Statues in the Brisbane airport
Nine hours in Sydney
You usually see the Opera House from the front, but the side view was pretty good too.
Train station.
Now it’s off to Brisbane for a really long stay, 22 hours!
Marigot after Irma
Last December, we enjoyed a super-relaxing vacation in St. Martin. Today, I googled around for photos of the devastation from Irma last week. Yikes.
These two photos are from in front of the cemetery that we overlooked from our AirBnB apartment… the very same apartment we spent some time dreaming about investing in. The pictures in my post RIP are taken from inside the cemetery, and the masts in the background of my pics could easily enough be from the actual boats shown here. Again, yikes.
Today, it’s Florida’s turn, and we are hoping that the many people we know and know of down there are safe and sound.
Piha to the rescue
Thanks to a generously loaned car, we made our first pilgrimage out of the city yesterday. We drove not quite an hour, much of it on a tiny little twisty toad, to Piha.
It is a beautiful black sand beach, with a decent surf break, but lots of tough currents, resulting in lots of water rescue activity. In fact the Piha Surf Lifesaving Club was the subject of a reality show a few years back.
We didn’t go near the water, because it was butt-ass cold, but we did need rescuing from the wind. Some people were in fact surfing, and some kids were frolicking a little, but Kiwis seem tough about the cold.
Luckily, the PSLC (that’s what we locals call it) runs a cafe and bar, and you can buy a membership for $5… shades of old Utah! We found the beach to still be very pretty from the lounge area.
The car was great, a Saab convertible. Unfortunately, one other memory this weekend was filling up the car to return it… $7+ per gallon, yikes. Still and all, it was really fun to get out and see such a beautiful place, and come summer… we’ll be back!
Good evening Goodwin
After we stood outside looking forlorn for a couple of minutes, the crew at the new bar in the Goodwin Hotel invited us in to participate in their soft opening. Glad to see this old hotel reopening, part of a wave of downtown revitalization that is hitting Hartford.
Boxer, motorcyclist, wordsmith, cartoonist, and entertainer
Another Hartford gem.
I didn’t know about this guy until walking by the plaque last night after work. What a great epitaph.
A matter of scale
Inside that cloud of smoke is a full size semi truck loaded with FedEx packages. One of those must’ve caught on fire, and now the whole load will probably be lost to the fire itself and damage from water etc used to put it out.
So there’s a fact… FedEx burns up whole truckloads of packages! I can imagine all the hassles and genuine trouble this incident has caused. Maybe somebody didn’t get into college because of a delayed document, or had their car repossessed, or got kicked off the transplant list… Maybe a birthday party was ruined: scarred for life.
But there is an alternative fact… Dr. Deming and his disciples have helped FedEx successfully deliver an astonishingly high percentage of packages, on time, to the correct address. Is it 99%, 99.9%, or 99.99%, or more? I don’t know, but it’s a lot, and it’s amazing. Seeing this truck on fire doesn’t change my willingness to use FedEx one whit… most of the time, more or less always, it works.
In the current political climate, differences in our personal willingness to ignore or at least discount the burning truck — or not — seem to be at the heart of a lot of what divides us. A lot of the issues we want to freak out about are only visible on some spreadsheet description of “the big picture” or in the economist’s “long run.” And on the other side of the coin, a lot the issues we choose to freak out about may NOT be visible on that same spreadsheet, but can’t be ignored, like the burning truck.
Signs of the Times, Texas Edition
Putting the shat back in washateria
We appreciate usiness.
I like this one especially. Usually when I get these sign pictures, they’re here because something broke or changed or because of a juxtaposition or translation problem. But in this case it appears there was never any attempt to spell it all out. The “your b” I expected to see was simply deemed surplus, like the EPA or ethics rules.
I appeal to your sense of decency
If you look at sewer drains, you see a lot of variations on this theme… don’t put motor oil or whatever here, because it ends up polluting some body of water.
In this case, I thought “national estuary” was a nice touch, because im not sure how much sympathy there would have been for plain old Galveston Bay.
My Triumphant Return
To Pasadena isn’t a return at all… wrong state! But this Pasadena is at least named after my Pasadena. There are a lot of similarities, like both are places. In America. With people in them! But beyond that, I admit to focusing more on the differences in terrain and civic sense of self.
Before my b-in-law moved here a couple years ago to turn over a new professional leaf and escape a horrendous commute from Katy, I’d only ever heard of Pasadena TX as the home of Gilley’s (mechanical bull, John Travolta, etc.). In fact, that was just down the street, but it’s long gone, and now there’s a middle school on the site.
We crossed a giant bridge over the Ship Channel the other night. I wish I’d gotten a picture of the refineries (which are far more emblematic of this town than Gilley’s ever was) lit up like dystopian fairy castles, but our rental car was too low to really see over the side barriers. Which explains why everyone here drives such big trucks!!
Kim and Bill’s Excellent Adventure
We’re in Houston for an interview, which gives us an unexpected chance for a little family visit.
On Saturday night, Brother Frank (there’s also an Uncle Frank, and somehow Brother Frank has always rolled easily off this only child’s tongue) surprised us with tickets to a jazz event. It was put on by Kim Prevost and Bill Solley, a couple he’s seen play lots of times and knows through a network of mutual friends.
Things started off with us having to find Lucky Run recording studio, around back in a building even a Realtor would describe as gray, anonymous and industrial.
But once we got inside, it started to look more like I expected… framed records on the wall, lots of name-checking (Solange! Lady Gaga!), and a young man behind the desk who clearly had other things to do.
I said ‘event’ on purpose, because this was a hybrid of concert and recording session. As VIP ticket holders, we got to sit in the master control room. Each musician was in a separate room (though all could see each other through windows). Here’s Bill in his room on the left, then Kim, then the background singers.
Drums, bass, and two keyboardists were off to the right. Because of that setup, each musician could be on their own track (or tracks: the drum kit had eight), while listening to while on headphones.
We got running commentary from the engineer, which was really interesting and all new to me. Most of the time he was just letting it run, but occasionally he would fiddle with something. He would turn players on and off on our monitors to explain how a recording gets made and edited. Lots of dials and switches.
Kim and Bill are from New Orleans, part of the great post-Katrina diaspora like Brattleboro’s own Samirah Evans (they’ve been on multiple festivals together back in the day). The music was great, soulful and jazzy, and complex enough to listen to way more than once. They did two complete shows, and will produce a DVD of the session and a fully edited recording.
Maybe this is a new performance concept or maybe not… but it was new to me. I thought it was a really cool way for them to pay for some studio time while cultivating a much deeper audience connection than in a regular lounge setting.
Thanks, Brother Frank!
Beer please
The hotel was funny… beautiful facility, lots of eager staff, even little housekeeping carts for every hallway…. all the trappings of a modern international destination. But, it seemed as if having actual guests was kind of a surprise. A happy surprise, to be sure, but still a surprise. From check-in to food service, there was a lot of scurrying and conferencing required to get anything done, but once they figured it out, everything was really nice.
One example: Of course we could get a beer at the bar, but getting a cold one required the use of actual ice. And cocktails are also available, as long as it’s fruit juice and booze, you buy the ingredients separately and show the bartender how to put them together.
Gee, the traffic is terrific
Rush hour from the cab in Nay Pyi Taw. I’m torn between calling this 8-lane highway “optimistic” and calling it a “boondoggle.” Time will tell.
Staying grounded
The Horizon Lake View Resort from which I have just returned was a study in contrasts, specifically the kinds of contrasts like where the watch melts off the table or the staircase seems to go in an endless circle. The hardcore UN types who have made a career of fancy resort conferences in impoverished countries seemed unfazed, but it was weird for me.
There was literally nowhere to go, or at least not without making a big production that I wasn’t up for. So, I stayed on campus the entire time.
This post is about the outsides.
The overall weather and vegetation looked and felt like the hottest muggiest haziest Southern California summer. Planted and watered things do great, but overall it’s kinda dry and scrubby. And I think those mounds of dirt might be termite mounds, which you don’t see in San Bernardino so often.
Because everybody burns all their brush (and probably everything else), when you do see the sun (morning and evening) it’s a bright neon pumpkin orange through the haze.
The landscaping is done by a small army of laborers who squat in the sun with simple hand tools and cone-shaped hats.
The resort also boasts a nice looking “organic farm” which was growing a lot of peppers and I think young grapevines. My understanding of the local economy is very limited, but I wondered if there might be a provision in their tax code saying that anybody with an organic farm of at least one hectare is permitted to invest a few tens of millions in a conference hotel with no need to pay any pesky taxes or worry too much about labor laws. Or maybe they’re just into sustainability…
Yowza.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 