Lowering Water Quality--Always!

Just in case you needed more reasons to dislike Wal-Mart:


Take salmon. Wal-Mart, which buys all its salmon from Chile, sells more than anyone else in the country and undersells all other retailers by at least $2 per pound. That's a lot of market power, which prompts Fishman to ask: "Does it matter that salmon for $4.84 a pound leaves a layer of toxic sludge on the ocean bottoms of the Pacific fjords of southern Chile?"

Salmon in Chile are raised in packed underwater pens — as many as 1 million per farm — and fed prophylactic antibiotics to prevent disease. Here's a fact you'd rather not know: A million salmon produce the same amount of waste as 65,000 people. Combine that waste with unconsumed food and antibiotic residue, and you've got a toxic seabed.

And still more, if you like.

Wal-Mart is deservedly catching the heat here, but in fact such conditions are not limited to the fish farms that supply it. In the US, salmon farms along the Maine coast are severely undermining efforts to recover wild Atlantic salmon populations. I try to avoid eating farm-raised salmon from anywhere.

Super Idea

Although I'm more than 40 miles from Ford Field, it's hard to escape the hoopla of preparations for next week's Super Bowl. Not being a football fan I try to tune most of it out, but one recent story about the event astonished me.

In the Free Press yesterday, Mitch Albom proposed a follow-up plan to the three-day Super Bowl party being organized for Detroit's homless population. Fearing its clientele being squeezed in the city's efforts to clean up the streets for visiting Bowl fans, the Detroit Rescue Mission will be staying open round the clock during Bowl weekend offering food, shelter, and the Game itself on big-screen TV. Revelers will be able to careen from Foxtown to Greektown to Corktown without someone asking for a handout which they would probably spend on alcohol, and the homeless are not consigned to the tender mercies of the DPD.

It sounds like the typical shameless effort to sweep urban problems under the rug when potentially free-spending visitors arrive for a game, or a political convention, though it's not the worst way such a plan could go down. An established poverty services agency is running the show. And at the very least, it will give some vulnerable people a few more hours of security.

Following a visit to the Mission, Mitch Albom thought this project ought to extend not only through Super Bowl weekend, but indefinitely. So he launched a fund drive he's calling Super All Year, which aims to raise $60,000 before kickoff time. And here we get to the astonishing part. That $60K will allow the Mission to:

*Stay open 24 hours.
*Add 30 new beds.
*Get a 24-hour-a-day van with a trained staff member to respond to any phone call and pick up a needy individual.
*Add a mental health worker to the staff.

...through April 1st. Two months of critical services for Detroit's downtrodden for the cost of a Lexus. Or of a score of tickets to some of the VIP parties taking place around town on game day. Or of 45 seconds of pacifying Iraq.

We--you, me, and all us Americans--could be getting a lot more for our money than we do as we currently spend it.

Kristine and I will send a little of ours to S.A.Y. Should you feel so inclined, you can find contribution information in Albom's article.

Super Bowl

Two Can Play that Game...

With a strategic finesse worthy of Howard Dean, Democrats in several state legislatures have set out to reclaim values-conscious evangelical Christian voters. The New York Times reports that

Democrats in Georgia and Alabama. . .have introduced bills authorizing school districts to teach courses modeled after a new textbook, "The Bible and Its Influence." It was produced by the nonpartisan, ecumenical Bible Literacy Project and provides an assessment of the Bible's impact on history, literature and art that is academic and detached, if largely laudatory.

The Democrats who introduced the bills said they hoped to compete with Republicans for conservative Christian voters. "Rather than sitting back on our heels and then being knocked in our face, we are going to respond in a thoughtful way," said Kasim Reed, a Georgia state senator from Atlanta and one of the sponsors of the bill. "We are not going to give away the South anymore because we are unwilling to talk about our faith."

"Thoughful" apparently has come to mean "blindly imitating." Naturally, shrewd Republicans see this move for what it is:

"Their proposal makes them modern-day pharisees," State Senator Eric Johnson of Georgia, the Republican leader from Savannah, said in a statement. "This is election-year pandering using voters' deepest beliefs as a tool."
...
Betty Peters, a Republican on the Alabama school board who opposed the initiative in that state, also dismissed the initiative as "pandering." Democrats, she argued, had adopted a new strategy: "Let's just wrap ourselves in Jesus."

They ought to know, having perfected the technique. A more detailed critique of the Dems' plan may emerge once Johnson, Peters, and their allies undergo plank removal.

Why is it that those who profess the most concern for declining role of faith in public life do the most to justify that trend?

Personally, I'd like to see more religion in public schools. Many people hold caricatured views of what religious adherents believe and value (not least because of politicians like those in the article). This would be inconsequential if religion were not a vital way of making sense of the world and relating to others for an enormous part of humanity. I'd love to see an upper level elective class in comparative religion in high schools--and I'd wager interest in the class would be high. This is a remote possibility, of course, at least until federally-ordered standardized tests include questions on the Five Pillars, the Eightfold Path, and the Great Commandment.

Tags: Religion; Politics

Spam, Skewered

Mary Beth Crain perceptively diagnoses the intellectual and moral pathology of spam in SoMA. One excerpt:

What bothers me most about these base and merciless assaults on my time and intellect is not that I do not have a penis and therefore don’t care about enlarging one, or getting Viagra at 78 cents a dose, or going on websites to watch “virgins getting it in the ass,” or getting “stiquff as a rodck in 60 secolnds.” It’s that they are so terrifyingly illiterate, and I'm not just talking about those deliberately misspelled subject headings intended to fool spam filters. I have the sneaking suspicion that 90 percent of this junk is coming from the students in the SAT prep classes that I teach. I want to email them back with corrected versions of their messages, and grades. F. F minus. F minus minus. Learn proper English, you fucking boneheads!

But maybe that’s not really what’s bothering me the most. Maybe what’s bothering me the most is spam’s blatant underlying, or overlying, message: Live your life getting something for nothing.

Read It All

Something That Should Never Happen (& Confessions of a Public Lands Fundamentalist)

Saturday's Grand Rapids Press reported a rather troubling proposal for infusing much needed cash into the state budget:

With assets that range from sparkling lakes to towering sand dunes to remote hardwood forests, Michigan's state parks rank among our most prized resources.

But in these cash-strapped times, a free-market think tank is floating a novel idea: Why not sell off and "privatize" 14 state parks, including Interlochen, Newaygo and Mears near Pentwater? Read the rest.

This is the brainchild of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which Michiganders may remember as the cerebral cortex of governor John Engler's administration in its early years. So far, the idea is, thankfully, not getting any traction in the state legislature or among conservationists. The comment of one Grand Rapids area camper perfectly sums up the proposal: "Stupid."

To me, this privatization scheme looks like an attempt to start peeling off slivers of state land so that, down the road, slicing off and selling larger chunks will seem more palatable to legislators and citizens. Readers of FTR know that public land and access to it are issues close to my heart. About this, I say, don't even think it.

That, anyway, was my reaction when I first learned of this, and I stand by it. However, as I thought further about the issue, I was struck by my absolutism. I'm far from a relativist, but I do recognize the contingency and limitations of most of our beliefs and perceptions. In nearly every sphere, I tend to be cautious about positions of absolute certainty. I realize the management of public lands involves complex considerations, and that even the best of intentions and the most careful planning can't ward off the possibilty of mismanagement. But when it comes to maintaining public acreage, I respond with a dogmatism even Pope Benedict might find a little scary. They're not making any more land, as the saying goes, and more to the point, governments aren't currently disposed to acquiring any more of it for public usage. (I'm not sure they need to be, though that's another issue.) Private landowners have an important role to play in conservation, but fewer and fewer of them are willing to allow people to walk on, let alone gather, hunt, fish or birdwatch, on their land. Without some kind of free, semi-wild space, those experiences are out of reach for many people. And as the extent of that free space diminishes, so does the quality of such experiences. Outdoor activities have long added considerably to the quality of life in this state, and for the sake of preserving that quality of life, I think an uncompromising stand on maintaining large tracts of public land is nothing to apologize for. You're welcome to call me a mental neanderthal, so long some modern analogue to traversing the plains in search of mastodons remains a ready option.

Sure, consolidate, swap, reorganize, in some circumstances even sell public lands if it serves a valid conservation purpose or if the recreational or ecological value of the land is minimal. Compromise, flexibility, and creative thinking are necessary to maintaining the health of all lands, and I don't think a purely hands-off approach to conservation is always helpful or warranted. But about any step toward a general privatization of state parks and forests, I say again: don't even think it. If you want to parse out the complications of that stance, do it once outfits like the Mackinac Center stop planning land grabs in misguided fundraising efforts. Or once they succeed and we're paying stiff admission fees to visit the places we once roamed at will.

Considering this, perhaps I can relate ever so slightly to the thinking of people who profess those resolutely certain views about which I'm usually skeptical. That Bill O'Reilly and I may share some cognitive DNA is a bit unsettling. But not nearly as much as the spectre of newly privatized state parks being converted to subdivisions, or "For Sale" signs lining the banks of the upper Manistee.

Outdoors; Conservation; Michigan

All is Well

Thursday night, I got a call from my sister saying that our father had gone into the hospital with chest pains. He was scheduled for a heart catherization on Friday morning, with a possibility of open heart surgery after that.

I got over to Kalamazoo around 2:30 yesterday afternoon to find him still waiting for his catheterization. He seemed to be doing fine, aside from a ferocious case of hives in reaction to the hospital bedsheets. They took him into the OR around 6PM and said we would have some word about him in an hour. About 40 minutes later, the surgeon came out and told us everything was fine--they didn't find a single thing wrong with his heart, and that he was in better condition than many people 20 years younger. Apparently, the stress test he received when he checked in to the hospital gave a false indication of problems. What caused the chest pain is uncertain, but it's unrelated to his heart or any other major system. He got to go home around midnight, and I made it home before the rain turned to snow.

When we spoke to him in the recovery room, my dad remarked that this was an awfully expensive way to find out nothing was wrong. My stepmother replied that many people in the hospital would gladly pay for such results. True enough.

Chasing Rainbows

NPR ran an interesting story this morning about efforts to revive native steelhead runs in Washington state. (Listen here.) A question that has stymied this efforts is, what exactly is a steelhead? They are rainbow trout that migrate out to sea, then return to rivers to spawn. However, they're still the same species as rainbow trout that never leave rivers. Why some rainbows become steelhead and others don't is still a mystery to fisheries scientists. Offspring of steelhead may develop into stream trout and vice-versa. So, opponents of mandates to recover steelhead under the endangered species act say, why is it necessary to preserve steelhead runs if there are still plenty of rainbow trout elsewhere? (and there are). Why restrict logging in steelhead-supporting drainages to preseve a fish that's otherwise abundant?

Under the rationale underlying the endangered species act, it's hard to say why. The ESA was targeted at preserving species, not habitats or ecosystems. Accordingly, it's perfectly sensible to ask, as former Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) once did, "How can salmon be endangered if I can buy a can of it in the grocery store?". A look at streams in her home state would have provided an answer, though perhaps one that would have flown over her head. The logic behind her question renders fish a commodity which can be sacrificed for a more profitable one.

Steelhead are as much a part of the Pacific Northwest as brook trout are of the Lake Superior watershed. Take away one species from a place, and you diminish it. It becomes somewhere other than it was. Sometimes this will happen naturally, though the exploitation of resources in the industrial and post-industial age has made it happens much faster. People aren't just fouling their nest or killing things off--they're dis-placing themselves. I'd prefer to live in and visit places that still resonate strongly with the animals, plants, rivers, and cycles there. Taking steelhead away and settling for river rainbows weakens that resonance. I can identify with Thoreau's desire to "know a whole heaven, and a whole earth." It may be too late for that (and I'm not sure how you'd gauge one in the first place), but I'd still like as rich an earth as I can find.

Tags: Fishing; Conservation

Angler's Mind

This seems to be spirituality week at FTR. Not that I planned that, but it's worked out that way. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. " Maybe next week will be Pro Wrestlers Who Flyfish. Anyway...

My wife and I have been taking a meditation course at a local Zen temple, looking for ideas to revitalize our own practice. Going there brought to mind an article I read a few years ago in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle about Zen flies. Apparently, fly fishing had quite a following among some of the Beat poets, and they tied some flies inspired by the Zen Buddhism they were also exploring. There were pictures of some of these in the article, which I may try to find and upload at some point. I can't recall them well enough to give a good description, but at the time they did strike me as incredibly artful, in a spare and minimalist way. Some even caught fish, I think.

The article is no longer available online, but I did find one revealing quote from it:

In San Francisco during the early fifties fly fishing was an important part of the Beat scene. Widespread interest in Buddhism and nature naturally led to Zen Flies. It was admittedly a passing phenomenon - as one angler-poet later explained in City Lights Review: "It got to where the perfect cast meant no cast. Eventually we just went swimming."

If that's the case, I'll happily remain unenlightened for now. Anyway, I think Nirvana is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it town outside Baldwin. I zip though it on the way to the Pere Marquette river (and some people seek it their whole lives!). When the rock band of that name gained celebrity in the early 90s, the town's sign disappeared, snatched up, I'd guess, by some poor sap who'd stop at nothing to honor his doomed heroes. There may be a lesson there about life as a circle of desire and suffering.

Tags: Fishing; Zen

Au Sable Apocalypse

In the minds of many anglers (most famously Norman Maclean), there is considerable overlap between religion and fly fishing. From the union of these two spheres comes a number of good things: acts of stewardship, for instance, or stories that others find moving and inspiring. Other results can be just plain odd. This is a case of the latter.

On a May evening a few years ago, after a day of fishing, I was walking back to my truck at a popular access along the Au Sable river to eat my supper. While still some distance from the truck, I heard loud and contentious voices. As I got closer, I made out that two men, sitting against the far side of a car parked next to me, were debating the fate of unsaved souls. One proclaimed resolutely that they suffered eternally in the flames of Hell. His antagonist contended that God simply annihilated them into nonexistence. The two went back and forth for some time, each marshalling intricate, high-decibel proofs for his position, and scornfully rebutting those of his opponent. This was a long way from the "One with Nature" sort of spirituality that fishermen are often disposed to while on the water. Munching my sandwich, I wondered idly if the apostles of Jesus carried on such rows while tossing nets on the Sea of Galilee.

The argument lost steam around the time I finished eating, and the former antagonists fell into quiet conversation about fishing and the fine weather. After I rigged to return to the river, I decided to have a chat with these riverbank mystagogues, mainly for the purpose of finding whether they'd been catching anything. I had enjoyed only fair luck that day. Walking around to the other side of their car, I found two cheerful looking men in their late twenties. They were quite friendly when we got to talking, and, to my relief, made no attempt to proselytize. Remnants of their own brown-bag supper were scattered on the ground, along with at least ten empty beer cans. It seemed one had caught many chunky trout, while the other had gotten skunked. Did this mean that one of them really was in touch with the order of things and attuned to the will of the Almighty? This was an intriguing and slightly scary notion, but in the end I couldn't determine which belief was held by the man anointed with trout. I couldn't match the voices staking out positions in the debate with those gently speaking to me now, and so went back to the river as agnostic as I'd come from it.

Toward sunset I enjoyed some fine fishing during a hatch of black caddis, which was a kind of redemption in itself.

Tags: Fishing; Spirituality

Spiritus Gladius

Last week, The Revealer reported on a unique fund-raising effort by Pastor Rod Parsely of Columbus, Ohio (believed by many to have had a key role in tipping Ohio for Bush in 2004):

This past August. . .Pastor Rod was raising cash for holy war -- I mean, relief work -- in Sudan by offering an actual 27-inch sword, in exchange for a gift of $54 or more. Now, Pastor Rod's got a whole new sword to sell. And this one's ten inches longer, with a blade of steel and a "gold-colored metal" handle inscribed with the cross. It's the "SWORD OF THE KING," promises Pastor Rod. . . .

Don't worry about where to sheath your blade -- in a special email solicitation, Pastor Rod writes that it comes with a "beautiful... mount." And the best part of all? You get the whole package -- magic sword, mount, delusions of potency -- for only $41 dollars and ten cents, in honor of Isaiah 41:10 ("...yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness."). That's almost thirteen dollars less for ten more powerful inches of Christian manhood.

Read The Rest

Pastor Rod (mere coincidence, that name?) thus offers his flock an opporunity to follow literally the injunction of Luke 22:36 ("[Jesus] said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one."--incidentally, a creative exegesis of this verse is very popular among opponents of gun control. ) The more important appeal of this offering, though, is its congruence with an ascendant religious sensibility, a muscular Christianity eager to smite the wicked but tending to overlook the kinds of wickedness that don't rush forth carrying weapons and breathing curses. Quite a contrast to the spirit that motivated the holy warrior we remember this day, and to the weapons he used.

Tag: Religion

New Year--New Gear

Just before Christmas, I reminisced about the Popeil Pocket Fisherman, a gadget whose primary value is as a kitchy conversation piece, sort of like a piscatorial mood ring. The other night, Kristine brought home something that I think tops that in the kitsch department--the Pen Rod.

It's just what it sounds like--a fishing rod you can carry in a case that looks just like a fountain pen. Take the cap off the pen and you find the tip of a telescoping fiberglass rod that extends to 39". It comes in a case with a minature bait casting reel (spin or fly reels optional), loaded with monofilament line, as well as a small spoon lure. Take a look.

They are sold as business promotions (minimum order 200 pieces, your logo free on 1000 or more), and in fact Kristine's boss gave her the one she brought home. It had been a gift to the boss from some sales rep, coming with a card that read "We're fishing for your business!" At least in this case, it was not an irresistable lure.

I think I'll bite, though. There's no danger of the Pen Rod replacing my Orivs 4 wt., but at least once this summer I'm going to have to whip it out and give it a try. It wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, really. Half-baked experiments are standard procedure when fishing, but specialized clothing and fine gear give people the impression you know what you're doing. Fish with the Pen Rod, and you lose that protective illusion, baring your daftness to the world.


Tags: fishing; curios

Precautions

The next fishing season is still a long way off, but I guess it's not too early to start planning in order to make it a good one. That would include preparing oneself to overcome the mishaps that can befall an angler . Here's one idea:


And if the trout refused my flies, I could just blow them out of the water.

Back to School Chaos (& Lentil Therapy)

The new semester began yesterday--smoothly. I put a bit more time into organizing things than I typically have in the past, and was especially proud of the websites I built for my distance learning sections of Tech Writing. At least until about 9:00 last night, when I checked in to the DL courses and found numerous complaints from students that the assigned book was not in the bookstore. Usually, all Tech Writing courses use a common book, ordered by the department. I hadn't heard of any change, but sure enough there had been one. Since my entire course had been built around the previously used textbook, I had a couple sites I had labored over for nothing. Plus I would look like a dork in front of my students and colleagues.

I went down to campus today to get the new textbook and begin revamping the course, but the person who has the books (and keeps them locked in her office) wasn't in, and not expected till late afternoon. However, I learned that I was not the only person in this position. Others had been blindsided by the book change and were scrambling for desk copies. Apparently the change was last minute. I got in touch with the tech writing coordinator by phone later, only to learn there were no more copies of the new book. After speaking to a publisher's rep later, I was assured one would be expedited to me. So much for that new, more organized Dr. Shupac with more free time to research and write.

So lots of angst and running around today with little to show for it. When I emailed Kristine about all this this afternoon, she commiserated and ventured that I probably wouldn't be in the mood to cook this evening. On the contrary. I made a pot of a french lentil soup that we like and found the preparation ritual soothing. It's a recipe that's almost impossible to screw up, and it tastes heavenly. Making it, you whip up a steaming, aromatic pot of self-confidence and optimism. Exercising an assured but loving control over a tasty cubic foot or so confirms that, despite suspicions you had to the contrary, you are not yet overwhelmed.

Temperatures are forecast to hit the upper 40s here this week. Great conditions for winter steelheading, which my schedule might actually permit...if I weren't stuck here tweaking my DL courses to the new textbook. If we were heading into a few days of heavy snowfall and subfreezing temerpatures, I'd curse being stuck here instead of skiing. Having more pastimes means more potential sources of pleasure, but also more potential sources of vexation. I suppose that underscoresThoreau's injunction to simplify, which I'll be considering tomorrow with my composition II students.
Tags: Education; Cooking

Things Left

Yesterday Kristine and I went shoe-shopping. We split up to browse in the gender-appropriate sides of the store, and when we met up again, Kristine held up a shoe box with some writing scratched in the top. "Look at this," she asked.

The impression in the shoebox read, "Going in hospital. Please hold for one week, 12/20/05." Which raised a slightly macabre question: did the lady ever make it out of the hospital? Or did she recover and decide that as long as you had your health, another pair of pumps wasn't that important. Such intimate speculations about a stranger, just from a random find in one of those famously impersonal big box stores.

Tags: Shopping; Randomness

Sturgeon Cam!

Ever wished you could observe live sturgeon in real time from the comfort of your desk? Perhaps not, but you actually can, and you have to admit these hulking prehistoric fish are pretty cool. Lake Superior State University maintains an underwater camera to monitor fish runs in the St. Mary's river, and generously broadcasts its images to the web. During winter, they move the camera to their indoor sturgeon tank. These 6' bottom feeders don't do a whole lot, but they can be mesmerizing. Feeding time is usually around noon. Check it out.

Tag: Nature

Cleanup Walk

Early this morning, I got out for a nice overland hike around one of the areas I was hunting this fall. I actually arrived there a little too early. The sun was just coming up when I pulled into the parking lot. When I tried to walk into the brush, I ran into an impenetrable wall of hawthorn and wild rose. I couldn't see an opening in the brambles, though I'm sure there must have been one. Not wanting to lose a pint of blood finding a path, I gave up and drove to another access point, where I found a clear trail into the woods.

Soon I found myself in some of the best looking grouse habitat I've seen locally. Probably where I should have hunted in the fall. I walked along an oak ridge for a ways, then descended into a mucky bottom area. One of the nice things about hiking in winter is that you can easily pass through wetlands where you would sink to your knees in warmer weather. I meandered around small shrubs and groves of aspen on the swamp's edge, and hopped across hummocks of marsh grass, crossing innumerable deer trails and spooking chickadees in waves.

After I climbed out of the swamp, I came across a milk crate resting against the bottom of a large oak. Someone's deer hunting lookout, left since the season ended a month ago. Hating to see litter in the woods, and figuring I could put the crate to good use, I picked it up. As I wandered around, I put other pieces of trash I found into it. I filled it when I reached a parking area strewn with styrofoam cups, snack bags, and spent shells. (Why so many spent shells right next to the road? Is that where all the birds are???). I didn't bother picking up the pair of undershorts frozen flat against the ground, or the severed deer head lying back in the brush.

I was only out a couple of hours, but it was an invigorating walk. For some reason, it felt like returning to some place I had once known well but from which I had been long absent. Not the physical place--it was more the manner in which I had come to and was immersing myself in those gray winter woods of southern Michigan. It was a habit of living I had been away from, a habit which hunting, fishing, even jogging alongside similar woods doesn't quite duplicate. One outing doesn't equal resumption of a habit, but I'm on the way.

Tag: Outdoors

Great Lakes Forum

A listserv I participate in recently brought news of the launch of a new forum dedicated to Great Lakes issues: the Great Lakes Town Hall. Each issue will feature an article about some regional environmental issue, as well as a guest column on aspects of Great Lakes history, culture, recreation,etc. There are discussion forums and resources for grassroots activism. Submissions of writing and photographs are welcome.

The town hall aims to be a comprehensive resource for those who live near and care about the lakes. As its purpose statement says,

Residents of the Great Lakes are divided by great physical and political distances...The Great Lakes Town Hall is designed to bridge those distances. Like the town meetings on which it is modeled, the Great Lakes Town Hall provides a "space" where residents from all across the Great Lakes basin - and all walks of life within the basin - can come together to identify common concerns, set the political agenda, share and develop collective solutions, and demand - as a public - that the Lakes are clean, abundant, and natural for generations to come.

Give it a look-see.

Great Lakes; Conservation

The Great Indoors

Aside from my hunting trip last week, this has been mostly an indoor, sedentary break for me. When I was a graduate student, I'd spend a good part of each winter break out tramping around state parks or game areas near wherever I was living. I studied and wrote too, but managed to get out for at least three or four good long rambles every week. For the last five holidays, Kristine and I went on a ski trip of a few days around Christmas or New years. Are we just losing steam as we slip into middle age?

We do seem to be getting lost in a video blur. We've watched two seasons of The Wire, a number of films on DVD that we hadn't gotten around to before, and been out to three movies. Friday we'll probably see a fourth.

Though aspiring to keep an "outdoor blog," I'm evolving into an avid indoorsman. Next week, once classes get launched, I hope to reverse this slide with a romp around one of the areas I was hunting this fall.

One of TroutGrrrrl's recent posts spotlighted a guy who clearly has no problems getting outside (and who keeps a hell of a blog, too). No off season for this dude. An inspiration for us all.

What A Party!

I rang in 2006 in...bed.

Last night, Kristine and I skipped dinner in favor of nibbling on cheese, fruit, and olives while sipping a bottle of good wine and watchng a couple episodes of The Wire. A pleasant evening, but by 10:00 I was nodding off. I wasn't in the mood for any more TV, and I didn't have energy for much else. I raised the possibility of turning in and letting the ball drop without us looking on. Kristine didn't object, so we picked up the leavings of our TV feast and retired to sleep in the new year.

Or so I thought. Once in bed, I felt wide awake, and from time to time I would look at the glowing red numbers on my alarm clock . I looked over once and saw 11:57. Having remained awake until that point, I figured I might as well watch for the new year's arrival. When 12:00 came up, I just turned away and closed my eyes again. The moment felt neither auspicious nor poignant. I was still tired but restless, and I thought of all the prepping for my new classes that needs to be done this week, and cringed a bit about my handwringng here yesterday.

At least the first morning of the new year began well. Driving to church this morning, the streets were utterly deserted. I don't think we saw ten cars on the move between home and downtown, and, more surprisingly, only one jogger. I liked the quietness, the calm lying over everything. It was about as close to the feeling of being on a river at dawn as you're likely to get riding in a car. It's a good feeling from which to sally into the year.

Happy 2006, all.