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The Wind Through the Keyhole

By Sean
29. August 2012 //

Funny story. I’ve been patiently waiting for A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book from George R. R. Martin‘s Song of Ice and Fire series, to come out in paperback. Originally it was scheduled to be published in mid-August. My friends and I anticipated picking it up. But as the date grew near, suddenly the publication date was pushed back to March of next year. Oh no! I had a choice. I could purchase the book in hardback. I could finally break down and get an e-book reader of some sort. Or I could wait until March. I came home from work and explained the situation to Whirl. She said, helpfully, “Oh, I bought that in hardback a long time ago. Read that.” Now I didn’t particularly want to read it in hardback, because it is a very large book. I mean physically. It’s big. It’s a big book. Hauling it around to and from work, or swim practice or on the bus or wherever– it’s just not the sort of volume one thinks of when describing something as portable. It comes in at over three pounds and over a thousand pages. (Incidentally, the other paperback volumes in the series are not particularly smaller in the size department, but every little bit helps, I guess.)

But I didn’t have to worry! Whirl had already purchased it. I would just have to be careful, but I could read it.

A couple days went by and I had become distracted by other things. Eventually I returned to wanting to start A Dance with Dragons. So I looked around the house for it. We have quite a few books around the house, but we’d recently gone through the task of returning them to some semblance of order. Finding this big book shouldn’t have posed a problem for me. But it did. So when Whirl got home I asked here for some assistance. She said, “Oh! You want to read that one? Sure! Just a minute.” And sure enough, a minute later she handed me The Wind Through the Keyhole. “Here you go.”

The Wind Through the Keyhole is the latest novel by Stephen King and is a very recent addendum to his seminal work, The Dark Tower series. Roland is there. Sussanah. Eddie, Jake, Oy. The novel is set between the end of book four, Wizard and Glass, and book five, Wolves of the Calla, and is made up of a story within a story within a story– all tied together by a fantasical weather phenomenon of Mid-World, the starkblast. When Whirl handed me the volume, I rejoined, “Babe, I do really want to read this. But I don’t think this has much to do with Westeros.” She smiled, shrugged her shoulders.

I’m sure I’m not the first reader to notice King’s dramatic presentation House Stark’s words, “Winter is coming” with his starkblast. But that was a realization I made only after a couple hundred pages in.

Ka.

Categories Books

Visiting Lake Tahoe

By Sean
13. August 2012 //

What's That!?

Before a couple weeks ago I’d never been to Lake Tahoe. To be honest, I’d never really known much about it. I hadn’t given it much thought at all, even after hearing the stories over the years from Whirl and her family. That’s all changed. I can happily state I am a fan of this spectacular place.

The trip was a family reunion. Everyone came from all over the West Coast– and the two of us from the Third Coast– to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Aunt Cynthia and Uncle Dennis. Twenty-three of us all together. Three generations. We spent a week there, at a rental property just outside Squaw Valley and down the road from Truckee. The site was no coincidence. Dennis grew up in Tahoe. He met Cynthia there. The two of them were married in a little church in Squaw Valley. Most of the family, at one point or another, has lived in the area for a time. And everyone– except me– had been there before.

I was the newcomer.

Arc of the Covenant

Which was fun to be. I got to see everything for the first time. Everything about the place was new to me. Certainly parts of it were familiar in a general way to my own experiences in Colorado, but this was someplace new. And nothing I’ve ever experienced can compare to the lake.

I swam in the lake– a little over a mile and a half in 56-degree water. The sun was shining and I’d brought along my wetsuit for just this occasion. It was exhilarating. We swam in the Truckee river, as well. We climbed all over the Squaw Valley ski resort. We went fishing. We cooked giant feasts for everyone for dinner. Played games of all sorts: from dominoes to euchre to Scrabble to ones that were made up on the spot.

Dennis 2One of the most interesting things was just listening to Dennis talk about his life there. Dennis is a builder, as were his father and grandfather. I talked with him at length about the various construction jobs he worked on in the area. From working on the construction of the dam at Stampede Reservoir to the rush of development that accompanied the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley and a number of homes along the north and west shores of the lake. I felt like I was visiting his giant backyard.

We took our photography gear with us and tried to capture some of the emotion and character of the place and the family.

It really was a great trip, with wonderful people to a beautiful place. Just what a summer vacation should be, I think.

Categories Family, Travel

Visit to Willowbrook

By Sean
24. June 2012 //

Juvenile Great Horned Owls 2 Yesterday I rode along with a few of my favorite Field Museum scientists to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn. There were two reasons for the visit. Whirl, Mary Hennen and Dave Willard had been invited to the annual Chicago Bird Collision Monitors picnic hosted by the center, and Mary had an appointment with the center’s staff veterinarian, Dr. Jen Nevis. Willowbrook is operated by the DuPage County Forest Preserve and provides wildlife rehabilitation and education about the animals and ecological systems of the area.

Willowbrook takes in thousands of birds each year, many of them collected by CBCM. CBCM rescues injured migratory birds, and advocates for mitigating the urban dangers affecting migratory birds. They also collaborate with building management, architects and the public to prevent bird collisions. Dave is the Field Museum scientist who has conducted the bird collision studies supporting the Chicago Lights Out program and he works closely with Mary and the CBCM volunteers in his research.

All of this preface is my way of describing that the picnic was attended by collection of volunteers and scientists who knew each other from years of working together on a project they are passionate about. And I was able to tag along and listen to what they had to discuss.

Juvenile Peregrine Falcon 3I brought the camera along. I decided that I would set aside my prejudice against photographing wild animals in captivity. And I’m glad I made that decision.

So far this season, Willowbrook has taken in three of the Chicago-area peregrine falcon fledglings for rehabilitation. Dr. Nevis had a number of questions for Mary about the fledglings and their behavior. In particular, Mary explained that fledgling peregrine falcons are not the best fliers at this age and will often stay in one place for hours. Often in poses that can appear quite distressing to someone who does not know otherwise.

After Mary answered Jen’s questions, Jen took us on a tour of the raptor rehabilitation facility where we were able to see how Willowbrook was caring for the peregrine fledglings and look in on some of the other current residents. I happily snapped pictures of each of the fledglings for Mary and Whirl in their spacious open flight chamber, as the first stop on the tour. The second stop was the highlight for me. Five juvenile great horned owls were rehabilitating in the second flight chamber. Perhaps somewhat to Whirl’s distress, my favorite bird-of-prey is not the falcon, but rather the owl. I could have stayed in that room watching them for all afternoon. They swooped from perch to perch in front of me. Wingspans of about four feet, and whisper quiet.

Juvenile Great Horned Owl In Flight 3Quite the treat. You will notice that one of the owls is afflicted by a retinal defect in the left eye. The center is actively looking to place this animal with a licensed facility, and were happy to see the animal flying about as actively as the others. I tried desperately get some good photographs of the afflicted bird to donate to the center and aid in the placement process.

Categories Chicago, Photography

The Graveyard Book

By Sean
14. June 2012 //

Rudyard Kipling published The Jungle Book as a collection of short stories in 1894. He would go on to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1907. Neil Gaiman published The Graveyard Book as a novel in 2008. The Graveyard Book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Newbery Medal, and Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book in 2009, as well as the Carnegie Medal in 2010.

Each of the eight chapters is a short story, each set two years apart as the protagonist grows up. Gaiman’s chapters have analogues to Kipling’s stories. A commonly cited example of this parallelism is the Graveyard chapter “The Hounds of God” and the Jungle story “Kaa’s Hunting”. Parallel characters reimagined by Gaiman include:

  • Mowgli: Nobody Owens
  • Mother and Father Wolf: The Owens
  • Bagheera: Silas
  • Baloo: Miss Lupescu
  • Shere Khan: Jack
  • The White Cobra: The Sleer
  • Bandar-Log: Ghouls
  • Chil the Kite: a night-gaunt
  • Hathi: Elizabeth Hempstock

Gaiman continues to write fantastically imaginative stories that appeal to me on a number of levels. He worked on this novel off-and-on for over twenty years, and his affinity for the inspiration as well as the depth of his own creativity is obvious.

Categories Books

Wabash at Twenty

By Sean
13. June 2012 //

Little Giant Stadium 1I’ve watched as my friends and I have passed various milestones over the past few years: marriage, a fortieth birthday, divorce, a twenty-year high school reunion, the death of a parent, children learning to drive or themselves graduating from high school. We talk — or don’t talk in some cases — about these events in terms that remind me of pedestrian versions of lifetime achievement awards.

Predictably someone is happy, “We made it!” Devastated, someone else wails, “What happened!? Where did it all go?”

In cases of tangible loss the reaction is understandable, but there are imes when the emotional response seems out of proportion with the event itself. These intrigue me: a particular birthday springs most prominently to mind. Yeah, so you’re forty. That does happen. Despite all our poetic attempts to describe it as otherwise, time is one of those universal principles that progresses at a regular pace. We know it’s coming. It doesn’t sneak up on us, appearing at our doorstep in a bizarre costume crying, “Surprise! Gimme all your birthdays!”

Time is fundamentally linked to change and movement. There is change precisely because there is time.

Whether we arrive at this conclusion rationally or empirically is irrelevant. It is the inevitability of the conclusion that I want to emphasize.

Chapel SpireI want to emphasize it because I want to convince myself that I’m acting like an idiot when I think about Wabash at twenty years gone. Unlike the other milestones — lifetime achievements — this one tripped me up. I was able to navigate the others with flinty-eyed composure. Not this. The twenty-year reunion has come and gone and I am no closer to understanding the causes, catalysts or components of my reaction. It was like I’d lost my mind. “Twenty years. It can’t be twenty years. We just graduated.”

I took stock of what my world looked like twenty years ago. I remember trying to study for finals while every television in the house was tuned to coverage of the riots consuming Los Angeles. Where were you during those days following the jury acquittal of four LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King? Do you remember the video footage? Bill Clinton was in the middle of securing the Democratic presidential nomination to challenge the “unbeatable” George H. W. Bush. Bush was flying high on 80% approval ratings after the Gulf War. Almost no one had email and absolutely no one had email on their phone. Kurt Cobain was still alive. The country’s economy was still suffering under the tenacious recession following Black Monday. My class was entering the workforce after several years of high unemployment, and massive government budget deficits. Generation X.

I continued to speculate about my reaction. Had I noticed a critical mass of cultural touchpoints similar to that spring in 1992? Was it the fact that I’d spent the same amount of time alive after college graduation as I had before? Was my college experience so formative that it has become viscerally knitted into who I am as a man? I start to systematically dismiss them. Some of these notions strike me as overly romantic. Others require a powers of observation I think exceed my capabilities. I just don’t think it’s about the math. There’s nothing particularly magical about years.

Eventually I gave up. I abandoned the task of trying to figure myself out. Socrates can apologize all he wants. I’d come to the end of this diversion of my unexamined life.

I accepted my fraternity brothers’ invitations and hopped on the bus to Indianapolis for a three-day weekend of reunions. I spent Friday and Saturday on the Wabash campus in Crawfordsville and Sunday with my fraternity pledge class in a backyard cookout outside Indianapolis. Some of these men I’d seen from time to time in the interim. I hadn’t kept in contact with most of them. And again I don’t know the reason for that. Was it apathy? Embarrassment? I honestly don’t know. After the initial guilt pangs subsided I settled in to enjoy just being with them again. We spent time catching up with each other and the college. I attended some colloquiums put on by fellow alumni. We sang Chapel Sing together.

Class of '62 Chapel Sing

Wabash is a small liberal arts college of between 800-900 students. Reunions for all classes on the five-year graduation interval are held simultaneously, and the class celebrating its 50th (1962 this year) is the highlight and typically has the highest percentage participation. Out of a graduating class of 153 men, 47 came back to Wabash for the 50th reunion. In contrast, my class at 17 attendees. The obvious reason for the smaller turnout is children. Many of my classmates commented on the number of games, matches, camps and activities they and their children were involved with that conflicted with the reunion schedule. That made sense to me, nor do I fault them for prioritizing those things over the reunion.

The highlight of the weekend for me was the cookout on Sunday. Eight fraternity brothers from my class, along with their wives and children converged on PJ’s place outside Indianapolis. I’d lived with these guys for four years while at Wabash. While some of us had gone overseas for a year during college, I still think of it as a four-year stretch. I can’t quite put into words how comfortable I felt seeing them again. I’ve already mentioned the inevitability of change, and things had changed. What surprised me more than anything, given that brace of change and my accompanying anxiety about it was how quickly those fears evaporated. How quickly I realized I was truly among friends.

I suppose that what reunion means. To capture again, for a weekend or a single, sunny afternoon, that state of friendship and harmony experienced in years now long behind us.

Categories Friends, Opinion

The Hunger Games

By Sean
8. June 2012 //

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog with what I’m reading. My current book comes courtesy of a suggestion from my 13 year-old niece when we were together in late March. She was quite effusive with her praise of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. And so I picked it up.

I knew nothing of it, recognizing the title from the media blitz accompanying the film adaptation, and so I went to read a bit more of what the book was about. My niece had given me a basic plot synopsis: the Capitol of the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem demands an annual tribute of twenty-four boys and girls from each of the feudal districts to compete in the Hunger Games, a battle to the death until only the victor remains. “And! There’s a love story,” my niece confessed casually.

Okay, interest piqued. I read a bit more about it.

When the book was published in 2008, Collins stated in an interview with Publishers Weekly that the idea for her world came during an evening of channel-surfing between a reality show competition and Iraq war coverage. “I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way.” She also cited the Greek myth of Theseus, where Athens is forced to send 14 young men and women into the labyrinth in Crete to be sacrificed to King Minos’ son, the Minotaur — in some versions of the story Minos conquers Athens by deception, in others by more traditional martial prowess.

Now I’m even more interested. Social commentary, Greek legends. And there’s a love story.

Categories Books

ILSMA State Meet 2012

By Sean
23. April 2012 //

I spent Saturday and part of Sunday at the UIC Flames Natatorium for the ILMSA State Meet. I swam five events in total, three of them relays. If I discount my times from when I swam as a kid, I posted personal best times in both individual events. Two of my relay split times were consistent, and one was impossibly off (0:20.45), so I’m sure that’s not accurate.

  • Mixed 200 Medley Relay (Free) : 0:31.09
  • Men 200 Free (seed 2:36.00) : 2:29.39
  • Men 100 Breast (seed 1:32.00) : 1:23.58
  • Men 200 Free Relay (3rd) : N/A
  • Mixed 200 Free Relay (3rd) : 0:31.84

I had intended only to swim on Saturday after failing to meet the registration deadline for the 500 Free which ran on Sunday. Fitz, my coach, asked if I could sub for a leg of the Mixed 200 Free Relay, so I agreed to come back. I did a long warmup and cooldown around the race and turned Sunday into an abbreviated version of my weekend practice.

The Chicago Blue Dolphins entered 19 swimmers in the meet, and that was a huge difference between my experience in Evanston where I was the sole representative and here. The team hung out together between events, encouraged each other, posed for pictures and generally contributed to that spirit of camaraderie that had been missing the first time around.

Whirl came along and cheered me on. Spencer and Templar came out to spend the afternoon at the pool and cheer as well. Once again, my squad of loyal fans adopted my (much speedier) work colleague, Brent, and cheered for him, too. Brent was the sole representative for his team at the state meet.

I know I’ve got some work to be competitive in my age group, but I am seeing steady progress on my times. I dropped seven seconds from the time on 200 Free I posted in Evanston. I dropped nine seconds off my practice time-trial seed time on the 100 Breast. My 100 yard split in the 200 Free was only a second slower than my goal time for the year in that event and the entire time for the event was only three seconds off my goal pace for the year.

Before the meet on Sunday, I stopped by Niqui’s house to try on a used men’s wetsuit she is interested in getting rid of. As Doug Sohn — of Hot Doug’s — proudly states, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘encased meats’, my friend.” After 15-20 minutes of wrestling with the wetsuit I successfully transformed myself into an ostensibly buoyant encased meat. Or a penguin.

I went through all of the trials of the wetsuit as a prerequisite to attempting some open water swimming later this year. There are a couple of events on the horizon that I’m considering where a wetsuit could be useful besides just practicing in Lake Michigan, Lake Tahoe and Donner Lake this summer:

Now, get back in the pool!

Categories Health, Swimming

Swim to Mackinac

By Sean
15. April 2012 //

I got to thinking about the 2012 Go the Distance event I signed up for at the beginning of the year. I mentioned it a while back. Since January I’ve been keeping track of my progress and most recently I’ve tweaked my goal a little bit. I was thinking about a way to visualize my progress beyond what I could see in a spreadsheet or a chart. That got me thinking about how far 500 kilometers really is. I started looking at maps, and it turns out the length of Lake Michigan is pretty close to that same distance.

A bit of research here and there and I found the course map for the Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac. It is the oldest annual freshwater distance sailboat race in the world. 536 kilometers (333 statute miles, 289.4 nautical miles) from Chicago, starting just off Navy Pier, to Mackinac Island, Michigan. After I read that, I had my goal. I could swim to Mackinac. Not all at once, mind you, but over the course of a year, I could make it. Follow along.

At the end of each month, I am adding a checkpoint along the route. I am also marking when I hit certain recognized milestone achievements. My ultimate goal is to reach Mackinac Island by the end of the year.

If you’d like something a little more immediate, the ILMSA State Meet is next weekend: April 19-22. It will be held at the UIC Flames Natatorium in the Physical Education Building at UIC. This is the same location where I swim with my team. I’m excited to see how I do. Thursday and Friday are in the evening only: 1000 Free; I’m not attempting that this time around. I am swimming two individual events on Saturday:

  • Event 14: 200 Free
  • Event 18: 100 Breast

It’s highly likely my coach will place me in a relay as well, either the 200 Medley or the 200 Free. I toyed with the idea of swimming the 500 Free on Sunday, but by the time I got around to registering for the meet the 500 Free was already closed. Cheer my teammates and me on if you like. Should be quite a show with some very fast swimmers entered into the meet.

Categories Health, Swimming

Everything Is A Remix

By Sean
23. February 2012 //

 
Everything is a Remix is a fascinating four-part video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. He explores the concept of creativity from the position that everything creative is fundamentally derivitive. Creation occurs through through some essential degree of copying, transformation, combination, and subversion. Ferguson demonstrates these interactions through a wide range of examples. Some familiar and some unfamiliar– that is until he skillfully highlights the sources: Led Zeppelin to Star Wars to Gutenberg to Apple. The drama occurs in Part 4. In Part 4, Ferguson focuses on the systemic failures caused by the conflict between the interwoven, tangled world of ideas and the the legal regard for for those same ideas as unique properties with distinct boundaries. Copyright from the shoulders of giants.



Categories Opinion

Don’t Stop Me Now

By Sean
21. February 2012 //

Reserve your seats, now! The ILMSA State Meet is two months away. I know this because the pool where I practice on Tuesday evenings, the UIC Flames Natatorium, has been reconfigured from the eight-lane 50 meter long course pool to an eight-lane 25 yard short course pool. Teammates have informed me this happens every year and the pool will remain in this configuration through April.

At first I thought that’s too bad, I’d really come to enjoy swimming in the long pool. Then I considered the upside. I’ll have the advantage of regularly swimming in the competition pool for several weeks before the big meet. I decided back in January to give the State Meet a shot. And to prepare myself, I swam three events in the Evanston Meet in late January. Despite a vicious case of nervousness, I managed to acquit myself without an overly undue amount of embarrassment. I swam three events and turned in three personal best times, beating my seed times in each event if we don’t count my DQ in the 100 Free due to a rolling start. I did say I was nervous, right? Anyway, here are my results from the Evanston Masters Swim Meet on January 22nd.

  • 100 Free : 1:12
  • 50 Breast : 0:39
  • 200 Free : 2:36

Whirl woke up with me at Oh God-thirty, came along and cheered me on. My friends Farmboy, Princess, Spencer and Templar came out to spend the morning at the pool and cheer as well. It felt great! Incidentally, my squad of loyal fans adopted my (much speedier) work colleague, Brent, and cheered for him, too.

The whole experience got me thinking about setting some actual goals for the upcoming year and see how close we come to hitting them. To that end, Niqui turned me on to the USMS program: Go The Distance.

Go the Distance is a self-directed program intended to encourage Masters swimmers to regularly exercise and track their progress. There is no time limit for the distance milestones, except that they must be achieved in the calendar year 2012. GTD is on the honor system– you track the distance you swim. […] When you achieve certain milestones, ranging from 50 miles through 1500 miles, you will be recognized on the U.S. Masters Swimming website and will receive special prizes from Nike Swim, our event title sponsor for the event.

Initially I wavered on a target distance. First I thought a mile a day. Since 2012 is a leap year, that would mean 366 miles. When I compared that goal to the yardage I turned in for 2011 (216 miles), I decided perhaps I should scale back a bit. — I settled on the distance of half a million meters. That translates to a little more than 310 miles but sounds so much more impressive. Right!?

So that’s one goal. Now I’m looking at my times and thinking of some others. I’d like to be able to compare where I am now to where I was at my peak at 18 or 19, I’m just not sure I have any of those times anywhere. I’ll have to look around. Anyway, that may not be terribly realistic at this stage, so I’ll focus on something that is more in line with my current performance. I’d love to drop my 500 Free time below seven minutes, shave a couple seconds off my 100 Free and see if I can get a competitive time in the 200 Free. As far as stroke events, I’m less certain, but faster is always better.

So let’s stretch it out a bit. Without further ado, here are some goal thoughts for 2012:

  • 100 Free : 1:08
  • 200 Free : 2:26
  • 500 Free : 6:55
  • 1000 Free : 14:20
  • 1500 Free : 21:30
  • 100 Back : 1:20
  • 50 Breast : 0:37
  • 100 Breast : 1:16
  • 200 IM : 2:34
  • One hour nonstop distance : 4100 yards
  • Total distance : 500000 meters

I’m not expecting to hit all (or even any) of these goals at the State Meet, but hopefully come December I will have achieved a few of them and pushed myself to set some new ones.

See you in the pool!

Categories Health, Swimming
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