Looking Back on 2006

As we head into what is starting out as a very rainy 2007, I thought I'd take a few moments to look back on my on-line life in 2006.

I posted 1,491 of my photos on flickr in 2006. In 2005, my first year there, I had posted only 656. I only started in April of that year, though, and didn't hit my stride as a photo-hobbyist until around July of 2005.


My busiest month in 2006 was July, when I posted 212 pictures. That's not surprising, as that is the month we in which we spend time at the Tyler Place, in Vermont. On the way up to Vermont this year, we also played tourist at the Statue of Liberty and at Mystic Seaport and Aquarium.

The irony is that, because I traditionally swear-off on-line life while on vacation, July is also the month when I spent the least amount of time at my computer.

I posted 247 entries to Mike's Musings in 2006. In 2005, I had posted 272 times. Perhaps I'm getting more selective? More busy? Less creative?


My busiest blog-posting month in 2006 was August. I have no idea why.

In looking back on 2006, I thought I'd take a tour through all 12 months, to see what was uppermost in my mind in each. I've tried to pull a representative post from each month:

1. January: I recorded A Walk Around The Point of Cape Henlopen. This was a photo-walk with Christina.
2. February: I reflected on driving at night in a post titled Snowy Fields, Full Moon.
3. March: Another photo-walk, this time recording Some of What We Found at the Botanical Gardens. I visited there with my colleague Sandy while we were at a conference in DC.
   
4. April: Another memory post, now looking back to my college days, visiting a frozen lake in Maine, Midwinter.
   
5. May: At the end of the month, we were already back on the beach. Which led me to the thought "And So We Begin Again."
6. June: One day I saw a person I could only describe as a Senior Delinquent.
   
7. July: A story in the local paper had me reflecting on guest workers and that notion that We Do Welcome Guest Workers in my city of Lewes.
   
8. August: We attended A Symphony Orchestra Concert at Lewes.
   
9. September: I reflected, as I often do in September, on my incredible luck in finding and marrying Karen. I wrote Our Marriage Turned 18 Today.
   
10. October: I found A Cause Worth a Donation in a scholarship fund set up in memory of former Lewes Mayor George H.P. Smith.
    
11. November: I started noting rants from out-of-state bloggers about Delaware's stretch of I-95. That had me wondering, "Does Delaware Need a better PR Firm?"
    
12. December: The phrase "The Curve of Your Laugh" set me off into another memory of life with Karen

I think it was a good year, at least in my efforts to find art in life. There was much to mourn in the world around us, but I always try to find beauty.

I've Gotta Get Me One of These!

Today I had the opportunity to take a geocaching trip to Cape Henlopen State Park with my brother Matt, his wife and daughters, and my parents. Matt and family were given a geocaching starter-kit by Matt's sister-in-law and her partner for Christmas.

This isn't quite the first time I've tried this. For the last several years we have organized a GPS-based or geocaching-style activity as part of the Delaware GIS Conference. I helped field-test a set of way-points tied to Cape Henlopen's World War II history interpretation.

I am surprised that I have not yet gotten myself a GPS unit. GPS has become a tool in geospatial data development, which is my field. On the other hand, I'm in data coordination and not in field data collection.

I'm thinking about getting a GPS now, though. I'm not sure that geocaching is my sport, though it is fun. What I'd like to do is use a GPS to collect point locations of the various neat things I find in my wandering around Delaware.

The Park was active today. The weather was warm and there was bright sunshine. Lots of folks were out enjoying the dunes and pine woods of the Park.

Quiet Please! I'm Eating

This will have to become a year-end tradition: The British Medical Journal late December edition, which seems to always feature research from out on the edge.

Last year was the first time I ran across this fun site. Last year at this time, the BMJ included studies looking at the effect of the shape of a glass on how much alcohol people pour, and at the effects of reading Harry Potter on accident-prone kids.

This year, the December 23 edition includes a paper entitled "Sword swallowing and its side effects."

A finding? "Major complications are more likely when the swallower is distracted..."

And: "Sword swallowers without healthcare coverage expose themselves to financial as well as physical risk."

Indeed.

By the way, did you know that there is a Sword Swallowers Association?

(BIG THANKS TO RESOURCESHELF, WHICH OFTEN SERVES UP THESE SORTS OF GEMS)

Storming Times Square

Karen, the girls and I made a flying visit to New York City on the Wednesday after Christmas. Irene the Organizatrist put together a bus trip for students and families of the Dance Studio. We sent away for Broadway tickets, booked our bus seats, got up hideously early, and drove over to Millsboro to catch our motor coach.

By chance, one of Colleen's friends from Academic Challenge was in the city with her family, from Seaford, for a few days. Against all odds, we managed to meet them for lunch at the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. Afterwards, they helped us take Standard Tourist Family Portrait #32.



After a short wander around Times Square, checking out the buildings and people, we headed to a matinée of Hairspray. That's a great show: bright, funny and rocking. We loved it.

Waiting in line outside the Niel Simon Theater, I enjoyed watching a young woman from Fox 5 in New York (Vanessa Alfano, maybe? Looking at this again, I think maybe it was Toni Senecal) doing takes for some sort of story. She would walk towards the camera, bouncy and animated, saying whatever the line was supposed to be for her report. Then she would stop, turn on her boot heel, and stalk back to her starting point, fuming and discontented. Next take? Bouncy and happy again.

Everyone in line enjoyed that.

After the show, with dusk falling, we headed up 52nd Street to Fifth Avenue, stopping to shop and take pictures. The girls had a strong urge to check out Saks Fifth Avenue. I thought it a good place to try for a new self-portrait.

Evening on Fifth Avenue, a day or two after Christmas, is crowded. Really, really crowded. We had to play old-fashioned, NFC-style, ground-attack football just to get through the crowds to meet the bus.

Then it was a creep through the streets of Manhattan, out the Lincoln Tunnel, down the turnpike and home. We pulled back into our garage just at Midnight.

It was a long day, but fun.

It Is An Ill Blog Post That Yields No New Words

I was going to swear-off pointing to "I Hate Delaware" blog postings, but one of the several that have resulted from Christmas traffic back-ups on I-95 in northern Delaware offers a word I had not heard: Shunpiking.

I found that word in a set of links on avoiding the Delaware Turnpike at the end of a post entitled "Ban Delaware" on Backwards City.

Shunpiking refers, of course, to finding ways around toll routes. The drive-around for the Delaware Turnpike has been the subject of some on-line conversation lately.

The fuss, by the way, tends to arise from traffic back-up associated with the toll plazas on I-95. Complainers advocate doing away with those tolls, or with Delaware altogether.

We can't get rid of the tolls, though. Our state runs on cash from out-of-staters. It's worked well so far; why change now?

A Very Merry Christmas to You All

In Which We Head Down a Familiar Road (But Get Lost Anyway)

I maintain Google alerts for a few topics, one of which is "Delaware." I'm curious to know what's being written about us out there along the back roads of the information superhighway system.

The results have focused mostly around two aspects of Delaware: the resort area and our roads. Neither subject area is surprising. Our beaches are our pride and our roads are sometimes our shame (as they are for many states).

This morning, Google alerted me to what may be a definitive "roads" site, a blog called On the Road that focuses entirely on the minutiae of American highways. It's the blog of a "roadphile" collective known as All About Roads, co founded by a former Delawarean named Alex Nitzman who had been collecting an posting photographs of Delaware Road signs.

Mr. Nitzman returned to northern Delaware recently and has written a comprehensive critique of recent road improvements and signage changes.

He has things to say about new road work and alignments, such as the new Route 141 Spur, which he argues is not a spur.

So much for the new “Delaware 141 Spur” being an actual spur. Instead the “Spur” is a relocated Delaware 141 mainline. Why is it so difficult to get the nomenclature right in the state of Delaware?

And he has many thoughts about the highway signs that have been replaced along upstate highways.

Not only are new signs installed everywhere, but the signs installed display exactly the same thing that the editions in which they replaced did! I believe DelDOT was quoted as stating that each sign costs between $25,000 to $50,000 each in 1997, and that cost most certainly has gone up since that time. So with that kind of expenditure, was it necessary to replace 80% of the guide signs along Interstate 95 north from Delaware 141 to U.S. 202 given the fiscal crisis?

I was interested to note that he also calls attention to the use of "Must Exit" on some signs in Delaware instead of the "Exit Only" that appears to be a highway signage standard; at least based on the the surprised looks I read about here and in other Delaware highway rants.

TINGB wrote about that wording in her report on driving home to DC through northern Delaware this fall:

Julie: Here's the exit.
Me: Why does it say "Must Exit" instead of "Exit Only?"
Julie: Because this is Delaware, and Delaware is stupid.

I did a little desultory Googling this morning on this "Must" vs "Only" thing. I was unable to find any definitive "standard" language that sets one as the right verbiage to use. I did find a marvelously incomprehensible discussion of research on highways and exits at the Federal Highway Administration's Highway Research Center. It may be in there, but please don't make me read any more of that. If there are any highway engineers in the audience, please leave a polite note correcting me.

This standards-confusion is not unusual, by the way. In government I find many things that are assumed to be "standard" by everyone, even though there's been no official "finding," because almost everyone is following the assumed standard. And, conversely, when there is a standard officially declared, most folks in government will ignore it.

Here are two items that need additional research:

1. What in the name of all that is oily is the derivation of the phrase "exit gore area" that I kept finding in my highway standards spelunking? The definition is "The area located immediately between the left edge of a ramp pavement and the right edge of the mainline roadway pavement at a merge or diverge area." But why "gore?" It can't be why I think it might be, can it?
2. Why do I always type "standrads" instead of "standards?" Is it Freudian?
   

Don't You Mean....

A headline on the WGMD News RSS feed caught my eye yesterday. They ran a short news item about a fire in a local chicken house.

The headline -- Millsboro poultry house fire - chickens spared -- left me thinking, "Yes, but for how long?"

I think the lede could be re-written. They ran:

Fire crews saved 35,000 chickens from becoming dinner after fire broke out in a poultry house in Millsboro Wednesday afternoon.

It more accurately might read:

Fire crews saved 35,000 chickens so that they eventually will become dinner after fire broke out in a poultry house in Millsboro Wednesday afternoon.

I think we all know that those chicken houses aren't housing pet chickens.

Me? I'm Tickled. Tickled Pink.

I am happier than I probably should be about this, but I am quite pleased that Mike's Musings is recognized in the January issue of Delaware Today magazine in a brief list of "10 Delacentric blogs you've got to see."

Mahaffie waxes poetic on many subjects with a high degree of grace and humor. His subjects run the gamut from art to politics to family life, but we especially enjoy his musings on Sussex County culture.

That's very nice. I do try for grace and I value humor.

The list includes a few of my favorites: Down With Absolutes, Delaware Watch, Kilroy, Hube and the boys at Rhodey, and Pulp Culture.

It left out some of my favorites too: TommyWonk, Sneaking Suspicions, First State Politics, and Delawareliberal (where they were somewhat miffed).

The Curve of Your Laugh

Driving the girls to dance this evening, I was half listening to an interview on the World Café. A performer started a gentle, acoustic love song with a phrase that sounded, to my partial ear, like "the curve of your laugh."

That can't be the actual lyric, but I think it paints a great sound. It made me think of Karen's sometimes out of control laughter when something catches her just right.

Years ago, my youngest brother Bob and his fiancée, also a Karen, brought home a new family member: a black lab puppy named Sasha. She was a pedigreed dog, a new thing for Karen and me; we're used to mutt cats and mixed breed dogs.

We eagerly read through Sasha's papers, tracing her line back until we reached a forebear named "Quiver of the River."

That's minor silliness, but it started Karen's laugh, an open, joyous, eyes shut, head thrown back giggle-laugh that lasts until the air runs out, then pauses, almost in disbelief, re-gathers itself, and takes off again.

That laugh has lasted for years, as Sasha grew from a gangly young pup, through her frolicking prime, and into a white-muzzled canine crone. All I had to do was say "Quiver of the River" and the laugh would pick up where it left off.

Now, though Sasha is gone, the laugh remains. It can be triggered by the many wonderful and silly things our girls do, or by comic improv (God bless Ryan Stiles), or by a chance gift of goofiness from the cosmos.

And it still has that lovely curve.