Looking ahead
2010 is starting off quickly. We've got a big dinner tonight for City Club and there's plenty of work for Mary Holste Design. It's a good combo. But I still want to do a little reflection here. At the tail end of 2008, I wrote that I wanted to become more civically active in Tacoma. That took off in a big way with City Club. A non-profit dedicated to civic dialog and discussion? Sign me up! I didn't know how I was going to do it exactly, but I do feel that it was one goal (I hate calling them resolutions) Read more…
A short trip to Carleton
I had a great time on our epic tour of the Midwest (4 states, 12 nights) but it feels great to be home. One surprise bonus right at the end was a day trip to Carleton. Here are some pics of the college under a lot of snow and temps in the single digits. First time I’ve been back in the winter since 2003. See the full gallery on Posterous
The new Satellite on Market
via weeklyvolcano.typepad.com Looking forward to getting back to Tacoma so I can check out the new Satellite Coffee by the downtown Y! Looks very cool.
The long slow journey home begins …
We’re leaving Madeline Island today for out last stop: Minneapolis. We won’t be there too long, just enough to see some friends before we fly back Monday. The picture is where we are right now. It’s 3 degrees, so this was taken through a window. The white “shore” you see in the distance is actually ice built up against the real shore, which is well out of sight. In two or three weeks, most of Lake Superior will be frozen over.
“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”
Yes, that's really the title of the book by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese. I've read a lot by him, principally his wonderful Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and his funny A Wild Sheep Chase. Hard-Boiled Wonderland is the most fantastical of his I've read–Chinese unicorns, allegorical villages, separated shadows, fish-like people living in the Tokyo underground … the list of the bizarre goes on. Alternating chapters, Murakami flips back and forth between two fantastical stories, he eventually combines them together into one story that actually turns out to be kind of moving. If you're interested in Murakami, I'd recommend either Wind-Up Bird Read more…
1100 pages of Stephen King
Under the Dome called out from the bookshelf to me for some reason I can't quite clarify. Maybe it was the similarity of the plot to The Simpsons movie, maybe it was the beautiful cover (which, since I read the book on my Kindle, I didn't get to enjoy). Or maybe it was that it seemed like such a perfect idea for a Stephen King novel. It was just so him. In fact, you've kind of read this novel if you've read much Stephen King. In terms of plot and theme, it's right there with the novella The Mist. Isolated, a Read more…
^