First Monday with Characters

The new Bay Bridge to San Francisco
from the upper floor of Tom's building
[Transamerica Pyramid far right]

Edited by Morris Dean

Tom Lowe, unmobile

This has been the Spring of my discontent. Back around Xmas I injured a toe while navigating my living space in the dark, and the recovery process, complicated by my diabetes, has gone very slowly. In the meantime I been wandering from doctors office to doctors office working out a strategy to solve this mess. Latest effort is physical therapy, followed by acupuncture to increase circulation when my doctor returns from China. After a couple of weeks the mix of techniques seem to easing the tightness and pain.
    What I have been spending my unmobile time doing is reading. As usual, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, notablyLeopold's Shack and Rickett's Lab, by Michael J. Lannoo, an essay on the work and ideas of two early ecologists. And The Human Division, the latest in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series.
    So many of the photographic ideas I had expected to carry out have fallen to my limping about. The only product of my efforts worth showing is the shot of the new Bay Bridge.

Paul's stepdaughter on the attack in the 800;
this does not bode well for his title
as fastest half-miler in the family

Paul Clark, aka motomynd, at the track

Nothing to report except that May was a relaxing and uneventful month. No funerals, no illnesses, and no near disasters on a motorcycle. My stepson earned his next-level karate belt, now one notch away from a black belt. My stepdaughter ran the fastest lap of her life on a track. Unfortunately she was in an 800-meter race and couldn't hold the pace for the second lap, but it was a great ending to her first year of track and gave us a glimpse of what is to come. My workouts also went well, and so far I am still the fastest half-miler in the family but that is a title I expect to lose sometime in June, as the stepdaughter gets faster, and I just get older....

Susan C. Price, up with her new website

its up:

    i can see it best on Google, i know that Firefox has some issues with how it appears
    i can find it best by using the tip top space on my google browser and entering "susancprice.com"
    my art contains nudity...so be warned.

Chuck Smythe, contemplating whether it's time 

Stanley Fish's reflections on selling his personal library ("Moving On")—"it was time"—hit me where it hurts. Several times recently I’ve looked at the thousand-odd volumes that dominate my house and are a living history of my mind: I know that at my age I will revisit very few of them, and that when I’m gone, likely nobody will even want them. Ouch.
    On a more pleasant note, here is another of Ed Schmahl’s marvelous photographs of Colorado. If you must have a title, “Amber Cloud.”

The Rogers in Costa Rica

It is the rainy season in Costa Rica, things slow down even more. The sun is out during the morning, so what has to be done that day is taken care of early. Janie is going to take a trip back to the States, spend a few weeks with family. She has many brothers and sisters—I have one sister and a 91-year-old aunt, so it doesn't take me long to catch up. Things are growing like crazy here; a little—in this case a lot—of rain does wonders. That is about all I have.

Dawn Burke, on vacation

Have been having a busy vacation week with family. From Kindergarten and 5th grade graduations to a trip to the Buffalo River and dodging bad storms along the way.

Buffalo River [from park website]

André Duvall, in camp and about

During the last week of May, I had my first two sessions with a personal fitness trainer. One of my goals starting this summer has been to increase my overall fitness level and muscle strength by going to the gym two or three times a week. In general, I have a healthy diet, and I regularly participate in mild cardio activity such as jogging. However, I have never lifted weights with any regularity or structured plan, and I’ve wanted to increase my upper body strength, which I consider to be fairly weak. Not having much knowledge about proper form or proper use of gym equipment, I have invested in a few sessions with a trainer to get me started in the right direction. At this moment, I am terribly sore from the first workouts, and it is taking my body a good while to repair and strengthen the muscle fibers that have torn, given that I am starting from square one with regards to strength training. For a couple of days, my arms were so sore that I couldn’t bear to even lift them to play the piano for more than a few seconds. However, one has to start somewhere! I am excited about what I have learned, and I look forward to future sessions.

[from chess camp website]

    Looking ahead, I am gathering supplies and preparing lesson plans to teach the 5-7 year old class at the annual Mid-South Chess Camp in Memphis, Tennessee, where I have served as an instructor starting in 2010, and where I started out as a counselor in 2008. This is one of the premiere chess camps in the Southern United States, bringing in renowned chess masters and grandmasters from around the country to work with children and adults of all skill levels. I am nowhere near the skill of a chess master, but I enjoy teaching fundamental chess concepts to beginning students, and I am also responsible for integrating music and art into the daily routine of the young campers. At the end of the camp, I put together a short “chess musical” which the children present at the closing ceremony. I also increase my own chess knowledge at this camp, and I always enjoy working with the myriad of personalities found among the children.
    Over Memorial Day weekend, I spent time with family in Arkansas. We toured a special exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, which featured the work of Norman Rockwell. The exhibit included all of his Saturday Evening Post magazine covers, as well as around 50 original paintings. Afterwards, we attended a Decoration Day ceremony at the family cemetery where my paternal grandparents are buried. Some distant relatives had prepared speeches about our family history, including information about my great-great-great grandfather’s life.
    Earlier in May I concluded my duties as Coordinator of Class Piano Studies at my university, and I also taught my final Class Piano courses there. It has been a fantastic experience working in a piano lab with various types of students, and I hope that I will continue to have opportunities to work in a Class Piano setting sometime in the future. I am now turning my attention towards working on my dissertation, as well as practicing music for upcoming concerts in June, one of which will raise money and food for the Mid-South Food Bank in Memphis, Tennessee. This is a joint concert between me and a friend who is an organist, and will feature both solo and duet selections.

Allen Crowder, in battle victorious

There were about 600 people at the fight Friday night [mixed martial arts "Battle in the South," in Wilmington, NC]. It was a great time. I had prepared as I needed to and wouldn't have changed a thing. I won 2 min and 23 seconds into the 1st round with a TKO. Nestoras Batzelas is a wrestler, and I made him stand up with me. I threw a bunch of leg kicks, which he was not expecting. He tried to take me down but I sprawled in time. Then he tried a second time and picked me up off the mat and slammed me onto it. I stayed calm and relaxed. I got my under hooks [reached up under his armpits] and waited for him to move. When I started to get up he went for a guillotine choke and almost had it. I dropped down a little bit and as I was looking back through the cage, I saw my brother, and I thought to myself, This guy is not about to choke me out in front of my brother. I grabbed Nestoras's hands and pulled out of the choke. I hit him a couple of times and he went for a take down, but again I sprawled and started to put him in a guillotine, both of us on our knees, but then decided to take his back [get behind him], where I beat his head till he tapped to end it.

Allen flanked by his brother & his father

The Neumanns, in the galley and running about

The galley's done! Soon as we got the dishwasher in the old water pump went on strike. Guess it wasn't happy about the newfangled appliance. We thought it might be air in the lines but no, the pump was just done. Of course it up and died just in time for Memorial Day weekend.
    We added an 18' runabout to our collection. Because a trawler and a dinghy just weren't enough. I guess it's no different from people with lots of kids? Repair bills instead of tuition.

The view from Geoff's Facebook page

Geoffrey Dean, on many days

In Bulgaria May 6th is St. George Day, which means that males with the name Georgi (with hard G's) or one similar to it, like Gergana and Georgita among the women, celebrate their “name’s day” on this date. I was pleased that several Bulgarian colleagues judge my name to be close enough to Georgi (at least in spelling) to merit a name’s day greeting. Some years ago my son, unconvinced by my explanation that there is no actual name’s day for Geoffrey, used his internet-searching savvy to uncover information on the 7th century English saint Ceolfrith (apparently pronounced “Chol-frid”), also known as Saint Geoffrey, whose celebration day in the English church calendar is Sept. 25th. So now I have two name's day dates to choose from—not that I'm looking for an excuse to celebrate.
    In May I completed my second script for a series of concerts for children based on the adventures of a bear named Phil (short for Philharmonic). The May adventure involves Phil learning to read just in time for another Bulgarian holiday, the day of Slavic culture and the Cyrillic alphabet, invented by Cyril and Methodius (also saints, so there’s also a religious element). On May 24th libraries and books generally are one focus of the celebration. June 1 was Children’s Day, and traditionally all drivers in Bulgaria keep their headlights on all day on this day as a way of honoring our children, and our commitment to keeping them safe. The problem is that the law on headlight use was changed in August 2012 and now requires year-round daytime headlight use, and nobody seems to have come up with an alternative practice for June 1st. I posted an emergency facebook status on this in hopes of getting some good ideas before I got on the road Saturday. But I didn't get any. My Bulgarian friends were absorbed with other issues, like how to get rid of the new cabinet of ministers.

One of many fine views from
Jim's house in South Lake Tahoe

Jim Rix, in transit

Right now I'm tied up moving back into the upstairs apartment and getting my house ready for summer vacationers (16 weeks of them), so an article from me is not feasible at this time.
    Glad to hear that you're seeing with your left eye.

Morris Dean, seeing with his left eye
    The last of the gas that was injected into my left eye dissolved about six days ago, and I'm seeing some shadow at the bottom left of the eye's image, including a stalagmite a little left of center extending about a fourth of the way into the field. I suppose this indicates some lasting damage to the retina—the stalagmite perhaps corresponding to a literal tear in the upper right of the retina?
    The 10° of opposing tilt between my left and right images remains, and my brain continues to prefer the more tilted left image (which tilts to the right). Even with no tape on either spectacle lens, the left image usually dominates, although sometimes the brain seems to want to attend to them equally, in which case I have really unpleasant double-vision—a good deal worse than I was experiencing before the surgery.
    The other day as I was walking alongside a building on my right—the left image predominant—I felt myself falling toward the building and realized that I had been unconsciously trying to align my body with its apparent tilt....

    My left image is not only more tilted, but also squiggly. The Amsler grid was devised for checking for retinal compromise. It looks great with my right eye (just tilted a bit to the left), but with my left eye—besides tilting to the right even more than the right image tilts to the left—the vertical and horizontal lines are squiggly. Amazingly, I can still read fairly well with my left eye. But it's disconcerting to slice mangoes and pears and other fruits with a crooking knife blade....
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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