Randy’s Blog

I have two excerpts from two wildly different sources to share:

First, I just finished reading a collection of ghost stories written by M.R. James, aptly titled "Collected Ghost Stories".

Apparently James is considered to be a master of the ghost story genre. There's nothing ghostly about the opening paragraph of his short story called "A Neighbor's Landmark", though. In fact, it appealed greatly to my inner book lover:

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.

Secondly, my Google News alert for bigfoot/sasquatch-related articles turned up an absolute gem last month. The article comes from the Atlas Obscura website, and is titled 17 Wonderful Reader Stories About Unique Holiday Heirlooms.

Here is the image and text of one of the stories:

Once, as my dad and I were driving from Columbus, Ohio, back to the D.C. area, we passed a big outdoor statue shop in the middle of rural Ohio. Finding a three-foot-or-so Sasquatch statue, we bought it and brought it home as a gag. The next Christmas, we put it in our family’s almost-life-sized glowing nativity scene, inside the manger and right behind Baby Jesus’s cradle, there to watch over Our Lord and Savior and protect him from the prying Romans just as Chewbacca protected Han Solo in a galaxy far, far away. There’s no particular reason we do this. Perhaps it is a mere testament to my family’s absurdist sense of humor surrounding issues of tradition and modernity. I like to think that while Balthasar, Melchoir, and Caspar traveled from Ethiopia and India and Persia to bring Jesus frankincense, myrrh, and gold, Sasquatch also saw the bright star and trekked from Cascadia, across continents and oceans, to bring Baby Jesus a gift of cedar-smoked salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and we merely do homage to that. In any case, though the statue itself does not look like a Christmas heirloom, we contextualize it into one every year.

Wendy and I celebrated yesterday's winter solstice by going to Evanston, IL to watch the OU men's basketball team play at Northwestern. It's very rare for OU to play a game so close to us (about an hour from our house) so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see them play in person. I bought tickets from StubHub over a month in advance, and I've been looking forward to it ever since.

Work and Cookies

My winter solstice began by going to work in the morning. Wendy took the whole day off, while I took off the afternoon. When I came home at midday, I discovered Wendy had made chewy brown sugar cookies! They were delicious. We ate lunch and cookies and got ready to go. The game wasn't until 8pm, but we didn't want to deal with rush hour traffic, so we decided to go down early, visit a museum near the arena, and eat dinner at a restaurant.

Leaf Vacuuming

As we were getting ready to leave, we heard loud rumblings outside. I looked out the window and saw it was the leaf vacuuming vehicle! Recently our neighborhood got a new trash service which offers curbside leaf vacuuming. So this fall, instead of mulching the many leaves in our yard, I just raked them to the curb. Vacuuming was supposed to take place the week after Thanksgiving, but we got a bunch of snow that week, so it didn't happen. I'd started to wonder if the leaves would be there until spring. But I guess enough snow had melted for them to start vacuuming. Here's what it looked and sounded like:

Museum

With that excitement over, we drove down to Evanston to visit the Halim Time and Glass Museum. I discovered it via Google Maps; it opened last year and has all kinds of amazing clocks and some really neat stained glass art. 

Here's a small sample of the stained glass:

There were over 1,000 clocks on display, and they were incredible. Some were unbelievably intricate and ornate. Many of them were hundreds of years old. Here's a tiny sample:

The Game

After the museum we went out to eat, and then waited for the arena doors to open at 6:30. Once inside, we found our seats, which were 9 rows behind OU's bench. We got to see the team warming up, and OU players and head coach Lon Kruger signing autographs and getting pictures taken with kids. We also saw Toby Rowland, the radio voice of the Sooners, preparing for the game.

Here's the team during the national anthem:

And here's the view from our seats as the game began:

It turned out to be an evenly matched game. There were a few frustrating stretches, where OU just couldn't score a bucket, but for the most part it was close throughout the game. In fact, it was so close that it went to overtime! Thankfully, OU pulled away in the final minute of overtime to win the game, 76-69! OU had a deeper bench, which I think was the decisive factor. Northwestern's players were too tired at the end.

A few other thoughts:

• Watching the game up close made me realize how hard it is to play defense. It looked really intense and required a lot of focus and communication with teammates.
• There was a loud and somewhat obnoxious drunk guy in front of us. It was a good reminder of why I don't go to many live games.
• I have a new appreciation for how hard it must be to be a head coach. From managing the clock, to dealing with referees, to being in the center of a hostile crowd, all while coaching what are basically teenagers! I am amazed they remain as calm and level-headed as they do.

It was great to watch the Sooners win a difficult game in overtime on the road. We headed home after the game, getting back just before midnight. We both ate another cookie to "help settle the nerves" after such an exciting basketball game.

Thus ends the tale of our winter solstice.

Boomer Sooner!

The week before Thanksgiving I went to an astronomy lecture where the topic was "Space: A Year in Review". The speaker talked about what the space programs of the private sector, and of governments around the world, were up to in 2018. It was a great presentation. He mentioned NASA's Mars InSight lander, which at the time was 10 days away from its successful landing on Mars.

That lecture firmly planted Mars into the forefront of my mind. A few days later, as Wendy and I were packing for our trip to visit her family, I searched through our piles of books and pulled out all the ones on Mars I could find. I've been reading them ever since. Here's the list, in order:

The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker: It's the story of a Mars colony, and it focuses on the woman who owns the only bar on the planet. It was very entertaining and I enjoyed it.

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling: After 70 pages I gave up. I did not like it. Too much tedious world building. So I moved on to the next book.

Life on Mars: a collection of young adult stories about Mars. The first short story was by Kage Baker, author of the first book on this list, and the short story referenced events from that book! So I just happened to read them in the right order. One thing I really liked about Life on Mars is that it included background notes from the author of each story. One story was inspired by a famous poem about an Arctic cremation: The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: I think this is only the 2nd book by Ray Bradbury I've ever read. It was outstanding. More on it in a moment.

Mars Underground by William Hartmann: I actually checked this one out of the library system. I'd heard about it years ago and I decided now was the time to read it. The author is a famous planetary scientist who convinced the scientific community that Earth had been hit by a large body in the past, which resulted in the moon's formation. He also investigated UFO reports. I enjoyed his Mars book, which is based on hard science, and is about a scientist on a Mars colony who unearths a strange artifact. My only complaint is that the plot progressed at a glacial pace. The strange artifact was discovered about 80% of the way through the book.

The main reason I wrote this post is to share what I discovered while reading The Martian Chronicles. At one point some of the first humans to visit Mars are exploring the ruins of an ancient Martian city. One of them is so moved he quotes this poem by Lord Byron:

So we'll go no more a-roving

    So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

    And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

    And love itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

    And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

    By the light of the moon

For the past couple of years, I've used a movie-streaming service called FilmStruck. I wrote about it last year in this blog post, discussing some of the fantastic movies I'd discovered. A little over a month ago, FilmStruck announced it was shutting down on November 29th. This was very disappointing news, and I was bummed out for weeks afterwards. 

The service provided streaming access to many movies in the Criterion collection, and to an extensive catalog of classic Hollywood movies. Some of the movies the service offered simply weren't available anywhere else, so it felt like an important part of cinema history was being lost. Other people felt the same way, and there was a surge of support to try to save the service, with an online petition, and with letters written by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, among others, lobbying for AT&T/Warner Brothers to save FilmStruck.

In the end, it didn't work. FilmStruck is now gone. For the past few weeks prior to the shutdown, people have been posting lists of movies to watch before the service disappeared. I made a list of those suggestions, checked which ones were available in our library system, and watched the ones that weren't. I saw a comment from one person last week who said his wife was pulling an all-nighter the night before the shutdown, to watch as many classic films as she could! FilmStruck certainly had a loyal fan base.

It turns out there is a glimmer of hope, though. A new streaming service is being planned for the spring of 2019, which will try to pick up where FilmStruck left off. It will be run by Criterion, and it sounds like Warner Brothers is granting them rights to some of their film catalog. I am cautiously optimistic.

Until that new service is available (crossing my fingers), my only option is checking out Criterion movies from the northern Illinois library system.

Finally, here are a few of the notable movies I've discovered since my last FilmStruck blog post:

The Cube (1969)

In 1969, NBC aired an "Experiment in TV" anthology television series. Jim Henson, before he became famous for the Muppets, wrote and directed a 1-hour long episode called The Cube, in which a man finds himself trapped in a cube, about the size of a small room. He doesn't remember how he got there. Other people enter the cube, have surreal conversations with him, and leave. But he's not able to get out. It's bizarre and fascinating. Unfortunately I haven't seen this available anywhere else, which is too bad. It really sticks with you afterwards.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

I am in awe of this movie. Technically, it wasn't available on FilmStruck; I checked it out of a nearby library. But I learned about it through a FilmStruck blog post. Fitzcarraldo is a crazy movie made by a crazy man (Werner Herzog). It's loosely based on a true story about a 19th century rubber baron, who had his steamship disassembled, carried across an isthmus, and reassembled! In the movie, a German man, who is obsessed with opera, concocts a plan to build an opera house in the middle of a South American jungle. To finance this crazy idea, he tries to make a fortune in the rubber business by buying a steamship and having the entire ship dragged over a mountain to a remote area populated with rubber trees.

The plot is crazy, but the director was even crazier. He demanded that the steamship actually be dragged over a mountain in real life! It took 5 years and 3 engineering companies, but he finally got his wish. At one point, after countless setbacks during filming, he needed more money. When one of the financiers questioned whether he should continue, the director said that abandoning the project would make him a man without dreams, and went on to say "I live my life or I end my life with this project." (A documentary film called Burden of Dreams chronicles the making of Fitzcarraldo.) 

The result of Herzog's dream was a beautiful, fantastic movie, with so much passion for opera that it made both Wendy and I want to watch opera!

The Green Ray (1986)

This was the final movie I watched on FilmStruck. It's a French film, and a number of people recommended it the past few weeks, because it's nearly impossible to find in the United States. It's a sweet movie about a lonely woman who has to spend summer vacation by herself, after her friend backs out of their plans at the last minute. The woman doesn't know what to do. She tries the beach, she tries the mountains, but even though she's surrounded by well-meaning people, she can't escape her loneliness. It seems like very little happens during the movie, but somehow it still holds your attention and keeps you interested.

The title of the movie is a reference both to a Jules Verne novel of the same name, and to the green ray of light that can be glimpsed at the end of a sunset if conditions are right. In Verne's novel, he writes that when someone glimpses that elusive green ray, they will understand their own heart, and the hearts of others.

I had time to watch a few more movies before the service shut down, but The Green Ray was so delightful I decided to stop there, and have it be my last memory of FilmStruck.

Last week Wendy bought some Cascadian Outfitters wine at the grocery store, and noticed once she got home that the label has a silhouette of a Sasquatch on it:

That got me thinking about writing a Bigfoot blog post. I first got seriously interested in Bigfoot after reading The Psychic Sasquatch, which I wrote about here. For my birthday this year, Wendy bought me the sequel, The Sasquatch People, which I enjoyed even more than the first book. After reading it, I created a Google News alert for any Bigfoot/Sasquatch related news. Here are some of the interesting things I've learned:

Bigfoot Museum

Last year Wendy and I stayed a couple of nights in Kearney, Nebraska to view the total solar eclipse. That part of Nebraska is known as the Tri-Cities area, which includes Kearney, Grand Island, and Hastings. Last month, a Bigfoot museum opened in Hastings. The lady who started the museum got the idea for it when she looked at her dining room table and realized she couldn't see it, because it was covered with Bigfoot artifacts! Had it been open last year, I'm sure I would have checked it out while we were there.

Bigfoot Festival

Speaking of places Wendy and I have been, a few years ago we went to Lake Lure, North Carolina for a wedding. About 45 minutes away is the town of Marion. Last month Marion hosted its first annual Bigfoot Festival, which drew thousands of people. The highlight of the event was a Bigfoot calling competition.

Wild Things Podcast

An NPR reporter was looking through archives of The Washington Post when she found an old article about a Bigfoot researcher with the same last name as her. She asked her family if he was related, and her grandfather said yes, it was his cousin, and he used to show up at family picnics and measure people's heads with calipers! The researcher died in 2002, so she never got to meet him. But she was so inspired that she started a podcast devoted to Bigfoot research, called Wild Things.

I have not listened to the podcast, but I did read some more interviews with the woman, whose name is Laura Krantz. In this short interview, she mentions that Bigfoot research falls into two camps: those who think it's just some kind of ape, and those who think it's paranormal. She said she didn't focus on the paranormal side very much in her podcast. She did make an interesting comment about the paranormal group, though:

And within that world, I would say that most of the people seem pretty down to Earth. They’re not crazies or spouting off really weird things. A lot of them have had an experience that really changes their perception of the natural world. They’re usually nature enthusiasts. They like being outside, and a number of them have backgrounds in biology or wildlife biology or work for different wildlife organizations and agencies. It’s not what I expected to find, which was kind of complete nutjobs and people with no social skills.

Italics are mine. Even though I've never seen a Sasquatch, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Our perception of what makes up the natural world is far too narrow!

Alligators in Central Illinois

Finally, this article, titled The Gators of Lake Decatur, isn't actually about Bigfoot, but Google alerted me to it because it does quote an Illinois native who runs the International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine, which has exhibits on Bigfoot. The article talks about people who have illegally brought baby pet alligators from Florida to central Illinois. Once the alligators get too big, they just dump them in the nearest lake, where they eventually either freeze to death during winter or are captured by a wildlife agency. It's not unheard of, though, for alligators to survive this far north, particularly if there's a factory that dumps hot water discharge into the lake.

Thanks to the article, I now know that it's "illegal to own an alligator in Illinois unless you have a license, carry liability insurance and plan to use your alligator in a prescribed number of yearly education programs."

Now that is news you can use!

We've had a long run of below normal temperatures lately. Here's a look back at some pictures from warmer days.

Let's start with this photo from May, which I forgot to include in my Spring Photos post:

It's a squirrel on our squirrel-proof bird feeder! Wendy snapped the photo when she got home from work one day. We think the squirrel got lucky; maybe it jumped from the pole and just happened to snag one of the food holes. We've never seen any squirrels on the feeder since. It gnawed at one of the food holes pretty good and make it a bit wider. I was disappointed that the feeder is no longer squirrel-proof, even if it was a one-time occurrence.

A few days before July 4th, I went for an evening walk around our neighborhood and spotted these patriotic bunnies:

On a hot July 4th, I went for a walk at Moraine Hills State Park, and spotted 4 sandhill cranes cooling off in the shade:

During a walk around the neighborhood one evening, we spotted an egret:

Here's a dead bird at our bird feeder:

That's right, it's a dead bird. I'm still scratching my head over how this happened. I went to refill the the bird feeder and noticed this bird didn't fly away. I soon realized it was dead. Not only did it mysteriously die, it somehow managed to wedge its head into the food hole so firmly that it stuck there. I had to shake the feeder fairly hard to get the bird dislodged. Then I thoroughly washed out the feeder and let it sit on the deck for a few days to dry out before I hung it back up. Weird.

In my Spring Photos post I mentioned we saw a black squirrel while on a hike. It must have followed us back home, because for a few weeks we kept seeing a black (or nearly black) squirrel in our yard, collecting the scraps of food the birds dropped:

About a month ago I was driving home and found the road in our neighborhood blocked by a bunch of geese. It was almost as if they were announcing the start of fall, which began a few days later.

Bonus mental picture!

One night a month or so ago, I was upstairs in the office. The window was open, and I heard an odd sound come from outside. I turned off the light, and peeked out the window. I saw a raccoon standing on its hind legs, looking longingly up at the bird feeder. It wasn't nearly tall enough to reach it. After a moment, it dropped down to all fours, and wandered away.

I ran my first 5K race on Saturday, the culmination of 12 weeks of training. I felt very confident that I could achieve my goal of running the entire way. In the end, I was able to do it, but it was way harder than I expected!

Here are some race day notes:

• It was cold! A cold front moved through on Friday, bringing the coldest temperatures in months and triggering a freeze warning Friday night. I never had the chance to train in cold weather. I did at least buy some cold weather running clothes, so at least I was prepared for that.
• I started out running way too fast and paid for it the rest of the way. This is a classic beginner's mistake, which I knew, and I still fell for it.
• My watch wasn't tight enough when I started running, so I had to adjust it as I ran.
• Later on, my watch face somehow changed, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back to normal as I ran, so I wasn't sure what my exact pace was.
• I almost ran the wrong way at one point. The course had a lot of twists and turns and forks. I was heading towards one side of a fork when I realized something wasn't right. I looked back, and fortunately there were a couple of runners behind me pointing to the right way.
• It was a hard course! Especially at the end. The last half mile was straight uphill. During the last mile, I seriously started to wonder if I could run the rest of the way. But I managed to do it. And I was completely exhausted when I finished.
• Before the race started, they announced that frost was covering the two boardwalks along the route. So be careful, they said! Fortunately by the time I got there, the frost was gone.
• Despite all of the above, I managed to finish with a time of 33 minutes, 53 seconds. That's my fastest 5K time so far! My pace was 10:56.
• Overall, I finished almost exactly in the middle of the pack, out of 55 runners.
• I got first place in my age group. There were only 2 other runners in my age group, and one of them was running with his 4-year-old son, so it wasn't exactly a competitive field.
• There was a raffle with various prizes. I won a free session with a local running academy which includes video analysis of my running technique. Cool!

After the race, we stuck around for another half hour for the awards ceremony. I received my medal for winning my age group. Then we went home so I could shower, and then back out for a much needed lunch.

Now that it's over, I'm following the advice from my training program and taking several days off. The animal shelter that we adopted Mr. Gordon from is having a 5K in early November. I'm thinking about doing that for my next event.

You might remember that several years ago I blogged about our trip to Marshall, Michigan, to see the hometown of my favorite author, John Bellairs, and all the houses that inspired his books.

You might also recall a few months ago I blogged about the trailer to an upcoming movie based on his most famous book, The House with a Clock in its Walls.

The movie was released yesterday, and Wendy and I went to see it. I am happy to report that it is a decent movie. Certainly not great, but decent. It's a little boring at times, but it has some touching moments, and a few scenes that are surprisingly scary for a kids movie. (The movie was produced by Steven Spielberg's company, and he personally encouraged the director to make it scary!) It detours from the book's plot quite a bit, but I didn't mind the changes, and I thought a few of them worked really well.

The best part of the movie is probably the casting of Cate Blanchett as Mrs. Zimmermann. She is ultra-fantastic in the role and brings a ton of class to the movie. Also, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the closing credits, which featured great organ music along with Edward Gorey-inspired animations.

The movie currently has a rating of 6.2 on IMDB, and a 67% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Decent, but not great. I hope it does well enough that more Bellairs books can be made into movies. Variety reports the movie was projected to earn $18 - $20 million during its opening weekend, but that it's now on pace to earn $24 million! That's a promising sign!

If you're at all interested, I recommend going to see it. But also, be sure to read the book!

While we were visiting Wendy's parents for the Perseid meteor shower, I noticed they had a rain gauge on their deck. I decided I wanted one of those on my deck, too. So I bought one a little over a week ago and installed it. Here are the daily rain totals since then, in inches:

8/27: 0.9

8/28: 2.35

8/29: 0

8/30: 0

8/31: 0

9/1: 2.38

9/2: 1.75

9/3: 1.15

One of Wendy's coworkers mentioned the "Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network" (CoCoRaHS) where volunteers can submit precipitation measurements. The data is used by the NOAA and lots of other weather groups. It looks cool, but I haven't joined it yet. You need to attend a training session and get a special rain gauge to submit data.

Saturday night we had a major thunderstorm roll through the area. For 2 hours we had constant thunder and lightning. I was trying to go to sleep at the time, and I thought it would never end! The newspaper reported that lightning strikes caused 4 structure fires in the county that night.

Then yesterday (Labor Day), we had a tornado warning! Radar detected rotation in a storm cell as it passed directly over our neighborhood. We closed all the blinds and took shelter in the basement as sirens blared, but fortunately the storm never got worse. There was a lot of rain, but not even much wind.

The forecast calls for another inch of rain tomorrow, but after that it cools off and the rain stops.

This feels more like spring weather than fall!

Last year I bought a Garmin fitness watch which has lots of fancy features: heart-rate monitoring, stress tracking, GPS, even wi-fi! It's designed for fitness enthusiasts, which I am not, but the watch fulfilled my nerdy data-tracking desires. Whenever I go on hikes or bike rides, I use the watch to track my workout.

Earlier this year, in July, Garmin emailed me about a new program called Garmin Coach, which is a free 5K training program. Garmin partnered with 3 different running coaches. You pick a coach, choose a goal, and then get a custom 8-12 week training program that adapts to your progress. Your workouts auto-download to your watch, which guides you during your run. Afterwards, the watch uploads the data from your run to Garmin, which feeds into determining what your next workout should be. It sounded cool, but there wasn't much detail about how the coach was involved. Was the coach I selected going to personally monitor my progress? Would I get direct feedback from him? I wasn't sure, so I signed up just to find out how it worked.

For my coach, I chose Greg McMillan, a physiologist and Olympic running coach. For a goal, I chose to just run an entire 5K, with no specific time goal. The sign-up form said I would be more motivated if I ran an actual 5K event at the end of the program. There was a handy search feature to find 5K events near me being held in 8-12 weeks. After some thought, I saw the wisdom in that advice, so I signed up for a 5K: it's called "Race for Open Space" and is sponsored by our local conservation district. It's held at the end of September.

Ever since then, I've been following my workout schedule (3 runs per week). I quickly discovered that I don't get direct feedback from the coach (this is a free program after all), but after most runs, I do get an article or video from the coach with general running tips. 

I'm now 8 weeks into my 12 week program and I've had 3 significant milestones recently:

The first is that a couple of weeks ago I upgraded my running attire. Instead of a shirt and shorts made of cotton, I'm now using lightweight, moisture-wicking fabric. These are very noticeably lighter, and I'm not so soaked in sweat as I was with cotton. That is very welcome.

The second is that a week and a half ago I went on a "preview run" of the 5K. This was an event held by the conservation district. Two instructors provided some tips and after a brief warm up, we went out and alternated between walking and jogging the 5K trail. There were several good things about this:

• The 5K is on a trail that I didn't even know existed. So now I have an idea of what it will be like on race day and what the topography is like.
• Some of the running tips were helpful. All of the training I've done so far is on the road; the 5K is on a trail and trail running is quite different. As the instructors pointed out, you need to spend most of the time looking down when trail running, watching out for rocks, tree roots, etc. Also, your pace will be slower than road running. Expect your pace to be about a minute slower on the trail, they said. These were good things to know!
• The trail is on one of the conservation district's sites and is very scenic. The preview run was in the evening, and the moon was already up. Before leaving, I took this photo:

Finally, the last milestone I achieved recently is that during a workout this past Wednesday, I ran 5K! The workout had me run for 40 minutes (longer than any runs up to that point). After 38 minutes, I had gone 5K. I think it helped greatly that the weather cooled off that day; it was in the upper 60s during my run with low humidity. Regardless, it seems I'm easily on track to meet my goal on race day!