There Goes the Sun

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him?  (Psalm 8:3-4)

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We're back.  Jenn and I spent Sunday and Monday on a quick, but intense pilgrimage to the Zone of Totality - in our case, Princeton, KY - to view the Great American Eclipse.  And what a great time. . .

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We left OurTown around noon on Sunday, and drove down to Evansville, IN, where we stayed with old friends. How many of you remember FTN?  He and his wife (she was Autumn in his blog, back in the day) and their two teenage children were our hosts, and took wonderful care of us Sunday evening and Monday morning.  We had been concerned about the traffic we would encounter, but honestly, traffic on the way down was pretty much a  non-issue for us (aside from the fact that the State of Indiana had about ten separate construction zones on I-69 between Michigan and Kentucky; I am not exaggerating).

We got up early on Monday, and headed across the Ohio River and into Kentucky.  Our initial plan had been to go to Hopkinsville, but at the last minute, we decided to go to Princeton (about 20 miles west) instead, looking for a smaller, more low-key setting.  As it turns out, we're glad we did (more on that to follow).  We got to Princeton (a town of about 6000 souls), around 8:30 AM, and found a group of folks settling into a parking lot that wasn't yet full, between the courthouse and the police station.  So we pulled in and joined them.  We all reasoned that, if the local authorities didn't want us there, well, we were right where they could see us, and they could tell us where they'd rather have us.

I can't say enough about the hospitality of the good folks of Princeton, KY.  They were invariably friendly to us, and eager to see to it that our stay with them, however brief, was a pleasant one.  The offices in the courthouse were closed (figuring that nobody would really want to be at work during the eclipse, I suppose), but there were a few gracious folks who showed up to keep the courthouse doors open, so we visitors could use the public restrooms in the courthouse.  We had arrived in Princeton more than three hours before the beginning of the eclipse, and five hours before the totality, so we spent our morning walking around, seeing the sights of the lovely little town, with its late-19th century buildings, and a beautiful cave, out of which issued an underground stream.  A few small shops were open, selling antiques, t-shirts, and whatnot, and there was a little artisan bakery selling some really spectacular cupcakes.

Our main concern had been the weather.  The forecasts for western Kentucky had been, um, unstable and somewhat ambiguous in the days leading up to the weekend.  But the closer we got to our go/no-go decision point, the trends were mostly promising.  When we got to Princeton, the weather was hot.  REALLY hot.  Probably around 95F, with humidity to match.  And most importantly, the sky was clear.  There was a thin layer of high haze in the morning, but as the day wore on, it virtually disappeared.  There were some clouds off to our west, but it became apparent that the prevailing breezes aloft were southerly; such clouds as there were bypassed us, and the skies over Princeton were beautifully clear all day.

With the heat and bright morning sun, a large part of our morning free time was spent in a search for shade.  There was a gap between a couple of the buildings on the main street, in which had been built a sort-of stairway park down to the cave and stream.  Jenn and I ended up settling there for a half-hour or so, chatting with a few other folks who were enjoying the shade as much as we were.

Folks continued to trickle into Princeton all through the morning (I'd guess a few hundred altogether, by the time the totality hit), even after the eclipse had begun, and us early-birds were already peering through our glasses at the gradually-diminishing crescent sun.  Some had come from Hopkinsville, up the road, with tales of being charged $50 to park (one enterprising Hopkinsvillian was charging folks $100 to sleep in their cars on his property), and by mid-morning Monday, the Hopkinsville authorities were refusing anyone new from setting up camp in their town, and so some of them were making their way to Princeton.

The little group of eclipse-chasers in our parking lot (about 20 carloads; maybe 40-50 folks in all) came from a variety of directions - several of us from Michigan (we spoke with people from Grand Rapids and the Detroit suburbs), Ohio (we had folks from Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton) and Indiana, as well as a group from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and one gentleman who was there with his teenaged son from the UK (they had planned a two-week tour of the US, with the eclipse as the centerpiece).

We had a couple of friends from OurTown who were on similar pilgrimages to ours - one on the bluffs above the Missisippi river in southern Illinois, and another in a park in northwest Missouri (I have no idea why they chose those locations; we chose Princeton because it was about the shortest travel distance for us).  Through the morning, we were trading texts with each other, describing our respective travels, and our viewing locations.

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The eclipse itself began at 11:55 AM, at which point we could just see a little wrinkle of less-than-perfect roundness in one quadrant of the sun's disk.  For the next hour or so, we wandered around from one car-group to the next, talking about our past eclipsian experiences, the sundry travel experiences that had brought us to Princeton that morning, or just talking about the weather or our families, in between pausing every few minutes to take another look at the steadily shrinking solar crescent.  Jenn and I were parked next to Pete and Marie from Cincinnati, a couple about our age with six children, and their youngest in high school, so we had some common ground to talk about.

By about an hour into the eclipse, the moon was covering about 70-80% of the sun's disk, and it was noticeable that the ambient light was significantly dimmer than normal.  Not long after that, we began to notice that the temperature, which had begun the day at an oppressive level, was positively comfortable.  With five minutes to go until totality, the sun was a thin sliver in the sky, and the ambient light was like the dusk just after sunset.

As it got closer and closer to the moment of totality, we could almost see the thin sliver of sunlight visibly shrinking, until, at the last instant, we saw the brilliant 'diamond ring' as the sun's corona became visible, and the last sparkle of sunlight made a bright flare, looking just like a diamond on a ring.  And then, an instant later, the sun went out.

(I didn't take this, but it was taken yesterday, and is basically what we saw)

Annie Dillard, in a wonderful essay in the Atlantic, about the 1979 eclipse in Yakima, Washington, wrote about an onrushing wall of shadow as the eclipse overtook her.  We didn't see anything like that.  For us, the last moments of sunlight were like someone wringing the last bits of light out of the air.  One moment, we were standing there, seeing each other's faces, and an instant later, it was dark.

A joyful shout went up all through the town for maybe ten seconds or so, and then it became quiet for the rest of the totality, as we all strained to absorb the entire experience.  The sky became deep blue, not quite black.  The street lights came on, but were not in the least an impediment to viewing the eclipse.  Venus shone brightly to the west of the sun.  I took a quick scan of the sky to see if any other stars were visible, but Venus was the only one we saw (we consulted an online star chart on our way home, and it indicated that a few others should have been visible; but from the chart, it seems they may have been hidden from our view by the courthouse).

And dominating the sky, directly above the courthouse, like something out of Back to the Future, was the black circle of the moon blotting out the sun, with the thin white ring of the solar corona surrounding it.  It's a little embarrassing, but to be perfectly, brutally candid, I've seen enough 'simulated' eclipse videos in my life, that it was a little hard at first to grasp that the celestial wonder I was witnessing was actually real.  But it was. Oh, yes; it was definitely real.

Two minutes and forty seconds after the sun disappeared, suddenly we had another brilliant 'diamond ring' flash, and then the sequence of the last seconds before totality was reprised, in reverse.  The group gave another round of applause to the sun, the dusky light returned, and it began to get warmer again.  We spent a few minutes watching the crescent sun growing back, as the moon slowly moved on, uncovering the sun and allowing it to shine once again.  Our little parking-lot community circulated around, shaking hands and thanking each other for sharing the experience, wishing each other a safe trip home.  And within a remarkably short time, folks had packed their cars back up, and the community of eclipse-watchers morphed into a line of cars heading out of town, back toward the freeway, and back, in a hundred directions, to their homes.

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Our trip home was a good deal more, uh, gruelling than our trip down had been.  On the inbound journey, we were all coming at different times, and stopping at different places along the way.  But we were all leaving at basically the same time.  And, for those of us headed north across the Ohio River, there are only a limited number of bridges by which to cross the river, and they're mostly in cities.  It took us an hour to travel the last five miles to the bridge back into Evansville (and there was even construction on the bridge itself).  So we arrived home almost two hours later than we'd planned.

But we had seen the total eclipse; we had seen the moon blot out the sun, and darkness at mid-day.  We had seen the spectacular black orb, and the diamond ring; all of it.  The wonder of God's creation.  Awesome, magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime; it took our breath away. . .

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There will be another total eclipse in the US in 2024, and even closer to us, passing through Indianapolis, Cleveland and Buffalo.  It should only take us 2-3 hours to drive into the Path of Totality for that one.  But you know, it's not guaranteed that I'll still be here in seven years (I hope and  even expect to be, but it is not guaranteed), and if I am, it's not guaranteed that the weather will co-operate then, either.  So, I am glad to have seen this one. Totally, totally worth it (you see what I did there. . .)

Thanks again to our wonderfully gracious hosts in Princeton, KY.  You all went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am grateful. . .

Another Eclipse Post. . .

As we draw closer to The Great American Eclipse of 2017, a few thoughts are percolating in my brain (which is not quite as painful as it sounds). . .

Of course, a solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and what's so complicated about that?  But when I think about it. . . It is at least a colossal conincidence (or is it?) that the moon and the sun are almost exactly the same size, when viewed from here on earth.  The moon is about a quarter the diameter of the earth, and the sun is about 100 times bigger than Earth.  But the sun is about 400 times farther from the earth than the moon, so they look to be about the same apparent size.  If the moon were a little bit smaller, or a little farther from earth, it would never be able to cover the sun (and all eclipses would be like the one in '94 that passed near OurTown).

Eclipses always correspond with a New Moon - when the moon passes from one side of the sun (viewed from our persepctive here on earth) to the other.  In fact, if the moon's orbit were coplanar with the earth's (i.e. perfectly 'flat' to earth's orbit), every new moon would result in an eclipse.  But because the moon's orbit is tilted by 6 degrees relative to the earth's, the moon sometimes passes above the sun, sometimes below it.  If the earth were bigger (I don't really know how much bigger would be 'big enough'), then the likelihood of the moon's shadow crossing the earth would increase, and there would be more eclipses.  As it is, total eclipses occur roughly every 1-2 years, somwhere on the planet (and the fact that it's been almost 100 years for the US means we're WAY overdue) (but, to make up for it, the next one comes less than seven years from now, in April 2024). . .

So, an eclipse happens when a new moon corresponds to the moon being at a point where its orbit is crossing the earth's orbit (or at least, 'close enough' to it).  And where the eclipse falls on the surface of the earth just depends on which part of the earth is turned toward the sun at the moment.  Next week just happens to be when our turn comes up here in the good ol' USA, for the first time in virtually a century.

It blows my mind a little bit that things like eclipses are mathematically predictable, to a high degree of precision.  I mean, we know when the eclipse is going to happen and where it's going to happen.  There are published maps, showing the path of totality, and how wide it is, and which towns are in the path of totality, and which are just outside it.  If you're on the southwest side of St. Louis, you'll see the totality; if you're on the northeast side, you'll just miss it, and we know that before it even happens.  We know how the eclipse will progress across the country, starting in Oregon around 10:15 AM Pacific Time, and ending in South Carolina about an hour-and-a-half later, mid-afternoon Eastern Time.  We know that the totality will last for just longer than two minutes (two minutes and 40+ seconds in Missouri/Illinois/Kentucky, where Jenn and I will (hopefully) be).  I mean, that's knowing an awful lot about how it's all going to happen, and it was known years, even decades ago. . .

Jenn and I are laying our plans to drive down next Sunday afternoon/evening.  We'll actually be staying with an old blogger-friend who lives not too far from the path of totality (but not actually inside it), then getting up early on Monday to fight the (hopefully not TOO awful) traffic, and settle in a decently favorable location from which to track the progress.  The long-range forecast, at least as of today, is pretty favorable for good viewing.  Hopefully, it will stay that way.  Then, sometime around 1:30 or so, the lights will go out.  And that's what I'm waiting to see. . .

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And of course, there are those who are just unclear on the concept. . .

In the meantime, I'm trying not to get too irritated with Jenn singing that old Bonnie Tyler song, over and over and over and over. . .

Signs In the Sky

By now, most of you, or at least some of you (okay, the nerds among you) have heard about the total solar eclipse that is due to happen on August 21, two weeks from today.  This is the first total eclipse visible in the continental United States since June of 1918, nearly a century ago.  So it's a pretty big deal, as eclipses go.  Over a narrow band maybe 50 miles wide, stretching from the Oregon coast to South Carolina, the moon will blot out the sun, for as much as two-and-a-half minutes, stretched over a couple hours, from coast to coast.

Jenn and I are planning to drive down to Hopkinsville, KY (about 8-9 hours drive time from OurTown), braving what will probably be pretty brutal traffic, at least by Hopkinsville standards.  Depending on what we see in the weather reports the day before, we could end up anywhere from Illinois to Tennessee, or just stay home, if we see that the eclipse path will be clouded under.  But we are looking forward hopefully to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the sun blotted out in mid-day.  I'll certainly blog about it, once we get back. . .

But until then, I'll whet your appetite with a few reminiscences of heavenly phenomena I've been witness to in the course of my young life. . .

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The earliest solar eclipse I can remember happened in July of 1963, when I was seven years old.  Our family was vacationing at a beach resort near what would soon become our hometown UpNorth.  In retrospect, my dad was probably interviewing for the job that would have us moving there the following November (just after the Kennedy assassination), and his bosses wanted to impress upon him the pleasantness of life on the Big Lake, in the midst of the North Woods.

Anyway, seven-year-old me was mostly happy to splash around in the Big Lake, among the sandbars and whitecaps; I recall it being sunny and warm for our entire stay there.  Then one day, folks gathered on the beach, with an air of excitement, talking about 'the Eclipse'.  Precocious (read: nerdy) child that I was, I had read age-appropriate astronomy books (maybe even a year or two above my grade-level), and knew what an eclipse was (at least in theory), but I had never seen one live and in-person.  My dad was a pretty mechanically-clever guy, and he rigged up an eclipse-viewing box, with a pinhole on one end, and a 'screen' of white cardboard on the opposite end (which, honestly, didn't require that much mechanical cleverness, but still. . .), so we could watch as the 'bite' the moon was taking out of the sun grew.  At that location, the eclipse reached a maximum of something like 85% totality.

There was much dire hand-wringing among the adults that we MUST NOT look directly at the sun, lest we go blind, so dad's little box-viewer was what we had available.  But, naughty boy that I was, I snuck off for a minute or two. I had, from time to time in my young life, squinted with my eyes just barely slitted open, and looked straight at the sun for a couple seconds, so I had reason to doubt the whole 'going blind' thing.  I wondered briefly if there were some sort of special rays or something associated with the eclipse, but decided that I'd done it before, and if I did it again just now, it probably wouldn't be any different.  So I did - just enough to confirm for myself that, viewed directly, through my tightly-slitted eyelids, the sun looked pretty much the same as what we saw in dad's box, so I was mainly content to view the eclipse via the box, for the rest of the duration of the eclipse, although I probably risked a couple more quick views through slitted eyelids.  I think one of the men at the resort had a welding hood with him, which was quite popular with the other vacationers present. . .

Anyway, it was very cool.  As the eclipse approached its maximum totality, the light had a strange, ethereal dimness about it - sort of twilight-ish, except that the sun was high in the sky, and shadows were mid-day short.  Very cool. . .

The event probably stayed in my brain because of the vacation aspect of it, combined with (especially) my mother's anxiety over my impending blindness.  Or, you know, maybe I'm just a nerd. . .

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In the course of 50-plus years since that first eclipse, I've experienced several other solar eclipses; this will be the sixth one in my lifetime to be more than 70% here in Michigan.  Some of them I've taken notice of, some of them came and went without me noticing much.  But there was another one, in May of '94, that is worth telling a story about. . .

The eclipse of '94 was an annular eclipse, meaning that the moon's disk was slightly smaller than the sun's disk (i.e., the moon was at a farther point in its orbit), so it wouldn't completely cover the sun.  But the path of maximum eclipse passed very close to OurTown, so the local news was in more-than-normal 'hype mode' for it.  One of the articles mentioned that a Number 14 welding shade was sufficient to allow viewing of the sun.  So I went to a local welding-supply store, and asked for a Number 14 shade.  "Number 14?" the guy said, when I asked him.  "Jeez, what are you trying to do?  Look at the sun?"  Well, yeah, I said.  "Well, I don't have a Number 14," the guy continued, "but if you slap a Number 6 and a Number 8 together, that's a 14; that ought to work.  I asked if he had a 6 and an 8 handy, so I could check it out.  He handed them to me, and I went out to the parking lot, put the 6 and the 8 together, and looked through them up at the sun, and saw the clear, green-tinted disk of the sun, at a comfortably dim brightness, comparable to the night-lights in my kids' bedrooms.  So the man had himself a sale. . .

A group of 5 or 6 of us played hooky from work for a couple hours on the day of the eclipse and drove to the county fairgrounds, maybe 15 miles from our office, and watched the familiar progression of the moon taking an ever-larger bite out of the sun, while the light took on the other-worldly dimness that I'd been through a few times by then.  At its peak, the sun was 96% blocked out, so the dimness was even more ethereal than usual that day.  My Number 14 welding shade was quite popular with my fellow-truants.

Our location at the fairgrounds was in what was called the 'Graze Zone', where the edge of the lunar disk just 'grazed' the edge of the solar disk, producing a very cool effect. At the height of the eclipse, the sun 'peeked through' the valleys between the lunar mountains, producing a 'string of pearls' effect, with a series of tiny pinpoints of light arrayed in an arc between the 'horns' of the thin crescent of the sun that remained visible.  And we saw it live, mitigated only by the green welding shade. . .

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Up to now, that 'string of pearls' is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen in the sky, although a few other things deserve at least a mention. . .

Halley's Comet came by in 1986, right on schedule, with all the hype that you would expect for a well-known once-in-a-lifetime event.  We have friends who have a farm 30 miles or so from OurTown (away from city lights), so we arranged a Halley's Comet viewing party with them, and the kids we both had at the time.  We actually stayed overnight at their house, and got up at 5AM, to catch the viewing window between when Halley would rise over the eastern horizon, and when the dawn's early light would wash it out.  It was pretty deep in winter at the time, so we ended up trudging across their barnyard in the snow (at 5AM), with temperatures hovering around 10 degrees or so (Fahrenheit; about -12C).

And Halley was pretty much of a dud.  We consulted our star charts, to be sure that we were looking in the right part of the sky, pointed our binoculars at the correct sector of the sky, and saw. . . a little smudge of light that wasn't on the chart.  That's all - just a little smudge.  We had to look several times to convince ourselves that it wasn't just a snowflake on the binoculars.  Once we had convinced ourselves that, by golly, that little smudge was Halley's Comet, we sighed, declared victory, and trudged back to the house to go back to bed.  While our kids wondered what the hell we had hauled them out into the frozen night for. . .

But in 1997, Hale-Bopp was a comet actually worth watching.  I think it took even the astronomer-types by surprise by how bright and prominent it was.  For weeks, there was this large, sort-of V-shaped apparition in the evening sky, visible even walking amid the bright lights of OurTown.  Nothing ambiguous or smudge-y about this one.  Very cool - the best comet I've seen in my young life. . .

In 2012, there was a Transit of Venus, in which Venus passed across the disk of the sun.  It happened rather late in the day here in Michigan, so I took my Number 14 shade to work with me, and at a suitably remote location on my drive home, I pulled off the highway and took a look at the sun.  And sure enough, there was a small black dot in the middle of the sun's disk - Venus, doing its very best to block out the sun (which amounted to something on the order of a 0.1% eclipse).  Not nearly as spectacular as even a partial eclipse, but very cool, nevertheless. . .

(There was also a transit of Mercury just last year, but it happened at an inconvenient time (early in the morning), so I missed it.  Plus, Mercury is both smaller than Venus, and farther from Earth, so it's harder to see.  But I wanted you all to know that I knew about it. . .)

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There are others, I'm sure (I recall a pretty cool triple conjunction involving Mars, Jupiter and the moon, I think), but those are the major highlights of my sky-viewing experience so far.  At least until August 21, I hope. . .

Progress Marches On. . .

"Our grandparents did not have ultrasounds, so they wondered about the sex of a child before it was born.  We are more sophisticated now.  We wonder about it after."

          - Anthony Esolen, professor at (for now) Providence College

Misadventures in Flying. . .

The headlines in recent days and weeks have been filled with stories of airline misadventures - people getting dragged off planes by the police, fistfights between passengers, rude treatment from flight staff, and on and on.  I really can't relate to much of what we're seeing lately - Jenn and I have flown exactly twice since 9/11, and while air travel wasn't exactly pleasant back in the day, it has gotten noticeably less pleasant since then.  Anyway, the recent stories remind me of one egregious tale of airborne awfulness. . .

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It was June of 1998, and my youngest brother was getting married in Missoula, Montana.  Jenn and I duly made our plans to fly out and be with my family in celebration of the joyous nuptials.  7M was 2 months old at the time, and in those days, you could still take an infant-in-arms on a plane, well, in-arms, without a child-seat (or, more relevantly to the cash-flow, another ticket).

In the week or so before our flight, a couple of our friends, who flew a lot more than we did, came to us, asking which airline we were flying on.  It turned out that the pilots' union for the airline which, indeed, we were flying on, was approaching the end of their contract, and had set a strike deadline for the weekend we were travelling.  Naive as we were, we didn't overly concern ourselves over it, and continued with our travel plans as if nothing was up.

Flying to Missoula from OurTown was a bit of an ordeal, all by itself, involving two planes, and four separate take-offs and landings.  From OurTown, we flew to another Michigan airport, about a 20-minute flight (and east of OurTown, so we began our journey traveling backwards.).  From there we flew to Minneapolis, where we changed planes and flew to Great Falls, Montana.  At this point, we were starting to relax, since it was only another 30 minutes or so in the air to Missoula.  We landed in Great Falls, and stayed on the plane, taking on a few more passengers, then taking off to our final destination.

Now, Missoula sits in a little bowl in the mountains, and whereas it had been bright and sunny all the way from OurTown to Great Falls and beyond, it was cloudy and rainy at Missoula (such are the climatological vagaries of mountainous terrain).  Even so, we broke through the bottom of the clouds, and the whole valley laid out below us.  We could even see the lights of the airport.  So we began to pack and stow our stuff in preparation to land.  The plane began its descent, and about halfway down, the pilot suddenly pulled up, aborting his landing, and went back into a holding pattern, informing us that conditions weren't favorable, but he would line up and try again.  We started down once more, but this time, he pulled up even sooner, telling us over the intercom that flight rules required 1000 feet visibility to land, but visibility was only 995 feet, so he was taking us back to Great Falls.  Which he did.

We arrived back at Great Falls (it was still bright and sunny), and taxied to the terminal building.  But not to a jetway.  Or any other means of leaving the plane.  The pilot engaged in some, uh, negotiations with his bosses about getting back in the air, and getting us all to Missoula.  While we sat in our seats on the plane.  For an hour.  With the plane powered down.  Including the air conditioning.  Finally, the pilot came back on the intercom, and told us that he was going to try to take us back to Missoula, even though conditions there hadn't improved, and he personally didn't think it was wise.

So we took off again, and in 30 minutes we were back at the bowl in the mountains where Missoula sits.  Again, the pilot made an attempt to land, but pulled up halfway down.  From the holding pattern, he told us that he'd make one more run, and this time, he descended virtually to ground level.  Except that, when we got to the airport, we were about 20 feet off the ground - AND THE RUNWAY WAS 20 YARDS TO OUR LEFT!!  He flew along in that configuration for virtually the entire length of the runway, before pulling back up, announcing that it just wasn't safe to land in Missoula that day, and took us back to Great Falls.  Again.

When we arrived back at Great Falls this time, we got off the plane, and the airline hastily arranged a fleet of buses to convey us all to Missoula.

The bus ride was pleasant enough, as bus rides go, but it was three hours, instead of the 30 minute flight we'd signed on for (and which - bonus points! - we'd already done twice, and twice more in reverse).  It twisted and wound through some beautiful montains.  At one point, the driver came on the intercom to tell us that just over the ridge to our left was the Unabomber cabin, so you know, more bonus points.

We eventually arrived in Missoula, just in time for dessert at the rehearsal dinner, and about five times more bedraggled than we started out.  The wedding the next day was lovely (some years later, Jenn and I rented the movie A River Runs Through It; the church in the movie is the same one in which my brother and his wife were married), and the day after the wedding, my brother took us for a hike in the mountains, which was pure bonus points.

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The airline and the union settled their differences over the weekend, and we returned home without incident.

But there remains a special place in Purgatory for the pilot who used the lives of a plane-load of passengers as a bargaining chip that day.  Oh, he made a nice show of following the rules (that last 5 feet of visibility made all the difference, I'm sure), and he gave us a nice stunt-flying performance (flying 20 feet off the ground, exactly parallel to the runway; if he could do that, he could land the plane on the runway; asshole), which we were privileged to view from inside the plane, no less.  And he used up six hours of our lives in the process.  All to flip the bird at his bosses.  What a guy!  But hey, we got to drive past the Unabomber cabin, and we did eventually get to Missoula, so there's that. . .

Talkin' Baseball. . .

Baseball season has begun, and that's always an occasion of joy in my own psyche.  I grew up loving baseball, and had some middling success at it, mostly before I was 15.  Once the other guys hit puberty, and started throwing real curveballs, and fastballs too fast for me to get around on, I sighed, learned how to drink beer, and moved over to the softball diamond.

Since I've been a father to sons, I've taken a lot of joy from watching my sons play (I've enjoyed watching my daughters play, too, but none of them played baseball; or even softball. . .).  All of my boys have been ballplayers, and among them, they've had at least as much success as I did in my day; and, what I'm happier about, they've come to love the game almost as much as I do.  My three oldest boys all learned how to play catcher, because I told them that coaches love a kid who'll volunteer to catch (and I wasn't even a catcher; but I did coach for a couple years).  I took 'em to see the local minor league team a few times every summer, and I'd point out to 'em how the catcher would subtly 'drag' a pitch into the strike zone, and sometimes get his pitcher a strike call that wasn't quite, uh, true.  And the first time I saw one of my sons do that in a Little League game (it wasn't exactly even minor-league subtle, but it worked on the teenage ump who was calling the game that day), I burst out laughing, which is to say, busting my buttons with pride. . .

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But that's not really the story I set out to tell you today.  It's really just setting the stage for me to tell you about my friend Todd. . .

I first met Todd probably about 10 years or so ago, when his son and mine were on a Little League baseball team together.  For most of that time, our relationship has been defined by our mutual fatherhood of athletically-inclined boys.  7M and Todd's son Joel were on baseball, basketball and football teams together, roughly from age 9 all the way through high school, and were often among the better players on the field for their respective teams.  I blogged five years or so ago about a memorable weekend of baseball, during which their team won six games in two days, in 95-degree heat, winning the championship with a suicide squeeze play in the bottom of the final inning of the final game.  Todd was the coach of that team (and I had some complimentary words regarding his, um, endowment afterward).  When Joel and 7M were on the high school football team, Todd and I ended up sitting together for most of the games, all the way to the state finals their junior year (they lost), and another run to the state semifinals their senior year.  And along the way, Todd and I built a really nice friendship.  We had both grown up as jocks of one degree or another (his degree was a lot higher than mine, at least in terms of actual athletic success), and we enjoyed talking through the games with each other.  When our sons graduated, our two families joined together for their open house.

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Todd is a bear of a man, thick and muscular, and strong as an ox.  You can easily imagine him as a football player, and he was.  But his first love was baseball, and as a young man, he had more-than-modest success.  When he was in high school, he was probably the second-best high-school ballplayer in Our Town.  The best was a young man named John Smoltz.  Todd played for the Catholic high school, and he and Smoltz were actually teammates during their freshman year.  After that, though, young Mr. Smoltz moved to Waverly High across town, and he and Todd would play against each other a few times every season.  As you might imagine, Smoltz cut quite a swath through the baseball world of Our Town, as all future major-leaguers do.  But Todd held his own, and even hit a home run (or two?) off young Smoltz.  In those days, John Smoltz was the kind of high-school pitcher that young ballplayers would congratulate themselves for even fouling a pitch back off him, to say nothing of actually putting the ball in play.  Much less getting an actual hit; much less hitting a home run.

I don't know what happened with Todd's baseball career after high school, if he ever played college ball, or what.  I don't think he ever got a pro contract.  For at least the past 20 years or so, Todd's life has been the typical, ordinary grind of work and raising kids.  And putting in his time on aluminum bleachers, sitting next to me, watching our kids play. . .

John Smoltz, on the other hand, did get a pro contract, and went on to a distinguished 21-year major-league career, virtually all with the Atlanta Braves.  He was eight times an All-Star, pitched in five World Series (winning one), and won a Cy Young Award as the National League's best pitcher in 1996.  Pretty rarefied air for a guy who grew up playing on the sandlots of Our Town.  Heck, along with Magic Johnson, he's one of the most distinguished athletes to ever come from here. . .

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Since our sons graduated from high school last spring, I've seen less of Todd, but we still enjoy the occasions when we bump into each other.  Two summers ago, John Smoltz was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.  A short time after that, I bumped into Todd, and he started reminiscing about when he and John Smoltz had been the two best ballplayers in Our Town, back in the day.  So I stopped him, and said, "You know what this means, don't you?"

He looked at me.  "What?"

"You hit a home run off a Hall of Famer."

He grinned, as big a grin as I've seen him grin (and he's got a pretty big smile, just normally).  "I did, didn't I?  How many guys can say that?"

Indeed, my friend. . . Not very many, indeed. . .

Howcum Izzit. . .

. . . That so much of what I see flying under the banner of 'Love Trumps Hate' looks more like 'My Hate is Cooler than Your Hate'?

Just, you know, askin'. . .

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And, under the heading of 'People Coming Unhinged', you have people (more than one, including a former official in the Obama administration) publicly advocating the military overthrow of the President of the United States.

I mean, wouldn't it be easier just to move to Chile, or Uganda?

The Visitor From Beyond. . .

This Christmas, I'm re-posting a favorite old cartoon of mine, with a really cute take on the Incarnation. . .

If the SETI folks only knew. . .

Deplore THIS!

Those of you who've followed my blog for a while know that I basically don't talk politics here.  I'm mostly of the opinion that most of my fellow-Americans, for a variety of reasons of their own, vastly overestimate the significance of politics, and its ability to affect their lives in meaningful ways.  Perhaps that's a quirk of my own, but I'm far more interested in the ways things like love, family and friendship work in my life, than I am in politics.  But I don't live in a vacuum, and there are strange doings afoot these days. . .

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Holy crud!  I don't know how or when it happened, but we are clearly living in some sort of strange, Twilight-Zone alternate universe or something.  I mean, the evidence is there for anyone to see:

- Bob Dylan wins a Nobel Prize (which he himself doesn't even seem to accept)
- The Cleveland Cavaliers win the NBA championship
- The Cubs win the World Series (and beat the Indians to do it)
- Donald Trump (I mean, Donald Freakin' Trump!!!) is elected President of the United States

What in the world is going on here?!?

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Let me start by saying clearly what I've been saying all along (mostly in comments on other people's blogs) - I am not, and have never been, a Trump supporter; I did not vote for Donald Trump (the guy I did vote for was so far off the radar that I haven't even been able to find anywhere how many votes he actually received; so no, you probably haven't heard of him).  I regarded both of the major candidates in this election as catastrophic in one way or another.  So please, don't take this as any kind of gloating on my part, because it isn't.  I am just as concerned about the future of our country as I was before the election, and I wonder what the future holds for all of us, not least for me and my family.

I will admit, however, to a certain measure of schadenfreude at the discomfiture of my friends on the left (I'll probably end up taking that to confession someday soon, sinful man that I am) (and yes, I do have friends on the left). . .

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I went to the polls on Tuesday to do my civic duty, and exercise the privilege extended to me as a citizen of this free republic.  Along with most of the rest of you (even you Trumpkins, if you're honest with yourselves), I fully expected that, sometime before my normal bedtime, I'd turn on the TV and learn that Mrs. Clinton had won the election, and become the president-elect, on her way to becoming the first woman elected President of these United States, and blah-blah-blah.  But the polls had been tightening up in recent days (as they always do), and I was curious as to how it was going. . .

Almost absent-mindedly, I turned on the TV, sometime around 9 o'clock, and saw the drama unfolding.  It was the most incredible, dumbfounding thing - it couldn't be happening, but it was.  One after another - Florida, North Carolina, Georgia - big electoral-vote 'battleground' states fell Trumpward, all close.  The juggernaut just kept rolling and rolling, and no matter how much my better judgement kept telling me it was time to go to bed, I couldn't look away.  Finally, sometime around 1AM, when Pennsylvania rolled over from Clinton leading to Trump leading, I could see where it was headed, and I finally called it a night.  Even my home state of Michigan, which is pretty reliably 'blue-leaning' for the national offices (the previous six presidential elections, and one single Republican Senate term in the last 40 years), fell on the Trump side, by less than 11,000 votes out of almost 5 million cast (less than a quarter of a percent, the closest margin of all the 50 states).  I mean, this wasn't supposed to happen. . .

But happen it did, to my astonishment as much as anyone else's.  I hasten to be clear - I had no horse in this race.  I'm not happy that my guy won, because my guy didn't win, and the guy that won is, let there be no doubt, NOT my guy.  It's just an astonishing, didn't-see-this-coming occurrence.  'Dewey-Defeats-Truman' astonishing.

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And now, the bitterness and rage from the losing side have commenced in earnest.  And thus, my schadenfreude. . .

See, I have this in common with the the Trumpkins - both of us are loathed by the Democrats.  They used to be better at hiding it, but lately, not so much.  As far back as 2008, Barack Obama, on his way to becoming President, spoke of those who are "bitter, cling[ing] to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them. . ."  And in this campaign cycle, Mrs. Clinton herself spoke of the Trumpkins as a "basket of deplorables".

It's really hard to miss what's being said - "You people are losers; we're smarter than you, we're more virtuous than you, we're more educated than you, we make more money than you.  And besides that, we're on the right side of history, 'cuz we just see more deeply into the future than the rest of you. Hell, our kids are cuter than yours, and they take oboe lessons.   We're just better people than you in every imaginable way.  So, the best thing for you is just to shut up and do what we tell you, because we know what's good for you, better than you know it for yourselves."

And increasingly, they have shown an inclination to make life hell for those who dissent from their vision of how things are.  I'm thinking bakers, florists, and photographers; even pizza-parlor owners who will probably never be asked to cater a wedding reception, but have the poor judgement to offer an unpopular opinion when asked.  I mean, really?  These are the people you're goin' after?

So, as I see it, all these 'bitter', 'deplorable' people people just stood up and said, "Yeah?  Well, deplore THIS!!"  (*insert finger gesture here*)

So now I'm seeing a lot of borderline unhinged stuff coming out in the news - it was 'White Nationalists' who won the election for Trump (I'm sure the KKK wishes they had that kind of clout).  Or all the standard 'Rural = Stupid' tropes we've seen for the past few years.  There is no such thing as a 'disagreement' with these folks; the only possible explanation is that you are wicked or stupid, or both.  And seriously - email-bombing Republican electors to change their votes?!?

I suppose it's understandable, on one level; I mean, these are people who've come to regard it as their birthright to hold hegemony over the culture; they have not tired of admonishing the rest of us not to be on 'the wrong side of history'.  So, when history proves not to be quite so co-operative as they had imagined, these all-knowing wise ones don't know what to do. . .

I'm thinking, they don't get it; they just don't get it.  They live in an insulated world where they're so convinced of their own superiority as human beings that they just can't imagine that everybody else can't see it, too.  Or that we'll all be anything but happy about having our noses rubbed in it.  I mean, for people who fancy themselves as tolerant, there sure are a lot of people they can't tolerate.  And, for people who claim to stand for the interests of 'the little guy', there are an awful lot of 'little guys' they regard as 'deplorable', and they're awfully eager to stomp on those same 'little guys' when they don't get in line.  For people who profess to hate bullying, they bully awfully well. . .

Anyway, that's what passes for political analysis around these parts. . .

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One more time (realizing that I risk seeming to 'protest too much'): I'm not a Trumpkin; I didn't vote for Trump; I'm as concerned as anybody about his character, and what kind of President he'll be.  In particular, I keep telling my evangelical Trumpkin friends that I think they're kidding themselves if they think he's their friend, but we will see what we will see (I also tell them that it's not a good look when you go after Bill Clinton for his sexual peccadilloes, but wave off Trump's; do you stand for principles, or is it just a matter of which side is engaging in the debauchery?  Just askin'). . .

But, come next January 20, he'll be our President - all of us, whether we voted for him or not, whatever we think of his character.

I also think that one of the most amazing things about this country of ours (maybe THE most amazing thing) is the unbroken string of 44 consecutive orderly transfers of power, spanning 228 years.  Now is not the time to break that string. . .

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And, if you're interested, here is an article that captures my thinking very well. . .

. . . To Make a House a Home

My friend Xavier has been telling the story of the house that he and his family have lived in for the past several years. It's a great story, and I encourage any of my readers to go and read it (here, and here and here and here). His story also provoked my own memories of how we came to live in the house we do, which is a pretty decent story in its own right. . .

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It was 17 years ago this month, in November of 1999, that Jenn and I went on a 'couple's getaway' to a bed-and-breakfast in Pentwater, MI, a lovely village on the shores of Lake Michigan (honestly, if you ever get the chance to spend time in Pentwater, take it). We had a lovely time together, walking on the beach (the rapidly-chilling fall weather notwithstanding), and enjoying the ambience of an off-season tourist town, and each other's company, glad for a weekend's respite from our seven (at the time) children. Reluctantly, when it came time to return to home and the real world, we got in our car for the three hours' drive home.

We were maybe 20 minutes into the drive when Jenn turned to face me and sighed heavily. "We need a new house," she said, soberly.

Clever woman, my wife; get your husband all softened up with romantic walks on the beach, and, um, you know, romantic stuff, then drop the hammer on him.

I continued driving, my eyes fixed on the road ahead. "Why do you say that?" I asked.

Honestly, I knew what she was talking about - our 1400-square-foot domicile had long since become too small for the two of us and the seven children God had blessed us with. We had taken some measures to squeeze as much 'living space' as we could out of the increasingly meager space we had. I had built a loft in the three boys' (3M, 4M, and 5M) bedroom, so they could all sleep in their tiny 10x12 bedroom, but still have a bit of open floor space in which to play. And Jenn and I had taken to sleeping on a hide-a-bed in the 'back bedroom' which mainly served as a playroom for the 'little kids' (6F and 7M) during the day. But no matter what we did, it was becoming impossible to cram the nine of us into the house we had.

I had floated some ideas about expanding the house - adding a second floor to the back addition, converting the attic into 'liveable' space - an office, or play space, bumping up the liveable square-footage to something closer to 1700 or so, and I was in the planning stages of financing the project, but now Jenn was weighing in with her thoughts on my plan.

"None of those things does anything about sitting all our kids, and their spouses and kids, around our table for the holidays," she noted. "We'll just end up needing something bigger in another few years, anyway."

I had to admit, her logic was pretty flawless. Leave it to my wife to be thinking ahead to holiday dinners with our kids' families, years in the future. We talked some more, and then I mulled her words over for a while as we drove ever-closer to home. I really didn't want to move; the last time we'd sold a house, we'd ended up owning two houses for two years or more, and ended up selling our first house at a loss, just to get out from under it. So I was not exactly looking forward to going through another round of buying and trying to sell a house.

Finally, I collected my thoughts into a pile and told her, "Okay, I'll agree to move, if three conditions are met. One, we're walking distance from the kids' school right now; I still want to be walking distance from the same school." (It was our parish school; we knew and were comfortable with the school and all the teachers, and were well dug-in with lots of good relationships there). "Second," I continued, "it has to be at least 2000 square feet, or it's not worth moving. And third, it has to be affordable." I named a price which was about double what we were paying for our house-at-the-time, but wouldn't strain our budget more than we could handle. "If you can find that house," I said, "I'll buy it. But I don't think you can."

You can see why Jenn likes to call me 'Mr. Supportive'. . .

We got back home, and life returned to normal - including the cross-bar in the hide-a-bed that ground against my ribs every night - and I almost forgot about our conversation in the car on the way home from Pentwater.

Then one day, Jenn came to me, more excited than usual (and you know, she's usually pretty upbeat and energetic, so this was notable). "I want us to go look at a house tonight," she enthused.

Damn; so she'd really meant it.

I agreed, so she called the realtor, who came by and let us into the house. It was three blocks from the kids' school (on the opposite side of the school from where we were living), on a dead-end street with a large park at the dead end. Okay. . . so far, so good. We drove up, and it was obvious that it was much larger than the house we then had. Okay. . . that's two. And the neighbors on both sides of the place were good friends of ours. Hmmmm. . . bonus points?

We went inside and looked around. Which wasn't easy, because the power had been turned off.

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At this point, I need to go off on a bit of a digression, which (I hope) will, in the fullness of time, add detail to the story. . .

The house was originally built in 1922. At the time, it was a large-ish single-family house. In fact, it was a farm house, just outside of the 1922 boundaries of OurTown, between OurTown proper and East OurTown, the college town five miles away. In time, both OurTown and East OurTown expanded, and the small farm for which our house was the farmhouse was broken into lots, and it all became part of the surrounding city. And so life went for the first 50 years or so of its existence.

Then, sometime in the 70s, the neighborhood we live in went through a kind of mini-collapse, and slumlords investors came in and scooped up all kinds of newly-distressed properties, of which ours was one.

The slumlord gentleman who bought our house reasoned, with flawless logic, that he'd wring more money out of his property if he could collect two, or even three, rents every month than if he rented it out as a large single-family dwelling. And it was certainly big enough, if a slumlord fellow were a little creative, to do just that.

He boarded up doorways and dolled up one end of the basement (including punching a hole in the foundation wall for an egress door), and turned it into a three-unit rental. Then, sometime in the 80s or early 90s (we think, from the neighbors' stories), they had a whopper of a flood, and the basement unit became functionally useless (at least, he couldn't muster the motivation to clean it up and render it habitable again).

I'm not sure what, exactly, precipitated the crisis, but in the fall of '99 the slumlord (who may or may not have been living in one of the units) abandoned the property. And when I say he abandoned it, I mean he abandoned it. . .

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So, when we came for our first look at the house, it was December. The first thing I remember about the house that would eventually become ours, is the puddles of ice on all the floors. The slumlord previous owner walked away from the place, and didn't even bother to drain the hot-water heating system before winter (it wasn't his house anymore, so what the hell did he care?). So, all the old cast-iron heat radiators cracked and spilled water on all the floors, which (mercifully) quickly froze.

But, as we looked around, I started to see possibilities in the place. The front door opened into the living room, and just to the right of the door was a small 'parlor' which whispered to me, 'Study'. I'd long wanted to have a study, where I could retreat for some short relief from the chaos of seven kids. It was part of my plan for the old house, to finish the attic. But. . . here was a study, ready-made and waiting. Nice. . .

There were other nice features - the built-in china cabinets in the dining room (which we found out later were mahogany that the slumlord previous owner had painted over; in fact, all of the trim in the living and dining rooms was painted-over mahogany. . . aarrgghhh!), the honest-to-goodness master bedroom (good-bye, hide-a-bed!), and a spacious family room in the back (at the opposite end of the house from the 'Study'!)

To make a long story a little less long, the house was to be sold at auction, and the 'nominal' price was exactly the number I'd given Jenn in our talk in the car. We could have put in a lower bid, but we thought, why try to grab it on the cheap and risk getting outbid? So we made a full-price bid (plus $10, just to remove the possibility that another bid might tie ours) (yeah, we were probably a tad over-eager. . .)

The day we closed, our new neighbors ripped out the fence separating our yard from theirs, opening up the three back yards together for their kids and ours. . .

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We were still left with the problem of selling our then-current house. We interviewed four realtors. Two of them took the attitude that our house was a slum-house in a slum-neighborhood, so we should just low-ball the price and get out as quick as we could. The other two actually saw some possibilities in the place, and were aware of a swell of demand in our part of town. Obviously, we chose one of the latter, and set the price at a level that I thought was extravagantly high, but our agent assured us that it was well-priced, and if it didn't sell, we could drop the price, but let's give it a chance. . . And he gave us a set of 'assignments' to get the house ready to sell. We pulled up the dingy old living-room carpet, only to find a full hardwood floor underneath it; we painted, we pulled up the carpet from the upstairs bathroom (yes, you read that right), painted, finished the living room floor, and then painted.  He even told us to put our books (35 boxes worth!) in storage, to make the place look more spacious. We rang in the New Milennium painting the living room (and duly rejoiced when the lights stayed on past midnight. . .)

Lo and behold, within less than a month, we had a full-price offer. In fact, the buyers specifically asked if we would mind leaving the loft in the upstairs bedroom. Which I was only too happy to accommodate, since I didn't really want to deal with the hassle of dismantling and disposing of it. . .

One final bit of the story. Our buyers were financing through the VA, and VA inspectors are notoriously, um, I don't want to say 'capricious', but you get the idea. The inspector wanted us to reseal the flat roof on the back addition. Well, I had just resealed it the previous year, and I told him so, but he wouldn't budge. Thing was, it was early March, which is still winter in this part of the world, and you can't seal a roof in early March - the tar just won't flow. He wanted us to set up an escrow account to have the work done the following summer, but I just told the guy (and not with a smile), "First 75-degree day that comes along, I'll seal it." And lo and behold - I think it was the very next day - we got a 75-degree day. In the single-digit days of March. So I took the day off work, went and bought a 5-gallon bucket of roof tar, and sealed the roof. Never let it be said that I'm un-cooperative (and, uh, hat tip to God. . .)

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Turns out, we turned enough of a profit from the sale of the old home to fix the new place up and revert it back to single-family status. We replaced the broken hot-water system with forced-air and central A/C for the same price we would have paid for a new hot-water system, restored the basement apartment to useability (which was nice for us, since our older kids were just approaching college age, and it was a nice feature for us to have the basement unit for them to use as a kind of 'launching pad'), and we even discovered 100-or-so square feet of 'dead space' which we added to the two second-floor bedrooms.

And we bought a brand-new queen-size bed for Jenn and me to sleep on. . .

There are more stories I could tell, but this is already waaaayyyyy too long. We've been living here for more than 16 years now, and even welcomed another kid into our family.  And we've made a few more improvements along the way (those mahogany china cabinets are magnificent without the paint; to say nothing of the skylights in the family room; or the kitchen remodel that Jenn's brother did in '07). The place has its idiosyncracies even still, but we have no doubt (and perhaps you'll agree) that God gave it to us. . .