friends for guidance. We put out food offerings – carved pumpkins now, hollowed out turnips originally (Gods know I don’t want to eat the turnips, I’m all for carving them) – in return for their help and advice.
And it’s a time to let go – of our weaknesses, our bad habits, of the losses from the past year that linger over us. If some losses are too fresh – a friend who recently passed away (this year, unfortunately), an accident the week before Halloween (last year, for me) – those can hold for the next year. Death, however unfortunate, is a natural part of our life cycle.
This is a time of rebirth for Pagans, as we recognize the losses from the past year and look forward to what may come. That next year is unknown, no matter what your plans, the year will probably surprise you. Celebrate these changes. A year ago, I couldn’t have guessed where I am now, yet I am happy with how things have changed.
Jack o’Lanterns
Tonight, I will have a giant spider web strung up across my doorway with treats attached, with a giant spider looking on. I will light the jack o’lanterns I carved, and walk from door to door with my daughter as she asks strangers for candy. And I will release things that need to be let go, and hold onto some losses that aren’t quite ready to leave yet.
Now I make an effort to try different gins, rather than making the same martini every time. 